A CREST report published today identifies the systematic use of fake social media accounts, linked to Russia, amplifying the public impacts of four terrorist attacks that took place in the UK in 2017.

The report was written by researchers at the Cardiff University Crime and Security Research Institute (CSRI). It was funded by CREST as part of our ‘Soft Facts and Digital Behavioural Influencing’ project, led by Professor Martin Innes, who directs the CSRI. You can read more about the project here.

Significantly, the project team found evidence of:

• Stimulation of cumulative extremism: social media platforms were being ‘weaponised’ on all sides of the political spectrum, for example amplifying both pro and anti far-right messages.
• Greater volume of accounts than previously thought: the project’s data show at least 47 active accounts.
• Targeting UK uncertainty: the accounts were active around all four UK terror attacks that the project looked at in 2017.

The evidence gathered by the team shows that at least 47 Russian twitter accounts were used to influence and interfere with public debate following the terror attacks at Westminster Bridge, Manchester Arena, London Bridge and Finsbury Park. Of these accounts, eight were especially active, posting at least 475 Twitter messages across the four attacks, which were reposted in excess of 153,000 times.

A significant aspect of these interference campaigns was the use of these accounts as ‘sock puppets’ – where interventions were made on both sides of polarised debates, amplifying their message and ramping up the level of discord and disagreement within public online debate.

Terrorist violence is fundamentally designed to ‘terrorise, mobilise and polarise’ its audiences. The evidence suggests a systematic strategic political communications campaign has been directed at the UK, designed to amplify the public harms of terrorist attacks.

The report is available to download for free from here.

Karena’s paper was called Impacts of the Accelerated Pace of Technological Change on Military Logistics where she spoke about the shifting ontologies of hybrid war and logistics.

She argued that the pace of technological change needs to be considered in order to support new ways of mobilizing innovative capabilities and insure flexibility in bureaucratic process and, importantly to make conceptual space for new methods of thinking through the ‘speed, scale and scope’ of modern war and its logistics.

The event closed with some words from General Hyten – Air Force General and Commander of United States Strategic Command who said “I love the Buffet panel … because each of them I probably disagree with more than any other group of people on stage …and the more I think about what you say and the more you challenge me to think about what I think, is unbelievably important.”

The panel took place in front of an audience of 650 from a range geographical locations and interdisciplinary backgrounds.

Watch the video of Karena’s panel here:

Individual projects can be worth up to £100,000 in value & in addition, more than 80 short-term student dissertation or placement projects are also available with researchers working on a project for up to six months.

The projects on offer are part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund and therefore offer significant value to participating companies.

“On offer is £7.1 million worth of research opportunities for regional businesses, enabling them to develop their business and make the transition to a lower carbon economy,” said Dr Andy Pickard, manager of the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation.

“Small and medium sized businesses may have a low carbon research idea that will help to grow the company, but which they don’t have the capacity to undertake the work themselves. The Centre’s funded research projects give them the chance to pursue these opportunities, helping spark economic growth and job creation.” he added.

Researchers will be supervised jointly by leading academics from UK top-ten ranked Lancaster University and a representative from their host SME. Depending on the needs of the projects, graduate researchers could have expertise from a wide range of science and technology disciplines including engineering, environmental science, computing, chemistry and physics, or alternatively design or management skills.

“We already have projects proposed to look into a variety of subjects including new ways to deal with Japanese knotweed, innovative approaches to measuring air quality, insulation in buildings, rewetting of coastal land to store carbon, and energy generation from small-scale hydro installations,” said Dr Pickard.

The initiative provides access for SMEs to facilities at Lancaster University and also involves the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the Universities of Chester, Cumbria, Liverpool, and Liverpool John Moores.

The Centre for Global Eco-Innovation recently completed a similar three year programme with Liverpool University and Inventya, which created 308 jobs and generated 190 new products and services, winning a business Impact Award and a Green Gown Award for research and development.

Following an independent evaluation 89 per cent of participant businesses said they would recommend the programme to others and 75 per cent said they expect significant or very significant impact on their business performance, jobs and growth.

Technology company Demopad, which has offices at Lancaster University’s InfoLab21 and trades worldwide, participated in the first Centre for Global Eco-Innovation programme. The company worked with a graduate researcher as part of a three-year PhD. The research programme resulted in new hardware products that the company has been selling in the UK as well as exporting to overseas. This included the Centro 8, which acts as a connecting hub for a vast array of sophisticated high-end home entertainment systems. It is also able to automatically control heating and lighting in homes, helping to reduce energy use, bills and carbon consumption.

Mike Cain, director of Demopad, said: “As a business manager this investment through the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation has encouraged us to think we can now compete on a global scale and enabled us to bring benefits to all aspects of our business, way beyond the actual project focus.

“Our relationship with Lancaster University has been nothing short of transformational. It has given us the opportunity to have a virtually unlimited extension of our research and development resource.”

The Centre for Global Eco-Innovation is part-funded by around £4 million by the European Regional Development Fund. Lancaster University is contributing an additional £3 million to the programme.

Businesses with a clearly defined project already can register online in minutes at http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/engage/business. For more information or help scoping a project, email enquiries@cgeinnovation.org and one of the Centre's team will be in touch.

More details are available by visiting http://www.globalecoinnovation.org/

The Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) has just launched the publication entitled ‘CREST Security Review’ (CSR).

Articles translate academic jargon to ‘so what’ answers and illustrate how behavioural and social science can be used effectively in everyday scenarios.

Since its launch last year, CREST, which develops and uses economic and social science research to understand, mitigate and counter security threats, has established a growing international network of more than 80 researchers.

It has commissioned research in priority areas and begun to tackle some of the field’s most pressing questions.

The new magazine communicates research from CREST’s work and from other leading research centres and academics around the globe.

“There really is some impressive work going on,” says CREST Director Professor Paul Taylor. “Yet, all that effort is irrelevant if practitioners, policy-makers, and other stakeholders do not get to hear about it.

“CREST Security Review is one way we will keep stakeholders informed not only on what CREST is doing but also on the best research from around the world.”

Each issue will include articles on a particular focus.

The first issue addresses information elicitation including interrogation and interviewing and other contexts where people are encouraged to provide information. It will look at evidence-based techniques for detecting deception – from the polygraph to better questioning strategies; on the power of simple friendly questions in information elicitation; and on human memory.

Other articles examine why people are so trusting when online, reveal how our smart watches will soon know us better than ourselves and summarise the differences and similarities between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.

• CREST Security Review is available from the CREST website.
• It is available free of charge, under a Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC-SA licence.
• CREST encourages the sharing and use of its material – for more information on how please visit https://crestresearch.ac.uk/copyright/

CREST is funded by the UK’s security and intelligence agencies to identify and produce social science that enhances their understanding of security threats and capacity to counter them.

CREST also receives funding from its six founding partners (the universities of Bath, Birmingham, Cranfield, Lancaster, Portsmouth and West of England).

Its funding is administered by the Economic and Social Research Council, one of seven UK Research Councils, which direct taxpayers’ money towards academic research and training. The ESRC ensures the academic independence and rigour of CREST’s work.

For more information on CREST and its work visit its website at www.crestresearch.ac.uk and follow it on twitter @crest_research

The ten successful projects (subject to contract) were selected out of 136 applications following an independent selection process.

Speaking about the announcement the Director of CREST, Professor Paul Taylor, said: “We were delighted with the outstanding response to our call. Standing out against stiff competition, the successful projects promise innovation, rigour, and results that will make a difference to how we understand and counter security threats. I am looking forward to working with them.”

The successful projects are:

• Professor Laurence Alison at the University of Liverpool, ‘The Birkenhead Drill’: An Exploratory Study of Expertise and Inertia in Emergency Service Responses
• Dr Stephane Baele at the University of Exeter, How Does Isis’ Online Propaganda Demonstrate Mechanisms of Radicalisation? Assessing Cognitive Mechanisms of Radicalisation With A Quantitative Analysis Of Isis’ Online Propaganda
• Professor Nick Donnelly at the University of Southampton, Differences in the Ability to Spot Rare, Non-salient or Hidden Targets
• Professor Karen Douglas at the University of Kent, Why do people adopt conspiracy theories, how are they communicated, and what are their risks? Perspectives from psychology, information engineering, political science, and sociology
• Professor Neil Ferguson at Liverpool Hope University, Learning and unlearning terrorism: The transition from civilian life into paramilitarism and back again during the conflict and peace process in Northern Ireland
• Dr Paul Gill at UCL, Applying Criminological Paradigms to Terrorist Decision Making Regarding Security and Risk
• Professor Par Anders Granhag at the University of Gothenburg, Minimal Social Exclusion: A Means to Increased Information Gain in Human Intelligence Interviews?
• Dr Christopher McDowell at City University London, From the Diasporisation to the Transnationalisation of Exile Politics: Understanding When Extremism Gives Way to Moderate Politics – The Case of Sri Lanka, 1983-2016
• Dr Jasjit Singh at the University of Leeds, Ethno-national, religio-cultural or anti-Muslim? Investigating Sikh radicalisation in Britain
• Professor Paul Thomas at the University of Huddersfield and Professor Michele Grossman at Victoria University (Australia), Community Reporting Thresholds: Sharing information with authorities concerning violent extremist activity and involvement in foreign conflict: A UK Replication Study

