Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

More than 60 organizations, including M&S, Microsoft UK and Vodafone, have signed the UK government's Cyber Resilience Pledge, a new initiative aimed at boosting cyber security and resilience across British businesses

Benchmarking contract lays groundwork for renegotiating £774M software agreement NHS England is spending £46,000 on "benchmarking" as it gears up for what looks like the next round of negotiations behind one of the UK public sector's biggest software deals.…

200 orgs and 5,000 devices compromised so far in Vlad's latest intelligence grab, Microsoft reckons The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued a fresh warning about Russia's ongoing targeting of routers to steal passwords and other secrets.…

Redmond says cheap virtual desktops powered a global wave of phishing and fraud Microsoft has taken its cybercrime fight to the UK in its first major civil action outside the US, moving to shut down RedVDS, a virtual desktop service used to power phishing and fraud at global scale.…

Cloud marketplace and distributor Pax8 has confirmed that it mistakenly sent an email to fewer than 40 UK-based partners containing a spreadsheet with internal business information, including MSP customer and Microsoft licensing data. [...]

Countries that banded together to challenge Boeing in the air try to do the same to AWS, Microsoft, and Google on the ground Feature More than half a century ago, a consortium of European aerospace businesses from the UK, France, Germany and Spain joined forces to take on America's Boeing. Fast forward to the 21st century and the countries are applying the same model needs to the world of cloud computing, giving the continent a fighting chance to reduce the digital domination of Big Tech.…

After a £312M upgrade to the retiring OS, Defra still has 24,000 devices to replace The UK's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has spent £312 million (c $407 million) modernizing its IT estate, including replacing tens of thousands of Windows 7 laptops with Windows 10 – which officially reached end of support last month.…

As government says £9B could end up in Redmond, poll says it's time for new thinking Register debate series Register readers are backing a shift away from Microsoft software as a default across the UK public sector after the government confirmed it expects to spend £9 billion with the software giant over five years.…

As £9 billion MoU sparks debate about value for money, it's time to have your say Register debate series It's a lot of money, £9 billion ($12 billion). Especially for a government which finds itself — for whatever reason — in a fiscal dead end.…

Are UK taxpayers getting real value from SPA24 — or just high cost convenience? Register debate series The UK government's five-year Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA24) with Microsoft is set to see public sector bodies spend around £1.9 billion each year—nearly £9 billion in total over half a decade. It's a vast sum for software and services, and one that deserves close scrutiny.…

For now at least - even though government buying can improve, open-source is not all its cracked up to be Debate Not for the first time, Microsoft is in the spotlight for the UK government's money it voraciously consumes – apparently £1.9 billion a year in software licensing, and roughly £9 billion over five years. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of voices challenging whether this is good use of public money. After all, aren't there plenty of open source alternatives?…

Regulators around the globe pay attention as results of 21-month cloud probe published Britain's competition regulator says Microsoft and AWS are using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers and proposes to designate both with strategic market status (SMS) to take action against them.…

Fancy Bear can't keep its claws out of Outlook inboxes The UK government is warning that Russia's APT28 (also known as Fancy Bear or Forest Blizzard) has been deploying previously unknown malware to harvest Microsoft email credentials and steal access to compromised accounts.…

The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has formally attributed 'Authentic Antics' espionage malware attacks to APT28 (Fancy Bear), threat actor already linked to Russia's military intelligence service (GRU). [...]

Russian military intelligence-linked hackers are using a new malware called “Authentic Antics” to secretly access Microsoft cloud email accounts, the UK's NCSC reports

Probe into Microsoft's $13 Billion OpenAI Investment Launched in 2023The U.K. antitrust regulator won't open an investigation into a partnership between computing giant Microsoft and artificial intelligence company OpenAI. U.K. Competition Market Authority concludes that there is no "relevant merger situation."

'Near-global' initial access campaign active since 2021 An initial-access subgroup of Russia's Sandworm last year wriggled its way into networks within the US, UK, Canada and Australia, stealing credentials and data from "a limited number of organizations," according to Microsoft.…

Recent campaign targeted 20,000 folk across UK and Europe with this tactic, Unit 42 warns Unknown criminals went on a phishing expedition that targeted about 20,000 users across the automotive, chemical and industrial compound manufacturing sectors in Europe, and tried to steal account credentials and then hijack the victims' Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.…

A phishing campaign targeting automotive, chemical, and industrial manufacturing companies in Germany and the UK is abusing HubSpot to steal Microsoft Azure account credentials. [...]

Head down to Grey Matter ISV Partner Day to learn about the latest Microsoft technologies Sponsored Post This year's Grey Matter ISV Partner Day will bring together Microsoft-focused ISVs, SaaS Providers and application builders from the UK and Ireland to learn about the latest Microsoft technologies from the software company's own experts.…