• London’s best architecture honored at the 2025 RIBA London Awards

    The Royal Institute of British Architects has recognized 38 projects as winners of the RIBA London Awards 2025. The diverse pool of projects ranged from the reinvention of the former Royal London Hospital to the restoration of the Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower to an almshouse designed to reduce social isolation for older generations.“This year’s winners exemplify architecture’s power to transform - turning spaces into places of connection, creativity, and care,” RIBA President Muyiwa Oki said about the projects. “Spanning the length of the UK and diverse in form and function, our 2025 winners show a deep sensitivity to place and a strong coherence of thought between all teams involved. Individually these projects inspire and uplift, but collectively, they remind us that architects do far more than design buildings, they shape the way we live, work and connect.”  Each of the Regional list winners will now go on to compete in the RIBA National Award competition, the winner of which is...
    #londons #best #architecture #honored #riba
    London’s best architecture honored at the 2025 RIBA London Awards
    The Royal Institute of British Architects has recognized 38 projects as winners of the RIBA London Awards 2025. The diverse pool of projects ranged from the reinvention of the former Royal London Hospital to the restoration of the Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower to an almshouse designed to reduce social isolation for older generations.“This year’s winners exemplify architecture’s power to transform - turning spaces into places of connection, creativity, and care,” RIBA President Muyiwa Oki said about the projects. “Spanning the length of the UK and diverse in form and function, our 2025 winners show a deep sensitivity to place and a strong coherence of thought between all teams involved. Individually these projects inspire and uplift, but collectively, they remind us that architects do far more than design buildings, they shape the way we live, work and connect.”  Each of the Regional list winners will now go on to compete in the RIBA National Award competition, the winner of which is... #londons #best #architecture #honored #riba
    London’s best architecture honored at the 2025 RIBA London Awards
    archinect.com
    The Royal Institute of British Architects has recognized 38 projects as winners of the RIBA London Awards 2025. The diverse pool of projects ranged from the reinvention of the former Royal London Hospital to the restoration of the Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower to an almshouse designed to reduce social isolation for older generations.“This year’s winners exemplify architecture’s power to transform - turning spaces into places of connection, creativity, and care,” RIBA President Muyiwa Oki said about the projects. “Spanning the length of the UK and diverse in form and function, our 2025 winners show a deep sensitivity to place and a strong coherence of thought between all teams involved. Individually these projects inspire and uplift, but collectively, they remind us that architects do far more than design buildings, they shape the way we live, work and connect.”  Each of the Regional list winners will now go on to compete in the RIBA National Award competition, the winner of which is...
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  • Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba Architects

    Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba ArchitectsSave this picture!© Doublespace Photography Younes BounharHouses•Toronto, Canada

    Architects:
    Batay-Csorba Architects
    Area
    Area of this architecture project

    Area: 
    3220 ft²

    Year
    Completion year of this architecture project

    Year: 

    2024

    Photographs

    Photographs:Doublespace Photography Younes Bounhar

    Manufacturers
    Brands with products used in this architecture project

    Manufacturers:  Heroal, Cocoon, EDM, Fraserwood, Ludowici Roof Tile, Moncer, SIMONSWERK North America, van de Moortel

    Lead Architects:

    Jodi Batay-Csorba, Andrew Batay-Csorba

    More SpecsLess Specs
    this picture!
    Text description provided by the architects. Situated on a corner city lot within the context of traditional Edwardian gable homes in Toronto's High Park neighborhood, the Westminster residence is a 2,340sf 3-bedroom primary home for a family of 4. The project aims to provide an underlying sense of familiarity and continuity within the archetypal roof form of the context, creating a paradoxical balance between blending in and standing out. Hidden within a steep, weathered terracotta roof, the project explores the notion of spatially occupying the underside of the roof, akin to an attic.this picture!this picture!this picture!this picture!The simple project form is a composition of three dark monolithic figures, a low dark brick-clad volume, a heavy triangular stone-clad roof and tall rectilinear dormers. The heavy roof hovers asymmetrically on top of the first floor, cantilevering the covered carport and side patio, producing an unsettling dynamic between the simple volumes.this picture!this picture!this picture!this picture!this picture!Similar in size and materiality, the dormers take on diametrically opposite stances in the project, with one grounding the west façade as it meets the ground, while the east dormer is inexplicably cantilevered and hovers above the carport.this picture!this picture!The material atmosphere is a marriage of Villain's lair meets light and airy refuge. The restrained palette consists of dark stained plain sawn walnut, heavy unfilled travertine, concrete and dark textural lime wash walls that juxtapose heavily against double height light-filled soft lime wash walls, wide plank knotted white oak floors and soft linen drapery and fabrics. The sequence of moving from compressed cavernous spatial experience to its inverse is narrated as one moves throughout the home.this picture!

    Project gallerySee allShow less
    About this office
    Published on May 16, 2025Cite: "Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba Architects" 16 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . < ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否
    You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream
    #westminster #residence #bataycsorba #architects
    Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba Architects
    Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba ArchitectsSave this picture!© Doublespace Photography Younes BounharHouses•Toronto, Canada Architects: Batay-Csorba Architects Area Area of this architecture project Area:  3220 ft² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2024 Photographs Photographs:Doublespace Photography Younes Bounhar Manufacturers Brands with products used in this architecture project Manufacturers:  Heroal, Cocoon, EDM, Fraserwood, Ludowici Roof Tile, Moncer, SIMONSWERK North America, van de Moortel Lead Architects: Jodi Batay-Csorba, Andrew Batay-Csorba More SpecsLess Specs this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Situated on a corner city lot within the context of traditional Edwardian gable homes in Toronto's High Park neighborhood, the Westminster residence is a 2,340sf 3-bedroom primary home for a family of 4. The project aims to provide an underlying sense of familiarity and continuity within the archetypal roof form of the context, creating a paradoxical balance between blending in and standing out. Hidden within a steep, weathered terracotta roof, the project explores the notion of spatially occupying the underside of the roof, akin to an attic.this picture!this picture!this picture!this picture!The simple project form is a composition of three dark monolithic figures, a low dark brick-clad volume, a heavy triangular stone-clad roof and tall rectilinear dormers. The heavy roof hovers asymmetrically on top of the first floor, cantilevering the covered carport and side patio, producing an unsettling dynamic between the simple volumes.this picture!this picture!this picture!this picture!this picture!Similar in size and materiality, the dormers take on diametrically opposite stances in the project, with one grounding the west façade as it meets the ground, while the east dormer is inexplicably cantilevered and hovers above the carport.this picture!this picture!The material atmosphere is a marriage of Villain's lair meets light and airy refuge. The restrained palette consists of dark stained plain sawn walnut, heavy unfilled travertine, concrete and dark textural lime wash walls that juxtapose heavily against double height light-filled soft lime wash walls, wide plank knotted white oak floors and soft linen drapery and fabrics. The sequence of moving from compressed cavernous spatial experience to its inverse is narrated as one moves throughout the home.this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this office Published on May 16, 2025Cite: "Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba Architects" 16 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . < ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream #westminster #residence #bataycsorba #architects
    Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba Architects
    www.archdaily.com
    Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba ArchitectsSave this picture!© Doublespace Photography Younes BounharHouses•Toronto, Canada Architects: Batay-Csorba Architects Area Area of this architecture project Area:  3220 ft² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2024 Photographs Photographs:Doublespace Photography Younes Bounhar Manufacturers Brands with products used in this architecture project Manufacturers:  Heroal, Cocoon, EDM, Fraserwood, Ludowici Roof Tile, Moncer, SIMONSWERK North America, van de Moortel Lead Architects: Jodi Batay-Csorba, Andrew Batay-Csorba More SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Situated on a corner city lot within the context of traditional Edwardian gable homes in Toronto's High Park neighborhood, the Westminster residence is a 2,340sf 3-bedroom primary home for a family of 4. The project aims to provide an underlying sense of familiarity and continuity within the archetypal roof form of the context, creating a paradoxical balance between blending in and standing out. Hidden within a steep, weathered terracotta roof, the project explores the notion of spatially occupying the underside of the roof, akin to an attic.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The simple project form is a composition of three dark monolithic figures, a low dark brick-clad volume, a heavy triangular stone-clad roof and tall rectilinear dormers. The heavy roof hovers asymmetrically on top of the first floor, cantilevering the covered carport and side patio, producing an unsettling dynamic between the simple volumes.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Similar in size and materiality, the dormers take on diametrically opposite stances in the project, with one grounding the west façade as it meets the ground, while the east dormer is inexplicably cantilevered and hovers above the carport.Save this picture!Save this picture!The material atmosphere is a marriage of Villain's lair meets light and airy refuge (this was a literal marriage of partners' goals). The restrained palette consists of dark stained plain sawn walnut, heavy unfilled travertine, concrete and dark textural lime wash walls that juxtapose heavily against double height light-filled soft lime wash walls, wide plank knotted white oak floors and soft linen drapery and fabrics. The sequence of moving from compressed cavernous spatial experience to its inverse is narrated as one moves throughout the home.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this office Published on May 16, 2025Cite: "Westminster Residence / Batay-Csorba Architects" 16 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1030177/westminster-residence-batay-csorba-architects&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream
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  • Purcell brought on to RIBA’s £60m House of Architecture job

