Weekly Updates

IT News & Updates

The latest in cloud, cybersecurity, AI, and web technology - curated for UK businesses every week

137

Articles

ConnectWise Suspends Cloud Backup After M365 Credential Theft - Why MSP Supply Chains Matter to Every UK Business

ConnectWise has suspended its Cloud Backup, SaaS Security and Cloud Management services after detecting unauthorised access to application identities, with security firm Huntress alleging a stolen Microsoft 365 credential is being actively used to compromise customer tenants. Because ConnectWise sells its tools to managed service providers who in turn support thousands of small businesses, most end customers affected will have no idea their IT support relies on the platform at all.

19 October 2026Read more

Microsoft 365

CMA Proposes Special Status for Microsoft - What It Could Mean for UK Businesses Locked Into 365

The Competition and Markets Authority has proposed designating Microsoft a "strategic market status" firm across five areas of its business software, from Windows and Office to security tools and SQL Server, citing switching barriers that make it hard for UK organisations to use rival providers alongside or instead of Microsoft. With a final decision due by February 2027 and a roadmap covering Copilot, Teams, cloud licensing and security bundling, it's a regulatory process every UK business dependent on Microsoft 365 should be watching.

17 October 2026Read more

Microsoft 365

Microsoft Is Cutting OneDrive Storage by Up to 4TB - Why This Matters If Your Business Runs on a Personal 365 Plan

Microsoft is overhauling OneDrive storage allowances on its Family, Premium and Pro consumer tiers, moving from a fixed 1TB-per-user allocation to a smaller shared pool across all users on the plan. Fully-used Family and Premium subscriptions stand to lose up to 4TB of combined storage, and Pro subscriptions up to 1TB - a reminder that many sole traders and micro-businesses relying on personal Microsoft 365 plans to save money are exposed to changes business-tier customers are shielded from.

10 October 2026Read more

Cloud & Infrastructure

Microsoft's Azure Maintenance Mishap Knocked Out UK South and UK West Connectivity for Seven Hours

A seven-hour Microsoft Azure incident degraded ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway and Azure VMware Service connectivity across 18 regions - including both UK South and UK West - after what Microsoft describes only as a correlation with its own infrastructure servicing activity. With both UK regions affected simultaneously and management tools impaired alongside the connections themselves, it's a reminder that redundancy within a single cloud provider doesn't protect against the provider's own maintenance process failing.

1 October 2026Read more

Cyber Security

Hijacked Azure Identities Destroyed 100+ Storage Accounts in Just 7 Minutes

Microsoft says the criminal group behind JadePuffer, the first known agentic ransomware infection, hijacked two Azure service principals and spent over 15 hours quietly mapping an organisation's cloud environment before a roughly seven-minute burst of destruction that deleted more than 100 storage accounts and targeted backup and recovery systems. Azure resource locks blocked some deletions - a reminder that in the cloud, identity is the real perimeter, and backup resilience depends on how many separate credentials would need to fall to destroy every copy.

29 September 2026Read more

Cloud & Compliance

Sensitive UK Police Data on Microsoft Azure Flagged as Vulnerable - What It Means for Data Sovereignty

A Guardian investigation has revealed that a 2017 UK police risk assessment accepted, in writing, that sensitive data migrated to Microsoft Azure could be transmitted worldwide and potentially accessed by "US government insiders" - risks five independent specialists say persist today across more than 40 police forces. For any UK organisation storing sensitive data in the cloud, it's a reminder that data residency and legal jurisdiction are not the same thing.

20 September 2026Read more

Cyber Security

BT Email Users Flooded With Password Reset Texts - The Weak-PIN Lesson for Every Business

Customers of BT's UK broadband email service have been flooded with hundreds, sometimes over a thousand, unsolicited password-reset text messages, with some reporting their accounts were hijacked despite changing their password. The likely culprit is a 4-digit verification PIN with too few possible combinations and too little rate-limiting - a design flaw many UK businesses' own account-recovery systems may share.

