News

IT for government and public sector

• February 27, 2025 27 Feb'25

  'Positive steps' in redress for Post Office Capture victims

  Lawyers say progress has been made in efforts to provide financial redress and justice for former users of the Post Office's flawed Capture system

• February 27, 2025 27 Feb'25

  MPs grill X, TikTok and Meta about online misinformation

  Representatives from the social media firms said that while the scale of their platforms makes content moderation difficult, they are effectively dealing with the vast majority of misinformation

• February 27, 2025 27 Feb'25

  Peer demands Fujitsu cough up £300m interim payment towards Post Office scandal bill

  Kevan Jones tells fellow peers in the House of Lords that Fujitsu should also be barred from bidding for public sector contracts

• February 27, 2025 27 Feb'25

  CVE volumes head towards 50,000 in 2025, analysts claim

  Many trends, notably a big shift to open source tools, are behind an expected boom in the number of disclosed vulnerabilities

• February 26, 2025 26 Feb'25

  US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard probes UK demand for Apple’s encrypted data

  A secret order issued by the UK against Apple would be a ‘clear and egregious violation’ if it provides back door access to Americans’ encrypted data, says US director of national intelligence

• February 26, 2025 26 Feb'25

  CISOs spending more on insider risk

  Insider risk management budgets have more than doubled in the past 12 months and look set to grow further still in 2025, according to a report

• February 26, 2025 26 Feb'25

  Scottish police fail to record ethnicity in DNA database

  Scottish policing bodies are failing to properly record and publish data on the ethnicity of arrested people, making it impossible to determine whether they are discriminating against certain sections of the population

• February 26, 2025 26 Feb'25

  IoT and SaaS will underpin government legislation introduced to protect rivers

  Tech platform will enable water companies, regulators and the public to monitor pollution levels in rivers

• February 26, 2025 26 Feb'25

  Lord Holmes warns of increasingly ‘urgent’ need to regulate AI

  The real-world negative impacts of artificial intelligence will only get worse if the UK does not move to regulate the technology in a way that centres on accountability, trust and public participation, says Lord Holmes

• February 25, 2025 25 Feb'25

  Government launches Digital Inclusion Action Plan

  Whitehall aims to fix digital exclusion through funding local digital skills, as charities and industry pledge to help with skills training, devices and connectivity

• February 24, 2025 24 Feb'25

  Government seeks payments tech partner through £49m contract

  UK government wants tech partner to help it embed open banking functionality into its Gov.uk Pay platform

• February 24, 2025 24 Feb'25

  European Union calls for more cyber data-sharing with Nato

  Updates to the EU’s Cyber Blueprint, establishing best practice for multilateral security incident response in Europe, include calls for more collaboration with Nato member states, as the geopolitical environment becomes ever more fractious

• February 24, 2025 24 Feb'25

  HMRC working to resolve system glitch that doubles self-assessment tax rebates

  A communications glitch in systems processing tax self-assessments has seen rebates duplicated in ‘very niche scenarios’

• February 21, 2025 21 Feb'25

  Auditor: 2026 till Birmingham recovers from botched Oracle project

  Grant Thornton’s report into a botched Oracle Fusion implementation at Birmingham City Council finds governance and risk comprehension failures to be at the heart of the fiasco

• February 21, 2025 21 Feb'25

  UK police forces ‘supercharging racism’ with predictive policing

  Amnesty International says predictive policing systems are ‘supercharging racism’ in the UK by taking historically biased data to further target poor and racialised communities

• February 21, 2025 21 Feb'25

  A landscape forever altered? The LockBit takedown one year on

  The NCA-led takedown of the LockBit ransomware gang in February 2024 heralded a transformative year in the fight against cyber crime. One year on, we look back at Operation Cronos and its impact

• February 21, 2025 21 Feb'25

  Fujitsu’s £600m-plus prize with His Majesty’s ‘cash cow’ in 2025

  Controversial supplier continues to reap the rewards of government IT contracts despite its participation in ‘ghastly fraud’

