Originally published by the Intercept, 13 December 2014 <\/p>\n
This weekend, the Intercept published further corroborating evidence linking the advanced malware known as Regin to GCHQs Operation Socialist attack on Begiums biggest telecommunications company, Belgacom. <\/p>\n
Operation Socialist, as the attack was codenamed, is the subject of several revelations from the Snowden archive (one, two, three). <\/p>\n
Edward Snowdens full statement on the latest reporting follows below: <\/p>\n
Weve never established smoking-gun attribution for a governmental cyber attack against critical infrastructure before, and for the first documented example to show on EU member state mounting a cyber attack on another is a breathtaking example of the scale of the state-sponsored hacking problem. <\/p>\n
If we say its OK for the UK to hack Belgium, were implicitly accepting the inverse. And if the UK can hit Belgium, China can hit the UK. When we find these massive holes in the security of our critical infrastructure, we ned to close them rather than tear them open, or else well soon find everything is vulnerable and nothing is safe. <\/p>\n
The people with the most to lose in that kind of world are the ones with the most complex systems. In other words, us, not them. <\/p>\n
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