Amazon is yet again facing a competition lawsuit in the UK, with £2.7 billion in damages being sought on behalf of 200,000 third-party sellers on the platform.
The lawsuit, raised by Prof Andreas Stephan of the University of East Anglia, will come before the UK’s Competition Appeals Tribunal.
The claim argues that tech giant Amazon is abusing its market dominance, putting third-party sellers at a disadvantage.
Third-party sellers claim that Amazon has favoured its own products and logistics services, and have unfairly placed a condition of Prime membership on the use of Amazon’s own logistics services over competitors.
Further, claimants argue that Amazon meddles with inter-platform completion, making it more difficult for third-party vendors to sell their products for less on other platforms.
The opt-out collective lawsuit means that eligible sellers automatically are included in the claim unless they opt-out, and there is no cost to the sellers included.
The allegations are nothing Amazon has not faced before – regulators have long investigated how they use of third-party data to their advantage on the marketplace.
“As a result of these abuses, third-party sellers have lost sales, faced increased costs and paid higher fees to Amazon for its services than they would have under normal conditions of competition,” the complainant wrote in a press release.
TechCruch contacted Amazon for comment, and the company emailed a response: “We are confident that these claims are baseless and that this will be exposed in the legal process.
Over 100,000 small and medium sized businesses in the UK sell on Amazon’s store, more than half of all physical product sales on our UK store are from independent selling partners, and the fact is that we only succeed when the businesses we work with succeed.”
Amazon has faced a similar lawsuit earlier this month, which was filed by the British Independent Retailers Association, with similar allegations seeking £1.1bn.
The lawsuits from third-party sellers and retailers follows years of anti-trust investigations from EU and UK authorities, with the e-commerce titan opting in for settlements with the UK Competition and Markets Authority and the EU’s competition watchdog.
Payment orchestration provider, BR-DGE, has announced its partnership with global open banking solutions firm, Trustly.
The integration into BR-DGE’s global orchestration platform will provide its customers with access to Trustly’s global open banking capabilities, which in 2023, processed $58 billion (£45bn) worth of transaction value.
This partnership will allow BR-DGE’s merchants to tap into and offer Trustly as a payment option, which aims to provide the safe, seamless deposit and withdrawal of funds to consumer’s bank accounts, as well as other payments, financial and KYC data products that Trustly offers.
“We’re focused on building the technology, connections and relationships that deliver measurable value for the whole payment ecosystem,” Tom Voaden, head of partnerships at BR-DGE, said.
“Our partnership with Trustly is another example of exactly this, empowering merchants and payment providers to easily leverage best-in-class solutions – in this case, open banking technology – to deliver enhanced customer experiences and drive profitability.”
The collaboration will allow merchants to leverage the technology as part of BR-DGE’s payment connectivity network, which is designed with intent to enhance convenience, lower costs, and increase checkout conversion rates.
In turn, Trustly will gain access to BR-DGE’s global ecosystem that empowers businesses across industries such as travel and transport, digital goods, platform businesses and retail.
One of BR-DGE’s major gaming customers will be the first to go live with an integration later this year.
The partnership also extends to supporting iDEAL payments, one of the most widely used online payment methods in the Netherlands.
“BR-DGE stands out as one of Europe’s most promising payment orchestration platforms, known for its excellent product and strong team,” Olof Wirfelt, chief commercial officer at Trustly Europe, said.
“We are excited to partner with BR-DGE as one of the first open banking payment providers on their platform, confident that our superior account-to-account payments and data products will significantly benefit their customers.”
Hybrid workers are calling on their employers to improve the lack of reliable mobile connectivity in the office, as seven in ten (70%) are affected.
According to a new survey from Cellnex UK, the issue has forced the majority of employees to leave their office building simply to make a phone call (60%), with reports of decreased productivity (74%) and increased stress levels (72%) as a result.
While areas in the UK have access to strong mobile signals in homes and local communities, these latest findings indicate that buildings are proving a barrier to workers receiving this service in the office.
Many hybrid workers are looking to their organisations to address this, with nearly two thirds of those surveyed (61%) calling on their employers to increase investment in office mobile connectivity.
The survey of 2,000 UK hybrid workers reveal that slow internet speeds (40%), weak mobile network signal (39%) and dealing with areas in the office which have poor or no mobile coverage (36%) are the top connectivity issues faced.
In fact, over a quarter (27%) of those experiencing connectivity issues experience this on average two or three days per week.
With many of today’s office buildings consisting of thick concrete or stone walls, brick and steel structures and an increased use of metallised-glass, over half (55%) of those surveyed report that their mobile connection is better at home than the office.
According to the findings, the top three problem areas at work with weaker mobile signal include office stairwells, meeting rooms and communal spaces such as kitchens or break rooms.
“These findings emphasise that many office buildings across the country are not yet fit for purpose when it comes to facilitating the needs of a modern workforce and we must ensure that our infrastructure is suitably upgraded to meet demand,” Edmund Wilkinson, head of sales for in-building solutions from Cellnex UK said.
“In today’s increasingly digital world, reliable mobile connectivity is essential for productivity and employee wellbeing.
“By addressing these issues businesses can expect to not only increase productivity, but also create a more collaborative and less stressful work environment for their employees.”
The majority of those surveyed (86%) also stated that they believe reliable mobile connectivity plays an important role in job performance. Poor mobile connectivity would also deter 68% of hybrid workers surveyed from coming into the office, and 40% stated that they have considered going so far as changing jobs due to persistent mobile connectivity issues.
As the UK’s healthcare sector looks to AI to support increased efficiencies, new research reveals that appropriate security practices are still not in place.
According to a report from enterprise mobility firm SOTI, titled Code Digital: Will Healthcare Thrive or Survive, data security is now the main IT concern for a third (33%) of respondents, an increase from 17% in 2023.
Further, 71% admit to their organisations experiencing one or more data breaches since 2022.
The survey of 1,450 healthcare IT professionals across the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Australia, uncovered the evolving landscape of healthcare technology adoption, the range of devices used, and the security risks and challenges.
Addressing Legacy Technology
Understandably, the persistence of legacy technology makes it difficult for healthcare workers to do their jobs efficiently and for IT infrastructure to be secure. Almost two thirds (63%) of global respondents believe their organisations are using outdated technology – this is a big increase from 46% in 2022. In the UK, the figure is at 65%.
The new research also shows that the UK’s healthcare is losing an average of 3.27 hours per week, per employee, due to technical or system difficulties associated with poorly managed devices and IT infrastructure – broadly in line with 2.9 hours in 2023.
Additionally, more than 85% of IT professionals estimate that employees now lost up to five hours per week, affecting the quality of patient care.
Nearly all (90%) of those working in healthcare believe their organisations would benefit from more interconnected medical devices.
This underscores another critical gap: despite the rapid growth in the volume and complexity of devices deployed in the sector, healthcare infrastructure and management processes have not kept pace.
This diminishes the ability to leverage the potential of newer technologies and the data they contain.
Data Security Concerns Escalate
Data security is a growing concern with 33% of UK healthcare professionals now citing it as their primary worry, compared to the global average of 23%. This increased apprehension is mirrored by a rise in data-related incidents: over half of those surveyed (51%) reported external data breaches since 2022.
Additionally, both accidental and intentional data leaks by employees have stayed the same over the past three years, along with DDoS ransomware attacks.
The survey results highlight the critical need for robust data protection measures and substantial investment in securing sensitive healthcare information.
With SOTI’s research revealing a direct link between the use of legacy technology and escalating security issues.
“Striking a balance between modernising with new technological advancements, such as AI, while also securing existing and older technologies is a challenge,” commented Stefan Spendrup, VP of Sales, Northern and Western Europe at SOTI.
“The blend of innovations combined with incumbent legacy systems can cause issues with device deployment, integration and management – as well as related security protocols required.
“This in turn results in increased vulnerability to cyberattacks and as our research shows, also means staff spend too much time fixing IT issues instead of being able to prioritise patient care.”
“A reliable and efficient device management solution can deliver enhanced visibility, oversee devices used to offer patient care and significantly bolster device security, including the ability to remotely manage and shut down any devices or endpoints during a security breach.
“And the proper management of tech will also help our healthcare sectors to evolve and accommodate the latest advancements, including AI, with ease.”
Employment remains a key concern for businesses as firms report improving business conditions across all other measures, according to the latest Addleshaw Goddard Scottish Business Monitor report.
Overall, while there is a mixed sentiment among responding businesses, there seems to be a moderate increase in optimism regarding the growth of the Scottish economy in the coming year.
Produced in partnership with the University of Strathclyde’s Fraser of Allander Institute, the report on the second quarter of 2024 shows cautious optimism with the proportion of businesses reporting higher costs decreasing in every category, as the rate of inflation drops.
“This quarter’s results are another step towards more positive news, despite some cautious notes – particularly on employment, which is a source of concern,” João Sousa, deputy director of the Fraser of Allander Institute, said.
“But fewer pressures on costs side and continued expectations of growth in the coming months indicate a more stable footing for Scottish businesses as they tackle the second half of the year.
“Businesses have highlighted political uncertainty as one of their main concerns for a number of quarters now. With the General Election due shortly, Scottish businesses will be hoping some of this uncertainty will dissipate, and whoever is in government from 5 July onwards will then move on to tackling other business concerns in a more stable and predictable environment.”
The survey of around 330 firms from across the economy found that business activity improved in Q2 across almost every measure, with the proportion of firms experiencing an increase in the volume of sales and turnover returning to positive territory, after a fairly bleak set of results in Q1 of this year.
Other conditions – volume of new business, level of new capital investment, and export activity, improved in Q2 but still show a negative net balance.
However, the net balance of firms reporting an increase level of employment has fallen further into negative territory, after being positive for most of 2023.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the country heads for a General Election, the vast majority of businesses expect economic/business uncertainty (89%) and political uncertainty (83%) to be important or very important over the next three months.
The Monitor also found glimmers of hope, as more than a quarter of Scottish businesses expect to see moderate or strong growth in the economy over the next 12 months, up from 19% last quarter.
Another key figure revealed that wages and total employee costs are expected to be the main driver in cost increases.
The report showed that while the expected volume of business over the next six months has declined slightly since last quarter (18 down to 16% net balance), the outlook still remains positive overall. This means that more businesses are expecting an increase in their volume of business over the next six months than a decline.
“As we have seen over the past few years, in the face of challenges and a landscape of moderate economic growth expectations, Scottish businesses are embracing as optimistic an outlook as possible,” Alan Shanks, head of Scotland at Addleshaw Goddard in Scotland, said.
“Firms are navigating the complexities of the current climate with resilience, underscored by an anticipated positive trajectory in business volumes over the next six months. This shows the enduring strength and adaptability of the Scottish business community.”
The Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC), has launched its ‘Energy Hubs: Fill the Backbone’ report, providing recommendations that will help scale Scotland’s hydrogen production potential and establish itself as a leading exporter of green hydrogen through the development of large-scale energy hubs.
Phase one of the Energy Hubs project examined the infrastructure, long-term investment, and technological innovations that will enable commercially viable and efficient energy hubs located in several key locations in Scotland, with the potential to reach 35 GW of hydrogen production capacity by 2045.
To realise this potential and capitalise on future export opportunities, the report recommends several steps, including investment, innovations, development, and optimisation.
NZTC recommends rapid investment targeted at next generation technologies and manufacturing processes to accelerate floating offshore wind.
Further, it recommends innovations in electrolyser technologies to improve the efficiency of hydrogen production while reducing system costs.
The net zero group also calls for the development of highly efficient energy storage facilities with GWh capacities, and the optimisation of integrating energy vectors within Energy Hubs, along with exploring further opportunities in alternative fuels and byproducts.
Phase two of the project will continue to focus on the challenges of hydrogen and alternative fuels production while exploring the concept of a ‘Super Hub’. This will involve integrating several large-scale Energy Hubs to optimise their combined performance and achieve economies of scale, enhancing competitive export potential.
The Energy Hubs Project, which received funding from the Scottish Government’s Energy Transition Fund (ETF) and matched funding from industry, complements NZTC’s ‘Hydrogen Backbone Link’ project, which demonstrates the feasibility of exporting 0.9 million tonnes of hydrogen per year from Scotland to Europe via a new dedicated hydrogen pipeline.
Several large-scale Energy Hubs, housing the necessary facilities for hydrogen production and its derivatives, will be crucial to the success of the Hydrogen Backbone Link.
“As the European hydrogen market expands, Scotland has the opportunity to establish itself as a leading producer and exporter of green hydrogen, positioning it as a major player in the future energy mix,” Darren Gee, programme manager of NZTTP at NZTC said.
“The Energy Hubs project marks the formulation of an actionable plan for large-scale hydrogen production, underscoring the critical need for investment, infrastructure, and technological innovation.
“To address identified challenges, accelerating the development of smaller-scale projects is crucial. This approach will allow us to gain experience and establish a robust supply chain capable of supporting the pivotal large-scale projects necessary to seize this opportunity.”
The first phase of project has received support from partners including Altera, Crown Estate Scotland, EnQuest, Kellas Midstream, Port of Aberdeen, Shell, Shetland Island Council, SLB, Subsea 7, Verlume, Wood, Wood Mackenzie and Worley.
Seven data licensing companies have formed the Dataset Protection Alliance (DPA), a trade union aiming to foster responsible and ethical methods for collecting data used to train AI and ML.
The DPA’s members have committed to promoting collaboration, developing best practices, and advocating for the rights of content creators in the rapidly evolving AI and ML landscape.
This follows a flurry of copyright lawsuits aimed at AI companies, with data protection advocates calling for swift legislation to regulate how AI companies collect data en masse to train their models.
It is no secret that powerful AI models require a vast amount of data to train on, and AI companies have consistently scraped the internet of data to provide for their ravenous models.
Content creators have been up in arms that they are not getting duly compensated for their work, claiming tha t many companies are breaching copyright law and plagiarising their work.
While tech companies claim that their data harvesting practices are legal, they are also turning to private data sellers as copyright lawsuits continue to raise concerns.
Data licence providers and sellers have therefore evolved into their own market, which brings up other ethical concerns regarding the protection of intellectual property.
The DPA is made of data licening companies from a range of sectors, including music, image, text, video, and voice.
The founding members include Rightsify, Global Copyright Exchange (GCX), vAIsual, Calliope Networks, ado, Datarade and Pixta AI, representing the US, Germany, and Japan.
“The launch of the Dataset Providers Alliance marks a significant milestone in the growth and maturation of the AI data licensing market,” said Alex Bestall, CEO of Rightsify and GCX.
“By bringing together companies that are at the vanguard of this industry, we can work together to address the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the rise of AI and ML.
“The DPA will serve as a powerful voice for dataset providers, ensuring that the rights of content creators are protected while AI developers get access to large amounts of high quality AI training data.”
The DPA released a mission statement, with intentions to promote transparency and standardisation in the licensing of intellectual property content for AI and ML datasets.
They also intend to educate stakeholders on the importance of responsible and ethical data sourcing and usage practices.
Facilitating dialogue and collaboration between dataset providers, AI/ML researchers, and industry partners is also a central tenant of the trade group.
Another tenant of the DPA is to advocate for the rights and interests of content creators and rights holders in the AI and ML ecosystem, which is ever expanding.
But encouraging innovation whilst ensuring the protection of intellectual property rights is also a main goal of the DPA, which is not a simple task.
Governments are currently grappling with the demand of further reaching AI systems with compounding pressure from creators to increase copyright protections.
About three quarters (73%) of workers are having their day interrupted by online virtual meetings, with over half (53%) saying they are interrupted regularly.
This is according to a new poll from Robert Walters, a recruitment company, which found that professionals are regularly interrupted and distracted from their work by an onslaught of virtual meetings.
“Throughout the pandemic, virtual meetings were indispensable for maintaining communication and connection with our colleagues and teams,” Daniel Harris, director of Robert Walters London and South East, said.
“However, the tide is now shifting – as more professionals return to the office, we’re still seeing Teams or Zoom meetings being scheduled for things that could be more efficiently and effectively handled through a brief message or email.”
According to the research, one in four UK professionals have over five virtual meetings a day, while one in three have up to four. As the average call takes around 30 minutes, this amounts to 2-2.5 hours a day being spent on virtual meetings instead of normal work.
“Meetings make up a vital part of almost everyone’s work day, but managers and senior leaders must be careful that they are using virtual meetings to aid productivity not hamper it,” Harris said.
When questioned on how productive they felt virtual meetings were, with around half (56%) saying that it largely depended on the meeting. 13%, however, felt like virtual meetings were not productive at all.
Interestingly, the report also found that a third of meetings were held online despite half of the attendees being in the same office.
“The success / productivity of a virtual meeting is dependent on a range of factors like who has organised the call, the number of attendees, whether there is clear plan of proceedings, what will be addressed and how engaged each person is,” Harris commented.
“Unlike in person meetings, during virtual meetings body-language or other social cues can be missed, hindering the natural flow of conversation. This can lead to professionals’ ‘zoning-out’ or even turning off their camera to hide the fact they are doing other things.”
There appears to be a generational gap as well in preference for online communication, with about two thirds (62%) of GenZ preferring messaging apps, and a third of professionals over 27 preferring email.
Only 5% of professionals across different age groups prefer online meetings when productivity is the focus, citing their disruptive nature to day to day tasks and schedules.
Microsoft is facing the heat for some anti-competition practices in the EU, as the European Commission threatens an antitrust fine for bundling Teams to its office product.
The initial complaint of bundling Teams, the chat and video app, with Microsoft’s other office products was brought up by Slack, a rival in the workplace messaging app market. Slack said the bundle gave Microsoft Teams an unfair advantage in the marketplace, prompting an investigation by the EU.
The EU has been preparing charges since April, and now Microsoft risks a fine which could be as much as 10% of its annual global turnover.
The competition watchdog found that bundling teams with other Office offerings gave the app a distribution advantage over others. Further, limitations in Microsoft’s interoperability with competitors put these rivals at a greater disadvantage.
In April, Microsoft did ‘unbundle’ Teams from Microsoft Office in an attempt to settle the antitrust claims, and also made some efforts to increase its interoperability.
The EU Commission, however, says that Microsoft did not go far enough in its efforts to ensure fair market competition, and is telling the tech giant to sell Office without Teams for a lower price.
Still, Slack and other rivals are calling for increased interoperability with Microsoft products.
“Preserving competition for remote communication and collaboration tools is essential as it also fosters innovation on these markets,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU antitrust chief, said in a statement.
Microsoft seems willing to solve the issue, with the company’s president, Brad Smith, saying “we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the Commission’s remaining concerns.”
Over half (55%) of organisations have an AI board, according to a new poll by Gartner, Inc. of more than 1,800 executive leaders.
The survey also found that over half (54%) of organisations have a head of AI or an AI leader that orchestrates activities with the emerging technology.
“The findings show that organizations are divided regarding if an AI board is necessary,” said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst Gartner. “The answer is yes, enterprises need an AI board to transcend the multidisciplinary challenges to drive value and reduce risk.
“However, the duration, scope, and resourcing is context-specific and use-case dependent. For some, it’s a short-term, stopgap measure. For others, it’s a longer-term change to their operating model.”
While the poll included 1,808 respondents who took part in a Gartner webinar in June 2024, and therefore does not represent global findings or the market as a whole, it shows a telling divide in AI leadership.
It also brings into question: what should AI boards prioritise?
Clearly Defined Rules Geared Toward Business
According to Gartner, AI boards must have clearly defined rules that map back to business remits.
Currently, accountability for AI is spread out. Additionally, some organisations are decentralised, siloed, or unclear as to where AI initiatives should lie.
When asked who is accountable for AI initiatives, only a quarter of respondents aligned to a clear role, such as a CIO. 16% said this should be aligned with an ‘AI leader’.
“AI board member composition should have representation from multiple disciplines and cross business units,” said Karamouzis. “It’s up to each organization to determine the best approach to drive speed and agility within their organization to ensure that the board does not get unwieldy and unproductive due to inability to meet or drive consensus.”
When asked to identify the top three focuses of the board remit, 26% of executives identified governance, and another 21% indicated strategy should be one of the primary focuses.
“The board member composition should align expertise with the scope of the remit,” said Karamouzis. “Board members should be senior level and seasoned executives with strong skills in strategy and execution, especially if they have GenAI ambitions.”
Of the 54% of executive leaders who indicated their organisations had a head of AI or an AI leader, 88% said that their AI leader did not have the title of chief AI officer (CAIO).
C-suite leaders take direction from their board of directors, and according to Gartner, most boards do not want to expand the C-suite. Despite this, boards do want an AI leader who is responsible for AI orchestration.
“AI and GenAI are complex and far-reaching and touch every job, activity and strategic conversation in the organization,” said Karamouzis. “However, this does not mean that the people or team responsible for orchestrating AI at an organization have to have a title at the altitude of the C-suite.”
AI startups are being sued by some of the world’s largest record labels, including Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records, over alleged copyright violations.
In what could be a landmark case setting a precedent for future AI copyright lawsuits, Suno and Udio, two AI startups with technology that generates music, are being sued in the US for £118,200 per ‘stolen’ work.
The lawsuit claims that the startups steal existing music and generates work that is similar enough to breach copyright violations. Essentially, the claimants say the AI-generated music is too close to the source material.
While AI firms have long said that their use of copyrighted works without a license is protected under the fair use doctrine, which many saying AI simply uses copyrighted material to learn from, the record labels are unconvinced.
Instead, the lawsuit says that the two AI startups are essentially copying songs with little transformation.
The claimants say that the AI firms have no reason to ingest the copyrighted material other than to distribute competing music.
The lawsuit says that the AI startups have to play by the same rules as people, and accused the firms of “wholesale theft” of copyrighted recordings.
Complaints went so far as to say the scheme threated “the entire music ecosystem” and “threatens to displace the genuine human artistry that is at the heart of copyright protection.”
Artists appear to have similar concerns, as the lawsuit follows a letter signed by 200 artists urging to stop the use of AI in the music industry over similar concerns.
Suno, based in Massachusetts, and Udio, based in New York, already have major followings and backings. Sumo has a partnership with Microsoft, with 10 million people already having used the app.
Udio gained major popularity after it was used to generate the song “BBL Drizzy” which lampooned the feud between rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake.
After a cyber-criminal gang disrupted London hospitals and published nearly 400GB of private data on the darkweb, the National Crime Agency (NCA) is reportedly discussing plans for potential retaliation.
According to The Guardian, the NCA is in discussion with the National Cyber Security Centre (NSCS) on potential responses to the attack, which Russia-affiliated ransomware group Qilin took credit for.
The cyber-attack itself took place on June 3rd, and targeted Synnovis, a pathology laboratory which processes blood tests for the NHS in London. and a swath of data was published to Qilin’s darkweb site on June 21st.
The cyber gang demanded $50m (£40m) in ransom for the data, which was left unpaid. On 21 June, the NHS revealed that a and a swath of data was published to Qilin’s darkweb site
The data was highly sensitive, and included patient names, birth dates, NHS numbers, and blood test descriptions.
Records for 300m patient interactions were stolen, as well as blood test results for cancer and HIV, The Guardian reported.
As a result of the attack, over 3,000 hospital and GP appointments and services continue to be disrupted. 1,134 planned operations were cancelled, and 2,194 outpatient appointments were postponed due to the disruption.
Blood stock shortages were a major cause of the delays to treatment as Synnovis’s systems were interrupted due to the attack. Vital information was encrypted during the attack, which infiltrated Synnovis’ computer system.
A source told The Guardian that the NCA has a specialist team working on the case to potentially remove the leaked data. Removing the data from the dark web, however, may be fruitless if Qilin copied the data.
Back in 2018, according to Sandra Pallier, design manager at Microsoft and director at ClimateAction.Tech, nobody was talking about climate change at work.
Which is problematic to hear – the science on climate change has been around for decades, and with “reduce, reuse recycle” a mantra from the 1990s, and pictures of desperate polar bears clinging to melting ice a trademark of the 2000s. 2018 is surely, if anything, late to climate crisis conversations.
Perhaps in the world of technology, with its eyes reaching to thrust humanity into the future, the prospect of a world fighting for water resources, half underwater and the other half on fire, was not an attractive conversation.
“There was a quietness at work in the design industry,” Pallier said. “But I saw this quietness as both a problem but also an opportunity.”
Pallier used this quietness to speak out, a first step in bringing awareness to climate change, and what companies can do about it.
But back in 2019, Pallier, in her own words, was a “measly young interactive designer,” who did not hold much power in her organisation.
“But the good thing about having less power is that you are a bit more mobile, a bit more flexible, and you can be a bit more daring,” Pallier said.
With climate change awareness on the rise, and protests launching across the globe, Pallier realised she could use her position as a small fish in a big pond to her advantage.
“In this moment I realised I could be the person to challenge the status quo.”
She found herself bringing up climate change not just during a coffee break, but in meetings, planning documents, project feedback. She brought other people into the conversation, and transformed conversations around the weather and even climate change to what her organisation, and the people involved, could do to be more sustainable.
These conversations happened, though, when Pallier had little power.
“The actions that you are able to take and feel comfortable taking might look very different from someone who is very early in their career,” Pallier addressed the leaders and decision makers in attendance at DIGIT’s inaugural ESG Summit.
“Everybody’s first step can be talking about climate,” she said, “but this is one of the easy things to do and I want you to do better.”
Pallier ranked corporate climate action in three categories: easy, medium, and hard.
While everyone can start at the easy level – which is breaking the climate silence – she is calling on leaders and managers to do better.
But before embarking on the sustainability journey, Pallier equipped the audience with a ‘getting started backpack’ with green design principles.
The Green Design Backpack
The ‘backpack’ provides some important information people need to know before they start their sustainability route.
“First, is that the climate crisis doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Pallier said. “We love to talk about carbon, we love to measure offsets, but it’s more than that.
“It’s not just about the environment either, it’s about exploitation.”
Pallier connected environmental issues to oft overlooked social issues – the destruction of the environment harms people, and disproportionately harms the most vulnerable and marginalised communities first.
Further, technology relies on resources and manufacturing, which can often be harvested or carried out with little regard for the people making it possible.
From cobalt mining in the Congo to union busting in Amazon packaging centres, tech practices harming the environment are often directly harming people as well.
Also a part of the ‘backpack’s’ realisations is that digital is physical. Precious metals required for hardware needs to be mined, often in endangered environments, often with little regard for the rights of the individuals mining them. Software runs on electricity, which is often created by burning fossil fuels. While technologists might want technology to be the solution to the climate crisis, it is important to acknowledge that it is a major contributor as well.
But along in the backpack were two other lessons: that big change starts small, and climate can be hard to talk about.
It can be difficult to bring up the concept of climate change in companies where many actions, direct or indirect, are complicit in the destruction of the environment, and therefore the destruction of lives. But it is because of this importance that Pallier says talking is the first step, but it cannot be anyone’s last step if they really want to combat climate change.
Step by Step
If your company isn’t talking about climate change, it’s likely far behind the times. While that is an excellent place to start, leaders, managers, and decision makers should be going the extra step to ensure sustainability is integrated into their business.
Empowering people is an essential part of medium actions.
“There are definitely a few people in your company who feel deeply about climate and want to take action,” Pallier said. “Giving them the room and the time to implement this is so important.”
Giving people the space to follow their passions and implement their values in a company can be vital to sustainability transformation efforts.
“These people might go away and optimise some business practices, or some of their work,” Pallier said.
This can look like simplifying user design and reducing payloads – decreasing the amount of data used and transferred means less electricity, less storage, and a less overall environmental impact.
Deleting unused data can decrease electricity expenditure, and optimising services can even make the more secure and interoperable.
“A lot of end users get rid of devices not because the hardware is broken, but because the old devices are no longer compatible with newer software,” pallier explained. “Optimising therefore can increase the longevity of these devices.”
Pallier also pointed to transparency and adaptability as key ‘medium’ level changes companies and employees can push for.
Having transparent climate initiatives and adaptable services and platforms to varying energy needs can be key in reaching net zero targets.
While these are design changes that can be made across companies to decrease emissions and reduce waste, Pallier still only ranks them as medium steps when it comes to climate change.
The hard part comes for those at the top – this is where leaders are tasked with challenging the status quo, changing business decision making and the culture, and centering climate action.