17 September 2026Read more

Cyber Security

BlueMoon Exploit Kit Shows How AI Is Collapsing the Browser Patch Gap

Security researchers at Proofpoint have identified BlueMoon, a novel exploit kit chaining two Chromium browser flaws with a Windows privilege escalation bug, already used by at least four suspected Chinese state-linked espionage groups. Researchers say AI-assisted exploit development let attackers weaponise publicly available Chromium patches within days rather than the weeks or months defenders used to have - a stark warning that browser and OS updates now need to be applied immediately, not on a routine schedule.

10 September 2026Read more

Cyber Security

Microsoft's Record 974-CVE Patch Tuesday: What UK Businesses Must Fix First

Microsoft has shipped its largest Patch Tuesday on record, addressing 974 CVEs including two Windows zero-days already under active exploitation and a no-interaction-required Exchange Server flaw. Adobe's own zero-day, dubbed StyleSmuggler, is already being used to backdoor online stores - giving UK businesses a long and urgent list of priorities this month.

9 September 2026Read more

Cyber Security

Invisible Unicode Characters Are the Latest Trick to Slip Phishing Emails Past Filters

Microsoft has uncovered a massive phishing campaign that used invisible Unicode 'tag' characters to split up financial keywords in emails, letting them slip past keyword and signature-based spam filters. The technique, known as ASCII smuggling and previously seen mainly in attacks against AI assistants, peaked at more than 2.37 million messages a day in February 2026 - a reminder that email security tools built for yesterday's threats can miss today's.

6 September 2026Read more

Cyber Security

Microsoft Patches Perfect-10 Entra ID Flaw Already Under Attack

Microsoft has fixed a maximum-severity CVSS 10.0 flaw in Entra ID, its cloud identity service used by businesses worldwide to control access to Microsoft 365 and other cloud apps, after confirming attackers were already exploiting it. No customer action is required, but Microsoft has not said who was behind the attacks or how long they had access.

22 August 2026Read more

Microsoft 365

Microsoft Merges Copilot Apps: What UK Businesses Must Back Up Before 18 August

Microsoft is merging its consumer Copilot app with Microsoft 365 Copilot into a single unified entity, with the rollout beginning now and Podcasts, Group Chat and Deep Research features being retired from 18 August 2026. UK businesses using Copilot should check their licensing tier and back up any content before the cut-off.

14 August 2026Read more

Cyber Security

UK Government Investments Breach Exposes 51 Officials’ Data - The Access-Control Lesson for Every UK SME

UK Government Investments, the Treasury body that manages taxpayer stakes in RBS/NatWest, Lloyds, Channel 4 and the Post Office, has admitted a staff member's mistake left an internal file with the names and work emails of 51 government officials publicly accessible for around 40 hours. The incident, disclosed in UKGI's 2026 annual report and escalated to the ICO, is a stark reminder that most breaches start with a simple misconfigured share or permission - exactly what Cyber Essentials controls and proper Microsoft 365 governance are designed to catch.

4 August 2026Read more

Cloud Infrastructure

Azure West US Outage - 23 July 2026: A Maintenance Bug Severed IP Routes for Five Hours, Taking Down AKS, PostgreSQL, ExpressRoute and Teams for UK Businesses

Between 14:44 and 19:41 UTC on 23 July 2026, a bug in Microsoft's request conversion system removed IP routes from more network devices than intended during routine maintenance in the Azure West US region - taking down AKS, PostgreSQL, Databricks, ExpressRoute, VPN Gateway and Microsoft Sentinel for nearly five hours, with the cascade reaching Teams, Outlook and SharePoint globally. For UK businesses running Azure workloads, this is a case study in why cloud resilience architecture - multi-region failover, availability zones, and a managed Azure partner - is not optional.

