News

Privacy and data protection

• July 29, 2020 29 Jul'20

  Cosmetics firm Avon faces new cyber security incident

  Technical information relating to Avon’s web and mobile sites was inadvertently left exposed on an unsecured Microsoft Azure server

• July 28, 2020 28 Jul'20

  De Montfort, KCL, Newcastle universities join list of Blackbaud victims

  Embattled cloud services provider now has big questions to answer over its handling of data belonging to UK universities and charities

• July 28, 2020 28 Jul'20

  Garmin may have paid hackers ransom, reports suggest

  Garmin’s services are coming back online, but the company remains tight-lipped about what exactly happened to it

• July 28, 2020 28 Jul'20

  NCSC names national security expert Lindy Cameron as new CEO

  New National Cyber Security Centre head joins from the Northern Ireland Office and has spent 20 years in government at home and abroad

• July 28, 2020 28 Jul'20

  Scotland’s security resilience centre concept goes national

  Based on the success of the Scottish Business Resilience Centre, a series of regional Cyber Resilience Centres are now launching across the rest of the UK

• July 28, 2020 28 Jul'20

  NCSC inducts six security startups to Cyber Accelerator

  10-week programme will guide some of the UK’s most innovative security startups as they scale their businesses for future growth

• July 27, 2020 27 Jul'20

  MI6 apologises after attempt to interfere with intelligence court

  The UK Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has apologised after attempting to persuade the secretary of Britain’s most secret court to withhold documents from senior judges in a case about crimes by undercover agents

• July 27, 2020 27 Jul'20

  Court adjourns hearing into Assange extradition as US delays serving new indictment

  Westminster Magistrates Court suspends scheduled extradition hearing into WikiLeaks founder after it emerged the US had failed to serve a second superseding indictment against him

• July 26, 2020 26 Jul'20

  Australia issues new cloud computing guidelines

  The new guidance, which comes after the expiry of the government’s cloud services certification programme, will help to bolster Australia’s cyber security resilience

• July 24, 2020 24 Jul'20

  Garmin outage prompts ransomware attack speculation

  Details are thin on the ground following a major service outage at Garmin, prompting industry speculation that the firm has fallen victim to a ransomware attack

• July 24, 2020 24 Jul'20

  A question of trust: University and supplier on the hook for data breach

  Data on students at the University of York was stolen in a ransomware attack on a supplier two months ago, and the response of both parties raises serious questions

• July 23, 2020 23 Jul'20

  Post-Privacy Shield, what chance for a Brexit data adequacy deal?

  The striking down of Privacy Shield has been hailed as a victory for digital rights and privacy campaign groups, but it will have consequences that go beyond transatlantic data transfers

• July 22, 2020 22 Jul'20

  NCSC reveals scale of cyber attacks on UK sports industry

  The UK’s sports industry is under near constant cyber attack, according to new statistics from the National Cyber Security Centre

• July 22, 2020 22 Jul'20

  US charges Chinese nationals with Covid-19 research hacking

  The two hackers allegedly worked with the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeting intellectual property and confidential business information

• July 22, 2020 22 Jul'20

  Privacy Shield: Companies face new hurdles to legally transfer data to the US

  Businesses will have to conduct legal assessments to ensure they can transfer data from the EU to the US and other countries, following a European Court of Justice ruling

• July 21, 2020 21 Jul'20

  Coronavirus: Government drags its feet on online misinformation

  Online misinformation about Covid-19 continues to spread unchecked, according to a DCMS committee report which has accused the government of dragging its feet over online harms

• July 21, 2020 21 Jul'20

  Russia Report reveals long-running cyber warfare campaign against UK

  Russia has been hacking the UK for years and the British government has also known about it for years, according to the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report

• July 21, 2020 21 Jul'20

  Australian industry panel calls for ‘clear consequences’ of cyber attacks

  A government-appointed panel recommends strong deterrence and other measures to be implemented in Australia’s next cyber security strategy

• July 20, 2020 20 Jul'20

  ICO hails transformative year as average fine trebles

  Information Commissioner’s Office annual report reflects on a busy period, during which it levied two of the largest fines so far seen under the GDPR

• July 20, 2020 20 Jul'20

  Test and Trace programme unlawful, admits government

  The Department of Health and Social Care failed in its legal obligation to complete a mandatory Data Protection Impact Assessment

• July 17, 2020 17 Jul'20

  Twitter hack fallout: Investigators on trail of cyber criminals

  Investigators are hunting the cyber criminals who broke into Twitter’s systems to hijack prominent accounts, amid concerns that more attacks may come

• July 16, 2020 16 Jul'20

  Russian state hackers attacking Covid-19 researchers

  Kremlin-linked APT29 group, also known as Cozy Bear, is conducting a campaign against Covid-19 researchers around the world

• July 16, 2020 16 Jul'20

  Schrems v Facebook: European court strikes down EU-US Privacy Shield agreement

  The European Court of Justice has struck down Privacy Shield, the EU-US data-sharing agreement, creating uncertainty for European countries that share data with the US and pressuring the US to reform surveillance laws

• July 16, 2020 16 Jul'20

  Cryptocurrency scammers attack Twitter in insider breach

  Apparent insider breach at Twitter saw so-called “blue tick” accounts of business people, politicians and celebrities hijacked to promote a Bitcoin scam

• July 16, 2020 16 Jul'20

  Coronavirus shines spotlight on cyber security

  Programme committee chair of this year's RSA Conference Asia-Pacific and Japan talks up the challenges that IT security professionals in APAC are facing to mitigate security risks amid the Covid-19 pandemic