It’s about changing goals, which would require a paradigm shift in how companies function, the goals they try to achieve, and how they measure success.
“At the highest level, the biggest goal is power, having the biggest market share, or money,” Pallier said, “but what if there was a different goal?”
Pallier says a real transformation would require companies to “put care first.”
“So this is mainly to do with how we’re currently measuring success, how we’re currently thinking about the goals of our companies.
“What if we change that to put care first and put societal and planetary health at the centre? What would that look like?”
It would require the environment and positive societal outcomes to be put at the forefront of project design and implementation, it would require companies to ask if they should implement new technologies or start new projects, and it would fundamentally change what drives businesses.
Lockbit has come back out of the shadows as the most prominent ransomware group through its activities in May, new research from NCC Group shows.
Lockbit, which fell silent after a coordinated operation by global law enforcement organisations, called Operation Cronos, disabled the gang’s key infrastructure in February 20234.
In May, Lockbit 3.0 returned to the scene with 176 ransomware attacks, accounting for 37% of the month’s total.
May marks a prolific return for the ransomware gang, marking a 665% increase in attacks from last month.
After the crackdown, a LockBit admin admitted negligence in a message, but also insisted that they would be back in action and would create a new leak site.
The resurgence suggests that LockBit did not fully dissolve after the law enforcement operation, and was potentially able to retain some of the talent that drove its ransomware-as-a-service scheme to dominant the landscape.
Besides LockBit, new groups were found to entre the top ten threat actor list last month.
Dan0n, which was first noticed in April this year, had 13 attacks, putting it in eighth place. Arcus Media, a new threat group, came in tenth with 11 attacks.
The NCC Group’s data found that ransomware attacks rose by 32% month-on-month across the globe, with an 8% year-on-year rise.
The UK has seen a crack down in illegal streaming and piracy, with a string of recent arrests after video piracy figures skyrocketed.
UK consumers are being squeezed by streaming subscription prices, the continual splintering of the streaming landscape, and the increased cost of living. Users are therefore turning to free, and often illegal, alternatives.
Just last week, a man from Greater Manchester was arrested for selling specially configured television set-top-boxes that would allow unlawful access to subscription services from a number of platforms, including Sky, BT, and Virgin Media. The arrest resulted in a sentencing of four years and six months.
This week, a man in Nottingham was arrested as police believe that he was involved in enabling the illegal streaming of Sky television content.
Prior to this, a man in Liverpool pleaded guilty to charges of selling and promoting illegally tampered Amazon Fire Sticks which provided customers illegal access to premium streaming and live content.
Another man, this time in Stockton-on-Tees, was arrested after Police suspected he was involved in another illegal streaming operation.
“These cases highlight the importance of protecting legitimate providers, as well as the significant impact that coordinated law enforcement efforts can have on combating digital piracy,” said Kieron Sharp, CEO of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), as reported by The Independent.
“The message is very clear: if you sell a device that provides access to content that is not licensed to you or owned by you, you could face criminal investigation, prosecution and conviction.”
Video piracy seems to be on the rise, despite efforts to stop it. Muso, an anti-piracy platform, and consultancy firm Kearney found that piracy increased by 12% from 2019 to 2023, with about 141 billion visits to piracy platforms in 2023.
Automation and generative AI (genAI) adoption could save public sector employees as much as 23 million hours a week, a new Microsoft report finds.
The automation of routine bureaucratic processes would leave public servants – such as nurses, doctors, social care workers, and council employees – freer to concentrate on higher value activities, saving four hours a week per person on average, the report claims.
The UK’s public sector could save £17bn by 2035 by adopting GenAI tools, but a five-year delay in implementation could see the country foregoing £150bn in economic benefit, the report warns.
“Effective AI implementation can drastically reduce administrative burdens, enabling frontline workers to focus more on essential services,” said Hugh Milward, vice president, external affairs, Microsoft UK.
Managing information and data is the administrative task taking up the biggest proportion of time across the public sector, taking on average over eight hours from a worker each week, the study found.
Around 45% of public sector respondents say they are ‘drowning in unnecessary administrative tasks’ and 55% say bureaucracy negatively affects their ability to perform their primary job functions.
But the report claims that using generative AI tools can save doctors four hours in admin time each week, nurses five hours, teachers two hours, and police officers 6.5 hours.
Dr Brauer said: “Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) mark an inflection point for public sector organisations across the world.
“Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) wield transformative potential to reshape government operations and redefine the future of public service delivery.
“Governments cannot afford to remain frozen as AI transforms the world around us.”
Some local councils, including Aberdeen’s, have already adopted generative AI tools to streamline many routine tasks, from taking minutes at meetings to answering queries from the public.
AI-powered legal assistant platform, Wordsmith, has raised $5 million in a round led by Index Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, and angel investors including Skyscanner founder Gareth Williams.
The investment is a testament to how applied AI is rapidly augmenting and enabling professional services.
“AI is not about replacing professionals,” Wordsmith CEO Ross McNairn said. “Just as the word processor didn’t replace writers, but instead made them more productive, Wordsmith is ushering in a new era of AI-assisted professional services.”
Wordsmith aims to provide a solution to a critical problem faced by in-house legal teams: the overwhelming volume of routine tasks that leave lawyers struggling to keep up with the demands of the business.
“‘In-house lawyers are under immense pressure, constantly being asked to do more with less,’ McNairn said . ‘They’re mired in repetitive work, reviewing countless contracts, answering the same questions over and over, and processing endless questionnaires. It can feel thankless, and leaves little time for the strategic, high-value work that moves the needle for business, and what motivated them to become lawyers in the first place.”
Wordsmith claims that their proprietary ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ AI technology works 10,000 times faster than humans – responding automatically or with review and approval of a member of the legal team, catering for legal tasks from across the business.
“Wordsmith is at the vanguard of a fundamental shift in how professional services are delivered. It’s not about replacement but augmentation,” Hannah Seal, the partner at Index Ventures who led the investment, said.
“By harnessing the power of generative AI, they’re not only transforming the legal industry, but also paving the way for a future in which AI-assisted professionals can provide better, faster, and more affordable services to their clients.”
Founded in 2023 by McNairn, Volodymyr Giginiak and Robbie Falkenthal, Wordsmith’s customers include tech companies such as Trustpilot, and the team have worked closely with DLA Piper on the design and training of customer AI agents.
The UK is home to the most generative AI startups compared to the rest of Europe, according to a study by venture capital firm Accel.
In its report, Accel found that of the 221 GenAI startups it analysed, 30% were UK founded, with 14% in Germany, 11% in France, and 6% found in the Netherlands. The survey also included data on startups founded in the state of Israel, which housed 13% of the 221 startups.
However, the UK has not led the rest of Europe in terms of generative AI funding. France, despite only having 11%, or about 24, of the analysed startups, had the largest amount of funding, at $2.29 billion (£1.8bn). The UK came in second, with $1.15 billion (£910k).
France’s Mistral, a generative AI company that rivals OpenAI, gained 600m euros (£507m) in a funding round, with a valuation of 5.8 bn euros (£4.9bn), contributing greatly to the country’s lead.
Across the global, generative AI startups raised over $25 billion (£19.7bn) in funding rounds, with expectations that 2024 will see this figure increase to $45bn (£35.47), according to Accel.
The UK’s universities have largely bolstered the country’s success in founding AI startups, with about a quarter of founders having been educated at UK universities, namely the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, University College London, and Oxford University.
Overall, more than a third of the startup founders analysed have worked for academic institutions, according to the data.
About a quarter of startups also had at least one founder who worked for a tech giant, including Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Deepmind, and Meta.
Founded in 2013, the rise of Talking Medicines has been nothing short of meteoric.
The company’s novel approach, which analyses conversational data from patients and physicians using artificial intelligence and advanced data science, has seen the company win multiple awards and be noted for its innovative use of data-driven AI.
Arguably the company’s greatest feat to date, is its successful expansion into the highly competitive healthcare market in the US.
In an interview with DIGIT, we spoke to Elizabeth Fairley, Talking Medicines’ chief operations officer and chief data officer to discuss the ins and outs of Talking Medicine’s rise and US expansion.
Finding Their Market
Talking Medicines founding team – consisting of Jo Halliday and Scott Crae – expanded in 2016 with the addition of Elizabeth Fairley, who now serves as the company’s chief operations officer and chief data officer.
Halliday’s marketing experience, Crae’s knowledge in building bespoke engagement platforms, and Fairley’s expertise in data science meshed to create a tenacious triple threat. They’ve been working within the healthcare sector since day one, but their offerings have transformed multiple times to move in tandem with the evolving market.
At the beginning of their journey, they released an app, MedSmart, which would collect patient data and offer guidance and reminders on how and when to take their medication.
However, pharmaceutical companies and physicians wanted to know what patients actually thought about the medication they were taking.
It’s with this in mind that Talking Medicines put the patient journey at the heart of their products and services.
The challenge for physicians and pharmaceuticals was understanding the “importance of the patient within the journey,” Fairley explained.
She added: “We realised that there was a vast amount of conversation happening on social media, with regards to patients talking about a huge variety of diseases.
“Where we help them is to provide an environment where they can get access to the kind of patterns and trends of what patients are talking about.”
By (lawfully) accessing this data, it created an entirely new avenue for healthcare companies and physicians to access patients’ experiences with different diseases, conditions, and medication.
Sifting through this conversational data, however, is no simple task. This is where a backbone, driven by data science, became indispensable.
Fairley described it as “trying to find a needle in the haystack.”
That’s when Talking Medicines began to build their own models to classify this data, sorting conversations into something from which insight could be derived, this process culminating into the creation Drug-GPT, their latest product, which allows customers to access this analysed data in an accessible, conversational manner.
Hopping the Pond
While it can be easy to see how Talking Medicine’s services are attractive to healthcare advertisement companies and physicians, their prolific rise in the UK and their spread to the US was in itself a bespoke craft.
The US pharmaceutical industry is one of the most lucrative in the world, with $30 billion spent on marketing by pharmaceutical companies in 2023. Over 60% of US adults are taking prescription medication, according to Fairley.
“So we are talking: big market, big money, big problem.”
This mammoth market was partially the inspiration for Talking Medicines’ shift into conversational data analysis from patients, attempting to sift through and sort the muddled market of pharmaceuticals and narratives around drug experience in the US.
Talking Medicines had their eye on the US from the offset, with penetrating an insular and highly competitive market always being the long-term goal.
Supported with a “just get on and do it” attitude, that’s exactly what Talking Medicines did.
The Talking Medicines team touched base in Boston, New York, and San Francisco to familiarise themselves with the US pharma advertising market.
“I think being there on the ground makes a massive difference,” Fairley said. “I think the advertising market is a very tight sector, so face to face meetings are important.”
Packing their time in the States with a plethora of meetings and engagements to really get to know the sector, as well as endeavouring to get the sector to recognise them, has made a world of difference for the team.
“Getting yourself completely submerged into where you’re going to land is really important,” Fairley noted.
Beyond the social aspects of the American market, Fairley stressed the importance of sound legal advice when setting up a company in the country.
“I’d really encourage on the ground, US-based legal advice that is suitable for the size of your business,” she said.
Navigating the US system, with its varying federal and state laws and regulations, can be a nightmare for foreign companies wishing to expand into the highly competitive, highly lucrative US marketplace.
Not only that, but for companies dealing with large expansive datasets, understanding data compliance and regulation in a country with 50 separate state governments is not a simple task.
“Really knowing your regulatory environment is important,” Fairley said.
She added: “That’s been an advantage coming from the UK because we’ve obviously got the GDPR, and with the [EU’s] AI act, we’re familiar with stricter regulations.”
But dealing with sensitive medical information, such as conversations between patients and physicians, requires further data governance considerations. Medical regulations such as HIPAA, and the various state laws, require an in-depth, on-the-ground understanding.
Overall, breaking into the US market takes a public leap across the pond.
“You need to be right in front of people,” Fairley advised. “You need to be going to events, awards, you need to get good advice on the ground, and build yourself into the ecosystem.
“The more you put in, the more you get back.”
The Growth Journey
Talking Medicines has been through several transformations since 2013, not just in their offerings, but in their priorities and team size as well.
Navigating tumultuous economic headwinds and emerging technologies requires a steadfast hand at the helm to not shy away from difficult decisions.
While the team doubled their headcount in 2022, Fairley says the team expanded and contracted as necessary to pinpoint and strengthen areas with potential to be filled.
“I think as a journey we’ve flexed the business up and down a few times actually,” Fairley shared.
“I think you have to be quite brave, because you can have different expertise along the journey that is really needed.”
Recruiting expertise when needed, and also retracting when necessary, has kept Talking Medicine agile in the face of adversity and a changing market.
According to Fairley, the ability to make these decisions and keep ahead of market trends comes with experience.
“This isn’t our first startup,” Fairley said of the Talking Medicines founding team. “We’ve all gone on this journey before. We’re experienced in what we’re doing with regard to the business and company growth.”
This experience has also enabled the company to take advantage of adverse circumstances. COVID offered the company a respite period to dive deeper into their research and development capabilities.
As far as AI developments, Talking Medicines has seen perceptions and hype cycles transform as AI continues to emerge.
Fairley says it’s been an interesting challenge, seeing more and more companies brand themselves as AI ‘masters’.
But in closing and procurement opportunities, there’s more in-depth questions about the use of AI technology, something that Talking Medicines has been doing for years.
“I think because we’ve got the depth, we can come through those rounds, and other companies who are just adopting AI and branding as AI companies might struggle with,” she said.
But the combination of the three leader’s varying expertise has kept Talking Medicines at the forefront of the market. Each member of the team is heavily involved in marketing and sales, with Crae leading the team’s ESG efforts.
“We’re a force as three, but we’re also pillars of strength in our own expertise,” Fairley said.
“We’ve got a very deep domain knowledge on data and modelling – we’ve got a high presence there. But we’re also very visible with regard to the marketing and sales that we’re driving, and we are visible through ESG and data for good,” Fairley said.
“I think that the combination sets us apart and makes us different – it’s exciting.”
And Talking Medicines has commandeered the AI bandwagon to their advantage, pushing some of their existing technology to the front with the launch of Drug-GTP, a curated large language model that can sift through conversational data and provide answers to customer queries around physicians’ and patients’ experience and perceptions.
The technology makes putting patients at the heart of the business that much easier. The launch of Drug-GPT quickly caught customer’s attention, and changed the way the market viewed Talking Medicine’s services.
“That’s when people started to go: ‘hang on a minute! This isn’t a social listening tool, this is actually a productivity tool,’” Fairley explained.
This shift encapsulated a major shift in how AI is being used across the board. From machine learning models that can sift and sort through information, AI systems continue to be used to provide conversational answers to questions surrounding the data they analyse and sort.
The UK’s competition watchdog is investigating the upcoming $14 billion acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) of Juniper Networks over market competition concerns.
HPE indicated it would buy Juniper Networks, the networking gear producer, in an effort to bolster its AI efforts.
The company hopes the acquisition will double its networking business, and expects to finalise the deal at either the end of year of the start of the 2025, according to Reuters, and HPE is communicating with the UK watchdog to complete the reviews and secure clearance for the deal without it needing to go to a further probe.
The CMA will have until 14 August to decide if it will probe deeper into any competition concerns.
This is not the only merger fueling competition woes amid the push for AI adoption and readiness.
As more companies vie to keep up and make their mark in the expanding AI landscape, mergers and partnerships between different companies have come under the spotlight as competition watchdogs content with big tech becoming even bigger.
Microsoft and OpenAI’s partnership, potentially one of the most dominant, has also come under the scrutiny of the CMA, as the competition watchdog fears the two companies will squash smaller firms trying to find their way in the blossoming AI market.
The CMA’s investigation into HPE and Juniper Networks has begun, and they are currently inviting comments from any interested parties with their thoughts on if the merger could “result in a substantial lessening of competition with any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”
Burnout among cybersecurity professionals is leading to a loss of productivity costing UK businesses £102 million a year, a new report from Hack the Box shows.
Their research, titled Building a firewall against cybersecurity burnout, revealed troubling trends around the mental health, stress, fatigue, and burnout about UK cyber-workers, and their disastrous economic affects.
To reach the sum of £102m, the skills company used the average daily wage of a cyber professional, and then calculating the average number of sick days taken, as well as the average number of days lost to poor productivity.
The stats, taken from the Infosecurity Institute, once calculated, revealed that UK businesses were losing $130m (£102m) a year, while counterparts in the US were losing $626m (£491m) from the productivity shortfall.
Hack the Box blamed only one culprit: employee burnout, citing a crisis in cybersecurity professionals’ mental health.
The swift continuous tirade of new technology, rushed adoption of AI, and escalating threats have lead to professionals pushing past exertion, often forced to complete tasks and battle threats outside of their normal wheelhouse.
According to the report, three quarters (74%) of employees have cited work-related mental health issues as reasons they have taken time off work.
Those directly in charge of security teams seem to be more aware of the problem: 90% of CISOs across the globe are concerned about the impact of stress on their team, while only 47% of CEOs share these concerns.
While CISOs are board members, there appears to be a disconnect from the very top, as 84% of cybersecurity professionals are suffering from stress, fatigue, and burnout.
With cyber-threats having risen 600% since the pandemic, these figures are likely to only be exacerbated by the exponential increase in complex cyber-threats enabled by advanced AI.
About two-thirds (65%) of cybersecurity and professionals said they have experienced stress, fatigue, or burnout specifically citing a skill gaps and the pressure to perform beyond their capabilities.
Contributing to this is that over half (56%) of business leaders confirming that they do not invest in new tools to enable teams to do their roles more effectively.
This is driving 8% of cybersecurity professionals to consider quitting their jobs due to overtime, stress, burnout, and mental health challenges within their role.
Organisations are losing faith in their employees, as 63% of UK and US IT security decision makers expect their mobile and remote workers to expose their organisation to the risk of data breach.
This is according to research from Apricorn, a manufacturer of hardware-encrypted USB drives, which surveyed 604 UK and US IT security decision makers.
The survey found that the lack of trust in employees may be justified, as 55% of those surveyed noted that their mobile/remote workers have knowingly put corporate data at risk of a breach in the last year.
This has increased from he 48% of UK IT security decision makers that disclosed the lax attitudes towards data security of their remote workers in the 2023 survey. In fact, 43% in the UK (40% in the UK and US) said their mobile/remote workers don’t care about security.
Ninety-five per cent of those surveyed in the UK and US agreed that their organisations’ mobile/remote workers were aware of IT security risks and practices and followed required policies to protect the day they work with at all times.
However, it would seem they may be putting a little too much faith in their ability to do so. This has increased from 58% in the UK in 2023 to 92% in 2024.
Unfortunately, 73% of remote employees in the UK and US lack the skills and technology needed to keep data safe, despite being willing to comply with these security measures, and again, up from 55% in the previous year to 74% in the UK specifically.
“Organisations must bridge the gap between trust and capability to establish a robust and secure data environment. Investing in comprehensive training programs and the necessary tech to equip employees to safeguard data is crucial,” said Jon Fielding, managing director, EMEA Apricorn.
“Providing employees with removable USBs and hard drives that automatically encrypt all data written to them, ensures companies can give everyone the capability to securely store data whether at rest or on the move.”
Unsurprisingly, phishing (31%) and employees unintentionally putting data at risk (30%) took the top spots as the main causes of a data breach within organisations in the UK and US, closely followed by ransomware (29%). In the UK alone, employee error has increased from 22% to 30% in the last year.
Whilst employee risk and distrust have increased, at least organisations are making a move to protect their data.
When asked if their organisation has an information security strategy/policy that covers employees’ use of their own IT equipment for mobile/remote working, 47% of UK IT security decision makers said they allow employees to use their own IT equipment remotely.
Furthermore, they control this access to systems and data through software they install. This has increased by 33% since 2023, showing businesses are clearly doing their part to lock down the use of employee devices and regain control of corporate data.
Positively, when asked if their organisation notified the ICO of a breach/potential breach since GDPR came into effect or if they were aware they had been reported by someone else, there has been a notable increase in those self-reporting.
Just 14% of surveyed IT security decision makers said they had been reported to the ICO by others, down from 32% last year, with 53% saying they themselves notified the ICO, compared with 40% previously.
“Data breaches are an unfortunate reality, but it’s encouraging to see that businesses are taking proactive measures to mitigate these risks,” added Fielding.
“Companies are now implementing more robust controls and investing in advanced technologies to safeguard sensitive information. Businesses have made significant strides in improving their response and reporting processes and the need for transparency and accountability when it comes to notifying regulatory authorities.
“The fact that businesses are actively working towards better data security and response mechanisms is a positive sign.
“It shows a commitment to evolving and adapting to the threat landscape and containing the impact of breaches to allow for a more efficient and effective recovery process.”
Chip maker Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company, beating out Microsoft as its microchips and processors continue to spearhead the global AI race.
Nvidia’s shares increased 3.5% to $135.58 on the stock market, raising its market capitalisation to £3.335 trillion. This follows just days after it beat tech giant Apple as the second most valuable company.
The trio’s shares are tight: Apple’s stock decreased by 1% to $3.286, and Microsoft, which is now the second most valuable company in the world, saw a dip of 0.45%, with a valuation of $3.317 trillion.
What’s put Nvidia, the American chip maker, at the top? Artificial intelligence, and its accompanying frenzy, have turned the chip maker into an indispensable centre of technological futures.
While it has its competitors, Nvidia is the main chip maker in the AI space, with its products powering OpenAI’s wildly successful LLMs, including ChatGPT.
As tech giants compete to offer the best in AI as we know it – Apple most notably just entered the race, rather late – Nvidia continues to benefit as companies vie for the AI-capable processors.
This fierce competition, and Nvidia’s market dominance, has seen its stock surge about 180% just this year. Microsoft, on the other hand, saw its shares grow about 19% in the same time span.
On Tuesday, the chip maker’s shares reached a record high of $103bn, and demand for the stock only increased as Nvidia decided to split its stock 10-for-one.
This reduced the price per share, making the highly-valuable stock more affordable to individual investors.
Nvidia is also now the most traded company on Wall Street, seeing an average daily turnover of $50bn. Apple and Microsoft see about $10bn each, for reference, according to LSEG.
The move to split shares likely contributed to the chip maker now accounting for 16% of all trading in S&P 500 companies.
Demand for its products have also seen prices surge: the price per unit for an AI-capable chip from Nvidia is about $30,000 (£2,3567). The chip maker has reportedly struggled to meet this demand, which could cause companies to turn to alternative chip makers.
However, this appears to not have dampened Nvidia’s market appeal.
The IMF has expressed ‘profound concerns’ about massive labour disruptions and the impact of generative AI on jobs around inequality, urging governments to do more to protect their economy.
In a recent report, the IMF highlighted that as AI technology advances, it could lead to significant disruptions in the job market, particularly affecting higher-skilled jobs. Unlike previous technological shifts, generative AI might cause substantial job losses in professions that require advanced skills, potentially widening the gap between different economic groups.
To address these challenges, the IMF suggests that governments need to strengthen their economic protections. This includes improving unemployment insurance and other safety nets to support workers who may lose their jobs due to AI advancements. By enhancing these measures, countries can better safeguard their economies and the well-being of their citizens.
Despite these concerns, the IMF acknowledges the considerable potential of AI to boost productivity and improve the delivery of public services. However, the rapid adoption of this technology also introduces significant risks that need to be managed carefully.
In response to these risks, the European Union has taken a leading role by proposing the AI Act, a comprehensive regulation aimed at mitigating the dangers associated with AI, including the potential for banning applications that threaten safety and fundamental rights.
To prepare for the future, the IMF emphasizes the importance of updating education and training systems. As the job market evolves, there will be a greater need for lifelong learning and opportunities for workers to reskill and adapt to new roles. The report suggests that sector-based training, apprenticeships, and reskilling programs will be crucial in helping workers transition to new tasks and sectors in an AI-driven economy.
“We want people to be able to benefit more broadly from the potential that this technology holds, and we want to ensure that there are opportunities created for people,” said Era Dabla-Norris, deputy director at the IMF’s fiscal affairs department and co-author of the report.
She added that the “transition could be painful for workers” facing the prospect of higher and longer unemployment because “older workers may not have the skills that are needed in the age of AI and it may require more time than in the past to acquire these new skills.”
Sheila Flavell CBE, COO of FDM Group, commented: “Businesses shouldn’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to adopting artificial intelligence, so they also shouldn’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to developing AI skills.
“The landscape has shifted so quickly that there needs to be a collaborative effort between government, education and industry to provide a level playing field and ensure that staff can safely maximise the benefits of AI.
“A combination of apprenticeship schemes and upskilling and reskilling programmes can open up multiple routes to develop practical AI skills, reaching a wider pool of staff and creating digitally adept multigenerational workforces.”
“Many staff are using AI tools such as ChatGPT in their day-to-day roles and that won’t change any time soon, so providing dedicated skills training is a must.”
Dr Adeshola Cole, CEO, Tritek Consulting commented: “The rise of AI isn’t slowing down and staff need to take the initiative and equip themselves with the necessary skills to oversee its development. The majority of organisations are rushing to adopt and upgrade AI tools and systems, but often lack the digitally skilled staff to manage AI’s risks, so need access to a talent pool of AI experts.
“Taking part in training courses is a great way for staff to bridge the skills gap, focusing on sector-based training that provides practical experience using AI tools, making themselves invaluable as businesses continue to rely on AI.”
Sai Bendi, software development manager, Encompass Corporation, commented: “While the acceleration of new technologies, such as Generative AI, has the potential to act as a driver for significant transformation across industries, in order for individuals to progress, it is important that employers focus on providing the learning and development support needed to be able to keep up with change and feel confident to best utilise the solutions at play.”
NHS Dumfries and Galloway has released a draft letter warning locals to assume that some of their data was compromised in the recent cyber-attack facing the health board.
In February this year, the NHS health board of Dumfries and Galloway was the victim of a cyber-attack. While services were not interrupted, cyber-criminals were able to access large amounts of personal patient and staff data, which were published on the internet on May 6 after their ransom demands were not met.
Now, the health board is alerting all residents of Dumfries and Galloway that “the best approach to take is to assume that some data relating to you is likely to have been copied and published.”
Residents are advised to take the situation seriously, and be cautious around any attempts to access their computer systems, or of any approaches by anyone claiming to hold their data.
The letter provided some detail on what type of data was stolen – mainly small files such as x-rays or test results, correspondence between health teams, and correspondence between health teams and patients.
As the volume of stolen data was so large, analysing the data and contacting affected individuals proved a challenge to the board, so they are prioritising what they deem to be ‘high-risk’ cases of more vulnerable patients. Those deemed ‘high-risk’ will be contacted by the board if it is revealed that their data was compromised and published in the attack.
The letter warned that threat actors could use the stolen information to exploit victims further, but cautioned that any attempt to do so would be against the Data Protection Act.
Both NHS staff and the wider public have been asked to be on guard toward any suspicious activity.
“This includes any attempts to access computer systems, such as suspicious emails from an unverified sender asking them to click a link (known as ‘phishing’), as well as phone calls,” the letter read.
The NHS board also recognised that the cyber-attack, and the ongoing revelations detailing is expansive impact, can lead to anxiety for potentially affected individuals in the community.
The board therefore included a helpline that can provide support, including phycological support for affected individuals experience anxiety.
“On behalf of NHS Dumfries and Galloway, I would like to apologise for the anxiety which may have been caused to you due to this situation,” Julie White, chief executive of NHS Dumfries and Galloway said in the letter. “We have sought to be as open as possible while adhering to the very explicit guidance we have received from Police Scotland and partner agencies”
The Tech Talent Charter (TTC) – a UK non-profit set up to improve diversity and inclusion efforts across the tech sector – is closing after nine years, citing the sidelining of diversity initiatives and falling budgets.
Representing nearly a quarter of a million UK tech workers, the TTC is set to cease its operations this August.
Over 800 tech employers are signatories of the TTC’s goals, and the non-profit has worked closely with tech employers to promote diversity and inclusion initiatives across the UK.
Now, in an open letter to members, the TTC said that many companies are ‘quiet quitting’ their diversity and inclusion efforts.
“Increasingly, D&I (diversity and inclusion) initiatives are performative at best – and a fig leaf for poor behavior at worst,” the open letter read.
The TTC also said that D&I budgets are consistently squeezed, and even cut entirely in some cases.
As more concerns and issues come to the forefront, the TTC has seen D&I leaders being tasked with managing not only diversity efforts, but ESG efforts as well: “so your budgets are shrinking, and your scope is increasing.”
The non-profit also cited a “very worrying” trend in the rise of anti-‘woke’ backlash surrounding D&I efforts, as well as fatigue from corporations.
The TTC conceded that a changed landscape requires a new solution.
Resources will still be available on techUK, with further details revealed in the coming weeks.
Over the next fortnight, TTC will host drop-in sessions to start a dialogue with interested parties on what is next for D&I in the UK tech industry.
“Our flame remains undimmed, and our virtual door remains open to you,” the open letter, authored by Debbie Forster and Karen Blake, co-CEOs of the TCC, read.
OGI Bio, a Scottish biotechnology company, has secured follow-on funding of £650,000 in a deal led by TRICAPITAL Angels and supported by Scottish Enterprise, Merleview, Apollo, and Old College Capital to accelerate the company’s growth and expansion in the UK, EU, and US biotechnology sectors.
Specialising in developing innovative solutions for microbial growth and analysis, OBI Bio focuses on creating advances bioreactors and automated systems that enhance the efficiency and precision of microbial growth.
By integrating cutting-edge technology and automation, OGI Bio facilitates product development in fields such as health and beauty, food manufacturing, feedstock, and green alternatives to petrochemicals.
The company’s solutions aim to optimise microbial workflows, reduce labour costs, and increase reproducibility from the earliest stages of product development.
OGI Bio was founded to overcome the challenges of time-consuming manual microbial growth. Unable to afford expensive automation solutions, the founders created and built their own systems from scratch.
“With this investment, we will be launching additional modules to complement our existing market offerings and an enhanced software package that provides our customers with greater flexibility in process control. This will allow them to view, measure, and control their culturing processes from anywhere in the world.” said Alex McVey, CEO of OGI Bio.
“TRICAPITAL Angels has been a crucial partner for OGI Bio since March 2022, leading the company’s first pre-seed raise alongside partners, including long-term backers Apollo Informal Investments. Over the past two years, TRICAPITAL Angels has continued to provide unwavering support, participating in two further financing rounds.“ McVey added.
TRICAPITAL Angels CEO Moray Martin commented, “TRICAPITAL Angels is proud to continue our support for OGI Bio. Their innovative approach to microbial growth and analysis is transforming the biotechnology industry, and we believe they are well-positioned for significant growth.”
New research has revealed that 98% of business leaders believe AI will have transformed their industry in the next three years.
The research, produced by Expleo, shows that 72% of businesses expect to deploy AI tools in the next 12 months, with around a quarter (24%) already deploying AI tools today.
Titled ‘Integrating AI: Navigating the next wave of business transformation‘, the report comprosies isnights from 803 key decision-makers at large- and mid-sized businesses in the UK, Ireland, France, and Germany to provide a strategic overview of AI adoption and the challenges organisations face when deploying AI.
Through a qualitative survey conducted by leading research firm IPSOS, respondents also provide detailed insight into how the technology is reshaping eight transformative industries: aerospace and defence, automotive BFSI, energy and utilities, life sciences, manufacturing, retail, and transport.
AI Adoption Gains Momentum
Expleo’s research points to a clear momentum shift for AI, moving beyond a period of promise to one where adoption is growing as businesses start to demand more from their deployments. This is characterised by four key trends, according to Expleo.
First, deploying AI is seen as an urgent priority. Whilst only 24% of businesses have already deployed AI tools, 72% expect to do so in the coming 12 months. The survey suggests that many business leaders fear being left behind, with 80% considering their industry to have been changed or changing thanks to AI yet just 56% believe AI is doing the same to their organisation and its processes.
Closely linked to this increased urgency to deploy AI at scale is a desire to see returns, particularly in areas that directly correlate to the bottom line. Better time-to-market (91%), financial gains (90%), and improved quality (90%) were cited as the top three measurements for ROI for AI deployments.
Despite the urgency, scaling AI remains a challenge. While there is a clear impetus to begin realising ROI from AI deployments, obstacles remain. Chief amongst these are technical integrations with existing tools (39%) and controlling costs (35%). In fact, just 17% of those surveyed did not see any major barriers to deploying AI.
Connected to these obstacles is a demand for proven expertise. The complex integration landscape has put Ai skills in high demand. 60% of businesses are turning to outside expertise to support their deployments today. Equally, more than half (55%) of businesses are investing in equipping their workforce with the competencies needed by investing in AI training for employees.
“AI is a technology for today, not tomorrow,” Rajesh Krishnamurthy, CEO of Expleo, said.
“But the optimism that abounds around the technology often isn’t matched by the success of deployments. After years of promise, businesses are at the point where they are demanding to see a return on their investments. The challenge now is to convert promise into meaningful impact.”
“Successfully moving AI deployments from proof of concept to production at scale is more than a technical exercise. Capable data scientists are a critical component to the success of AI deployments, but so is business knowledge. Building teams with techno-functional expertise and implementing a process to ensure adoption across the user base will ensure AI applications are both technically sound and generate value too.”
Growing concerns about the use of AI in news and public information across the globe are confounding newsrooms as they maneuver to reach oversaturated audiences, a new report has found.
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s annual Digital News Report, which is based on a survey of nearly 100,000 people covering 47 countries, providing a snapshot of how news media platforms are struggling to maintain revenue when challenged by AI.
Generative AI tools are being used to provide summaries of world events and information, forcing newsrooms to make sacrifices and even adopt AI themselves to keep up with content demand.
Consumers, however, remains suspicious about using AI to generate news content, the report found, especially for more sensitive topics like politics.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of UK respondents and 52% of US respondents said they would not be comfortable with news that was mostly produced with AI. The 2,000 representatives in each country did say that they were more comfortable with behind-the-scenes AI uses, such as AI tools that made the work of journalists more efficient.
Across the globe, concerns about false news content online increased by 3% from last year’s survey, with 59% of respondents admitting they were concerned.
The survey also showed that news organisations were struggling to get a paying audience, with only 17% of respondents across 20 countries paying for online news, a stagnant figure for the past three years.
But AI is not the only challenge newsrooms are facing: social media has transformed how many people are consuming their news. Platforms like TikTok have taken ahold of younger generations who no longer turn to traditional news media.
In a survey of TikTok users who use the app for news, over half (57%) said they mostly follow individuals for news, while only about a third (34%) follow journalists or actual news brands.
Influencers are essentially taking over the news outlet market, and newsrooms will have to find a way to engage with users directly to keep up.
BuildBuddy, a Scottish startup founded by James Menzies and Alix Baldwin, has won £1m from investors for its innovative platform that’s been dubbed the ‘Skyscanner for construction materials.’
The tech startup uses artificial intelligence (AI) to find the best construction materials at the best price for small and medium enterprise builders across the UK.
The company aims to revolutionise the way construction materials are purchased for small businesses with the platform, which works similarity to Scottish unicorn Skyscanner.
BuildBuddy scours the web for the best deals and suitable delivery terms, which the company says can help save builders as much as 14% on a typical order.
East Lothian-native Menzies first came up with the idea after his expieriences running his own construction company, Zebra Property Group, with offices in Edinburgh and London. Running this business, Menzies came across myriad frustrations with the cost of building materials, and sought an easier way to sort through offers.
Teaming up with Balwdin, who formerly served as managing director of funeral Choice, a price comparison site, the duo co-founded BuildBuddy, and now raised £1m in seed capital to support a wider roll out of the platform.
The team also recruited Skyscanner executive Shane Corstophine, who is based in East Lothian, as a board advisor.
“Raising £1m in seed capital is a huge milestone for BuildBuddy and reflects the confidence investors have in our concept,” Menzies said.
“Just as Skyscanner has helped travellers find the best deals on flights, BuildBuddy will streamline the process of purchasing construction materials, allowing the UK’s 330,000 SME builders to find the best goods at the best price.
“BuildBuddy is an incredibly exciting concept that has the potential to revolutionise the construction industry.”
Corstophine added: “BuildBuddy is an ingenious idea and – as this landmark investment shows – Jamie and Alix are exceptionally well-equipped to execute it.”
Valve Corporation, the owner of video game distributor Steam, is being sued in a class-action lawsuit for £656m for allegedly using its market dominance to overcharge 14m UK customers.
Steam is the largest platform selling PC games across the globe, and the lawsuit is claiming that Valve is using this platform to “rig the market” and shut down competition.
According to claimants, Valve’s terms and conditions requires games publishers to sign a ‘price parity’ obligation, which prevents video game titles from being sold at cheaper prices on different platforms.
Vicki Shotbolt, who is bring the case to the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London, says that this has allowed Steam to charge a 30% commission on games, and she claims UK consumers are largely fronting the bill on these extra costs for games and game-add ons.
“UK gamers spend billions every year and Valve has a stranglehold on the PC gaming market. Competition law is there to protect consumers and ensure that markets work properly,” Natasha Pearman, leading partner in the lawsuit which has been filed by Milberg London LLP, said.
The law firm has experience in video game market dominance claims, previously brining up a consumer lawsuit against PlayStation Sony for £5 for a similar charge.
According to VG Insights, Steam saw record-breaking sales last year, resulting in £7.1bn in global revenue, with 580m games sold.
The video game market is largely dominated by popular games, with the top ten bestselling games accounting for the majority of sales.
According to Osum, Steam dominates around 80% of the EU market share of video game distributors, showing is popularity. Its online platform is not console-dependent, meaning that users can purchase games for various platforms and consoles.
The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s AI and data science organisation, has announced it received a renewed grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a goal of helping countries address their digital public infrastructure (DPI) demands.
A secure, private and trustworthy digital public infrastructure is key to enabling residents access public and private services such as healthcare, finance, and social protection.
The project, funded by a £3.14 million ($4m) grant over the next three years, aims to build upon existing efforts of the partnership to establish trustworthy digital infrastructure systems and increase the scope of their work beyond digital identity to include secure and privacy-preserving data exchange, credentialing, and electronic signature mechanisms for paperless and cashless digital economic growth.
Part of the work will focus on uncovering and mitigating risks and threats facing digital infrastructure systems, while also improving methods to enable the secure and private sharing of data with user consent and safeguards.
The work will also focus on developing trust mechanisms to allow digital ID technologies to facilitate cross-border trade and interoperability.
Other areas of focus include increasing knowledge and skills to facilitate the design and development of trustworthy identity systems, as well as supporting countries to understand, evaluate, and mitigate cyber risks in digital systems.
During this period, the researchers will launch a Digital Identity Cyber Threats Observatory which will monitor professional media and forums, vulnerability databases and the dark web to identify emerging cyber threats, risks and incidents that are directly relevant, or closely related to the national digital identity community.
The outputs of this work – led by Professor Carsten Maple, Turing Fellow, and Professor Jon Crowcroft, Special Adviser to the Executive at The Alan Turing Institute – will be disseminated as a digital public good.
“We are excited to continue to work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to deliver trustworthy digital infrastructure that can support the delivery of tangible benefit across the world, but especially to those in low- and middle- income countries that need it most,” Professor Maple said.
The two organisations have already been collaborating for four years with an investment of £4m ($5.1m) to enhance the security and privacy aspects of national scale digital ID infrastrucutre and address the related privacy and security implications, maximising the benefit of this technology for countries across the globe.
Digital IDs can be crucial in an increasingly digital society and every year billions of dollars are being invested to develop more secure, scalable, and user-friendly identity systems.
Many developing countries, however, lack a reliable identification system for their residents, which impacts their ability to access essential services like healthcare, education, finance, and social welfare programmes.
If trustworthy digital public infrastructure is designed and implemented effectively, it can help countries achieve their national priorities and accelerate progress towards their sustainable development goals.
For example, in India, UPI, is a mobile based payment DPI that facilitates interbank, peer-to-peer, and person-to-merchant transactions and services.
It allows government organisations and private companies to use direct transfer to reach 80 million unbanked women, who previously received their salaries in cash. This directly contributes to achieving the gender equality goal through furthering financial inclusion and economic empowerment.
DPI can also reduce administration, make public services more efficient and improve security by providing an alternative means of authentication to traditional forms of ID. This improved infrastructure is especially impactful for low- and middle- income countries where it can accelerate growth by an estimated 20-30%.
“In the past four years, we have come to share our understanding of trustworthiness in many dimensions of digital identity,” Professor Crowcroft said. “In the next phase of our work, over the course of the next 3 years, we shall extend this understanding to digital infrastructures in general, and to digital public infrastructures in particular.”
Despite government-backed efforts to cement the UK’s place as a science and technology superpower by 2030 with multi-million pound investments in AI, new research launched today from online learning platform Coursera places the UK 45th globally for technology and business skills proficiency.
The findings come from Coursera‘s 2024 Global Skills Report, which draws on data from over 148 million learners and 7,000 institutional partners from 109 countries to identify skill proficiency trends.
This data is combined with third-party indicators, including the Global Innovation Index (GII), Labour Force Participation Rate, Human Capital Index (HCI), and GDP per capita.
The results indicate that the UK is continuing to fall behind in the global race for key skills, having ranked 38th in 2022 and 64th in 2023.
This year, the UK continues to be outperformed by prominent European counterparts, including Germany (3rd), France (5th), Spain (7th), as well as developing economies like Brazil (19th).
The UK’s struggle to upskill are matched and exceeded by other Anglophone peers, most notably the United States, which places 69th.
Coursera’s data reveals rapid growth in GenAI course enrolments – a 1,060% year-on-year increase – as the world races toward AI literacy. While the UK has seen a 961% increase in AI upskilling in the past 12 months, it has seen a lower uptake than the global average, and lags behind the US (1,058%).
Nations across the world appear to be prioritising AI upskilling more than the UK. In Brazil, which ranks among the global top 20, and which attains cutting-edge proficiency in tech and data science, there has been a 1,079% year-on-year increase in GenAI course enrollments.
“With the UK technology sector employing millions of people and contributing over £150 billion to the nation’s economy, the country’s institutions and leaders must continue to prioritise upskilling to remain competitive in the AI age – one in which two-third of jobs may be exposed to the some degree of automation” said Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO.
“This report aims to offer actionable insights for UK businesses, governments, and academic institutions as they respond to this unprecedented disruption, and contribute to a future in which access to high-quality learning empowers everyone.”
Police Scotland is set to deploy Motorola Solutions’s body cameras to police officers across the nation in a new deal.
10,500 Motorola VB400 body cameras are set to be rolled out to officers across Scotland as part of the £13.3m investment in enhancing transparency, accountability, and public safety.
Prior to the procurement, Police Scotland conducted a national public consultation on body camera deployment with 81% of 9,000 responses agreeing that it would increase public confidence in policing.
“The introduction of body worn video will transform policing in Scotland, and a national roll-out is a key priority,” said Jane Connors, deputy chief constable, Police Scotland. “Body worn video can significantly enhance public confidence and support officer and public safety by providing effective and transparent evidence of police and public actions.”
“Body worn video will also improve the quality of evidence presented in court to deliver faster justice for victims by increasing early guilty pleas and reducing time spent at court for victims, witnesses and police officers,” Connors said.
The VB400 claims to reliably capture high-quality video and audio, aiming to provide a more objective record of events, helping front-line officers to document incidents and as they attempt to increase trust with the communities they work in.
Footage is automatically uploaded to VideoManager for secure storage that is tracked and auditable, protecting the chain of custody so that the police, public, and judicial systems can be assured of the integrity of video evidence.
“We are proud to support Police Scotland with its nationwide deployment of the VB400 body camera, an innovative technology solution developed in Scotland that will help to make communities safer,” said Mark Schmidl, senior vice president for international sales, Motorola Solutions.
The UK has come out ahead of the rest of Europe with the highest valued AI sector, coming in at £72.3bn.
According to Tech Nation’s UK Tech in the Age of AI report, the UK ranked first in Europe in terms of AI funding, and £2.67bn was raised by UK AI startups in 2023.
Further, 16% of total UK VC investment went to AI startups in the first quarter of 2024, showing the marked interest in the emerging technology.
Existing companies are also jumping on the AI trend, with one in two using AI to improve their existing product offering.
In Scotland specifically, of the £332m that was invested in tech, £62.8m was invested in AI last year.
According to the report, the UK has 1,800 VC-backed AI startups, and is already home to 20 AI unicorns.
When looking at the tech ecosystem overall, the UK is home to 171 unicorns, and the first quarter of 2024 saw a combined market value of the UK at $1.1 trillion (£860bn).
“The UK tech sector reached a combined market valuation of $1.1 trillion in Q1 2024, a landmark achievement for UK tech and another milestone in our remarkable growth story,” Carolyn Dawson OBE, CEO of the Founders Forum Group said.
UK-headquartered funds reached £39.4bn in the first quarter of 2024, the biggest quarterly fundraise to the sector to date.
This is after UK startups managed to raise £16.72bn in 2023.
All of this has contributed to making the UK tech sector the number one tech ecosystem in Europe, and the third most valuable in the world.
“There are already encouraging signs in 2024,” Dawson said. “The $50.2b raised by UK-headquartered funds in Q1 2024 represents the biggest quarterly fundraise to date, releasing new, deeper buckets of capital for UK startups.
“84% of UK startup and scaleup founders are positive about the future of UK tech and 69% of tech professionals believe AI will have a transformative impact on the UK economy and country as a whole.
“The UK now has the opportunity to lead the responsible development of AI on a global scale.
“As we look forward, we can be hugely positive about this crucible moment for UK tech.”
Following a major breach of 23andMe, the DNA testing and hereditary platform, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is partnering with its Canadian counterpart to investigate the company.
In October 2023, 23andMe, the genetic testing site which harbours deeply personal information such as ethnic backgrounds, medical information, and heraldry linkage, suffered a data breach that affected 6.9 million users.
The company disclosed that it was not aware of the data breach until hackers already had five months of access, and published stolen data on a 23andMe-related subreddit.
The breach affected around half of the company’s userbase, and included information such as names, birthdate, relatives and genetic relation percentages, ancestry reports, and even user locations that had been self-reported.
To access the information of 6.9m users, the hackers only needed the already breached credentials of 14,000 individuals, which could then be used to access information of other users due to a feature called DNA Relatives. Users could opt-in to automatically be linked to genetic relations who also opted-in to the programme in an effort to find long-lost relatives.
The feature made the hacker’s efforts all the more damaging, opening up the door to millions of accounts’ personal information and genetic history.
As a custodian of highly sensitive personal information, 23andMe may face intense scrutiny from the UK and Canadian data protection watchdogs.
Following the data breach and outcry from affected users, 23andMe turned to blaming victims for reusing passwords rather than admitting fault for the data breach, or for users that were affected as a result of their DNA relatives feature.
“People need to trust that any organisation handling their most sensitive personal information has the appropriate security and safeguards in place,” John Edwards, the UK Information Commissioner said in a statement.
“This data breach had an international impact, and we look forward to collaborating with our Canadian counterparts to ensure the personal information of people in the UK is protected.”
The investigation will leverage support from both nations, examining the scope of information exposed and its potential harms, whether 23andMe has adequate safeguards to protect the highly sensitive data, and if the company provided adequate notification about the breach to regulators and affected customers.
“In the wrong hands, an individual’s genetic information could be misused for surveillance or discrimination,” Phillipe Dufrense, privacy commissioner of Canada, said.
“Ensuring that personal information is adequately protected against attacks by malicious actors is an important focus for privacy authorities in Canada and around the world.”
Apple has made a major move in the AI race in its annual developers conference, announcing the launch of Apple Intelligence.
The new personalised AI model will be integrated into Apple products, such as their iPhone and Macbooks,
The tech giant has largely been absent, or at least lagging behind, in the AI race. Its slower pace has seen it be overtaken by Microsoft, and then Nvidia, resulting in the company slumping from first to third most valuable company in the world.
The new AI feature will see ChatGPT integrated with Apple’s offerings, including with its chatbot Siri, to offer greater assistance in navigating its products.
The integration of ChatGPT relies on a partnership with its creator, OpenAI, which is also in a partnership with rival Microsoft for its AI development.
The new system, Apple Intelligence, will use ChatGPT to enhance Siri’s responses to queries, as well as boost text and content generation capabilities on Apple devices.
It will see AI integrated into almost all of Apple’s services, from text editing and refinement to driving directions.
The tech, which will be rolled out as a pilot in the autumn, is similar to Microsoft’s Copilot AI feature, but will come at no extra charge on new Apple devices.
Apple, which has long justified its high price tag with top security assurances, stressed the data security and privacy of Apple Intelligence to developers.
Some AI processes will be carried out on individuals’ phones, while others which require more power will be sent to the cloud. AI’s requirements include a hefty energy tag and an vast swath of data, meaning that many functions rely on cloud data storage and data centres to be carried out. Apple has stressed that while this will occur, no data will be stored in the clouds used to process AI tasks.
While Apple may be looking to strengthen its position in the AI arena, this partnership, and Apple’s coinciding confidence in ChatGPT, could also strengthen OpenAI’s dominance in the AI.
“Gartner predicts that in 3 years, there will be hardly any conversational platforms left on the market (if any) that are NOT powered by an LLM,” Annette Zimmerman, VP analyst of the emerging technologies and trends team at Gartner said.
“Chatbots, avatars, and virtual assistants without GenAI technology will not be competitive any longer, that’s how disruptive GenAI has become .”
The Data Lab, Scotland’s Innovation Centre for Data and AI, has announced it has reached 5000 members in its online community of data and AI professionals and enthusiasts, doubling its membership numbers since last year.
Launching in September 2021 and free to join The Data Lab Community offers data and AI professionals, students, and enthusiasts alike the opportunity to connect, collaborate, learn and grow with like-minded individuals.
With members from over 80 countries, it has become a forum for academics, students and professionals to network and collaborate with people passionate about data and AI in the UK.
“We’re delighted to see our Community grow and develop into a thriving, collaborative space for data and AI enthusiasts in Scotland and beyond in less than three years,” Paul McMillan, community and events programme manager at The Data Lab, said.
“The impact The Data Lab Community has had already connecting those passionate about data and AI and adding value to our members through mentorship and job opportunities has far exceeded our expectations.
“Over 1,700 jobs have been shared through our platform, and we’re thrilled to support the Scottish tech sector, helping people like Tricia to advance their careers in data and AI.”
The Community has committed itself to offering an inclusive platform and providing safe spaces for some underrepresented groups in data and AI in an effort to help them thrive.
Only 24% of people working in tech in the UK are women, and 12% of the UK workforce are from a BAME background.
In contrast to these figures, nearly half of The Data Lab’s Community are women, and a quarter are from an ethnic minority background.
Community sub-groups like Women in Data and AI, as well as Neurodivergence in Data and AI, support people from marginalised groups in advancing their data and AI careers by improving access to a support network and opportunities for training, upskilling, and mentorship.
Several of its members have secured jobs through its job board, including Tricia Govindasamy, who joined The Data Lab Community ahead of moving to Scotland from South Africa to pursue a master’s degree in data science at the University of Strathclyde.
From making new connections, speaking at The Data Lab events, and judging an international data visualisation competition, Tricia ultimately applied for two jobs on the jobs board and was coached by The Data Lab partner DataKirk to help prepare for the interviews. She recently accepted her job as an information analyst at Public Health Scotland.
“Before moving to Scotland to pursue my studies, I joined The Data Lab Community to get involved in the data and AI space and get the opportunity to network with people in the UK, ” Tricia said.
“People have been really helpful, and the knowledge and networking have exceeded my expectations. I have been able to make connections that I wouldn’t ordinarily have access to.”
Scotland’s only private electric vehicle charge point operator, FOR EV, has been boosted by a £10 million follow-on investment from the Scottish National Investment Bank.
The cash injection follows an initial investment of £2m by the Bank in 2021, followed by £10m the following year, and now a further £10m commitment.
“The provision of sufficient charging points is an essential part of Scotland’s net zero transition,” Andy Clapp, executive director at the Scottish National Investment Bank, said.
“We are pleased to back FOR EV’s ambitious plans and its ability to grow and scale as a company, delivering widespread environmental and economic impact.
“FOR EV is aligned to the Bank’s mission to help deliver a net zero Scotland.”
The funding aims to help FOR EV’s ambitious plans to deliver high-quality, accessible electric vehicle charging hubs across the UK and further expand its unique fleet proposition, which offers bespoke solutions for fleets of all sizes to transition to a net zero future with greater ease.
The latest of these points was unveiled this week at Loch Ryan ferry port in Cairnryan, near Stranraer, where Stena Line’s 1.3m annual customers will now have access to rapid electric vehicle charging.
The new charging hub, which can charge eight electric vehicles simultaneously and provide around 320 charging sessions a day, is the result of a public-private joint venture between FOR EV and South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE).
Martin Valenti, director of net zero, nature and entrepreneurship at SOSE, said: “By supporting FOR EV to install new rapid EV charge points at Loch Ryan Port, we’ve significantly improved the port’s infrastructure. This investment will provide a boost to drivers who have already made the transition to electric vehicles, encourage more to make the switch, and help the South of Scotland play a key role in the wider goal to reach Net Zero by 2045.”
SOSE has invested £170,000 into the facility within the ‘landside’ area of the port, which forms part of the UK’s busiest domestic short sea route, Cairnryan-Belfast.
As well as serving Stena’s customers, the hub can also be used by the local EV driver community, providing a boost for the area’s charging infrastructure. Two additional charge points have also been installed specifically for use by Police Scotland.
Lindsay Wallace, the executive director of sales and innovation Europe at FOR EV, said: “Our newest hub will future-proof Stena Line’s Loch Ryan Port while also providing local people, who have until now suffered from a dearth of EV charging infrastructure in their area, with improved access to high-quality charging facilities.
“The £10m of follow-on investment from the Bank will support our ambitious plans to further improve EV infrastructure across the country. For example, we hope to work with SOSE to explore other prospective charging sites that will help accelerate the development of a robust EV infrastructure for Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders. This will support and encourage more businesses and communities to adopt electric vehicles as we journey towards a Net Zero future.”
Andrew Kane, regional port operations manager at Stena Line added: “At a time when electric vehicle usage is increasing rapidly, the introduction of the port’s new EV charging infrastructure, provided by FOR EV, will help to meet customer demand for charging services.
“Customers will now have the convenience of rapid charging their vehicle before boarding or after disembarkation of our vessels to continue their journey seamlessly. Stena Line has ambitious sustainability goals, and introducing infrastructure such as this within our ports to support our customers’ own sustainability is key to reaching our targets.”
The Royal Bank of Scotland‘s Business Activity Index, a monthly index measuring the change in output for Scotland’s manufacturing and service sectors between each, scored 55.2 in May, an increase of 1.4 from April, indicating an expansion in private sector activity for the fifth month in a row.
This is the strongest pace of growth in two years, with data showing it was largely achieved riding the tails of improving demand for services, which masked a downturn seen in demand for manufacturing.
However, job growth and backlog accumulation was only found in service firms as a result of the downturn in manufacturing.
After picking up significantly in April, price pressures also eased in May.
The Bank also observed an increase of inflows of new work, which supported the growth in activity. This was the fourth successive month Scottish Businesses registered a rise in inflows in new work.
The index, which is seasonally adjusted, saw a three-month high in new work, which was broadly in line with the rest of the UK.
Service firms were the centre of this increase, where a faster intake of new businesses offset the continuous downturn at manufacturers to stabilise overall growth.
Better marketing strategies, new client wins, and increased customer activity helped support the latest growth, according to surveyed service providers.
Business confidence is also up: Scottish businesses are optimistic about growth in the coming year, and cite plans for digitalisation and marketing improvements, as well as improving demand conditions.
This confidence however, as mainly driven by the service sector, as manufacturers grappled with their downturn.
Even with the overall uptick, Scottish firms were the least optimistic out of the 12 UK regions surveyed for the second month in a row.
Still, the report revealed more positives for Scotland.
Job creation accelerated, with hiring activity the strongest in three months, owing wholly to the increase in service sector where expansion drove recruitment and employment.
Of the 12 monitored nations and regions, Scotland only feel behind Northern Ireland and the West of England when it came to stronger increases in employment levels.
