A WEEK may be a long time in politics, but it is an absolute age in the internet age. The pace of online change is increasing exponentially and shows no sign of slowing down.

Yesterday the Queen opened Britain’s showpiece national cyber security centre, part of a £2bn five-year national strategy to identify and defend the country against online attack.

When we see columns of tanks and missiles accompanied by thousands of soldiers goose stepping past the Kremlin it’s easy to imagine the threat an emboldened Russia poses.

But cyber threats are much more insidious. We cannot see the viruses, trojans, keyloggers and fake blogs until they are deployed against us. Some of them may already be in place, ready to strike at the click of a mouse.

The Government now ranks cyber warfare among the gravest threats facing our country.

It’s not hard to see why. Ten years ago the Internet of Things was the stuff of science fiction. Today there are more than six billion internet-enabled devices in use worldwide. By 2020 there will be more than 20 billion.

Having a fridge that can order a spare pint of milk may be useful but embedding the internet into our country’s infrastructure puts us at greater risk of a devastating cyber attack.

The national cyber security centre has its work cut out. According to a survey last year, the UK’s resilience to a cyber attack is worse than Nigeria, Latvia, Cyprus and even the Ukraine – and one of the biggest culprits is the UK Government.

Nearly all of England’s NHS trusts still rely on PCs running Windows XP, three years after Microsoft stopped delivering security updates. Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent also runs on the same obsolete operating system.

We welcome the new focus on cyber security but if the Government is serious it needs to upgrade its own infrastructure as a matter of urgency.