Tag Archives: GCHQ

The NCSC Annual Review 2025: Between Capability and Stasis

The article examines the NCSC Annual Review 2025 as both a testament to accomplishment and a warning. It praises the NCSC’s technical competence but questions its identity: regulator, delivery agency, or state-backed market player? It highlights contradictions — DSIT hailing it as “the jewel in the crown” while eroding its remit, diluting CyberFirst into TechFirst, ending its startup work, and overstating the benefits of Cyber Essentials. The piece concludes that the NCSC is overextended and under-defined, needing clarity of purpose more than new initiatives — less performance, more direction.

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Systems in Tension: Britain’s China Crisis Spy Farce and the Architecture of Denial

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A forensic if mordant look at how the “Chinese spies in Parliament” case collapsed. I don’t think it was lies, more a system that’s eating itself. Legal, political, and economic silos each told their own version of the truth until coherence disappeared into the vortex. Between Cummings’ claims, Martin’s rebuttals, the embassy standoff, and Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Starmer, it’s a living portrait of Britain’s institutions locked in tension. Prosperity versus protection; diplomacy versus denial. But it doesn’t mean the system is broken; it might be working exactly as intended. Get the money in at all costs?

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West Midlands Cyber Hub Diaries: Day One (Or Perhaps Day Sixty)

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The West Midlands Cyber Hub marks a long-held ambition to give the region a central home for cyber. Building on the rebooted West Midlands Cyber Working Group (WM CWG), the Hub is designed to strengthen community coherence, increase investment, and connect students, SMEs, enterprises, and universities in a neutral space. Supported by DSIT, Innovate UK, Aston University, TechWM, and the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, the Hub will open its first phase at Enterprise Wharf in Birmingham, forming the core of a hub-and-spoke model across the region. The project team, led by Sevgi Aksoy and I (Wayne Horkan), with Rebecca Robinson as PM, is preparing for a pre-launch event on 30th September 2025.

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A Brief History of the Term Cyber (Meaning Cybersecurity)

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This article explores how the word cyber evolved from its academic roots in cybernetics to its current role as shorthand for cybersecurity. It traces the rise of cyberpunk fiction, the growing association with digital threats in the 1990s, and how UK policy frameworks adopted and institutionalised the term, culminating in the creation of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). From Greek etymology to modern geopolitics, cyber has shifted from describing control to denoting risk.

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When a Parking Permit Becomes a Cyber Risk: Understanding Indirect Supply Chain Threats

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While applying for a parking permit, I discovered an expired SSL certificate on a council website, highlighting how small oversights in public services can expose broader cybersecurity risks. This real-world example shows why organisations must take indirect supply chain risk seriously, particularly in regions critical to national security.

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