Pressures on capacity in the service sector, after their marked growth, has resulted in a fractional increase in order backlogs across Scotland after a year of continual decline.
While manufacturers rapidly depleted their backlogs, the service sector linked the uptick to additional business from new and existing clients.
London was the only region outside of Scotland that reported a rise in the level of outstanding business.
Cost burdens remained intense – input prices rose sharply in May, with anecdotal evidence pointing to rising labour, fuel, and raw material costs.
Despite this, inflation eased after April’s high. Input price inflation in Scotland was stronger than the rest of the UK for the first time in four months this May.
Average prices rose in May across Scotland as well, largely driven by increasing cost burdens. Output charges also rose steadily in May, in line with the rate of increase in input prices.
The rate of inflation was at its second-slowest speed in over three years, and was weaker than the UK average.
Judith Cruickshank, chair of the Scotland board at RBS, commented: “The Scottish private sector exhibited further gains midway through the second quarter – the upturn was contingent on the sustained rise in services activity which rose at a sharp and quicker rate and was vital in offsetting the shortfalls seen at manufacturers.
“Moreover, the divergence between the two sectors is set to persist as manufacturing new orders fell rapidly, while demand trends improved for services.
“May data also signalled a faster rate of job creation and a fresh rise in outstanding business, but these upturns were again fuelled by the service sector.
“While the service sector looks set to expand in the coming months as expectations for future activity strengthens, the manufacturing sector will only hold back growth momentum, unless demand for goods picks up.”
Despite it being four years on from the start of the global pandemic, companies are still struggling to manage hybrid working.
Hybrid work has become the overwhelming norm across industries which allow it, despite many CEOs and bosses trying to urge workers back to the office. A temporary holdfast from the pandemic, the phenomenon seems cemented in the working world.
However, a survey commissioned by Lucid Software of over 2,500 workers across the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands in April 2024 found that over half (54%) of organisations still struggle to balance employee productivity.
Further, 62% of firms continually changed their work policies in the past four years, oscillating from fully remote to in the office mandates, with hybrid policies peaking in between.
In conjunction with these shifting tides is a strong (47%) resistance to change from employees.
Employees also had complaints about hybrid models, with one in five (20%) contemplating quitting due to their organisation’s hybrid work policy, as well as the lack of tools to support their remote work.
In the UK specifically, employees struggled to feel supported in their hybrid working models, with about a quarter (27%) finding brainstorming and kick of sessions lacking in clear steps, and 37% finding the ownerships of tasks across their teams to be vague.
Two-fifths (41%) of UK respondents reported that projects were also failing as a result of their company’s work policies.
Despite concerns, only 38% of businesses had adopted digital collaboration tools, and less than that (29%) had offered collaboration training for workers to streamline the hybrid process.
Lucid’s study revealed a stark gap between the IT companies are investing in and what is actually providing benefit.
Nearly two in five (38%) of UK entry-level workers use at least three productivity applications, with the figure increasing for managers and executives. With only 29% being offered collaboration training, Lucid thinks that this is what has lead to 23% of UK workers saying they lack the right applications for success.
Further, the number of applications necessary for hybrid work have overwhelmed and frustrated 35% of UK workers, culminating in a catch-22 cycle of quantity over quality.
“Despite the fact that companies have been practising hybrid work for years now, leaders continue to fall short in adequately equipping and training their employees with the essential digital tools and processes needed for success,” Jarom Chung, vice president of product management at Luci Software said.
“Specifically, the data demonstrates that effective visual collaboration is not just a luxury but a necessity in hybrid work, empowering employees to streamline vital information, collaborate seamlessly and maximise their productivity.”
Nvidia is now the second most valuable publicly listed company in the world, after its market value skyrocketed past $3 trillion (£2.3tn), beating out Apple.
AI seems to be defining success in the market place, with Nvidia’s AI chip promises putting it just behind Microsoft in terms of market value, which leapt over Apple thanks to its partnership with OpenAI.
The chip company’s share price jumped by 5% to more than $1,224 (£957.67) following a sustained climb from last year. In February, the company was valued at $2tn, with the rapid rise galvanised by Nvidia’s plans for a stock split.
This split, set to happen on 7 June, would increase the number of shares ten times, and reduce their value, which would make Nvidia shares more affordable.
Starting off as a computer chip company mainly geared towards video games, Nvidia is now seen as the leader in the AI chip frontier, with the company aiming to stay at the forefront of chip technology to enable further AI expansion.
Shareholders have clearly responded to the strategy, as Nvidia saw sales triple since April 2024 compared to April to June 2023. Compared to the first three months of 2024, sales have risen 18% since this April.
However, not everyone appears to be fully on board. Scottish Mortgage, the UK’s second largest investment trust, has doubts that Nvidia will live up to its predicted sales gains, though the AI future does seem bright.
Scottish Mortgage has gone so far as to take “a little bit of money out” of the chip giant, deputy manager Lawrence Burns said, as reported by Microsoft Start, though it remains the trust’s largest holding.
Burns cited a potential “period of digestion” in the AI landscape which might delay returns on AI chip design and manufacturing. A further mismatch in demand, between those excited to see new AI chip advancements and those actually needing to implement these AI chips, could also cause a “bumpy period” for chip makers.
Internet addiction is changing the brain chemistry of young people which could escalate their addictive behavioural patterns, new research shows.
The study from PLOS Mental Health reviewed research of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine how different parts of the brain interact when a person suffers from an internet addiction.
Findings were concerning – those with a confirmed internet addiction had a decrease in the functional connectivity of regions of the brain involved in active thinking, which is necessary for executive control and responsible for decision making and memory.
Adverse effects were discovered in multiple neural networks across the brains of affected young people. During rest, there was increased brain activity in certain regions, most likely due to the addiction.
The study examined the fMRIs of 237 individuals with a clinically confirmed internet addiction, with participants ranging from 10 to 19 years of age.
The alterations seen in these individuals brain chemistry resulted in further addictive behaviours and tendencies. The study even suggested that these changes were connected to mental health and development challenges, and intellectual ability and physical coordination.
Max Chang, lead author of the study and an MSc student at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (GOS ICH), said: “Adolescence is a crucial developmental stage during which people go through significant changes in their biology, cognition and personalities.
“As a result, the brain is particularly vulnerable to internet addiction-related urges during this time, such as compulsive internet usage, cravings towards usage of the mouse or keyboard and consuming media.
“The findings from our study show that this can lead to potentially negative behavioural and developmental changes that could impact the lives of adolescents. For example, they may struggle to maintain relationships and social activities, lie about online activity and experience irregular eating and disrupted sleep.”
The research could even be used to see the signs of internet addiction early, allowing for early treatment and mitigation.
“Clinicians could potentially prescribe treatment to aim at certain brain regions or suggest psychotherapy or family therapy targeting key symptoms of internet addiction,” he said.
“Importantly, parental education on internet addiction is another possible avenue of prevention from a public health standpoint. Parents who are aware of the early signs and onset of internet addiction will more effectively handle screen time, impulsivity, and minimise the risk factors surrounding internet addiction.”
Irene Lee, who served as senior author of the research paper also based at GOS ICH, said: “There is no doubt that the internet has certain advantages. However, when it begins to affect our day-to-day lives, it is a problem.
“We would advise that young people enforce sensible time limits for their daily internet usage and ensure that they are aware of the psychological and social implications of spending too much time online.”
Social media has long been a worry among parents and child safety advocates for its potential adverse affects on young people. The Online Safety Act was introduced to combat online harms largely caused by inappropriate content online, but social media has also been slammed for its addicted algorithms.
Just this year, New York City filed a lawsuit against TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube, claiming that their algorithms were addictive and harmful to children.
Social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, has updated their terms and conditions to explicitly permit adult content and pornography on the site.
Since its founding, X has allowed pornographic material for a long time in practice, and has been a haven for sex workers and adult content creators to promote their work. Reuters estimated that around 13% of all of X’s content was pornographic back in October 2022, just before Elon Musk took over the site.
However, these posts were not explicitly allowed as per the site’s rules. In an update to its terms and conditions though, adult content is now officially allowed.
“You may share consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual behavior, provided it’s properly labeled and not prominently displayed,” the new rules said.
But X went further as to defend the creation and sharing of adult content as it enshrined its permit in the new rules.
“We believe that users should be able to create, distribute, and consume material related to sexual themes as long as it is consensually produced and distributed,” the updated rules read. “Sexual expression, whether visual or written, can be a legitimate form of artistic expression.”
The site will restrict adult content for children and “for adult users who choose not to see it.”
Part of these restrictions mean that pornographic and adult images are kept from highly visible places, such as profile pictures. Creators are also tasked with labelling adult content so that they can be hidden from view for those trying to avoid it on the site.
Restricted content will include “content promoting exploitation, nonconsent, objectification, sexualization or harm to minors, and obscene behaviors,” X’s new rules state.
Other recent moves that provide more spaces for adult content creators include upgrades to X’s communities tool, which allow people to form groups with other users. Users can create NSFW communities focused on sharing adult content that can now be hidden from users outside of the group.
The AI chip race is heating up yet again, as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has revealed its latest designs, as well as a plan to develop more models to challenge industry leader Nvidia over the next couple of years.
The explosive proliferation of AI capabilities has galvanised an intense demand for advance chip technology, especially as energy costs dampen accessibility and excitement for emerging technology.
AMD’s CEO Lisa Su introduced a new chip, the MI325X accelerator, at the Computex technology trade show, saying it should be available by the end of 2024.
The California-based chip company has been vying for years to overtake Nvidia, the industry leader, which currently dominates the AI semiconductor market with 80% of its share.
AMD claims that their new chip will perform inference, the process of generative AI computation, 35 times better than its old models. The company also revealed that its new series, MI400 will arrive in 2026.
The company is matching Nvidia’s annual release cycle, attempting to keep up with demand for newer, more advanced chips to power AI computing needs.
“This annual cadence is something that is there because the market requires newer products and newer capabilities,” Su said at the event, as reported by Reuters.
Investors are keen for semiconductor designers and manufacturers to keep up the pace – AMD saw their shares increase by more than double since the beginning of 2023. Nvidia, however, saw a seven-fold increase in their shares.
The AI race continues to heat up as Arm, the UK chip design company, announced that it expects 100 billion of its own chips to be ready for AI worldwide by the end of next year.
Gartner also recently predicted that worldwide AI chip revenue is expected to grow by a third (33%) just this year, set to total £56 billion.
“There’s a reason it’s called data science,” Dr Janet Bastiman, chief data scientist at Napier AI said to a packed keynote hall at DIGIT Expo West. “Because science is magic that works.”
While advances in AI may seem magical, they can cast a dangerous spell on businesses and projects alike if its use does not have a solid enough foundation. After all, science requires a sturdy basis and methodology to ensure it works.
Dr Bastiman explained some of the most common and prolific AI downfalls and how understanding data, and data science principles, is essential to successful AI implementation.
AI projects can be multi-million pound projects, and make critical decisions in sectors like healthcare, financial services, and public service. They can be used to detect anomalies for natural disasters, fight financial fraud, and screen for cancer.
With many companies jumping on the AI hype train, however, they could be on the road to nowhere, or worse – crashing and burning.
A lot of teams might have a simplistic look at how AI systems actually work: “Identify the problem, gather some data, feed it into AI, mess around a bit and you’ll have a solution.
“This is the magic you’ve been fed,” Bastiman mused—and she would know, considering her deep and impressive experience in and around data.
Bastiman served as the chair of the Royal Statistical Society’s data science and AI section, was part of the FCA’s synthetic data expert group, and is now the chief data scientist at Napier AI, using AI to fight financial crime.
She knows that “no company sets out to fail,” but without a solid foundation of data, these can be doomed to fail.
Building this requires robust data management, understanding, and a stringent scientific method. Bastiman presented some baseline essentials in building this data foundation.
Building Your Data Backbone
AI is just data science in action. Data is the foundation of AI, and ensuring it is understood and sturdy is an essential first step of using AI.
“You probably all heard that really twee saying that ‘data is the new oil,’” Dr Bastiman said. “Well, if we follow that analogy, and it is a fair one, we do not use crude oil straight from the ground.”
It does not matter how advanced a machine is, or how skilled the driver is – crude oil is not going to power a vehicle. The same is true for data. It needs to be properly understood, filtered, and harnessed for specific use cases.
Dr Bastiman provided integrated starting points for ensuring that data is robust enough for AI implementation.
“So the first question that I am always asked by customers whenever they want an AI project is: ‘How much data do I need?’ And it is a really difficult question to answer because the answer is always: ‘It depends.’”
Availability, reliability, representation and bias are all things to consider from the amount of data one inputs.
Data can be corrupted even before it finds its way to you – biases and assumptions can be made before it even ends up on a system. Understanding data providence and what assumptions were made prior to its implementation is therefore vital.
Understanding if a data set is representative of what the data is being used to convey – for instance, using a national basketball team to estimate average height across a country’s population, would not be representative. While these assumptions and knowledge bases are obvious to us, they need to be implemented in a system.
This is where understanding use cases is so vital – it is important to know what the AI is being used for so that the appropriate amount of data can be used.
Trying to represent an entire population may require more representative data, but sometimes, less is more.
Irrelevant data can cloud an AI system’s vision, having it consider things outside the realm of its scope.
“When image recognition first came out, there was the famous problem of the background of the image being important to the classification,” Dr Bastiman said.
“So Huskies, for example, were not identified for any feature of the dog just from the snowy background. So if you showed the AI an array of images asking it to recognize a dog with a snowy background, it would always say Husky.
“So that background was irrelevant, but the network learned something it shouldn’t have done.”
Distilling data is essential, but documenting this is also vital in ensuring that bias is mitigated and assumptions can be tracked.
Cutting 95% of data away to hone in on an AI system may be required, but keeping this data for other uses, and marking where and how this data was cut, can allow analysts to track where a data set may have gone wrong.
While some data may be irrelevant, data gaps may exist, and more data may need to be generated to fully encapsulate and solve an issue.
This is where synthetic data can be useful, but the tool also has associated risks and potential pitfalls.
Synthetic data cannot be used on its own, Dr. Bastiman says. It needs to not only represent data, but have the same shape as real data.
“So the same statistics, the same correlations and interdependencies,” she explained.
“You can’t just generate randomness or you’ll learn nothing or at best your models will learn the wrong things.
“If you don’t have any real data to start with, then you’re making it up again from your bias, which is a huge problem.”
Even with real data, mitigating bias is difficult. “We are all biased based on our experience,” Dr Bastiman said. “And all of that information affects how we deal with data, what we believe to be true.”
Dr Bastiman continually referenced documentation and testing as essential to developing a data set – it is data science after all, and taking note of assumptions, processes, and testing is vital to ensuring the AI model actually works, and mitigated biases.
“Testing is absolutely critical to data science.”
Without proper testing, models that are unrepresentative, use incorrect assumptions, or are biased can enter an algorithm with dire consequences.
But what happens when you just do not have the right data for a project?
Dr Bastiman dedicated some of her keynote to the issue of dealing with managers, directors, and executives when using data science and AI.
“It’s really hard if you’re asked to do something that isn’t great, and until you’re at a level where you can say no, you may be forced to do these things as a data scientist,” she said.
These asks can range from using a smaller dataset than required, to ethical disagreements and moral quandaries on biases, implementations, to what is actually possible based on the available data.
Explaining why a project just won’t work can be a challenge, however.
“It’s really difficult as it depends on the statistical literacy of your management team,” she said. “In an ideal world, they all would be. In the real world, they tend not to be.”
“And in that ideal world, the conversation should go a little bit like this. You express concern about a project, you say it’s unethical, your boss who’s lovely is very accepting of this, asks what you need, and you say I’ll try something else. That would be lovely.”
But the real world is often far from ideal. Often, data scientists are met with passive aggressiveness, threats to their job, a “do it or I’ll find someone who will” attitude.
First, Bastiman issued a plea to stakeholders.
“If you are a stakeholder and your data person is expressing concerns, please listen to them. Particularly if it’s a business critical project, they are expressing concerns for a reason.
“It’s not because they’re incapable, it’s because they have bad data. And bad results are never good for a company.”
But if that still does not work, Bastiman issued advice for data specialists themselves to explain their data concerns.
Showing your work – explicitly why a project just won’t work – can be one of the most effective ways to prove to management that you are not incapable, but that rather a job is impossible.
“A lot of the things that we’re working on have real world impacts,” she asserted.
“You need to make sure it’s right. Show them whether it can be done or not, what you need to fix it, or whether it just can’t be done.”
Meta has revealed it discovered “likely AI-generated” content used across its social media platforms including fake profiles posting comments supporting the state of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In a quarterly security report, Meta found profiles in Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated profiles, including profile pictures, posting comments pretending to be Jewish students, African Americans, and others posting comments under news organisations’ and US lawmakers’ posts.
The comments largely targeted audiences across North America, and praised the ongoing genocide of Palestinians perpetrated by Israel.
In its report, Meta credited the social media AI campaign to STOIC, an Israeli political marketing company based in Tel Aviv.
This is the first time Meta has disclosed the use of generative AI for text in influence operations on any of its platforms since it emerged in 2022, though Meta has previously found profile photos generated by AI since 2019.
Meta has said that they removed the Israeli campaign, and were not overly concerned in how the rise of AI could mitigate their efforts to quell the spread of rampant misinformation and disinformation across their platforms.
Since the advancement in large language models, experts have been concerned on how these tools can be used by governments and threat actors alike to conduct misinformation campaigns and conduct operations across social media.
Amid many global conflicts, and during an important election year across many countries in the globe, the rise of AI misinformation is stoking fears across international governments.
Over 300 million children around the world have been affected by online sexual abuse in the last year, new research from the University of Edinburgh’s Childlight Global Safety Institute shows.
The Light Index aims to produce a global chronical of the scale and nature of child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) and how this proliferates online.
The picture painted by the data is stark, detailing how pervasive this despicable crime is across the world.
One on eight children globally, meaning over 300m, have been subjected to online solicitation in the last 12 months, such as unwanted sexual talk, which can include non-consensual sexting, unwanted sexual questions and unwanted sexual act requests by adults or other youths.
Further, one in eight children across the globe have experienced non-consensual taking, sharing or exposure to sexual images and videos in the last 12 months.
Child online sexual abuse existed in ever country that recorded it, with instances ranging from non-consensual sexual online contact, to sextortion: the solicitation of sexual acts or imagery often via coercion or threatening behaviour.
Globally, 3.5% of children experience sexual extortion, according to the report.
“This is on a staggering scale that in the UK alone equates to forming a line of male offenders that could stretch all the way from Glasgow to London – or filling Wembley Stadium 20 times over,” Paul Stanfrield, CEO of Childlight, said.
“Child abuse material is so prevalent that files are on average reported to watchdog and policing organisations once every second.”
The survey also revealed patterns among perpetrators – 9% of men globally have said that they have engaged in online behaviours at some point in their lifetime that could be classes as online child sexual abuse offending. Further, even more men said that they would be more likely to engage in these activities if it was more difficult for them to get caught.
“And yet paradoxically, this coincides with the roll out of end-to-end encryption on major file-sharing platforms that are increasingly used to secretly share sexual images of children,” Paul Stanfield said.
“Just when more than ever we need to shine a light to protect our children, with reports of child sexual exploitation and abuse material being filed once every second, lights are being turned off.
“If encryption of file sharing is to be the norm, a balance clearly must be struck that meets the desire for privacy for all users, with adequate proactive detection of child sexual abuse material online.”
Encryption has been a worry of child advocacy groups since its mainstream introduction to messaging apps. End-to-end encryption allows for increased privacy of messages from law enforcement and companies, but equally provides privacy to those using messaging platforms to commit or solicit criminal activity.
These measures were squashed, largely due to concerns over overall privacy as well as the difficulty associated with rolling out the technology whilst maintaining a level of privacy. balancing privacy, and child safety without turning to total surveillance continues to confound governments, privacy rights groups, and child safety advocates alike.
But the Childlight report highlights the pervasive issue of child sexual abuse online. Other reports, notably from Ofcom, shows how the expanding digital landscape, as well as advances in AI and deepfake creation, have created even more avenues for perpetrators to enact their crimes or access child abuse material.
The problem is prolific, and Childlight’s haunting survey shows that even more perpetrators would exist if they were given the means, meaning that even more children would face these harms.
DIGIT Expo West is bringing Scotland’s largest annual technology showcase to Glasgow. Attendees will experience a packed conference programme featuring keynotes, interactive workshops and panels, alongside an extensive exhibition hall and networking area.
The 100% live event will be held in Glasgow’s Scottish Events Campus, and registration is still open and completely free.
DIGIT Expo is the largest annual enterprise technology conference series run in Scotland, and a must-attend for senior technologists, digital leaders, entrepreneurs, and C-level decision makers.
Speakers at DIGIT Expo West 2024 include:
Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologies, Google
Cheryl Hung, Senior Director, Arm
Faisal Kamrn, Principal Technology Analyst, Sony
Elizabeth Fairley, COO, Talking Medicines
James Maciver, CTO, Phlo
Ayorinde Thompson John, Executive Director, JPMorgan Chase & Co
Dr. Sofiat Olaosebikan, lecturer in computer science, University of Glasgow
Marika Lohmus, Head of Risk & Payments, Cleo
Alison B Lowndes, Senior Scientist: Global AI, Nvdia
Euan Wielewski, Machine Learning Lead, NatWest
Speaking about the event, DIGIT founder Ray Bugg, said: “DIGIT Expo West will deliver our strongest speaker line-up ever, with high-level representation from some of the world’s biggest companies and some incredible innovators from the Scottish tech ecosystem all set to take the stage.
“The excitement around the event is clear, with over 2,000 registrations already confirmed, promising a packed event full of Scottish tech’s best and brightest, presenting a networking opportunity like no other – all this for our first ever DIGIT Expo West, demonstrating a tangible appetite for this kind of event in Glasgow.
“You won’t want to miss it. Get in now before we have to close registrations!”
DIGIT Expo West 2024 | Secure Your Place
For more information on DIGIT Expo West and how to book your FREE place at the conference, please visit: www.digitexpowest.com/register
Stephen Bird, the chief executive of abrdn, is stepping down from the role after four years.
According to reports, Bird has agreed with the board to step down after it was decided now is a good time for a change in leadership.
Abrdn’s current chief financial officer will replace Bird on an interim basis as the company looks for a successor.
The financial services company says it will begin the search after a “significant strategic repositioning.”
The move follows a tumultuous year for the Abrdn, which has taken an array of cost-cutting measures this year. The firm aims to cut 500 jobs in an effort to save the company up to £150m in costs.
The company has also sold its assets – totalling £7.4bn – under management private equity business to Partia Investment for up to £100m.
Abrdn’s chair, Sir Douglas Flint, said of Bird: “He joined us as the pandemic took hold and, despite the restrictions this imposed, spearheaded a fundamental reshaping of the company, leading from the front to create a company that can be competitive in a fast-evolving sector.”
He added that Bird had “the courage to make tough but necessary decisions,” to improve Abrdn’s standing.
Bird called his time leading Abrdn a privilege, adding that he is immensely proud of the work we have done together to simplify abrdn and position the company for sustainable growth.”
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has released its first interim paper for its investigation into anti-competitive behaviour in the cloud market, revealing significant barriers as companies try to adopt multi-cloud strategies.
The preliminary paper was released as the CMA continues their investigation has affirmed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure are dominating the cloud market, with Google taking up the third spot. Other independent cloud providers are being squeezed by egress fees.
A lack of interoperability in interfaces, authentication, and platforms were major hurdles stopping customers from adopting multi-cloud.
The potential fall outs of multi-cloud – its expensive cost and associated complexity – often outweigh the sometimes vague benefits of adopting a multi-cloud strategy, often preventing customers from pursing this strategy.
Egress fees, one of the main concerns that prompted the initial investigation, were also seen as a barrier, but the CMA found that these were not front of mind when customers were looking to switch. The extra fees to transfer data to rivals were often expected, even if they were exorbitant. The acceptance of these extra and often prohibitory fees, however, is a concern for fair market competition and consumer rights.
Customers did seem concerned about the transparency of these egress fees, though they were generally accepted.
Switching not only brought cost and operational risk, the CMA found, but it took IT staff away from core work and was more complex and time consuming that teams anticipated.
On the technical side, cloud customers cited tech barriers like portability of code, incompatible data formats, and difficulty in migrating databases and file storage systems.
Egress fees were even affecting the ability for customers to use multi-cloud strategies for cloud backups, which can leave them at greater security risk they rely on the same provider for all of their cloud data backups.
The CMA’s report also highlighted that AI will only heighten competition and vendor lock-in.
“Concern does also exist,” said paper read, “that once an AI solution is chosen, it will be difficult to switch away from, creating another opportunity for cloud providers to potentially lock customers into their cloud offering.”
While the paper did not constitute a final judgement, it does confirm some of the major and more technical details regarding anti-competitive behaviours among cloud providers.
People recovering from strokes could soon have their recovery boosted by a new ‘soft robotic arm’ being developed at the University of Aberdeen.
James Greig, a final year PhD researcher, has designed and built the device which could allow patients to carry out individual physiotherapy at home in addition to existing assisted physio sessions.
The lightweight, affordable equipment uses flexible, inflatable material to support the arm as it makes basic repetitive movements – essential for rehabilitation following a stroke.
Like many public services, access to physiotherapy is limited and so Greig identified a need for technologies that patients can use safely at home to compliment their regular physio.
“What we’re trying to address is a product to address the lack of availability to physiotherapy for stroke patients who have maybe suffered some loss of mobility in the arm,” Greig said.
“I wanted to make a lightweight device that can be made readily available in the community. So it’s cheap, easy to wear and doesn’t need specialist assistance to use.
“It means people can have more physiotherapy so they can do some work at home as well as the work that they’ve been doing with the physiotherapist.”
All strokes are different depending on what part of the brain has been affected but many people will be left with high muscle tone where the muscles develop spasticity and the contracted muscles can leave the arm in an almost fixed pose.
Typically, throughout rehabilitation, physiotherapists will try to mobilise the limb, which, if done from an early stage, can reduce high spasticity.
“We’re basically trying to mimic the same movement that physios will encourage in their sessions but using robotics in a way that allows people to do this at home without the physiotherapist actually being there,” Greig said.
“If we can augment the physio-led rehabilitation with some work they can do at home using the robotic device, then we can improve their recovery.”
Worn on the arm and secured with straps, the robotic device works by pumping air from a small compressor into a series of strips of material which inflate, press against each other and encourage movement in the limb – akin to a bicep curl.
While Greig’s innovation was designed with stroke patients in mind, it could be used to aid anyone undergoing physiotherapy on this specific movement of the arm.
Soft robotics such as these are a relatively new field which – in contrast to the rigid bodied robots built from metals and hard plastics – use flexible materials that can be used (among other things) to mobilise and move the limb.
“The key challenge is how we scale up these devices to generate enough force to allow them to work on larger joints without making them too heavy and too cumbersome,” Greig said.
While it’s too early to begin clinical trials, information and feedback sessions held with a group of physiotherapists saw encouraging feedback for the device.
Thérèse Lebedis, consultant AHP (occupational therapist) in Stroke, who has worked with Greig on the project, said: “This is an exciting development in the field of robotic technology, offering the potential to provide an adjunct to rehabilitation therapies such as occupational therapy and physiotherapy and the opportunity to increase intensity through repetition.”
GDPR fines cost businesses €4.5 billion (£3.83bn) over the last six years, new research from Nordlayer has shown, with the biggest fines coming from Spain, Italy, and Germany.
Individual data protection authorities across Europe have issued 2,072 GDPR violation decisions since the legislation was introduced six years ago.
Businesses in Spain had the worst record, with 842 GDPR fines, paying out a total of €80m (£68.16m) in fines since 2018.
Italy came in second overall. The country had less than half the number of violations as Spain, at 358, but paid even more in total fines, which amassed to €229m (£195bn).
German companies had 186 total violations, paying €55m (£46.8bn) in fines since 2018. Romania was close behind with 179 violations, but this only amassed to €1.1m (£940,000).
At number five is Poland, with 73 violations and €4m (£3.4m) in total fines.
