Reporting on UK cyber policy is mostly cataloguing delay and retreat. Simple things, endlessly stuck.
Cyber Shield is a tonic. It's ambitious, visionary and aspiring. The “because they are hard” tier of national expertise and focus. The payoff could be enormous. Genuinely exciting stuff.

Britain’s cyber agency laid out plans on Tuesday for what it called “a national scale, sovereign defense capability” that would use agentic AI systems to discover and fix cybersecurity weaknesses across government networks and critical national infrastructure.

Ridiculous this is being broadcast in full.

Saying you're the "most physically attacked" MP when two MPs have been killed in the last decade is just horribly self-absorbed.

Fewer than 15 of Britain's 350 largest listed companies signed up to the government's flagship voluntary cybersecurity scheme at its launch on Tuesday, eight months after ministers wrote personally to the chair and chief executive of every FTSE 350 firm urging them to do so.

“I am not a crook”

I also run wearing my Apple Watch?

Really interesting judgment, particularly considering the potential relevance for cyber incidents: “Lawyers for the company also said the blasts could have been executed by non-state saboteurs. However, Moulder found that even if this was the case, their motives would have been driven by the war.”

A sensible outcome would be FIFA saying there should be a process for reviewing red cards post-game. Expedite the review for Balogun's (in my opinion, wrongful, red) and apologise for approaching the issue without a proper governance structure. And Infantino resigns for bringing FIFA into disrepute.

Scoop: Britain's National Cyber Action Plan, the government's forthcoming strategy for defending the wider economy against state-backed and criminal hacking, has been delayed again amid the current ongoing drama in Westminster.

The stars finally aligned! Wilco and I finally got the play those Mermaid Avenue songs together at Solid Sound last weekend. You can stream the whole set here www.nepm.org/podcast/the-...

I hope Andy Burnham takes action against Apple Maps because I suspect but have not confirmed that the stars in the background are not the actual real stars. This is harmful content.

Scoop: Britain's National Cyber Action Plan, the government's forthcoming strategy for defending the wider economy against state-backed and criminal hacking, has been delayed again amid the current ongoing drama in Westminster.

I gotta say, @jwarminsky.bsky.social, my favorite part of the indictment is STOKES going all Karen with Dragon Force ransomware because he didn't want to pay the $500. EVERY retail employee knows the "do you know much I spend here" customer. Also, keep "Hackers" out your mouth you little punk.

There’s a joke about doing homework in here.

lol

The Trump administration is demanding that U.S. intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list that some fear will be misused or compromise operations www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/u...

US posts $10 million reward over Russian cyber campaign targeting Signal, WhatsApp The Record therecord.media/10million-re... @therecordmedia.bsky.social

They’re calling it the quote on British politics that ended the need for all other quotes

I feel like this should be an oil painting.

Interesting to see a lot of people mocking this man for his appearance. Very much not to make excuses for his personal decisions, but I wonder if that kind of reception played into how a person ends up planning this kind of mass-casualty attack?

GitHub dismissed security reports on flaws now exploited by supply-chain worm, researchers say via @alexmartin.bsky.social & @therecordmedia.bsky.social

Really interesting too that for a decade, the house style of British cyber advice has largely been the vocabulary of risk management. Now @ncsc.gov.uk's chief executive says it's more appropriate to start talking more about cyberspace being contested at all times.

New: Britain is already fighting the opening exchanges of future conflicts in cyberspace, the country’s cyber chief warned Wednesday, as he disclosed that hostile states are responsible for three-quarters of the attacks striking the country's critical national infrastructure.

Been too long since we had an @alexmartin.bsky.social undersea cable story at @therecordmedia.bsky.social! Finland brings charges against cargo ship officers for cutting submarine cables

Some interesting breaking news on the Russia sanctions front, as the UK's Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) has just announced a record fine of over £1 million against a company called Sabre Global Technologies Limited. But looking closer, the fine raises some big questions...

New: GitHub rejected two formal vulnerability reports identifying design flaws that researchers say are enabling variants of the Shai-Hulud supply-chain worm to infect and compromise hundreds of software packages and developer accounts worldwide.

What's happened? Every time I go to click on what might be an interesting video on YouTube, it's not actually the interesting video, it's some awful American talking over the actual interesting video. Who are these people? What can we do to stop them? It's a shame there's no Bluesky for YouTube...

The new measure will take effect on August 31, the anniversary of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Estonia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is intended to protect public institutions from cyber threats, said Minister Liisa Pakosta. ✍️ @darynant.bsky.social

New: The Finnish Prosecution Service announced Monday it was bringing charges against the captain and the bosun of The Fitburg, a cargo vessel which damaged several submarine cables in the Baltic Sea on New Year’s Eve.

A Brussels court has sentenced Belgian-Russian national Victor Labin to five years in prison for illegally exporting dual-use goods and chemicals to Russia.

Is it worth pointing out that Pitt the Younger and Gladstone largely did very well serving both as PM and their own Chancellor?

Who was the last Defence Secretary who could arguably be considered to have had a successful time in office?

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...

Scoop: Britain has weakened proposed cybersecurity protections for its telecoms networks that were developed in response to the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, after the companies responsible for implementing the measures lobbied against them.

Good scoop here from @alexmartin.bsky.social on UK watering down proposed telecom rules meant to respond to Salt Typhoon. Both the US and the UK have now done this, and the underlying reason behind both decisions is the same: therecord.media/uk-weakens-t...

Scoop: Britain has weakened proposed cybersecurity protections for its telecoms networks that were developed in response to the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, after the companies responsible for implementing the measures lobbied against them.

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...

If you absolutely love it when someone uses a short-form messaging platform to link somewhere they’ve been freed from reader-friendly character limits, then boy are you in luck 🎉 In some greater length, here's a LinkedIn article about why Signal and the UK govt are both wrong, and what could work ⤵️

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]

The European Commission is preparing to take France and Spain to Europe’s top court over their failure to pass cybersecurity legislation.

The European Commission proposed a sweeping set of laws and strategies this week aimed at reducing the European Union's reliance on foreign technology, amid concerns that its long-standing tech dependencies are becoming a security vulnerability.

A security researcher published a working exploit Tuesday for a flaw in Microsoft's VS Code allowing an attacker to steal a victim's GitHub access token with a single link click — saying he bypassed Microsoft's official reporting process because of how the company treated his previous disclosures.

🇦🇺🇨🇦🇳🇿🇬🇧🇺🇸 China's military intelligence services are increasingly turning to online job platforms with thousands of adverts intended to recruit people with access to sensitive information, the Five Eyes intelligence partnership warned on Wednesday in its first joint bulletin of its kind.

Join me on a little 30-second rabbit hole... 🕳️🐇 There’s something weird about the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ statement in response to the Five Eyes security bulletin, as shared below. Have a close read, if you can see it. I myself didn't until I added the statement to my copy. [1/11]

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...

Sad news. Lance Corporal James Freeman, 29, of the Royal Anglian Regiment, died on Sunday in Erbil, the capital of the country’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, in an incident that also killed an American soldier.

🛰️📡 “Every GPS satellite is a numbers station. The receivers were always listening. We just had not been.” This is an absolutely ✨fascinating✨ bit of writing and research, and also a great reminder that GPS is ultimately a US military asset made available to the world as a public good.

On 9 June, the UK Cyber Effects Network will be publishing its first edited volume. Edited by me, @tcstvns.bsky.social, @piahuesch.bsky.social and Emma De Angelis, the volume has a range of contributions on the UK approach to offensive cyber.