Episode 5 of Canaries in the Wild is live - and our first in-person recording. We sat down in central London with Ollie Whitehouse, CTO of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the security mission of GCHQ.
Ollie has been running deception for over 23 years, from personal honeypots in 2002 to leading NCSC's national-scale cyber deception programme today. He brings a perspective that spans hobbyist, vendor, practitioner, and national policymaker.
Two decades of catching adversaries
From the early days of the Honeynet Project to catching a criminal zero-day that a vendor had spent eight days failing to root-cause, Ollie shares stories from the front line of deception.
Why deception, why now
Hear the case for deception as one of the very few asymmetric tools available to defenders - low-cost to deploy, high-signal when it fires, and uniquely psychological in its effect on the people on the other end.
Ollie explains how that effect compounds at national scale, and why being open about national-level deployment is itself part of the strategy: making certain adversaries pause and ask whether the UK is a more hostile or unwelcome environment to operate in than somewhere else.
Inside NCSC's national deception programme
Ollie walks through the why and the what of the programme, from Decepticon to the first wave of findings, and where the Active Cyber Defence service goes next.
AI, synthetic data, and the lack-of-noise signal
How AI changes the picture for both attackers and defenders, and why the lack of canary alerts is itself a high-value signal.
Listen Now
Listen to Episode 5 here.
