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takyon writes:

GCHQ are a bunch of over-achievers, save for one achievement: reporting the security flaws they discover in order to get them fixed. Instead, their hacking capabilities have substantially increased:

The UK has substantially increased its hacking capabilities in recent years, an official report says. This includes the ability to attack other country's communications, weapons systems and even infrastructure. The details were revealed in the annual report of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which oversees the work of intelligence agencies. It said GCHQ had "over-achieved", creating double the number of new offensive cyber-capabilities expected.

The report said GCHQ's allocation of effort to develop hacks had increased "very substantially" from 2014. The programme of developing the capabilities is divided into three tranches and GCHQ said that it had just finished the first. "We... actually over-achieved and delivered [almost double the number of] capabilities [we were aiming for," an official from the agency told the committee. The details of the successes are classified in the public version of the report.

GCHQ is also upgrading its supercomputers, an effort referred to as Project Golf:

Project GOLF (£***m over ten years) is a project to enhance the supercomputing capacity that supports much of GCHQ's work. GCHQ has told us that this project is particularly critical, as it predicts that "projected mission needs will exceed existing data centre capacity limits in ***". GCHQ noted that its relationship with the US brought significant benefits ***. GCHQ has reported that this project *** is on track to be fully operational in early 2018.

Here are the annual reports (2016-2017 PDF).

Related: How GCHQ Manipulates Online Opinion
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