The government of Ecuador had only just rid itself of one unwelcome problem — Julian Assange, who had been claiming political asylum in its London embassy — when it was hit with another: mass cyber assault.

Last week the deputy information minister announced that, since the WikiLeaks founder was stripped of protection and arrested at the embassy, Ecuador has been hit by some 40m cyber attacks.

The scale of the world’s cyber security problem in undeniable. During the first six months of 2018, a total of 3.3bn data records were compromised, according to the Breach Level Index, a global database. Sweden’s signals intelligence agency, FRA, estimates that there are more than 10,000 cyber attacks a month by hostile states or their proxies against targets in the country. According to the UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey of 2018, 72 per cent of large UK companies experienced attacks last year.