Security News
An alert issued on Tuesday by the FBI warns about an increase in PYSA ransomware attacks on education institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom. According to the FBI, PYSA attacks have been launched by "Unidentified cyber actors" against higher education, K-12 schools and seminaries in a dozen U.S. states, as well as the U.K. The threat actors behind PYSA attacks are known to encrypt data on compromised systems, but they also steal information from victims and threaten to leak it in an effort to increase their chances of getting paid.
A former asylum seeker with a postgraduate degree in cybersecurity who alleged his bosses were spying on him for MI5 has lost his attempt to claim he was racially discriminated against. The anonymous man, who worked for an unnamed company that set up a UK cyber range in mid-2019, told the Employment Tribunal that he had quit after being subjected to racial harassment at work - but judges overruled all of his legal claims.
SoftServe has become an official Google Cloud reseller in the delivery and management of Google Cloud solutions. With this designation, SoftServe can support end-to-end delivery and management of Google Cloud solutions, from application development to cost control, in guiding its UK&I clients through the complex landscape of public cloud resource management.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre has reminded Brits to patch their Microsoft Exchange Server deployments against Hafnium attacks, 10 days after the US and wider infosec industry shouted the house down saying the same thing. The agency told press on Friday afternoon that it had proactively helped UK organisations fix around 2,100 affected mailservers following last week's out-of-band patches to resolve four zero-day vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.
A new UK law will explicitly authorise the "Voluntary" slurping of data from mobile phones of crime suspects and witnesses. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which was introduced to Parliament this week, contains clauses that will allow police and others to extract data from mobile phones if the user "Voluntarily" hands the device over.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre is now helping IoT gadget firm FootfallCam Ltd secure product lines following the recent digital burglary of its nursery webcam operation. Company director Melissa Kao confirmed to The Register that the NCSC, a sibling of UK spy agency GCHQ, was helping the company shore up security after its NurseryCam product was hacked last week.
The European Commission lifted the threat of crucial data flows between Europe and Britain being blocked in a move that would have crippled business activity as it said Friday that privacy safeguards in the UK met European standards. In a key post-Brexit decision, the EU executive said that British authorities had sufficient measures in place to protect European users' personal data, freeing up data transfers for businesses as well as for police.
Another month and two more British companies behind nuisance marketing calls are collectively facing a £270,000 penalty for breaking the law by calling people registered by the Telephone Preference Service. Just last month UK data watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office issued the same financial slap against four companies found to be flouting regulations.
British prosecutors can make use of evidence gathered by the French and Dutch police from encrypted messaging service EncroChat's servers thanks to a legal interpretation of whether RAM counts as data storage, the Court of Appeal has ruled. Multiple reporting restriction orders are in force on most EncroChat cases currently before the criminal courts - though those restrictions are not being applied to police forces and the National Crime Agency, both of which have been boasting since last year about EncroChat-linked arrests and convictions, and even the contents of EncroChat messages.
Theta Lake announced its expansion into the United Kingdom with the addition of Theta Lake UK, locally-based entity with employees and UK focused technology. "Theta Lake gives us a depth of security and compliance collaboration coverage that served us pre-pandemic, during remote work scenarios in the pandemic, and in the future as the work-from-anywhere environment evolves. Its UK footprint, London-based data center, and UK focused functionality further demonstrates its commitment to us."