Built for research
Basalt's Oxford Science Vale practice has been working research threat profiles long enough to know which controls actually move the dial — and which line items quietly waste budget. We bring that pattern recognition in week one.
Oxford Science Vale research organisations face IP theft, state-sponsored academic targeting and HPC misuse. Basalt's application security practice tests against that real threat profile, not a generic United Kingdom-wide playbook. Application security programs built around your engineering org — threat modelling, secure-by-default libraries, AppSec champions and CI/CD guardrails that ship.
The research, space, biotech concentration around Oxford Science Vale sees IP theft, state-sponsored academic targeting and HPC misuse. Our application security work in South East / Harwell & Culham is scoped against this real threat profile, not a generic checklist.
Every finding ships with a control reference against NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR, with NCSC UK guidance cited where it changes the remediation priority. Board reporting follows the FCA SYSC operational resilience expectation set.
Basalt delivers application security to organisations across Oxford Science Vale and the wider South East / Harwell & Culham region (population ~15k). The research, space, biotech sectors that anchor the region face a distinct threat profile — IP theft, state-sponsored academic targeting and HPC misuse — and our engagements are scoped to that, not a generic playbook. Reporting maps cleanly to the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR that British boards already use, with regulator context (NCSC UK) called out where it changes a remediation priority.
Basalt's Oxford Science Vale practice has been working research threat profiles long enough to know which controls actually move the dial — and which line items quietly waste budget. We bring that pattern recognition in week one.
Findings ship with control references against NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR and remediation guidance written for the team that has to action it. Your board, your auditor, and your on-call engineer all get something they can use.
Basalt doesn't resell tooling. British research clients get an independent read on what's working, what isn't, and what's costing more than it should — not a thinly-veiled sales pipeline.
Cyber security in United Kingdom can't be done with last year's threat models. The Basalt practice runs against current attacker tradecraft — agentic AI abuse, MCP and AI-tool supply chain, post-quantum readiness — alongside the legacy infrastructure work that still keeps most organisations awake at night.
Most Oxford Science Vale engagements scope inside one week and start within two. Retainer clients can trigger work the same day. We do not pipeline British clients through junior teams — a senior consultant scopes and runs the work end-to-end.
Both. Sensitive work — classified-adjacent environments, live incident response, OT walkthroughs — gets on-site time in Oxford Science Vale and the wider South East / Harwell & Culham region. Routine assessments and detection engineering run remote with a tight feedback loop.
Every finding ships with a control reference against the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK GDPR so your compliance team is not re-mapping our report. Where NCSC UK guidance exists for the specific finding, we cite it inline. Board-level reporting follows the FCA SYSC operational resilience expectation set.
The research sector concentration in Oxford Science Vale drives a different threat model than a generic British engagement — IP theft, state-sponsored academic targeting and HPC misuse. Our scoping reflects that, and so does the test library we bring to the work.
Yes — this is core to how we work. Basalt actively researches and tests against agentic AI tool-abuse and indirect prompt injection at scale, MCP server and AI-tool supply chain compromise and identity-first attack chains across federated SaaS. Most regional providers haven't mapped these attack paths; we run them in production against client systems with explicit scope.
Strategic cyber security consulting
Adversarial testing for LLMs and AI systems
CREST-aligned penetration testing
Source code review and SAST/DAST integration