Security News
Greater Manchester Police is struggling with a partial outage of a Capita-built computer system used by frontline officers to input information. The PoliceWorks systems, which form part of the force's new iOPS - a £27m project undertaken by everyone's favourite outsourcer - went down after a planned IT upgrade at midnight on Monday.
The study [PDF] shows that nearly all councils across the UK exposed data about visitors to their websites, which was then sold on to private companies. These elements enable users to be tracked around the web, scraping together whatever information it can, such as what websites and apps they're looking at, their location and their device.
Six individuals were arrested in the United Kingdom last week for their involvement in a bank cyber-heist and money laundering operation. The arrests were made in connection to the laundering of money stolen in February 2019 from Malta's Bank of Valletta, after cyber-criminals used malware to access the bank's systems and illegally remove around €13 million.
Will Britain's Huawei decision serve as a blueprint for other nations' 5G infrastructure rollouts? U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Tuesday announced that the country's four biggest telecommunications firms will be allowed to use equipment from Huawei for up to 35 percent of non-sensitive parts of their 5G and gigabit-capable networks.
The NHS has suffered 209 successful ransomware attacks since 2014, according to new figures based on Freedom of Information requests, but with a dramatic improvement since 2017, the year WannaCry ransomware hit the health service. The WannaCry attack in 2017 - famously thwarted by Brit white hat hacker Marcus Hutchins - caused a spike to 101 incidents and we know many of these were severe.
As a result, Huawei will be excluded from the sensitive "Core" parts of new 5G and gigabit-capable networks. On Wednesday, the European Commission endorsed guidelines for 5G networks that would allow European Union member states to decide whether to allow "High risk" telecommunications groups, including Huawei, in their networks, The Hill reports.
The security proposals released Monday mainly focus on improving the security of passwords by ensuring that they are not resettable to any universal factory setting as well as refining the way IoT manufacturers disclose vulnerabilities in their connected devices. The goal of these proposals is to provide greater security protections as the number of connected devices, including security cameras, routers, smart home devices and autonomous vehicles, increase.
The British government has finally woken up to the relatively lax security of IoT devices, and is lurching forward with legislation to make gadgets connected to the web more secure. The Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said it will require makers of IoT hardware to ship devices with unique passwords that cannot be reset to a factory default setting.
Britain on Tuesday greenlighted a limited role for Chinese telecoms giant Huawei in the country's 5G network, but underscored that "High risk vendors" would be excluded from "Sensitive" core infrastructure. London's decision, following a meeting of the National Security Council chaired by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, came shortly after Brussels said it would allow Huawei a limited 5G role in the European Union.
U.K. officials are considering a proposal to allow China's Huawei to play a limited role in providing certain equipment for the country's 5G rollout, which would defy calls from the U.S. for a complete ban of telecom gear from the company, Reuters reports. Britain's National Security Council, which is chaired by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is scheduled to meet in the coming days to decide whether to deploy Huawei equipment within the country's 5G networks, according to Reuters, which cited unnamed U.K. government sources.