UK police are building a new system to help fight economic crime and improve the tracking, management and recovery of criminal assets, the Police Digital Service (PDS) has announced.

Set to replace the legacy Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD) that has been used since 2003 to locate and seize illicit assets – including cash, property, vehicles and high-value goods – the Asset Recovery IT (ARIT) project aims to streamline the way criminal assets are tracked and shared, help disparate teams work more effectively together, and improve the evidence provided to courts.

It will also aim to prevent criminal money from funding further illegal activity, with PDS committing to working closely with police officers, financial investigators, prosecutors and local authorities to build a cloud-based system that meets their individual needs.

The system is also expected to support international and cryptocurrency recovery capabilities, helping more than 3,500 users to manage the recovery of assets held abroad or in digital currencies. All of this will take place within a single, streamlined system.

The ARIT announcement follows the Home Office’s conclusion that JARD’s technology was outdated, expensive to maintain, and lacked the flexibility needed for more complex investigations. 

The need to replace JARD has been known for some time, with the Home Office initially publishing a contract notice – worth an estimated £25m – for the “Replacement of the Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD) IT Systems” in August 2020.

“JARD is an aging system that has been modified and updated on a number of occasions over its 15-year plus lifecycle,” reads the notice. “It is now, however, reaching the end of its useful life as it is not conducive to modern expectations of electronic data capture and subsequent analytical filtering and manipulation.”

Now contracted to NEC Software Solutions – the Japanese software supplier behind the facial recognition algorithms used by the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police – for an estimated £14.4m, PDS said it is aiming to have a “minimum viable product” in place by September 2026.

At this point, JARD will be decommissioned, with the more than 180 government and law enforcement agencies using it – including HM Revenue & Customs – being transitioned over to the national ARIT system by the end of that year.

Computer Weekly contacted the Home Office about what happened with the earlier contract notice – as PDS was only formally commissioned to work on JARD in April 2024 – and why it has taken five years to find a supplier to develop a replacement for a system that was deemed out of date in August 2020. However, the Home Office had not responded by the time of publication.

“ARIT represents a bold step forward in our mission to equip UK law enforcement with the digital tools needed to tackle the evolving threat of economic crime,” said Tony Estaugh, PDS CEO and the former biometrics commissioner of England and Wales.

“This project is a testament to the impact of collaboration and innovation in public service, and I’m proud of the role PDS is playing in delivering a solution that helps safeguard communities and ensure that crime doesn’t pay.”

Marco Fiorentino, the executive director at NEC, added: “The new system will make it easier to protect the public and stop criminals from profiting from illegal activity. With ARIT, whether it’s a police officer seizing a suspect’s luxury car, a financial investigator tracking laundered cryptocurrency, or a council officer handling illicit cash, they’ll be able to log and track evidence quickly and simply.  

“This will lead to quicker action, clearer evidence, and improved results in court.”

PDS said the project falls under the Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery (AMLAR) Programme, which is led by the Home Office’s Economic Crime Division, and forms a “key” plank of the department’s wider Economic Crime Plan.

According to the plan, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) – one of the law enforcement bodies that will be using ARIT – estimated in 2021 that, while exact amounts are unknown, it is a “realistic possibility” that over £100bn is laundered through the UK or UK corporate structures every year.

In May 2024, the UK’s then-deputy foreign secretary, Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, said that nearly 40% of the entire world’s “dirty money” is going through the City of London and other crown dependencies.

The latest Home Office statistics on illicit asset seizure show that £284.5m worth of assets were recovered from confiscation, forfeiture and civil recovery orders in the financial year ending March 2025. This represents an increase of 15% on the previous financial year.

A recent study of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, has detected several organic compounds that had never been recorded there before. The findings, published this month in Nature Astronomy, provide new clues about the interior chemical composition of this icy world, as well as new hope that it could harbor life.

The researchers analyzed data from the Cassini probe, which launched in 1997 and studied Saturn and its moons for years until its destruction in 2017. For Enceladus, Cassini gathered data from ice fragments forcefully ejected from the moon’s subsurface ocean up into space.

