UK

Barclays Wealth & Investment Management is using Nuance's FreeSpeech voice biometrics solution to automatically confirm and identify customers, instead of using security questions that rely on the customer's ability to remember a number of different details.

Security questions—often referred to as "knowledge-based authentication"—can be time-consuming and frustrating for customers that have to provide often hard-to-recall information on obscure topics.

The UK has set up a cyber security “fusion cell” for cross-sector threat information sharing. The intention is to put government, industry and information security analysts side-by-side for the first time.

In another first, public and private sector analysts will be joined by members of intelligence agencies, law enforcement and government IT as they exchange information and techniques and monitor cyber attacks in real time.

What appears to be a glaringly obvious security hole has been blamed for the snatching of 300 domains hosted by one web-hosting firm last year, The Reg has discovered.

A source told El Reg that anyone with a hosting package from 123-Reg, and hence an account control panel, simply had to change the final section of the URL manually (to, for example, /someoneelseswebsite.co.uk) to be able to gain access to another site's emails, name servers and billing.