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. […]Bitcoin Magazine
Government Defeated as Lords Back UK Digital Assets Strategy
The UK government suffered a defeat in the House of Lords on Wednesday as peers backed an amendment requiring the Treasury to draw up a national strategy for regulating digital assets.
The upper chamber approved the measure by 194 votes to 138, with Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers combining against a near-solid bloc of Labour votes. Baroness Neville-Rolfe, a Conservative former Treasury minister, moved the amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill.
The new clause, titled “Digital assets strategy,” would require the Treasury to prepare, publish and consult on a strategy for regulating and developing digital assets and related digital financial market infrastructure in the UK.
JUST IN:
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) September 11, 2026
The regulation of digital assets includes “cryptoassets, qualifying stablecoins, Central Bank Digital Currencies, tokenised securities and other digital and tokenised financial assets,” according to the draft.
The UK is in the process of drafting a sweeping new crypto bill. The country’s Financial Conduct Authority finalised its regulatory framework for cryptoassets in June, with the regime due to take effect on 25 October 2027. The authorisation gateway for firms opened on 30 September and runs to 28 February 2027.
Britain is trailing behind Brussels and Washington with digital asset regulation. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation has applied to service providers since 30 December 2024.
And the U.S. under President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, establishing a federal framework for dollar-backed tokens. Broader market-structure legislation remains unfinished: the Clarity Act cleared the House in July 2025 by 294-134 but has been stuck in the Senate over DeFi, stablecoin yield and ethics provisions, with a procedural vote set for next week.
This post Government Defeated as Lords Back UK Digital Assets Strategy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
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 […]Bitcoin Magazine
Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading
British financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown is letting retail investors buy bitcoin — nearly one year after it said the cryptocurrency was “not an asset class.”
The Bristol, UK-based investment firm’s website said it was offering bitcoin and other crypto exchange-traded notes to investors. ETNs are investment funds which trade on stock exchanges and track the prices of digital assets.
It comes after the firm, which manages nearly £173 billion (over $233 billion) in assets, last year warned customers about buying bitcoin.
NEW:
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) September 4, 2026
“While longer-term returns of Bitcoin have been positive, Bitcoin has experienced several periods of extreme losses and is a highly volatile investment — much riskier than stocks or bonds,” the firm said at the time.
“The HL Investment view is that Bitcoin is not an asset class, and we do not think cryptocurrency has characteristics that mean it should be included in portfolios for growth or income and shouldn’t be relied upon to help clients meet their financial goals.”
Now, a number of ETNs tracking the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are available. The firm warns users that “crypto ETNs are considered high-risk and may be volatile.”
U.S. regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 approved bitcoin exchange-traded funds for investors after a decade of saying no to the products.
The funds had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs as investors previously unable to buy exposure to the asset class rushed in to buy the products.
Run by top asset managers and banks like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley, the investment vehicles now collectively manage over $100 billion in assets.
This post Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
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 […]Late amendments to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill would give ministers new powers to restrict risky technology providers as supply chain attacks intensify.
The post UK Moves to Block High-Risk Tech Suppliers From Critical Infrastructure appeared first on SecurityWeek.
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 BriefWhen the analog TV signals were turned off in most places around fifteen years ago, their replacement took the form of a set of digital multiplexes. ATSC for North America, and DVB-T for Europe and other places. This would deliver a multi-channel broadcasting solution for the future, and this would be how those not on a cable would consume their telly. It’s a surprise then to find that some governments are already looking at turning off digital TV broadcasting, with the UK in particular wanting to put a date on the switch-off of 2032.
It’s been no secret for many years that linear broadcast TV is being overtaken by streaming services, and this move projected to come at the end of the transmitting contract was always likely to come eventually. Even with increasingly few younger people watching traditional TV though, it still comes as a bit of a shock that it’s happening so soon. The replacement will be an online service for which initially a set-top-box will be required. We’re guessing there will be a storm of protest, but since it’s still quite a few years away and broadband coverage is now near-universal, there’s a good chance it will peter out as the time approaches.
