News

Privacy and data protection

• July 02, 2020 02 Jul'20

  Locked-down teens flock to NCSC CyberFirst training scheme

  A record number of 14 to 17-year-olds have signed up to the National Cyber Security Centre’s CyberFirst summer school

• July 02, 2020 02 Jul'20

  Police secrecy over ‘IMSI-catcher’ mass surveillance of mobile phones

  Following a tribunal ruling, constabularies in England and Wales can refuse to confirm or deny whether they use mass surveillance devices, known as IMSI-catchers to monitor people’s location, phone calls and text messages

• July 02, 2020 02 Jul'20

  Sodinokibi gang begins dark web celebrity data auctions

  Group claims to be auctioning confidential legal data on pop stars Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and basketball player LeBron James

• July 01, 2020 01 Jul'20

  UK’s unsung cyber security heroes sought

  Nominations have opened for the fifth annual Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards

• July 01, 2020 01 Jul'20

  Zoom making progress on cyber security and privacy, says CEO

  Three months after being hit by a spate of security incidents, Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, has been discussing progress towards a more secure product

• July 01, 2020 01 Jul'20

  Remote workers more aware of security, but still flout the rules

  Almost three-quarters of remote workers reckon they have gained in cyber security awareness during lockdown, but don’t seem to be especially bothered about keeping themselves safe

• July 01, 2020 01 Jul'20

  FakeSpy Android malware targets Royal Mail app users

  The FakeSpy malware was first identified in October 2017 but is now significantly more powerful and dangerous

• June 29, 2020 29 Jun'20

  Lawyers learn of fresh US allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from press reports

  The US has filed an updated indictment against Julian Assange alleging that he conspired with hacking groups to obtain information for WikiLeaks. Defence and prosecution lawyers learned about it from press reports

• June 29, 2020 29 Jun'20

  Evil Corp’s latest ransomware project spreading fast

  A new ransomware strain dubbed WastedLocker is spreading rapidly and targeting major corporations

• June 29, 2020 29 Jun'20

  Airports deploy thermal cameras to control Covid-19, science suggests it’s merely ‘safety theatre’

  UK airports are rolling out thermal surveillance cameras to identify people who may have coronavirus, but science says the technology is ineffective at detecting and preventing the spread of the disease

• June 29, 2020 29 Jun'20

  Out of date security laws leave UK plc at risk during pandemic

  The CyberUp coalition has written to Boris Johnson to urge him to reform the UK’s 30 year-old cyber crime laws

• June 25, 2020 25 Jun'20

  Pub ‘check-in’ apps provoke fresh privacy concerns

  With pubs and restaurants required to collect customer data for contact tracing when they reopen, data privacy risks will be heightened

• June 25, 2020 25 Jun'20

  CBI: Digital economy needs joined-up regulations and gigabit broadband

  The coronavirus pandemic has shown the need for fast, reliable networking across the UK. The CBI is urging the government to do more

• June 25, 2020 25 Jun'20

  Veeam bullish on growth in APAC

  Veeam’s top executive in Asia-Pacific expects the company’s growth momentum in the region to continue despite the Covid-19 pandemic, and is setting sights on growth areas such as container backups

• June 24, 2020 24 Jun'20

  NCSC catches a million phishes in its nets

  The NCSC has racked up a million suspicious email reports from the public just two months after launching a reporting service, but the lucky sender won’t be receiving a grand prize

• June 24, 2020 24 Jun'20

  EU judges GDPR an overall success, but changes still needed

  Two years after its implementation, an EU report says that the GDPR is achieving what it set out to do, with a few reservations

• June 24, 2020 24 Jun'20

  Political parties harvest personal data to create profiles on voters, most of it wrong

  The UK’s three main political parties are collecting personal data on voters, but much of it is wrong and its use may fall foul of data protection laws

• June 24, 2020 24 Jun'20

  Brits will sell their personal data for pennies

  Surprising findings from an Okta report on digital identity suggest Brits would be willing to part with valuable personal data for a surprisingly low amount

• June 23, 2020 23 Jun'20

  Neurodiversity on the rise among career hackers

  More diverse hackers enhance the ability of both traditional and cutting-edge cyber security solutions to find and fix vulnerabilities, according to a new report from Bugcrowd

• June 23, 2020 23 Jun'20

  Twitter contacts business users over data exposure

  Issue relates to how web browsers cached confidential data entered in Twitter’s ads and analytics services, but is unlikely to have resulted in compromise

• June 23, 2020 23 Jun'20

  Concern over digital risk falls dramatically during pandemic

  Brits are understandably more worried about the NHS than personal cyber security

• June 21, 2020 21 Jun'20

  APAC still hotbed for cyber attacks

  Individuals and organisations in APAC are encountering malware more frequently than the rest of the world, study finds

• June 19, 2020 19 Jun'20

  Eurostar to roll out facial recognition for ‘passport-free’ travel to Europe

  Facial recognition will make passports on the Eurotunnel an option rather than a necessity, but privacy campaigners have questioned whether gathering biometric data on passengers is necessary

• June 19, 2020 19 Jun'20

  Australian prime minister confirms country is suffering repeated nation-state cyber attacks

  Concern over critical national infrastructure as cyber attackers repeatedly try to gain access to network of organisations operating in multiple sectors

• June 19, 2020 19 Jun'20

  AI bias and privacy issues require more than clever tech

  The new AI Barometer report from the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation has assessed the threats and opportunities of artificial intelligence in the UK

