Bill Goodwin

Pegasystems offers an alternative take on how enterprises can use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate their business processes without burning through their budgets.

MPs are calling on the government to reduce the UK’s dependency on big technology companies amid concerns that the UK is over-reliant on overseas suppliers, posing national security and economic risks. An amendment to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (CSRB) calls for the government to publish a digital security strategy to assess the risks of relying on overseas technology in critical infrastructure.

Hackers will use AI-enabled cyber capabilities to exploit known vulnerabilities in legacy technology at scale by 2028, says National Cyber Security Centre CEO Richard Horne.

The UK’s information commissioner, John Edwards, has resigned his position following a work place investigation into undisclosed allegations. Edwards said in a statement that he accepted that there had been occasions when “he exercised poor judgement” and had “made attempts at humour that were inappropriate.” In a post on LinkedIn, Edwards said that as a result he had decided that it was appropriate to resign from his position. “I do not wish to be a distraction from the ICO’s important work”.

Powerful AI models could be used to conduct cyber attacks within a matter of months, western intelligence agencies warned today, placing governments and businesses at greater risk. The leaders of the Five Eyes cyber security agencies, which include the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, warned today that “Frontier AI” models will pose a greater risk to cyber security than expected. “The rapid pace of frontier AI development means cyber risk assumptions can become outdated in months, not years. We must act before and be prepared to adapt and withstand evolving threats,” the agencies said in an unprecedented warning. Their advice echoes concerns that hostile states such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea may rapidly catch-up with AI capabilities developed by the US and available to organisations in Europe, giving them offensive cyber capabilities far in advance of today.

Mainstream software suppliers are pursuing a “philosophy of madness” by persuading enterprises to deploy thousands of AI agents, says Alan Trefler, CEO and founder of Pegasystems. He claims that enterprises are in danger of lining up problems for the future by letting loose AI agents en masse with the ability to make potentially business-critical decisions on their computer networks.

Enhanced powers to collect and share data are at the heart of EU plans to expand Europol, putting it at loggerheads with human rights groups.

Migration campaign group Front-Lex has filed a complaint to Europe’s data protection watchdog, calling for a ban on Europol’s data processing operations that do not comply with EU law, following an investigation by Computer Weekly, Solomon and Correctiv.

Last year, Unum partnered with Amazon Web Services and Pegasystems, which provides a low-code platform to Fortune 500 companies to automate their business processes, in a project to re-engineer Unum’s Cobol computer code. The insurance company is using AWS’ AI-powered Transform platform to translate its old code into modern business workflows which run on Pega’s cloud platform.

The UK and the European Union have issued sanctions against individuals an organisations linked to Russian backed cyber-attacks. In their first joint cyber-sanctions package, the UK and Europe has targeted 24 individuals and entities linked to the Russian Intelligence Services, for conducting malicious cyber and information campaigns. The move came as the UK and the EU named a unit in Russia’s domestic intelligence service, FSB Centre 16, as the perpetrator of a cyber-attack on Poland’s energy grid infrastructure in December last year, which placed the power supply of 500,000 citizens in winter at risk. The UK and 12 other countries have separately urged businesses to take steps to secure outdated routers, following warnings that Centre 16 has been using vulnerabilities to attack critical national infrastructure around the world.