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Articles for Category Tag - Security

O2 UK’s AI Flags 50 Million Suspected SPAM and Scam Calls a Month

18th March, 2025 (5 Comments)

Readers may recall that mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) integrated Hiya’s new AI-powered scam detection service (‘Call Defence’) to help combat fraud and nuisance calls last November 2024 (here). Since then, more than 150 million “suspected” scam and spam calls have been flagged by the new technology, recently rising to more than 50m per month.

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Cable Thieves Knock Out Broadband in St Neots for a Second Time UPDATE2

17th March, 2025 (10 Comments)

Criminals have, for the second time in the space of around one month (here), today disrupted Openreach’s broadband services in the Cambridgeshire (England) town of St Neots by attempting to steal an unspecified amount of the UK network operator’s local copper telecoms cable.

DrayTek Reveal Multiple New Security Vulnerabilities in their Routers

13th March, 2025 (15 Comments)

Customers of DrayTek‘s popular broadband routers, which are a familiar name in the UK ISP world, have this week been notified about two recently published security vulnerabilities in several of their products – both of which have a Common Vulnerability Score (CVSS) of 9.8 out of 10. But don’t worry, new firmware already exists to patch them.

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SHiFT Bring Together UK Full Fibre Operators to Improve Health and Safety

7th March, 2025 (0 Comments)

The SHiFT Group (Safety & Health in Fibre Telecoms), which was setup a few years ago to help improve health and safety practices and standards across the UK’s fibre broadband industry, has informed ISPreview that they will once again be bringing network operators together at a conference on 2nd April 2025 – at the Heart of England Events and conferencing centre.

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Vodafone UK Tests IBM Quantum Safe Tech for Internet Security

3rd March, 2025 (0 Comments)

Customers of Vodafone UK’s mobile and broadband services, specifically those that also use their internet anti-malware ‘Secure Net‘ service (included with their ‘Pro II Broadband’ packages), may in the near future be able to benefit from quantum-safe cryptography after the operator collaborated with IBM on a new Proof of Concept (PoC) test.

Hiya Finds 32 Percent of Unknown UK Calls are SPAM in Q4 2024

25th February, 2025 (5 Comments)

The Q4 2024 Global Call Threat Report from Hiya, which works with broadband ISPs and mobile operators (BT, EE, O2, Virgin Media etc.) to help tackle SPAM and fraud calls, has revealed that UK residents received 4 spam calls per person each month (unchanged from Q3) and the percentage of unknown calls that are spam hit 32% (up from 28%).

Broadband Outage in St Neots After Thieves Steal Openreach Cable

18th February, 2025 (12 Comments)

Broadband, phone and Ethernet services in the Cambridgeshire (England) town of St Neots have been disrupted after criminals ripped up and stole around 500 metres worth of Openreach’s (BT) copper telecoms cable, which has impacted four of their fibre street cabinets in the area – serving premises with around 380 customers.

TP-Link Opens Largest National UK Distribution Centre in Newbury

11th February, 2025 (15 Comments)

Networking kit manufacturer TP-Link, which produces a lot of affordable broadband routers, WiFi extenders and smart home devices for ISPs and consumers, has this morning announced the opening of its “largest” UK and Ireland National Distribution Centre to date in Newbury.

Ofcom Refines Thinking on Cost of Adding Power Backup to UK Mobile Sites

10th February, 2025 (34 Comments)

The telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has today published the results of a recent study it conducted into the costs of improving power resilience at UK mobile network sites (masts etc.). This finds that the cost of ensuring “almost everybody” could maintain access to the emergency services for up to 4 hours, in the event of a power cut, would be approx. £1bn.

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Rights Holders Move Closer to Imposing Website Blocks on VPN Providers

9th February, 2025 (30 Comments)

Rights Holders, having recently succeeded in forcing even some third-party public Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers to block websites that have been found to facilitate internet copyright infringement (piracy), are now turning their attention to major Virtual Private Networks (VPN) like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, ProtonVPN, and others.

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Virgin Media O2 UK Blocked 168 Million Suspected Fraud Texts Over Past 2 Years

5th February, 2025 (5 Comments)

Mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) has today revealed that their UK network blocked 168 million suspected fraudulent text messages from reaching customers over the past two years (up from 89 million texts in 2023), with scams including fake TikTok job offers, and deals and discounts for popular brands.

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Comms Council UK and NTS to Help Crackdown on Telephone Fraud

29th January, 2025 (0 Comments)

The Comms Council UK, which represents the UK’s national Unified Communications and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) phone industry, has today announced a new “joint information sharing initiative” with National Trading Standards (NTS) that aims to help “crack down on telephone fraud“.

