The British Army will buy a heavy wheeled recovery vehicle to tow and recover damaged Boxer armored vehicles in the field, after the Ministry of Defence dropped plans for a dedicated Boxer repair and recovery variant, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard told Parliament, UK Defence Journal reported. Pollard was answering Conservative lawmaker […]

Britain will lead development of three new sensor and effects packages for underwater drones under the AUKUS security partnership with the United States and Australia, with the systems due to be available across all three nations’ uncrewed underwater fleets from 2027, the UK Ministry of Defence said on Oct. 27. The three payloads are a […]

Singapore-based BeeX used its ALPHA underwater drone to place explosive charges on a moored sea mine and a swinging steel target and then destroy both during a closed-door mine countermeasures demonstration in the United Kingdom, the company said on Oct. 27. The one-day event, held on Sept. 17 and hosted by British defense consultancy Copper […]

The UK Ministry of Defence has hired Astroscale UK as prime contractor for LEDA, a new £15 million (about $20 million) military space program under which the company will build, launch and operate a spacecraft to study how satellites maneuvering close to other spacecraft could be used in orbital warfare, and how to counter them. […]

Saronic Technologies’ Corsair drone boats, the same type the U.S. military used to strike an Iranian naval base in July, have operated alongside forces from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia at Maritime Big Play Pacific, the AUKUS partners’ largest demonstration of uncrewed and autonomous technology, held in San Diego this October. The […]

NATO commanders spent 10 days in October rehearsing how they would fight a war against an enemy army of one million soldiers, running the alliance’s Avenger Triad 26 computer-assisted exercise from a command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, where about 150 officers from several countries tracked a simulated attack on alliance territory around the clock on […]

The U.S. Navy attack submarine USS Colorado (SSN 788) arrived at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia on Oct. 27 to begin a scheduled monthlong maintenance period. For the first time, Australian civilian technicians will carry out routine maintenance on a Virginia-class submarine in Western Australia, working alongside American shipyard specialists, with the U.K. Royal Navy […]

Britain’s Royal Navy could be left with just one frigate available for operations at any given time next year, as two more of its five remaining Type 23 frigates are expected to be declared unseaworthy within months, leaving three ships in service in 2027 with one at sea, one in training and one in maintenance, […]

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has opened a tender to buy Skydio X10D small drones, the American-made reconnaissance quadcopter already ordered by the thousands by the U.S. Army, with an estimated budget of £120,000 (about $160,700) excluding VAT, according to a notice on the Defence Sourcing Portal. The tender was issued by Navy Commercial, the Royal […]

British defense technology company Stratonex Defence Technologies is developing a range of unmanned ground vehicles, tactical drones, counter-drone systems and military mobility platforms, with a focus on reducing the exposure of personnel to battlefield threats. The company’s VARAN unmanned ground vehicle is among its central projects. The platform has undergone initial mobility and remote-control testing, […]

A heavy-lift cargo drone built by BAE Systems subsidiary Malloy Aeronautics has shot down several one-way attack drones with laser-guided rockets during a Pentagon experiment in Florida, firing one rocket after another without having to land and reload. The modified aircraft, known as the TRV-150, carried a three-pod launcher loaded with BAE Systems’ APKWS rockets […]

Britain has now received seven Challenger 3 prototype tanks for trials, with an eighth in the final stages of build, as the British Army works to prove the design of its next main battle tank before full production begins, UK Defence Journal reported. Defence minister Luke Pollard gave the figures in a written answer in […]

Britain will send Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to shoot down Houthi missiles and drones aimed at Saudi cities and critical infrastructure, the UK Defense Ministry said on Oct. 20. CNN reported that the jets will fly defensive counter-air missions over the kingdom, and a spokesperson for the prime minister’s office […]

British aircraft maker Skyfly Technologies has raised $10 million to turn its two-seat electric vertical takeoff aircraft into Longbow, a hybrid-electric cargo drone designed to carry 200 kg (440 pounds) more than 640 km (400 miles) and take off from ships, fields or forward bases without a runway. The seed round, announced on Oct. 20, […]

British defense technology company Stratonex Defence Technologies has unveiled VARAN, a modular unmanned ground vehicle concept designed to accompany and support forward units on the battlefield, with swappable mission equipment and the ability to navigate without satellite positioning. The company introduced the vehicle on social media and on its website, describing VARAN as a payload-agnostic […]

The British Army’s new Challenger 3 tank has now driven 2,000 km (1,240 miles) and fired more than 200 main gun rounds in testing, and it is set to start a tougher phase of trials in November, according to its builder, Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land. RBSL, the British-German joint venture building the tank, shared the […]

The British Army is looking for new ways to power its troops in the field, offering £2.45 million ($3.26 million) to companies that can develop better batteries, faster chargers and quieter alternatives to the diesel generators units rely on today. UK Defence Innovation, the Ministry of Defence’s innovation arm, launched the Tactical Power Challenge on […]

The British Army has dropped plans for armored mortar, repair and recovery, and anti-tank overwatch versions of its Boxer wheeled armored vehicle, and has ruled out using Boxer in the armored cavalry role, Defence Minister Luke Pollard told Parliament. Pollard, the minister for defence readiness and industry, gave the answers in response to written questions […]

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.

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