For more information about the selection process and the successful projects please visit the CREST website at: https://crestresearch.ac.uk/news/commissioning-call-awards-announced

The Violence & Society UNESCO Centre is a coalition of researchers based in eight departments across three faculties at Lancaster University, linked to collaborators in other UK, European and international universities, policy-makers and service providers.

Distinguished Professor Sylvia Walby, from the University’s Sociology Department, who is Director of the Violence & Society UNESCO Centre and holder of the UNESCO Chair in Gender Research said: “The launch of this new research centre represents a very significant and exciting opportunity to bring together colleagues from across the University and external partners to collaborate on pushing forward this very important global research agenda on violence.”

The Centre launches on 15 March 2016 with a Public Lecture by Kristiina Kangaspunta, Chief of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Trafficking in Persons Unit on ‘Trafficking in Human Beings: Large, Medium, Small - The Size of Human Trafficking’.

Trafficking in human beings – one of the topics the new Centre is researching, has been described as the second largest source of illegal profits in the world, victimising millions of people and generating billions of dollars. The challenge of producing accurate estimates of something that is hidden is immense. This lecture challenges current orthodoxies and considers the ways forward.

Professor Andrew Atherton, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University, will chair the event, which will take place in the Management School Lecture Theatre 6 from 4.15pm to 6pm. All are welcome.

Lancaster’s involvement in the Hub brings together expertise from the Security Lancaster andImagination Lancaster research centres and Lancaster’s Data Science Institute.

This interdisciplinary work will concentrate on a number of key areas, including the security considerations for connected devices in critical infrastructure and industrial environments, the creation and use of ‘big data’ for ‘smart’ highways maintenance and ‘e-Campus’ (the world’s largest research testbed for ambient displays), as well as developing new design techniques that will be used to create visions of what the future for the internet of things may be to enable as many people as possible to engage with shaping those futures.

Rachel Cooper, Professor of Design Management and Policy at Lancaster University, said: “The Internet of Things is shaping up to be the next big digital revolution with billions of objects becoming connected to the internet. These devices will produce unprecedented volumes of data as well as posing significant security challenges and the need for innovative design solutions".

“Working alongside colleagues within the Hub, Lancaster’s expertise will cut across these areas to provide solutions that will help ensure that the IoT brings about its much promised economic and societal benefits to the UK in a way that is safe, secure and robust.”

Ed Vaizey, Digital Economy Minister announced the Government funding for the Hub on 6 January 2016, he said: “UK universities are renowned for their creativity, and pioneering research and development. We want the UK to be a world leader in the adoption of Internet of Things technologies, and I know that bringing these universities together with partners from the UK's thriving tech industry will be instrumental in making this a reality.”

An additional £9.7 million comes from partners including SMEs, industry, NGOs, and public bodies. With just over £4 million of additional support from the participating institutions, the total investment in the PETRAS IoT Hub comes to £24 million over three years.

The Hub is a consortium of nine leading universities have come together as the PETRAS IoT Hub, led by UCL with Imperial College London, Lancaster University, University of Oxford, University of Warwick, Cardiff University, University of Edinburgh, University of Southampton, and University of Surrey.

Initial IoT work carried out by Lancaster experts as part of the Hub includes:

• Studying the security and safety risks posed by the introduction of IoT in industrial infrastructures.• Developing novel cyber security driven architectures based on the philosophy ‘If it is not cyber secure, it is not safe’.• Contributing expertise in data and trust within IoT systems for smarter highways maintenance and ambient environments.• Developing new design techniques that will enable people to shape the future of the Internet of Things.

