News

IT for government and public sector

• August 04, 2022 04 Aug'22

  SBRC to administer NCSC training across Scotland

  The Scottish Business Resilience Centre has been awarded a £500,000 contract to extend cyber resilience training across more than 250 at-risk organisations

• August 04, 2022 04 Aug'22

  Financial services regulator opens digital delivery centre in Leeds

  The Financial Conduct Authority is increasing the number of tech experts in its workforce through a new digital delivery centre in Leeds

• August 04, 2022 04 Aug'22

  Spyware activity particularly impactful in July

  After a quiet June, vulnerability exploitation ramped up in July, with intrusions linked to spyware seeing unusually high volumes of activity, according to a report

• August 04, 2022 04 Aug'22

  Financial Ombudsman Service mining for gold in cloud HR and finance

  The Financial Ombudsman Service is reaping the benefits of the cloud-based human resources and finance system it implemented last year

• August 03, 2022 03 Aug'22

  New EU due diligence law needs amending to stop tech sector abuse

  European corporate due diligence directive seeking to transform how companies approach their human rights and environmental risk is welcome, but without further changes, it will fail to effectively curb tech firms’ harmful practices, claims ...

• August 02, 2022 02 Aug'22

  UK safety tech sector sees strong revenue and employment growth

  Safety tech is now one of the fastest-growing sectors in the UK tech industry, with jumps in revenue, investment and employment

• August 01, 2022 01 Aug'22

  Estonia is building AI Gov Stack

  Data scientists in Baltic nation are creating a repository of software code that provides building blocks for digital services

• July 29, 2022 29 Jul'22

  IPA revises review of HMRC’s £300m datacentre migration

  Infrastructure and Project Authority’s annual report ranks HMRC’s £300m datacentre migration as “unachievable”, but – ahead of publication – it appears the organisation has had a change of heart

• July 28, 2022 28 Jul'22

  Home Office selects CGI as strategic delivery partner

  IT services supplier will act as strategic delivery partner for the Home Office’s plans to modernise and join up UK law enforcement’s digital capabilities

• July 28, 2022 28 Jul'22

  Cyber criminals pivot away from macros as Microsoft changes bite

  As Microsoft resumes blocking macros by default in its Office application suite, reversing a temporary reversal, analysis from Proofpoint suggests the action has had a remarkable effect

• July 28, 2022 28 Jul'22

  Teams in Grenoble work on 6G breakthrough technology

  Even as 5G networks are being rolled out, new requirements are driving scientists, and engineers in Europe are back to the lab to start developing 6G

• July 28, 2022 28 Jul'22

  The verdict is Pure as Scottish prosecutor upgrades high-end storage

  Scotland’s prosecution service saw disk drives in the dock every week with EMC legacy storage. Now it’s got Pure all-flash and has turned over an (Evergreen) new leaf

• July 27, 2022 27 Jul'22

  Government slammed for slow response to IR35-related consultation on zero-rights employees

  The government has taken four years to publish its response to a three-month consultation on whether employment status and tax laws should be more closely aligned, and concluded that now is not the right time to make any changes

• July 27, 2022 27 Jul'22

  Consumers left out of pocket as security costs soar

  As the average cost of a security incident reaches an all-time high of nearly $4.5m, an IBM Security study reveals how these costs are being passed on to ordinary people

• July 27, 2022 27 Jul'22

  Cyber security training ‘boring’ and largely ignored

  Two-thirds of employees don’t bother to pay attention to cyber security training – and the fault does not lie with them

• July 26, 2022 26 Jul'22

  Secret court asked to quash a decade of MI5 surveillance warrants following ‘systemic breaches’

  The culture at MI5 was to ‘prioritise’ missions ‘over everything else’, including compliance with safeguards designed to protect the public, the UK’s most secret court heard yesterday

• July 26, 2022 26 Jul'22

  No More Ransom initiative helps 1.5 million people in six years

  One and a half million people have now taken advantage of free ransomware decryption tools offered by a joint European project

• July 26, 2022 26 Jul'22

  Post Office attacked subpostmasters who questioned Horizon, say victims

  When the Post Office’s lie about the Horizon system failed to silence subpostmaster critics, it took more extreme measures, say victims of the scandal

• July 26, 2022 26 Jul'22

  Ducktail infostealer targets Facebook Business users

  Newly uncovered Ducktail operation targets individuals with access to Facebook Business service and tries to steal their accounts

• July 26, 2022 26 Jul'22

  Lambeth maps future with cloud applications

  With its funding dramatically cut, Lambeth Council has turned to cloud delivery of its business applications to have a simpler technology stack and be nimbler in delivering services to its 330,000 population

• July 26, 2022 26 Jul'22

  Six more subpostmaster convictions overturned in Horizon scandal

  More former subpostmasters have their wrongful convictions for theft and fraud overturned in the Court of Appeal

• July 25, 2022 25 Jul'22

  Home Office ‘unlawfully’ approved MI5 bulk surveillance warrants

  MI5 provided ‘false information’ to the Home Office to secure bulk surveillance warrants, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal heard

• July 25, 2022 25 Jul'22

  Umbrella IT contractors could get back-dated holiday pay windfall following Supreme Court ruling

  Umbrella industry stakeholders weigh-up the financial implications of a Supreme Court ruling, which could pave the way for IT contractors to submit back-dated claims for holiday pay

• July 25, 2022 25 Jul'22

  Latest Atlassian Confluence vulnerability raises concerns

  CVE-2022-26138 is the second major vulnerability disclosure made for Atlassian’s Confluence collaboration platform in recent months