• July 15, 2020 15 Jul'20

  Government proposes IoT security enforcement body

  The government is today publishing new proposals concerning planned legislation that will protect users of smart IoT devices from cyber criminals

• July 15, 2020 15 Jul'20

  Video providers slammed by credential stuffing attacks

  Attacks on the media sector are spiking as cyber criminals try to gain access to valuable consumer accounts

• July 15, 2020 15 Jul'20

  Singapore’s Project Ubin hits commercialisation milestone

  A blockchain payments network prototype spearheaded by Singapore’s central bank and its partners could speed up and lower the cost of cross-border payments

• July 14, 2020 14 Jul'20

  European court to decide legality of EU-US data sharing in dispute between Schrems and Facebook

  A ruling by the European Court of Justice will have ramifications for hundreds of thousands of companies that share data with the US. The case aims to balance US surveillance laws with the rights of EU citizens to keep their data private

• July 14, 2020 14 Jul'20

  ‘Name-and-shame’ ransomware attacks increasing in prevalence

  Since emerging at the tail-end of 2019, double extortion, or exfiltration and encryption, ransomware attacks have become highly popular, and now account for a significant number of incidents, according to Emsisoft research

• July 14, 2020 14 Jul'20

  Australian enterprises facing more cyber attacks

  The volume of cyber attacks in Australia jumped from 90% in October 2019 and 81% in February 2019, underscoring the worsening threat landscape in the country

• July 13, 2020 13 Jul'20

  Zoom zero-day a reminder to stop using Windows 7

  Researchers have disclosed a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability to videoconferencing service Zoom, which only affects users of Windows 7 systems

• July 09, 2020 09 Jul'20

  HSBC customers targeted in new smishing scam

  SMS phishing scam is targeting HSBC customers in the UK to trick them into handing over their bank account details

• July 09, 2020 09 Jul'20

  NHS trust uses case management software to deliver time savings

  To deal with inefficient and unreliable processes, East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Trust has implemented a case management system specifically designed for HR practitioners

• July 09, 2020 09 Jul'20

  Clearview AI faces ICO investigation over facial recognition

  Controversial company that scraped data from the public internet to build its facial recognition algorithm faces a joint UK-Australian investigation into its practices

• July 09, 2020 09 Jul'20

  Most finance firms are multicloud, but many are unprepared for public cloud cyber attacks

  Financial services firms are moving to the cloud at pace, but many are uncertain whether they could cope with an attack on an application based in the public cloud

• July 09, 2020 09 Jul'20

  More Joker malware apps chucked off Google Play Store

  Infamous Joker billing fraud malware continues to sneak past Google’s security controls

• July 09, 2020 09 Jul'20

  Pubs and restaurants failing on cyber fraud protection

  Virtually all of the UK’s most popular restaurant and pub brands are failing to proactively block fraudulent emails from reaching their targets

• July 09, 2020 09 Jul'20

  Tencent Cloud teams up with ADBC on banking services

  Singapore’s Asia Digital Bank Corporation could leverage Tencent Cloud’s financial cloud platform to provide banking services to small businesses

• July 08, 2020 08 Jul'20

  Political awareness needed to ethically handle migration data, panel claims

  Understanding the political, social and economic relationships between different groups in society is needed to ensure location data is not used in ways that further endanger already vulnerable people on the move

• July 08, 2020 08 Jul'20

  Use of spyware apps linked to domestic abuse soars in lockdown

  The rise in domestic violence during the pandemic has been linked to increase use of stalkerware apps by abusers

• July 08, 2020 08 Jul'20

  Cosmic Lynx cyber crime group takes BEC to new heights

  Newly identified Russian threat group targets large organisations with increasingly dangerous business email compromise attacks

• July 08, 2020 08 Jul'20

  Over 15 billion credentials for sale on dark web

  Research by Digital Shadows reveals the scale of the security threat facing consumers as it uncovers 15 billion usernames and passwords stolen in more than 100,000 different data breaches

• July 08, 2020 08 Jul'20

  Security funding soars despite Covid-19 slump, but problems lie ahead

  The overall cyber security funding ecosystem in the UK is healthier than ever despite Covid-19, but the figures mask stark and concerning disparities in where the money is going

• July 07, 2020 07 Jul'20

  MSP Xchanging attacked in ransomware incident

  Specialist managed services provider is restoring customer access to systems after an unspecified ransomware incident

• July 07, 2020 07 Jul'20

  Australian government foreshadows ‘sovereign data’ classification

  The Australian government will examine if certain government datasets should be declared sovereign and only be hosted in the country

• July 06, 2020 06 Jul'20

  Lorca scale-ups bring diverse security to the fore

  London Office for Rapid Cybersecurity Advancement announces the cyber security scale-ups that will make up its fifth cohort

• July 06, 2020 06 Jul'20

  North Korea behind spate of Magecart attacks

  The Magecart credit card skimmer found on the website of retailer Claire’s Accessories was likely put there by the Lazarus or Hidden Cobra North Korean APT group, reports Sansec

• July 03, 2020 03 Jul'20

  Chinese law may require companies to disclose cyber-security preparations outside China

  Companies with Chinese operations may have to disclose information about the security of their networks in other countries under China’s draft data security law

• July 02, 2020 02 Jul'20

  Cops take out encrypted comms to disrupt organised crime

  The UK’s National Crime Agency, alongside other law enforcement agencies in France and the Netherlands, have busted illicit arms and drugs rings after disabling an encrypted comms platform