• February 20, 2025 20 Feb'25

  Watchdog approves Sellafield physical security, but warns about cyber

  The Office for Nuclear Regulation has taken Sellafield out of special measures for physical security, but harbours cyber security concerns

• February 19, 2025 19 Feb'25

  Warning over privacy of encrypted messages as Russia targets Signal Messenger

  Russia is using phishing attacks to compromise encrypted Signal Messenger services used by targets in the Ukraine. Experts warn that other encrypted app users are at risk

• February 18, 2025 18 Feb'25

  EY: Industrial companies worldwide stunted in emerging technology use

  Businesses globally are spending more on emerging technologies year-on-year, but struggle to expand experimental use cases, finds EY’s sixth annual Reimagining Industry Futures study

• February 18, 2025 18 Feb'25

  Meta’s planned subsea cable will exceed circumference of Earth and support AI innovation

  Meta’s planned 50,000 km subsea cable will be the world’s longest and connect the five major continents

• February 17, 2025 17 Feb'25

  Liverpool reinvents customer service through digital platform

  Liverpool City Council wants to improve residents’ experience of dealing with the council, and sees digital technologies as key to achieving its goal

• February 14, 2025 14 Feb'25

  NHS launches breast cancer AI trial

  The trial will see 700,000 women taking part in artificial intelligence-based screening for breast cancer, looking at whether use of technology can help identify signs of cancer earlier

• February 14, 2025 14 Feb'25

  Gartner: CISOs struggling to balance security, business objectives

  Only 14% of security leaders can ‘effectively secure organisational data assets while also enabling the use of data to achieve business objectives’, according to Gartner

• February 14, 2025 14 Feb'25

  Government launches consultation on plan to streamline business through e-invoicing

  Government announces 12-week consultation on electronic invoicing as part of its plan for change

• February 14, 2025 14 Feb'25

  Government renames AI Safety Institute and teams up with Anthropic

  Addressing the Munich Security Conference, UK government technology secretary Peter Kyle announces a change to the name of the AI Safety Institute and a tie-up with AI company Anthropic

• February 13, 2025 13 Feb'25

  UK accused of political ‘foreign cyber attack’ on US after serving secret snooping order on Apple

  US administration asked to kick UK out of 65-year-old UK-US Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement after secret order to access encrypted data of Apple users

• February 13, 2025 13 Feb'25

  UK government sanctions target Russian cyber crime network Zservers

  The UK government has imposed sanctions on a Russian cyber crime syndicate responsible for aiding ransomware attacks, targeting the group and individual members

• February 12, 2025 12 Feb'25

  AI Action Summit: Two major AI initiatives launched

  Sustainability and ‘public-interest’ artificial intelligence initiatives have been launched during the AI Action Summit in Paris

• February 12, 2025 12 Feb'25

  AI Action Summit: UK and US refuse to sign inclusive AI statement

  The UK and US governments’ decisions not to sign a joint declaration has attracted strong criticism from a range of voices, especially in the context of key political figures calling for AI ‘red tape’ to be cut

• February 12, 2025 12 Feb'25

  CCRC reviewing 17 Post Office convictions with potential Capture software involvement

  Statutory body began looking at convictions of subpostmasters who used the Capture system following the wider understanding of the Post Office Horizon scandal

• February 12, 2025 12 Feb'25

  Cisco Live EMEA: Network supplier tightens AI embrace

  At its annual EMEA show, Cisco tech leadership unveiled a raft of new products, services and features designed to help customers do more with artificial intelligence

• February 11, 2025 11 Feb'25

  Google: Cyber crime meshes with cyber warfare as states enlist gangs

  A report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group depicts China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as a bloc using cyber criminal gangs to attack the national security of western countries

• February 11, 2025 11 Feb'25

  Fujitsu public sector boss says supplier has advantage in HMRC bid despite Post Office scandal

