Ben Aung

@sagegroupplc's security team is growing! We want to hear from you even if you don’t think you fit one of our adverts (skills or geographically). We look for curiosity, enthusiasm and people who love being in a team. Everything else flows from that. sage.com/en-gb/company/caree…

Fascinating indeed. Interested to understand the practicalities of how NSA and DNSA advice will flow from and between NSS, cab sec and No10

I recall being woken up in the middle of the night by the COBR duty team in circa 2017 to be told UK special forces whereabouts were being published on the web via Strava (I had no idea what this was at the time)

No not at all. That NCSC advisory role is one of many in a v large organisation, with little direct accountability, no people management and probably a relatively sedate daily tempo of friendly meetings. The Aldi job probably none of those things.

The Aldi job is 10x more stressful believe me

Chris, I see you’ve tried to explain yourself (also on the BBC News front page). Privately, I hope you reflected on what led to you being the vehicle for briefing which feels both vindictive and misogynistic, and hope you do a lot better next time

I can speak to the benefit of generalist skills as additive to professional capability (in my case technology/cyber), not least as it makes you more employable/deployable. I have also found the private sector to be the inverse of the CS in proportion of generalist vs specialist

Won’t beat the time a crane fell on it!

I can say with cast iron certainty that 18 year old ‘cyber defenders’ will be creating significantly more work than any defending they do

Beautiful. How does it ride?

There’s quite a bit of rewriting history about Sue going on, seemingly by people who were nowhere near her or perhaps have an axe to grind. The quote also sounds like the last thing Jeremy would actually say

Foreign nationals can hold DV, but most roles which require DV are reserved for British or dual nationals (agree the story doesn't make sense though)

Ministers are not security vetted or subject to STRAP (which isn’t a clearance). If you don’t know this then I wonder what else you don’t know.

Do you use it as a notebook too? (recall your fondness for good pens)

The officials version met regularly, the ministerial one almost never

COBR has always been used in a variety of different ways. Cameron would have activated it in this situation, May wouldn’t, Johnson 🤷🏽‍♂️. COBR and NSC also not mutually exclusive to one another - one can tackle the immediate issues, the other the medium to long term

The table is 😬

Great article, Ciaran. Would love to read a longer form version if you’re ever inclined to write one!

It’s interesting how closely the findings from a report like this chime with (my) day to day interactions with HO as a civil servant

It doesn’t work that way, you overstate the sophistication of the process. Vetting officers generally see it as easier as candidates have had less opportunity to make mistakes (recreational drug use aside). The intelligence community is also full of people just out of university

Two things strike me about this: - brings home just how many people in the US system have TS clearances and access, an unmanageable number - the ability of someone to just retype classified docs and circumvent $millions of controls, I'm not sure how this risk is managed