Security News
The Cabinet Office spaffed almost £300,000 on cybersecurity-related training for its staff in the last year - an eye-popping increase of almost 500 per cent on the year before. This is according to a Freedom of Information request by political think tank Parliament Street, which found the Cabinet Office lavished £274,142.
The UK's financial watchdog has fired a warning shot across the bow of Binance, and ordered it to place a notice on binance.com scaring off Brit crypto fans. This seems to have come about because Binance, which is ultimately based in the Cayman Islands, wanted to launch an exchange in the UK using its London-based affiliate Binance Markets Ltd. Since the start of the year, cryptocurrency firms in Britain have had to register with the nation's Financial Conduct Authority and meet its anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorism-funding requirements.
A home improvement biz based in East Sussex is facing a fine of £130,000 for making upwards of 900,000 unsolicited marketing calls to individuals and businesses that had enrolled on the Telephone Preference Service. Colour Coat of St Leonards-on-Sea made almost 970,000 connected calls between 1 August 2019 and 31 March last year, the Information Commissioner's Office found, of which more than 452,000 were to folk or entities registered with TPS or the corporate equivalent.
Customers of the Three UK telco company are panicking as they receive a series of random phone calls due to an ongoing issue. Outbound calls from customers are being routed to random strangers.
Based on the information collected by the company to date, it believes the impact of the incident was limited and the attackers only managed to access roughly 0.2% of its data. Gateley admitted that the compromised data included some client information and the firm said it will notify impacted customers.
Pizza takeaway and delivery outfit Papa John's has been fined £10,000 by the UK's data watchdog for sending marketing fluff to punters without their say-so. Following a year-long investigation, the Information Commissioner's Office found that the company had sent 168,022 "Nuisance marketing messages to its customers without the valid consent required by law."
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has inked a deal with Norton where it will refund customers whose antivirus software subscription was automatically renewed. Today's agreement comes after the regulator launched legal action against Norton in March - a first for a consumer protection case - when the company refused to furnish the CMA with the information needed during the course of the investigation.
Google is offering U.K. regulators a role overseeing its phasing out of ad-tracking technology from its Chrome browser, in a package of commitments the tech giant is proposing to apply globally to head off a competition investigation. The U.K. competition watchdog has been investigating Google's proposals to remove so-called third-party cookies over concerns they would undermine digital ad competition and entrench the company's market power.
Britain has told the UN that international cyber law should allow zero-notice digital punishment directed at countries that attack others' infrastructure. A statement made by UK diplomats to the UN's Group of Governmental Experts on Advancing Responsible State Behaviour in the Context of International Security called for international law to permit retaliation for cyber attacks with no notice.
British infosec businessees mostly support beefing up the Computer Misuse Act to directly tackle the ransomware crisis - while reform campaign CyberUp has written to Home Secretary Priti Patel offering "Support" for "a renewed, forward looking framework". A number of firms that spoke to The Register expressed firm support for changes to the act that make it easier for law enforcement to pursue and convict ransomware extortionists.