AnalysisWannaCry – the file-scrambling ransomware that infamously locked up Britain's NHS and a bunch of other organisations worldwide in May 2017 – is still a live-ish threat to this day, infosec researchers reckon. By simply observing the internet for telltale signs of the malware strain – also known as WannaCrypt – Brit security …

Kaspersky Lab reckons the number one reason its customers call them for emergency help is because of ransomware – with Wannacry still playing a large part in detections picked up by the Russian company. In its Incident Response Analytics report for 2018, published this week, Kaspersky said it had seen the infamous malware …

Marcus Hutchins is on his way home to England after a judge spared him a stretch behind bars in America for developing the Kronos banking trojan. Hutchins, the British malware reverse-engineer who shot to fame in May 2017 for thwarting a global Wannacry epidemic by discovering and activating its kill switch, was facing up to …

BBC "sister" medical drama shows Holby City and the venerable Casualty from which it sprang have announced that they are teaming up for a two-part "cyberattack special". NHS techies, stop sniggering at the back! Auntie has promised: "The various storylines will include a car crash, a possible pregnancy and two members of staff …

Marcus Hutchins, the Brit white-hat hacker who halted 2017's WannaCry ransomware outbreak, has failed to stop the American legal system using statements he made while recovering from the effects of holidaying in Las Vegas. Hutchins, aka MalwareTechBlog, faces a criminal trial in the US over allegations he wrote parts of the …

The UK's Department of Health and Social Care released a progress update this week on the hesitant efforts to deal with shonky NHS IT. Woman in hospital (in hospital gown) covers face with hands On the NHS tech team? Weep at ugly WannaCry post-mortem, smile as Health dept outlines plan READ MORE First the bad news. The …

The US Treasury department is placing new sanctions on two IT companies it believes to be sending money to North Korea. The ruling bars two companies, China Silver Star and Volasys Silver Star, and one person, Jong Song Hwa, from owning any assets in the US or doing business with any US companies or contractors. Based in …

The US government has formally accused the North Korean government of being behind the Sony Pictures hack, the WannaCry ransomware that crippled the UK's National Health Service and other organizations, and a series of online bank heists including $81m stolen from Bangladesh's national bank. The state-sponsored attacks were …

BSides ManchesterA children's nurse prescribed hospitals ways to improve their computer security at the BSides conference in Manchester, England, earlier this month. Jelena Milosevic developed an interest in cybersecurity over the past four years while working as an on-call nurse in several hospitals across the Netherlands, where she said …

Chipmaker TSMC has warned that a previously disclosed virus infection of its Taiwanese plant may cost it up to $250m. The malware struck on Friday, and affected a number of unpatched Windows 7 computer systems and fab tools over two days. "The degree of infection varied by fab," the firm said in an update on Sunday. "TSMC …

Symantec has announced plans to slash 8 per cent of its global workforce in response to disappointing sales. The security software maker revealed on Thursday that revenues for the quarter ended 29 June fell 1.6 per cent to $1.16bn from $1.18bn a year ago. Losses were pegged at $63m, an improvement on $133m in the same period …

Companies are still leaving basic security flaws and points of entry wide open for hackers to exploit. This according to research from security house Positive Technologies, which says that its penetration testers found that enterprises were rife with things like months-old unpatched vulnerabilities and unsecured access points …

Miscreants have developed the first strain of ransomware worm capable of infecting legacy systems, such as Windows XP and 2003. The infamous WannaCry outbreak, which severely affected the UK's NHS, showed just how much damage ransomware can do. ransomware 74 countries hit by NSA-powered WannaCrypt ransomware backdoor: …

NHS trusts across England experienced more than 1,300 hours of downtime in the last three years, according to results from Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. Nearly a third of the trusts (25 out of 80) that responded to an FoI request from Intercity Technology admitted they had experienced outages across their IT systems …

An unusually large wave of phishing emails was spewed out this morning, with recipients warned that all their devices had been infected by WannaCry. Action Fraud UK has said it has already received over 200 reports of the phishy email this morning, while beleaguered IT support contractors – seemingly mostly based in the UK – …

Israel Cyber WeekHealthcare regulations oblige medical equipment vendors to focus on developing the next generation of technologies rather than addressing current cybersecurity issues, according to experts presenting at the eighth Israel Cyber Week. Ophir Zilbiger, partner and head of the BDO Cybersecurity Center Israel consultancy, said …

Privacy of medical data and the machinations of surveillance capitalism were under the spotlight at a Cambridge University symposium last week. Much of the day-long event, marking the 20th anniversary of think tank the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), was spent debating state-backed surveillance in its many …

RoundupMay is already upon us, and as usual it has been a busy week for security news. Here's a summary of what didn't make it into El Reg this week, well, until now. Son of a glitch! Brainiacs at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam have detailed an attack called GLitch. It exploits Adreno GPUs built into Qualcomm-powered system-on-chips …