Why you and I will pay the price for the next big cybersecurity crisis | John Naughton

As a former top civil servant has pointed out, private firms seem happy to let governments pick up the pieces when hackers strike

Ciaran Martin is what is known in Whitehall as a safe pair of hands". In the 23 years he spent working there he held a number of senior roles within the Cabinet Office, which included negotiating the basis of the Scottish referendum with the Scottish government and being director of security and intelligence. He was also responsible for (and I am not making this up) spearheading the equalising of the royal succession laws between males and females in the line". Before that, he had been private secretary to the permanent secretary at the Treasury and then principal private secretary to the cabinet secretary. When the government set up the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in 2016 he was appointed its first director. He now basks as a professor in the luxurious environs of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

Folk with that kind of background generally don't go in for hyperbole. And yet Martin has recently been all over the mainstream media warning that nobody is safe from Russia's digital pirates" (the Spectator), that the sale of semiconductor factory to Chinese-owned firm presents a bigger UK risk than Huawei" (Daily Telegraph), that UK schools have been held to ransom" by Russian hackers (BBC Radio 4) and so on. And now here he is in Prospect magazine under the headline We have privatised our cyber security. The winners are the hackers".