Amazon Web Services

Earl Russell Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I refer my noble friend to what I said in last week’s Oral Question. I hope the Bill will be published very soon, before the end of the year. At this stage I cannot go into too much detail as to what is in the Bill, but I hope to soon be able to share the Bill itself with noble Lords.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I noticed yesterday that the Amazon share price did not move at all as a result of this incident. Is it the Government and us as consumers who are meeting the cost of this, and is that unacceptable?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

The noble Earl poses an interesting point. At the end of the day, businesses have to take upon themselves their responsibilities towards future cyberattacks and whether, as I said, their infrastructure and digital framework are secured from any such attacks. I am a firm believer in that. Before I came to this House, when I was running various businesses, the first thing I did was ensure that we had a comprehensive risk assessment as to whether our system might be attacked. We also ensured that our website and software source codes were lodged with an escrow account to protect them further, so that if anything happened we could get access to those source codes. I urge businesses to ensure that their systems are compliant with the latest security patches and, if possible, to get Cyber Essentials certified so that they can have confidence that their systems are protected from any such attacks.