While these countries had the most amount of individual fines, Ireland had the most prolific violations and fines since GDPR was introduced. This is largely because Ireland is where most major global tech companies – including Amazon, Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, have their European headquarters.
The Irish Data Protection Authority (DPA) issued €2.8 billion (£2.4bn) fines since 2018, and made rulings on some of the most transformative GDPR cases seen.
Meta was charged with six of Europe’s ten biggest fines, the biggest amounting to €1.2bn (£1bn) for a lack of sufficient legal basis for data processing in 2023, which caused Meta to transform much of its business plan for its flagship platform, Facebook. Meta faced a number of fines regarding data processing and sharing among its various platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Still, the Irish DPA has often been lambasted for not being harsh enough on some of its rulings on Meta. The EU data protection board (EUDPB) has had to takeover and review a number of cases made against the tech giant. The 2023 case caused Meta to change its data processing completely, which ushered in its controversial pay or consent advertising model.
TikTok paid €345m (£294bn) for GPR violations, and Google faced two different fines, one for €90m and one for €60m.
In Luxembourg, Amazon was fined €746m (£635m) for GDPR violations.
The most common reason for a fine was insufficient legal basis for data processing – essentially, companies did not have a legal reason for processing the person data that they did. These fines cost a total of €1.6bn (£1.3bn) since 2018. General data processing non-compliance costs over €2bn (£1.7bn) across 578 fines.
“We’ve witnessed businesses across industries change their data handling practices and invest in security measures to achieve compliance,” said Carlos Salas, cybersecurity expert at NordLayer.
“While full compliance has been challenging for many companies, the GDPR’s impact in empowering individuals and holding organizations accountable for data mishandling cannot be overstated. It has reshaped the digital landscape, forcing a much-needed prioritization of privacy rights.”
“Achieving and maintaining GDPR compliance is an ongoing journey, not a one-time destination,” Salas said.
“Data protection regulations evolve, and cyber threats become more sophisticated, so businesses must remain proactive in their data privacy and security approach.”
The National Records of Scotland (NRS) has disclosed that personal and sensitive data it held was accessed and published as part of the cyber-attack on NHS Dumfries and Galloway which was first reported in March.
NRS holds information on the NHS Dumfries and Galloway IT network as it runs an administrative service for the NHS to allow the transfer of patient records when people move between health board areas, across borders within the UK or move overseas.
Based on their internal audit of the stolen information, the NRS has identified “a small number of cases where there was sensitive information help temporarily on the network at the time of the attack,” a statement read.
NRS says that they are already engaging with affected individuals and has informed the Information Commissioner.
Some information which comes from the statutory births, deaths and marriages registers was also accessed.
“We are aware that this will be distressing news for those individuals most directly affected. This is a live criminal investigation, and we are working closely with NHS Dumfries and Galloway, Police Scotland, Scottish Government and other agencies involved in the inquiry,” NRS chief executive Janet Edgell said.
“NRS takes cyber security and privacy seriously. This includes ensuring the continued safe provision of the service we provide.”
The initial cyber-attack took place in March and accessed and stole data from the Dumfries and Galloway NHS Health Board. Later, in May, the threat actor group threatened to publish 3TB of data, which was published on the 6th of May.
In March, the cyber gang Inc Ransom posted a ‘proof pack’ of data stolen from the health board, threatening to lead the sensitive information unless its “unspecified demands” were met.
The health board denied to comply, and the data was released. While the health board confirmed that the gang did not access primary patient health information records, the information published could put NHS staff at greater risk of identity theft.
While patient records themselves were not accessed in full, millions of small, separate pieces of data were accessed, including highly personal information about patients, which could put them at greater risk of targeted attacks.
UK workers could collectively safe 19 million hours a week by 2026 by using generative AI for routine and repetitive tasks, according to new research from Pearson, the global learning company.
The stat comes from the latest instalment of Pearson’s Skill Outlook series which looks ahead to 2026 and identifies the top ten job tasks with the most time saved by using the technology, in five countries (Australia, Brazil, India, UK and US).
Based on their research, Pearson found that generative AI can most effectively support tasks related to record maintenance, data collection, or researching and compiling information for others.
For the study, Pearson used census and other workforce datasets to create a single view of the current workforce across the countries involved in the research. Each job was viewed simply as a collection of tasks, and then calculated how much time was spent on each task each week. Then, they calculated what this would be in 2026 as GenAI is adopted into the workplace.
The company then calculated which tasks would have the greatest hours reduced by GenAI, specifically large language model chatbots and AI text-to-visual media generators.
Based on this methodology, Pearson compiled the top ten work tasks with the most hours saved by GenAI by 2026 in the UK.
Coming in number one is maintaining current knowledge in an area of expertise, which would have 679,000 hours saved by generative AI. However, Pearson did not explain what AI tools would reduce the time spent on maintaining expertise, or explain how this is not a “high value” task.
Next on the list is developing education programmes, plans, or procedures, followed by creating visual designs of displays.
A full list of the work tasks and their predicted saved hours is below.
Maintain current knowledge in area of expertise (679,000 hours)
Develop educational programs, plans, or procedures (665,000 hours)
Create visual designs or displays (525,000 hours)
Maintain operational records (512,000 hours)
Prepare legal or regulatory documents (490,000 hours)
Maintain health or medical records (406,000 hours)
Prepare reports of operational or procedural activities (401,000 hours)
Advise others on products or services (387,000 hours)
Explain regulations, policies, or procedures (386,000 hours)
Monitor individual behaviour or performance (383,000 hours)
By augmenting tasks with generative AI, companies and their workers may be able to reallocate time to focus on other work aspects, such as strategic thinking, collaboration, caring for others, decision making, innovation, problem solving, empathy and leadership.
“In nearly every workplace, people spend their day on common, time-consuming tasks that eat away at productivity or their work-life balance,” Oliver Latham, VP of strategy and growth for Pearson Workforce Skills, said.
“If those tasks could be augmented with generative AI, employers and their workers could reallocate time to the things that needs a more human touch and mean more to their customers.
“Employers should consider how to incorporate this new technology into their teams, and redesign roles to free people up to focus on more valuable, human tasks. They should also consider the need for training and support for employees, so they can use it effectively and responsibly.”
AI-enhanced malicious cyber-attacks ascended to the top of the Gartner emerging risk rankings in the first quarter of 2024, according to Gartner, Inc.
“The prospect of malicious actions enabled by AI-assisted tools is concerning risk leaders worldwide,” said Gamika Takkar, director, research in the Gartner Risk & Audit Practice.
“The relative ease of use and quality of AI-assisted tools, such as voice and image generation, increase the ability to carry out malicious attacks with wide-ranging consequences.”
During the first quarter of this year, Gartner surveyed 345 senior enterprise risk executives to capture and benchmark their top 20 emerging risks and provide leaders a view of their causes and potential consequences.
Risks related to AI captures the top two rankings in the quarter one 2024 survey with AI-enhanced malicious attacks cited as the top emerging risk and AI-assisted misinformation also causing concern.
Escalating political polarisation, which entered the tracker for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2023, dropped from the second most cited concern to third place.
Following this was globally consequential risks, at 61%, and misaligned organisational talent profiles (60%).
Causes of AI-Enabled Attacks and Misinformation
One of the key drivers of AI-enabled attacks and misinformation is the rapidly expanding access to its capabilities.
AI enhancement can provide malicious code, and facilitate phishing and social engineering, which enables better intrusion increased credibility and more damaging attacks.
“Its low cost and rapid growth also expose users to the technology who have little awareness on how to recognise when AI-enabled tools are providing valid vs false or misrepresented information,” said Takkar.
Potential Consequences to Mitigate
The potential impacts of AI-enhanced attacks and misinformation are far-reaching and consequential to reputation, productivity and the ability of organisations to respond.
Increased breaches and disclosure requirements can erode trust in an organisations and brand among clients, consumers, and partners.
“The speed and quality of AI-enhanced attacks and misinformation also hinder information security teams’ ability to respond and adapt to the new security landscape, further amplifying its vulnerabilities,” said Takkar.
Nearly 90% of surveyed IT security decision makers admitted that their organisation had suffered damage before containing and investigating cloud security incidents, a new report has revealed.
Research examining how organisations approach cloud security incidents from Cado Security revealed widespread shortcomings that leave organisations vulnerable to delays in resolving incidents.
The primary contributing factor to these delays resulting in the damage is a lack of visibility and control over cloud environments, the research revealed.
Worryingly, 43% of organisations have experienced significant damage from a cloud incident alert that didn’t get investigated and 23% of cloud alerts are never investigated.
For those incidents that are investigated, 65% of respondents noted spending 3-5 days more on cloud investigations than on-premises, leaving them open to additional risk as attackers infiltrate networks.
As many as 93% of those surveyed highlighted that delays in resolving incidents were due to a requirement to request permission to access resources from the cloud team. This is concerning given that 92% stated that they have a formal process for cloud investigation in place.
36% of organisations reported lack of visibility and control over cloud environments was the biggest operational challenge when it comes to timely investigation and response to cloud-based threats.
A lack of cloud-specific knowledge also contributed to this with 34% of organisations reporting limited cybersecurity skills specific to cloud technologies.
Integration of security tools across multiple cloud platforms was also flagged by 45% as the top operational challenge when it comes to responding to cloud security threats, perhaps due to the 82% that confirmed having multiple tools/platforms in place to perform forensics investigations in the cloud.
This makes investigating threats hugely challenging for 70% of those surveyed, as resources are impacted across multiple cloud providers.
“A robust incident response programme – especially one that extends to the next generation of technologies – is critical to safeguarding organisations against emerging threats,” said James Campbell, CEO & co-founder at Cado Security.
“Yet, as revealed in our latest report, organisations still lack streamlined incident response strategies for cloud environments. The findings reinforce that organisations urgently need to adopt new approaches to swiftly investigate and respond – not only to better address the risks, but also to comply with the complex and ever-changing incident response reporting mandates across the globe.”
The good news is that those surveyed recognise where investigation and response automation can be improved and how AI and automation can benefit investigations going forward to make processes more efficient and avoid the risk of failed compliance and costly breaches.
This is positive when 44% said data breaches and data loss incidents are the biggest challenge faced with cloud-based threats and 34% admitted to having been fined for not meeting regulatory requirements.
Looking forward, over half of respondents said cloud response platforms will better their visibility into cloud-based threats and risk and 95% believe AI will play a major role in cloud incident response in the next two years.
Organisations are exploring various strategies to perform investigation and response in cloud environments.
Naturally, security teams have attempted to leverage existing tools, such as SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) platforms to address these challenges.
However, the findings indicate that incident response automation is twice as effective as SOAR for cloud investigations.
Positively, 77% expect the annual overall budget for cloud forensics and incident response IT security budget to increase in 2024 and 83% of organisations have a budget for cloud forensics.
“Whilst there is still a way to go, it seems businesses are taking steps in the right when it comes to investigation and response automation and are investing in the right places with almost 40% recognising that cloud response platforms will minimise the costs associated with investigations, not to mention the savings associated with the cost and repercussions of a data breach,” added Campbell.
There has been a 341% increase in malicious emails in just the past six months, according to new research from SlashNext.
The company’s State of Phishing 2024 Mid-Year Assessment found that over the past 12 months, malicious emails have increased by 856%.
Interestingly, the company also tracked the increase in malicious emails since the launch of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022, a staggering 4151%. The stark figure suggests that the threat landscape has been remarkably transformed by the introduction of ChatGPT.
Generative AI becoming available on a mass scale has enabled threat actors to usher in a new era of sophistication, allowing for more advanced BEC attacks, and refined social engineering tactics.
But the report also shows significant threat factors from credential phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and trusted services attacks as part of this trend.
As well, 11% of phishing were QR-based, showing how prolific the newer method is in the evolving threat landscape.
Text-based BEC attacks rose 29% since the start of 2024, and 45% of all reported mobile threats were ‘smishing,’ a form of phishing that uses text messages.
Credential phishing, however, was the number one access point for breaches, increasing 217% from October 2023 to March 2024.
Another threat on the rise in CAPTCHA-based attacks, where threat-actors manipulate CAPTCHA bot checks which are meant to prevent fake accounts, spam, and automated bots.
Attackers exploit this by generating thousands of domains and using CAPTCHAs to hide credentials phishing forms from security protocols that are unable to bypass the CAPTCHAs.
To hide phishing and malware, cyber-criminals are still relying on tried and trued domains to maintain an increased level of anonymity.
Microsoft Sharepoint, AWS, Salesforce, and other large service vendors are the most popular platforms to host phishing malware, according to the report.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is looking into Microsoft’s new feature which takes consistent screenshots of user’s devices every few seconds.
The new feature, Recall, will encrypt and store these screenshots on a person’s laptop, and will feature exclusively on its upcoming Copilot+ PCs which will feature Microsoft’s AI tools.
The UK’s data watchdog is contacting Microsoft for further details on the product’s safety, including queries on how this data is stored and how easy it is for others to access.
Microsoft says that users can limit the types of screenshots Recall can take, including excluding certain websites from being captured. According to the company, it is an optional experience.
“Recall data is only stored locally and not accessed by Microsoft or anyone who does not have device access,” the firm said in a statement.
In order to access the snapshots, a person would need to access the physical device these are stored on, and bypass any security controls such as device log ins.
Recall was created to help users find and remember things they have seen online, similar to a photographic memory. It would let users search through their history for past searches and images they have seen in more natural language.
But privacy experts have larger concerns around how accessible this locally stored data is.
While users may be able to control what Recall can screenshot, they may also avoid opening certain documents or visiting certain websites on their devices all to avoid having this information photographed.
Cyber experts are concerned on what Microsoft’s technology will look like in practice.
“This is basically spyware,” Kevin Robertson, COO and co-founder of Acumen said.
“It’s good to see the ICO carrying out this investigation, but it’s unlikely to make any real difference. Microsoft is too big and too powerful to be brought down. They’ll just say its optional and it’ll get implemented anyway. Most users will turn it on without realising the impact or it will be on by default.
“How on earth can Microsoft even think about calling itself a security company with features like Recall? This is going to get abused on so many levels.
“Imagine your PC taking screenshots of you putting in passwords, bank details etc, all just stored on your PC. If your PC is compromised, or if that info is shared into Copilot etc., it’s just liable to abuse.
“This will be the next Microsoft ‘feature’ to hit the news when it’s exploited in a major way.”
A new census commissioned by Scottish Enterprise has revealed the national economic development agency is on track to meet the Scottish Government target of growing Scotland’s employee-owned business (EOB) community to 500 companies by 2030.
The census – conducted by academics from the University of Leeds, University of New South Wales, and the White Rose Employee Ownership Centre (WREOC) – is the second commissioned by the agency, with the first taking place in May 2022.
Since then, the EOB community in Scotland has grown by 47% or 91 companies – an average of 45 new EOBs per year.
If this trend continues, Scottish Enterprise will be on course to meet the 2030 target, which the Scottish Government set out in its 2021 Programme for Government.
Latest figures show there are currently 286 EOBs operating in Scotland (up from 195 in 2022) – comprised of 177 Scottish-registered EOBs, 25 Scottish-registered workers’ cooperatives and 84 EOBs with trading/production operations in Scotland, but which are registered elsewhere.
It also revealed that Scottish-registered EOBs and worker cooperatives have a combined turnover of £1.47 billion and employ 7,593 people. This is a 113% (£780m) increase in turnover and a 42.5% (2,265) increase in employment since the 2022 census.
“It is heartening to see such positive growth across the sector as we progress towards our target of 500 Employee-Owned Businesses in Scotland by 2030, with 47% more companies now in operation by comparison to 2022,” minister for employment and investment Tom Arthur said.
“These businesses provide unique benefits to the people and places in which they operate, generating increased levels of productivity and resilience, which in turn drive profitability, as evidenced by a huge 113% increase of the total turnover across the sector in the past two years.
“These companies are also more inclusive places to work, with nearly all Scottish-registered EOBs using our Fair Work policy guidance to invest in workforce development and create channels for effective voice.”
Darah Zahran leads the Co-operative Development Scotland team – the Scottish Enterprise unit responsible for growing employee ownership. She said: “This latest census really highlights the fantastic progress that has been made over the last two years in growing Scotland’s EOB community.
“Employee ownership is an attractive succession option when an owner is retiring or moving on. It gives remaining employees a meaningful stake in their organisation, a genuine say in how it’s run, ensures consistency for customers and anchors the business in its community for the long term.
“EOBs are also proven to be more resilient in times of economic crisis, more profitable and more productive – all key measures of business success. It’s great to see that more and more businesses are recognising these advantages and embracing employee ownership.”
Companies supported by Scottish Enterprise to transition to employee ownership in the last two years include Alexander (Scotland) & Co steel merchants in Stirling/Bathgate, and Glen Drummond chartered accountants in Livingston. Chris Wilson, director at Glen Drummond, said “Clients are at the heart of everything we do.
“Employee ownership allows our customers to continue getting a quality service from the people they know and trust for years to come.”
In May 2023 another EOB was created when Dunkeld-based Land Rover Experience Scotland gave employees a majority stake in the business. Director Will Cox said: “Through Scottish Enterprise we learned about employee ownership and, following discussion with our employees, decided to sell 83% of the business to the team, with one remaining director retaining the other 17%.
“Employee ownership ended up being a great fit for us, as we really wanted to ensure the business stayed in the local area and retained its existing management team.”
Kilwinning-based Shuttle Buses became employee owned in September 2022 (read more here), giving all 70 employees a company stake as MD David Granger prepared for his eventual retirement. He said: “Having considered various exit strategies, it was clear that employee ownership was the best way forward.
“We have a great workforce, some of whom have been with the company for almost as long as I have, and safeguarding their future was equally important to me as my own.”
An expanded threat landscape, the consistently changing tide of workers in and out of jobs, and the proliferation of AI as a tool for threat actors continue to contribute to a vast, complex, and dangerous cybersecurity ecosystem.
Further, the human factor continues to be a major concern, as Proofpoint’s Data Loss Landscape report found that mistakes by employees is the biggest data loss problem facing companies.
This is potentially why nearly three quarters (70%) of CISOs believe their business is at risk from a cyber-attack in the next year, up from 68% in 2023, and 48% in 2022.
According to Proofpoint’s new report which surveyed 1,600 security leaders, CISOs are feeling confident, and fearful, for the coming year in cyber.
Less than half (43%) of CISOs believe they are not prepared for a targeted cyber-attack, down from 61% in 2023 and 50% in 2022.
While it is positive to see an increase in CISO confidence, it remains to be seen if this is hubris amid the growing threat landscape and their own cyber concerns. Further, this still leaves over four in ten not confident in their team’s ability to handle a cyber-attack.
The Human Element
While social engineering and ransomware continue to plague firms, nearly three-quarters (74%) of CISOs label human error as their most significant cyber vulnerability, an increase from 60% in 2023 and 56% in 2022.
Four out of five (80%) think some key cyber concerns in the next two years will include human risk and employee negligence.
This is despite most (86%) thinking that their employees understand their role in protecting the business from cyber-threats.
Besides human error, around two-fifths (41%) believe ransomware will be a top threat in the next year.
Great Expectations
CISOs have said that their place in the boardroom has solidified in the past few years, with more citing that they see eye to eye with their boards (84%), a huge uptick from 61% in 2023.
However, this heightened recognition is likely due to increases cyber pressures, which is in turn, placing greater responsibility and demand on cyber teams.
Over half (53%) of CISOs have either experienced burnout themselves, or seen someone on their team experience it, in the past year.
Two-thirds (66%) of CISOs have found that the expectations placed on them are excessive, which marks an increase from 61% in 2023, 49% in 2022, and 21% in 2021.
Edinburgh-based CCU International has won the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) most prestigious award, Small Business of the Year.
A trailblazing enterprise tackling carbon emissions through innovative carbon capture technology, CCU International was just one of three Scottish companies to take home top prizes from the awards.
FSB’s event saw representatives from more than 140 small businesses, plus self-employed professionals, gather from across the UK, with each previously names a regional winner in their respective area.
Three Scottish businesses were crowned category winners. CCU International took home the Innovation Award and Small Business of the Year, while Beyond Green and Boogie Beat Music and Movement, both also Edinburgh-based, claimed the Diversity & Inclusion and Franchise Awards, respectively.
A start-up business aiming to revolutionising carbon capture, CCU International pioneers next-generation, proprietary technology that not only captures but refines carbon dioxide directly from industry chimney, flue, and exhaust stacks.
It then channels CO2 back into industry or converts it to valued commodities such as aggregates for construction material, sustainable aviation fuels and surfactants used in household consumer products.
Beena Sharma, CEO and co-founder at CCU International, said: “Our double win is so humbling, especially considering we’ve only been at this for a short period compared to some of the other phenomenal businesses here. This is the small business awards, so it’s just the start of many things to come, and naturally, it feels amazing, all while validating that we’re on the right track.
“Our technology has proven that what we’re doing can be done, despite being told otherwise many times. Being recognised not just for innovation but as a business making a difference, impacting climate change in a big way, is incredibly rewarding.
“As a Scottish-based company, it’s a huge win for Scotland. We often compete for attention but have a phenomenally innovative business community and a great entrepreneurial ecosystem. Recognition from FSB will give us credibility with new and existing clients, firmly placing us as technology innovators, not just in Scotland, but also the UK, and hopefully paving the way for confident global expansion.
“We’ve had many highlights, and each award win solidifies that we’re heading in the right direction. Stepping on stage for the first time was surreal, but winning the overall best UK small business award took us by surprise. It shows that it’s not about how long you’ve been doing it; it’s about the impact you’re having.”
Meanwhile, Beyond Green claimed the Diversity and Inclusion Award for its commitment to increasing accessibility. Its small and passionate team of sustainability advisors help businesses make better choices by futureproofing their operations, protecting their profit margins, and building their values into their business.
Beyond Green is a B Corp and a Disability Confident Leader, dedicated to created a better, more efficient, sustainable and equitable future for everyone.
Lisa Kaiffer, Director at Beyond Green said: “We are incredibly proud to have won the Diversity & Inclusion Award. We’ve spent the last few years investing in our accessibility programme, building our skills and awareness internally, and starting conversations with our clients. It’s been amazing to see the difference we can make for each other and our wider network.
“Accessibility is sometimes seen as a topic exclusive to disability, but it’s also about how we all can work better together and build on each other’s strengths. The last few years have been a lot for most people, with the pandemic, the energy crisis, and the cost of living crisis adding more pressure in all aspects of our lives. Creating a space for us to talk about what we need from work makes a big difference. It means a lot to be recognised nationally for our efforts.
“As a small business, we don’t have the same marketing reach as large organisations. We’re reliant on word-of-mouth from clients and recommendations from our networks. Winning this award gives us the platform to raise our profile and stand out from our competitors.”
Boogie Beat Music and Movement provides engaging music, movement classes and workshops in the community for families, schools, nurseries and children’s birthday parties. It also runs inter-generational workshops in care homes and day centres, and was awarded this year’s Franchise Award.
Mairi Curle is the franchise owner of Boogie Beat Music and Movement for Edinburgh Mid and East Lothian. She said: “Winning this national award feels surreal. I was up against tough competition from people who are much more established than I am. I think the speed of our growth is the reason we’ve been given this award, and it’s really nice to be recognised for that success over the last 18 months since I took the business on. I have a fantastic team delivering such a high-quality service, and they are going to be blown away by this win.
“We’re diverse in terms of what we offer – from our intergenerational sessions to our workshops in communities and classes. We really focus on inclusion and accessibility, and we’re always striving to improve ourselves for the benefit of the communities we work in. Supporting communities is so important to us and our nominated charity, Love from Jamie, does amazing work locally and we are proud to donate a portion of all our sales to them.
“Boogie Beat brings such fun and happiness to so many people. The intergenerational sessions are a special sort of magic. When you bring children from nursery into the care home environment, a light comes off the faces of women and men living there. Seeing the children dance inspires adults to participate, get up and do a bit of a boogie. The staff, children and adults are thrilled. It’s just such a special thing to do. I leave thinking ‘this is the best job in the world’.
“This is the first time I’ve entered the FSB awards, and I’d encourage any small business to enter. You have literally nothing to lose. You know your business inside out, so put it down on paper. It’s not difficult to fill out the application form, and you just never know where it’ll take you.”
This year’s Celebrating Small Business Awards grand final, delivered in partnership with headline sponsor Tyl by NatWest, was a momentous occasion for FSB, representing a celebration of the UK’s best small businesses and self-employed professionals. Founded in 1974, FSB has been the leading voice for millions of small businesses and the self-employed community in the UK for half a century.
Martin Mctague, OBE, national chair of FSB, said: “Congratulations to CCU International. They are a shining example of how small businesses are harnessing and driving innovation, technology and sustainability to energise the UK’s economy and inspire the next generation.
“Well done, also, to Boogie Beat Music and Movement and Beyond Green. From leading the charge for sustainability, to supporting businesses, increasing accessibility and strengthening communities through connection, Scottish small businesses showcased the creativity and tenacity that holds up our national economy.”
A new campaign by Scotland’s national and international economic development agency Scottish Enterprise aims to alert businesses – particularly SMEs – to potential supply chain opportunities in the energy transition sector.
Spending on offshore wind is expected to reach £29 billion by 2030 under Scottish government plans, and Scotland’s clean heat market is forecast to be worth £31 billion this decade.
As Scotland’s oil and gas industry moves towards low carbon technologies, the agency will provide companies with the support and advice they need to help them diversify and grow.
“The energy transition is the single biggest market opportunity for Scotland’s manufacturers, with significant opportunities in areas including offshore wind, hydrogen and clean heat,” Scottish Enterprise head of high value manufacturing, Jerome Finlayson, said.
“We’re focused on helping accelerate technology innovation, supply chain capability and investment in manufacturing and key infrastructure – such as ports and harbours – with the potential to double the number of companies operating across the energy sector.
“Our research shows that manufacturers need help to better understand how they can enter this market and take full advantage of these opportunities. That’s why we’re ramping up our efforts to target and support companies who could diversify.”
There are currently 169,000 skilled professionals employed in Scotland’s manufacturing sector, according to Scottish government statistics.
In the first instance, the campaign by Scottish Enterprise will target companies identified as having a specific or potential link to the supply chain requirements of the energy transition sector.
A great example of this in action is Renfrew-based screw compressor manufacturer Howden, who is diversifying into the heat pump industry for the first time with Scottish Enterprise support.
The company historically worked with the oil and gas industry. Assisted by Scottish Enterprise, the company took a strategic decision to invest in innovation to develop new designs for its oil-free range of screw compressors.
Howden’s value stream leader David McMahon said: “Howden have seen huge growth in demand from the energy transition sector.
“Our global customers see the value Howden’s compressors can bring to these emerging markets.
“Howden and Scottish Enterprise have a long-standing relationship where we have been supported financially with launching new products. We continue to work with SE as we look to add new products to our portfolio to support these sectors.”
The campaign will call on manufacturers throughout Scotland to come forward and find out how they could get involved.
A campaign landing page on the Scottish Enterprise website provides more details on companies already successfully making the transition, factsheets on how to get involved, and further information on the kind of support Scottish Enterprise can provide.
Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, has partnered with UK charity Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), as it backs new standards of good practice for combatting child abuse on pornography sites.
The IWF hopes that Pornhub’s backing of the standards will encourage other online pornography purveyors to join suit.
The IWF is challenging pornography sites to screen people by age, but this can simply be done by asking users to declare that they are over 18.
However, the standards do say that sites must obey UK law, and the Online Safety Act is set to require more stringent age verification for adult entertainment sites, such as using biometric AI face-scanning techniques that can estimate age.
Aylo previously stated that these more robust checks will simply drive users to darker and more illegal corners of the internet, and even took different US states to court over similar age check laws.
Now, the company says it will comply with the UK law.
“We will always comply with the law, and the Online Safety Act is no different, but it is clear from other jurisdictions that site-level age verification does not prevent children from accessing adult content online while creating data privacy issues and increasing exposure to unmoderated, harmful material”, it said.
Rather than age checks across sites, Aylo is pushing for mandated parental controls on devices to mitigate underage access to adult sites.
Besides checking user age, the IWF’s standards have protection for the people adult sites feature as well.
Pornography websites must check the age of those appearing in content using AI tools before it is published, and ensure that all participants have consented to appear in the content shown.