    The institute confirmed it had appointed the heritage specialist, ranked 10th in last year’s AJ100 league table, to deliver the RIBA Stage 4 design on the project to overhaul its 66 Portland Place base.
    In February, Benedetti Architects finally submitted its revamp plans for the Grade II*-listed, 91-year-old, George Grey Wornum-designed building to Westminster City Council, three years after winning the original competition.
    The RIBA said the 10-strong Clerkenwell-based practice would remain as design guardians on the project, which could take up to three years to complete.Advertisement

    Benedetti was selected for the job in 2022 following an RIBA-run competition. Also shortlisted were David Kohn Architects, Belfast-based Hall McKnight, Roz Barr Architects, a collaboration between Freehaus with Donald Insall Associates, IDKHugh Broughton Architects, and a joint bid between Feix&Merlin with Haptic Architects & Heritage Architecture.
    News of Purcell's appointment comes as RIBA resumes its search for a temporary home. Earlier this week, it emerged that a proposed move to the nearby Royal College of Physicians offices had collapsed.
    But despite this setback and the fact Benedetti Architects' plans have not yet been approved, the institute still plans to shut its café and bookshop at the end of this month and close its doors to all staff by 29 August. The building is set to reopen in 2028 following its full refurbishment – a project that aims to improve the 1930s building’s accessibility.
    Speaking about the decision to bring Purcell on to the team, RIBA chair of board Jack Pringle said: ‘At the competition stage, RIBA was pleased to open the project to all architectural practices, including SMEs, to maximise the creative talent pool available to the institute.
    ‘We were delighted to appoint Benedetti Architects to that role, fresh from their triumph at BAFTA. Now, for Stage 4, we are pleased to retain Benedetti as our design guardian and to bring in the powerful team of Purcell with their in-depth knowledge of the renovation of historic buildings – not least the Palace of Westminster, the National Gallery in collaboration with Selldorf Architects, and Auckland Castle where they collaborated with Niall McLaughlin Architects.’Advertisement