PETRAS IoT Hub Director Professor Jeremy Watson said: “We will maximize the economic and societal opportunities of the Internet of Things by removing barriers to adoption.”

“Working with business, public, and third sectors will enable the PETRAS IoT Hub members to investigate questions of safety, security, privacy and trust within real life settings.

“The UK has the potential to be the world’s most supportive environment for the development and deployment of a safe and secure Internet of Things. We will raise the bar using innovative collaborative and interdisciplinary research methods.”

Lancaster academics involved in the PETRAS IoT Hub include Professor Rachel Cooper, Professor Paul Coulton, Professor Awais Rashid and Professor Nigel Davies.

Professor Philip Nelson, EPSRC’s Chief Executive, said: “In the not too distant future almost all of our daily lives will be connected, in one way or another, to the digital world. Physical objects and devices will be able to interact with each other, ourselves, and the wider virtual world. But, before this can happen, there must be trust and confidence in how the Internet of Things works, its security and its resilience. By harnessing our world-leading research excellence this PETRAS research Hub will accelerate IoT technology innovation and bring benefit to society and business.”

The founding partners will oversee programmes of activity that attract the best social scientists from the UK and abroad to partner with industry and government and break new ground in our understanding of and capacity to counter contemporary threats.

Launching today (October 1), the Centre was commissioned by and will be administered by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with a focus on conducting independent research and knowledge synthesis to inform approaches to countering contemporary security threats to individuals, communities and institutions.

The centre is funded for three years with £4.35 million from the UK security and intelligence agencies and a further £2.2m invested by the founding institutions.

Director of CREST Professor Paul Taylor, from Lancaster University, said: “Bringing together the UK’s top economic, behavioural and social scientists with partners in industry and government will provide unprecedented opportunities to develop our understanding of security threats and how best to mitigate them. Today’s threats are challenging and diverse. The ambitious and innovative activities of CREST over the coming years will meet these challenges."

As well as conducting world-class, independent research, the Centre will stimulate public and professional debate, connect disciplinary communities, inform security policy and practice, and provide training to research leaders of the future.

Lancaster University will lead the research programme on ideas, beliefs and values in social contexts, examining how extremist ideologies are transmitted and countered.

The other founding partners will lead programmes looking at actors and narratives, online behaviour, eliciting information, and protective security and risk assessment.

The project will initially fund 13 PhD students working across all five universities.

Software obsolescence, increased automation of ship control systems, cloud computing, and the deception and bribery of key staff and crew through social media are just some of the emerging potential weaknesses that online criminals and agents could exploit.

The 'Cyber Operations in the Maritime Environment' report by academics at Lancaster University’s Security Lancaster – an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research – highlights that this heightened vulnerability will require navies and shipping companies to adopt new defensive measures to mitigate against cyber-attacks.

"In years gone by only those who had the capacity to build expensive ocean-going vessels had the ability to secure sea lanes and exploit the maritime landscape for profit," says Oliver Fitton of Security Lancaster and one of the report’s authors. "For the first time in maritime history the positive correlation between capital spent and power is undermined, cyber-attacks are low-cost alternatives to physical attacks, which have the ability to cripple maritime operations.

"The whole maritime industry must reassess its spending on long-term platforms (ships and other vessels).

"Ship builders especially must consider whether it is right to spend billions of pounds on platforms, and physical defensive systems, when they have the potential to be nullified by a single well-informed individual, thousands of miles away, with an internet connection and a few browser tabs open.

"Money may be better spent in cyber offence and defence. Another question that should be asked at the dawn of the age of cyber weaponry is – will you always need to be at sea to secure and exercise command in it?"

The report highlights how the ending of support for software such as Microsoft’s XP operating system – a user-friendly and robust system that could be adapted to a wide range of uses at sea – after 13 years means there will be no further official security updates. However, ships using the software are designed with much longer lifespans.

Due to short software lifespans like these, the report recommends that navies will have to 'fundamentally rethink' how they use technology on the commissioning of expensive vessels such as the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers that are currently under construction.

"It is impossible to imagine that these ships will maintain their effectiveness in 50 years' time if they continue to use their inaugural computer systems," says Mr Fitton. "Software will continue to have a dramatically shorter lifespan than hardware (ships). In the maritime environment hardware will continue to be designed and built to last for decades. Whereas software will only last until a vulnerability is developed to attack it, until the vendor (software company) decides not to support it or until the vendor goes out of business."

