ScottishNews.com

Streeting said Britain needed to become more resilient to threats from hostile states, terrorists and organised criminals, warning that attacks on digital infrastructure could have a direct impact on ordinary life.

The warning came as the UK Government launched its new Be Ready campaign, encouraging households to prepare for up to three days of disruption to services including electricity, water, communications and the internet.

Speaking during the opening of a new Rheinmetall defence manufacturing facility in Telford, Streeting said households and businesses needed to consider how they would respond if essential systems suddenly stopped working.

He said: “We’ll also need to take the country a step further and ask them are they prepared for increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on our businesses, are they prepared for the eventuality that there may be disruption to essential supply chains caused by hostile state actors or terrorists?

“How would we cope if the payment systems at the local supermarket went down?”

Streeting said those were the kinds of challenges Britain could face and that everyone had a role to play in making the country more resilient.

He has described some of the activity Britain faces from hostile powers as “state-sponsored terrorism”, arguing that phrases such as “hybrid warfare” and “grey zone threats” can fail to convey the seriousness of the danger to the public.

He said the threats were “not hypothetical but real” and warned that Britain needed to strengthen national resilience alongside its military defences.

The Defence Secretary later said he wanted the public to be “alert but not alarmed” and insisted the preparedness campaign should not lead to panic buying.

The Government is instead advising people gradually to make sure they have enough essential supplies to cope for three days if normal services are interrupted.

The recommended household supplies include three litres of drinking water per person per day, non-perishable food, a torch and spare batteries, a charged power bank and a battery-powered or wind-up FM radio.

People are also advised to keep some cash at home in case card payments or cash machines are unavailable, along with essential medication, a first aid kit and printed copies of important documents and phone numbers.

The National Cyber Security Centre this week told UK organisations to take immediate action over two critical vulnerabilities affecting PHP, the widely used software that sits behind large numbers of websites.

The security issue could, under certain conditions, allow an attacker to remotely execute commands on an affected web server. Organisations have been told to install updated versions and to consider taking vulnerable systems offline if they cannot be protected immediately.

Several public services were temporarily taken offline while organisations dealt with the vulnerability, although the discovery of the flaw does not in itself mean those systems had been successfully attacked.

Streeting said cyber incidents of this kind were likely to happen “more and more”, with threats coming not only from foreign governments involved in espionage or sabotage but also from organised crime.

The NCSC separately warned last month that it had seen increased targeting of operational technology systems in the UK and internationally.

It said the threat from states using offensive cyber capabilities had “almost certainly increased” against a backdrop of geopolitical instability and rapid technological change.

The Be Ready initiative is the first stage of a three-year campaign designed to make emergency preparedness more routine in the UK.

Ministers say similar advice is already commonplace in countries including France, Ireland and the Netherlands and argue that households able to look after themselves during the first days of an emergency can allow emergency services to concentrate on the most vulnerable.