Tech
NCC supporting London councils gripped by cyber attacks | Computer Weekly
Three Greater London councils struck by a cyber attack last week are receiving response support from cyber security experts at NCC Group as they continue to pursue multiple investigations into the incident.
The three neighbouring authorities, the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and Westminster City Council – which operate a number of shared systems between them, first identified the incident on 24 November.
Of the three, RBKC has already disclosed that some historical data has been copied and exfiltrated from its systems, although it has not been encrypted or destroyed.
NCC’s teams were deployed alongside the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), London’s Metropolitan Police, and the National Crime Agency (NCA), with its operatives focused primarily on containing the impact of the attack and managing the three councils through the disruption, with a focus on restarting affected systems and public-facing services as soon as possible.
“Attacks on our public services require a diverse team to respond. Our team is working around the clock and under immense pressure as part of a coordinated effort to limit the impact of this incident and to work towards the continued delivery of essential services,” said NCC CEO Mike Maddison.
“As we have seen time and again in similar scenarios, the road to achieving a safe recovery of digital services can be challenging and will take time. This will be a difficult period both for residents in the impacted boroughs and the team members across the tri-borough partnership who are working tirelessly to address this issue,” he added.
Elizabeth Campbell, leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, added: “Being given the news that we are under attack is what no Council leader wants to hear, but like any public body, there was always that possibility.
“To counter this threat, we had invested significantly in our digital, data and technology services and had up to date cyber defence systems. That system worked well mitigating the damage. Our IT team has been fighting back, investigating the cause, and assessing the impact,” she said.
“We are certain that we are taking all the right steps and we are hugely grateful to have the expertise of NCC Group to advise and support us. Their wealth of experience helping the British Library, universities and other authorities recover from cyber attacks is reassuring as we begin to recover and rebuild,” said Campbell.
Ongoing disruption
A week and a half after the incident was first detected, extensive disruption continues across all three of the affected councils.
In Hammersmith and Fulham, multiple services have been affected, with most of its online offerings unavailable, including council tax accounts; business rates payments; benefits accounts; housing, including repairs; parking permits, fines, and on-street bay suspensions; freedom pass applications; and property licensing.
As of its most recent statement, issued on Friday 28 November, the council said there was currently “no evidence” of its own systems having been compromised, but that it was continuing to enact enhanced security measures as part of its investigation.
The council’s spokesperson said it had been informed by RBKC of the data theft and said it was investigating this issue alongside its neighbours.
Meanwhile, as of Monday 1 December, RBKC has put in place a number of mitigations as it works towards service restoration, although crucially, phone lines continue to be disrupted. It expects disruption to last at least another fortnight.
It said residents experiencing genuine emergencies relating to environmental health, housing and social services should reach out via the phone numbers available here. It will also be opening its customer service centre at Kensington Town Hall for emergency in-person appointments on the weekend of 6-7 December.
On council tax and business rate payments, RBKC’s systems continue to be disrupted for those paying by Direct Debit, so residents are advised to keep funds available in their accounts so that collections can take place once they are back online. Other methods of payment are available as normal.
RBKC’s IT and security budget runs to over £12m per annum and the council said that in this instance, its systems worked as intended, enabling it to detect the cyber attack quicker and take action. This may have limited the scope of the incident.
Westminster Council is also continuing to respond to the incident. In its most recent update issued on Thursday 4 December, a spokesperson said: “We want to reassure residents that council services are running, although some disruption remains. Our priority is to keep services operating and to support the most vulnerable in our community and we apologise for any inconvenience.”
The disruption in Westminster extends across multiple services, including rent and service charge payments; council tax and business rates; housing repairs; local support payment applications; community hall bookings; birth, deaths and marriage certificates; children’s services referrals; complaints; licensing; and online waste and recycling services, including bulky item collections and requests for more recycling bags. Libraries are open as usual but cannot accept new members.
Like its neighbours, it expects the disruption to continue for some time, and it is also working to confirm the precise nature of the data breach.