Aside from the end of analog TV, we’ve seen a steady decline in AM and Long Wave transmission across Europe. What makes this surprising then is that instead of being a legacy analogue system, the one facing the turn-off is the future-proof replacement, and one that still sees plenty of use at that. A major shift in consumer electronic technology is taking place, but will anyone notice it?
Header: Carlos Adampol Galindo, CC BY-SA 2.0.
The attack caused real-world operational disruption and raised concerns about the resilience of Britain’s distributed energy infrastructure and the potential for repeatable attacks.
The post Iran-Linked Hackers Shut Down UK Power Plant for Four Days appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The root cause of the incident is believed to be a compromised AWS access key that was exposed in publicly available JavaScript build artifacts.
The post Over 1,000 Charities Hit by Beacon CRM Data Breach appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Coinbase has launched futures, options, and perpetuals for professional clients in the United Kingdom, expanding its derivatives offering through its MiFID authorization.
The rollout is not for UK retail users. Eligibility is limited to users classified as Professional Clients, which means they must meet criteria tied to trading activity, portfolio size, or relevant professional experience.
That is the most important detail.
Crypto derivatives can offer hedging, leverage, and more sophisticated trading strategies, but regulators draw a clear line between professional and retail access. Coinbase’s UK expansion gives qualifying clients more tools, while keeping retail users outside the product set.
For more details, visit the official Coinbase platform.
The UK has a complicated relationship with crypto derivatives.
Retail access has been heavily restricted, but professional and institutional markets continue to develop through regulated structures. Coinbase’s move fits into that gap: more advanced products for clients who meet professional standards.
For qualifying users, derivatives can be useful.
They allow traders to hedge spot exposure, manage risk, express views without holding the underlying asset, or structure more complex strategies around volatility and timing.
For Coinbase, the offering helps deepen its institutional and professional trading business in a major financial market.
The eligibility criteria matter because “professional” is not just marketing language.
Elective professional status typically requires users to meet certain thresholds. These can include trading frequency, portfolio size above €500,000, or relevant professional experience in financial markets.
That means a casual UK crypto user should not expect access.
This distinction protects the accuracy of the story and the regulatory framing. Coinbase is not reopening crypto derivatives to everyone in the UK. It is expanding access within a defined professional-client framework.
That may still be commercially meaningful, but it is not a retail mass-market launch.
Spot trading is only one part of a mature market.
Derivatives are where many professional traders manage exposure. Futures and options can support hedging, basis trades, volatility strategies, and risk transfer. Perpetuals, while crypto-native, are also central to liquidity and price discovery in digital assets.
Offering these products to UK professionals gives Coinbase a more complete trading stack.
It also helps the exchange compete with other venues serving institutional and sophisticated crypto clients.
The more regulated venues offer derivatives, the more professional flow may move away from purely offshore platforms.
The announcement may be especially relevant for larger assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, because professional derivatives demand usually starts with the most liquid markets.
Institutions are more likely to trade products where spreads are tight, liquidity is deep, and risk models are mature. That tends to favor BTC and ETH first, before moving further into altcoins.
Over time, derivatives access can help build more efficient markets around major crypto assets.
But efficiency cuts both ways. Leverage can support liquidity, but it can also amplify volatility when positioning gets crowded.
Coinbase’s expansion is another sign that the UK crypto market is becoming more segmented.
Retail users face one set of rules. Professional clients face another. Regulated firms are building inside those boundaries rather than waiting for a single open market.
That may frustrate some users, but it is likely how crypto integrates into traditional finance.
The immediate takeaway is clear: Coinbase is giving UK professional clients access to a broader derivatives suite, but ordinary retail investors are not included.
Crypto derivatives are expanding in the UK, but only through the professional lane.
This article is based on Coinbase’s official UK derivatives announcement.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released by Coinbase. at Coinbase
Login