25 July 2026Read more

Cyber Security

Microsoft July 2026 Patch Tuesday - 622 CVEs, 3 Actively Exploited SharePoint & AD FS Zero-Days: What Every UK Business Running Microsoft 365 Must Do This Week

Microsoft's July 2026 Patch Tuesday - released 14 July - is the largest in the company's history at 622 CVEs, including three zero-days actively exploited in the wild targeting on-premises SharePoint Server and Active Directory Federation Services, with CISA issuing an emergency alert the same day urging immediate patching. The SharePoint RCE flaw CVE-2026-58644 (CVSS 9.8) allows unauthenticated remote code execution via deserialization, while CVE-2026-56164 (SharePoint EoP) and CVE-2026-56155 (AD FS privilege escalation) were both confirmed exploited before Microsoft published patches - making this the most operationally significant Patch Tuesday for UK Microsoft 365 users since Hafnium targeted Exchange Server in 2021.

21 July 2026Read more

Technology Stack

Powered by industry-leading technologies including SolarWinds, Cloudflare, BitDefender, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Cisco Meraki to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable IT solutions.

Latest Articles

Internet & Connectivity

Fixed Wireless Access for UK Business: A Practical Guide to 5G and Microwave as an Alternative to Fibre in 2026

22 Oct, 2026

Fixed wireless access delivers business internet over radio rather than a cable into the building, and for many UK businesses it is a genuine primary...

Database Reporting

Database Reporting Security: A UK Business Guide to Who Can See What When You Build Internal Dashboards in 2026

21 Oct, 2026

Row-level security reporting means building dashboards that show each person only the rows of data they are entitled to see their own region, their own team,...

AI Integration Architecture: A UK Business Guide to Connecting LLMs to Your Existing Systems Without Creating a Maintenance Nightmare in 2026

20 Oct, 2026

Good LLM integration architecture is what separates an AI feature that keeps working for years from one that becomes a maintenance burden within months. The...

IT News & Updates

ConnectWise Suspends Cloud Backup After M365 Credential Theft - Why MSP Supply Chains Matter to Every UK Business

CMA Proposes Special Status for Microsoft - What It Could Mean for UK Businesses Locked Into 365

Microsoft Is Cutting OneDrive Storage by Up to 4TB - Why This Matters If Your Business Runs on a Personal 365 Plan

Microsoft's Azure Maintenance Mishap Knocked Out UK South and UK West Connectivity for Seven Hours

Hijacked Azure Identities Destroyed 100+ Storage Accounts in Just 7 Minutes

Sensitive UK Police Data on Microsoft Azure Flagged as Vulnerable - What It Means for Data Sovereignty

BT Email Users Flooded With Password Reset Texts - The Weak-PIN Lesson for Every Business

BlueMoon Exploit Kit Shows How AI Is Collapsing the Browser Patch Gap

Microsoft's Record 974-CVE Patch Tuesday: What UK Businesses Must Fix First

Invisible Unicode Characters Are the Latest Trick to Slip Phishing Emails Past Filters

Microsoft Patches Perfect-10 Entra ID Flaw Already Under Attack

Microsoft Merges Copilot Apps: What UK Businesses Must Back Up Before 18 August

UK Government Investments Breach Exposes 51 Officials’ Data - The Access-Control Lesson for Every UK SME

Azure West US Outage - 23 July 2026: A Maintenance Bug Severed IP Routes for Five Hours, Taking Down AKS, PostgreSQL, ExpressRoute and Teams for UK Businesses

Microsoft July 2026 Patch Tuesday - 622 CVEs, 3 Actively Exploited SharePoint & AD FS Zero-Days: What Every UK Business Running Microsoft 365 Must Do This Week

Need IT Support?

Technology Stack

Latest Articles

Fixed Wireless Access for UK Business: A Practical Guide to 5G and Microwave as an Alternative to Fibre in 2026

Database Reporting Security: A UK Business Guide to Who Can See What When You Build Internal Dashboards in 2026

AI Integration Architecture: A UK Business Guide to Connecting LLMs to Your Existing Systems Without Creating a Maintenance Nightmare in 2026

Newsletter sign up form - it's quick and easy

Enquiry Received!