Security News
The NSCS has attributed the campaigns to a Russia-based group called SEABORGIUM and the Iran-based TA453 group, also known as APT42. The threat groups target individuals working in academia, defence, government, non-government organisations, and think-tanks.
The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre has issued a warning of Russian and Iranian state-sponsored hackers increasingly targeting organizations and individuals. More specifically, the country's cybersecurity agency has identified a spike in spear-phishing attacks attributed to threat actors tracked as SEABORGIUM and TA453.
Threat actors abused an open redirect on the official website of the United Kingdom's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs to direct visitors to fake OnlyFans adult dating sites. As part of this malicious campaign, threat actors abused an open redirect at that looked like a legitimate U.K. government link but redirected visitors to the fake OnlyFans dating site.
UK broadsheet media outlet The Guardian has become the victim of a ransomware attack which seems to have take out a large chunk of office-based systems. Journalists at the center-left newspaper have continued to work from home and publish on its website, but according to the publication's own output, it has been hit by "a serious IT incident, which is believed to be a ransomware attack."
Tax authorities from Australia, Canada, France, the UK and the USA have conducted a joint probe into "Electronic sales suppression software" - applications that falsify point of sale data to help merchants avoid paying tax on their true revenue. A Friday announcement [PDF] from the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement, states that the probe "Resulted in the arrest of five individuals in the United Kingdom who allegedly designed and sold electronic sales suppression systems internationally."
The United Kingdom, Japan and Italy will pool resources to build a sixth-generation warplane scheduled to be ready for deployment by 2035, with capabilities understood to include AI to rival never-before-seen tech on fighter jets built by China and Russia, although this wasn't stated explicitly. The "Sharing the costs" bit will be important to the UK, which hasn't built a fighter jet alone for quite some time.
The UK government is putting forward changes to the law which would require social media platforms to give users the option to avoid seeing and engaging with harmful - but legal - content. Presenting the amended Online Safety Bill to Parliament this week, Michelle Donelan, the minister for digital, culture, media and sport pledged to create a "Third shield" to protect users from harmful content.
The United Kingdom has decided Chinese video cameras have no place in government facilities. Government departments have also been "Advised that no such equipment should be connected to departmental core networks" and told to consider whether they should remove and replace Chinese video cameras "Deployed on sensitive sites" - and do so before planned upgrades.
The United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre, the government agency that leads the country's cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities. "These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact," the agency said.
The UK's Home Secretary - the minister in charge of policing and internal security - has been forced to apologize for breaching IT security protocols in government. On another occasion, she accidentally forwarded official documents to a Member of Parliament from her Gmail account because she did not have her phone with her.