Enceladus is one of 274 bodies so far discovered in Saturn’s gravitational pull. It measures about 500 kilometers in diameter, making it the planet’s sixth-largest satellite. While this moon does not stand out for its size, it is notable for its cryovolcanoes—geysers at Enceladus’s south pole that spew out water vapor and ice fragments. Plumes of ejected material can extend to nearly 10,000 kilometers in length, which is more than the distance from Mexico to Patagonia, and some of this material rises into space. The outermost of Saturn’s main rings—its E ring—is primarily made up of ice ejected into space by Enceladus.

This material is believed to come from a saline water chamber beneath the moon’s icy crust that is connected to its rocky core. It’s possible that chemical reactions are taking place down there, under high pressure and heat.

Until now, most chemical analyses of ice from Enceladus were of particles deposited in Saturn’s E ring. But during a high-speed flyby of the moon in 2008, Cassini was fortunate enough to directly sample freshly ejected fragments from a cryovolcano. The new research paper reanalyzed this data, confirming the presence of previously detected organic molecules, as well as revealing compounds that had previously been undetected.

“Such compounds are believed to be intermediates in the synthesis of more complex molecules, which could be potentially biologically relevant. It is important to note, however, that these molecules can be formed abiotically as well,” Nozair Khawaja, a planetary scientist at Freie Universität Berlin and lead author of the study, told Reuters. The discovery significantly expands the range of confirmed organic molecules on Enceladus.

The key is that the compounds appeared in freshly ejected particles, suggesting that they were formed within the moon’s hidden ocean or in contact with its internal interfaces, not during their journey through the E ring or via exposure to the conditions of space. This reinforces the hypothesis that hydrothermal processes beneath Enceladus’s surface could be generating rich organic chemistry. Combining this new research with previous studies, scientists have now found five of the six elements essential for life—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—in the satellite’s ejected material.

This itself is not a discovery of life, nor of biosignatures—the signs of life. However, the research confirms that Enceladus has the three basic conditions for life to form: liquid water, an energy source, and essential elements and organics. “Enceladus is, and should be ranked, as the prime target to explore habitability and search whether there is life or not,” Khawaja said.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Windows 10 was launched in July 2015. It was supposed to be the last major operating system (OS) upgrade, but Microsoft released Windows 11 in October 2021, and now Windows 10 has reached end of life, which means it will no longer be updated.

Consumers who register for extended support and back up their PCs in the Microsoft cloud will be able to get free security updates until October 2026. Corporate PCs and devices connected to Active Directory will only receive Windows 10 security updates if they are covered by an Extended Security Updates (ESU) subscription.  

In July, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that the security risks of not upgrading are significant. As the NCSC notes in a blog post on its website, in addition to the difficulties associated with being out of support, an out-of-date operating system is a prime target for cyber criminals.

“We saw this when a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6-11 was exploited after Windows XP support ended on 8 April 2014, and before it was patched on 1 May 2014. And again in 2017, a vulnerability in unpatched versions of XP was exploited extensively by the WannaCry ransomware – an attack which resulted in huge costs and damage globally,” says the NCSC in the post.

Analyst Forrester’s Say goodbye to Windows 10 to reduce your cyber risk report points out that Windows 11 now has significant security features that are not available in Windows 10. These include administrator protection that Forrester says helps enable least privileged access. There is a feature called Smart App Control, which is used to validate the applications before they are run. In the report, Forrester notes that the latest version of Credential Guard extends account protection to machine account passwords, which is a new feature in Windows 11.

“Much has been made about Microsoft’s plans to better control the security of the kernel after CrowdStrike’s 2024 issue. Their goal isn’t to completely lock out vendors, but to ensure incidents like this don’t reoccur; if features and functions can be moved out of the kernel and into the user space, they should be,” write Forrester analysts Paddy Harrington, Merritt Maxim, Sophia Barrett and Christine Turley in the report.

But the improvements in Windows security also make it more difficult to move older hardware onto Windows 11. One of the difficulties holding organisations back is the hardware requirements of Windows 11, which introduced a need for PCs to have the Trusted Platform Module (TPM 2.0), UEFI and support for Secure Boot. “If your devices lack even one of these features, you’ll be unable to upgrade easily,” says the NCSC. 

Following an analysis of its customers’ PCs, Nexthink estimates there has been a 33% decrease in Windows 10 devices between 19 May and 1 August. Assuming a further 33% reduction by 14 October – the date on which support officially ends – this leaves around 121 million Windows 10 PCs still running the operating system at the end of support deadline.

