Security News

Norfolk and Suffolk police have stepped forward to admit that a "Technical issue" resulted in raw data pertaining to crime reports accidentally being included in Freedom of Information responses. "A technical issue has led to some raw data belonging to the constabularies being included within the files produced in response to the FoI requests in question. The data was hidden from anyone opening the files, but it should not have been included."

Every year local government bodies or councils across Britain contact residents, asking them to update their voter details on the electoral register if these have changed. What's worse is, failure to respond to this notice by visiting the website can, at least in theory, lead to a criminal penalty-a fine up to £1,000, according to the Electoral Commission website.

The UK's Electoral Commission has been the subject of an online attack that may have exposed the names and addresses of voters, as well as the Commission's email system and unspecified other systems. In a public notice on its site, the Commission said that the intrusion was identified in October 2022, after suspicious activity was detected on its systems, but that it was clear that the attackers had first accessed those systems more than a year earlier, in August 2021.

The UK Electoral Commission disclosed a massive data breach exposing the personal information of anyone who registered to vote in the United Kingdom between 2014 and 2022. The disclosure comes ten months after the Commission first detected the breach and two years after the initial breach occurred, raising questions about why it took so long to report the incident to the public.

Discover the new shadow IT guidance published by the U.K.'s NCSC. Use this guide to better identify and reduce the levels of shadow IT within your organization. A new publication from the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre provides guidance to organizations concerned with shadow IT, which most of the time results from non-malicious intent of employees.

All appointments for Swiss Schengen tourist and transit visa applicants have been cancelled across the UK. TLSContact, the Swiss government's chosen IT provider for facilitating visa applicants...

In March, the U.K. government released a white paper promoting the country as a place to "Turbocharge growth" in AI. According to the white paper, 500,000 people in the U.K. are employed in the AI industry, and AI contributed £3.7 billion to the national economy in 2022. In response, on July 18, the independent research body Ada Lovelace Institute, in a lengthy report, called for a more "Robust domestic policy" in order to regulate AI through legislation that clarifies and organizes the U.K.'s effort to promote AI as an industry.

Apple has joined the rapidly growing chorus of tech organizations calling on British lawmakers to revise the nation's Online Safety Bill - which for now is in the hands of the House of Lords - so that it safeguards strong end-to-end encryption. "It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk."

A new Android malware campaign has been observed pushing the Anatsa banking trojan to target banking customers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria, and Switzerland since the start of March 2023. "The actors behind Anatsa aim to steal credentials used to authorize customers in mobile banking applications and perform Device-Takeover Fraud to initiate fraudulent transactions," ThreatFabric said in an analysis published Monday.

If you say THE Twitter hack, everyone knows you mean the one that happened in July 2020, when a small group of cybercriminals ended up in control of a small number of Twitter accounts and used them to talk up a cryptocoin fraud. SIM swaps are where a criminal sweet-talks, bribes or coerces a mobile phone provider into issuing them with a "Replacment" SIM card for someone else's number, typically under the guise of wanting to buy a new phone or urgently needing to replace a lost SIM. The victim's SIM card goes dead, and the crook starts receiving their calls and text messages, notably including any two-factor authentication codes needed for secure logins or password resets.