UK

The UK has crowned its Cyber Security champion, Will Shackleton.

Shackleton, who is 19 and has already earned an internship at Facebook, beat 3,000 entrants and 41 fellow finalists to emerge at the top of the competition, according to organisers, and is a very worthy winner.

Naturally, he was happy to receive the gong for having cracked through a challenge set by BT, GCHQ, the National Crime Agency, Juniper Networks and Lockheed Martin.

GCHQ and firms such as Lockheed Martin and BT attempted to identify Britain's most talented "cyber defenders" last week in order to ensure the UK's citizens and businesses are protected against future cyber attacks.

In a dark room deep beneath the streets of Whitehall, the Cyber Security Challenge Masterclass saw seven teams of six investigate a cyber attack from a foreign government that was crippling the City of London's financial sector.

Two Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in London have been responsible for infecting more than a quarter of a million routers around the world.

Security researchers from specialist internet security consulting firm Team Cymru have found an exploit that has already switched 300,000 router domain name system (DNS) servers, which could in turn be used to redirect web traffic.

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

I've been preaching the gospel of Linux security for decades now, but it's always nice to see proof-positive from an independent organization that Linux is indeed the most secure operating system around.

The Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), the group within the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that assesses operating systems and software for security issues, has found that while no end-user operating system is as secure as they'd like it to be, Ubuntu 12.04 is the best of the lot.

The British Prime Minister's national security adviser, Kim Darroch, is expected to propose that ministers have the final decision on deals that affect critical national infrastructure, the Financial Times said, citing sources.

The move comes after the parliament's security committee raised concerns about a tie-up between BT Group and Huawei Technologies allowing the Chinese company to become embedded in Britain's telecommunications network infrastructure without the knowledge and scrutiny of ministers.

A new survey commissioned by the UK Government's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has revealed the scale of cyber attacks on UK companies.

The 2013 Information Security Breaches Survey, which collected data from 1,402 respondents, presented results for large organisations (in excess of 250 employees) and small firms (less than 50 members of staff).

Britain will clear Chinese telecoms equipment firm Huawei to run a UK-based cyber security centre if it agrees to tighter rules to allay spying and hacking fears, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Huawei supplies software and equipment which channels phone calls and data around Britain and has found itself at the centre of a debate, particularly in the United States, over whether it is a risk for governments to allow foreign suppliers access to their networks.

Crime-fighting and intelligence agencies in the UK and the US have begun monitoring users of encrypted, anonymising online networks – the dark web – in a bid to track down paedophiles posting images of children being sexually abused.

Back in August 2013, one of the myriad of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that several major telecommunications companies provided British intelligence with direct access to their undersea fiber optic cables.