Further, sites must compare content with material that has been digitally fingerprinted as child abuse imagery before it is uploaded to a site.
People who published and appear in material on the adult sites must also be confirmed to be over 18 years old.
“These are pragmatic and necessary steps,” Baroness Gabrielle Bertin, who was appointed to lead a review on pornography by the UK government said. “There is potential to make a huge impact for children’s online safety here.”
Pornhub and many of the adult entertainment companies operating on the platform have faced numerous allegations and lawsuits for not doing enough to protect the people featured across the platform. Many have said that the company did not do enough to stop the spread of non-consensual content, like revenge porn.
However, the IWF has said that since the parent company changed ownership in 2023 and rebranded from Mindgeek to Aylo, it is improved. Aylo’s annual ‘actionable reports’ of child sexual abuse material fell to zero, according to IWF, likely due to the company expanding its moderation team and implementing more safeguards.
Still, advocates are not ready to congratulate the biggest website for adult entertainment in the world.
“What I don’t want to happen is this to be used as some sort of marketing tactic, or some sort of paper pushing exercise, or a way for companies to say, on the surface, ‘look we’re doing something’, but actually, the substance of it is not there,” Elena Michael, co-founder of advocacy group Notyourporn told the BBC.
Gartner Inc has announced the top five strategic technology trends in software engineering for 2024 and beyond.
Meeting business objectives is one of their top three performance objectives for 65% of software engineering leaders, according to a Gartner survey of 300 software engineering and application development team managers in the US and UK from the fourth quarter of 2023.
By investing in disruptive technologies, software engineering leaders can empower their teams to meet business objectives for productivity, sustainability and growth.
“The technology trends Gartner has identified are already helping early adopters to achieve business objectives,” said Joachim Herschmann, VP analyst at Gartner.
“These disruptive tools and practices enable software engineering teams to deliver high-quality, scalable AI-powered applications, while reducing toil and friction in the software development life cycle (SDLC), improving developer experience and productivity.”
1. Software Engineering Intelligence
Software engineering intelligence platforms provide a unified transparent view of engineering processes that helps leaders to understand and measure not only velocity and flow but also quality, organisational effectiveness and business value.
Gartner predicts by 2027, half (50%) of software engineering organisations will use software engineering intelligence platforms to measure and increase developer productivity, compared to 5% in 2024.
2. AI-Augmented Development
Software engineering leaders need a cost-effective way to help their teams build software faster.
According to the Gartner survey, 58% of respondents said their organisation is using or planning to use generative AI over the next 12 months to control or reduce costs.
AI-augmented development is the use of AI technologies, such as generative AI and machine learning (ML), to aid software engineers in designing, coding, and testing applications.
AI-augmented development tools integrate with a software engineer’s development environment to produce application code, enable design-to-code transformation and enhance application testing capabilities.
“Investing in AI-augmented development will support software engineering leaders in boosting developer productivity and controlling costs and can also improve their teams’ ability to deliver more value,” said Herschmann.
3. Green Software Engineering
Green software engineering is the discipline of building software that is carbon efficient and carbon-aware.
Building green software involves making energy-efficient choices for architecture and design patterns, algorithms, data structures, programming languages, language runtimes, and infrastructure.
By 2027, 30% of large global enterprises will include software sustainability in their non-functional requirements, up from less than 10% in 2024.
The use of compute-heavy workloads increases an organisation’s carbon footprint, and generative AI-enabled applications are especially energy-intensive, so implementing green software engineering will help organisations prioritise their sustainability objectives.
Platform engineering reduces cognitive load for developers by offering underlying capabilities via internal developer portals and platforms that multiple product teams can use.
These platforms provide a compelling ‘paved road’ to software development, which saves time for developers and improves their job satisfaction.
Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organisation will establish platform engineering teams, up from 45% in 2022.
5. Cloud Development Environments
Cloud development environments provide remote, ready-to-use access to cloud-hosted development environment with minimal effort for setup and configuration.
This decoupling of the development workspace from the physical workstation enables a low-friction, consistent developer experience and faster developer onboarding.
Virgin Media O2 has claimed a new milestone in its Shared Rural Network (SRN) rollout, as the Scottish Isle of Eigg became the operator’s 150th site to benefit from improved 4G coverage.
These new and upgraded sites are providing residents, businesses and visitors in rural areas with faster and more reliable mobile connectivity than ever before.
While these 150 sites are controlled by Virgin Media O2, customers of Three and Vodafone are also benefiting from the operator’s extensive rollout. Taking into account progress from all operators, this means Virgin Media O2’s customers can now benefit from 4G services at more than 200 rural locations.
The remote, community-owned Isle of Eigg, which has a population of less than 100, became the 150th site of benefit from improved mobile connectivity after Virgin Media O2 used boats, helicopters and off-road vehicles to install a new 4G mast on the island.
The island previously had coverage from just one provider so the upgrade offers residents choice and will help many visitors stay connected for the first time.
The SRN is a £1 billion joint initiative between mobile network operators and UK Government to extend 4G connectivity to 95% of the UK’s landmass by the end of 2025.
“We are continuing our Shared Rural Network rollout at pace to ensure more rural communities can access reliable mobile connectivity,” Jeanie York, chief technology officer at Virgin Media O2 said.
“Having delivered more sites than any other operator, our commitment to delivering this ambitious programme and levelling up rural areas is clear.”
“The 150 sites we have delivered will enable more residents, businesses and visitors in rural areas to benefit from better mobile coverage, with dozens more locations set to go live in the coming weeks. This work is vital in tackling the urban-rural digital divide that exists in the UK.”
Of the 150 rural sites that have been built or upgraded by the company so far, 117 are in some of Scotland’s most remote areas, including Shetland, Ardross, and Argyll & Bute.
A further 28 are in rural parts of England, including parts of Yorkshire, Suffolk and Kent, while three sites have been upgraded in Northern Ireland and one in Wales.
The upgrades provide customers with faster and more reliable mobile data and higher quality voice calls, transforming coverage in areas that previously suffered from patchy or slow services.
“Backed by government funding, Virgin Media O2’s rapid rollout of the Shared Rural Network is delivering better 4G coverage to rural communities across the UK,” Julia Lopez, minister of state for data and digital infrastructure said.
“The completion of its 150th mast in the Isle of Eigg in Scotland involved the use of helicopters, boats and off-road vehicles to get the build done and shows the UK Government’s commitment to rural residents and businesses, so the British public can enjoy good connectivity wherever they live.”
Meta’s social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, as are to be investigated by the EU for potential breaches in EU online content rules related to child safety, which could lead to major fines.
After the passing of the landmark Digital Services Act by the EU, large tech companies are required by law to mitigate illegal and harmful content on their platforms, with particular safeguards for children.
The European Commission announced it would open an in-depth investigation into Facebook and Instagram following concerns the platforms had not done enough to address risks to children on their platforms. The investigation comes after Meta submitted its risk assessment in September 2023.
“The Commission is concerned that the systems of both Facebook and Instagram, including their algorithms, may stimulate behavioural addictions in children, as well as create so-called ‘rabbit-hole effects’,” the EU executive said in a statement.
The EU is concerned that Meta’s algorithms for its social media platforms may take advantage of inexperienced minors, leading to social media addiction and poor mental health.
They also doubt the effectiveness of Meta’s age verification tools, and if the sites have enough privacy, safety, and security measures for children.
Now that an official investigation has been opened, the EU Commission has the right to request additional information, conduct interviews and inspections.
It can also take further enforcement steps, adopting interim measures and non-compliance decisions. At this time, Meta may also offer commitments which the EU can accept to remedy the issues raised in the proceedings.
International banking giant Santander has disclosed that customer and staff data has been breached after a third-party provider was compromised.
In a statement published on 14 May, the bank said that it had recently become aware of unauthorised access to a Santander database, which was hosted by a third-party.
So far, the company revealed that data from customers of Santander Chile, Spain and Uruguay, as well as some current and former Santander employees of the group had been accessed.
Customer data in all other Santander markers and businesses are not affected, according to the banking group.
No transactional data, nor any credentials that would allow transactions to take place on accounts are contained in the database, including online banking details and passwords.
The bank’s operations and systems are not affected, so customers can continue to transact securely.
After becoming aware of the breach, the Spanish bank implemented measures to mitigate the impact of the incident immediately, including blocking the compromised access to the database and establishing additional fraud prevention controls to protect affected customers.
Santander has encouraged all customers to stay vigilant, and to always verify information they receive, as well as only contact the bank through official channels.
The bank has also informed customers told customers that it will never ask customers for codes, OTPs, or passwords.
Suspicious emails and messages should be reported to the bank directly, and online banking should never be accessed from suspicious emails or unsolicited emails.
Further, customers are advised to never ignore security notifications or alerts from Santander related to their accounts.
Malted AI, the Edinburgh-based artificial intelligence startup recently featured by DIGIT, has secured £6 million seed investment funding.
Founded in 2023, the startup ‘distils’ AI models, helping smaller companies build tailored AI models at a fraction of the cost.
The funding round was led by Hoxton Ventures, joined by Creator Fund and several angel investors.
To create smaller AI chatbots, Malted AI takes the output of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, and distils them into more compact models.
LLMs can often being too general and overly expensive for smaller organisations needing more specific AI chatbots and solutions.
The company’s technology allows smaller companies to apply small language models (SLMs) that use domain-specific information to solve domain-specific problems and queries. Instead of accomplishing general tasks moderately well, the goal is to complete a small range of tasks to perfection.
In its first pilots, Malted AI is already being used by financial and legal firms with continued rollout planned for the rest of 2024.
The new funding will be used in research and product development and well as recruitment, aiming to double the team size.
“At Malted AI we see smaller as better when it comes to AI, a single, many-billion parameter foundation model is costly, too general and too slow – it’s not fit for purpose for the complex challenges enterprises face,” said Iain Mackie, Malted AI’s chief executive and co-founder.
“We are building a world-leading distillation platform that solves the highest value enterprise problems.
“We envision enterprises using Malted AI to build small models to address singular challenges, effectively building a network of proprietary SLMs that are optimised for a single problem.”
Conceived from concepts that helped Ian Mackie, Carlos Gammel, and Federico Rossetto win the Amazon Alexa Prize in 2022, the team now has 10 members with track records in AI.
This includes an ex-quant trader, a former-Meta researcher and applied-AI talent from Google, Bloomberg, Amazon, Deepmind.
The company has Jeff Dalton, chancellor fellow at Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, as an external chief scientific advisor.
Bryan Gartner, partner at Hoxton Ventures, said: “Malted AI has the capacity to be one of Europe’s most notable AI companies as they flip the thinking and approach to AI adoption within the enterprise.
“Iain, Carlos and Federico are some of the brightest AI minds emerging from the birthplace of European AI – Edinburgh – and have close ties to the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow
Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere, from automation threatening to replace a swath of jobs, to social media deepfakes, cyber-threats, and advancing chatbots, ChatGPT and other large language models have fundamentally changed the way people interact with the online world, seek information, and create.
It’s brought up profound debates and questions about what constitutes original creation, what are we really seeking to get out of society, and how will automation and AI affect the future of work?
As more and more companies integrate AI tools into their existing business models, a continuous flow of startups boasting their own unique AI systems and applications have cropped up, battling it out for space in the ever-expanding AI landscape.
DIGIT has therefore taken the time to highlight just some of the many Scottish AI startups that have emerged onto the market int he last few years.
9 of Scotland’s Most Interesting AI Startups
1. Malted AI
While large language models may be all the rage, smaller models can be tailored to specific needs without the hefty price tag of large language models when it comes to energy consumption and data usage.
That’s where Malted AI comes in. Founded in 2023, this Edinburgh-based company “distils” AI models using domain specific knowledge to create bespoke, small language models designed for smaller enterprises and more specific use cases. These focused models can then scale in production.
Malted AI is currently a small company, but according to their LinkedIn, their headcount has increased by 25% in the last six months.
Their focused AI solutions could be ideal for smaller businesses looking to enhance their AI abilities, allowing customers to search and analyse domain databases, as well as generate accurate reports.
TAISK puts AI into everyday tasks for teachers and businesses. Founded in 2023 in Edinburgh, the company connects companies and schools with the right AI tools for them, using foundational models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and more, taking the ideas of teachers and businesses into fruition.
From developing lesson plans to customer service, curating homework tasks and pop quizzes, the company seeks to put a positive spin on AI in education.
Their TAISK Labs platform connects their AI experts with enterprises to discover their specific AI requirements and create tailored solutions. For teachers, TAISK can help generate lesson plans, worksheets, colouring pages, and tests.
With TAISK, founder Alexander Fahie hopes that AI can be part of the solution to education’s many struggles amid a funding and teacher shortage.
Wedo offers AI-powered solutions to modern fintech issues, allowing businesses to manage and hold multiple currencies, make international payments easily, automate invoices and manage contracts.
Not just confining itself to fintech, Wedo AI also fills marketing, sales, and delivery purposes.
The startup is also built on blockchain technology to cater to a remote and hybrid international workforce.
Their AI technology is geared towards efficiency in job-matching, workflow automation and optimisation, and improved decision making.
Wedo also leverages the blockchain for security and transparency in transactions, using the innovative new-age technologies to offer an integrated finance, marketing, and business management platform for larger and smaller companies alike.
The female-founded startup began operations in 2021, and has outfits in Palo Alto California, as well as in Glasgow, London, and Berlin. In 2022, Wedo’s founder Indiana Gregg raised $2.3 million in a seed round, breaking many a glass ceiling for female tech founders, who have often been left out of the headline-making AI funding rounds.
A spin out of the University of Edinburgh, Net AI utilises AI for the telecommunications and mobile networking industry to drive down energy costs and increase efficiency.
In the cost of living and energy crises, Net AI has increasingly marketed itself as a tool to minimise energy expenditure. Dubbed EnergAIze, the system claims to decrease energy costs by up to 50% by controlling the number of radio or computing systems required for certain network capacities and capabilities.
Net AI also serves mobile networking functionality, with their AI-driven anomaly predictor identifying unusual patterns, identifying potential disruptors before incidents occur.
Their other systems use predictive AI to anticipate short and long term customer perceptions, helping companies better plan deployments.
Founded in Aberdeen, this AI automation and manufacturing company focuses on food processing and packaging.
As myriad tasks online continue to be replaced by AI systems, the same continues to occur for manufacturing.
The in-house systems at Leap AI allow packaging and processing jobs to be done at a lower cost, and enables customisation of nearly any repetitive task.
More complicated or specialised packaging systems therefore are able to be swiftly automated and performed using Leap’sAI software and AI-powered robots.
Leap AI focuses on SMEs in the food and beverage industry aiming to provide a more bespoke service to processing requirements using AI.
Helpix AI focuses on customer interactions, using an automated AI system to talk to customers across multiple channels in their own language. The company also specialises in enhancing their customer’s AI capabilities with code-free configuration, enabling the easier merging of domain-specific knowledge into the AI model.
The system also offers continuous learning, so the adopted AI model continually refines and improves itself.
Their chatbot offers omnichannel engagement – it can interact across multiple platforms from social media to messaging apps, and seamlessly adapts responses to the language used by customers.
Founded in 2023, the Edinburgh-based company is still in its earliest stages. Interested parties can join the waitlist to access Helpix AI’s offerings, which did make 3rd Product of the Day on Product Hunt.
Bennu.AI takes AI, robotics, and automation directly to waste management woes. Their robotic bins sort waste correctly, minimising incorrectly discarded products, increasing the material recycled, and mitigating the amount of waste wrongly going to landfills.
Conceived in 2021, Bennu.AI won Best Tech at the University of Edinburgh Venture Building incubator. From there, the company participated in COP26 and won the Scottish EDGE award for sustainable robotics.
BENNU.AI then produced an alpha and finally a beta version of their smart bin, JANUS, which has capabilities to drain liquids as well as sort different waste material in tandem. The bins even use a low-energy sensor so the bin is only on when it is in use.
Currently, the company is working on getting JANUS prepped for manufacturing, fine tuning the bin to make it less expensive to produce, as well as improving its AI accuracy.
It would be inconceivable to produce a list of Scottish AI startups without mentioning Gigged.AI, the Glasgow-based talent management platform.
Using AI, the platform matches companies with freelancers, placing people with the right skills to companies that need them the most.
Gigged.AI also uses AI to create bespoke Statements of Work to explain digital project requirements, whilst matching companies to a range of verified freelancers.
Founded in 2021, the company has received recognition from KPMG as a tech innovator, as well as Scottish Edge Winner, and a Tech Nation Rising Start Regional Winner.
Richard Wilson, CEO and founder of Gigged.AI has also been a proponent for the future of work, and how AI can be integrated to improve hiring practices amid the skills shortage.
Founded in 2020 and a graduate of a University of Edinburgh accelerator programme, Inicio AI offers a bespoke virtual assistant for income and expenditure, helping with debt management and offering improved customer experience.
The debt management service offers a friendly virtual assistant – budgie – to offer customers 24/7 customer support and advice, helping them complete tasks without waiting or judgement.
Their benefits calculator is personally tailored to customers needs, and has built-in benefits calculators to help customers seamlessly calculate their expenditures.
The offering aims to reduce call centre costs and improve overall efficiency. The company’s detailed record keeping also demonstrates proper data governance, keeping people’s documents secure.
Heriot-Watt scientists are part of a £13 million project funded by the UKRI Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to advance sustainable manufacturing.
Heriot-Watt’s Ultrafast Optics Group will receive £1 million through the new Future Advanced Metrology Hub for Sustainable Manufacturing, led by the University of Huddersfield.
The hub will focus on the potential for metrology, the science of measurement, to enable net-zero manufacturing.
Laser measurement for sustainable manufacturing
Professor Derryck Reid, head of the Ultrafast Optics Group said: “Metrology is a crucial tool for enhancing manufacturing’s sustainability. It underpins the constant drive for accuracy, speed, reduced waste, reduced energy usage and enhanced product quality.
“We’ll be working with the Huddersfield-led hub to advance our existing femtosecond LiDAR technology, which can measure distances with unprecedented accuracy.
“In contrast to conventional LiDAR, which achieves a few centimetres of resolution, our approach has a precision of around one ten-thousandth of a millimetre.
“In the manufacture of high-value products, a product might start life as an inexpensive metal block before progressing through several stages of precision machining, each adding more value.
“The cost of machining errors becomes greater at each stage, but their likelihood can be reduced by better metrology tools such as those we are developing, reducing waste and moving us closer to fully sustainable manufacturing.”
Professor Dame Xiangqian (Jane) Jiang from the University of Huddersfield is an expert in precision metrology and will lead the new hub.
“This new hub brings together a consortium of world-leading experts in metrology to address the significant challenges the manufacturing sector faces in meeting net zero goals,” she said.
“The critical mass funding support from EPSRC is a reflection of the consortium’s research strength and capacity to deliver groundbreakingly new technologies.”
The EPSRC, part of UK Research and Innovation, is funding the hub under its Manufacturing Research Hubs for a Sustainable Future initiative, announcing five with a total of £55m this week – all focusing on different disciplines.
Professor Charlotte Deane, executive chair of the ESPRC, said: “Given the scale and importance of the UK’s manufacturing sector we must ensure that it is able to benefit fully from advances made across the research and innovation ecosystem.
“With their focus on innovation and sustainability, the advances made by the hubs will benefit specific sectors, the wider manufacturing sector and economy, as well the environment.”
More than 25 industrial partners, including Renishaw, Machine Tool Technologies (MTT), Taylor Hobson, Cummins and Siemens, are also a key part of the project.
Social engineering threats – those which rely on human manipulation – account for most cyber-threats faced by individuals in 2024.
According to the latest quarterly Avast Threat Report, which looks at the threat landscape from January-March 2024, scams, phishing and malvertising accounted for 90% of all threats on mobile devices and 87% of threats on desktops.
Moreover, the threat research team discovered a significant spike in scams leveraging sophisticated tactics such as using deepfake technology, AI-manipulated audio synchronisation, and hijacking of YouTube and other social channels to disseminate fraudulent content.
A Gateway for Criminals?
While all social media is a natural breeding ground for scams, Avast has found that YouTube has become a significant channel for crime.
According to telemetry from Avast, four million users were protected against threats on YouTube in 2023, and approximately 500,000 were protected in January-March 2024.
Automated advertising systems combined with user-generated content provides a gateway for cyber-criminals to bypass conventional security measures, making YouTube a potent channel for deploying phishing and malware.
Notable threats on the platform include credential stealers like Lumma and Redline, phishing and scam landing pages, and malicious software disguised as legitimate software or updates.
Scammers have also turned heavily to videos as lures. Whether from stock footage or an elaborate deepfake, scammers are using all video varieties in their threats.
One of the most widespread techniques involves exploiting famous individuals and significant media events to attract large audiences.
These campaigns often use deep fake videos, created by hijacking official videos from events and using AI to manipulate audio synchronization.
These videos seamlessly blend altered audio with existing visuals, making it harder for the untrained eye to tell they’re anything but authentic.
Additionally, YouTube serves as a conduit to Traffic Distribution Systems (TDS), directing people to malicious sites and supporting scams ranging from fake giveaways to investment schemes.
Some of the most common tactics which YouTube is exploited for scams include:
Phishing Campaigns Targeting Creators: Attackers send personalized emails to YouTube creators proposing fraudulent collaboration opportunities. Once trust is established, they send links to malware under the guise of software needed for collaboration, often leading to cookie theft or account compromise.
Compromised Video Descriptions: Attackers upload videos with descriptions containing malicious links, masquerading as legitimate software downloads related to gaming, productivity tools, or even antivirus programs, tricking users into downloading malware.
Channel Hijacking for Scams: By gaining control of YouTube channels through phishing or malware, attackers repurpose these channels to promote scams – such as cryptocurrency scams – often involving fake giveaways that require an initial deposit from viewers.
Exploitation of Software Brands and Legitimate-Looking Domains: Attackers create websites that mimic reputable companies that people trust and offer illegitimate downloadable software.
Social Engineering via Video Content: Attackers post tutorial videos or offers for cracked software, guiding people to download malware disguised as helpful tools. This tactic takes advantage of people seeking free access to otherwise paid services or software, leveraging YouTube’s search and recommendation algorithms to target potential victims.
The Growing Business of Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS)
With scams surging, cyber-criminals are capitalising on a new business opportunity: malware-as-a-service (MaaS).
Through this model, organised crime groups are able to recruit smaller-scale criminals who want to make quick money by disturbing malware on behalf of the group. These criminals can purchase malware, subscribe to it or share profits in a commission-style partnership.
The most common malware utilised in MaaS are information stealers, which are continuing to find new distribution channels.
For example, DarkGate was observed to be spread via Microsoft Teams, using phishing. .Lumma Stealer, another MaaS information stealer, continues to spread via cracked software propagated on YouTube, using fake tutorials to mislead victims. This further emphasizes that such strains – and their creators – never miss an opportunity to leverage social engineering to distribute malware.
“In the first quarter of 2024, we reported the highest ever cyber risk ratio – meaning the highest probability of any individual being the target of a cyberattack,” said Jakub Kroustek, malware research director at Gen.
“Unfortunately, humans are the weakest link in the digital safety chain, and cybercriminals know it. They pray on human emotions and the quest for knowledge to infiltrate people’s lives and devices for financial gain.”
This mental health awareness week, new research from BT has uncovered widespread anxiety among business leaders about the pace of technological change in the workplace.
Nearly nine in ten (86%) company directors and executives report suffering from bytemares: tech-related stress that’s severe enough to disrupt their sleep – with security and AI the top causes.
BT estimates the resulting tech paralysis could cost the economy £11.79 billion by 2030, as many small businesses right up to large multinationals opt to defer investment in tech transformation.
Rapid Pace of Tech Evolution
From AI to cybersecurity, big data to digital skills, nearly 9 in 10 (88%) businesses are investing in new technology this year to improve productivity and gain competitive advantage, as tech investment overall is set to increase 31% year-on-year.
For most business leaders, selecting and implementing the right technology plays a pivotal role in the success of their business.
Nearly two-thirds (62%) recognise that digital and tech transformation is critical to the survival of their company.
But the sheer pace of tech evolution is a cause for concern. 9 in 10 (88%) say workplace technology is a source of stress in their lives and three in five (59%) decision-makers say tech is advancing so quickly they worry about the future of their business.
Financial services (74%) and HR (78%) are most concerned about the impact on their sector this year.
The concern is that the associated stress of delivering tech transformation is standing in the way of progress, at both a business and national scale.
BT’s research estimates that 104,000 British businesses could be opting not to invest in new technology this year due to stress associated with the implementation, transformation and upskilling involved.
It suggests that this tech paralysis could stunt growth by an estimated £11.79 billion by 2030.
Tech Anxiety
Whether it’s worrying about cybersecurity (32%), tech transformation (25%), or digital skills (24%), directors and executives are calling out for support to navigate tech, with half (50%) wishing they had a trusted partner to help them with tech transformation.
While cybersecurity is seen as the biggest technological threat to businesses this year, AI is proving to be a huge source of stress. Three in four business leaders say that it has made them feel stressed or anxious in the past year.
Worries include data privacy and security (34%), as well as quality and reliability (29%). One in five (21%) see it as an existential threat to their business.
Bas Burger, CEO – business at BT, said: “Today, every business is a digital business – and our research shows that the pace of change is taking its toll.”
A new survey of cyber leaders reveals that nearly half (44%) of cybersecurity professionals are struggling with regulatory compliance due to its painstaking complexity.
Infosecurity Europe’s survey of 200 IT security decision makers revealed their outlooks across 12 differed cyber regulations currently or soon to be enforced. The UK’s Data Protection Act, which is soon to be replaced by the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, was considered to be ‘somewhat complex’ by leaders, as was the EU’s Cybersecurity Act.
Only the EU Cybersecurity Act and the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) had 50% of cyber leaders saying they were compliant, showing that organisations had a long way to go to reach regulatory compliance.
Besides regulatory compliance, the study revealed several trends around AI, cyber budgets, and the evolving threat landscape, as well as the approach from board members.
AI: A Double-Edged Sword
Generative AI is continually seen on both sides of the cyber landscape: while it can be a brilliant tool in fighting fraud, detecting phishing scams, and fighting against threats, it can also be harnessed by cyber-criminals to improve the effectiveness of their schemes. This has lead to an all out arms race in cybersecurity, seeing which side can master AI first.
It is no surprise then, that 54% of respondents say they plan to implement AI into their cyber strategy in the next 12 months.
AI was met with optimism from respondents, with 42% saying that the tech will result in faster training, broader awareness, and better education. 44% think AI will give their workforce greater bandwidth to focus on future planning as a result of increasing automation.
Still, leaders are cautious, with half (50%) saying that legislative challenges and moral dilemmas may slow their adoption of AI.
Around half (48%) say that the use of AI will evolve dramatically over the next year.
Evolving Threat Landscape
Increased connectivity, more and more IoT devices, continuous cloud adoption, and the rise of AI have all contributed to a massive expansion of the threat landscape.
40% of leaders surveyed cited ransomware and AI generated attacks as causes to accelerated investment into cyber defences. 33% were also worried about social engineering, human error, and threats to the supply chain.
The report serves as a timely reminder that while new threats emerge, some established threats remain prominent,” Keith Martin, professor of information security at Royal Holloway.
“Ransomware remains the almost perfect crime, while social engineering remains a significant vector by which seemingly impenetrable security infrastructures can still be breached.
Budgets are Growing
As these fears stoke the fire, budgets appear to increase, as 69% of respondents say that they have seen or will see their cybersecurity budgets rise in 2024.
Some have even reported a surge in spending, with 15% saying that their budgets will or have grown by 50% or more. Most, however, show a smaller increase.
For those increasing their budget, cloud security and incident response tend to see the biggest spending injection, with 47% noting that between one and 20% of additional funding will go to these areas.
46% said that up to a fifth of the budget will go to managed service provider outsourcing and antivirus, while 45% cited an increase in identity management.
This is followed by education and training, managed detection and patching with 43%, and AI and product consolidation at 41%. Two in five (40%) said that up to a fifth of their budget would go to email security and threat exposure.
Cybersecurity Culture
While threats and budgets are up, there appears to be a split on the best approach.
