"They were warned cutting-edge research could be targeted by states to boost their own militaries and economies."
That seems like just part of how academia works today. People publish their work pretty openly. It's not locked up in a silo. Other people can see what they're doing and make use of it. Reputation depends on openly publishing work. If you don't want academia to work like that, I think that's going to involve some considerable rejiggering of the system. Or if it's just certain sensitive areas, move people in some areas to be classified, or to work at private labs, or something like that. I don't know how-readily universities are going to be able to deal with it.
"Former head of the National Cyber Security Centre Ciaran Martin told BBC Radio 4's Today programme security services were concerned about university staff being targeted in a bid to influence research"
I'm fuzzy on the concern. How does one influence research? To alter what is being researched? To try to sway findings?
"...as well as intellectual property theft through cyber attacks..."
That I can see, though I'd think that all organizations might be subject to it. I don't even know if academia is the most-prone to it or the most at-risk. A quote from The Cuckoo's Egg:
Our computers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory weren't especially secure, but we
were required to keep outsiders away from them and make an effort to prevent their
misuse. We weren't worried about someone hurting our computers, we just wanted to
keep our funding agency, the Department of Energy, off our backs. If they wanted
our computers painted green, then we'd order paintbrushes.
But to make visiting scientists happy, we had several computer accounts for
guests. With an account name of "guest" and a password of "guest," anyone could use
the system to solve their problems, as long as they didn't use more than a few
dollars of computing time. A hacker would have an easy time breaking into that
account—it was wide open. This would hardly be much of a break-in, with time
limited to one minute. But from that account, you could look around the system,
read any public files, and see who was logged in. We felt the minor security risk
was well worth the convenience.
Mulling over the situation, I kept doubting that a hacker was fooling around in
my system. Nobody's interested in particle physics. Hell, most of our scientists
would be delighted if anyone would read their papers. There's nothing special here
to tempt a hacker—no snazzy supercomputer, no sexy trade secrets, no classified
data. Indeed, the best part of working at Lawrence Berkeley Labs was the open,
academic atmosphere.
Fifty miles away, Lawrence Livermore Labs did classified work, developing
nuclear bombs and Star Wars projects. Now, that might be a target for some hacker
to break into. But with no connections to the outside, Livermore's computers can't
be dialed into. Their classified data's protected by brute force: isolation.
If someone did break into our system, what could they accomplish? They could
read any public files. Most of our scientists set their data this way, so their
collaborators can read it. Some of the systems software was public as well.
Though we call this data public, an outsider shouldn't wander through it. Some
of it's proprietary or copyrighted, like our software libraries and word processing
programs. Other databases aren't for everyone's consumption—lists of our
employees' addresses and incomplete reports on work in progress. Still, these
hardly qualify as sensitive material, and it's a long way from classified.
"and partnerships being abused."
Yeah, that seems like a valid concern. I remember listening to some podcast talking about concerns about genetic data that researchers on some US project had access to being used for other purposes by people they were collaborating with.