This is going to be a bit of a ‘why oh why?’ and ‘is it just me?’ type column, which I personally tend to find pretty rebarbative myself (I do wonder why Daily Mail readers don’t just go and commit mass suicide if they really are at that constant pitch of disconnect with modern life). But – deep breath – I have decided there just is no point to the IT security industry and I think all the firms should hand the money back to the investors and shut up shop.
Why do I say this? I have a real, real problem with this week’s story about a 25 year old piece of human rubbish who tried to sell my country’s secrets – including the names of the spies and intelligence operatives who try to make sure me and my family don’t get blown up on the Tube tomorrow – for £2m.
There are so many aspects to this squalid tale that if I was more flip about some things I’d find funny. The kid is a nutter, plainly (though he’s talking that up as a defence, I do know). He’s a pathetic Walter Mitty who reckoned he could get a champagne lifestyle on what a policeman told one of the papers was a Ginger Beer budget. And for God’s sake – he tried to sell our secrets to, er, the Dutch. Did he figure North Korea didn’t have the budget or that the truly fearsome FSB would laugh at him, as they probably would have done?
Luckily for us, he picked well: our friends in the Netherlands immediately ratted him out to us. And the next sort of funny bit; he was that easy to argue down cost-wise he was willing to settle for less than half (£900,000) of his asking price.
But but but… he was able to walk away night after night with literally thousands of files, documents, lists of operatives, video of whatever is really in Area 51 for all I know, on any CD or USB he probably just took from the MI6 stationery cupboard.
For that is who had hired him. MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. The ones the folks in ‘Spooks’ are a bit scared of, remember, as so hard-core. The ones whose mission is, and I quote from its official website, to "provide the British Government with a global covert capability to promote and defend the national security and economic well-being of the United Kingdom".
That’s important. And yet it can’t manage information security 101; it patently has no data hygiene worth a damn; no encryption (I pass over that stunning contradiction in silence); no way of checking what’s walking in and out of the building. For God’s sake, it was harder getting out the files George Smiley wanted from The Circus in Tinker, Tailor than this, surely, and that was a) made up and b) 40 years ago.
So – I am angry. MI6 is a joke for letting this happen. Worse, what’s the point of decades of chat about security if the most secure outfit in the country hasn’t been listening?
Enough. Publish the secrets on the Web and get it over with and let’s stop buying products that the users never use.
Yes, I’m angry. And so should you be. Unless you feel there is something useful to learn here – I, and the people of the UK who were so nearly compromised so dangerously, are dying to hear what you have to say.
