It is undoubtedly a success story but calling it rare is unfair on the many other stories which are not similarly aired. For example (taking issue with the intro), the largest Silicon Valley companies have leaned on GCHQ expertise for many years and organisations globally have benefited as a result

Which should be able to stand on its own feet without diminishing the risk from cyber

I’m not sure this is what Anthony Finkelstein is doing but it is ludicrous to assert there is parity with cyber. The piece reads like UK NACE marketing material - who I have sympathy for and are underinvested but in my experience have struggled to make a compelling enough case for their domain

Great piece, thank you

With agentic AI we might see ministers circumventing officials altogether by putting their AI generated policy ideas into practice with autonomous agents!

I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive and perhaps a great tool for Ministers to be better customers of their dept’s advice

Although, as you say, if you have web servers exposed you don't stand much chance. My surprise with X is less that they got knocked over, but more the length of time it took for them to recover - I suspect a lot of global brands do suffer DDoS outages but most go unnoticed.

With many applications, it is hard to achieve close to absolute protection from DDoS, even with Cloudflare etc. It is not a straightforward bandwidth issue but rather your ability to distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic and configure tools to allow the former and block the latter.

Completely agree with this and instinctively it should start with the SCS, which seems to have grown out of control

Haha diplomatically put, Tony

Would love to hear @tonycomer.bsky.social's view on how we dug ourselves out of that relationship issue

I would say it's fairly even between security bros and AI bros - the AI security bros could tip it but in which direction??

A great listen, Ciaran

Really nice explainer, Dave. My worry/cynicism is how quickly Ministers and Whitehall will run with (and ultimately become bored with) a fad or slogan without considering all of the infrastructure needed to make it a true ‘holistic approach’, as you describe it. I hope we can be that radical.

I hope one day we find out what was happening behind the scenes in terms of planning for gov pre-election, what Sue was expecting to change and how, functioning of mission boards/centre, cab sec appointment etc. It does sometimes feel like they’d not given it much thought at all

They must be hugely relieved there are columnists to keep them straight

'someone' will be losing their mind about it