Gareth Corfield

UpdatedChina's ambassador to Denmark has reportedly threatened to kill off a proposed free trade deal unless the semiautonomous Faroe Islands sign a deal with Huawei for 5G mobile network equipment. The explosive revelations were made by Berlingske, a Danish daily newspaper based in Copenhagen. The allegations are based on an audio …

HMS Prince of Wales, second of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, has been commissioned today at Portsmouth Naval Dockyard. Dignitaries gathered in Portsmouth for the warship’s formal commissioning ceremony, the vessel having been formally handed to the Royal Navy by her builders yesterday. The Prince of Wales …

If you're an Oracle database user and are tempted to pay off a Ryuk ransomware infection to get your files back, for pity's sake, don't. The criminals behind it have broken their own decryptor, meaning nobody will be able to unlock files scrambled by the malicious software. This is according to infosec biz Emsisoft, which …

Black Hat EuropeElastic, the biz behind open-source search engine stack Elasticsearch, has launched its own SIEM – a somewhat counterintuitive thing to do, you'd think, until you look at how many others are using Elasticsearch for lucrative security products. For those not in the know, SIEM is short for Security Information and Event …

A jailed hacker who profited from the Angler Exploit Kit has been ordered to sell his £5,000 Rolex watch after the National Crime Agency (NCA) applied to confiscate £270,000 of criminal proceeds from him. Zain Qaiser, 25, formerly of Barking in London, has been ordered to pay £270,864.47 to the British state following a …

Black Hat EuropeA veteran drone hacker reckons the recent release of the Dronesploit framework won't go down quite as its inventors hope. Alexandre D'Hondt and Yannick Pasquazzo gave a quick talk about Dronesploit during Black Hat Europe, held in London last week. The duo aim to produce a Metasploit-style CLI framework tailored for tinkering …

US prosecutors have slapped a $5m bounty on the heads of two Russian nationals they claim are part of the malware gang behind the banking trojans ZeuS and Dridex. The crew, nicknamed "Evil Corp" by the Americans in a press conference today, was named and shamed with the help of Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) and GCHQ …

Black Hat EuropeFaking digital evidence during a cyber attack – planting a false flag – is simple if you know how, as noted infosec veteran Jake Williams told London's Black Hat Europe conference. Speaking to a packed room, Williams informed his rapt audience that it's straightforward to misdirect investigators trying to attribute a cyber …

+CommentFresh from the latest Gatwick drone controversy, aviation charity CHIRP is launching a confidential drone incident reporting service for commercial and recreational drone fliers. The free-to-use service mirrors CHIRP's existing manned aviation functions, in which pilots and aviation professionals of all hues raise issues of …

Google has said it fired off 12,000 warnings to unlucky users of its GMail, Drive and YouTube services telling them it believes they're being phished by state-backed hackers. The ad tech firm’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said in a blog post that between July and September it told people in 149 countries around the world that …

A RuneScape artist who found a document on an office printer that stated a senior veep's salary and mentioned it to colleagues was wrongly fired by red-faced managers, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled. John McCambridge, a lead concept artist on the long-running massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), …

Cloud-'n'-comms biz Datrix has suffered a phishing attack that resulted in some customers' contact details being compromised – though the company reckons it contained the attack within 15 minutes. The London-based firm sent an email to its customers earlier this week, seen by El Reg, confirming it had been "the target of a …

The University of London has lost a Court of Appeal attempt to block a new mobile phone mast that would have served Vodafone's London HQ. Cornerstone Telecommunications, which is jointly owned by Vodafone and Telefónica (parent firm of O2 UK), saw off the university's attempt to overthrow an earlier judgment giving them the …

Ethical hacking is a "redundant term" but to be a "hacker" is no longer a bad thing, according to proponents of the cybersecurity art form known as "penetration testing". One-time Lulzsec hacker Jake Davis and his deportation-proof hacker mate Lauri Love appeared at a talk organised by pentesting biz Redscan in which the great …

IBM has paid off 281 people who brought age discrimination claims against it in UK Employment Tribunals – leaving four more cases outstanding. In a judgment quietly published last week, Big Blue was said to have reached "confidential settlement terms" with 281 people out of the 285 who had raised employment law grievances …

Fresh from banking a £100m windfall through its controversial dot-UK cash grab, Nominet is now sorting out the aftermath – through its quasi-legal UK registry's domain name dispute resolution service. In the last few weeks three companies have secured rulings over dot-UK domain names which were abusively registered by people …

Halfords is telling potential DAB radio buyers that the digital radio tech is "super-fast" compared to analogue AM radio, which might come as a surprise to the laws of physics. The car accessories retailer is trying, like all good businesses do, to drum up interest in its DAB digital radio sets. To this end it published a …

A French hospital has suffered a ransomware attack that reportedly caused the lockdown of 6,000 computers. Rouen's Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) reverted to pen and paper instead of computerised record-keeping during last week's attack, according to Le Monde. The attack, which took place on Friday November 15 at …

British Airways suffered yet another IT failure, causing knock-on flight delays and cancellations for thousands of unhappy travellers*. An unspecified computer system crash has meant some of BA's fleet has been grounded for hours and counting – it seems to be largely an inbound flight issue. Long-haul flights appear to be have …

Two airline pilots reported a near-miss with a drone while just 30 seconds from touchdown at London Gatwick airport earlier this year, an official report has revealed. Both the captain and first officer (FO) of an Airbus A320 landing at Gatwick in the evening of 8 July this year saw the errant drone, which the first officer …

Half of UK public sector IT chiefs think the data they're responsible for protecting is less valuable than private sector information, according to a survey by antivirus firm Sophos. Just over 50 per cent of 420 senior managers quizzed by Sophos agreed with the statement: "The data held by my organisation is less valuable than …

A British video-editing startup exposed what is claimed to be "thousands" of user-uploaded videos, including family films and home-made pornography, in an unsecured Amazon AWS bucket. Research by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, for security biz vpnMentor, revealed that VEED.io left an AWS bucket completely unsecured and hosting what …

Brexit-supporting businessman Arron Banks has had his Twitter account hijacked and his private messages dumped online by person or persons unknown – and random script kiddies are trying to claim the credit for it. Banks’ account was seemingly accessed two days ago, with @arron_banks on Twitter (since suspended) being used this …

A rape investigation involving everyone's favourite cupboard-dwelling WikiLeaker, Julian Assange, has been dropped, Swedish prosecutors told the world's press today. Deputy director of public prosecutions Eva-Marie Persson told journalists that the case against Assange had been discontinued, around seven years after …

Multinational police agency Interpol is due to say that tech companies deploying strong encryption helps paedophiles – unless they build backdoors for police workers. Three people "briefed on the matter" told financial newswire Reuters yesterday that the agency would be issuing a statement this week condemning the use of …