News

IT for utilities and energy

• February 14, 2024 14 Feb'24

  Microsoft patches two zero-days for Valentine’s Day

  Two security feature bypasses impacting Microsoft SmartScreen are on the February Patch Tuesday docket, among more than 70 issues

• February 13, 2024 13 Feb'24

  Hunter-killer malware volumes seen surging

  Latest Picus Security report on malware tactics, techniques and procedures reveals an increasing focus on disabling security defences

• February 07, 2024 07 Feb'24

  NCSC warns CNI operators over ‘living-off-the-land’ attacks

  Malicious, state-backed actors may well be lurking in the UK’s most critical networks right now, and their operators may not even know until it is too late, warn the NCSC and its partners

• February 07, 2024 07 Feb'24

  South Staffs Water faces group action over Clop ransomware attack

  South Staffordshire Plc, the parent company of South Staffordshire and Cambridge Water, is facing legal action from customers whose data was compromised in a 2022 Clop ransomware attack

• February 06, 2024 06 Feb'24

  UK’s McPartland Cyber Review to probe trust in technology

  The UK government has launched a cyber security review that will investigate how best to give businesses the confidence they need to use new technologies

• February 05, 2024 05 Feb'24

  US sanctions Iranians behind CNI cyber attacks

  US government issues new sanctions against six Iranians suspected of being behind a series of cyber attacks targeting critical national infrastructure, notably water supply systems

• January 25, 2024 25 Jan'24

  Bugcrowd sees surge in vulnerability submissions, led by public sector

  Crowdsourced vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty platform Bugcrowd says it saw a 151% uptick in submissions related to government and public sector organisations in 2023

• January 24, 2024 24 Jan'24

  WebKit vulnerability sparks Apple’s first major security update of 2024

  A zero-day in the open source WebKit browser engine that powers Safari has sparked Apple’s first major patch roll-out of the new year

• January 24, 2024 24 Jan'24

  Southern Water confirms cyber attack after Black Basta claims

  Southern Water, which supplies millions of customers in southeast England, has confirmed it has fallen victim to a cyber attack, although its services appear to be running normally

• January 24, 2024 24 Jan'24

  AI will heighten global ransomware threat, says NCSC

  The benefits of artificial intelligence to cyber criminals being well-known, the NCSC now assesses it’s likely AI will soon be widely used to enhance ransomware attacks

• January 23, 2024 23 Jan'24

  Treat cyber risk like financial or legal issue, says UK government

  UK government and NCSC launch proposed code of practice on cyber security governance to help directors and business leaders toughen their defences

• January 23, 2024 23 Jan'24

  Leak of 26 billion records may prove to be ‘mother of all breaches’

  The discovery of a dataset comprising 26 billion stolen records may prove to be record-breaking in both its size and the danger it poses to ordinary people

• January 18, 2024 18 Jan'24

  PSTN switch-off threatens access to adult social care services

  The Public Switched Telephone Network switch-off is threatening vulnerable Londoners access to adult social care and other vital services, as councils are left to manage the cost without financial support from the centre, says London chief digital ...

• January 11, 2024 11 Jan'24

  Cisco fixes high-impact flaw in unified comms platform

  Cisco unified comms customers are urged to patch a critical vulnerability in Unity Connection, a messaging and voicemail product

• January 10, 2024 10 Jan'24

  Windows Kerberos, Hyper-V vulns among January Patch Tuesday bugs

  Microsoft starts 2024 right with another slimline Patch Tuesday drop, but there are some critical vulns to be alert to, including a number of man-in-the-middle attack vectors

• January 09, 2024 09 Jan'24

  Babuk Tortilla ransomware decryptor made available

  A joint effort between Cisco Talos, Avast and the Dutch police will bring relief to many victims of a variant of the Babuk ransomware known as Tortilla

• January 04, 2024 04 Jan'24

  Celona and Palo Alto partner to enhance private 5G network security

  Wireless services specialist Celona and security firm Palo Alto Networks are coming together to enhance device protection for organisations operating private mobile networks

• January 03, 2024 03 Jan'24

  Artificial intelligence to the front in Sweden’s National Technology Strategy

  Sweden focuses in on artificial intelligence in its latest far-reaching national IT strategy

• January 02, 2024 02 Jan'24

  China’s UNC4841 pivots to new Barracuda ESG zero-day

  The Chinese state threat actor behind a series of cyber attacks on Barracuda Networks customers embarked on a campaign targeting the supplier’s email security products in the run-up to Christmas

• December 21, 2023 21 Dec'23

  Top 10 cyber crime stories of 2023

  Ransomware gangs dominated the cyber criminal underworld in 2023, a year that will prove notable for significant evolutionary trends in their tactics

• December 20, 2023 20 Dec'23

  ALPHV/BlackCat operation down, but maybe not out

  Multinational law enforcement has targeted the operations of the notorious ALPHV/BlackCat cyber extortion gang, but the group’s members appear to remain defiant

• December 13, 2023 13 Dec'23

  Microsoft’s Christmas present for cyber teams: no zero-days

  Barely 30 vulnerabilities, and no zero-days, have been fixed in the final Patch Tuesday drop of 2023

• December 13, 2023 13 Dec'23

  Critical UK infrastructure a ‘hostage of fortune’ to ransomware

  A lack of ransomware planning and preparedness at the highest levels of government is leaving UK operators or critical national infrastructure dangerously exposed, according to a Joint Committee report

• December 05, 2023 05 Dec'23

  Operator of Sellafield nuclear facility denies hacking claims

  The operator of the Sellafield nuclear site has denied allegations that senior managers covered up a series of cyber security lapses that enabled Chinese and Russian threat actors to compromise its networks

