Security lapse leaves sensitive information and contact details of 51 government officials exposed for 40 hours

The public body in charge of the UK’s state investments has been pushed to improve its internal security after a data breach left “high-level management information” publicly accessible for nearly two days.

UK Government Investments (UKGI), the agency that manages the taxpayers’ interest in a swathe of companies including Channel 4 and the Post Office, said the security failure also left more than 50 government officials’ personal details exposed for nearly 40 hours.

Details of parents and staff, including email addresses and phone numbers, are among data taken by cybercriminals

The Department for Education and a police database have been targeted by a cyber-attack, exposing more than 740,000 pieces of data.

Details of government officials, senior school leaders, university staff, police officers and members of the public have been taken by hackers.

Hackers access Australian customers’ names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and some bank account details, company says

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Origin Energy customers’ addresses, phone numbers and partial bank account data have been accessed in a hack, the company has confirmed.

The firm has 4.8m customer accounts in Australia, providing electricity, fossil gas, LPG and internet services to homes and businesses.

Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m

The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.

Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.

‘Malicious actor’ obtains sensitive data including Medicare numbers, treatment details and pathology results in cyber-attack on Partnered Health

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Australians’ medical records and patient information could be sold on the hidden market, an expert has warned, after a cyber-attack at one of the nation’s biggest healthcare providers.

Partnered Health revealed 21 clinics across several cities including Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra were affected when a “malicious actor” accessed its data on 23 June.

Signal agencies in Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada sound alarm after Trump blocks foreign nationals from Anthropic’s Fable AI model

Powerful AI models capable of devastating new cyber attacks on governments and businesses are mere months away, intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now”.

The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

• This week’s question: Is ‘ripen at home’ fruit the supermarkets’ idea of a joke?

I’ve been struggling to get my head around the idea that a passkey, which can be a pin on your phone, or facial recognition, can be safer than using a complicated password and two-factor authentication.

I get that having something unique to your device, not stored on a company’s server, is unphishable and less hackable by cybercrims, but what if your phone is nicked and someone guesses the password? And what if you lose your phone?

Tech company says it ‘caught and disrupted’ NSO Group’s attempts to access accounts in Jordan and Lebanon

A spyware firm has been targeting WhatsApp users with malicious links in contravention of a US court order forbidding it from doing so, Meta has said.

In a post, Meta said WhatsApp had “caught and disrupted spear phishing attempts” by NSO Group, which a spokesperson said targeted a handful of users in Jordan and Lebanon. It had also caught the group creating “test accounts and groups” on WhatsApp.

Anna Turley gives Reform leader 24 hours to report Russian hacking claim in ‘public and national interest’

The Labour chair has given Nigel Farage 24 hours to report to security services the claim that his phone was hacked by Russia-linked actors or the party will do it for him.

In a letter to the Reform UK leader, Anna Turley said it was “in the public and national interest” to ensure that a suspected overseas hack of a senior politician’s phone by a hostile state was properly investigated.

Ciaran Martin says Reform UK leader’s allegation over Guardian report on £5m gift ‘entirely unsubstantiated’

Nigel Farage’s claim that a Russian hack was behind a Guardian report on the £5m gift he received from a crypto billionaire has been described as “without any merit” by a former head of the National Cyber Security Centre.

Ciaran Martin, founding chief executive of the agency, which is part of GCHQ, said Farage’s allegation, if true, would have major implications for UK policy towards Russia but that the Reform UK leader had yet to provide “a shred of evidence”.

Businesses are advised against paying – but many are prepared to deal to protect users’ privacy

After a week of outages, hundreds of millions of students’ data stolen, delayed assignment due dates and school login pages being defaced by hackers, the US tech firm Instructure – which operates the education platform Canvas, used by education providers worldwide – announced it had “reached an agreement with the unauthorised actor” behind the ransomware attack.

Experts read the careful language as a sign that a ransom has been paid. The company has not confirmed this.

