When Channel 4 launched a trailer for their new drama, The Undeclared War, it was perhaps a little too on the nose after the past two years. A prime minister and his cohort, addressing the nation from a couple of branded podiums, warning the public to stay alert to imminent danger (all that was missing was “next slide, please). You’d be forgiven for shuddering with flashbacks.
But this new show, from the Bafta award-winning writer and director Peter Kosminsky (Wolf Hall, The State), is thankfully not about a global health pandemic. No, this is a brand new subject to get the night terrors about: the threat of cyber warfare.
The Undeclared War is set in 2024, and focuses on a team of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) analysts, who are working on fending off cyber-attacks on the UK ahead of a general election. Starring Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg, Adrian Lester and Hannah Khalique-Brown, the team are pulled into a dangerous online battle with their opponents, trying to stop the potentially catastrophic onslaught from hitting the general public.
Is it based on a true story?
Well, it’s not technically a true story, but it is based in a lot of truth. For starters, the GCHQ is something that definitely exists in the UK already.
GCHQ is one of the three UK Intelligence and Security Agencies, along with MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, and their main role, according to their nicely vague website, is to: “support and guidance to make the UK safe, whilst pioneering a new kind of security for an ever more complex world.”
From terrorism to online fraud, the real team are working to stop “invisible” enemies from targeting anybody with a computer or phone in the country, which is basically every single one of us.
What specific cases have been solved by the GCHQ?
For security reasons, obviously they don’t like to shout about them. Their greatest achievements are probably the cases that we’ve heard nothing about. One case they did expand on was disrupting a sophisticated criminal conspiracy and peer-to-peer botnet known as Gameover Zeus. Traced back to a Russian hacker, Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, he infected over 500,000 users around the world – including 15,000 in the UK – to steal millions of dollars from anybody with enough money to warrant raiding their accounts.
Of course, the most recent example of our national cyber security coming under attack is online activity around the Brexit referendum and our general elections, with hostile actions being traced back to Russia.
According to The Times: “GCHQ stepped in to foil an attempted cyber-attack on BBC election coverage by the Kremlin-backed gang of hackers known as Fancy Bears. The attack came after Russian hackers crashed 11 French television channels.GCHQ traced the source of the French attacks to Russia and was able to advise the corporation and other media organisations about protecting their systems.
In 2020, the then foreign secretary Dominic Raab admitted: “The government has concluded that it is almost certain that Russian actors sought to interfere in the 2019 general election through the online amplification of illicitly acquired and leaked government documents.”
What does the showrunner say about the inspiration for the fictional series?
At a launch event for the series, the creator, Kosminsky said: "There is a hot war going on in cyberspace between a number of antagonists, in this particular case of Britain and Russia. And it's really dangerous. I think I was really shocked by the fragility of our hugely internet dependent society. And I just wanted people to be more aware of this.
Kosminsky continued: “There are no techniques shown or strategies described that aren't happening and aren’t real. The characters are fictional, completely fictional. And I call it a cautionary tale because I think that if we're not careful this hot war will escalate to the point where it threatens our civilisation. I think it's as serious as that. So that's why I wanted to tell the story.”
Yikes.
Interestingly, in his series, Kosminsky, who wrote it five years ago, also predicts that in November 2022, Boris Johnson will be “ousted by a coup” orchestrated by one of his colleagues during an economic crisis. We’ll just have to wait to see how that one plays out as well.
The Undeclared War starts on Channel 4 on Thursday June 30 at 9pm.