• July 22, 2022 22 Jul'22

  Russia could become the world’s largest market for illegal IT

  Russia could become the biggest market for illegal IT equipment as companies try to get round sanctions imposed on the country

• July 21, 2022 21 Jul'22

  GCHQ experts back scanning of encrypted phone messages to fight child abuse

  Ian Levy, technical director of the NCSC, and Crispin Robinson, technical director of GCHQ, back client-side scanning software on mobile phones to detect child abuse

• July 21, 2022 21 Jul'22

  Buy ‘plug-n-play’ malware for the price of a pint of beer

  Three-quarters of malwares and almost 90% of exploits retail on the dark web for about £8.40 or less, according to a report

• July 21, 2022 21 Jul'22

  UK government introduces data reforms legislation to Parliament

  Proposed changes to UK’s data protection regime include new grounds for data processing, significant powers for the secretary of state to direct the regime’s application, and fewer restrictions on law enforcement’s use of data

• July 21, 2022 21 Jul'22

  Victorian multilingual chatbot to provide Covid-19 support

  The AskVic WhatsApp chatbot will provide culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Australia’s state of Victoria, with Covid-19 information and support

• July 20, 2022 20 Jul'22

  (ISC)² expands entry-level cyber programme after UK success

  Flush with success from a UK certification programme, reaching 100k in the UK, (ISC)² now wants to provide free security certification to a million people worldwide

• July 20, 2022 20 Jul'22

  Cato aims to bust cyber myths as it extends network protections

  Cato Networks is beefing up its platform’s security features with ransomware and data loss protections, and the firm’s security strategy lead Etay Maor is using the occasion – and his unique access to billions of data points from the firm’s network ...

• July 20, 2022 20 Jul'22

  Estonia calls on tech experts to develop its Siri-like civil servant

  Estonian government opens up applications to tech experts across the world, offering them the chance to work on a world first for digital government services

• July 20, 2022 20 Jul'22

  Barnet Council to bring work outsourced to Capita back in-house by 2026

  London borough is bringing swathes of outsourced services back in-house next year, with more to follow by 2026

• July 20, 2022 20 Jul'22

  Advanced Research and Invention Agency gets CEO and chairman

  The government has named a CEO for the agency it set up to get more out of science and technology, after its original appointment couldn’t take the role

• July 20, 2022 20 Jul'22

  Russia’s Cozy Bear abusing Dropbox, Google Drive to target victims

  Russian APT known as Cozy Bear has become adept at quickly incorporating popular cloud storage services into its attack chain to avoid detection

• July 19, 2022 19 Jul'22

  European IT services see bumper quarter, but signs of slowing emerge

  Spending on IT and BPO services in Europe saw significant growth in the past quarter, but there are signs of a slowdown

• July 18, 2022 18 Jul'22

  US cyber agency CISA to open London office

  The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has chosen London to host its first office outside America

• July 15, 2022 15 Jul'22

  Drivers’ union calls for immediate dismissal of Uber executive

  Uber’s continued employment of an executive directly involved in efforts to resist regulatory oversight puts the ride-hailing firm in breach of its 2018 licence conditions, says drivers’ union

• July 15, 2022 15 Jul'22

  Log4Shell on its way to becoming ‘endemic’

  US government report concludes that, like Covid, Log4Shell will be with us for a long time to come

• July 14, 2022 14 Jul'22

  Global IT services market shows signs of slowing

  Spending on IT and business process services could be set to reduce over the coming months as the latest ISG figures show early signs of decline

• July 14, 2022 14 Jul'22

  Government pauses Online Safety Bill’s progress

  The government has paused the Online Safety Bill’s journey towards becoming law, amid timetable pressure

• July 14, 2022 14 Jul'22

  ICO wants to ‘empower people through information’

  Information Commissioner’s Office sets out commitment to safeguard the information rights of the most vulnerable people in UK society

• July 14, 2022 14 Jul'22

  EC urged to rejig green power strategy to include greater use of energy storage tech

  Ten stakeholders from the world of energy storage systems have penned an open letter to the European Commission’s policymakers, urging them to factor in their technology to the EC’s green transition plans

• July 13, 2022 13 Jul'22

  Slippery phish wriggles around MFA protections, says Microsoft

  Microsoft’s threat researchers share details of a phishing campaign that hit 10,000 organisations, against which standard multifactor authentication provides little defence

• July 13, 2022 13 Jul'22

  July Patch Tuesday brings more than 80 fixes, one zero-day

  While some admins can put their feet up and let Windows Autopatch do the hard work of updating their Microsoft estates, for the rest of us, the Patch Tuesday bandwagon keeps on keeping on

• July 13, 2022 13 Jul'22

  ICO calls for review into government use of private email and WhatsApp messages

  Information Commissioner’s Office reprimands Department of Health and Social Care after ministers and officials conducted government business on their own email accounts and messaging apps

• July 12, 2022 12 Jul'22

  First cohort of data science professionals certified by AfDSP

  The Alliance for Data Science Professionals has certified its first cohort, with the imprimatur of the UK’s national statistician, Ian Diamond

• July 12, 2022 12 Jul'22

  MaliBot Android malware spreading fast, says Check Point

  The MaliBot malware is becoming a persistent and widespread problem, and Android users should be on their guard, says Check Point

• July 12, 2022 12 Jul'22

  Microsoft Windows Autopatch now generally available

  Microsoft customers with Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 licences can now take full advantage of its new automated patching service

• July 12, 2022 12 Jul'22

  Whitehall IT veteran Mike Potter returns as new government CDO

  Potter will become the most senior digital government leader, in charge of the Central, Digital and Data Office, when he replaces Joanna Davinson in the autumn