Why are they making celebrities out of cyber criminals?

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

The past few weeks have painted a bleak picture of Britain's digital defences. Empty shelves at M&S, supply chain disruptions at Co-op, and systems offline at Harrods. It's like a dystopian episode of The Great British Bake Off, except instead of soggy bottoms, we're dealing with compromised servers.
Enter Scattered Spider, a loose collective of predominantly English-speaking hackers, many reportedly teenagers, who may have brought Britain's biggest retailers to their knees.
The National Crime Agency has confirmed it's investigating this group's potential involvement, marking the first time authorities have publicly named them as suspects.
Here's where things get awkward. CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity giant, has been producing impressive figurines of various hacking groups, complete with dramatic packaging and "Know them, find them, stop them" taglines.
But as BBC Technology Correspondent Joe Tidy astutely points out, are we inadvertently glamorising these groups? There's something deeply uncomfortable about turning cybercriminals into collectible merchandise. It's like creating action figures of bank robbers - technically educational, but potentially sending mixed messages.
The irony isn't lost on anyone. We're making celebrities out of criminals while simultaneously trying to catch them.
While figurines make conversation starters, the real excitement lies in the cutting-edge technologies being developed to combat these threats.
Take Heriot-Watt University's ground breaking Integrated Quantum Networks (IQN) Hub. Professor Gerald Buller's team is developing quantum encryption that's near unbreakable, using quantum mechanics to create security keys that change every time someone tries to crack them.
Cybercrime costs UK businesses £27bn annually. What's particularly fascinating about groups like Scattered Spider is their demographic, often teenagers communicating through Discord and Telegram, who possibly live in suburbs near the retailers they're targeting.
Joe Tidy's direct communication with the hackers reveals criminals who are articulate, strategic, and frustratingly ordinary. They're not cartoon villains, they're people who've chosen criminal applications for their technical skills.
As the UK aims to become a quantum-enabled economy by 2035, quantum technologies will form the backbone of next-generation cybersecurity infrastructure. Unlike current encryption relying on mathematical complexity, quantum security uses physics itself as protection, theoretically impossible to breach without detection.
The combination of traditional investigative work and breakthrough technologies like quantum encryption offers our best hope for creating a digital environment where groups like Scattered Spider become museum pieces.
Perhaps we should focus less on action figures and more on the real-world heroes developing technologies that make criminal enterprises obsolete. After all, the best way to deal with villains isn't immortalising them in plastic, it's building a world where their methods don't work.
I'll be first in line for my figurine of Professor Gerald Buller.
Annie Diamond is the deputy managing director of specialist technology, science and energy PR agency Hot Tin Roof
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