News

The speed with which the government proposed and then ratified new legislation, which has given the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) significant punitive powers in the event of data security failures, has become a talking point amongst industry experts.
The ICO’s new ability to impose fines of up to half a million pounds has been well publicised, [...]

A new series of attacks levelled at organisations in the public sector began last week, as reports of emails containing the malware program Bredolab came in.
Security expert Tony Millington said that although the use of Bredolab was not obviously significant in itself, the way in which the email campaign was run did raise some questions [...]

A serious new botnet formed from over 75,000 computers within over 2500 organisations has been discovered by security experts at NetWitness. It has been reported that the botnet is controlled by the Zeus virus and there are suggestions that millions of pieces of data have already been harvested by the hacking group behind the infection.
The [...]

Con artists who target internet users via phishing sites and email scams are set to come under fire from the government after new funding and powers were announced to help combat the growing threat posed to consumers.
Online fraud and scams are believed to cost UK citizens over £3.5 billion each year according to government statistics. [...]

An inventor from Wallingford in Oxfordshire has come up with a new portable USB storage device that can be set to self-destruct if it falls into the wrong hands, allowing for a seemingly James Bond-esque level of data security.
The Security Guardian USB memory stick was created by 57-year old Norman Shaw and it is intended [...]

An outage yesterday meant that over 10 million blogs were left offline for close to 2 hours, costing the wordpress community around 5 million page views. Even Wordpress admitted this is the worse outage they have seen in 5 years.
Matt Mullenweg wrote;
“We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core [...]

MEPs have decided to put an end to the provisionally enforced Swift pact that had allowed US intelligence services access to details of millions of bank transfers performed by European citizens.
The Swift pact had allowed US authorities an unprecedented level of access to financial data. The intention behind the agreement was to help with the [...]

Another UK council has been forced to admit to an incidence of data loss from within and this time the victims implicated in the breach are hundreds of disabled citizens from in and around Wigan.
The council was in the news back in September 2009 after it revealed the loss of personal data pertaining to over [...]

When we first started using Wordpress to power our own website earlier this year we were pleased to see that there were a few plugins available to back up our site but disappointed that none of them offered true online backup.
Blogging is big business and if you’ve invested hundreds or thousands of hours writing blog [...]

Oil giant Shell has been the latest in a long line of high profile businesses to come under scrutiny after hundreds of thousands of pieces of personal data were discovered on the open market online last week.
Telephone numbers, addresses and names of Shell staff were amongst the leaked information. A total of more than 170,000 [...]