A cyber attack on the UK’s Defence Academy last March caused “significant” damage, a retired senior British military officer has revealed. Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who served as director-general of joint force development and led the military’s thinking on the future of warfare, told Sky News that the attack forced the Defence Academy to rebuild its network. “The consequences for the operations were significant, but then manageable,” Stringer said in his first television interview since leaving the military in August 2021. He said the perpetrators could have been cyber criminals or a hostile state such as China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. “It could be any of those or it could just be someone trying to find a vulnerability for a ransomware attack that was just, you know, a genuine criminal organization,” Stringer said. The school, based in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, teaches 28,000 military personnel, diplomats, and civil servants a year. …