When the NHS was launched in 1948, this leaflet was sent out to everyone. I wanted to recreate the coat of arms that was on top to print on a t-shirt. Sadly, the scan available is too low a resolution for most modern purposes. Wikipedia has vector logos of most of the coats of arms…
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I don't particularly like picking on the security of Government websites. I do it a lot - but I always feel guilty about besmirching the good name of the many talented people who work in the Civil Service. Today's flaw, however, is a particularly basic mistake which simply shouldn't be allowed to happen by any…
Continue reading →Would you like to know every domain name the UK Government had registered? Of course you would! There could be all sorts of interesting tit-bits hidden in there (ProtectAndSurvive.gov.uk? EbolaOutbreak2017.nhs.uk? MinistryOfTruth.police.uk?) Rather than relying on Freedom of Information requests, or Open Data, we can go straight to the source of domain names - the DNS!…
Continue reading →Well, it's not often I get to completely influence the UK Government's approach to open standard. GOV.UK is adopting .ODF as their official document standard! All documentation will be also made available in HTML & PDF. Sweet! Yeah, yeah, so I only played a small part in the (no doubt) hideously complicated process - but…
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This is part 5 of a series of blog posts looking at the security of the UK Government's web infrastructure. The primary cause of the vulnerabilities I've exposed over this series is abandonment. In a flurry of excitement a website is commissioned and created. Then, as time wears on, people begin to drift away from…
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This is part 4 of a series of blog posts looking at the security of the UK Government's web infrastructure. Over the last few days, I've shown that hundreds of websites run by branches of the UK state are in a perilous state of disrepair. There are multiple sites with hugely embarrassing XSS flaws, running…
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Cyber Security is of vital national importance. As the United Kingdom places more of its infrastructure onto the Internet, bugs and glitches go from minor inconveniences to full scale national emergencies. Suppose, for a moment, that a hacker were to interrupt payment processing for banks, or tamper with the UK's water supply, or cut off…
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