• December 01, 2023 01 Dec'23

  The Security Interviews: Mark McClain, SailPoint Technologies

  SailPoint founder and CEO Mark McClain reflects on how the concept of identity has evolved over the past 20 years, and points to rapid evolution still to come

• November 27, 2023 27 Nov'23

  India's Hexaware creates hundreds of jobs in UK

  Hexaware opens IT services operation in Birmingham, with a plan to recruit 250 people in the region by 2025

• November 13, 2023 13 Nov'23

  Rogue state-aligned actors are most critical cyber threat to UK

  The prospect of rogue nation-state-aligned attackers bringing down the UK’s critical infrastructure is keeping the NCSC up at night

• November 09, 2023 09 Nov'23

  Revealed: How Russia’s Sandworm ramped up attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure

  New Mandiant intelligence reveals how the APT known as Sandworm has been evolving its playbook, twisting legitimate executables known as LoLBins into malicious tools as it seeks to disrupt daily life in Ukraine

• November 06, 2023 06 Nov'23

  Netherlands starts building its own AI language model

  Dutch government allocates €13.5m to develop an open artificial intelligence language model according to national values and guidelines.

• November 01, 2023 01 Nov'23

  Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson on her AI Safety Summit goals

  As the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park takes place, Computer Weekly caught up with Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson to find out what one of the UK’s most prominent AI advocates wants from proceedings

• October 19, 2023 19 Oct'23

  Nuclear regulator raps EDF over cyber compliance

  The Office for Nuclear Regulation says EDF has come up short on needed measures to improve cyber security standards at several critical UK nuclear facilities

• October 17, 2023 17 Oct'23

  Government to pump £30m into NHS medtech

  The government hopes the funding, which is available to integrated care systems across the country, will ease winter pressures through the help of technology

• September 18, 2023 18 Sep'23

  Government seeks industry views on cyber threat to UK CNI

  The Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee is seeking evidence from the cyber sector as it launches an inquiry into the resilience of the UK's critical national infrastructure

• September 13, 2023 13 Sep'23

  Patch Tuesday: Microsoft fixes zero-days in Word and Streaming Service

  September 2023 brings a light Patch Tuesday, with two zero-days and five critical vulnerabilities listed in the latest release

• September 12, 2023 12 Sep'23

  European enterprises to spend more on generative IT to close gap on US

  European organisations are upping their spending on generative AI innovation, but face challenges recruiting the right people to support this

• September 07, 2023 07 Sep'23

  Honeywell goes quantum to protect utilities from future threats

  Honeywell and quantum computing specialist Quantinuum will integrate quantum-hardened encryption keys into future smart meters

• September 05, 2023 05 Sep'23

  Plymouth Uni spearheads research into wind farm cyber resilience

  Project hosted at the University of Plymouth in Devon aims to develop cyber security measures to protect the UK’s increasingly important offshore wind farm assets

• August 29, 2023 29 Aug'23

  Top-performing CISOs reserve time for professional development

  Survey of chief information security officers conducted by Gartner sheds light on habits shared by the top-performing members of the profession

• August 23, 2023 23 Aug'23

  Cyber attacks in 2023 develop quicker as average dwell times plummet

  The median attacker dwell time shrunk from 10 to eight days in the first seven months of 2023, and in the case of ransomware attacks it is down to just five days

• August 21, 2023 21 Aug'23

  Cyber attack on Aussie energy services firm may hit UK CNI

  Energy One, an Australia-based supplier of tech services to the energy sector, is investigating the possibility that some UK customers may have been caught up in an ongoing cyber attack on its systems

• July 28, 2023 28 Jul'23

  Lancaster Uni lends cyber support to nuclear decommissioning body

  Lancaster University’s cyber team has joined with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to help support and protect its 300-year mission, while enhancing its own capabilities in the process

• July 25, 2023 25 Jul'23

  Tetra radio users’ comms may have been exposed for years

  A number of flaws in the encryption algorithms used in the secure Tetra radio communications standard have potentially left users exposed to snooping

• June 30, 2023 30 Jun'23

  SGN pens IT service desk outsourcing deal

  Utility company SGN renews its internal IT services managed services contract with new supplier

• June 28, 2023 28 Jun'23

  GDPR tax reclaim scheme preys on fears of SMEs

  IT suppliers are a target of companies offering a tax reclaim scheme that preys on small businesses’ fears around General Data Protection Regulation compliance

• June 27, 2023 27 Jun'23

  Johnson Controls opts for container-based app delivery with Portworx

  Buildings management giant built a suite of customer-facing products using containers and opted for Pure Storage Portworx for hybrid cloud container management and data protection

• June 20, 2023 20 Jun'23

  EDF deploys Dynatrace to fuel site reliability engineering drive

  The energy company has adopted the observability platform to support in-house software development

• June 19, 2023 19 Jun'23

  Dutch government puts up €123m to address shortage of ICT workers

  Financial injection aimed at improving cooperation between vocational education and business in the Netherlands, and making the tech professions more attractive

• June 07, 2023 07 Jun'23

  UKtech50 2023: The most influential people in UK technology

  Computer Weekly has announced the 13th annual UKtech50 – our definitive list of the movers and shakers in the UK tech sector

• June 07, 2023 07 Jun'23

  UKtech50 2023 winner: Michelle Donelan/Chloe Smith, secretary of state, DSIT

  Computer Weekly looks at the achievements and successes of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, as its secretary of state is recognised as the most influential person in UK technology for 2023

• May 25, 2023 25 May'23

  Alert over Chinese cyber campaign targeting critical networks

  A Chinese threat actor known as Volt Typhoon has been observed infiltrating CNI networks in a cyber espionage campaign, according to intelligence