    According to its last accounts for the year ending April 2024, Purcell had a turnover of £26.4 million and a workforce of nearly 290 staff.
    The submitted Benedetti scheme includes replacing the revolving glass door on the main entrance with a more accessible entrance for blind visitors, as well as less steep wheelchair ramps and new steps.
    A separate entrance on Weymouth Street will be introduced for a new café – replacing the current bookshop – with pavement seating to encourage public use of the building. 
    The bookshop will relocate to be more ‘public-facing’ towards Portland Place on the north-west corner of the ground floor. The main exhibition space will move upstairs, with the existing ground-floor gallery untouched.
    Source:Benedetti/RIBA
    The introduction of larger lifts aims to provide universal access to all of the building’s 28 levels, many of which can only currently be reached by stairs. A ‘generously sized’ entrance to the library, matching original Wornum features inside the building, will further increase accessibility. 
    The refurbishment also addresses inefficiencies in the plumbing and electrical systems, removing fossil-fuel-dependent systems to meet the RIBA and Westminster City Council's climate targets. Heritage single-glazed windows will be largely retained, with secondary glazing introduced elsewhere.
    Other aspects include restoring the Jarvis Foyer, a 400-seat hospitality space, and more display space for architectural models and drawings. Meanwhile, banners originally proposed for the entrance have been dropped on the advice of Westminster Council following a consultation last summer. 
    66 Portland Place was built in 1934 and has had piecemeal upgrades throughout its history, most recently in 2019 with the addition of a Hayhurst & Co-designed learning centre and a Carmody Groarke-designed gallery.
    The RIBA has previously said it would look to fundraising and sponsorship to pay for the House of Architecture and that ‘the funding strategynot linked to member fees’.
    Meanwhile, the institute, having failed to secure temporary office space at the Royal College of Physicians in St Andrew’s Place, Regent’s Park, said it was now ‘exploring contingency plans to ensure suitable working arrangements for staff'.
    Source:Benedetti/RIBA
    Benedetti’s submitted RIBA House of Architecture refurbishment
    #purcell #brought #ribas #60m #house
    Purcell brought on to RIBA’s £60m House of Architecture job
    The institute confirmed it had appointed the heritage specialist, ranked 10th in last year’s AJ100 league table, to deliver the RIBA Stage 4 design on the project to overhaul its 66 Portland Place base. In February, Benedetti Architects finally submitted its revamp plans for the Grade II*-listed, 91-year-old, George Grey Wornum-designed building to Westminster City Council, three years after winning the original competition. The RIBA said the 10-strong Clerkenwell-based practice would remain as design guardians on the project, which could take up to three years to complete.Advertisement Benedetti was selected for the job in 2022 following an RIBA-run competition. Also shortlisted were David Kohn Architects, Belfast-based Hall McKnight, Roz Barr Architects, a collaboration between Freehaus with Donald Insall Associates, IDKHugh Broughton Architects, and a joint bid between Feix&Merlin with Haptic Architects & Heritage Architecture. News of Purcell's appointment comes as RIBA resumes its search for a temporary home. Earlier this week, it emerged that a proposed move to the nearby Royal College of Physicians offices had collapsed. But despite this setback and the fact Benedetti Architects' plans have not yet been approved, the institute still plans to shut its café and bookshop at the end of this month and close its doors to all staff by 29 August. The building is set to reopen in 2028 following its full refurbishment – a project that aims to improve the 1930s building’s accessibility. Speaking about the decision to bring Purcell on to the team, RIBA chair of board Jack Pringle said: ‘At the competition stage, RIBA was pleased to open the project to all architectural practices, including SMEs, to maximise the creative talent pool available to the institute. ‘We were delighted to appoint Benedetti Architects to that role, fresh from their triumph at BAFTA. Now, for Stage 4, we are pleased to retain Benedetti as our design guardian and to bring in the powerful team of Purcell with their in-depth knowledge of the renovation of historic buildings – not least the Palace of Westminster, the National Gallery in collaboration with Selldorf Architects, and Auckland Castle where they collaborated with Niall McLaughlin Architects.’Advertisement According to its last accounts for the year ending April 2024, Purcell had a turnover of £26.4 million and a workforce of nearly 290 staff. The submitted Benedetti scheme includes replacing the revolving glass door on the main entrance with a more accessible entrance for blind visitors, as well as less steep wheelchair ramps and new steps. A separate entrance on Weymouth Street will be introduced for a new café – replacing the current bookshop – with pavement seating to encourage public use of the building.  The bookshop will relocate to be more ‘public-facing’ towards Portland Place on the north-west corner of the ground floor. The main exhibition space will move upstairs, with the existing ground-floor gallery untouched. Source:Benedetti/RIBA The introduction of larger lifts aims to provide universal access to all of the building’s 28 levels, many of which can only currently be reached by stairs. A ‘generously sized’ entrance to the library, matching original Wornum features inside the building, will further increase accessibility.  The refurbishment also addresses inefficiencies in the plumbing and electrical systems, removing fossil-fuel-dependent systems to meet the RIBA and Westminster City Council's climate targets. Heritage single-glazed windows will be largely retained, with secondary glazing introduced elsewhere. Other aspects include restoring the Jarvis Foyer, a 400-seat hospitality space, and more display space for architectural models and drawings. Meanwhile, banners originally proposed for the entrance have been dropped on the advice of Westminster Council following a consultation last summer.  66 Portland Place was built in 1934 and has had piecemeal upgrades throughout its history, most recently in 2019 with the addition of a Hayhurst & Co-designed learning centre and a Carmody Groarke-designed gallery. The RIBA has previously said it would look to fundraising and sponsorship to pay for the House of Architecture and that ‘the funding strategynot linked to member fees’. Meanwhile, the institute, having failed to secure temporary office space at the Royal College of Physicians in St Andrew’s Place, Regent’s Park, said it was now ‘exploring contingency plans to ensure suitable working arrangements for staff'. Source:Benedetti/RIBA Benedetti’s submitted RIBA House of Architecture refurbishment #purcell #brought #ribas #60m #house
    Purcell brought on to RIBA’s £60m House of Architecture job
    www.architectsjournal.co.uk
    The institute confirmed it had appointed the heritage specialist, ranked 10th in last year’s AJ100 league table, to deliver the RIBA Stage 4 design on the project to overhaul its 66 Portland Place base. In February, Benedetti Architects finally submitted its revamp plans for the Grade II*-listed, 91-year-old, George Grey Wornum-designed building to Westminster City Council, three years after winning the original competition. The RIBA said the 10-strong Clerkenwell-based practice would remain as design guardians on the project, which could take up to three years to complete.Advertisement Benedetti was selected for the job in 2022 following an RIBA-run competition. Also shortlisted were David Kohn Architects, Belfast-based Hall McKnight, Roz Barr Architects, a collaboration between Freehaus with Donald Insall Associates, IDKHugh Broughton Architects, and a joint bid between Feix&Merlin with Haptic Architects & Heritage Architecture. News of Purcell's appointment comes as RIBA resumes its search for a temporary home. Earlier this week, it emerged that a proposed move to the nearby Royal College of Physicians offices had collapsed. But despite this setback and the fact Benedetti Architects' plans have not yet been approved, the institute still plans to shut its café and bookshop at the end of this month and close its doors to all staff by 29 August. The building is set to reopen in 2028 following its full refurbishment – a project that aims to improve the 1930s building’s accessibility. Speaking about the decision to bring Purcell on to the team, RIBA chair of board Jack Pringle said: ‘At the competition stage, RIBA was pleased to open the project to all architectural practices, including SMEs, to maximise the creative talent pool available to the institute. ‘We were delighted to appoint Benedetti Architects to that role, fresh from their triumph at BAFTA. Now, for Stage 4, we are pleased to retain Benedetti as our design guardian and to bring in the powerful team of Purcell with their in-depth knowledge of the renovation of historic buildings – not least the Palace of Westminster, the National Gallery in collaboration with Selldorf Architects, and Auckland Castle where they collaborated with Niall McLaughlin Architects.’Advertisement According to its last accounts for the year ending April 2024, Purcell had a turnover of £26.4 million and a workforce of nearly 290 staff. The submitted Benedetti scheme includes replacing the revolving glass door on the main entrance with a more accessible entrance for blind visitors, as well as less steep wheelchair ramps and new steps. A separate entrance on Weymouth Street will be introduced for a new café – replacing the current bookshop – with pavement seating to encourage public use of the building.  The bookshop will relocate to be more ‘public-facing’ towards Portland Place on the north-west corner of the ground floor. The main exhibition space will move upstairs, with the existing ground-floor gallery untouched. Source:Benedetti/RIBA The introduction of larger lifts aims to provide universal access to all of the building’s 28 levels, many of which can only currently be reached by stairs. A ‘generously sized’ entrance to the library, matching original Wornum features inside the building, will further increase accessibility.  The refurbishment also addresses inefficiencies in the plumbing and electrical systems, removing fossil-fuel-dependent systems to meet the RIBA and Westminster City Council's climate targets. Heritage single-glazed windows will be largely retained, with secondary glazing introduced elsewhere. Other aspects include restoring the Jarvis Foyer, a 400-seat hospitality space, and more display space for architectural models and drawings. Meanwhile, banners originally proposed for the entrance have been dropped on the advice of Westminster Council following a consultation last summer.  66 Portland Place was built in 1934 and has had piecemeal upgrades throughout its history, most recently in 2019 with the addition of a Hayhurst & Co-designed learning centre and a Carmody Groarke-designed gallery. The RIBA has previously said it would look to fundraising and sponsorship to pay for the House of Architecture and that ‘the funding strategy [was] not linked to member fees’. Meanwhile, the institute, having failed to secure temporary office space at the Royal College of Physicians in St Andrew’s Place, Regent’s Park, said it was now ‘exploring contingency plans to ensure suitable working arrangements for staff'. Source:Benedetti/RIBA Benedetti’s submitted RIBA House of Architecture refurbishment (February 2025)
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  • Why we must reform the Computer Misuse Act: A cyber pro speaks out

    Eight years ago, Simon Whittaker, head of cyber security at Belfast-based consultancy Instil, narrowly avoided having his front door smashed in by the Police Service of Northern Irelandand was only saved from an expensive repair job because a relative was home at the time.
    Whittaker was the innocent victim of a misunderstanding that arose when his work as a cyber security professional butted heads with legislation contained in the UK’s Computer Misuse Actof 1990 that at first glance seems sensible.
    “What happened to me is that we were working with a client who was working with an NHS Trust, demonstrating some of their software,” he explains. “Their software picked up information from various dark web sources and posted this information on Pastebin.”
    This post was made on Tuesday 9 May 2017and the information contained several keywords, including “NHS” and “ransomware”.
    This accidental act was enough to trip alarm bells somewhere in the depths of Britain’s intelligence apparatus. The National Crime Agencygot involved, emails whizzed back and forth over the Atlantic to the Americans. Unbeknownst to Whittaker and his family, a crisis was developing.

    “We ended up with eight coppers at our door and a lot of people very upset,” says Whittaker. “It cost us about £3,000 in legal fees, when all that had happened was a few words had been posted on Pastebin.
    “We talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it’s quite accurate, inasmuch as they had identified the smallest amount of evidence – that wasn’t even evidence because nothing happened – but it was enough.”
    And the punchline? It just so happens that the posts were identified on Friday 12 May as part of the investigation into the WannaCry attack, which caused chaos across the NHS. Whittaker’s home was raided the following Monday.

