Sir Alex Younger is dressed neatly, with the lean build of a former military man. His answers are detailed but precise as befits an expert in human intelligence. It is last Friday morning and the former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, is preparing to go to the Munich Security Conference, a 50-year-old gathering of leaders in international security policy. 

Later that day, Yulia Navalnaya will unexpectedly take to the stage there to speak movingly of the then still unconfirmed death of her husband, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. But that news has yet to break, and Sir Alex Younger is taking the time to speak to The Currency ahead of his visit to Dublin on March 15 to speak at a conference hosted by Future Horizons called Securing Tomorrow. 

In his well-spoken way, he doesn’t pull his punches about the threat facing Ireland as the European home of many of the world’s biggest technology companies and a centre for chip making, life-saving drugs and data centres, holding everything from trivia to vitally important commercial secrets. 

Early disruptive effects of technology

Younger joined MI6 in 1991, three years before Netscape launched its browser popularising the internet for the first time. “I met the disruptive effects of technology very early in my career,” he recalled. “God bless me for my naivety but in the early days, I thought the internet was on our side. I was enthralled by the possibilities that connectivity engendered and just assumed it would be freedom’s friend.” 

Younger said he had hoped that the spread of information would make it harder for dictators and autocrats to control their populations. “Happy days,” he recalled wryly. “It turns out, however, that the internet can just as easily be used by autocrats to control their populations, surveil them, and close down people’s private space.” 

Ten years ago, Younger became Britain’s chief spy, also known as C He served in this position for six years, a year longer than his term, after he was asked to extend his tenure amid the uncertainty of Brexit. The disruptive impact of the internet and technology for both bad and good was, he said, the context of his entire career. A computer science graduate who had also served in the army, Younger said responding to these changes was a major challenge when he took charge.

“We were disrupted. Our operating model relied on anonymity, and that was just destroyed by the internet,” he said. “We had to fundamentally and quickly alter the way in which we operated.” Sir Alex said his tech background convinced him of this but, at the same time, he could see how technology could be used by British intelligence to find out information it never could before. “I ran our counterterrorism operations for many years, so I could see the flip side. I understood the importance of data, and its capacity to prefigure terrorist activity.” 

Sir Alex said it was a challenge as head of MI6 to explain why it needed access to certain data. Three years into the job, he was in charge when Britain suffered five terrorist attacks including one by an Islamist suicide bomber that killed 23 people among the crowd attending an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena.  

“We had to win the argument with the public about the necessity for us to have proportionate access to data in order to protect them,” Younger said. “It was a very interesting and thought-provoking time for me because of all the different attitudes that exist.” 

“The cyber component of what we did grew exponentially throughout my career,” Younger said. “It is absolutely imperative to make this technology work for us and not our opponents. I have the scars on my back from the experience of having to transform an organisation.”

Ireland’s exceptionalism has run its course

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Younger said, reinforced the need for Ireland to recognise itself as part of a bigger coalition of countries defending the same principles. “I think Irish exceptionalism has just about run its course,” Younger said. “I know why Ireland positioned itself to keep itself at arm’s length from this because of all of the difficulties and arguments that have so bedevilled Ireland’s history. I get it.”

Younger said Ireland could no longer afford to maintain this position. “Ireland’s extraordinary economic success is now fundamentally invested in all of the things that we need to protect – and that protection has to be collective.” 

On February 11, US former president and now presidential candidate Donald Trump said he “would encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that fail in their financial obligations to Nato. “Donald Trump’s remarks reverberated around the world precisely because of his ignorance of the quality and importance of collective defence,” Younger said. “I look at Ireland, if I can be frank, as a friend which benefits enormously from the collective defence arrangements that have kept our continent safe over the years.” 

“It would be a massive error to believe that you’re somehow, by dint of your national personality, immune to these threats.”

“These arrangements are indispensable to Ireland not just because of digital connectivity but also because you are the Northwestern flank of one of the most strategically contested spaces in the world, the North Atlantic,” Younger said. “Ireland has managed to carve a space with its avowedly neutral approach, which we all respect. I don’t think anybody is asking Ireland to get into some ideological bun fight. But it would be a massive error to believe that you’re somehow, by dint of your national personality, immune to these threats. It would be a source of huge hazard to think that.”

Will Ireland have to change? “I expect Ireland will decide to play a more active role in the international security arena in due course,” Younger said. “But at the private and individual level the time is now,” he added. “If Ireland’s attitude pervades into general cybersecurity standards that would be mad. Ireland has by any standard an extraordinarily sophisticated and structurally important data architecture now. Whether the institutional arrangements are in place to protect it, I do not know. But I would say that I can’t think of a single country that is fundamentally organised in a way that is equal to this challenge.”

Ireland’s need for high cybersecurity standards

One of Younger’s aims during his time with MI6 was to strengthen the UK’s defences. 

