CM

Ciaran Martin

Things Ciaran Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Ciaran Martin has been a guest on Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government (3 times) , The National Security Podcast , Resilient Cyber and Risky Business .

Recently: “Risky Business #858 -- The $6.3b laptop” on Risky Business (November 2026); “AI Cyber FUD and the Apocalypse That's Always Around the Corner” on Resilient Cyber (October 2026); “The Southport attacks: Has terrorism changed?” on Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government (January 2025); “Rishi Sunak and the Attack of the Cybermen” on Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government (March 2024); “Clare O'Neil MP and Professor Ciaran Martin on cyber security” on The National Security Podcast (November 2022); “Playing Chicken With Kyiv” on Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government (February 2022).

What They Said

“Apart from its highly questionable investment value, its fundamental worthlessness, its terrible security practices, and its complete funding of illicit crime all over the world, there's a lot to be said for it.” — Ciaran Martin, Risky Business

Patrick Gray had just said he doesn't see the point of crypto and that at least you can turn gold into jewelry. Martin delivered this deadpan reply in a week dominated by the $6.3bn Binance theft.

Risky Business · 2026-11-04 Permalink → Listen →
Risky Business Around 10:14 into the episode
Ciaran Martin

Yeah. And the hack looks pretty basic, as you've both illuminated. The money laundering experts seem pretty impressed by the way the money was laundered quickly. Yeah. Yeah. So that seems to be the very careful bit of it.

Patrick Gray

…of value. So as an investor, I don't get it either. It holds zero appeal, except as like a risk on if it's ripping, like maybe getting on the momentum. But like it doesn't do anything. You know what I mean? Like at least you can turn gold into jewelry, right? Yeah. So I just, I don't get it. Apart

Ciaran Martin

from its highly questionable investment value, its fundamental worthlessness, its terrible security practices, and its complete funding of illicit crime all over the world, there's a lot to be said for it.

James Wilson

Aside from that, it's great. Yeah,

Patrick Gray

so we're going to change the name of this podcast to the Diamond Hands Crypto to the Moon podcast. But look, look, moving on, because we've got to move on. We've got plenty to get through this week. There has actually been a crypto exchange in Brazil had an incident as well where they lost $46…

James Wilson

It truly is. The numbers are one thing, but what really gets me in the sort of the desensitization aspect is when even when like the, you know, the Binance was at six something billion dollars in the news, CZ, the former CEO, and then even the current CEO both came out and said, that's cool. We can…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Authorities all around the world have been telling people for years, don't buy cocaine because it's immoral. You're funding human trafficking and misery and exploitation. I wonder at what point people are going to say, and I'm half joking, but only half joking, don't invest in crypto because you're buying ICBMs for Kim Jong-un.” — Ciaran Martin, Risky Business

The hosts were discussing the $6.3bn Binance hack and its attribution to North Korea. Martin, a former head of the UK's NCSC, argued that crypto theft pays for weapons procurement and that sanctions have little left to bite on, and floated this half-joke about changing investor behaviour.

Risky Business · 2026-11-04 Permalink → Listen →
Risky Business Around 07:00 into the episode
Ciaran Martin

…the North Korean do this? Why do they specialize in it? Why do they train people to look at the most vulnerable points in the crypto infrastructure? Why do they exercise all that strategic patience? Because they want to buy ICBMs and they want to pay for nukes. So this really, really matters. This

Patrick Gray

…see more attempts at that sort of theft, but it petered out because it's just too hard. Too much of the money is recoverable. And, you know, too many changes were made to the actual Swift network itself to make that sort of stuff unworkable. But in crypto, it just doesn't seem to be getting better.

Ciaran Martin

I think that's exactly right. And if you, if you study, and as you say, I'm a bit of a North Korea watcher. If you study their tradecraft, if you study their targeting over the last decade or so, they've kind of given up on banks. They're just, it's not worth it. They can't get out the money anymore. And I think they got four out of the 35 transactions through from the Swift heist. And then I think they misspelt foundation as Fundación or something like that. And it triggered alerts and so on. So it's pretty expensive typo back then. But to get back to crypto, I mean, there is a structural problem here. And I say this sort of half jokingly because you have to try and have some levity in these matters. But as you say, it's really, really serious. Authorities all around the world have been telling people for years, you know, don't buy cocaine because it's immoral. You're funding human trafficking and misery and exploitation. I wonder at what point are people going to say, and I'm half joking, but only half joking, don't invest in crypto because you're buying ICBMs for Kim Jong-un. And it really is something where…

Patrick Gray

not like the North Korean government gives a crap if some of these guys get vanned when they're on, you know, when they're in Malaysia or something.

Ciaran Martin

Well, exactly. And what are you going to do to the regime? Are you going to sanction them a bit more because it's pretty tight? It's pretty tight already. So I think you're going to have to look at improving crypto security, but there's no sign of that.

Patrick Gray

No, there isn't. And I mean, once the money's gone, it's gone. Sort of like old school Mac computers where people would actually throw stuff into the bin and hit delete and then go, oh, hang on, I want to undelete that. You can't. You can't. It's gone. Irreversible.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Software Engineering & Infra