Discussing the challenge of migration, Tim Flower, DEX strategist at Nexthink, says: “Windows 11 brings powerful new capabilities, but only if devices and employees are ready to take advantage of them.”

Why Windows 10 wasn’t the last major OS update

Microsoft releases two major updates of its Windows operating system each year. Windows 10 was supposed to be the largest refresh before it moved to bi-annual updates, as Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal recalls.

“When Windows 10 came out after Windows 7, Microsoft, I’m sure, said it was going to be the last big operating system upgrade,” he says. “Effectively, Microsoft was saying there would be no Windows 11 after Windows 10, and we took that for gospel to mean that it would be the last upgrade.”

However, in a Computer Weekly YouTube video, Atwal points out that the success of the Windows operating system actually hinders progress.

“So much legacy software and peripherals are supported through the operating system. At some point, that’s just become too much in terms of the code and managing the updates,” he says.

What this implies is that, at some point, updates to device driver software will no longer be available. If a PC continues to run outdated device drivers, there is a risk that the old driver software could have a known vulnerability that is being exploited. Clearly, Microsoft is unwilling to coordinate the effort required to support device drivers indefinitely, which means that perfectly good peripherals will lose support eventually; they may still run using the older (legacy) device driver, but there will not be any newer versions (see box: MacOS end-of-life).

To discourage people from trying to continue using these device drivers, Windows 11 uses a feature called Secure Boot, which enforces signed device drivers. This means only software that has a current digital signature can be installed. But like many features in Windows, there are workarounds, and unless an IT department runs a fully locked-down PC environment, savvy end users can workaround the Secure Boot feature.

Moving to Windows 11

The NCSC says Windows 11 introduces a secure-by-default setup, which includes BitLocker, virtualisation-based security (VBS) and support for native passkey management. While some of these features were available in Windows 10, they are now switched on by default. “Devices that don’t meet Windows 11 hardware requirements – and are therefore unable to use the features that are needed to secure Windows – remain fundamentally vulnerable to attack,” the NCSC warns.

Among the benefits of migrating is the built-in artificial intelligence (AI) that Microsoft is promoting, which is available in Copilot+ PCs. AI PCs will represent 31% of the total PC market globally by the end of 2025, according to Gartner. The analyst firm’s latest forecast projects that worldwide shipments of AI PCs will total 77.8 million units in 2025.

By the end of 2026, Gartner expects 40% of software providers to prioritise investments in AI capabilities directly on PCs, up from 2% in 2024. In the same year, multiple small language models (SLMs) will run locally on PCs, up from zero in 2023.

Unlike five years ago, there is growing interest in using ARM-based hardware to support AI inference workloads on Windows 11. According to Microsoft, ARM-based PCs offer all-day battery life.

Gartner’s forecast shows that ARM-based laptops will gain a larger share of the consumer market than the business market, as application compatibility challenges are overcome. Its research found that business users prefer x86 PCs to run Windows. According to Gartner, the x86 PC market is expected to make up 71% of the AI business laptop market in 2025, with ARM making up 24%.

Discussing the forecast, Atwal says: “Businesses are evaluating ARM-based PCs to understand if it is a viable platform. The issue is that not all of the applications they need run on ARM at the moment, although the large majority of applications are ARM-compatible.”

Microsoft says applications need to be rebuilt to run natively on Windows ARM-based PCs. Applications that have not been rebuilt can be run using the Prism emulation that was shipped with Windows 11, version 24H2.

Atwal expects more native ARM applications to become available over the next 12 months. In particular, he sees an opportunity to use small language models directly on AI PCs, offering faster response times, lower energy consumption and reduced reliance on cloud services.

As Atwal notes, SLMs provide task-specific intelligence. “Since the AI runs directly on devices, SLMs help keep user and business data secure,” he adds.

Over time, the partnership between Qualcomm and Microsoft to deliver ARM-based Copilot+ PCs is likely to result in an enterprise alternative to x86-based Windows hardware.

“That partnership is driving ARM onto mainstream PCs, which is different to where we were maybe five years ago or 10 years ago when ARM hardware was around the edges,” says Atwal.

However, the support for new hardware and constant development of new and improved PC peripherals mean Microsoft will continue to be challenged with how much legacy software the Windows OS can support. From an IT management perspective, this means support for older hardware will continue to drop and IT leaders will continue to plan PC and operating system refreshes to ensure their PC estate remains current.