UK to hire hundreds of hackers for new £500m cyber

UK to hire hundreds of hackers for new £500m cyber: Britain is building an army to wage war by hurling computer hackers at its enemies.

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the country is recruiting “hundreds” of hackers at a cost of up to £500 million ($909 million), The Register reported.

News of the “laptop army” was delivered from an appropriately militaristic setting: the bowels of the Ministry of Defence’s vast Pindar nuclear bunker, or “Current Contingencies Task Room,” situated deep below Whitehall, at the Tory conference on Sunday, the Daily Mail reported.

Future wars will, Hammond told the newspaper, be fought by “IT geeks in rooms like this rather than soldiers marching down the streets, or tanks or fighter aircraft.”

He said:

More and more, modern warfare will be about people sitting in bunkers in front of computer screens, whether remotely piloted aircraft or cyber weapons.

The laptop warriors will work with existing government IT security teams to protect critical infrastructure and data stores were the country to come under electronic attack.

Instead of bombs and bullets, the new cyber regiment will fashion lethal computer worms and viruses to wipe out enemy targets.