Exclusive: £10m needed for regulator charged with developing tools to thwart financial crime and protect consumers

Banks are under pressure to stump up millions of pounds in interim funding for the organisation that polices open banking, with regulators saying the new money is needed to prevent financial crime and protect consumers if things “go wrong”.

Large banks including NatWest, HSBC, Lloyds, and Santander UK, were among more than 40 City firms summoned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) last week, to discuss a cash injection into Open Banking Limited (OPL), the body which oversees innovation in this area.

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LockBit was a sophisticated criminal operation, offering the tools needed to steal a company’s data and hold it to ransom. Then it was itself hacked. Alex Hern reports

A ransomware site on the dark web has allowed criminals to extort hospitals, businesses and schools for years. By encrypting data or threatening to post data online, hackers have cost companies millions of pounds.

It’s called LockBit, and it was very successful until one day last month when hackers who logged on to the site found it had been hacked by authorities including the UK National Crime Agency and the FBI. These agencies announced they were in control of LockBit’s site, marking a new stage in their war on cybercrime.

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Gang has set up a new site on the dark web and declares an intention to vote for Donald Trump

The LockBit ransomware gang is attempting a comeback days after its operations were severely disrupted by a coordinated international crackdown.

The Russian-based group has set up a new site on the dark web to advertise a small number of alleged victims and leak stolen data, as well as releasing a rambling statement explaining how it had been hobbled by the UK’s National Crime Agency, the FBI, Europol and other police agencies in operation last week.

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Mike McClelland proposes a 1p charge for messages in response to an article on the downside of Ireland’s datacentre boom. Plus a letter from Sue Stephenson

The long read (Power grab: the hidden costs of Ireland’s datacentre boom, 15 February) highlights the enormous cost in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions of our collective love affair with the seemingly free ability to send emails, text and WhatsApp messages every minute of the day. There is an enormous cost to us all in terms of data storage – a fact of which we are barely cognisant.

Think how much money could be raised to counter the impact on our environment if we all paid just one penny for each digital message we blithely send. And tuppence if there is an attachment, and thruppence if it includes a digital photo of the meal you ate at a restaurant last night.

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UK agency says they have ‘hacked the hackers’ and will help LockBit victims decrypt their systems

A massive law enforcement operation has seized the “command and control” infrastructure for international ransomware group LockBit, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed on Tuesday, and will repurpose the technology to expose the group’s operations to the world.

The joint operation, between the NCA, the FBI, Europol and a coalition of international police agencies, was first revealed with a post on LockBit’s own website, which read: “This site is now under the control of the National Crime Agency of the UK, working in close cooperation with the FBI and the international law enforcement taskforce Operation Cronos.”

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Lockbit’s website under control of security agencies from both sides of Atlantic, according to post

Lockbit, a notorious cybercrime gang that holds its victims’ data to ransom, has been disrupted in a rare international law enforcement operation by Britain’s National Crime Agency, the FBI, Europol and a coalition of international police agencies, according to a post on the gang’s extortion website.

“This site is now under the control of the National Crime Agency of the UK, working in close cooperation with the FBI and the international law enforcement taskforce, ‘Operation Cronos’,” the post said on Monday.

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The company pointed at people who ‘failed to update their passwords’ as sensitive data was offered for sale on forums

Three years ago, a man in Florida named JL decided, on a whim, to send a tube of his spit to the genetic testing site 23andMe in exchange for an ancestry report. JL, like millions of other 23andMe participants before him, says he was often asked about his ethnicity and craved a deeper insight into his identity. He said he was surprised by the diversity of his test results, which showed he had some Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

JL said he didn’t think much about the results until he learned of a massive breach at the company that exposed the data of nearly 7 million people, about half of the company’s customers. Worse, he later learned of a hacker going by the pseudonym “Golem” who had offered to sell the names, addresses and genetic heritage reportedly belonging to 1 million 23andMe customers with similar Ashkenazi Jewish heritage on a shadowy dark web forum. Suddenly, JL worried his own flippant decision to catalog his genes could put him and his family at risk.

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Datacentres are part of Ireland’s vision of itself as a tech hub. There are now more than 80, using vast amounts of electricity. Have we entrusted our memories to a system that might destroy them?

In the doldrum days between Christmas and New Year, we take a family trip to see a datacentre. Over the past two decades, datacentres have become a common sight on the outskirts of Dublin and many other Irish cities and towns. Situated in industrial business parks, they are easy to miss. But these buildings are critical to the maintenance of contemporary life: inside their walls stand rows and rows of networked servers; inside the servers, terabytes of data flow.

It’s a seven-minute drive from where we live now in Artane, Dublin, to the Clonshaugh datacentre, situated in a business park behind Northside shopping centre. Although we live close by, we haven’t driven this way before, and our route takes us through a number of the local authority estates that my husband lived in as a boy. These estates are set on either side of a long, straight road pocked with chicanes to deter joyriders. Even though the housing development sprawls for miles on either side – with large wind-blasted green spaces in between – the houses huddle, squashed together. It looks as if someone has transplanted a warren of inner-city Victorian terraces to this desolate terrain.

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Exclusive: Whistleblowers say Paula Vennells agreed to move archive, which risked destroying data that could clear operators

The former Post Office boss Paula Vennells gave Fujitsu a bonus contract in 2013 to take over an archive of branch data, despite warnings such a move would destroy evidence that might clear operators, whistleblowers have said.

Transaction information was “replatformed” on cost grounds from a “gold standard” external storage system known as Centera to one owned by the Japanese software company running the Post Office’s Horizon IT network.

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Federal police warn they will track down alleged criminals using Warzone trojan software

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A man has been arrested as part of an international operation to shut down a global cybercrime network targeting Australians as Australian federal police warn they will track down other people alleged to be involved in the use of the malicious software.

Daniel Meli, 27, was arrested in Malta on 7 February for allegedly selling and training criminals in the use of Warzone, a remote access trojan software that bypasses security systems and remotely accesses computers without the victims’ knowledge.

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