    So, what is the CMA, and how did it almost land Whittaker in the nick? It’s a big question that speaks not only to his unpleasant experience, but to wider issues of legal overreach, government inertia and, ultimately, the ability of Britain’s burgeoning cyber security economy to function to its full potential.
    Indeed, the CyberUp campaign for CMA reform estimates that the UK’s security firms lose billions every year because the CMA effectively binds them.
    In a nutshell, it defines the broad offence of Unauthorised Access to a Computer. At face value, this is hard to argue with because it appears to make cyber crime illegal.
    However, in its broad application, what the offence actually does is to make all hacking illegal. As such, it is now woefully outdated because it completely fails to account for the fact that, from time to time, legitimate security professionals and ethical hackers must access a computer without authorisation if they are to do their jobs.
    “It’s so frustrating, the idea that there’s a piece of legislation that’s been around for so long that was originally brought in because they didn’t have any legislation,” says Whittaker.
    “Somebody broke into Prince Philip’s email account, a BT account, and they didn’t have any legislation to do them under, so they got them under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act.”
    Whittaker is referring to a 1985 incident in which security writer and educator Robert Schifreen hacked the BT Prestel service – an early email precursor – and accessed the Duke of Edinburgh’s mailbox.
    Schifreen’s archive, preserved at the National Museum of Computing, reveals how he hacked Prestel to raise awareness of potential vulnerabilities in such systems. In a 2016 interview, Schifreen told Ars Technica that he waited until after 6pm on the day of the hack to be sure that the IT team had gone home for the evening and couldn’t interfere. He even tried to tell BT what he was doing.
    The CMA was the Thatcher government’s response to this, and 35 years on, the offence of Unauthorised Access to a Computer is now at the core of a five-year-plus campaign led by the CyberUp group and backed in Parliament by, among others, Lord Chris Holmes.
    Whittaker says it is very clear that in 1990, it was impossible to predict that research would fall into the information security domain. 
    “Nobody expected there would be people open to bug bounties or to having their IT researched and investigated. I don’t think anybody back then realised that this was going to be a thing – and if you look at the underlying message of the CMA, which is, ‘Don’t touch other people’s stuff’, there is some sense to that,” he says.
    “But what the CMA doesn’t do is put any kind of allowance for research or understanding that there are cyber professionals out there whose job it is to try to break things, to try to keep the nation secure and organisations safe,” he adds.
    “The CMA was a piece of legislation that was very broad, and the idea that it’s still there after this amount of time, and hasn’t been adapted in accordance with the changes we’ve seen over the last 20, 25 years that I’ve been in the industry, is quite bizarre,” says Whittaker.
    “The legislation around murder hasn’t changed since 1861 in the Offences Against the Person Act. It’s not like the offence of murder has changed hugely since 1861, whereas the computing world has changed dramatically since 1990.”

    Cutting to the core of the problem, what the CMA does in practice is force security professionals in the UK to operate with one eye on the letter of the law and one hand tied behind their backs.
    Whittaker recounts another story from Instil’s archives. “We had a look on Shodan, and identified there was an open Elasticsearch bucket that was dropping credentials for a very large mobile phone and fixed-line provider in Spain.
    “Every time a new order came in, it dropped their data into this bucket, which then provided names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank details, lots of really interesting stuff,” he says.
    “We were very concerned about reporting this. Because we had found it, we were concerned there was going to be blame associated with us. Why were you looking? What were you doing? What was happening here? We engaged our lawyers to help us do that responsible disclosure to them.
    “We did it privately – we’ve never spoken about it to anybody, but we spoke with the organisation and they were ultimately very grateful. Their CISO was very understanding, but it still cost us about two grand in legal fees to be able to do it.”
    Whittaker can recount many other stories of how people who are just trying to do some public-spirited research into similar issues have had to either stop and not do it, or travel to another jurisdiction to do it, because of the CMA.

    To more deeply understand how the CMA hamstrings the UK’s cyber professionals, let’s go back in time again, this time to the early 2000s, when Whittaker, then working in software development, caught the cyber bug after a job took him to Russia following an acquisition.
    “One of the first things the Russians asked us was, “Have you ever had a security or pen test?’ We said, ‘No, but don’t worry, we’re really good at this stuff’, and within 20 seconds, they had torn us to pieces and broken us in multiple different ways. I was watching the test and I said, ‘That’s so cool, how do I work out how to do that?’”

    If the amendment comes, it will enable us to be able to compete and to protect ourselves and our citizens in a much better way

    Simon Whittaker, Instil

    About 20 years down the line, Whittaker’s company, founded as Vertical Structure, but now merging into InstilCrest-accredited penetration tester, and certified by the National Cyber Security Centreas a Cyber Essentials certifying body and an assured service provider for the Cyber Essentials programme.
    “We teach people how to break things. We teach people how to break into their own systems. We teach people how to break into their own cloud infrastructure, how to do threat modelling, so they can start to understand how to think about threats,” he explains.
    But in practice, this means Whittaker and his team are teaching people to do things that a court could argue is against the CMA in some way, shape or form, so in addition to the technicalities, he is also very careful to teach his clients all about the law and how to operate within its confines when brushing up against hard limits.
    “The pieces of paper have to be signed, the scope has to be agreed on,” says Whittaker. “When we’re teaching juniors, we spend probably half a day going through the CMA and detailing to them exactly how nervous they have to be about this stuff, making sure they are aware of it.
    “It is definitely at the forefront of our minds. And if there is a breach in scope, you stop. You contact the client and say, ‘Listen, we’ve scanned too many IPs, we’ve done this, we’ve done that’. You speak to the client regularly about making sure that doesn’t happen.
    “In all of our considerations, we would rather pull back on the project rather than risk hitting a third party when we’re pen testing,” says Whittaker.
    He looks, maybe a little wistfully, to the work of security researchers at larger US or Israeli security organisations that have a little leeway in such things, or to the work of those in more lenient jurisdictions, such as the Baltics, where the cyber research wings of prominent virtual private network providers churn out large volumes of research, often on big flaws in consumer technology.
    “You hear, for instance, stories about broadband provider X that sent this box that is rubbish and can be accessed remotely. I can hack all of those things, but I can’t go and do the research in a responsible, formal way, because if I do, I run the risk of being arrested or sued,” he says.
    “It’s really frustrating for smaller organisations like ourselves. We want to be able to do this research. We want to be able to help. We want to be able to provide this information. But it’s very complicated.”

    The Computer Misuse Act is currently up for reform as part of a wider Home Office review of the act, but progress has been shaky and stalled out several times thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and the successive collapses of Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments.

    It’s frustrating for smaller organisations like ourselves. We want to be able to do this research. We want to be able to help. We want to be able to provide this information. Butvery complicated

    Simon Whittaker, Instil

    Cut to 2024 and a new Labour government, and things seemed to be moving again. But then in December 2024, attempts by Lord Holmes and other peers to have the DataBill amended to introduce a statutory defence for cyber professionals were rebuffed by the government, with under-secretary of state at the Department for Science, Innovation and TechnologyBaroness Margaret Jones saying reform was a complex issue.
    The government is considering improved defences through engagement with the security community, but Jones claims that to date, there is no consensus on how to do this within the industry, which is holding matters back.
    More recently, science minister Patrick Vallance weighed in after police highlighted their concerns that allowing unauthorised access to systems under the pretext of identifying vulnerabilities could be exploited by cyber criminals.
    He said: “The introduction of these specific amendments could unintentionally pose more risk to the UK’s cyber security, not least by inadvertently creating a loophole for cyber criminals to exploit to defend themselves against a prosecution.”
    But after many years and frequent engagement with the government, the campaigners, while keeping things civil, are clearly frustrated – and understandably so. They want things to be moving faster.
    Whittaker says reform would be the difference between night and day for his security practice.
    “It would allow us to be more secure in our research. I’d love to be able to just look at things in more detail and help people secure themselves. It would allow us to focus on our jobs instead of being worried that we’re going to breach something or that something else is going to go wrong. It would be a step change from what we currently see – that ability to perform in a useful way,” he says.
    “All we are trying to do is give our teams, these experts that we have right here in Belfast and around the country, the ability to be able to compete on a global scale. If the amendment comes, it will enable us to be able to compete and to protect ourselves and our citizens in a much better way,” he concludes.
    And when all is said and done, isn’t keeping the UK safe in the ever-changing, ever-expanding threat landscape more important than enforcing a blanket definition of hacking as an illegal act when cyber criminals around the world know full well they’re breaking the law and simply don’t give a damn?