Internet Danger Websites with Scam Ads and Malware

UK Phones Providers Introduce Tougher Blocking of Foreign Scam Calls

29th January, 2025 (10 Comments)

Ofcom has confirmed that, from today, UK phone providers (fixed line and mobile) are expected to have implemented changes that aim to block scammers who call from abroad and imitate UK landline numbers (i.e. spoofed calls). Further measures are also expected to follow “later this year“, which will tackle spoofed mobile numbers.

Cross-Party Inquiry Examines Threats to Undersea UK Internet Cables

27th January, 2025 (0 Comments)

The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) has launched a new UK inquiry that will see cross-party MPs and Lords examine the growing threats to undersea fibre optic cables, which are described as being the ‘backbone’ of the world’s internet (broadband, mobile etc.) systems.

Mobile giant Vodafone UK and Sky (Comcast) have reportedly two among several "groups" that have approached budget conscious fixed broadband ISP TalkTalk about a potential deal (most likely an acquisition), which in theory could create a much larger provider with more influence over the industry. Just to recap. In 2020 TalkTalk became the subject of a £1.1bn takeover by Toscafund - controlled by hedge fund tycoon Martin Hughes (here), which including debt valued the broadband provider at around £1.8bn. The deal took the ISP private and gave them more financial flexibility for their future plans. Since then, they've backed Freedom Fibre (here) and this week made the notable acquisition of Ethernet provider Virtual1 (here). According to the FT (paywall) and Sky News, TalkTalk is now said to have asked investment bank Lazard to review its options after allegedly being approach by several groups, including Vodafone and Sky (Sky Broadband). Lazard is a logical choice as they recently acted as Financial Advisor to TalkTalk on the Virtual1 transaction. Some industry analysts have reportedly suggested that TalkTalk itself could now be worth "at least" £3bn. But this seems rather optimistic for an ISP that doesn't have any significant fixed line broadband infrastructure to call its own (excluding their old unbundled LLU network) and largely just piggybacks off Openreach (BT), CityFibre and Freedom Fibre. But TalkTalk do have a strong business and wholesale side. Funnily enough, Sky Broadband are in a similar position with their own fixed line base, while Vodafone also likes to piggyback off Openreach and CityFibre. At present, Vodafone has a fixed broadband base of 991,000 customers, while Sky Broadband is estimated to be home to around 6.7 million and TalkTalk has approximately 4.2 million. Suffice to say, anybody gobbling up TalkTalk would instantly become a much larger provider, giving them a greater say in how the UK broadband market develops and more opportunities for convergence (Vodafone with mobile, and Sky with mobile and TV). Crucially, TalkTalk's consumer base is mostly made up of those on older copper and hybrid fibre lines (i.e. ADSL and FTTC / VDSL2), which are ripe for a future migration to FTTP. At the time of writing, all of the aforementioned operators have decline to comment on the reports, and TalkTalk has yet to receive any serious formal offers. In other words, we strongly suspect that this is largely just an exercise in spin to help TalkTalk drum up some more productive interest in the idea. But at the same time, it's not unreasonable to suspect that they might succeed, as the interest seems genuine. On the other hand, we see reports like this every year or so and only a very few ever convert into a serious offer. Time will tell. Much may depend upon whether or not TalkTalk’s new owners are more flexible and pragmatic about doing a deal than the previous lot. Arguably, TalkTalk might have gone much further by now had they taken some different decisions a few years ago (e.g. co-investing in FTTP instead of Pay TV).

Budget Broadband ISP TalkTalk Probes Possible UK Data Breach

25th January, 2025 (9 Comments)

Customers of debt-troubled UK internet provider TalkTalk have been given an uncomfortable reminder of the 2015 cyberattack (here), which came after the ISP admitted that it was “investigating” reports on a cybercrime forum that alleged the provider had suffered a new data breach.

Police Arrest After Protestors Cut Vital Fibre Optic Cables in UK Cities

25th January, 2025 (34 Comments)

The City of London Police (CoLP) have arrested a 29-year-old man after a climate protest group claimed to have “[disrupted] the wifi systems of hundreds of insurance companies across the UK“, which they achieved by cutting key fibre optic cables in London (similar events are also said to have occurred in Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield).

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O2 UK Reveals First Insights from AI Granny Created to Waste Scammers Time

23rd January, 2025 (19 Comments)

Mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) launched a “human-like” AI (Artificial Intelligence) ‘Granny’ called Daisy in November last year (here), which was designed to answer calls in real-time from fraudsters and keep them busy (away from customers) for as long as possible. Since then, the bot has chatted with over 1,000 scam callers, and it’s learnt a few things.