#cybersecurity

#cybersecurity

Kensington and Chelsea Council has written to 100,000 households warning their personal details may have been taken in a recent cyber attack. The town hall urged residents to follow National Cyber Security Centre advice and warned criminals could use the information to make scams seem more legitimate, according to an update on its website. The council said the attack was carried out "with criminal intent"

Various groups are keeping their eyes peeled for hacking and information warfare efforts launched in response to an unprecedented U.S. operation conducted over the weekend that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York to face criminal charges. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is continuing to monitor the cyber landscape in the raid's aftermath. In a written statement, CISA acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala did not acknowledge any disinformation tracking, but said that the recent events in Venezuela demand "heightened vigilance" across sectors.

I only agree to invest if the startup and its founders check all the boxes,

The UK government has unveiled a £210m Cyber Action Plan to reinforce IT security resilience across the nation's public services, with a new central Cyber Unit to be established to coordinate risk management and incident response across departments. Westminster said that its new plan would "rapidly improve cyber defences across government departments and the wider public sector". Cyber attacks can take vital services offline in a matter of seconds -

Kirsten Davies has been sworn in as the Pentagon's chief information officer, giving the Defense Department its first permanent IT head during Trump 2.0. Davies was confirmed by the Senate on Dec. 18 as part of a group of tech nominations, which included Ethan Klein to be the U.S. chief technology officer and Pedro Allende to lead the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology office. The LinkedIn page for the DOD CIO office said Davies was officially sworn in on Dec. 23.

Koi offers endpoint software security and boasts that it can "Secure anything with an 'Install' button." Koi was founded by three members of the IDF's 8200 Intelligence Corps who claim it took them 30 minutes to create and publish an extension that could bypass most security environments, including those at large enterprises. Born from that was Koi, which they say "scans, governs, and monitors self-provisioned enterprise software at scale."

Think of your network like an apartment building. You've got a locked front door - that's your perimeter. But once someone gets inside, there's no front desk checking IDs, no elevator security and the same outdated lock on every unit. An intruder can roam freely, entering any apartment they choose. Microsegmentation is the internal security system. It's the keycard for the elevator, the camera in the hallway, the unique lock on your door. It's what stops one compromised device from becoming a full-blown breach.

AI-Enhanced Phishing and Deepfakes: No longer are phishing emails riddled with obvious errors. AI tools can instantly craft convincing messages by harvesting content from social media and corporate sites, personalizing scams to increase their effectiveness. Adding to this, deepfake technology enables cybercriminals to mimic voices and even video images of executives to authorize wire transfers or issue fake instructions, making fraud exponentially harder to detect.

The financial industry operates on a foundation of trust. Clients entrust financial institutions with their most sensitive data, from personal identification to investment portfolios. In an era where digital threats are constantly evolving, maintaining that trust is more challenging than ever. This makes robust security not just an operational need but a core business requirement. Implementing specialized IT solutions for financial experts is essential for protecting sensitive information, ensuring regulatory compliance, and preserving the integrity that underpins the entire sector.

They call it stopping the bleeding: the vital window to prevent an entire database from being ransacked by criminals or a production line grinding to a halt. When a call comes into the cybersecurity firm S-RM, headquartered on Whitechapel High Street in east London, a hacked business or institution may have just minutes to protect themselves. S-RM, which helped a high-profile retail client recover from a Scattered Spider cyber-attack has become a quiet, often word-of-mouth, success.

It's the end of the year. That means it's time for us to celebrate the best cybersecurity stories we didn't publish. Since 2023, TechCrunch has looked back at the best stories across the board from the year in cybersecurity. If you're not familiar, the idea is simple. There are now dozens of journalists who cover cybersecurity in the English language. There are a lot of stories about cybersecurity, privacy, and surveillance that are published every week.

After 33 years, Bernardo Quintero decided it was time to find the person who changed his life the anonymous programmer who created a computer virus that had infected his university decades earlier. The virus, called Virus Malaga, was mostly harmless. But the challenge of defeating it sparked Quintero's passion for cybersecurity, eventually leading him to found VirusTotal, a startup that Google acquired in 2012. That acquisition brought Google's flagship European cybersecurity center to Malaga, transforming the Spanish city into a tech hub.

Investors are concerned with future stock performance over the next one, five, or 10 years. While most Wall Street analysts will calculate 12-month forward projections, it is clear that nobody has a consistent crystal ball, and plenty of unforeseen circumstances can render even near-term projections irrelevant. 24/7 Wall St. aims to present some further-looking insights based on CrowdStrike's own numbers, along with business and market development information that may be of help with your own research.

The livestream was hosted by @RealMattMoney, who can be seen in a Bloomberg screenshot - see below - on the White House's "Live News" section sitting at a typical streaming setup, and wearing gaming headphones and a dark gray t-shirt. An overlay shows his stream chat, where viewers praise his analysis. Beneath the video window, the stream's title, displayed in elegant White House font, promises there will be "no mid-stream ads," plus a little descriptor offering a $10 discount if you click a link for "StreamYard."

But what would happen if such a technology were to land in the hands of terrorists and criminals, who aren't beholden to the norms of modern warfare at all? In a new report, pan-European police agency Europol's Innovation Lab has imagined a not-so-distant future in which criminals could hijack autonomous vehicles, drones, and humanoid robots to sow chaos - and how law enforcement will have to step up as a result.

The livestream of a YouTube content creator talking about investments mysteriously appeared to take over a White House website, raising questions about whether the site was hacked. The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking. It's unclear if the website was breached or the video was linked accidentally by someone in the government. The White House said in a statement that it was aware and looking into what happened.

OpenAI has released GPT-5.2-Codex, a new version of its agentic AI model for software development that focuses specifically on professional software engineering and cybersecurity. The model builds on GPT-5.2 but has been further optimized to work independently within complex development environments. With this release, OpenAI is positioning Codex not just as a programming assistant but as a broader support technology for the entire software development process.

As reported in Chinese state media, tests of the network saw it shift 72 terabytes of data in 1.6 hours, across a distance of around 1,000 km between a radio telescope in Guizhou province and a university in Hubei. We think that's almost 100 Gbit/s, an impressive feat for a sustained long-distance data transfer even if it took place in a controlled environment.

A warning for WhatsApp users: cybercriminals have discovered an alarmingly simple way to access a user's conversations in real time by manipulating the app's device pairing or linking routine.

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

Steve Schmidt, the chief security officer at Amazon, says his team has identified and blocked more than 1,800 attempts by North Korea to secure IT roles at the tech giant. He warns that this scheme is becoming more prevalent across the technology industry as the nation-state actor targets the lucrative salaries of generative artificial intelligence and machine learning jobs, and the troves of valuable data such workers have access to.

Technology plays an important role in how businesses operate, communicate, and deliver services. As systems become more advanced, many companies find themselves facing IT challenges that disrupt daily work, affect productivity, and impact customer experience. Believe it or not, these issues aren't limited to large organisations, as small and medium-sized businesses often feel the pressure even more, especially when IT responsibilities fall on already busy teams.

"SoundCloud recently detected unauthorized activity in an ancillary service dashboard," opens a Monday post from the company. "Upon making this discovery, we immediately activated our incident response protocols and promptly contained the activity. We also engaged leading third-party cybersecurity experts to assist in a thorough investigation and response." Not long after SoundCloud and its hired help contained the incident, the site became the subject of multiple denial of service attacks.