“In the UK, we’ve made many mistakes but our structures are pretty optimal,” he said.  “We took the decision to give cybersecurity tasks to our national signals intelligence agency GCHQ, our sister service. That was controversial because it sounds like putting a fox in charge of a chicken coop.” Younger said, however, that had worked out as GCHQ had the expertise and the ability required. “We now have a single authority for cybersecurity, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is a part of GCHQ and that is the single point of cooperation with our foreign partners. It has been invaluable. The experiment has worked really well.”

Younger said, as he expected, the NCSC had a good relationship with Ireland. He said he couldn’t say how well Ireland was prepared, but that it was certainly imperfect, as were all countries. Ireland, he said, had a greater need to have high standards of cybersecurity.

“Given Ireland’s success in attracting foreign firms to basically put their attack surface in Ireland, there’s got to be a massive reputational risk,” he said. “Big multinationals have their own formidable cyber defence capabilities but there are some things they can’t do. It is up to the Irish Government and state practitioners to put the right protections in place. You wouldn’t want to kill the golden goose of FDI by underinvesting.”

Younger said he had been following the HSE cyberattack in 2021, which cost the state €100 million and came close to shutting down much of the health service. “The HSE attack is a perfect example. I hope that served as a wake-up call, because it is a classic example of the vulnerability of your critical national infrastructure to criminals,” he said. 

Early signs of attackers using AI

One of the topics that Younger will speak about in Dublin is artificial intelligence and its impact on cybersecurity and business. “On AI, I’m a marginal optimist,” he said. “There is no doubt that on the attack side, we are seeing early signs of attackers employing AI to augment the quality of their attacks.” 

Younger pointed out that many successful attacks required an element of fooling human beings to access systems. “The deep-fake industry has offered a number of opportunities for attacks, but we haven’t really seen that yet on an industrial scale. However, it is certainly already going on,” Younger said. “AI will lower the barriers to entry of becoming an attacker by making it simple for people, who wouldn’t have been able to do so otherwise, to write malicious code. We’ve seen a bit of that, but it’s not strategic.”

“We haven’t seen more intelligent malware, and that might be the next issue. It hasn’t really kicked in yet, but we can’t be complacent about it.” Younger said AI also offered new opportunities to prevent cyber attacks. “Cyber defence is all about reacting at internet speed to anomalous behaviour,” he said. “AI offers us all sorts of strategic opportunities to solve some of the problems facing us.”

“My prediction is that as these new systems with AI at their heart are integrated, a whole new set of vulnerabilities will open up,” Younger said. “It’s always the most dangerous time when things are changing rapidly, like when we first went to the cloud. But my hope is, once this is all settled and it’s a mature technology, then life is going to be a lot more difficult for hackers.” 

Younger will be speaking in Dublin to business leaders and professionals. What sectors does he think are most at risk? “I was at a cyber meeting the other day, and we were looking at trends in ransomware. One of the big trends is targeting legal firms.” Why? “Apparently, the partnership structure appears to sometimes inhibit the serious level of investment that is required to ensure cybersecurity.” 

Russia is seeking to influence Ireland

In December 2016, Younger gave a rare public speech for a head of MI6 while still in office, when he said cyber-attacks, propaganda and subversion from hostile states were a “fundamental threat” to European democracies. 

“The connectivity that is at the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims deniably,” he said at the time. Seven years later, Younger said he remained worried. “The dog hasn’t really barked yet in terms of really high-quality disinformation. But it is a fact Putin has been trying to screw up our elections in Britain for years. He absolutely is willing to do that in Ireland if it suits him,” he said.

“If I was the leader of a Russian intelligence service I can think of things that I would want to do, and outcomes that I would be seeking.” And Russia, he said, was seeking to influence Ireland. “I’m sure there is stuff going on,” he said. “But equally my experience of Putin disinformation operations is that they’re really very, very indiscriminate. They really are designed to screw things up, and to prevent and to reduce levels of capacity. They’re not sophisticated. To my mind, the biggest threat is ourselves.”

“The key problem is us tolerating tech making money out of discord.”

“I don’t think we should big up the Russians too much. They are a threat, and it’s going to get worse. But the biggest threat is that we blame the Russians for stuff that is actually our fault. We are the problem.”

What does that mean? “Specifically, the fact that tech has been allowed to profiteer from the culture wars and create social media platforms that essentially suppress empathy and elevate dissent in order to increase clicks – I think that is unconscionable.”

State-promoted disinformation is something for intelligence agencies to worry about, he said, but it isn’t the biggest threat. “The key problem is us tolerating tech making money out of discord, that just seems to me to be plain wrong.”

Join Future Horizons for an exclusive professional training session with keynote speaker Sir Alex Younger, former chief of MI6, at the Shelbourne Hotel on March 15. Supported by The Currency, this event guarantees participants two accredited hours of world-class CPD training with a panel of distinguished guest speakers. Reserve your tickets now by clicking here.