The report says the trend towards increased automation of shipping operating systems –enabling smaller crews, which reduces costs – also presents opportunities for malicious attackers.

"As the trend for greater automation continues new vectors of attack will be created," says Mr Fitton. "The trend to integrate technology makes sense when efficiency and economy are under consideration but not necessarily when security threats are taken into account."

The report predicts that off-the-shelf standard technology will become widespread – making it easily obtainable by criminals and leading to increased opportunities for attacks. Subcontractors maintaining these software systems could also be a potential threat vector.

As sea-faring vessels will be increasingly connected to the internet, another key vulnerability will be people on-board being targeted through their social media accounts and criminals or agents using methods such as social engineering, deception, identity theft, bribery and blackmail.

Mr Fitton said: "Friend and contact lists allow attackers to build up a picture of acquaintances, colleagues, friends and family members for use against the target maybe in the form of an identity theft attack or in the form of blackmail – which is especially effective when an individual is thousands of miles away from his or her loved ones. Each connection in a social network is a potential vector for social attack.

"For many years crews were isolated from the rest of the world while at sea but technology is changing that. Already US naval ships have their own wi-fi networks and private firms are attracting the best crew they can by offering comprehensive connectivity to employees.

"This means that new individuals who were once unreachable are now targets for remote attackers."

The report stresses the need for policies and procedures to be put in place to reduce the risk of employees coming under attack.

The 'Cyber Operations in the Maritime Environment' report was produced in response to an identification of a lack of understanding of the cyber threat within British Maritime Doctrine – the National Strategy for Maritime Security and commercial maritime operators. It was written by Mr Oliver Fitton, Dr Basil Germond, Dr Mark Lacey and Dr Daniel Prince.

More information about Security Lancaster is available by visiting Security Lancaster

Researchers in Britain and the Netherlands have made a breakthrough, developing a method with a success rate in tests of over 70% that could be in use in police stations around the world within a decade. Rather than relying on facial tics, talking too much or waving of arms – all seen as tell-tale signs of lying – the new method involves monitoring full-body motions to provide an indicator of signs of guilty feelings.

The polygraph is widely used in the US in criminal and other cases and for security clearance for the FBI and CIA, but is much less popular in Europe. There has been a lot of scepticism in the scientific and legal communities about its reliability. By contrast, the new method developed by the researchers has performed well in experiments.

The basic premise is that liars fidget more and so the use of an all-body motion suit – the kind used in films to create computer-generated characters – will pick this up. The suit contains 17 sensors that register movement up to 120 times per second in three dimensions for 23 joints. The findings are to be published at an international conference on system sciences opening at Kauai, Hawaii, on Monday.

One of the research team, Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said: “Decades of deception research show that the interviewer will tell truth from lies only slightly better than random, about 55 out of 100.

“The polygraph has been around since the 1920s and by measuring physiological stress induced by anxiety you can get to 60. However, it can easily be abused as an interrogation prop and many people are anxious anyway facing a polygraph on which their job or liberty depends.”

He said the new method, by contrast, achieved a reliability rating of over 70% and he was confident they would be able to do better. In some tests, the team has already achieved more than 80%.

Anderson said: “The takeaway message is that guilty people fidget more and we can measure this robustly.”

Anderson added that the research had a special significance at this time, against the background of the US Senate report on torture by the CIA. Apart from the moral case against torture, Anderson pointed out that it was a very unreliable way of gathering accurate information. “We have known for a long time that torture does not work,” he said. The new method offers a pragmatic, scientifically backed alternative for conducting interviews.

The research paper was written by Dr Sophie van der Zee, of Cambridge University, Professor Ronald Poppe of Utrecht university, Professor Paul Taylor of Lancaster university, and Anderson.

The polygraph was created in 1921 by policeman John Larson, based on research by the psychologist William Marston, and records changes in pulse, blood pressure, sweating and breathing to ascertain whether a subject is lying. While cinema depictions suggest the device is near-infallible, the US supreme court ruled in 1998 that there was no consensus that the polygraph was reliable, a finding supported by the US National Academy of Scientists in 2003.

