Gareth Corfield

Google has hit back at US president Donald Trump in the never-ending legal spat over its use of Oracle's Java code in the Android mobile operating system, urging the US Supreme Court to judicially review an appeal court's 2016 ruling against it. In a legal submission (PDF) made to the highest court in America, the Chocolate …

Sextortion is bad. Malware is bad. Spam is bad. Unhappily for a French ISP's users, online crooks combined all three in a hideous attempt to extort cash with custom malware that records their on-screen doings, according to infosec researchers. In a curious evolution of online attempts to scam people, the Varenyky malware being …

The hacker crew behind the US Democratic National Committee breach are still at it and have infiltrated an EU country's embassy in Washington DC, according to infosec biz ESET. The Dukes, aka APT29 or Cozy Bear, were widely fingered as having been behind the infamous hack on the DNC, the governing body of the US opposition …

UpdatedThree UK has suffered a nine-hour outage and counting, affecting 3G and 4G calls across the entire British Isles. The mobile network operator, which boasts 11.7 million customers, has been down since around 11 last night judging by the volumes of angry tweets directed at it. A quick squint at Down Detector shows thousands of …

FeatureDescending down the entry ramp and stepping over the Mail Rail tracks for the first time, you start to see London's underground heritage from – quite literally – a whole new angle. Hidden beneath the Royal Mail sorting depot at Mount Pleasant, in west Clerkenwell, London, Mail Rail itself is a marvellous piece of hidden …

Updated123-Reg, which promotes its “award-winning 24/7 UK support,” as a selling point for its service, is suffering a sustained and ongoing email service outage – with Reg readers claiming the company has shut off its online support channels. The outage began at around 1100 UTC and seems to have KO’d the entirety of their email …

Bosses worldwide will be rejoicing after a British academic declared that banning work email use out of hours could negatively effect underlings' mental health. The unwelcome news comes after a University of Sussex academic conducted a study which supported the idea of tailoring workplace email use policies around individual …

Cisco has suffered an odd series of outages that briefly KO'd its website and corporate blogs. The Register was first alerted yesterday to the blog outages, which replaced reams of corporate content with the default WordPress post-installation admin config page. Downtime started at around 2pm GMT and lasted for roughly an hour …

The British government should make it a crime to disable geofencing and electronic conspicuity on one’s drone, according to MPs from a parliamentary committee looking at future drone regulation. In a report issued today, Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee (STC) demanded the government issue a White Paper (not a …

Malware authors behind the Finfisher spyware suite, well beloved by dictators, have sent legal threats intended to silence a German news blog that reported them to criminal prosecutors over allegedly illegal malware exports. "Our reporting on the criminal complaint [we filed] against the producers of the state trojan-horse …

A Dutch vBulletin forum for sex workers and their clients has reportedly been hacked using that infamous RCE vuln, baring the privates (and data) of a quarter of a million people. The forum, named Hookers.nl in an endearingly Dutch way, currently has its user data for sale for just €300 on a cybercriminals' forum, according to …

British telcos and academics have told a Parliamentary enquiry the UK needs to get on with allowing Huawei equipment into the heart of its future 5G networks. In submissions to an ongoing consultation entitled Ensuring access to "safe" technology: the UK's 5G infrastructure and national security inquiry, business and academia …

A former BAE Systems defence contractor has appeared in court accused of leaking "highly sensitive" secrets to foreign governments. Simon Finch, 49, of Swansea, Wales, is charged under the UK's Official Secrets Act with making a "damaging disclosure" of information last October, according to top newswire Court News UK. He …

A second Airbus Zephyr high altitude pseudo-satellite (HAPS) drone, built for the UK's Ministry of Defence, has crashed in Australia while on a test flight. The 25m-wingspan aircraft reportedly crashed after encountering turbulence, according to a local news story. It was being flown from Wyndham, a remote airstrip in a …

Aria Technology Ltd, the company that used to run e-tailer Aria PC, is headed for the Court of Appeal in a third attempt to overturn a £750,000 VAT fraud ruling. The company has secured permission from Lord Justice Lewison to appeal against an HMRC decision to deny the firm £758,770.69 in input tax after the UK taxman decided …

TalkTalk has been slapped down by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after emailing lies to its customers as part of a hard-sell tactic for expensive fibre broadband. In February and March this year, some customers received emails from TalkTalk saying: "We regularly look at how your broadband is performing to make sure …

A minister has said that future Internet of Things and data regulation will take into account "decisions that we need to be aware we are making" when handing personal data over to tech companies. Junior tech policy minister Matt Warman told a Westminster Hall debate of MPs last week that the IoT "represents a whole new chapter …

US defence firm Raytheon is punting a security suite that apparently promises to harden military aircraft against "cyber anomalies". The company is reportedly developing "a new warning system that tells pilots when their planes are being hacked". "Basically, we're trying to give the pilot the information about what's …

Infamous card-skimming malware Magecart is still out there – and the latest campaign has affected at least 17,000 domains so far, according to threat intel biz RiskIQ. Head researcher Yonathan Klijnsma told The Register there are still around 15 active Magecart-employing cybercrime groups that RiskIQ is aware of. With the …

TalkTalk will start charging £50 a year for its legacy email accounts unless you sign up as a broadband customer of the breach-scarred telco. And if you don't pay, it'll delete your account. Presumably sick of ex-customers with ancient Tiscali and TalkTalk Mail addresses talking to The Register about why TalkTalk customer …

An RAF Typhoon pilot has been posted to Virgin Orbit as part of the UK government's previously declared plan to grow Blighty's space industry. Flight Lieutenant Mathew Stannard, formerly of 41 Sqn RAF, will join the Beardy Branson-branded outfit later this year. Stannard will spend three years with the new rocket launch …

Zendesk has admitted to suffering a data snafu – but while it affects 10,000 customers, it only applies to those who were using the firm's helpdesk products before 1 November 2016. In an email to all its customers, seen by The Register, Zendesk coughed to the breach. "We recently became aware of a security matter that may …

Google has lost its attempt to squash a High Court lawsuit that could see the firm stung for £3bn over its exploitation of a loophole in Apple's Safari browser. The Court of Appeal, sitting at London's Royal Courts of Justice this morning (PDF), upheld former Which? director Richard Lloyd's attempt to start a not-quite-class- …

Thomas Cook's former breach detection contractor has warned of a sharp spike in scammers setting up fake websites to lure ex-staff and customers alike. Digital risk biz Skurio said it has spotted "a flurry of web domain registration activity" focused on Thomas Cook-themed domain names. These appear to have been set up by …

Security plaftorm vendor Comodo has 'fessed up to a digital break-in affecting 245,000 users – after it ignored line one in the first chapter of the "How to do Basic Security" book about timely patching of software. Despite the whole world (yup, us too) shouting about the latest zero-day bug in vBulletin forum software, Comodo …