    Timeline: Computer Misuse Act reform

    January 2020: A group of campaigners says the Computer Misuse Act 1990 risks criminalising cyber security professionals and needs reforming.
    June 2020: The CyberUp coalition writes to Boris Johnson to urge him to reform the UK’s 30-year-old cyber crime laws.
    November 2020: CyberUp, a group of campaigners who want to reform the Computer Misuse Act, finds 80% of security professionals are concerned that they may be prosecuted just for doing their jobs.
    May 2021: Home secretary Priti Patel announces plans to explore reforming the Computer Misuse Act as calls mount for the 31-year-old law to be updated to reflect the changed online world.
    June 2022: A cross-party group in the House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill that would address concerns about security researchers or ethical hackers being prosecuted in the course of their work.
    August 2022: A study produced by the CyberUp Campaign reveals broad alignment among security professionals on questions around the Computer Misuse Act, which it hopes will give confidence to policymakers as they explore its reform.
    September 2022: The CyberUp coalition, a campaign to reform the Computer Misuse Act, has called on Liz Truss to push ahead with needed changes to protect cyber professionals from potential prosecution.
    January 2023: Cyber accreditation association Crest International lends its support to the CyberUp Campaign for reform to the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
    February 2023: Westminster opens a new consultation on proposed reforms to the Computer Misuse Act 1990, but campaigners who want the law changed to protect cyber professionals have been left disappointed.
    March 2023: The deadline for submissions to the government’s consultation on reform of the Computer Misuse Act is fast approaching, and cyber professionals need to make their voices heard, say Bugcrowd’s ethical hackers.
    November 2023: A group of activists who want to reform the UK’s computer misuse laws to protect bona fide cyber professionals from prosecution have been left frustrated by a lack of legislative progress.
    July 2024: In the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill introduced in the King’s Speech, the UK’s new government pledges to give regulators more teeth to ensure compliance with security best practice and to mandate incident reporting.
    July 2024: The CyberUp Campaign for reform of the 1990 Computer Misuse Act launches an industry survey inviting cyber experts to share their views on how the outdated law hinders legitimate work.
    December 2024: An amendment to the proposed DataBill that will right a 35-year-old wrong and protect security professionals from criminalisation is to be debated at Westminster.
    December 2024: Amendments to the Data Bill that would have given the UK cyber industry a boost by updating restrictive elements of the Computer Misuse Act have failed to progress beyond a Lords committee.
    January 2025: Science minister Patrick Vallance rejects proposed amendments to the Computer Misuse Act, arguing that they could create a loophole for cyber criminals to exploit.
    #why #must #reform #computer #misuse
    Why we must reform the Computer Misuse Act: A cyber pro speaks out
    Eight years ago, Simon Whittaker, head of cyber security at Belfast-based consultancy Instil, narrowly avoided having his front door smashed in by the Police Service of Northern Irelandand was only saved from an expensive repair job because a relative was home at the time. Whittaker was the innocent victim of a misunderstanding that arose when his work as a cyber security professional butted heads with legislation contained in the UK’s Computer Misuse Actof 1990 that at first glance seems sensible. “What happened to me is that we were working with a client who was working with an NHS Trust, demonstrating some of their software,” he explains. “Their software picked up information from various dark web sources and posted this information on Pastebin.” This post was made on Tuesday 9 May 2017and the information contained several keywords, including “NHS” and “ransomware”. This accidental act was enough to trip alarm bells somewhere in the depths of Britain’s intelligence apparatus. The National Crime Agencygot involved, emails whizzed back and forth over the Atlantic to the Americans. Unbeknownst to Whittaker and his family, a crisis was developing. “We ended up with eight coppers at our door and a lot of people very upset,” says Whittaker. “It cost us about £3,000 in legal fees, when all that had happened was a few words had been posted on Pastebin. “We talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it’s quite accurate, inasmuch as they had identified the smallest amount of evidence – that wasn’t even evidence because nothing happened – but it was enough.” And the punchline? It just so happens that the posts were identified on Friday 12 May as part of the investigation into the WannaCry attack, which caused chaos across the NHS. Whittaker’s home was raided the following Monday. So, what is the CMA, and how did it almost land Whittaker in the nick? It’s a big question that speaks not only to his unpleasant experience, but to wider issues of legal overreach, government inertia and, ultimately, the ability of Britain’s burgeoning cyber security economy to function to its full potential. Indeed, the CyberUp campaign for CMA reform estimates that the UK’s security firms lose billions every year because the CMA effectively binds them. In a nutshell, it defines the broad offence of Unauthorised Access to a Computer. At face value, this is hard to argue with because it appears to make cyber crime illegal. However, in its broad application, what the offence actually does is to make all hacking illegal. As such, it is now woefully outdated because it completely fails to account for the fact that, from time to time, legitimate security professionals and ethical hackers must access a computer without authorisation if they are to do their jobs. “It’s so frustrating, the idea that there’s a piece of legislation that’s been around for so long that was originally brought in because they didn’t have any legislation,” says Whittaker. “Somebody broke into Prince Philip’s email account, a BT account, and they didn’t have any legislation to do them under, so they got them under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act.” Whittaker is referring to a 1985 incident in which security writer and educator Robert Schifreen hacked the BT Prestel service – an early email precursor – and accessed the Duke of Edinburgh’s mailbox. Schifreen’s archive, preserved at the National Museum of Computing, reveals how he hacked Prestel to raise awareness of potential vulnerabilities in such systems. In a 2016 interview, Schifreen told Ars Technica that he waited until after 6pm on the day of the hack to be sure that the IT team had gone home for the evening and couldn’t interfere. He even tried to tell BT what he was doing. The CMA was the Thatcher government’s response to this, and 35 years on, the offence of Unauthorised Access to a Computer is now at the core of a five-year-plus campaign led by the CyberUp group and backed in Parliament by, among others, Lord Chris Holmes. Whittaker says it is very clear that in 1990, it was impossible to predict that research would fall into the information security domain.  “Nobody expected there would be people open to bug bounties or to having their IT researched and investigated. I don’t think anybody back then realised that this was going to be a thing – and if you look at the underlying message of the CMA, which is, ‘Don’t touch other people’s stuff’, there is some sense to that,” he says. “But what the CMA doesn’t do is put any kind of allowance for research or understanding that there are cyber professionals out there whose job it is to try to break things, to try to keep the nation secure and organisations safe,” he adds. “The CMA was a piece of legislation that was very broad, and the idea that it’s still there after this amount of time, and hasn’t been adapted in accordance with the changes we’ve seen over the last 20, 25 years that I’ve been in the industry, is quite bizarre,” says Whittaker. “The legislation around murder hasn’t changed since 1861 in the Offences Against the Person Act. It’s not like the offence of murder has changed hugely since 1861, whereas the computing world has changed dramatically since 1990.” Cutting to the core of the problem, what the CMA does in practice is force security professionals in the UK to operate with one eye on the letter of the law and one hand tied behind their backs. Whittaker recounts another story from Instil’s archives. “We had a look on Shodan, and identified there was an open Elasticsearch bucket that was dropping credentials for a very large mobile phone and fixed-line provider in Spain. “Every time a new order came in, it dropped their data into this bucket, which then provided names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank details, lots of really interesting stuff,” he says. “We were very concerned about reporting this. Because we had found it, we were concerned there was going to be blame associated with us. Why were you looking? What were you doing? What was happening here? We engaged our lawyers to help us do that responsible disclosure to them. “We did it privately – we’ve never spoken about it to anybody, but we spoke with the organisation and they were ultimately very grateful. Their CISO was very understanding, but it still cost us about two grand in legal fees to be able to do it.” Whittaker can recount many other stories of how people who are just trying to do some public-spirited research into similar issues have had to either stop and not do it, or travel to another jurisdiction to do it, because of the CMA. To more deeply understand how the CMA hamstrings the UK’s cyber professionals, let’s go back in time again, this time to the early 2000s, when Whittaker, then working in software development, caught the cyber bug after a job took him to Russia following an acquisition. “One of the first things the Russians asked us was, “Have you ever had a security or pen test?’ We said, ‘No, but don’t worry, we’re really good at this stuff’, and within 20 seconds, they had torn us to pieces and broken us in multiple different ways. I was watching the test and I said, ‘That’s so cool, how do I work out how to do that?’” If the amendment comes, it will enable us to be able to compete and to protect ourselves and our citizens in a much better way Simon Whittaker, Instil About 20 years down the line, Whittaker’s company, founded as Vertical Structure, but now merging into InstilCrest-accredited penetration tester, and certified by the National Cyber Security Centreas a Cyber Essentials certifying body and an assured service provider for the Cyber Essentials programme. “We teach people how to break things. We teach people how to break into their own systems. We teach people how to break into their own cloud infrastructure, how to do threat modelling, so they can start to understand how to think about threats,” he explains. But in practice, this means Whittaker and his team are teaching people to do things that a court could argue is against the CMA in some way, shape or form, so in addition to the technicalities, he is also very careful to teach his clients all about the law and how to operate within its confines when brushing up against hard limits. “The pieces of paper have to be signed, the scope has to be agreed on,” says Whittaker. “When we’re teaching juniors, we spend probably half a day going through the CMA and detailing to them exactly how nervous they have to be about this stuff, making sure they are aware of it. “It is definitely at the forefront of our minds. And if there is a breach in scope, you stop. You contact the client and say, ‘Listen, we’ve scanned too many IPs, we’ve done this, we’ve done that’. You speak to the client regularly about making sure that doesn’t happen. “In all of our considerations, we would rather pull back on the project rather than risk hitting a third party when we’re pen testing,” says Whittaker. He looks, maybe a little wistfully, to the work of security researchers at larger US or Israeli security organisations that have a little leeway in such things, or to the work of those in more lenient jurisdictions, such as the Baltics, where the cyber research wings of prominent virtual private network providers churn out large volumes of research, often on big flaws in consumer technology. “You hear, for instance, stories about broadband provider X that sent this box that is rubbish and can be accessed remotely. I can hack all of those things, but I can’t go and do the research in a responsible, formal way, because if I do, I run the risk of being arrested or sued,” he says. “It’s really frustrating for smaller organisations like ourselves. We want to be able to do this research. We want to be able to help. We want to be able to provide this information. But it’s very complicated.” The Computer Misuse Act is currently up for reform as part of a wider Home Office review of the act, but progress has been shaky and stalled out several times thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and the successive collapses of Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments. It’s frustrating for smaller organisations like ourselves. We want to be able to do this research. We want to be able to help. We want to be able to provide this information. Butvery complicated Simon Whittaker, Instil Cut to 2024 and a new Labour government, and things seemed to be moving again. But then in December 2024, attempts by Lord Holmes and other peers to have the DataBill amended to introduce a statutory defence for cyber professionals were rebuffed by the government, with under-secretary of state at the Department for Science, Innovation and TechnologyBaroness Margaret Jones saying reform was a complex issue. The government is considering improved defences through engagement with the security community, but Jones claims that to date, there is no consensus on how to do this within the industry, which is holding matters back. More recently, science minister Patrick Vallance weighed in after police highlighted their concerns that allowing unauthorised access to systems under the pretext of identifying vulnerabilities could be exploited by cyber criminals. He said: “The introduction of these specific amendments could unintentionally pose more risk to the UK’s cyber security, not least by inadvertently creating a loophole for cyber criminals to exploit to defend themselves against a prosecution.” But after many years and frequent engagement with the government, the campaigners, while keeping things civil, are clearly frustrated – and understandably so. They want things to be moving faster. Whittaker says reform would be the difference between night and day for his security practice. “It would allow us to be more secure in our research. I’d love to be able to just look at things in more detail and help people secure themselves. It would allow us to focus on our jobs instead of being worried that we’re going to breach something or that something else is going to go wrong. It would be a step change from what we currently see – that ability to perform in a useful way,” he says. “All we are trying to do is give our teams, these experts that we have right here in Belfast and around the country, the ability to be able to compete on a global scale. If the amendment comes, it will enable us to be able to compete and to protect ourselves and our citizens in a much better way,” he concludes. And when all is said and done, isn’t keeping the UK safe in the ever-changing, ever-expanding threat landscape more important than enforcing a blanket definition of hacking as an illegal act when cyber criminals around the world know full well they’re breaking the law and simply don’t give a damn? Timeline: Computer Misuse Act reform January 2020: A group of campaigners says the Computer Misuse Act 1990 risks criminalising cyber security professionals and needs reforming. June 2020: The CyberUp coalition writes to Boris Johnson to urge him to reform the UK’s 30-year-old cyber crime laws. November 2020: CyberUp, a group of campaigners who want to reform the Computer Misuse Act, finds 80% of security professionals are concerned that they may be prosecuted just for doing their jobs. May 2021: Home secretary Priti Patel announces plans to explore reforming the Computer Misuse Act as calls mount for the 31-year-old law to be updated to reflect the changed online world. June 2022: A cross-party group in the House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill that would address concerns about security researchers or ethical hackers being prosecuted in the course of their work. August 2022: A study produced by the CyberUp Campaign reveals broad alignment among security professionals on questions around the Computer Misuse Act, which it hopes will give confidence to policymakers as they explore its reform. September 2022: The CyberUp coalition, a campaign to reform the Computer Misuse Act, has called on Liz Truss to push ahead with needed changes to protect cyber professionals from potential prosecution. January 2023: Cyber accreditation association Crest International lends its support to the CyberUp Campaign for reform to the Computer Misuse Act 1990. February 2023: Westminster opens a new consultation on proposed reforms to the Computer Misuse Act 1990, but campaigners who want the law changed to protect cyber professionals have been left disappointed. March 2023: The deadline for submissions to the government’s consultation on reform of the Computer Misuse Act is fast approaching, and cyber professionals need to make their voices heard, say Bugcrowd’s ethical hackers. November 2023: A group of activists who want to reform the UK’s computer misuse laws to protect bona fide cyber professionals from prosecution have been left frustrated by a lack of legislative progress. July 2024: In the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill introduced in the King’s Speech, the UK’s new government pledges to give regulators more teeth to ensure compliance with security best practice and to mandate incident reporting. July 2024: The CyberUp Campaign for reform of the 1990 Computer Misuse Act launches an industry survey inviting cyber experts to share their views on how the outdated law hinders legitimate work. December 2024: An amendment to the proposed DataBill that will right a 35-year-old wrong and protect security professionals from criminalisation is to be debated at Westminster. December 2024: Amendments to the Data Bill that would have given the UK cyber industry a boost by updating restrictive elements of the Computer Misuse Act have failed to progress beyond a Lords committee. January 2025: Science minister Patrick Vallance rejects proposed amendments to the Computer Misuse Act, arguing that they could create a loophole for cyber criminals to exploit. #why #must #reform #computer #misuse
