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Comment by yarrel | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who don't know what GCHQ is, it's the UK's NSA with all the problems that entails -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Head...

"In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting all online and telephone data in the UK via the Tempora programme."

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All the contributors have rather cryptic usernames: https://github.com/orgs/gchq/people

And then there is james257.

Haha, I would never have noticed that if you hadn't written it!

Take a hint

Other than the anachronistic name (thought "cyber" wend out in the 90's), I'm extremely impressed to see such an awesome tool come out of the public sector. Kudos to GCHQ!

> "cyber" wend out in the 90's

I take it you have no exposure to the public sector? Referring to "Cyber" as "IT/Info/Computer/Network Security" will immediately identify you as an outsider in man public sector positions.

And vice versa outside of government!

It would be better if we knew they weren't using it for evil.

Nah, "Cyber Security" is becoming the defacto term for referring to what I would have called IT Security in the past (some interesting reading on the topic here http://cyber.uk/cyber/)

The other day someone was telling me they used to run a website called CyberHomes. All I could think of was how weird that would sound today.

> thought "cyber" wend out in the 90's

A year ago someone in my research group claimed that they were 'getting into cyber'. I looked around the room and almost every other member of the group looked confused and a little concerned.

Apparently 'cyber' has become a byword for 'cyber security'. I hope that this does not last.

> Apparently 'cyber' has become a byword for 'cyber security'. I hope that this does not last.

I wouldn't get your hopes up, from the people who brought you forensic (i.e. legal) as a byword for science.

The security group at work now fancies themselves as "Cyber Command".

We immediately began mocking them with a buzz lightyear graphic.

They might be interested in this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command

Back in the late 90's on AOL, "cyber" was short for "cybersex."

'Cyber' usage has recently become de rigueur by people in positions of authority. see http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/trumps...

According to Google Trends, "cyber" overall slowly going out of use, but "cyber security" has a reverse trend. At the same time, Cyber Monday is winning it all.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cyber%20sec...

EDIT: I've managed to get rid of this pesky Cyber Monday out of the graph!

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cyber%20-mo...

The word is usually used in the context of war. See:

https://cyberbelli.com/2012/05/26/cyberspace-is-a-domain-of-...

http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article...

http://www.academia.edu/1753317/A_Theory_of_War_in_the_Cyber...

Google trends is not good for this kind of analysis. Google trends is based on the number of searches for a particular term relative to all other searches. So you see the same trend when you look at other tech topics like Linux, programming, SSH, computer science, etc. It's not that these things are necessarily becoming less popular, just that tech oriented people were over represented on the early internet, and thus Google search. As more non tech people started googling stuff, tech topics fell in their relative importance.

Re-read the comment you replied to, cyber security is trending in the opposite direction of Cyber (or SSH). That would seem to invalidate your thesis; Cyber security is gaining popularity relative to other topics.

Edit: there's also an interesting spike in Google trends for "cyber" every November. National Cyber Security Awareness Month is in October.

There were two assertions made in tener's comment. The first was that the term "cyber" was going out of use, the second was that the term "cyber security" was increasing. My comment was referring to the first assertion.

How to update it for this decade: Replace Cyber with Data !

Data Sex?

This is the best part of this site, I completely forgot what this article was about and I'm 60 comments deep about the history and trends of the word "cyber". There needs to be a site dedicated to these entertaining comment threads / bravo

Shouldn't it be called Cyber UK Army knife instead of Cyber Swiss Army Knife, then?

Proof that technology is neutral and isn't all about freedom and ethics; will be avoiding anything published by them.

Why? You admit yourself technology is neutral.

Yes which means I have to apply my own reasoning and ethical thinking.

So does your chain of reasoning go like this: GHCQ made the application. GHCQ is a spy agency. Therefore, GHCQ must have planted a backdoor in the application?

Because that would be a logical fallacy.

I was a little blown away that it was that GCHQ.

That said, how could they possibly collect or intercept this, isn't it a bunch of client side scripts, all hosted on GitHub?

Theoretically, they could sabotage the crypto algorithms, hope that someone uses it, intercept that communication, and decrypt it using the sneaky weakness they introduced.

Or the right circumstances could cause the library to make requests to their secret government hacking command-and-control server.

Seeing that they released this at github.com/gchq/..., I'd keep my eyes open for requests to secret-hacked-data-backchannel.open-exploit-project.gchq.co.uk

(Or, with less sarcasm: this is probably the project on github with the lowest possibility of containing government backdoors).

(or maybe that's just what they want you to believe)

(or maybe that's just what /we/ want you to believe)

(or maybe that's just what /I/ want you to believe)

You should probably read the manual before using a webapp for your encryption needs. From the Readme:

>it should be noted that the analyst is not a professional developer and the code has not been peer-reviewed for compliance with a formal specification

>Cryptographic operations in CyberChef should not be relied upon to provide security in any situation. No guarantee is offered for their correctness.

I did read that, and I don't believe it provides any clarity related to what I wrote.

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