What a treasure

My natural suspicion of politicians talking about technology -- I automatically assume that they are talking complete rubbish unless presented with sound evidence to the contrary -- was aroused today when I read that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had turned up at some Google event to go on about cyberattack.

Foreign intelligence agencies are carrying out sustained cyberattacks on the UK Treasury, targeting it with malicious emails and programs designed to steal information, the Chancellor, George Osborne, has revealed... He said that government systems are the target of up to 20,000 malicious emails every month

[From Osborne: Treasury under sustained cyberattack | Technology | guardian.co.uk]

This is a very unimpressive figure. I'm the target of 20,000 malicious e-mails every month - I've just looked in my junk folder and there are hundreds of them in there right now. I suppose they might not all be malicious, because many of them are in Russian so I have no idea what they say. But you get my point. The log from my internet router at home shows intrusions attempts every few minutes - surely international cyber terrorists would be more interested in the Treasury than me? If anything, the Chancellor's figures show sustained disinterest in the Treasury from malicious e-mailers the world over.

What really puzzled me about the historian Baronet Osborne's remarks were that he thought that there might be anything in the Treasury computers worth stealing. What on Earth would these Johnny Foreigners.com want with an always-wrong economic forecasting model and Gordon Brown's plan to borrow the UK into permanent penury? I doubt they're after the credit card number, because that was maxed out by the Scottish solicitor Alastair Darling some time ago. If anything, I would have thought that the Treasury's activities over the last few years are evidence that it has already been penetrated by Asian wizards dedicated to the UK's demise, inscrutable IT mountebanks who have planted a virus rendering the British government incapable of sound financial management. This theory would explain an awful lot of recent activity: aircraft carriers with no aircraft on them, for example.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes