In an interview with the Evening Standard, Gavin Williamson stressed that North Korea was a real threat to the UK.

In the interview, found here, he said:

“This is not just a problem for the United States. This is a global problem. Britain has to step up in terms of dealing with it. There are threats emerging right around the world. Britain is a global player, it’s a world player. We will never hesitate to deal with aggression and threats.”

Recently North Korea fired an intermediate range ballistic missile eastwards over Japan and into the Pacific. This was described as the regimes latest provocation amid high tensions over its banned weapons programmes.

North Korea launched a Hwasong-12 ballistic missile that passed over Hokkaido. The missile travelled 3,700 kilometres and reached a maximum height of 770 kilometres; this is the furthest any North Korean IRBM missile has ever travelled.

Initial estimates suggest the Hwasong-12 would have a maximum range of between 3,700km and 6000km.

Additionally, much was made of the links North Korea has to various cyber attacks. Similarities were spotted between a major cyber-attack earlier in the year and code used by a group with links to the North Korean government say Kaspersky and Symantec.

The companies said that technical details within an early version of the WannaCry code are similar to code used by the government-linked North Korean hackers, Lazarus Group.

An attack that hit the NHS brought to light a global ransomware infection, hitting 75,000 computers in 99 countries, demanding ransom payments in 20 languages.

Ransomware is computer malware that installs covertly on a victim’s device that either mounts the cryptoviral extortion attack from cryptovirology that holds the victim’s data hostage, or mounts a cryptovirology leakware attack that threatens to publish the victim’s data, until a ransom is paid.

NHS services across the UK were hit by a large-scale cyber-attack. Hospitals across the country have reported being hit by the attack and in some instances in England, patients are being turned away from A&E and operations are being cancelled.