Security News

The UK Information Commissioner's Office has yet again postponed its £280m in fines against British Airways and Marriott Hotels for data leaks. The fines were handed to both companies following damaging and widely publicised digital break-ins affecting millions of people around the world.

UK-based financial technology company Finastra is investigating a cybersecurity incident that may involve a piece of ransomware infecting some of its systems. Finastra has not shared any details about the attack.

Cybersecurity researchers say UK-based document printing and binding company Doxzoo exposed hundreds of gigabytes of information, including documents related to the US and British military, by leaving an AWS S3 bucket unprotected. The exposed data included names, addresses, email addresses, passport scans, partial payment information, order details, copyrighted publications, teacher's guides, certifications and diplomas, medical documents, floor plans, personal photos, and documents that users likely paid for, such as university course materials and diet and exercise plans.

A UK inquiry into child sexual abuse facilitated by the internet has recommended that the government require apps to pre-screen images before publishing them, in order to tackle "An explosion" in images of child sex abuse. The imagery isn't only "Depraved"; it's also easy to get to, the inquiry said, referring to research from the National Crime Agency that found that you can find child exploitation images within three clicks when using mainstream search engines.

Hackers have slurped biz comms customers' data from a database run by one of O2's largest UK partners. In an email sent to its customers, the partner, Aerial Direct, said that an unauthorised third party had been able to access customer data on 26 February through an external backup database, which included personal information on both current and expired subscribers from the last six years.

A critical crown court IT system and thousands of laptops used by the UK's Ministry of Justice run on Microsoft's obsolete and unsupported Windows XP operating system, The Register can reveal. As recently as March 2019, the ministry was paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for a VPN to support 2,000 Windows XP laptop users - news that comes as the department admits that a critical court IT system is also running on XP boxen.

UK Parliament's Defence Committee is to open an investigation into 5G and Huawei with a special focus on national security concerns. The House of Commons committee, made up of MPs, wants to find out for itself whether or not Huawei poses a threat to national security, something that nobody has ever raised before and which is bound to uncover lots of new and original insights.

At an event run by think tank The Institute for Government last month, he was asked about proposals that could allow the sharing of medical and social care data across government bodies under the Digital Economy Act 2017. The Public Service Delivery Review Board has suggested that it will ask government to extend the Digital Economy Act to include the sharing of medical data across government, something primary legislation currently prevents.

The UK's spy agency auditor has given public sector snoopers a clean bill of health - except for domestic surveillance specialists MI5, whose cloud data storage blunder is still under investigation. In its annual report for 2018, published this week, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office concluded once again that all is broadly well in the murky world of British state surveillance, where everyone from eavesdropping agency GCHQ to council binmen is legally allowed to spy on you.

UNITED NATIONS - The United States, United Kingdom and Estonia accused Russia's military intelligence Thursday of conducting cyber attacks against the Georgian government and media websites in an attempt "To sow discord and disrupt the lives of ordinary Georgians." Estonian Ambassador Sven Jurgenson read a statement afterward, flanked by UK Ambassador Karen Pierce and acting U.S. deputy ambassador Cherith Norman Chalet, saying the cyber attacks "Are part of Russia's long-running campaign of hostile and destabilizing activity against Georgia and are part of a wider pattern of malign activity."