Security News
Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they'll lean heavily on the "Think of the children!" rhetoric we're seeing in this current wave of the crypto wars.
A Nottingham man was imprisoned this week for more than two years after hacking the computers and phones of dozens of victims, some of them underage, and spying on them using remote access trojans. 32-year-old Robert Davies used fake online social media profiles and Skype accounts for catfishing his victims and hacking their devices by sending links that allowed him to infect them with RATs obfuscated using crypters.
Electric car chargers will have to include secure boot and automatic network disconnection if unsigned software runs on the smart devices - but only from 2023, the British government has said. New security requirements for smart chargers won't be enforced until the last day of this year, according to government papers reviewed by The Register.
The Information Commissioner's Office has confirmed that former New Zealand privacy commissioner John Edwards has started his new role as the UK's Information Commissioner. While legal experts have warned of the dangers of the UK straying too far from the EU's General Data Protection Directive - or risking the adequacy decision which currently allows data sharing between the UK and the EU to support business as usual - his message is don't stop believing.
One sector that I believe is ripe and particularly susceptible to cyber attacks currently is the UK's energy sector. Impacted by a surge in demand for energy by countries across the northern hemisphere, the supply chain that services the UK's critical need for gas and electricity is currently grappling with a widespread energy crisis as we head into winter.
The US Attorney's Office of Massachusetts on Monday announced the extradition of Vladislav Klyushin, a Russian business executive with ties to the Kremlin, on charges of hacking US computer networks and committing securities fraud by trading on undisclosed financial data. Klyushin, 41, a resident of Moscow, Russia, was arrested in Sion, Switzerland on March 21, 2021, reportedly upon disembarking from his private jet while on vacation with his family.
The United Kingdom's National Crime Agency has contributed more than 585 million passwords to the Have I Been Pwned service that lets users check if their login information has leaked online. Just like with the passwords coming from the FBI, this massive collection has been added to the Pwned Passwords data that allows searching if a password has been compromised.
The UK government has officially included decapod crustaceans-including crabs, lobsters, and crayfish-and cephalopod mollusks-including octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish-in its Animal Welfare Bill. This means they are now recognized as "Sentient beings" in the UK. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
The British government has launched a £2.6bn National Cyber Strategy, intended to steer the state's thinking on cyber attack, defence and technology for the next three years - and there's some good news if you run a tech company. Its authors praised the formation of the National Cyber Force "Offensive cyber activity" unit, a joint venture between spy agency MI6, domestic intel agency GCHQ and the Ministry of Defence.
The global pandemic has provided cover for all sorts of phishing scams over the past couple of years, and the rise in alarm over the spread of the latest COVID-19 variant, Omicron, is no exception. U.K. consumer watchdog "Which?" has raised the alarm that a new phishing scam, doctored up to look like official communications from the National Health Service, is targeting people with fraud offers for free PCR tests for the COVID-19 Omicron variant.