17% of leaders want to go all-in on AI and machine learning to automate everything, while 16% want to remove all current solutions and start from scratch.
Another 15% say that training and education would be the best method to mitigate the onslaught of cybersecurity incidents.
Whereas 13% look to outsourcing their operations to trusted cyber professionals as the best take.
This mixed bag of opinions can make it difficult to have cohesion even within a single organisation, with 27% saying there is a lack of communication between departments, unclear accountability, and issues with leadership.
Further, 36% say they struggle to have constructive conversations about cybersecurity at a board level. Around a third (30%) of cyber leaders say that it would take falling victim to a serious cyber incident for a board member to make the effort to become a cyber expert.
OpenAI has released a new AI large language model, dubbed GPT-4o, which is set to be the foundation for its chatbot ChatGPT.
The new model boasts enhanced reaction times and processing of images, texts, and audio, as well as increase proficiencies in languages other than English.
Its faster responses are designed to sound more human-like, even verging on flirtatious at times.
GPT-4o also meets GPT-4 Trubo on text, reasoning and coding intelligence performance, with higher performance on multilingual vision and capabilities.
The model is more conversational, as it can be interrupted and the delay between responses is on par with humans.
In demonstrations performed and provided by OpenAI, two chatbots conversed with each other in a somewhat natural manner. Still, the models are far from human – one model continued to describe the light fixtures rather than mention a new person had emerged into the room during a live take.
What sets GPT-4o apart from previous models is its training on voice mode, or the mode where a human has a conversation with the application via their voice.
Prior to GPT-4o, Voice Mode was a pipeline of three different models, one to transcribe audio to text, one to take in text and output text, and one that converts text back to audio. This looses a lot of information, such as tone, recognition of multiple speakers, and background noise, as well as different expressions like laughter or singing.
With GPT-4o, the single new model was trained end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning that all inputs and outputs are processed by the same neural network, meaning minimal loss across transcription.
The new model, however, is not without its glitches. The model did misidentify a person as a wooden surface, and at some point began to solve and equation it had not been presented with.
While the model does have work to do, OpenAI is rolling it out across ChatGPT’s free tier, with another version with 5x the response speed available to those with a paying subscription.
A multi-million-pound project lead by Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University is using AI to slash the carbon capture and storage design time from 1oo days to just 24 hours.
Researchers at the university’s global research institute for net zero are developing specialist AI techniques for scientific computing, material discovery, and financial forecasting, aiming to enable efficient CO2 capture and storage in deep geological formations.
Hopefully, the project, entitled ECO-AI, will show how bespoke technologies can enable carbon capture and storage (CSS) to be a viable economic option for traditional industries wanting to decarbonise, including steel, chemicals and cement.
Conducted in partnership with colleagues from Imperial College London, the research is expected to leave a framework for future researchers to build upon and play a role in helping the UK Government reach its net zero target by 2050.
Time is of the essence to achieve net zero, especially in Scotland, which has a net zero goal of 2045, the world’s most ambitious.
ECO-AI, with £2.5m in funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), aims to develop energy efficient solvents for CO2 capture followed by permanent storage of captures CO2 into geological storage sites, through various AI techniques.
“Our research has the ability to really advance existing scientific research streams to source suitable options for safe storage of CO2 without consuming too much energy and without the need to deploy expensive and often time-consuming exploratory investigations,” Ahmed Elsheikh, leader of the data and AI research theme at iNetZ+, said.
“Based on the great engagement and interactions evidenced in our workshop and hackathon events, we’re confident that through our applied research and with more collaboration with business and industry, we can collectively make a profound impact on the global shift towards a carbon-neutral future.”
Using AI simulators, standard techniques can be replaced for modelling flow migrations and simulations on a supercomputer that may have previously taken up to 100 days can now be achieved in a day.
“Using our new global research institute as a vehicle to impact global solutions towards decarbonisation, we’re pioneering ground-breaking methods in all major sectors that can propel us toward a net zero future,” Gill Murray, deputy principal for enterprise and business at Heriot-Watt University said.
“At the core of our overall mission is the integration of research-informed teaching that will shape the next generation of leaders and engineers.”
The move aims to boost the UK’s supercomputing research community to power the discovery of new drugs, harness the full potential of AI, and more.
EuroHPC brings together top-class supercomputing resources from across 35 countries, including Norway, Turkey, and all 27 EU member states, to drive research in the next generation of computing technologies. The UK has secured enhanced access to the Horizon Europe funded portion of the programme, worth over £770 million between 2021 to 2027.
The move will support our scientists to make use of the cutting-edge European supercomputing facilities the UK gained access to through Horizon Europe. Their ability to solve problems and perform calculations with more speed and power than traditional computers are capable of, make these systems vital to the development of exciting discoveries that will benefit us all, from new medical treatments to novel clean energy applications.
By joining the Joint Undertaking, UK scientists will have the opportunity to bid for vital research support, strengthening the UK’s computer capacity.
In November, the UK’s deal to associate with Horizon Europe secured UK researchers access to future EuroHPC supercomputers, which may have been lost due to Brexit.
The UK is now set to gain further access to the Horizon Europe-funded portion of EuroHPC, which is worth around £770 million from 2021 to 2027.
With match funding from the government, UK researchers, businesses and scientists can now bid confidently for further EuroHPC grants, ensuring our brightest minds have access to cutting-edge compute facilities.
Through EuroHPC, UK researchers now have access to:
LUMI, a pre-exascale EuroHPC supercomputer located in Kajaani, Finland.
Leonardo, a pre-exascale EuroHPC supercomputer in the Bologna Technopole, Italy.
MareNostrum 5, a pre-exascale EuroHPC supercomputer =located in Barcelona, Spain.
MeluXina, a petascale EuroHPC supercomputer located in Bissen, Luxembourg.
Karolina, a petascale EuroHPC supercomputer located in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
Discoverer, a petascale EuroHPC supercomputer located in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Vega, a petascale EuroHPC supercomputer located in Maribor, Slovenia.
Deucalion, a petascale EuroHPC supercomputer located in Guimarães, Portugal.
The UK’s AI Safety Institute has release its evaluations platform, paving the way for safer innovation of AI models.
After establishing the AI Safety Institute, the UK is continuing to drive towards greater global collaboration on AI safety evaluations with the release of the AI Safety Institute’s homegrown Inspect evaluations platform.
Inspect is a software library enabling testers – from startups, academia, and AI developers to international governments – to assess specific capabilities of individual models and then produce a score based on their results.
The tool can be used to evaluate models in a range of areas, including their core knowledge, ability to reason, and autonomous capabilities.
Released through an open source licence, it means Inspect is now freely available for the AI community to use.
By making Inspect available to this global community, the Institute aims to help accelerate the work on AI safety evaluations being carried out across the globe, leading to better safety testing and the development of more secure models.
Available from 10 May, the UK government says it is the first time an AI safety testing platform spearheaded by a state-backed body has been released for wider use.
Sparked by some of the UK’s leading AI minds, its release comes at a crucial time in AI development, as more powerful models are expected to hit the market over the course of 2024, making the push for safe and responsible AI development increasingly crucial.
“As part of the constant drumbeat of UK leadership on AI safety, I have cleared the AI Safety Institute’s testing platform – called Inspect – to be open sourced,” secretary of state for science, innovation, and technology, Michelle Donelan said.
“This puts UK ingenuity at the heart of the global effort to make AI safe, and cements our position as the world leader in this space.
“The reason I am so passionate about this, and why I have open sourced Inspect, is because of the extraordinary rewards we can reap if we grip the risks of AI. From our NHS to our transport network, safe AI will improve lives tangibly – which is what I came into politics for in the first place.”
Alongside the launch of Inspect, the AI Safety Institute, Incubator for AI (i.AI) and Number 10 will bring together leading AI talent from a range of areas to rapidly test and develop new open-source AI safety tools.
“As Chair of the AI Safety Institute, I am proud that we are open sourcing our Inspect platform,” Ian Hogarth, chair of the AI Safety Institute, said.
“Successful collaboration on AI safety testing means having a shared, accessible approach to evaluations, and we hope Inspect can be a building block for AI Safety Institutes, research organisations, and academia.
“We have been inspired by some of the leading open source AI developers – most notably projects like GPT-NeoX, OLMo or Pythia which all have publicly available training data and OSI-licensed training and evaluation code, model weights, and partially trained checkpoints. This is our effort to contribute back.
“We hope to see the global AI community using Inspect to not only carry out their own model safety tests, but to help adapt and build upon the open source platform so we can produce high-quality evaluations across the board.”
Over £2 billion has been invested by leading tech companies in the UK this week, including in data centres and superconducting magnets manufacturing.
Supporting more than 1,300 jobs, Siemens Healthineers have announced that they are investing £250 million to design and manufacture superconducting magnets for MRI scanners at a new Siemens Healthineers facility in North Oxfordshire.
The UK tech investment comes as AI firm CoreWeave are also investing £1 billion in the UK, as well as confirming their new European Headquarters will be based in the capital.
These two UK data centres will be opened in 2024, with a further expansion planned in 2025, helping secure the necessary processing power for machine learning and AI, graphics and rendering, life sciences and real-time streaming.
This £2 billion UK tech investment also follows Scale AI, the data infrastructure company for AI, selecting London as the location for its first European headquarters.
Earlier this week, Wayve announced they had secured over $1.05 billion to develop the next generation of AI-powered self-driving vehicles in the UK. Founded in the UK in 2017, Wayve is a home-grown British success story and a testament to the UK’s global leadership in creating the economic and regulatory conditions for start-ups in the AI and self-driving vehicle industries to grow and thrive.
“Businesses are making a safe bet in Britain,” chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt said. “We have attracted the third highest amount of greenfield foreign direct investment since 2010 and the UK accounts for around half of all AI private capital investment in Europe. We really are turning a corner, and the businesses of the future agree.”
The UK accounts for around half of all AI private capital investment in Europe and hundreds more AI companies are starting up in the UK every year.
The AI sector employs more than 50,000 people in the UK and contributes more than £3.7 billion to our economy every year. By 2035, our AI market is forecast to grow to over $1 trillion.
“MRI technology plays a vital role in diagnosing disease, helping patients to get healthy and stay healthy. As a world leader in medical imaging, we are very proud to open the next chapter of our history here in Oxford,” Bernd Montag, chief executive of Siemens Healthineers said.
“This factory will be the global centre for our innovative low-helium magnet technology, meaning we consume far less of a scarce natural resource and enable access to MRIs for many more patients.”
Some of the world’s biggest AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, have also chosen London as the base for their first international offices in a huge vote of confidence in our approach to AI.
Microsoft also recently announced a new AI hub in London, and one of the leaders in the AI field, Google DeepMind was also founded in London over a decade ago and remains in the UK to this day.
April saw a shocking figure of breached records, totalling over 5.3 billion, arising from 652 publicly disclosed security incidents, according to research compiled by IT Governance.
The number of records in April, 5,336,840,757, was high compared to last month, but still did not top the mammoth figure from January 2024 of 26 billion records.
The figure, however, does bring the total number of data records leaked to over 35 billion for 2024 so far.
Two outlier events largely contributed to April’s high figures, according to Alan Calder, founder and executive chairman of IT Governance.
Firstly, a data-scraping website called Spy.pet was found to be selling 4,186,879,104 Discord messages for sale.
Data scraping is typically automated, extracting information from websites enabling criminals to compile personal data to later sell.
The effective method secure over 4.1 billion records, but Discord banned the affiliated accounts, and Spy.pet has been taken offline.
Next, critical vulnerabilities in nine pinyin keyboard apps affected up to a billion users in China. Criminals could eavesdrop on users’ keystrokes on these cloud-based keyboard apps, allowing them to collect passwords, usernames and other personal information.
In addition, the report revealed differing trends in the most breached sectors, varying depending on known records breached and the total number of actual incidents.
IT services and software had the most records breached in April, accounting for over 5.2 billion breaches. This is followed by manufacturing (18.3m) and insurance (15.3m).
For actual number of incidents, however, education took the top spot, facing 160 confirmed and publicly disclosed incidents of data breaches. Healthcare (90) and the public sector (61) followed behind.
“The spike in data breached this month is really concerning,” said Calder. “It’s a reminder of the persistent challenges we face in safeguarding sensitive information. Organisations need to be one step ahead in protecting our privacy and implement tighter security measures to prevent these kinds of breaches.
“Boards need to lead the charge in prioritising cyber security, weaving it into every aspect of their business strategies,” he added. “This commitment goes beyond protecting against cyber threats; it’s about compliance, safeguarding corporate assets and ensuring directors fulfil their responsibilities to uphold organisational integrity.
“Investing in robust security measures is a must. We need to allocate resources, train staff and stay up to date on the latest threats. When it comes to cyber security, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Economic woes are driving down tech budgets, as 50% of boardroom leaders saying that they have slashed their tech budgets due to economic headwinds such as inflation and undulating interest rates.
The new figure comes from The IN Group, which surveyed 700 tech and non-tech boardroom executives in the UK, US, Germany, and the Netherlands for its Tech and the Boardroom report.
Half of respondents revealed that their tech department had faced budget pressures driven by economic turbulence.
In the UK, 51% of boardroom leaders said that their technology budgets had been reduced as a result.
Despite overall budgets being cut, however, 81% said that their company had increased tech investment over the last year. This could reflect an eye to the future, with companies placing their stakes on AI to improve overall efficiency.
“It’s essential for the boardroom to invest in technology to drive digital transformation and to stay ahead of the game, especially in the face of economic turbulence,” Nick Baxter, CEO of The IN Group, said.
“Technology evolution isn’t slowing down for anyone, so those who continue to align their business and technology strategies, fuelled by investment, will be best placed for growth when the economy picks up.
“Overall, it’s the responsibility of the entire C-suite to understand the power that tech such as AI and automation can bring, being the driving force for operational efficiency.”
The positive outlook on tech investment could reflect an eye to the future, with companies placing their stakes on AI to improve overall efficiency.
This coincides with the nearly four in five (78%) of boardroom leaders looking to prioritise investment in automation in order to cut costs and boost efficiencies for the year ahead.
And, while budgets may have been slashed, 81% are positive about increasing their technology investment in the year ahead.
Overall, 80% of UK respondents felt that technology was successfully driving transformation across their business, with 76% saying that their technology and business strategies were in alignment.
69% of all respondents said that their main priority was value creation, beating out value optimisation, amid uncertain economic roads ahead.
“A critical takeaway from the survey is the emphasis on technology as a key driver of economic growth and operational efficiency,” Professor Alexeis Garcia Perez, of Aston University, said.
“Despite reported cuts in tech department budgets, overall tech spend has increased, underscoring a shift towards investing in transformative technologies and capital expenditures outside traditional IT departments.
“This indicates a broader recognition of the role of technologies in enhancing business capabilities and the competitive positioning of the firm.”
Matching many other social media and online platforms, TikTok will start labeling AI-generated images and videos, the company said.
The social media giant, which is currently fighting against a potential ban in the US, will adopt AI watermark tool Content Credentials.
TikTok is among 20 other tech companies who have signed an accord earlier in the year pledging to fight the scourage of AI-generated content which could influence the upcoming elections taking place across the globe.
While the company already flags content that has been made with AI within the app itself, the new measures will watermark content that is made with AI outside of the platform.
TikTok is the latest company to adopt Content Credentials, with YouTube and Meta saying they plan to flag all AI-generated images.
The technology was created and promoted by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which was cofounded by Adobe and Microsoft, but is available to others to use.
OpenAI has adopted the technology as well. In order to the tech to function, AI-generators and platforms both need to use the tool.
For example, OpenAI’s Dall-E image generation tool will attach a watermark to all images it generated, and will add data to the resulting file to indicate if it has been tampered with.
When this image is uploaded to a participating online platform, it will automatically be watermarked as an AI-generated image.
The move coincides with OpenAI and Microsoft launching a £2m fund to battle deepfakes ahead of major global elections taking place this year.
In response to fears regarding AI’s influence on elections, Google has restricted its AI chatbot Gemini from responding to queries about elections occurring across the globe.
Bruntwood SciTech’s ambitious plans to redevelop the Glasgow Met Tower as a bustling digital hub have been cancelled.
Known for its iconic People Make Glasgow sign, the 14-story building which is – depending on your take – a monstrosity or marvel of modern architecture, was set to be completely refurbished into a shiny office space.
The £60m project was announced by Bruntwood SciTech just last November, after they bought the building in 2022. The listed building was previously owned by Glasgow City College, but was out of use since 2014.
When DIGIT spoke to Bruntwood’s property director, Pete Crowther, in 2023, the Met Tower was set to be reopened in winter of 2024.
“Tech and digital businesses will have everything they need to create their first home or their regional, national or international hub at Met Tower and be supported with attracting and retaining talent,” Crowther told DIGIT at the time.
However, the company has since pulled the plug on operations, citing “significant changes” to economic conditions, as well as the construction market. Now, the company is looking at alternative options for the building.
A spokesperson for Bruntwood SciTech said: “We recognise the iconic position of this building, the opportunity it provides for the city, and the need for it to be brought back to life as soon as possible.”
Labour MSP for Glasgow, Paul Sweeney, was “dismayed” by the cancelled plans.
“With rival cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool powering ahead with such investments, Glasgow is at serious risk of falling further behind in its growth and development,” he said, as reported by the BBC.
A Glasgow City Council spokesman said: “We will be working with partners to do all that we can to help deliver a sustainable redevelopment of the building and site as quickly as possible.”
OpenAI is finally revealing some of ChatGPT’s inner workings, disclosing some of the methodology behind why it refuses to provide answers to certain queries.
ChatGPT will not answer any question – it notably refrains from answering opinionated questions, refuses to generate illegal content, and will not create sexual material.
Until now, how the chatbot discerns which questions are answerable and which must remain unanswered has been hidden. Now, OpenAI is giving just a glimpse on how it trains its models, providing guidance to other AI developers attempting to generate data for research purposes, or tailor their own AI chatbots for various purposes.
To explain its methodology, OpenAI published a draft of the Model Spec, a document specifying the company’s approach to shaping model behaviour, especially when conflicts arise.
The company provided examples of how the model is trained to not answer questions that would pertain to legal activity, and to provide medical descriptive advice, without providing specific medical diagnosis.
OpenAI also explained how it trained certain models to follow developer rules rather than user overrides, providing an example of ChatGPT being used to help a student with a math question.
The Model Spec also ensured that the chatbot would ask clarifying questions when having a real-time conversation with a user, rather than making assumptions around a vague question.
Somewhat controversially, however, OpenAI has revealed that its protocol refrains ChatGPT from changing people’s minds, even on factual and scientific matters.
For example, if a user tells ChatGPT the earth is flat, instead of correcting the user, it will simply respond that it is aware many people believe this, despite a scientific consensus stating otherwise. When pressed, it will say that everyone is entitled to their opinion.
However, OpenAI has said that it is interested in receiving feedback on this principle.
And, when asking the free ChatGPT version, DIGIT found that it responded with factual evidence, saying that the “idea the Earth is flat has been debunked for centuries,” as seen in the image below of the conversation.
When asked its own opinion on the difference between OpenAI’s Model Specs and its own responses, ChatGPT responded that “It’s about striking a balance between providing accurate information and respecting individuals’ autonomy in forming their beliefs.”
UK government departments have suffered hundreds of data breaches which could put the data of over 100,000 people at risk, new data from FOI requests has disclosed.
Revealed today, the FOI requests were compiled by Apricorn, an encrypted USB device manufacturer delving into the rates and nature of data breaches and device loss reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office during 2023.
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) was revealed to have declared 18 breaches – the sensetive data the department holds varies from personally identifiable information to sensitive financial details.
The release also showed a stark rise in incidents for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), which escalated from 19 incidents to 278 from 2021 to 2023.
It was also revealed that the House of Commons had 41 reported breaches last year, and the House of Lords suffered eight incidents of breaches or losses.
Apart from the breaches, the FOI requests also revealed a plethora of device losses which could also jeopardise data. HMRC declared that over a thousand devices, including mobiles, tablets, and USBs, were lost or stolen, a marked increase from 2022. However, this figure could be inflated due to an audit of legacy phones which were replaced with newer models.
However, other departments also disclosed device losses – the Ministry of Justice lost 653 devices; the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero: 122; the Department for Education: 78; Home Office: 153; House of Commons: 65; and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology: 54.
“Government departments will inevitably fall victim to data breaches due to the valuable data they handle, but it’s positive to see these breaches being rightfully declared to the ICO,” Jon Fielding, managing director, EMEA at Apricorn said.
“However, the effects and repercussions for the government departments and their customers could be hugely detrimental. With so much at risk, a back-to-basics approach may well be required to establish how so many breaches are slipping the net.”
Besides these worrying trends in data and device loss, the FOI requests also revealed a lack of policy concerning data breaches among many government departments.
Of the 40 departments questioned, only one confirmed they had cyber insurance in place, where as 19 stated they did not, and 13 declined to disclosed, while the rest did not respond.
Six of those that did respond, including HMRC and the Cabinet Office, declared that they had no intention of seeking cyber insurance. This could be because cyber insurance is not factored into their budgets, though recovery after a data breach could prove to be more expensive.
“Though cyber insurance is not mandated, it’s certainly a worthwhile investment given the value of the data housed by these government departments. These same FoI requests unveiled councils within the UK have disclosed almost 1500 data breaches in 2022,” Fielding said.
“The cost of recovery and response can far outweigh the cover itself and put public data at risk of being further exposed. That said, insurance is not simply about the cost of a breach but helps organisations focus on shoring up cyber defences to ensure compliance regulations are met and adhered to. It also allows for organisations to identify and implement the tools and back-up processes that can limit the chance of attack and enable full recovery should a breach occur.”
By 2027, 50% of organisations will support supplier contract negotiations through the use of AI-enabled contract risk analysis and editing tools, according to Gartner, Inc.
According to a Gartner survey of 101 procurement leaders conducted in November 2023, sourcing and contract life cycle management is expected to be the area where GenAI can be most impactful on their business over the next year.
AI, and particularly GenAI solutions, are fundamentally changing the way that procurement organisations work.
“Interest in AI for procurement has increased dramatically, and we expect to see a rise in use. In our survey, 58% of procurement leaders said they already are implementing, or plan to implement AI in the next 12 months,” Kaitlynn Sommers, senior director analyst, Gartner Supply Chain Practice, said.
“AI-enabled risk and editing solutions will help procurement expedite business decision making, decreasing time spent on the contracting process and increasing capacity for additional tasks.”
GenAI can help procurement teams take on more ownership in the supplier contract negotiation process by using automated editing tools that leverage legal department guidance and previously agreed-upon terms.
GenAI can also add efficiency to the contract negotiation process by highlighting potential risks and offering risk reduction options.
“GenAI promises to empower procurement professionals to make informed, data-driven decisions that yield tangible results faster,” added Sommers.
“Our research reveals that procurement leadership anticipates a 21.7% increase in productivity from the use of GenAI in the next 12 to 18 months. Both procurement professionals and solutions providers should be taking action now or risk being at a disadvantage over the next three to five years.”
For procurement organisations looking to start leveraging GenAI for contract management, Gartner has several recommendations.
First, companies should move beyond a digital repository of contracts to a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution that supports authoring and negotiation of contracts.
Companies should also start quantifying risk in contract clauses by using current contract templates to understand the main terms negotiated in various contract types.
Gartner also recommends partnering with the legal department on defining risk across terms that are not business-led and outline the roles and responsibilities of both groups with a more digitally enabled future-state negotiation process.
Finally, organisations should evaluate their current partners and explore new vendors to identify those that will support the organisation’s ambition.
Are we secure? This is the important question that most CISOs dread being asked. Not always because their company is insecure, but because it is such a difficult question to comprehensively answer.
Think about a global enterprise. The organisation could have thousands of employees, its estate could span multiple geographics, while its technology assets could run into the millions. The organisation may train staff, meet regulatory compliance requirements, boast state-of-the-art security tools to defend its architecture, and follow all the recommended cybersecurity hygiene best practices.
But does this make it secure? Unfortunately, the answer is still inconclusive. There are simply too many unknowns to reach a concrete conclusion.
But ‘Are we secure?’ is a question that cannot be ignored.
In today’s hostile digital world, being secure is a necessity. Ransomware attacks can destroy organisations in minutes, while data breaches can cause irreparable financial damage.
Organisations must know they are secure to survive in today’s digital world. Furthermore, understanding the security posture of an organisation is also important for stakeholders, such as boards, insurers, and partners and customers.
So, how can CISOs, CTOs, CEOs, and other business leaders reach an answer?
Getting under the hood of security
The biggest problem for most organisations centres around a false sense of security. These businesses allocate budgets for cyber defences, train staff and surpass compliance requirements, so when they suffer a successful attack, they don’t understand what went wrong.
But in reality, adopting security measures is only one part of the solution. The measures must also be regularly assessed to ensure they are effective.
Many organisations believe this assessment can be achieved via penetration testing or red teaming, and while these are useful tools, they fall short of the insight organisations need into the inner workings of their security measures to answer the all-important question of ‘Are we secure?’.
Compliance audits tend to look at the intent of a security measure and penetration testing performs operational tests on technical implementations. This means both these types of tests frequently miss things which can jeopardise the security of an organisation.
So, what assessments should organisations undertake to assess their security, so they can effectively report on their posture?
Cyber Risk Technical Assessments
One of the best ways to achieve an overall picture of an organisation’s cyber status is through Cyber Risk Technical Assessments.
These technical risk assessments carry out an assessment of an organisation’s cybersecurity posture, its integrations, network design and configurations, against key cybersecurity best practices and frameworks to understand how secure they are, not just by design, but in practice. The assessments also test organisations against different threat scenarios, including data loss, network takeover and ransomware, to take a risk-informed look at the IT environment against realistic threats.
Unlike penetration tests or compliance audits, Cyber Risk Technical Assessments get under the hood of an organisation. Assessors will interview senior management to understand the “crown jewels” of the business. They will then use this information to run a full assessment of the business to identify issues which could put it at risk.
The assessments cover on-premises and cloud assets to assess that the environment is set up and configured correctly, and what the exposure is to other types of threat vectors that could cause harm.
Once weaknesses and areas of concern have been identified, the Cyber Risk Technical Assessment team works with the organisation to implement fixes, thus improving security and building internal cyber awareness on what ‘good looks like’.
Cyber Risk Technical Assessments provide organisations with a cyber security health check to provide confidence that all that should be done to improve the security posture is done.
‘Are we secure’ is an easy question to ask but an impossible question to answer for many CISOs today. But, by adopting Cyber Risk Technical Assessments, this allows organisations to carry out extensive assessments of their security measures, which allows them to identify and remediate issues.
This means when CISOs are asked the all-important question of ‘Are we secure?’, they can provide both an accurate and positive response.
TSB, the UK banking group, has announced it will be closing 36 branches and cutting 250 jobs. Areas targeted by the cuts will include fraud operations, central operations, and the staff at the closing branches.
Branch closures will begin in September this year and continue into May of next year, and it is expected that the job cuts at branches will follow suit.
The decision to cut branches, however, is in line with banks across the UK which continually close bank branches as more and more turn to digital banking. However, this often leaves digitally excluded people without a way to access vital banking services.
TSB has said that the local branches chosen for closure did not have enough customers using them.
In-branch banking has fallen 43% over the past four years, with about 96% of all banking transactions taking place outside a branch.
“The decision to close a branch is never taken lightly, but our customers are now doing most of their banking digitally and we need to move to a better balance of digital and face-to-face services,” a spokesperson for TSB said.
“We remain committed to a national branch network and through innovation and integration with video, telephone, digital, branch and other face-to-face services TSB customers have more ways to bank with us than ever before.”
After this round of closures, TSB will have a total of 175 branches left in the UK.
Unite, a trade union representing many bank workers, has called the closures a ‘grave mistake’.
“These workers perform essential work in the fraud departments and across the branch network,” regional officer for Unite, Andy Case, said.
“Through extensive negotiations Unite has been able to substantially reduce the number of jobs at risk.”
The negotiations were not sufficient, Case said, however, and the union is still pressing TSB to reconsider the cuts and closures.
TSB did say that it would be opening two banking “pods” in local communities where customers can speak with an expert to help them with online and mobile banking, as well as deposit or withdraw cash.
