Security News

U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Wednesday urged global cooperation to combat cyberattacks by "Hostile state actors" and criminal gangs. Raab also pledged 22 million pounds in support to "Vulnerable" countries in Africa and the Indo-Pacific to improve their digital defense capacity.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre highlights the success of its Active Cyber Defence program. The UK's National Cyber Security Center Active Cyber Defense program is an ambitious project designed to improve the security posture of an entire nation.

Priti Patel has promised a government review of the UK's 30-year-old Computer Misuse Act "This year" as well as condemning companies that buy off ransomware criminals. "As part of ensuring that we have the right tools and mechanisms to detect, disrupt and deter our adversaries, I believe now is the right time to undertake a formal review of the Computer Misuse Act," said Patel.

Folks in England can from next week use the NHS App to confer their vaccination status, in the face of warnings that the technology could lead to identifiable medical information being exposed. The British government has announced that from 17 May, people will be able to demonstrate their COVID-19 vaccination status - a so-called vaccine passport or certificate - using the NHS App, which began its public rollout in January 2019, well before the pandemic.

Domains'n'hosting outfit Namecheap harboured more than a quarter of all known phishing sites that falsely posed as UK government web presences during 2020, according to the National Cyber Security Centre today. It also encountered the usual COVID-themed ones we've all become familiar with over the last year - fake copies of the NHS Test and Trace app laced with malware - plus sites impersonating Capita TV Licensing, the outsourced subscription sales arm of the BBC. Email scams were also popular, with 26,000 being shut down after netizens flooded the NCSC's email reporting portal with complaints of four million suspicious messages.

Russian spies from APT29 responded to Western agencies outing their tactics by adopting a red-teaming tool to blend into targets' networks as a legitimate pentesting exercise. A couple of weeks ago, Britain and the US joined forces to out the SVR's Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, giving the world's infosec defenders a chance to look out for the state-backed hackers' fingerprints on their networked infrastructure.

Agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom on Friday published a joint report providing more details on the activities of the Russian cyberspy group that is believed to be behind the attack on IT management company SolarWinds. The FBI, NSA, CISA and the UK's NCSC say the Russian threat actor tracked as APT29 was behind the SolarWinds attack, which resulted in hundreds of organizations having their systems breached through malicious updates served from compromised SolarWinds systems.

In a move akin to calling the fire brigade after your house has burned down, the UK government today announced the passage of a bill that would afford it powers to intervene in potentially hostile direct investment. The National Security and Investment Bill, which was introduced last November and has since received royal assent, gives the government powers to scrutinise, alter, and block transactions where there is a risk to national security.

Google has urged the UK's Supreme Court to throw out a £3bn lawsuit brought by an ex-Which director over secretly planted tracking cookies on devices running Safari, on the grounds that local law doesn't allow for opt-out class action lawsuits. The case, being heard over two days this week in the Supreme Court, the final court of appeal in Britain for civil cases, has huge implications for legal businesses and investors as well as data protection law.

Google on Wednesday began a legal bid at Britain's highest court to try to block a class action alleging that it illegally tracked millions of iPhone users. In October 2018, the High Court dismissed the case but the Court of Appeal overturned the decision in October 2019, allowing it to proceed.