  Fujitsu public sector boss is banking on huge deals with HMRC despite Post Office scandal, after another lucrative year

• February 11, 2025 11 Feb'25

  AI Action Summit: Global leaders decry AI red tape

  The focus of previous AI summits on the safety of artificial intelligence systems has been replaced by concerns there is too much regulatory red tape, which politicians and AI developers have argued is holding back innovation

• February 11, 2025 11 Feb'25

  AI Action Summit: European AI investment ramps up

  A number of private companies and European governments have announced large-scale investments in artificial intelligence during the two-day AI Action Summit in Paris

• February 11, 2025 11 Feb'25

  AI projects get £85m funding to improve NHS diagnostics and drugs

  The funding pot is being distributed between three projects, aiming to establish new ways of researching how artificial intelligence can be used to target hard-to-treat diseases and develop medicines

• February 10, 2025 10 Feb'25

  Apple: British techies to advise on ‘devastating’ UK global crypto power grab

  A hitherto unknown British organisation – which even the government may have forgotten about – is about to be drawn into a global technical and financial battle, facing threats from Apple to pull out of the UK

• February 10, 2025 10 Feb'25

  Natural England clears clouds with machine learning

  Earth observation images from satellites can be blotted by cloud cover, but Natural England has cleared the sky using artificial intelligence

• February 10, 2025 10 Feb'25

  Google drops pledge not to develop AI weapons

  Google has dropped an ethical pledge to not develop artificial intelligence systems that can be used in weapon or surveillance systems

• February 09, 2025 09 Feb'25

  Government opens up bidding for AI growth zones

  As part of its AI opportunities action plan, the government is encouraging local authorities to put in bids for AI growth zones

• February 09, 2025 09 Feb'25

  HMRC spends £785m a year on running digital tax systems

  Beyond £785m spend, HMRC also spent £482m on upgrading legacy systems and introducing new digital systems, as it continues to fall behind its plans to become one of the most digitally advanced tax authorities in the world

• February 07, 2025 07 Feb'25

  Tech companies brace after UK demands backdoor access to Apple cloud

  The UK has served a notice on Apple demanding backdoor access to encrypted data stored by users anywhere in the world on Apple’s cloud service

• February 07, 2025 07 Feb'25

  US lawmakers move to ban DeepSeek AI tool

  US politicians have introduced a bill seeking to ban the use of the DeepSeek AI tool on government-owned devices, citing national security concerns due to its alleged links to the Chinese state

• February 07, 2025 07 Feb'25

  Ransomware payment value fell over 30% in 2024

  Several factors, including the impact of law enforcement operations disrupting cyber criminal gangs and better preparedness among users, may be behind a significant drop in the total value of ransomware payments

• February 06, 2025 06 Feb'25

  UK’s Cyber Monitoring Centre begins incident classification work

  The Cyber Monitoring Centre will work to categorise major incidents against a newly developed scale to help organisations better understand the nature of systemic cyber attacks and learn from their impact

• February 05, 2025 05 Feb'25

  Malaysian public sector embraces generative AI

  Nearly half a million civil servants set to get access to Google Workspace with Gemini to improve delivery of public services

• February 05, 2025 05 Feb'25

  Met Police spied on BBC journalists’ phone data for PSNI, MPs told

  The Metropolitan Police monitored the phones of 16 BBC journalists on behalf of police in Northern Ireland, a cross-party group of MPs heard

• February 05, 2025 05 Feb'25

  State of Open Con 25: Why public sector needs an open approach

  Openness, open source and open data were among the topics discussed at OpenUK’s State of Open Con 25 in London

• February 05, 2025 05 Feb'25

  Youth activists protest Meta over mental health impacts

  Protest outside Meta’s London offices marks launch of Mad Youth Campaign, an effort by activists to challenge the ways in which corporate power negatively shapes the conditions young people live under