Snippings

The Bank of England is very keen on seeing a global identity standard and a safe, secure and permissioned method of sharing information. Dave Ramsden from the Bank said at UK Fintech Week 2021 that a prime use would be an open platform—that could harness novel data sources and advanced analytics—to provide SMEs with better access to productive finance.

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Santander has said “key services are recovering” following customers’ problems accessing accounts online and withdrawing cash from its ATMs.
The bank, which has 14 million active UK customers, said earlier that the problems affected branch, telephone, online, app and card services.

From Santander services recovering after problems accessing online accounts – BBC News:

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Neville Maskelyne was a British music hall magician who had already undertaken some telegraph experiments. He was keen to see whether Marconi’s system was truly as groundbreaking as he claimed. The Eastern Telegraph Company’s tasked Maskelyne, to set about the business of breaking into the secure communications. He started his task by building a 50 metre radio mast on the cliffs of Porthcurno to see if he could intercept Marconi’s company messages being sent to vessels at sea. He succeeded quite easily and soon realised that without tuned equipment it was relatively easy to intercept a signal without anyone knowing.

From Hacking at the Royal Institution | The Royal Institution: Science Lives Here:

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The Federal Government must adopt security best practices; advance toward Zero Trust Architecture;

From Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity | The White House:

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Zero trust security is an IT security model that requires strict identity verification for every person and device trying to access resources on a private network, regardless of whether they are sitting within or outside of the network perimeter. No single specific technology is associated with zero trust architecture; it is a holistic approach to network security that incorporates several different principles and technologies.

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The Principles

 

The principles start off with an introduction to the concepts of zero trust before diving into the principles themselves.

 

As things stand, the ten principles are:

 

Know your architecture including users, devices, and services
Create a single strong user identity
Create a strong device identity
Authenticate everywhere
Know the health of your devices and services
Focus your monitoring on devices and services
Set policies according to value of the service or data
Control access to your services and data
Don’t trust the network, including the local network
Choose services designed for zero trust

 

From Zero trust architecture design principles – NCSC.GOV.UK:

 

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he company halted operations because its billing system was compromised, three people briefed on the matter told CNN, and they were concerned they wouldn’t be able to figure out how much to bill customers for fuel they received.

From Colonial Pipeline did pay ransom to hackers, sources now say – CNNPolitics:

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So how would a ZTA have stopped the Colonial attack? Well, remember the attack vector was a Colonial employee clicking on a link that arrived in a spam e-mail.

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Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe gave one of the strongest hints yet that the UK is on its way towards some form of Britcoin.

“We may not be there yet, but it looks probable in this country that if we want to retain public money capable of general use, and available to all citizens, the state will need to issue, public digital money,” Cunliffe told his audience.

From Central bankers split on CBDC future:

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Disney added 8.7 million subscribers to its Disney+ streaming service in the March quarter, finishing the period with 103.6 million subscribers, well below investor expectations of the 110 million.

From Briefing: Disney+ Growth Slows — The Information:

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Ensuring competition in the provision of payments services is important for the wider economy. Today, businesses pay substantial fees in order to accept payment from their customers whether directly to private companiesfootnote[19] or indirectly through the costs of sorting, transporting and securely storing cash.

From Do We Need ‘Public Money’? – Speech By Jon Cunliffe, Bank Of England, Deputy Governor, Financial Stability, Given at the OMFIF Digital Money Institute, London:

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In thinking about these possible roles of generally available public money it is important to think beyond the status quo in which private money is issued only by tightly regulated commercial banks.

From Do We Need ‘Public Money’? – Speech By Jon Cunliffe, Bank Of England, Deputy Governor, Financial Stability, Given at the OMFIF Digital Money Institute, London:

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And so perhaps the most interesting part of the U.K.’s announcement of a CDBC taskforce was not the tantalizing glimmer of a Britcoin. It was the BOE’s creation of a new “omnibus” account to provide access to its real-time settlement system beyond its traditional customers. This will allow new providers of financial market infrastructure to leverage blockchain technology to deliver faster and cheaper wholesale payments and settle them using central bank money.

One consortium, comprised of 15 shareholders including UBS Group AG, Barclays Plc and Nasdaq Inc., has already applied for access with a goal to be up and running next year. Others are likely to follow.

Put another way, Britain may have the world’s first synthetic digital currency system for wholesale payments — backed by a central bank — as early as 2022. Such a development, over time, will have a profound impact on the role of banks in settlement. This is what to watch, not the Bahamas’ sand dollar.

From Bitcoin Won’t Leave Central Bankers in the Dust. Watch Britain and Singapore – Bloomberg:

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George Selgin, who is a thorough scholar of such things and an expert on the evolution of payment services, wrote an excellent piece for The Hill making precisely this point, calling on the Fed to follow the example the Bank of England set in 2017 by providing “master accounts” to non-banks. In the UK, for example, Wise (formerly Transferwise) has a settlement account at the Bank of England and therefore access to the same payment rails that banks do.