Three-storey GreenSquare datacentre in Hazelmere was to power cloud computing and the acceleration of AI

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A 15,000 sq metre datacentre near Perth will no longer go ahead after the developer withdrew plans amid community opposition over its impact on culturally significant sites.

The three-storey, 120-megawatt GreenSquare datacentre in the town of Hazelmere had been intended to power cloud computing and the acceleration of artificial intelligence, but faced fierce community backlash – as is increasingly common with such developments.

Health service has given US tech firm ‘unlimited access’ to certain data to build integrated platform, according to reports

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MPs have warned that an NHS decision to grant Palantir access to identifiable patient information in its plan to use AI to improve the health service is “dangerous” and will fuel public fears that data privacy is not being prioritised.

NHS England has allowed staff from the US tech firm and other contractors to access patient data before it has been pseudonymised, despite internal fears of a “risk of loss of public confidence”, the Financial Times reported.

Technology minister tells Commons ‘de-identified’ information from UK Biobank advertised for sale on Alibaba

The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed.

The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project, was found for sale on three separate listings last week. Ian Murray, the technology minister, told the Commons on Thursday that, after working with the Chinese government and Alibaba, the records had now been removed. It is not believed any sales were made.

Washington’s focus on online retailer Coupang has led to accusations that the Trump administration is tying issues of national security to domestic corporate matters

When South Korea’s biggest online retailer revealed last year that a data breach had compromised tens of millions of customer accounts, it appeared to be a corporate crisis. But five months later the issue has grown into a diplomatic storm, threatening to further degrade relations between Seoul and the Trump administration.

Coupang, often described as South Korea’s answer to Amazon, is a US-incorporated company whose business is overwhelmingly based in South Korea. Headquartered in Seattle and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, it is run by Korean-American billionaire Bom Kim. In November last year the company disclosed that a former employee had stolen an internal security key, enabling unauthorised access to data from 33.7 million users.

2Apply’s over-collection of personal information adds to the power of the real estate industry in the competitive rental market, Carly Kind says

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An online rental platform has been urged to stop collecting users’ personal information after the Australian privacy commissioner found the gathering of “excessive” data compounded the vulnerability of tenants amid the housing crisis.

RentTech platforms are increasingly used by real estate agents in Australia for people applying for rental properties to submit applications and supporting documentation. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute has identified 57 different rent platforms operating in Australia.

Undisclosed number of names and contact and reservation details accessed in latest cybercrime attempt

The accommodation reservation website Booking.com has suffered a data breach with “unauthorised parties” gaining access to customers’ details.

The platform said it “noticed some suspicious activity involving unauthorised third parties being able to access some of our guests’ booking information”.

Letter from group published by MPs blames 12 March glitch on software update to its mobile banking apps

Lloyds Banking Group exposed the personal data of nearly 500,000 customers in an IT glitch that left people’s payments, account details and national insurance numbers visible to other users, a committee of MPs has revealed.

A letter from Lloyds, published by MPs on the Treasury select committee on Friday, blamed the glitch on a software defect introduced during an IT update to its Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland mobile banking apps overnight into 12 March.

Banks, governments and tech providers urged to upgrade security because current systems will soon be obsolete

Banks, governments and technology providers need to be prepared for quantum computer hackers capable of breaking most existing encryption systems by 2029, Google has warned.

The tech company said in a blogpost that quantum computers would pose a “significant threat to current cryptographic standards” before the end of the decade and urged other companies to follow its lead.

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The pollies have been asked this morning whether people should consider working from home to save fuel, as conflict escalates in the Middle East.

Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.

This is like Covid style restrictions I think that are potentially being floated. I would not support that in any way, and I don’t think businesses would do so either …

If people can work from home and they want to and it works for their employers, fine, I think that’s terrific, but it doesn’t help small businesses. It certainly doesn’t help the truckers and the fishers and the farmers and the manufacturers and the miners that are relying on fuel supply.