Top 10 Stories

LA Times: As the movie industry becomes a growing economic force in China, a new report predicts that Hollywood may become the next target for state-sponsored hacking efforts by that country's government. In a report from FireEye, a San Jose cybersecurity company, researchers in the company's Mandiant Intelligence Center (now a division of FireEye labs) identified at least one hack of an entertainment company that can be traced back to China.  

  BBC: BT is being investigated by the UK's data authority after a whistleblower claimed the company "exposed user credentials en masse". BT is currently moving its customers' email accounts from a Yahoo-powered system to its own bespoke set-up.  

  BBC: The inclusion of a valuable database of postcodes and addresses in the Royal Mail flotation has been criticised by an influential group of MPs. The Public Administration Committee said the Postcode Address File (PAF) was a national asset and should not have been included in privatisation.  

IT News: The US National Security Agency has denied claims it uses servers purportedly belonging to Facebook to spread malware for mass surveillance purposes. In response to leaked documents detailing a ten-year long effort to infect worldwide computer systems and networks with malware - with help from fake Facebook servers - the NSA said it uses its technical capabilities only to support “lawful and appropriate foreign intelligence operations”.

  CSO: Healthcare organisations see an expanding landscape of uncertainty that has raised concerns among security pros and points to the need for more thorough threat analyses, a study showed. Risks posed by health insurance and information exchanges, employee negligence, cloud services and mobile device usage has dampened confidence in protecting patient data, the Fourth Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy & Data Security found. The study, released Wednesday, was conducted by the Ponemon Institute...

  Techworld: Europe on Thursday approved a new cybersecurity law, but held back from requiring Internet giants such as Google, Amazon, Ebay and Skype, to report security incidents. Members of the European Parliament voted by a huge majority to approve the Network and Information Security (NIS) directive.  

  ICO: A Welsh home care provider has been found in breach of the Data Protection Act after the files of 10 vulnerable and elderly people were found on a street in Neath Port Talbot. The news follows an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) into the data loss by Neath Care in August 2013. The papers explained the individuals’ care plans and included sensitive information relating to their health. The ICO found that...

  Computing: Millions of UK citizens could be hit by an IT disaster similar to that suffered by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in the summer of 2012, unless banks move off of legacy systems, according to RBS's chief analytics officer, Alan Grogan. The IT glitch affected NatWest, Ulster Bank and RBS, and cost the RBS Group an estimated £125m. The incident left millions of customers unable to access their accounts, while RBS struggled...

  Computing: Google has begun routinely encrypting web searches conducted in China as it rolls out a more robust and secure system for handling search traffic. The system is being implemented in response to revelations over widespread surveillance being conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA), GCHQ and other governmental authorities around the world.  

  Search Security: As enterprises prepare for a potential security catastrophe after next month's Windows XP end-of-life date, retailers and payment-processing firms face an additional risk: being unable to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. On April 8th, Microsoft will end support for its legacy Windows XP operating system. Customers using XP, which was released in 2001 and is based on kernel technology that dates back even further, will no longer receive technical support or...