    Why we must reform the Computer Misuse Act: A cyber pro speaks out
    www.computerweekly.com
    Eight years ago, Simon Whittaker, head of cyber security at Belfast-based consultancy Instil, narrowly avoided having his front door smashed in by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) (see photo of warrant below) and was only saved from an expensive repair job because a relative was home at the time. Whittaker was the innocent victim of a misunderstanding that arose when his work as a cyber security professional butted heads with legislation contained in the UK’s Computer Misuse Act (CMA) of 1990 that at first glance seems sensible. “What happened to me is that we were working with a client who was working with an NHS Trust, demonstrating some of their software,” he explains. “Their software picked up information from various dark web sources and posted this information on Pastebin.” This post was made on Tuesday 9 May 2017 (remember this date – it’s important) and the information contained several keywords, including “NHS” and “ransomware” (see screenshot of Pastebin page below). This accidental act was enough to trip alarm bells somewhere in the depths of Britain’s intelligence apparatus. The National Crime Agency (NCA) got involved, emails whizzed back and forth over the Atlantic to the Americans. Unbeknownst to Whittaker and his family, a crisis was developing. “We ended up with eight coppers at our door and a lot of people very upset,” says Whittaker. “It cost us about £3,000 in legal fees, when all that had happened was a few words had been posted on Pastebin. “We talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it’s quite accurate, inasmuch as they had identified the smallest amount of evidence – that wasn’t even evidence because nothing happened – but it was enough.” And the punchline? It just so happens that the posts were identified on Friday 12 May as part of the investigation into the WannaCry attack, which caused chaos across the NHS. Whittaker’s home was raided the following Monday. So, what is the CMA, and how did it almost land Whittaker in the nick? It’s a big question that speaks not only to his unpleasant experience, but to wider issues of legal overreach, government inertia and, ultimately, the ability of Britain’s burgeoning cyber security economy to function to its full potential. Indeed, the CyberUp campaign for CMA reform estimates that the UK’s security firms lose billions every year because the CMA effectively binds them. In a nutshell, it defines the broad offence of Unauthorised Access to a Computer. At face value, this is hard to argue with because it appears to make cyber crime illegal. However, in its broad application, what the offence actually does is to make all hacking illegal. As such, it is now woefully outdated because it completely fails to account for the fact that, from time to time, legitimate security professionals and ethical hackers must access a computer without authorisation if they are to do their jobs. “It’s so frustrating, the idea that there’s a piece of legislation that’s been around for so long that was originally brought in because they didn’t have any legislation,” says Whittaker. “Somebody broke into Prince Philip’s email account, a BT account, and they didn’t have any legislation to do them under, so they got them under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act.” Whittaker is referring to a 1985 incident in which security writer and educator Robert Schifreen hacked the BT Prestel service – an early email precursor – and accessed the Duke of Edinburgh’s mailbox. Schifreen’s archive, preserved at the National Museum of Computing, reveals how he hacked Prestel to raise awareness of potential vulnerabilities in such systems. In a 2016 interview, Schifreen told Ars Technica that he waited until after 6pm on the day of the hack to be sure that the IT team had gone home for the evening and couldn’t interfere. He even tried to tell BT what he was doing. The CMA was the Thatcher government’s response to this, and 35 years on, the offence of Unauthorised Access to a Computer is now at the core of a five-year-plus campaign led by the CyberUp group and backed in Parliament by, among others, Lord Chris Holmes. Whittaker says it is very clear that in 1990, it was impossible to predict that research would fall into the information security domain.  “Nobody expected there would be people open to bug bounties or to having their IT researched and investigated. I don’t think anybody back then realised that this was going to be a thing – and if you look at the underlying message of the CMA, which is, ‘Don’t touch other people’s stuff’, there is some sense to that,” he says. “But what the CMA doesn’t do is put any kind of allowance for research or understanding that there are cyber professionals out there whose job it is to try to break things, to try to keep the nation secure and organisations safe,” he adds. “The CMA was a piece of legislation that was very broad, and the idea that it’s still there after this amount of time, and hasn’t been adapted in accordance with the changes we’ve seen over the last 20, 25 years that I’ve been in the industry, is quite bizarre,” says Whittaker. “The legislation around murder hasn’t changed since 1861 in the Offences Against the Person Act. It’s not like the offence of murder has changed hugely since 1861, whereas the computing world has changed dramatically since 1990.” Cutting to the core of the problem, what the CMA does in practice is force security professionals in the UK to operate with one eye on the letter of the law and one hand tied behind their backs. Whittaker recounts another story from Instil’s archives. “We had a look on Shodan, and identified there was an open Elasticsearch bucket that was dropping credentials for a very large mobile phone and fixed-line provider in Spain. “Every time a new order came in, it dropped their data into this bucket, which then provided names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank details, lots of really interesting stuff,” he says. “We were very concerned about reporting this. Because we had found it, we were concerned there was going to be blame associated with us. Why were you looking? What were you doing? What was happening here? We engaged our lawyers to help us do that responsible disclosure to them. “We did it privately – we’ve never spoken about it to anybody, but we spoke with the organisation and they were ultimately very grateful. Their CISO was very understanding, but it still cost us about two grand in legal fees to be able to do it.” Whittaker can recount many other stories of how people who are just trying to do some public-spirited research into similar issues have had to either stop and not do it, or travel to another jurisdiction to do it, because of the CMA. To more deeply understand how the CMA hamstrings the UK’s cyber professionals, let’s go back in time again, this time to the early 2000s, when Whittaker, then working in software development, caught the cyber bug after a job took him to Russia following an acquisition. “One of the first things the Russians asked us was, “Have you ever had a security or pen test?’ We said, ‘No, but don’t worry, we’re really good at this stuff’, and within 20 seconds, they had torn us to pieces and broken us in multiple different ways. I was watching the test and I said, ‘That’s so cool, how do I work out how to do that?’” If the amendment comes, it will enable us to be able to compete and to protect ourselves and our citizens in a much better way Simon Whittaker, Instil About 20 years down the line, Whittaker’s company, founded as Vertical Structure, but now merging into InstilCrest-accredited penetration tester, and certified by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) as a Cyber Essentials certifying body and an assured service provider for the Cyber Essentials programme. “We teach people how to break things. We teach people how to break into their own systems. We teach people how to break into their own cloud infrastructure, how to do threat modelling, so they can start to understand how to think about threats,” he explains. But in practice, this means Whittaker and his team are teaching people to do things that a court could argue is against the CMA in some way, shape or form, so in addition to the technicalities, he is also very careful to teach his clients all about the law and how to operate within its confines when brushing up against hard limits. “The pieces of paper have to be signed, the scope has to be agreed on,” says Whittaker. “When we’re teaching juniors, we spend probably half a day going through the CMA and detailing to them exactly how nervous they have to be about this stuff, making sure they are aware of it. “It is definitely at the forefront of our minds. And if there is a breach in scope, you stop. You contact the client and say, ‘Listen, we’ve scanned too many IPs, we’ve done this, we’ve done that’. You speak to the client regularly about making sure that doesn’t happen. “In all of our considerations, we would rather pull back on the project rather than risk hitting a third party when we’re pen testing,” says Whittaker. He looks, maybe a little wistfully, to the work of security researchers at larger US or Israeli security organisations that have a little leeway in such things, or to the work of those in more lenient jurisdictions, such as the Baltics, where the cyber research wings of prominent virtual private network providers churn out large volumes of research, often on big flaws in consumer technology. “You hear, for instance, stories about broadband provider X that sent this box that is rubbish and can be accessed remotely. I can hack all of those things, but I can’t go and do the research in a responsible, formal way, because if I do, I run the risk of being arrested or sued,” he says. “It’s really frustrating for smaller organisations like ourselves. We want to be able to do this research. We want to be able to help. We want to be able to provide this information. But it’s very complicated.” The Computer Misuse Act is currently up for reform as part of a wider Home Office review of the act, but progress has been shaky and stalled out several times thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and the successive collapses of Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments. It’s frustrating for smaller organisations like ourselves. We want to be able to do this research. We want to be able to help. We want to be able to provide this information. But [the law makes it] very complicated Simon Whittaker, Instil Cut to 2024 and a new Labour government, and things seemed to be moving again. But then in December 2024, attempts by Lord Holmes and other peers to have the Data (Access and Use) Bill amended to introduce a statutory defence for cyber professionals were rebuffed by the government, with under-secretary of state at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) Baroness Margaret Jones saying reform was a complex issue. The government is considering improved defences through engagement with the security community, but Jones claims that to date, there is no consensus on how to do this within the industry, which is holding matters back. More recently, science minister Patrick Vallance weighed in after police highlighted their concerns that allowing unauthorised access to systems under the pretext of identifying vulnerabilities could be exploited by cyber criminals. He said: “The introduction of these specific amendments could unintentionally pose more risk to the UK’s cyber security, not least by inadvertently creating a loophole for cyber criminals to exploit to defend themselves against a prosecution.” But after many years and frequent engagement with the government, the campaigners, while keeping things civil, are clearly frustrated – and understandably so. They want things to be moving faster. Whittaker says reform would be the difference between night and day for his security practice. “It would allow us to be more secure in our research. I’d love to be able to just look at things in more detail and help people secure themselves. It would allow us to focus on our jobs instead of being worried that we’re going to breach something or that something else is going to go wrong. It would be a step change from what we currently see – that ability to perform in a useful way,” he says. “All we are trying to do is give our teams, these experts that we have right here in Belfast and around the country, the ability to be able to compete on a global scale. If the amendment comes, it will enable us to be able to compete and to protect ourselves and our citizens in a much better way,” he concludes. And when all is said and done, isn’t keeping the UK safe in the ever-changing, ever-expanding threat landscape more important than enforcing a blanket definition of hacking as an illegal act when cyber criminals around the world know full well they’re breaking the law and simply don’t give a damn? Timeline: Computer Misuse Act reform January 2020: A group of campaigners says the Computer Misuse Act 1990 risks criminalising cyber security professionals and needs reforming. June 2020: The CyberUp coalition writes to Boris Johnson to urge him to reform the UK’s 30-year-old cyber crime laws. November 2020: CyberUp, a group of campaigners who want to reform the Computer Misuse Act, finds 80% of security professionals are concerned that they may be prosecuted just for doing their jobs. May 2021: Home secretary Priti Patel announces plans to explore reforming the Computer Misuse Act as calls mount for the 31-year-old law to be updated to reflect the changed online world. June 2022: A cross-party group in the House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill that would address concerns about security researchers or ethical hackers being prosecuted in the course of their work. August 2022: A study produced by the CyberUp Campaign reveals broad alignment among security professionals on questions around the Computer Misuse Act, which it hopes will give confidence to policymakers as they explore its reform. September 2022: The CyberUp coalition, a campaign to reform the Computer Misuse Act, has called on Liz Truss to push ahead with needed changes to protect cyber professionals from potential prosecution. January 2023: Cyber accreditation association Crest International lends its support to the CyberUp Campaign for reform to the Computer Misuse Act 1990. February 2023: Westminster opens a new consultation on proposed reforms to the Computer Misuse Act 1990, but campaigners who want the law changed to protect cyber professionals have been left disappointed. March 2023: The deadline for submissions to the government’s consultation on reform of the Computer Misuse Act is fast approaching, and cyber professionals need to make their voices heard, say Bugcrowd’s ethical hackers. November 2023: A group of activists who want to reform the UK’s computer misuse laws to protect bona fide cyber professionals from prosecution have been left frustrated by a lack of legislative progress. July 2024: In the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill introduced in the King’s Speech, the UK’s new government pledges to give regulators more teeth to ensure compliance with security best practice and to mandate incident reporting. July 2024: The CyberUp Campaign for reform of the 1990 Computer Misuse Act launches an industry survey inviting cyber experts to share their views on how the outdated law hinders legitimate work. December 2024: An amendment to the proposed Data (Access and Use) Bill that will right a 35-year-old wrong and protect security professionals from criminalisation is to be debated at Westminster. December 2024: Amendments to the Data Bill that would have given the UK cyber industry a boost by updating restrictive elements of the Computer Misuse Act have failed to progress beyond a Lords committee. January 2025: Science minister Patrick Vallance rejects proposed amendments to the Computer Misuse Act, arguing that they could create a loophole for cyber criminals to exploit.
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  • Carter Gregson Gray submits plans for care homes and affordable housing

