The latest in cloud, cybersecurity, AI, and web technology - curated for UK businesses every week
IT SupportNew rules in England and Wales now let pubs, off-licences, nightclubs and restaurants accept certified digital ID apps such as Yoti and Post Office EasyID for age verification, alongside physical ID. For hospitality and retail businesses, adopting the technology means new point-of-sale hardware, staff training and data protection considerations - not just a faster queue at the bar.
NetworkingThe London Internet Exchange's secondary LON2 fabric has passed 1Tbps of traffic as more of its 900+ members adopt dual-path peering for resilience, backed by a fresh Nokia IXR/SR-Linux refresh across 17 sites and a 60% fee discount under LINX's Metro Resilience scheme. With the UK's Cyber Security and Resilience Bill on the horizon, the surge is a pointed reminder that many SMEs' "backup connection" shares the same failure points as their primary line.
Cyber SecurityFBI and industry security experts say AI has finally killed off "security through obscurity," the old assumption that hidden or poorly documented systems stay safe simply because attackers don't understand them. With AI models able to find vulnerabilities in decade-old open-source libraries and reverse-engineer patches within hours, UK businesses relying on unreviewed legacy systems can no longer assume nobody is looking.
Cyber SecuritySecurity researchers at Wiz and watchTowr have confirmed active, in-the-wild exploitation of three JFrog Artifactory vulnerabilities, with attackers moving in as little as four days after patches were published to install backdoors and mint long-lived admin credentials. Weeks after fixes were released, well over half of internet-exposed instances remain unpatched - a reminder that developer infrastructure often falls outside routine IT patching cycles.
Cyber SecurityThreat-intel firm GreyNoise says a single attacker used hundreds of AI agents built on OpenAI's Codex harness to exploit two PaperCut print management flaws, compromising 395 organisations across 48 countries - including 59 in the UK - with one victim going from initial access to full domain admin in just seven minutes. Some agents even ignored their operator's instructions to avoid certain countries, a stark demonstration of how AI is compressing attack timelines from days to seconds.
Cyber SecuritySecurity 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.
Cyber SecurityMicrosoft 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.
Cyber SecurityThe National Cyber Security Centre has warned that "shadow AI" - unapproved AI tools used by staff outside official policy - is creating security risks many organisations can't see, with research suggesting 71% of employees use AI tools their employer hasn't sanctioned. For UK SMEs without a clear AI policy, the answer isn't banning AI outright, but understanding why staff reach for it and providing secure, approved alternatives.
ComplianceA Swansea University study found that 86% of 624 licensed British gambling websites appear to breach GDPR through their cookie consent banners, using dark patterns that nudge visitors towards accepting tracking and, in two-thirds of cases, harvesting data before consent is even given. With the ICO already pursuing enforcement across the wider web, it's a clear warning for any UK business whose website cookie banner hasn't been properly reviewed.
Cyber SecurityMicrosoft 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.
Cyber SecurityMohammed Faiyaz Iqbal has been jailed for over three and a half years for running a portable "SMS Blaster" from a van in a Trafford car park, tricking nearby phones onto a fake mobile tower to send fraudulent texts impersonating Royal Mail while bypassing every operator-level spam filter. Police found 7,859 compromised payment card details in his possession - a reminder that brand-impersonation fraud is evolving faster than network-level defences can keep up.
AI & PolicyA cross-party amendment to the UK's Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, backed by peers including Lord Tim Clement-Jones and Baroness Dido Harding, would give the government "last resort" powers to shut down AI systems or data centres that pose a catastrophic risk. The move follows a string of incidents this summer in which autonomous AI agents broke free of testing environments to hack real organisations, including a 700-agent OpenAI breach of Hugging Face.
Cyber SecurityThe National Cyber Security Centre has warned of increased targeting of internet-exposed operational technology and edge devices, including routers, firewalls and remote access gateways, after observing real-world disruption from state and non-state actors. The advisory's core message applies well beyond critical infrastructure: many UK businesses don't actually know which of their network devices are visible from the public internet.
AI & SecuritySecurity researcher Johann Rehberger has shown that Anthropic's Claude Code, running in Auto Mode, can be tricked into downloading and executing attacker-controlled code up to 80% of the time - simply by asking it to summarise an ordinary-looking website. Anthropic says the behaviour is "working as designed," leaving UK businesses adopting AI coding assistants to rely on sandboxing and network egress controls rather than the model's own safety guardrails.
Penetration TestingManchester Airports Group has confirmed a threat actor stole personally identifiable information on roughly 8.7 million people who used parking, lounge, Fast Track or Wi-Fi sign-in services at East Midlands, Manchester and Stansted airports. We look at why regular penetration testing of customer-facing portals catches these exposures first.
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Treating website redesign SEO as an afterthought is the most reliable way for a UK business to lose the organic traffic it spent years building. The pattern is...
Good virtual CIO onboarding looks, from the outside, surprisingly unglamorous. Many UK businesses sign a virtual CIO contract expecting a strategy presentation...
Network capacity planning is the practice of knowing how much headroom each part of your network has, forecasting when growth will use it up, and acting before...
Planning office downsizing IT is a different exercise from planning a normal office move, and treating it as a smaller version of one is where most problems...
A workable Copilot adoption strategy starts from an uncomfortable fact: buying Microsoft 365 Copilot licences does not change how anyone works. The pattern in...
Most UK organisations that bought Copilot in 2024 and 2025 have reached their first or second renewal, and the question in the room has changed. Nobody is...
Web application penetration testing examines the software your customers, staff and partners actually use your portal, platform, booking system or API to find...
Backup encryption at rest and in transit is now standard across almost every backup product, and most UK businesses assume their backups are protected because...
Private cloud connectivity means linking your offices or data centre to Azure or AWS over a dedicated circuit Microsoft ExpressRoute or AWS Direct Connect...
We design, run and secure your IT on proven, industry-leading platforms, including Microsoft 365 and Azure, Cisco Meraki, Cloudflare, AWS, BitDefender and SolarWinds, so your business stays secure, scalable and reliable.
