Security News

British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks
2020-10-16 12:15

British Airways is to pay a £20m data protection fine after its 2018 Magecart hack - even though the Information Commissioner's Office discovered the airline had been saving credit card details in plain text since 2015. It also condemned BA's claims during fine negotiations that credit card data breaches are "An entirely commonplace phenomenon" and "An unavoidable fact of life".

British Hacker Sentenced to 5 Years for Blackmailing U.S. Companies
2020-09-22 04:32

Nathan Francis Wyatt , 39, who is a key member of the infamous international hacking group 'The Dark Overlord,' has been sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $1,467,048 in restitution to his victims. U.K. police first arrested Wyatt in September 2016 during an investigation into the hacking of an iCloud account belonging to Pippa Middleton, the younger sister of the British royal family member Duchess of Cambridge, and stealing 3,000 images of her.

Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report
2020-08-25 14:25

In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.

Capita's bespoke British Army recruiting IT cost military 25k applicants after switch-on
2020-07-22 10:33

Capita's 2017 decision to implement bespoke IT systems on a £1.3bn British Army recruiting contract led to nearly 25,000 fewer applications to join the military in the following year, new figures have revealed. The switching-on of bespoke Defence Recruiting System IT systems contributed to the lowest number of wannabe Army recruits signing up since 2013 as well as a drop of 22 per cent in the number of applicants.

US Hails British Ban on China's Huawei
2020-07-15 11:41

The United States hailed Britain's decision Tuesday to order the phased removal of China's Huawei telecoms giant from its 5G network, following months of pressure from Washington. "We welcome news that the United Kingdom plans to ban Huawei from future 5G networks and phase out untrusted Huawei equipment from existing networks," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.

British Army pulls up its SOC: New regiment to do infosec work even civvies will recognise
2020-06-05 19:37

The British Army has raised a new regiment that will take charge of its in-house security operations centre, a move calculated to make cyber defence a more mainstream part of all things armed and camouflaged. The Ministry of Defence stated that 13 Sigs will "Provide the basis of the new Army Cyber Information Security Operations Centre, focusing on the protection of Defence's cyber domain."

British Airline EasyJet Suffers Data Breach Exposing 9 Million Customers' Data
2020-05-19 06:50

British low-cost airline EasyJet today admitted that the company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, which it labeled "Highly sophisticated," exposing email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers. In an official statement released today, EasyJet confirmed that of the 9 million affected users, a small subset of customers, i.e., 2,208 customers, have also had their credit card details stolen, though no passport details were accessed.

British Airline EasyJet Suffers Data Breach Exposing 9 Million Customers' Data
2020-05-19 06:50

British low-cost airline EasyJet today admitted that the company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, which it labeled "Highly sophisticated," exposing email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers. In an official statement released today, EasyJet confirmed that of the 9 million affected users, a small subset of customers, i.e., 2,208 customers, have also had their credit card details stolen, though no passport details were accessed.

UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy
2020-04-28 06:19

The UK has decided to break with growing international consensus and insist its upcoming coronavirus contact-tracing app is run through centralised British servers - rather than follow the decentralized Apple-Google approach. Within the details over how it would work, the memo revealed the NHS and UK government reckon the contact-tracing protocols built by Apple and Google protect user privacy under advisement only.

Hackers Trick 3 British Private Equity Firms Into Sending Them $1.3 Million
2020-04-23 03:01

In a recent highly targeted BEC attack, hackers managed to trick three British private equity firms into wire-transferring a total of $1.3 million to the bank accounts fraudsters have access to - while the victimized executives thought they closed an investment deal with some startups. According to the cybersecurity firm Check Point, who shared its latest investigation with The Hacker News, nearly $700,000 of the total wire transferred amount has permanently lost to the attackers, with the rest of the amount recovered after researchers alerted the targeted firms in time.