May 24, 2023 By Paul Ducklin
It’s taken more than five years for justice to be served in this case, but the cops and the courts got there in the end.
The UK law enforcement office SEROCU, short for South East Regional Organised Crime Unit, this week reported the peculiar tale of one Ashley Liles, the literal Man in the Middle whom we referred to in the headline.
These days, we usually expand the jargon term MitM to mean Manipulator in the Middle, not merely to avoid the gendered term “man”, but also because many, if not most, MitM attacks these days are performed by machines.
Some techies have even adopted the name Machine in the Middle, but we prefer “manipulator” because we think it usefully decribes how this sort of attack works, and because (as this story shows) sometimes it really is man, and not a machine, in the middle.