Six pop-up locations will also be added in lieu of the 36 branches, where customers can access in-person support for banking needs.
However, this still may leave many digitally excluded people out in the lurch without more in-person bank services.
The leader of the infamous ransomware group, LockBit, has been revealed after authorities infiltrated and took down the gang’s infrastructure earlier this year.
Dmitry Yuryevich Khorochev, a Russian national, has been identified as the ringleader of the gang, otherwise known as LockBitSupp.
Until now, the LockBit leader remained anonymous, even offering a $10m reward if someone could uncover his identity.
Now, the once anonymous threat actor terrorising the cyber world has been sanctioned by the UK, US, and Australia, has received several travel bans, and has had his assets frozen.
“These sanctions are hugely significant and show that there is no hiding place for cyber criminals like Dmitry Khoroshev, who wreak havoc across the globe. He was certain he could remain anonymous, but he was wrong,” National Crime Agency (NCA) director general Graeme Biggar said in a release.
The US has also brought an indictment against Khorochev, and are offering a $10m reward to anyone who can provide information leading to his arrest.
According to US attorney Philip R. Sellinger, the Lockbit ringleader personally took home $100m from the gang’s victims.
The actions targeting Khoroshev form part of an extensive and ongoing investigation into the LockBit group by the NCA, FBI, and international partners who form the Operation Cronos taskforce.
The true impact of LockBit’s criminality was previously unknown, but data obtained from their systems showed that between June 2022 and February 2024, more than 7,000 attacks were built using their services.
“Cyber criminals think they are untouchable, hiding behind anonymous accounts as they try to extort money from their victims,” security minister Tom Tugendhat said.
“By exposing one of the leaders of LockBit, we are sending a clear message to these callous criminals. You cannot hide. You will face justice.”
Ofcom, the UK’s online safety regulator, has released a package of proposed measures for social media and other online platforms must take to improve children’s online safety.
The proposed measures are empowered via the Online Safety Act, which gives Ofcom the jurisdiction to further regulate the safety of the internet.
The Act is not without controversy, however, as recently many bereaved parents have called out the UK government for not take enough action against online harms to protect their children.
While the rules are currently just proposals, they are expected to come into effect in Summer 2025.
What Are the New Measures?
To start, online platforms must conduct a risk assessment on how likely it is children will access their site – if a child is likely to access it, then a further risk assessment must take place. This will investigate the actual risks posed to children using the site, as well as the risk that comes from the design, functionality, and algorithms included in the platform.
One of the highlighted measures Ofcom is pushing is for more robust age checks across the internet. Services that do not have outright bans on harmful content should introduce highly effective age checks to prevent children from access the entire platform, or at least content that is inappropriate for under-18s.
Further, Ofcom is calling on companies to introduce safer algorithms that do not recommend harmful content to children. As part of this, children should be able to provide negative feedback to algorithms so the platforms can learn what content they do not want to see.
Effective moderation of harmful content is also key, and this falls not just on online platforms but on large search services. Ofcom is calling for improvements to safe search settings for children which must filter out the most harmful content. As part of this, online services must be clear on their moderation policies, what content is allowed on their site, how it is reviewed, and they must also ensure that content moderation teams are well-trained and resourced.
Ofcom believes that these changes will improve children’s online experiences and protect them from harmful and age-inappropriate content more effectively.
According to the internet watchdog, the measures will more robustly prevent children from accessing pornography and seeing or being recommended harmful content.
Further, children will not be added to group chats on messaging platforms without their consent, and it will be easier for children to complain if they do see harmful content.
Tech giants Meta and Snapchat have shared their mostly supportive views of the measures, citing that they already have measures in place to protect their underage users.
Parents of bereaved children, who died as a result of experiencing online harms, are unimpressed with the new measures.
In an open letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer, parents urged politicians and the government to do more to promote online safety and protect children online. They are pleading with politicians in Westminster to strengthen the Online Safety Act.
“While we will study Ofcom’s latest proposals carefully, we have so far been disappointed by their lack of ambition,” they said in the letter.
Bereaved parents have also expressed their frustration at Ofcom’s process, claiming they have been excluded from consultations on online safety as the regulator formulates measures.
Ahead of several major elections across the globe, Microsoft and OpenAI have announced the launch of a $2 million Societal Resilience Fund to further AI education and literacy among voters and vulnerable communities.
Two billion people across the world are set to vote in elections this year, but AI tools have made misinformation and the spread of fake news even more of a prolific problem threatening democracy.
The public, especially more vulnerable groups, therefore needs tools and information that will help people navigate an increasingly complex digital ecosystem confounded by AI advances and the proliferation of deepfakes.
The fund comes after several organisations have introduced tools to filter and flag AI-generated content and mitigate against the threat of deepfakes.
With these new tools, people can make realistic videos and images of politicians, and spread fake news more widely and convincingly.
YouTube has introduced a tool to flag AI-generated content across their platform, and Meta has started doing the same to AI-generated images.
Google went so far as to restrict it’s AI chatbot, Gemini, from answering 2024 election-related queries in an effort to not circulate biased information, and to mitigate against people sharing fake answers as real.
Microsoft and OpenAI’s fund aims to provide education to the public via grants to several organisations including Older Adults Technology Services from AARP (OATS), the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) and Partnership on AI (PAI).
In conjunction with this announcement, OpenAI has just launched a new tool to detect deepfakes for misinformation researchers. This tool is designed to aid in identifying fake images generated by DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generator.
“The launch of the Societal Resilience Fund is just one step that represents Microsoft and OpenAI’s commitment to address the challenges and needs in the AI literacy and education space,” a statement from OpenAI and Microsoft said.
Scottish businesses in the energy, renewables, and retrofitting sectors can put their names forward to secure a spot on a new major framework worth up to £120m over four years to support the delivery of crucial retrofitting and decarbonisation works and services.
The new retrofit and decarbonisation framework extends beyond public buildings, encompassing both domestic and non-domestic requirements, offering an opportunity for businesses of all sizes, particularly smaller firms, to tender for these vital works.
Dubbed N9, the Scottish Procurement Alliance (SPA) says the new framework is designed to foster inclusivity and flexibility, particularly to benefit micro and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This approach ensures that organisations of various sizes have tailored opportunities within the framework to access works and services.
Lesley Anderson, regional director at the Scottish Procurement Alliance, Scotland’s largest, free-to-join procurement organisation, said: “This framework is a brilliant opportunity for businesses of all sizes working in energy consultancy, insulation, HVAC, building controls, EV charging and infrastructure and other renewable technologies to support the nationwide upgrade effort at a crucial time.
“N9 will provide comprehensive energy efficiency and decarbonisation support tailored to the unique needs of public sector organisations across Scotland.
“This includes everything from outlining energy policies to implementing insulation works and building management and metering systems.
“We’re committed to fairness and transparency, and with N9, we’ve particularly aimed to empower small businesses by reserving exclusive spots for them. This not only levels the playing field but also opens up opportunities for smaller companies, that may have previously been out of reach.”
SPA has upgraded the N9 framework to include new support features such as consulting for PAS (Publicly Available Specification) legislation as well as value bands in three ranges – up to £750,000, between £750,000 and £2.5 million, and over £2.5 million, along with guidance on energy policies.
The framework features six workstreams covering consultancy, multi-disciplinary works, building insulations and performance, heating and ventilation systems, control and management systems and solar PV and EV charging.
Places have been reserved specifically for micro and small businesses within various lots.
“We’ve significantly enhanced N9, revamping its structure and expanding our HVAC services to include options like district and network heating,” Lesley added.
“These updates align with the broader clean heat and decarbonisation agenda, incorporating elements from the proposed Heat in Buildings Bill and the Heat in Buildings Strategy.
“As with any changes these were made through wide-ranging and deep consultation with suppliers and partners to ensure that we are offering the best value for money and addressing industry needs head-on.”
Despite nearly three quarters (73%) of European organisations reporting that their staff use AI at work, only 30% provide limited training to employees in tech-related positions, while 40% offer no training at all, according to new research from ISACA.
However, issues around AI aren’t limited to the absence of training in the workplace. Policy on how AI should and shouldn’t be used is also lacking, with only 17% of organisations having a formal, comprehensive AI policy in place.
Aside from lack of training and policies, business and IT professionals are reporting a gap in education around AI. When asked how familiar respondents were with AI, almost three quarters (74%) were only somewhat familiar or not very familiar at all.
Concerns around the use of AI don’t stop there, however: when asked about generative AI being exploited by bad actors, 61% of respondents were extremely or very worried that this might happen. When comparing data from last year’s survey, the sentiment has virtually not imprived.
“AI is going to continue to come to the fore, helping to shape the way that IT and cybersecurity industries transform and innovate,” Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at ISACA, said.
“AI is being used twofold – bad actors are weaponising it to develop more sophisticated cyberattacks and in response it is being used by cyber professionals to better detect and respond to those threats. If businesses are to see the benefits of using AI, they need to have the right skills in place in order to be able to identify new threat models, risks and controls.”
Upskilling and training are in high demand, with 34% of respondents believing they will need to increase their skills and knowledge of AI in the next six months, and just over a quarter (27%) stating they will need to do so in the next seven months to a year, to retain their job or advance their career.
In total, an overwhelming 86% of respondents feel that this training will be necessary within the next two years.
“As cyber criminals use AI to carry out increasingly sophisticated and targeted attacks, it’s more important than ever for cyber professionals to have formal training and clear company policies on AI to follow,” Dimitriadis added.
“Businesses can upskill their teams and keep pace with the evolving threat that the rise of AI poses, protecting their reputation and strengthening customer trust.”
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps will address parliament today concerning a recent hack into the Ministry of Defence (MoD) payroll system.
The government was made aware of the attack just days before, and it is still uncertain what specific information was accessed.
The MoD system hacked does include names and bank details of personnel in the British armed forces, and in some cases, personal addresses.
The government has so far not found evidence that data from the system, which was managed by an external contractor, was stolen, but is conducting an investigation as if it did.
It has been reported that, while the defence secretary will not disclose a specific culprit, the government suspects that China is behind the attack.
However, investigations are at the early stages and take months or even years to piece together, so it will take time before enough evidence is gathered to disclose suspects.
Both Sky News and the BBC have reported to “understand” the culprit behind the attacks to be China.
In response, China’s foreign ministry said it “firmly opposes and fights all forms of cyber-attacks”, and “rejects the use of this issue politically to smear other countries,” as reported by Sky.
The hacked system was not connected to main MoD computer systems, and has been taken down. The MoD will provide service members advice and support to ensure they are not concerned about their safety.
While it is uncertain what entity is behind the attack, the implication that it was China could put the UK at risk of cooperating with countries that currently have strenuous relations with the country.
Welcome to the latest edition of the DIGIT Deal Roundup.
As we enter Spring, Scotland’s tech sector is seeing some big funding wins in medtech, the energy sector, and the broader innovation economy.
For a recap on those standout stories, here’s our round-up.
Funding and Investments
Glasgow Uni Gets £4.9M for “World-leading” Electron Microscope
A new grant will support the creation of a “world-leading” electron microscopy facility at the University of Glasgow.
The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded £4.9 million in funding to the University of Glasgow to build a new electron microscopy facility for materials science.
Researchers from the university’s School of Physics and Astronomy have long-standing expertise in the study of functional materials, including the magnetic films used for data storage, materials for energy applications, and semiconductor technologies.
The new microscope, named MagTEM2, will help support materials projects across the university, and will also be accessible as a facility to national and international users from 2026.
Calcivis, the Edinburgh-based biotechnology firm, has secured £5 million in new funding to roll out its early tooth decay detection tech.
The latest investment round was led by £4m of funding from the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB), along with £1m from IFS Maven Equity Finance, which is managed by Maven Capital Partners and is part of the Investment Fund for Scotland (IFS), delivered by the British Business Bank.
The Scots firm’s patented system uses a biological diagnostic agent in combination with an imaging device to enable the early detection of tooth decay, which can then lead to earlier preventative treatment for dentistry patients.
Glasgow Biotech Company EnteroBiotix Lands £27M Funding Round
The Glasgow-based biotechnology firm announces the completion of a £27 million funding round.
This substantial financial boost, backed by both new and existing investors, marks a significant milestone for the company as it looks to improve the landscape of microbiome therapeutics.
The funding round was made up of £15.7m in equity funding, as well as the conversion of £11.6m in loan notes into equity.
The round saw contributions from seasoned life science investors Thairm Bio and Kineticos Life Sciences, alongside the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB). Additionally, existing investors such as Scottish Enterprise and several private investors reaffirmed their commitment.
Scots Hydrogen Energy Startup Secures £1M Investment
Glasgow-based hydrogen energy startup, Clyde Hydrogen, secures over £1 million in pre-seed funding.
The Scottish startup is a spinout from the University of Glasgow, and provides hydrogen production solutions to reduce carbon emissions. It closed its pre-seed round of over £1m in equity and grants, led by Zinc, the University of Glasgow, and strategic angel investors.
The collaboration with the University of Glasgow will allow Clyde Hydrogen to gain access to world-class research facilities and expertise in renewable energy technologies. While Zinc, an early-stage mission-driven investor, will add strategic investment insight and a network of industry connections to the mix.
Clyde Hydrogen’s decoupled electrolyser technology promises to deliver high-pressure green hydrogen safely at scale and at a reduced cost. This innovation has the potential to align renewable energy with hydrogen production more efficiently than current methods, addressing a longstanding challenge in the industry.
New Edinburgh Uni Medtech Spinout Launches With £10M in Backing
Lung cancer could be spotted and treated more quickly thanks to a €12 million (£10m~) investment in technology aiming to diagnose and treat disease in just minutes.
The investment has led to the launch of Prothea Technologies Ltd., a spinout company from the University of Edinburgh and Bath, which is developing tech to “see and treat” diseased tissue in a single procedure.
Financing for Prothea was co-led by European firms Earlybird Venture Capital and Mérieux Equity Partners, with participation from NRW Bank as well as Old College Capital, the University of Edinburgh’s venture investment fund.
The team behind Prothea say that its technology could cut hospital pressures and waiting times, and pave the way for diagnosis and treatment to be carried out in one hospital visit.
With pre-launch testing underway, the funding will help Orbex ramp up the development of Prime, its 19-metre long, two-stage rocket designed to transport small satellites into Low Earth Orbit. The aim is to ensure full readiness and scalability for its launch period.
Orbex now has two active patents in a number of European countries and the United States covering various parts of its rocket technology.
IIt is powered by a renewable biofuel, which allows the rocket to reduce carbon emissions significantly compared to other similarly sized rockets being developed elsewhere around the world.
Phillip Chambers, CEO of Orbex, said: “Orbex is one of only two space rocket manufacturers in the UK, and the only one to also operate its own spaceport. Our technology is pivotal in making the UK a hub for European orbital launch, and we are entering a critical phase of development.
“We are building a sustainable, cost-effective launch vehicle to compete with the best of Europe’s spaceflight manufacturers. This additional funding will support our goal to push on into an operational launch phase and scale our business when the time comes.”
Scots HealthTech Phlo Raises Additional £9 Million
Phlo have announced the close of a £9 million funding round, accessing additional investment for their group of businesses amid a challenging investor market.
The new capital will power significant scaling of the digital healthcare business, and its evolution from a digital pharmacy into a ‘holistic digital healthcare leader.’
The raise comes at a difficult time in the market, where investment in digital health startups has declined year-on-year since 2021. However, Phlo’s in-house technology stack and commitment to digital-first patient care and health outcomes has been a major driving force in investment confidence.
This latest round of financing comes 14 months after the completion of Phlo’s £10m Series A round, and 12 months after Phlo’s acquisition of the assets of their former competitor, TruePill UK. It follows a year of robust business growth and scale across multiple verticals and the launch of several major new products across women’s health, weight management and on-demand prescribing services.
The UK government has launched its new Smart Shipping Acceleration Fund today—an £8 million programme aiming to put the UK at the forefront of cutting-edge maritime technology.
Maritime minister Lord Davies is in Southampton to announce the fund, which will help kickstart feasibility studies to develop smart shipping tech such as autonomous vessels.
Proposals for automated port systems to help them detect safety hazards, optimise activities, and reduce environmental footprint are also eligible to receive the financial support.
The fresh batch of funding comes from the wider £206 million UK Shipping Office for Reducing Emissions (UK SHORE) programme, which was announced in March 2022.
£5 Million Investment Fund for Scots Small Businesses
The British Business Bank’s Investment Fund for Scotland has agreed £5 million of deals to support the growth of small businesses, six months since the fund was launched to improve access to finance and provide a boost to the Scottish economy.
The milestone comes as five new debt funding deals – managed by FSE Group – have been confirmed to give businesses in the drinks, healthcare, recruitment, and creative industries access to funding for growth.
Cosmetic surgery group, Elanic Clinic; oat milk cocktail brand, Panther M*lk; life sciences recruitment firm, Entrust Resource Solutions; graphic design consultancy, John Young Group; and a whisky labelling business have collectively secured £3.25 million of loans from the fund.
Earlier this year, the Bank announced the first equity deals from the Investment Fund for Scotland through fund manager Maven Capital Partners, supporting med-tech firms Carcinotech and Calcivis, while Kedras Clinics benefitted from the first loan from the fund via DSL Business Finance.
Scots MarTech Hyble Secures £2.8 Million Funding Round
UK and Ireland growth capital investors BGF, has announced a £2.5 million follow-on investment in Edinburgh-based Hyble, a provider of marketing technology to the global drinks and hospitality sector, as part of a £2.8m funding round.
The funding will be used to capitalise on momentum stemming from Hyble’s successful US launch and the recent signing of a multi-year contract with beverage alcohol distributor, Southern Glazer’s Wines and Spirits (SGWS).
Hyble’s expansion into the USA has driven 73% year on year revenue growth in Q1, and the growth of Hyble’s team across the UK and US, to almost 100 people in the past year.
Craig Letton, CEO at Hyble, said: “We’re pleased to secure this new funding at an important moment for Hyble’s long term growth trajectory.”
Glasgow Medtech Nebu-Flow Secures £4.7M in Additional Funding
Nebu-Flow, the Glasgow-based medical device firm, has secured an additional £4.7 million of investment to help accelerate the next generation of inhaled drugs for patients with respiratory conditions.
The company’s nebuliser platform for respiratory drug delivery has been developed to provide a number of advantages over existing technologies, with the global market valued at over $1 billion (£798m~).
The funding round was led by SCVC, a UK-based venture capital firm investing in early-stage deep tech spinouts, and was supported by Scottish Enterprise, Foresight WAE Technology, SIS Ventures, Ascension, and Conduit EIS Impact Fund.
A former spinout, Nebu-Flow’s team has strong knowledge of inhalation drug delivery, with the company’s chair Dr John Pritchard having over 25 years’ experience in the field and previously working in senior roles for GSK, AstraZeneca, 3M, and Philips.
Glasgow Tech Hub ‘thebeyond’ Secures £2.5 Million Investment
A new 10 year lease has been agreed and ‘thebeyond’ will open in March in two suites in Glasgow’s Skypark extending to around 20,000 sq ft.
Federated Hermes has announced the investment of £2.5m in ‘thebeyond’, a new European technology hub created by Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC), enabling Scottish Internet of Things (IoT), from drones and robotics brands to compete globally.
Federated Hermes has invested significantly in the scale up and is now enabling STAC’s vision for ‘thebeyond’, applying its ‘urban placemaking expertise’ to develop a major European technology centre on site in the coming two years, closely linked with local universities as well as wider industry.
A new 10 year lease has been agreed and ‘thebeyond’ will open in July in two suites in Glasgow’s Skypark extending to around 20,000 sq ft.
Abrdn Sells Private Equity Business for up to £100M
Abrdn, the Edinburgh-based financial services company, has completed the sale of its assets – totalling £7.4bn – under management private equity business to Partia Investment for up to £100m.
Following a strategic review of the groups’s alternative businesses, the sale was conducted after it was found that the capital generated from the sale of certain private equity businesses would be better deployed within the core investment business.
Rene Buehlmann, chief executive of investments at abrdn, commented: ”The sale of our European-headquartered private equity business to Patria Investments follows the sale of our US-headquartered private equity business to High Vista Strategies last year and marks another step forward in our efforts to reshape and simplify our Investments business.”
Darktrace to Be Acquired by US Private Equity Group for £4.3 Billion
UK cybersecurity and AI company Darktrace has agreed a $5.3bn (£4.2bn) sale to US private equity business Thoma Bravo.
Darktrace, whose co-founding investor Mike Lynch is currently on trial for fraud and conspiracy in the US, agreed to an offer 44% higher than its average share price over the past three months.
In a statement to investors, the Darktrace board said that its “operating and financial achievements have not been reflected commensurately in its valuation, with shares trading at a significant discount to its global peer group”.
The comment will fuel fears that the FTSE is haemorrhaging prestigious company listings to the US, in search of greater fundraising potential. Recent departures include the chipmaker Arm Holdings, the gambling company Flutter, and the building materials business CRH.
Patient data from NHS Dumfries and Galloway has been released on the dark web after a ransomware group threatened to share the large volume of data after a cyber-attack in March.
Back in March, a small amount of information was shared by the ransomware group as proof their their cyber-attack successfully accesses patient data. They had warned at the time that more confidential data would be released if a ransom was not paid.
The ransomware group claiming responsibility, Inc Ransom, have now owned up to the threat, releasing data on the dark web.
This release of data follows a sustained cyber campaign by the threat actors which interrupted the NHS region’s IT system from 15 March. Services were back up by 19 March, but it was not until 27 March that a small number of patient data was published by a ransomware group.
According to updates on the NHS Dumfries and Galloway site, the sustained cyber-attack began in February, and accessed a very large amount of patient and staff data.
“This is an utterly abhorrent criminal act by cyber criminals who had threatened to release more data,” NHS Dumfries and Galloway chief executive Julie White said.
“Work is beginning to take place with partner agencies to assess the data which has been published. This very much remains a live criminal matter, and we are continuing to work with national agencies including Police Scotland, the National Cyber Security Centre and the Scottish Government.”
The health board noted the anxiety this breach may be causing patients, but urged people to remain vigilant as their data may have been shared on the dark web.
A dedicated helpline is now open to the public (01387 216 777), and ongoing updates on the situation can be found here.
“Data accessed by the cyber criminals has now been published onto the dark web – which is not readily accessible to most people,” White added.
“Recognising that this is a live criminal matter, we continue to follow the very clear guidance being provided to us by national law enforcement agencies.”
Jude McCorry, CEO of Cyber and Fraud Centre – Scotland, said: “It is truly awful that patient data has now been released in the NHS Dumfries and Galloway cyber attack. This will understandably be hugely concerning to patients, and we would encourage anyone affected to follow the health board’s advice and be alert to any approaches by anyone claiming to have your personal or NHS data, and report to Police Scotland.
“We are also asking people not to share any personal data that may make its way onto different forms of social media, in relation to the attack over the next few weeks.
“This attack further emphasises the sophistication of ransomware groups, and we would urge any organisations in Scotland that need support to mitigate the impacts of an attack, to contact our free Incident Response helpline on 0800 167 0623. Our team can give expert guidance to help you resume operations.
“If you are concerned your organisation has been the victim of a cyber attack or data breach, please ensure that you report the incident to Police Scotland on 101. If you are an individual and think your data may have been stolen in a data breach, you can take some simple steps to mitigate the impact such as being alert to phishing attacks, safeguarding other online accounts and monitoring your bank account for suspicious activity.”
Paris is anticipating a flurry of cyber-attacks due to the upcoming Olympics, but have been preparing themselves for battle.
The so-called cyber-warriors have been training hard for the upcoming Games taking place this summer, but they hope to stay out of the limelight this round. Instead of making onto a podium, cyber specialists hope to keep the games secure from threat actors.
The Paris Games organisations’ cybersecurity team is concerned about teenage hackers taking advantage of the plethora of websites and booking sites, to state-affiliated actors camouflaging their activities via the biggest sporting event in the world.
In a press conference on Friday, Vincent Strubel, the head of France’s national cybersecurity agency (ANSSI), said that the country is “preparing for everything” as they expect the level of cyber-threats to be “unprecedented” this year.
“There will be cyberattacks during the Games and the Paralympics,” he told reporters. “Some won’t be serious. Some will be serious but won’t have an impact on the Games. And perhaps there will be some that are serious and liable to have an impact on the Games.”
To train, ANSSI hired ethical hackers to test their websites for different threats – as the threat is “unprecedented”, the training as been too, according to Strubel.
“There are 500 sites, competition venues and local collectives, and we’ve tested them all.”
ANSSI has been working with Cisco and Eviden, as well as using AI, to test different threats across their websites and IT system.
While Strubel did not name specific attackers, French President Emmanuel Macron said he expected that Russia would target the Paris Olympics with a cyber-attack.
The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang were targeted by a computer virus called Olympic Destroyer, which western nations blamed on Russian-affiliated threat actors. While Russia denied these accusations, the US has since indicted six Russian spy hackers for a hacking campaign that included the Games as a target.
Traditional security tools are too limited to handle complex cloud and AI threats, CISOs fear, as revealed by a new report from Dynatrace.
The report surveyed the perception of cybersecurity leaders on the threat landscape as new threats emerge and new frontiers are quickly conquered by threat actors.
With cloud adoption continuing to swallow up the entire tech ecosystem, data protection and threat defence is ever more important.
This is why it is so alarming that over three quarters (76%) of CISOs cite the limitations of security tools for real-time identification of risks in dynamic cloud-native architectures as a key challenge.
Similarly, 77% of CISOs also say that current tools such as XDR and SIEM are unable to manage cloud complexity, as they lack the intelligence needed to drive automation at scale, putting these systems at further risk.
Another key challenge cited by three out of four (75%) of CISOs is the prevalence of bling spots due to the limitations or restrictions upon agent-based security tooling as a key challenge.
The Double-Edged Sword of AI
The rise of AI is also worrying cyber leaders. The double-edged sword of AI innovation means that while companies can integrate AI into their security posture, threat actors are already employing the technology to enhance their attacks.
Over half of CISOs (52%) are concerned that that the use of AI by cyber-criminals will enable them to create new vulnerability exploits faster and execute them on a wider scale.
However, the use of AI within an organisation also poses a risk, according to CISOs.
Further, 47% are worried about the risk of AI resulting in inappropriate data use, leading to noncompliance within their own organisation. The use of AI to process data can cause trouble for proper data governance as regulations continue to change and rollout, often leaving organisations confused.
Similarly, 45% fear that using AI to accelerate software development is a risk that could lead to less oversight and more security vulnerabilities.
The autonomous advantages of AI could therefore pose to be a security downfall if they AI is not implemented with care.
The UK government is investing £16 million forinnovations aiming to support the recovery and future stability of Ukraine’s energy system.
The programme’s goal is to rebuild Ukraine’s energy system, displace fossil fuels, and support post-war recovery.
Delivered by a UK-based innovation agency, the programme will leverage an additional £5m in private sector co-investment and involves collaborations between over 50 UK and Ukrainian organisations.
“Today we have a chance to demonstrate that the struggle for energy independence is a fight for the future,” minister of energy Ukraine Herman Halushchenko said.
“The green transition goes way beyond ecology or distributed generation. For Ukraine, this is a matter of national security.
“I am sure that the implementation of the project in the field of green technologies is of great importance for the future cooperation between Ukraine and the UK in the energy sector.”
Some notable projects include developing a new space heating technology for heat pumps, an innovation battery storage solution for renewables, a more targeted approach to harnessing geothermal energy in Ukraine, and work to optimise Ukraine’s bioenergy resources.
The funded projects will have two years to execute their work plans and receive support from an accelerator programme for further investment and market entry.
By combining the rich science, technology, and innovation heritage of both the UK and Ukraine, this competition aims to address not only Ukraine’s immediate priorities, but also wider global challenges.
“I am proud that the UK continues to support the recovery of the Ukrainian energy sector, particularly after recent brutal attacks from Russia. We want to see it greener and more resilient,” British Ambassador to Ukraine Martin Harris said.
“Our support for these 13 innovations – which bring together the best of British and Ukrainian business, universities, and civil society – will help Ukraine recover in a more sustainable way. These projects showcase the depth and breadth of partnership between our countries.”