The experiment carried out by Anderson and his colleagues involved 180 students and employees at Lancaster University, of which half were told to tell the truth and half to lie. They were each paid £7.50 for their participation in the 70-minute experiment, involving two tests. Some were interviewed about a computer game ‘Never End’ that they played for seven minutes, while others lied about playing it having only been shown notes about it. The second test involved a lost wallet containing £5. Some were asked to bring the wallet to a lost-and-found box while others hid it and lied about it.

“Overall, we correctly classified 82.2% (truths: 88.9%, lies: 75.6%) of the interviewees as either being truthful or deceptive based on the combined movement in their individual limbs,” the report says.

Anderson said: “Our first attempt looked at the extent to which different body parts and body signals indicated deception. It turned out that liars wave their arms more, but again this is only at the 60% level that you can get from a conventional polygraph. The paydirt was when we considered total body motion. That turns out to tell truth from lies over 70% of the time, and we believe it can be improved still further by combining it with optimal questioning techniques.”

Another advantage is that the total body motion is relatively unaffected by cultural background, anxiety and cognitive load (how much you are thinking) that confound other lie-detection technologies, Anderson said. The use of all-body suits is expensive – they cost about £30,000 – and can be uncomfortable, and Anderson and his colleagues are now looking at low-cost alternatives. These include using motion-sensing technology from computer games, such as the Kinect devices developed by Microsoft for the Xbox console.

Anderson acknowledges that agencies such as the CIA could teach agents how to counter the full-body motion method by freezing their bodies but he said that in itself would be a giveaway.

This article was originally published at The Guardian. Read the original article.

Announced by Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, the certification reflects the agency's approval of the high standards and abilities with which Lancaster University is equipping its graduates as they help to plug the large skills gap in the ongoing battle against cyber criminals that are costing the economy billions.

Professor Awais Rashid, director of Security Lancaster, said: "Government recognises that robust cyber security is essential for the UK to prosper in the digital age.

"At the moment there is a significant skills gap with demand for talented people equipped with the necessary cyber security skills being outstripped by supply. Centres of excellence like Security Lancaster are working hard to help equip our students with those sought-after and increasingly important skills to help meet the cyber security needs of business, industry and the society-at-large.

"We are happy our Masters in Cyber Security has received this certification as part of a rigorous national assessment and we are sure this measure will also help employers to identify the best graduates with the necessary skills."

The GCHQ certification reflects the aims of the National Cyber Security Programme, UK Government and its delivery partners, to increase the UK's academic capability in all fields of cyber security.

Lancaster University's Security Lancaster is an EPSRC-GCHQ Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. GCHQ, which has identified establishing a network of cyber security centres of excellence as a strategic priority, has indicated that delivering certified Masters qualifications is likely to be a prerequisite for future centre of excellence status in cyber security education for universities.

Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, said: "Cyber security is a crucial part of this government's long term plan for the British economy. We want to make the UK one of the safest places in the world to do business online. Through the excellent work of GCHQ, in partnership with other government departments, the private sector and academia, we are able to counter threats and ensure together we are stronger and more aware."

Chris Ensor, Deputy Director for the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance at GCHQ, said: "As the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, GCHQ recognises the critical role academia plays in developing the UK's skill and knowledge base.

"I'd like to congratulate the universities which have been recognised as offering a Master's degree which covers the broad range of subjects that underpin a good understanding of Cyber Security."

According to a report from security company McAfee cybercrime costs the global economy £266 billion annually. A 2011 Government report estimated the cost to the UK economy to be around £27 billion a year.

An independent report commissioned by Lancaster University estimated that cybercrime costs key sector businesses in North West England almost £107 million a year.

Emphasising the importance the certification brings to industry Mark Hughes, President of BT Security, said: "At BT we are acutely aware of the impact of the UK cyber skills gap and recruiting the right people with the right knowledge and skills is a big deal for us.

"As a leading Internet service provider we want to employ the very best. That is why we welcome GCHQ's certification of Master's degrees in Cyber Security. The fact that GCHQ recognises these courses as high calibre gives us, at BT, the confidence that those graduating with a Master's from one of these universities will have the sound knowledge base in cyber security that we would be looking for. This is a great step forward in developing the cyber specialist of tomorrow."

Other universities to have received full certification from GCHQ are Edinburgh Napier University, University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Cranfield University and University of Surrey received provisional certification.

More information about Security Lancaster is available by visiting www.security-centre.lancs.ac.uk

Information about Lancaster University's MSc in Cyber Security is available by visiting www.scc.lancs.ac.uk/masters/CyberSecurity