    The up-and-coming studio has lodged plans with Westminster City Council – also the scheme’s backer – for permission to demolish two single-storey adult care buildings on the site in Maida Vale and replace them with three new blocks.
    Bungalows at 291 Harrow Road and the neighbouring 1-2 Elmfield Way are currently used to house 13 people with varying needs.
    Associated communal and support spaces would also go under the plans, as would a temporary multi-use games area for which planning consent has lapsed.
    In their place, the practice would build three adjoining blocks to deliver new residential, commercial, cultural and sports space.
    A communal lounge and co-working facility would be provided for privately-owned homes, while a 230m² all-weather sports space would be created.Advertisement
    The scheme, which has been designed with landscape specialist Farrer Huxley would also include 272 cycle spaces and a roof garden for social care residents, families and staff.
    Carter Gregson Gray said its scheme ‘gathers people together and celebrates community … At its heart lies a garden designed for rest, play and conversation: a place of connection.’
    Floor plan 291 Harrow Road (fourth plan)
    It said the central block in the V-shaped development would ‘provide generous light-filled homes for 24 residents with additional needs’.
    The multi-purpose, all-weather play space would ‘provide residents and the wider community with a high-quality accessible sports and leisure venue which takes pride of place’, added the practice.
    ‘It is imagined as a beacon for the people of the area.’
    Meanwhile, wide pavements, rain gardens, trees and social spaces would be used with the ambition of ‘establishing a new urban character’.Advertisement
    The practice added: ‘As a backdrop to this, the architecture seeks to establish a quiet order to the site, driven by environmental ambitions and the experience of residents and passers-by.
    The buildings are robust, precise and delicate, reflecting the predominant materiality of the area while introducing a new tradition in Westminster.’

