News

IT for government and public sector

• August 24, 2022 24 Aug'22

  Most CISOs think they’ve been attacked by a nation state

  Most organisations have made changes to their cyber strategies and policies following Russia’s invasion, and almost two-thirds suspect they have been directly targeted or impacted by a nation-state cyber attack

• August 23, 2022 23 Aug'22

  Home Office announces Scale-up visa for fast-growth firms

  Scale-up visa launched to help high-growth businesses employ talent from overseas, but sponsorship requirements could undermine effectiveness

• August 23, 2022 23 Aug'22

  Farming tech projects get £16.5m in government funding

  Projects receiving funding through latest round of farming innovation programme include tech to improve fruit farming and the use of artificial intelligence to improve pigs’ welfare

• August 22, 2022 22 Aug'22

  Google Cloud and Singapore government team up on AI

  Singapore’s National AI office will tap Google Cloud’s expertise in artificial intelligence to build artificial intelligence applications and train public sector officers on AI

• August 22, 2022 22 Aug'22

  Kaspersky threat data added to Microsoft Sentinel service

  Microsoft and Kaspersky have agreed a collaboration to integrate Kaspersky’s threat data feeds into Microsoft’s cloud-native SIEM/SOAR service

• August 22, 2022 22 Aug'22

  Lloyd’s to end insurance coverage for state cyber attacks

  Lloyd’s of London has instructed its members to exclude nation state cyber attacks from insurance policies beginning in 2023, saying they pose unacceptable levels of risk

• August 19, 2022 19 Aug'22

  Cozy Bear targets MS 365 environments with new tactics

  Cozy Bear, or APT29, is trying out new tricks as it seeks access to its targets’ Microsoft 365 environments

• August 18, 2022 18 Aug'22

  LexisNexis sued by immigration advocates over data practices

  Four immigration advocacy groups launch lawsuit in Illinois alleging data broker’s collection, aggregation and sale of people’s personal data, including non-public information, to corporations and government bodies

• August 18, 2022 18 Aug'22

  Growing MFA use spurs ‘pass-the-cookie’ attacks

  The exploitation of stolen session cookies by cyber criminals is once again back on the agenda, thanks to the growing popularity of multifactor authentication tools

• August 18, 2022 18 Aug'22

  It takes a breach to force boards to take notice of cyber, says UK government

  Too often, it takes a major incident for business leadership to pay attention to cyber issues, according to a government-commissioned study of victims

• August 18, 2022 18 Aug'22

  GPS tagging of migrants breaches UK data protection law, says Privacy International complaint

  Privacy group files complaints with Information Commissioner’s Office and Forensic Science Regulator over Home Office’s GPS monitoring of migrants

• August 16, 2022 16 Aug'22

  Cyber security accelerator launches in Greater Manchester

  Accelerator will add to Manchester’s growing cyber security ecosystem, which already includes several tech unicorns, arms companies and the offices of GCHQ

• August 16, 2022 16 Aug'22

  Why organisations need to harmonise their CIO and CISO roles

  Unless properly managed, conflicting responsibilities between the chief information officer and the chief information security officer can cause project delays and budget overruns, says Netskope’s Mike Anderson

• August 16, 2022 16 Aug'22

  DWP looks to hire new CDIO

  Department is on the hunt for a chief digital and information officer to lead on its digital agenda, offering up to £200,000 pa for the role

• August 15, 2022 15 Aug'22

  Lawyers and journalists sue CIA and Mike Pompeo over Assange surveillance claims

  CIA and its former director sued over allegations that they authorised unlawful spying on US citizens when they visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London

• August 15, 2022 15 Aug'22

  Royal Mint turns to Circular Computing for remanufactured Lenovo laptops

  BSI Kitemark for laptops supplied by Circular Computing intended to certify remanufactured products that are ‘as good as’ brand new devices

• August 12, 2022 12 Aug'22

  UK Amazon workers stage series of wildcat strikes over pay offers

  Amazon warehouse workers across the UK have organised a series of spontaneous strike actions after the e-commerce giant’s management offered them pay rises between 35p and 50p

• August 12, 2022 12 Aug'22

  Online Safety Bill ‘not fit for purpose’, say tech experts

  IT specialists lack confidence that legislation compelling tech firms to tackle online harms will work as intended, with only a small minority believing ‘harmful but legal’ content can be effectively and proportionately policed by internet platforms

• August 10, 2022 10 Aug'22

  Increase in UK startups scaling to exit, but half still struggle

  Despite more startups scaling to the point of exit than ever before, half are still stuck in low growth stages – particularly those working with emerging technologies

• August 10, 2022 10 Aug'22

  Microsoft fixes two-year-old MSDT vulnerability in August update

  August’s Patch Tuesday drop fixes more than 120 CVEs, including another MSDT RCE zero-day that is being actively exploited.

• August 10, 2022 10 Aug'22

  ‘Coopetition’ a growing trend among ransomware gangs

  Sophos shares data from its new X-Ops unit at Black Hat in Las Vegas, revealing a growing number of ransomware victims being attacked by multiple gangs at the same time

• August 10, 2022 10 Aug'22

  UK to surveil convicted migrants with facial recognition

  A Home Office scheme to biometrically scan the faces of convicted migrants who have already carried out punishments has come under fire from privacy and human rights groups for being discriminatory

• August 09, 2022 09 Aug'22

  HS2 sets aside £9.5m to cover cost of IR35 non-compliance

  HS2 has become the latest public sector entity to have fallen foul of the IR35 rules, with its accounts confirming that it is anticipating a tax bill of £9.5m for failing to assess the status of contractors provided to it by a third party

• August 05, 2022 05 Aug'22

  NAO guide for senior government leaders flags barriers to better data use

  A National Audit Office guide for government chiefs on improving data use points to difficulties in achieving data sharing benefits and laments variability in cross-government data quality

• August 05, 2022 05 Aug'22

  CIO interview: Stephen Booth, CIO, Coventry University

  After more than 20 years at the university, the CIO is still taking on new responsibilities – including his team becoming a commercial entity and acquiring its own software

• August 05, 2022 05 Aug'22

  Reliance on PSN may have exacerbated cyber attack impact

  As it seeks a new supplier to reinvigorate the migration away from the Public Services Network, the Cabinet Office says relying on the legacy network may be putting public sector bodies at heightened risk in cyber attacks

• 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