Bitcoin’s anonymity: clever or criminal? December 4, 2018 Professor Kevin Curran believes that the growing phenomenon of email scams where attackers claim they stole your password and hacked your webcam while you were visiting naughty websites is enabled in large part due to the difficulty in associating a Bitcoin address with any other address in the Bitcoin network. This is a key feature [...]
Tech outages at financial firms double as watchdog warns of data breach risk November 27, 2018 IT failures at financial institutions have more than doubled in the last year, the Financial Conduct Authority has revealed, as firms fight to update their legacy technology to keep apace with fintech startups. In the 12 months to October, the UK's financial firms reported a 138 per cent increase in technology outages to the FCA, as [...]
Uber fined by UK watchdog over data leak during 2016 cyber attack November 27, 2018 Ride-hailing giant Uber has been fined £385,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office, for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a cyber attack in 2016. The ICO said today that a series of "avoidable data security flaws" led to the leaking of information about 2.7m of its UK customers, including full names, email addresses and [...]
Barclays fights off cyber attack attempts every day, says digital defence head November 26, 2018 Barclays fights off attacks from cyber criminals every single day, according to the head of the bank’s cyber security operations centre. Former Europol cybercrime centre head of operations Paul Gillen told City A.M. that the number of attempts against the lender each day was “substantial”. However, the attacks vary in degree with the most common [...]
The new face of piracy: cyber crime is threatening the shipping industry November 26, 2018 When you think of the word pirate, you probably start to imagine the yo ho ho, Jack Sparrow-sort of buccaneer from Disney movies. Modern-day piracy comes in two varieties. There’s the digital kind: people illegally downloading music or films from the internet. Then there’s the more traditional kind: groups who hijack sea vessels to steal [...]
Vision Direct promises to compensate customers who lost out in website hack November 19, 2018 An online contact lens supplier will refund customers left out of pocket when their credit card details were stolen from its site earlier this month. Vision Direct told City A.M. that over 16,000 people were at risk from a hack on its website at the beginning of November. Customers who logged in to the website, [...]
Hackers jailed over £77m Talk Talk cyber attack that affected thousands of customers November 19, 2018 Two hackers have been jailed for their part in a £77m cyber attack on Talk Talk that compromised the financial details of thousands of customers. Matthew Hanley, 23, from Tamworth, was jailed at the Old Bailey this afternoon for 12 months after admitting charges relating to the data breach in 2015. Connor Allsopp, 21, also from [...]
War games: Bank of England to test financial services sector’s resilience to cyber attacks November 9, 2018 The Bank of England will today test the financial industry's ability to withstand a major cyber attack on the UK. Leading banks will be among around 40 firms that will partake in the exercise, aimed at ensuring firms are able to meet certain recovery requirements in the wake of a cyber-attack. "This exercise forms a [...]
Workplace monitoring is not a scary Big Brother, but a way to protect your business October 24, 2018 Picture this: an incident occurs in your organisation and your trade secrets are exposed to competitors and the media. The ensuing scandal means senior executives resign, the share price drops, employee morale falls, and eventually jobs are put at risk. This is not the stuff of TV thrillers, but is happening with increasing regularity to organisations [...]
UK foils more than 10 cyber attacks per week, says GCHQ October 16, 2018 The UK has faced more than 10 cyber attacks per week on average in the last two years, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) today revealed, with most coming from “hostile” nation states. Since it became operational in 2016, GCHQ’s cyber crime defence centre has been forced to defend Britain against 1,167 threats, 557 of which [...]