The world’s nine nuclear-armed states expanded their arsenals in 2025, according to a new assessment from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Researchers Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda found that most countries deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons during the year, even as the overall number of warheads in the world continued to decline. […]

British radar maker Blighter is pushing for more sales in Central and Eastern Europe, showcasing its border and low-altitude air surveillance radars this week at the MSPO defense exhibition in Kielce, Poland. The company builds ground-based radars that use electronic scanning array antennas rather than the mechanically rotating dishes found on older radar systems, letting […]

The vehicle built to replace the Land Rover Defender on the civilian market is now competing to replace Land Rovers in British Army service, and its bid just got two companies stronger. Hobson Industries and TVS Supply Chain Solutions have joined Team Grenadier, the industrial group INEOS Automotive formed in June to compete for the […]

Germany will supply Ukraine with several thousand more IRIS-T guided missiles, funded through the European Union’s 90 billion euro ($105 billion) loan package for Kyiv, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said September 8. Pistorius made the announcement ahead of a video conference of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the Ramstein-format meeting of Kyiv’s international backers, […]

HMS Queen Elizabeth is due to leave Portsmouth Naval Base at 6:20 p.m. on Saturday, September 5, carrying more than 800 sailors on a three-month deployment around British and northern European waters, according to UK Defence Journal. The deployment is the first extended sea period for the 65,000-tonne carrier since it took on a new […]

British vehicle maker Supacat has started production on 18 HMT Extenda military vehicles for the Czech Republic’s special operations forces, with deliveries scheduled to begin in 2027. The vehicles will go to the Czech Army’s 601st Special Forces Group, the country’s premier special operations unit, replacing an aging fleet of Land Rover Defender 110 vehicles […]

Britten-Norman flew its first Islander aircraft built entirely in the UK on Thursday, marking the return of complete airframe manufacturing to Britain after years of assembling major sections built overseas. The BN2B-26 Islander took off from Bembridge Airport on the Isle of Wight at 2:25 p.m. and has now entered flight testing, the company said. […]

A British-made counter-drone system was one of four technologies given a central role in a NATO training exercise in Latvia last month, where soldiers from multiple allied countries used it to detect and track drones over a dense pine forest. The system, called BlackTalon Ecosystem, is built by Enterprise Control Systems (ECS), part of the […]

General Dynamics Land Systems has teamed up with Ford Motor Company and Ricardo to compete for the UK Ministry of Defence’s Light Mobility Vehicle program, the companies announced. The team’s proposal is built on the Ford Ranger platform, which General Dynamics UK described as Europe’s best-selling pickup truck for 11 consecutive years. “Combining the strengths […]

Manufacturing company Quickparts announced a nearly $6 million investment in its Seattle Aerospace & Defense Center of Excellence, adding 12 Stratasys NEO 3D printing systems across its facilities in the United States, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, the company said Tuesday. The deployment is the company’s second major capacity investment in 18 months, following […]

Andy Burnham was a few weeks into the job as the new Prime Minister of the UK when he found himself exchanging messages with someone claiming to be Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff. The exchange, first reported by Politico last week, was brief and apparently trivial. Burnham grew suspicious, stopped replying and told the right people; the British embassy in Washington quietly informed the White House, which confirmed that Wiles’s own devices hadn’t been touched. No harm done, officially.

Embarrassments like this are becoming more common. The FBI warned last year about impostors using AI to mimic senior officials, after someone posing as Wiles contacted senior Republicans and business figures. The State Department later chased a fake Marco Rubio who reached three foreign ministers. And every one of these approaches lands on a habit “Signalgate” already exposed: when one wrong contact card could add a journalist to a strike-planning thread, the name on the screen was the only authentication in the room. If you want to see what this security weakness looks like run as a nation-state campaign look at a case that closed quietly in Taipei last month.

In July, prosecutors in Taipei’s Shilin district wrapped up proceedings against two local businessmen, Li Hualun and Chen Mengsen, who had spent months registering accounts on LINE (the messaging app nearly everyone in Taiwan uses), each tied to a real Taiwanese phone number. They leased the accounts to Xiamen Empress Information Technology, a mainland firm Taiwanese investigators say works under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party’s cyber forces. The going rate was about 1,100 RMB per account, call it $160.

A working exploit for a major platform costs millions on the gray market. A trusted local identity cost less than a decent dinner, and it did something no technical exploit can do.

The operators used the fake accounts to become journalists. In the approach that eventually unraveled the scheme, one of them even dressed up a leased account in the name and photo of Chen Yishan, editor-in-chief of CommonWealth Magazine, and began courting an aide in a legislator’s office. Interview requests, invitations to contribute articles, the ordinary traffic of political journalism followed.

There was no malicious link in the first message, or the tenth. Investigators found the operators worked on targets for months, sometimes close to a year. Any counterintelligence officer would recognize the rhythm. It was the patient cultivation and recruitment of an agent run through a chat app.

The eventual ask was small and reasonable-sounding. Journalists use encrypted tools to protect their sources, so would the contact mind installing a secure communication app to keep talking? The app was in fact malware. The MO turns a decade of good security advice inside out. The more someone knew about how careful reporters actually operate, the more normal the request looked.

Researchers at Citizen Lab and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose reporting the Taiwanese prosecution now corroborates, counted more than a hundred malicious domains behind the wider campaign, and found errors in the phishing messages suggesting the attackers were using AI to draft them and to pick targets. The people on the receiving end were lawmakers and their staffs, defense think tanks, semiconductor companies, dissidents at home and abroad. Taiwanese media reported that even the island’s overseas missions were probed.

Through all of it, nothing technical failed. The networks held and the patches were current. The attackers went around the security stack entirely, and the thing they spent, their actual operational currency, was the credibility of a free press. Every fake interview request makes the real ones a little harder. This cost never shows up in an incident report.

The two men who supplied the accounts got deferred prosecutions and payments totaling a bit under $6,000. That is the current legal price, in a frontline democracy, for renting identity infrastructure to a foreign intelligence service. It isn’t a deterrent. It’s barely a business expense.

Which brings us back to Downing Street. A prime minister with the full apparatus of British intelligence behind him replied to a stranger because the name on the screen looked right. Nothing in either story depends on LINE, or Taiwan, or Westminster.

Swap in WhatsApp or LinkedIn; swap the fake editor for a fake recruiter or a fake chief of staff. Aged, locally registered accounts are already a commodity in criminal markets. All the model requires is a person who handles something worth stealing and a persona they have no fast way to check.

That last part is fixable, though not by the security team alone. Organizations that handle sensitive work should treat identity verification as a counterintelligence habit. Platforms need to treat the account-rental trade Taiwan uncovered as the national security problem it has become rather than a terms-of-service nuisance. And legislatures need to punish collaboration with foreign intelligence services at something above a traffic ticket.

Mostly, though, the people likeliest to be approached — the legislative staffer, the fab engineer, the think-tank fellow, the human rights activist, apparently the occasional head of government — need to become more educated on how foreign intelligence cultivation and targeting actually works: slowly, warmly, and with no suspicious link in sight until the very end. The adversary in this case looked at hardened networks and vigilant software and made a rational choice. Building a fake trusted persona was cheaper — $160 a head – than spending millions on a sophisticated cyber exploit. We need to start defending the credibility of verified, trusted identifies the way we defend our networks: as the attack surface it already is.The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief