Alexander Martin
@alexmartin
Journalist covering cybersecurity and intelligence. UK Editor at The Record from Recorded Future News. Dad of two. 🏠 Sheffield 📧 alexander.martin@therecord.media 📱 Signal: AlexanderMartin.79
DSIT is becoming part of BIST. If I was clever I'd come up with a joke about the AI gravy train.
Wilson at fourth! Absolute madness. Just madness. Absolutely wrong. The worst PMs we've ever had in terms of their long-term impact on the country were, from worst, Eden, followed by Cameron, followed by Wilson. cdp.leeds.ac.uk/2021/07/08/t...
Update on John Edwards departure as the Information Commissioner. Liz Kendall told a parliamentary committee this morning that the independent investigator found sexual harassment and bullying, and that Edwards is preparing to serve legal papers on a woman at the ICO. Kendall says she is appalled.
It's a claim of access, not a particularly detailed confirmation of that access.
This was very low-hanging fruit. SGTL's own bank flagged and froze multiple transactions. Internal emails copped to circumvention and a test payment from a US bank account... Why did this case take four years to conclude, and what does that say about OFSI's capacity for more complex investigations?
Disclosure Day 🛸 Watched it yesterday evening. A solid 3/5. Good: Spielberg (with Kaminski as DoP) delivers absolutely beautiful, hooking cinema. Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor are great. It is a more serious attempt to address some big themes and questions around the whole aliens thing. Bad...
The government has in other circumstances published such proportionality assessments. Three weeks after the telecoms consultation closed, DSIT shared independent research estimating cyberattacks cost the UK's economy £14.7 billion, versus £590m implementation costs: therecord.media/british-gov-...
None of the published assessments account for the cost of a successful hostile-state intrusion into UK telecoms infrastructure. This is one-sided accounting, as we were told by Rob Bratby and Ciaran Martin.
Seems to be a gap between the factsheet assurance and the text of the bill itself. Section 17C(3) states material benefits may include “information.” There is no stated journalistic defence. A big issue given murky links between cybercrime groups, hacktivists and state actors.
Only a very broad, passing reference to how the National Security (State Threats) Bill introduced to Parliament today would interact with the issue of (potentially unscrupulous? a debate for another time) journalists using state-hacked materials in their reporting: www.gov.uk/government/p...
Signal’s alternative is even more fatalistic. Dystopian hyberbole, and basically “do the hard social stuff” which is vague to the point of being a way of not answering the question. “Fund education and social services” is what you say when you don't want to engage with the specific problem. [4/5]
Two things on this. Firstly, ✨of course✨ the government can know the identities of people using the internet. That threshold was crossed a very long time ago. Secondly, there’s something miserable and fatalistic about both sides of this debate, and it isn't helping anyone. [1/5]
You replace some regular spaces with U+2002 spaces in a particular pattern, send subtly different versions to different recipients, and you can identify a leak from the spacing alone. It's invisible to the naked eye but trivial to detect with a Unicode inspector. [10/11]
The weird thing is the spacing. There are slightly, almost imperceptibly, larger spaces between some words and others. These aren’t uniform. Some are normal Unicode spaces U+0020. Some are different. Why? [3/11]
A really charming, admirable man. www.thetimes.com/uk/obituarie...
Strange to see this statement from Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, about patient data compromised during the Synnovis ransomware attack being unstructured and therefore of lower risk to data subjects. How accurate is that claim? Source: www.bedfordshirehospitals.nhs.uk/news/notific...
Please don't dunk on how dumb the idea is the UK could actually grow all of the foods we eat. Dunk on the even dumber national security framing. Our domestic wheat yields dropped by almost half due to the wet winter of 23/24 (eciu.net/analysis/rep...). Why didn't we have a bread shortage? Imports.
A brief break from news posts because we've just missed the 49th anniversary of this paper, which explains how the universe could end at literally any moment. We wouldn't, and couldn't, see it coming - the laws of physics would just ✨change✨ Paper: www2.physik.uni-muenchen.de/lehre/vorles...
It's taken me far too long to try mashed avocado with a dash of soy sauce in a chicken and rice salad bowl 😚🤌 Yes, I could have let the rice steam dry more but it didn't really change things at all.
I'm quite sorry not to be at Cyber UK this week, but thoroughly enjoying General Sir Rob Magowan's aiguillette on his No1s.
Sure am looking forward to flying to southern Europe in a few weeks time to get away from this news cycle.