Security News
Britain's data watchdog says it has snared Swansea-based business CPS Advisory for making more than 100,000 "Unauthorised direct marketing calls" to people about their pensions, and subsequently fined the company £130,000. Under a change to the Private and Electronics Communications Regulation in 2019, a firm can only make live calls to folks about work or a personal pension scheme if they are authorised to do so by the Financial Conduct Authority, or it is the trustee or manager of such a pension.
Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday failed to persuade a British judge to throw out new US allegations against him, as he resumed his fight to avoid extradition to the United States for leaking military secrets. Inside, Assange's lawyers sought to "Excise" new allegations lodged by Washington in recent weeks, saying they had not had time to formulate a proper response.
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.
British infosec accreditation body CREST has appointed an ex-police officer to investigate the NCC Group exam cheat-sheet scandal as its chairman temporarily steps aside. The accreditation body has been rocked by revelations from The Register that major industry player NCC Group's training material was leaked in a Github repo alongside cheat sheets to help candidates pass accreditation exams first time.
British infosec accreditation body CREST has suspended all of its accreditation exams after The Register revealed a published cache of files including what appeared to be internal exam sheets as well as docs apparently tied to key industry player NCC Group. We understand from sources that the security body has suspended all of its CREST Certified Infrastructure Tester and CREST Certified Web Application Tester exams for up to a month while their contents are reviewed.
Since the beginning of 2020, the North Korea-linked threat group known as Lazarus has successfully compromised dozens of organizations in Israel and other countries by targeting their employees with appealing job offers, UK-based cybersecurity firm ClearSky reported this week. Earlier this week, the Israeli defense ministry claimed to have successfully prevented a Lazarus attack targeting the country's defense manufacturers, but ClearSky says that the attackers were in fact successful in their attempts.
UK workers are spending an extra two hours at work every day while people in the US are working three extra hours, according to an analysis of VPN data. NordVPN Teams found that people in both countries are still working the extra hours that started in April when coronavirus lockdowns started.
British Airways expects the fine for its 2018 credit card data leak to be just 10.8 per cent of the £183m proposed by the UK data watchdog - while US hotel chain Marriott has both halved and kicked its own data blunder punishment into the long grass once again, The Register can reveal. Marriott has secured an extension for fine negotiations to 30 September, having secured two already; one from January to 31 March and a second that ran through May. On top of that, the company set aside $65m to cover its proposed fine, down from the Information Commissioner's original intention to impose a £99m penalty.
Former UK trade minister and current Conservative MP Dr. Liam Fox has been named as the source of hacked trade documents released during last year's British elections. A report from Reuters cited two anonymous sources who say that the 58 year-old Fox, who has since stepped down, had an email account taken over by Russian hackers, who then used it to obtain and release documents about Anglo-American trade talks.
The chairman of UK Parliament's Defence Committee has suggested making popular app TikTok subject to Huawei-style code reviews by GCHQ, if its reported move to a new London HQ comes true. Calls to simply ban TIKTOK are shortsighted - we are losing this tech Cold War.