IT HAS been described as a sniffer dog for the 21st century but QinetiQ’s SPO-20 can only ever be a partial solution in the campaign against terrorism.

One obvious drawback is that the millimetre wave technology it uses can spot a device that is tied to only the front of a potential suicide bomber. To be effective, an organisation would have to have a scanner trained on the backs of people approaching a building, as well as their fronts.

Dr Duncan Hine, head of QinetiQ’s network security business, explains that effective security is moving away from assessing known threats to identifying vulnerabilities. However, QinetiQ believes that technology on its own does not provide a panacea. Good security is a combination of the right intelligence, people, processes and technology.

SPO-20 is just one of a number of solutions that QinetiQ is developing from its defence expertise for use by law- enforcement agencies and businesses with critical assets that need to be protected.

Security is one of the fastest growing parts of QinetiQ’s business with revenues up by 30.5 per cent last year to £32.1 million. The possibilities for exploiting or developing existing technology and applying it to new areas is also significant, worth £50.3 million to the company last year.

Dr Hine explains that this has been the biggest change for the former research agency which was used to working exclusively for the armed forces.

For the past five years, the company has been evolving from a government-focused agency to offer its solutions elsewhere. Leading companies that rely on the internet for sales, procurement and monitoring are some of the keenest customers of QinetiQ, including airlines, retailers, oil and gas companies and financial services groups.

Companies are particularly worried about IT and network security. A recent MORI survey conducted for the CBI and QinetiQ showed more than half of 100 leading businesses questioned said that IT security was of “great concern” to them. Their other great worries are standby facilities for business continuity, risk to brand values and risk to employees.

A third of businesses are concerned about terrorist action and a fifth are worried about environmental terrorism and computer hacking. While physical attacks from suicide bombers have penetrated London, it is actually the cyber threat from organised crime, clever schoolboys or terrorists that poses the biggest threat to businesses.

In this environment, QinetiQ can host websites that are critical to companies’ infrastructure and need high levels of security. It can provide forensic capability which may be used to prosecute a hacker and it also offers a poacher-turned-gamekeeper service, in which it will break into a company’s systems and then show the company how it was done and how it can be protected.

A number of leading British businesses have brought QinetiQ in to provide round-the-clock intruder detection services. These cannot be identified but range from the most famous big brand names to relatively low-profile agencies.

QinetiQ is also managing a new cyber-security network which is intended to accelerate the development of products that could plug the gaps in businesses’ defences.

With £10 million of funding from the Department of Trade and Industry, the project has drawn its steering committee from Aviva, BP, Visa, British Airways, Cisco and Microsoft. It is intended to inform government initiatives such as e-borders and identity cards.

Trying to gauge the scale of the problem is difficult. Dr Hine says that so-called “security events” occur every minute. “There’s always something happening. On a wide scale, there are the uninformed intrusions. On a small scale there are very well-informed incidences. Those are the most worrying, especially when someone internally is an accomplice.”

The security chief says that he sees evidence of “everything” in the course of a month from industrial espionage to fraud. According to the police, most crimes in this country are committed by a small number of hardened criminals. But that is not the case when it comes to cyberspace.

“There is the death of distance. It’s as easy for someone to attack a British company from Asia as it is from Balham High Street,” Dr Hine says.

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