Tag Archive for: Undeclared

The Undeclared War’s creator on showing cyberwarfare on TV

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Writer/director Peter Kosminsky is no stranger to British television. From his start in the late 1980s working on documentaries to writing and directing recent projects such as Wolf Hall and The State, Kosminsky has covered topics as diverse as the Falklands War, British ISIS agents in Syria, and Thomas Cromwell’s clash with King Henry VIII in the 16th century.

His latest project, the six-episode Peacock series The Undeclared War, tackles a new subject: cyberwarfare and Russian aggression during the 2024 British general election. While set in the near future, the show deals with topical themes that are both realistic and sobering. In an interview with Digital Trends, Kosminsky talks about casting such notable actors as Star Trek’s Simon Pegg and Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance and the urgency to fictionalize a very real threat to democracy around the world.

Digital Trends: What was the genesis behind the creation of The Undeclared War?

Peter Kosminsky: Well, like a lot of people, I watched some “bad actors” trying to undermine the U.S. presidential election in 2016. I found that really frightening. What do we have if we don’t have the integrity of our election system? I mean, look at what happened to the last U.S. presidential election, the sort of poisonous impact that’s having on political life in the United States. As far as I can tell from a distance, if people lose trust in their elections, it’s serious.

Absolutely.

So that’s where I started. You know, I thought, Ok, what’s going on here in England? And the more I dug into it, the more terrifying it became. Actually, I didn’t even know that there was a fourth domain of conflict called cyber. I knew about land, sea and air, and that was it, really. I discovered that there was a hot war going on in the cyber domain. They were firing cyber weapons at each other [Britain and Russia]. And it was, by its nature, escalatory. When I started to look at the Russian concept of information operations, they see cyber as just one aspect of it.

The cast of The Undeclared War populate on computer screens for the series poster.

I realized that there was a concrete strategy at play to try to create chaos in our society, in the West, to try to undermine people’s trust in our institutions, in our…

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What a real Undeclared War cyber attack could mean

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A grim-faced Prime Minister walks to a podium and delivers a sombre message to the British public that their lives are about to be disrupted in the most dramatic and fundamental way. This may sound like one of Boris Johnson’s televised addresses during the Covid pandemic, but it is in fact a scene from a new Channel 4 drama, The Undeclared War, about another potentially devastating threat from an unseen force: a major cyber attack that could bring the nation to a standstill.

The six-part series, directed by Peter Kosminsky and starring Adrian Lester as the Prime Minister, Simon Pegg as head of GCHQ and Hannah Khalique-Brown as an intelligence officer, is the result of five years of extensive research about what could happen in the event of a widespread hack on computer networks affecting government, the NHS, national infrastructure and banks. In fact, there are many comparisons with the Covid pandemic, and not only due to the viral nature of malware.

While the impact of a major cyber attack may stretch out for more than two years or more, as it did with Covid, experts warn there are gaps in the emergency planning by world governments to deal with such a crisis, just as they were underprepared for the pandemic. Planning for a viral pandemic was always about a worst case scenario that ministers, public health officials and scientists hoped would never happen – and so it is with a cyber attack.

But experts believe governments, businesses and the public need to take the threat, which may seem abstract, more seriously. They hope The Undeclared War, set in the very near future, will bring it to life. The ongoing reality of war in Ukraine, which has fuelled high inflation and food and energy insecurity, brings an added dimension to fears of a major cyber attack.

The worst case scenario is so much more than a website going offline for a few hours, but critical national infrastructure (CNI) such as water reservoirs, gas and oil pipelines and refineries, the NHS, supermarkets and transport networks being disrupted, with the aftermath lasting several days as the public panics to stock up on dwindling supplies and hospitals cannot operate on patients or conduct MRI scans.

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Fighting and Winning the Undeclared Cyber War – InsideSources

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Fighting and Winning the Undeclared Cyber War  InsideSources

War is no longer declared” says Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann: cyber warfare is transforming this line of poetry into reality. American cities.

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‘Wolf Hall’ Team Reunites for Cyber Warfare Series ‘The Undeclared War’

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  1. ‘Wolf Hall’ Team Reunites for Cyber Warfare Series ‘The Undeclared War’  Variety

  2. ‘Wolf Hall’ team developing cyber warfare series for Channel 4  Screen International
  3. WOLF HALL Creator Peter Kosminsky to Develop Cyber Warfare Drama for UK’s C4  Broadway World

    4. Full coverage

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