    Source: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/carter-gregson-gray-submits-plans-for-care-homes-and-affordable-housing">https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/carter-gregson-gray-submits-plans-for-care-homes-and-affordable-housing">https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/carter-gregson-gray-submits-plans-for-care-homes-and-affordable-housing
    #carter #gregson #gray #submits #plans #for #care #homes #and #affordable #housing
    Carter Gregson Gray submits plans for care homes and affordable housing
    The up-and-coming studio has lodged plans with Westminster City Council – also the scheme’s backer – for permission to demolish two single-storey adult care buildings on the site in Maida Vale and replace them with three new blocks. Bungalows at 291 Harrow Road and the neighbouring 1-2 Elmfield Way are currently used to house 13 people with varying needs. Associated communal and support spaces would also go under the plans, as would a temporary multi-use games area for which planning consent has lapsed. In their place, the practice would build three adjoining blocks to deliver new residential, commercial, cultural and sports space. A communal lounge and co-working facility would be provided for privately-owned homes, while a 230m² all-weather sports space would be created.Advertisement The scheme, which has been designed with landscape specialist Farrer Huxley would also include 272 cycle spaces and a roof garden for social care residents, families and staff. Carter Gregson Gray said its scheme ‘gathers people together and celebrates community … At its heart lies a garden designed for rest, play and conversation: a place of connection.’ Floor plan 291 Harrow Road (fourth plan) It said the central block in the V-shaped development would ‘provide generous light-filled homes for 24 residents with additional needs’. The multi-purpose, all-weather play space would ‘provide residents and the wider community with a high-quality accessible sports and leisure venue which takes pride of place’, added the practice. ‘It is imagined as a beacon for the people of the area.’ Meanwhile, wide pavements, rain gardens, trees and social spaces would be used with the ambition of ‘establishing a new urban character’.Advertisement The practice added: ‘As a backdrop to this, the architecture seeks to establish a quiet order to the site, driven by environmental ambitions and the experience of residents and passers-by. The buildings are robust, precise and delicate, reflecting the predominant materiality of the area while introducing a new tradition in Westminster.’ Source: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/carter-gregson-gray-submits-plans-for-care-homes-and-affordable-housing #carter #gregson #gray #submits #plans #for #care #homes #and #affordable #housing
    Carter Gregson Gray submits plans for care homes and affordable housing
    www.architectsjournal.co.uk
    The up-and-coming studio has lodged plans with Westminster City Council – also the scheme’s backer – for permission to demolish two single-storey adult care buildings on the site in Maida Vale and replace them with three new blocks. Bungalows at 291 Harrow Road and the neighbouring 1-2 Elmfield Way are currently used to house 13 people with varying needs. Associated communal and support spaces would also go under the plans, as would a temporary multi-use games area for which planning consent has lapsed. In their place, the practice would build three adjoining blocks to deliver new residential, commercial, cultural and sports space. A communal lounge and co-working facility would be provided for privately-owned homes, while a 230m² all-weather sports space would be created.Advertisement The scheme, which has been designed with landscape specialist Farrer Huxley would also include 272 cycle spaces and a roof garden for social care residents, families and staff. Carter Gregson Gray said its scheme ‘gathers people together and celebrates community … At its heart lies a garden designed for rest, play and conversation: a place of connection.’ Floor plan 291 Harrow Road (fourth plan) It said the central block in the V-shaped development would ‘provide generous light-filled homes for 24 residents with additional needs’. The multi-purpose, all-weather play space would ‘provide residents and the wider community with a high-quality accessible sports and leisure venue which takes pride of place’, added the practice. ‘It is imagined as a beacon for the people of the area.’ Meanwhile, wide pavements, rain gardens, trees and social spaces would be used with the ambition of ‘establishing a new urban character’.Advertisement The practice added: ‘As a backdrop to this, the architecture seeks to establish a quiet order to the site, driven by environmental ambitions and the experience of residents and passers-by. The buildings are robust, precise and delicate, reflecting the predominant materiality of the area while introducing a new tradition in Westminster.’
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