• June 18, 2020 18 Jun'20

  US pulls out of talks with Europe for global digital tax

  Despite the US’s resistance to an international digital services tax, the UK and other European countries plan to continue pushing for a global solution to taxing technology giants

• June 18, 2020 18 Jun'20

  Data protection watchdog calls for controls on police mobile phone stop-and-searches

  Information commissioner wants new safeguards on the use of police powers to download sensitive personal data from the mobile phones of suspects and crime victims

• June 18, 2020 18 Jun'20

  Cisco patches dangerous Webex vulnerability

  CVE-2020-3347 bug enables cyber criminals to steal meeting records from within Cisco’s Webex service

• June 18, 2020 18 Jun'20

  Zoom U-turns on end-to-end encryption

  Embattled video-conferencing provider Zoom backtracks on previous refusals to provide end-to-end encryption to free users

• June 17, 2020 17 Jun'20

  Cosmetics company Avon offline after cyber attack

  Representatives left unable to place orders after company’s back-end systems went offline over a week ago

• June 17, 2020 17 Jun'20

  Amnesty identifies most privacy-invasive Covid-19 contact-tracing apps

  Bahrain’s ‘BeAware Bahrain’, Kuwait’s ‘Shlonik’ and Norway’s ‘Smittestopp’ are the most privacy-invasive contact-tracing apps, reveals Amnesty International study

• June 17, 2020 17 Jun'20

  Macquarie eyes government contracts with new Canberra datacentre

  New Macquarie datacentre in the Australian capital designed to achieve Tier 4 datacentre standards will deliver 1.5MW of capacity by December 2020

• June 16, 2020 16 Jun'20

  UK-US data deal puts Brexit data adequacy pact at risk

  European Data Protection Board writes to MEPs saying the UK is at risk of failing to strike a post-Brexit data adequacy accord if its data protection agreements with the US don’t strike the right note

• June 16, 2020 16 Jun'20

  Activists call on Zoom to implement encryption for all

  A coalition of tech organisations and nonprofits have urged Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to make end-to-end encryption available to all users

• June 16, 2020 16 Jun'20

  Norway’s contact-tracing app suspended over privacy concerns

  Norway has been given until 23 June to justify the location tracking of citizens who download its contract-tracing app

• June 15, 2020 15 Jun'20

  Banking trojans roar back to prominence in May

  Check Point sees an upswing in malicious activity around a number of classic banking trojan malware variants

• June 15, 2020 15 Jun'20

  Accessories store Claire’s hit by Magecart credit card fraudsters

  Attackers gained access to retailer’s website as long ago as March

• June 12, 2020 12 Jun'20

  Hospital uses thermal surveillance cameras to protect patients against second wave of Covid-19

  A North Midlands NHS trust claims to be the first NHS trust to deploy thermal surveillance cameras to protect patients and staff against the coronavirus

• June 12, 2020 12 Jun'20

  NHS email service users ensnared in phishing attack

  More than 100 accounts on the NHSmail service were affected by attack, but health service says no patient data was accessed

• June 12, 2020 12 Jun'20

  Fake contact-tracing apps delivering banking trojans

  Spoof government coronavirus apps are popping up all over the world, says the Anomali Threat Research team

• June 12, 2020 12 Jun'20

  100,000 cheap wireless cameras vulnerable to hacking

  Active devices built by Chinese firm HiChip have been sold in the UK as webcams and connected baby monitors

• June 12, 2020 12 Jun'20

  UN secretary general calls for global digital cooperation

  Antonio Guterres launches roadmap for digital cooperation and calls for world leaders to come together to “connect, respect and protect people in the digital age”

• June 12, 2020 12 Jun'20

  Twitter kills thousands of misinformation accounts

  The accounts were linked to the governments of China, Russia and Turkey, and engaged in systematic operations against pro-democracy activists, political opponents and dissidents

• June 11, 2020 11 Jun'20

  Coronavirus: Bungled British response leads to rise in security risks

  Covid-19 cyber security threats are evolving over the course of the pandemic, becoming more targeted to virus hotspots such as the UK

• June 10, 2020 10 Jun'20

  Decade-old vulnerability among 129 Patch Tuesday fixes

  A 10 year-old bug in Windows Group Policies could easily enable attackers to gain highly privileged user status on target systems, opening the doors to a wave of cyber attacks

• June 10, 2020 10 Jun'20

  Unsecured Elasticsearch server breached in eight hours flat

  Comparitech’s Bob Diachenko wanted to find out how long it would take for hackers to find and attack an unsecured, public internet-facing database, so he set up a honeypot

• June 10, 2020 10 Jun'20

  Virtual GP practice accidentally exposes patient video calls

  A small number of users of Babylon’s GP at Hand service were briefly able to view other patients’ video GP consultations thanks to a bug in a new software feature

• June 10, 2020 10 Jun'20

  Nasty surprises lurking in furloughed employees’ inboxes

  Research conducted by KnowBe4 points to a looming email security problem as furloughed employees head back to work

• June 10, 2020 10 Jun'20

  How Australian firms can defend against supply chain attacks

  Supply chain security risks can wreak havoc if measures are not taken to deter cyber attackers from exploiting a supplier’s security gaps to target another firm

• June 09, 2020 09 Jun'20

  Honda investigates suspected Snake ransomware attack

  Attack disrupts global operations at carmaker, with assembly lines falling silent and sales suspended