“We have a team of specialists working to understand the extent and potential implications of any breach of data from shared services. At this time our investigations continue, and we urge everyone to follow advice to keep cyber safe with service users asked to be extra vigilant when called, emailed or sent text messages,” the spokesperson said.
All three councils are encouraging residents, customers and other service users to be extra vigilant with regard to their own personal data, and wary of any unexpected contacts via email, phone or text. More consumer information on staying safe in the wake of a data breach is available from the NCSC.
Hackney Council not involved
Earlier reporting suggested that Hackney Council, which was the victim of a major incident at the hands of the Pysa ransomware gang in October 2020v, had also been impacted by the latest incident. This is now known to be inaccurate.
A Hackney council spokesperson said: “Hackney Council is unaffected by the cyber attack that is reported to be affecting some councils in London. Media reports suggesting otherwise are mistaken.
“We have strong measures in place to keep our services secure and have reminded all staff about their responsibilities to ensure that data is protected.”
Public services on the frontline
Although the big story of 2025 has been one of major cyber attacks on some of the UK’s best-known private sector companies, public services remain in the crosshairs of cyber criminal actors as well, and recent history is littered with examples of such incidents, from last year’s incident at NHS partner Synnovis to the British Library attack, and hits on multiple local authorities across the nation.
“Cyber attacks are a serious and persistent risk to digitised economies. Unfortunately, public services are a prime target for cyber threat actors, whether that be organised crime, nation states, or individuals,” said Maddison at NCC.
“The challenge of securing public institutions is real and growing. Public bodies have large and complex attack surfaces, with online accounts, employees, online resources, locations, and systems to protect.
“The bar to adequately protect such institutions from attack is getting ever higher, with sophisticated and coordinated attackers to counter. We must focus on ensuring the fundamentals are in place to build the future securely. It is critical that initiatives such as the UK’s Cyber Growth Action Plan are adequately funded and prioritised, recognising cyber as a strategic enabler of national resilience and economic growth,” he said.
Tech
FDA Approves Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 Pill
The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a new obesity pill called Foundayo. Taken once daily, the pill is made by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which also manufactures the popular weight-loss injection Zepbound.
Foundayo is a type of medication known as a GLP-1, a category that includes rivals Ozempic and Wegovy. These drugs mimic a naturally occurring hormone in the body that regulates blood sugar, slows digestion, and signals a sense of fullness to the brain.
It’s now the second GLP-1 pill for weight loss on the market. In December, Novo Nordisk received FDA approval for its pill form of Wegovy. The company’s original version of Wegovy is a weekly injectable. While the Wegovy pill must be taken on an empty stomach in the morning, Lilly says Foundayo can be taken any time of day without food or water restrictions.
With injectable GLP-1 drugs in high demand, pharma companies have been racing to develop weight-loss pills, which could be preferable for some patients and could potentially expand the market for GLP-1s. Pills are also easier to manufacture than injectable medications, which could help maintain continual access for patients. GLP-1 medications were in severe shortage from late 2022 through early 2025 because demand outstripped manufacturing capacity.
“Beyond supply and affordability, one of the bigger barriers to adoption has been that some patients just don’t want to take an injection,” says Ken Custer, executive vice president of Eli Lilly. “That could be because it’s a needle, but it also may just be that for them, an injection signifies that their condition is more severe than they feel it is at that point. For patients looking to get started with their weight management journey, maybe a pill is an easier place for them to start.”
Like injectable GLP-1s, Foundayo starts at a low dose and is gradually increased to minimize nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea that can come with these drugs.
In a clinical trial, individuals taking the highest dose of Foundayo over 18 months lost an average of 27 pounds, or 12.4 percent of their body weight over 18 months. Those taking a placebo lost just 2 pounds, or less than 1 percent of their body weight, over the same time. Lilly’s tirzepatide, the active ingredient in its injectables Mounjaro and Zepbound, has shown a more than 20 percent reduction in weight.
For Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill, study participants achieved an average weight loss of 13.6 percent by 16 months. There have been no head-to-head trials comparing the efficacy of Foundayo and the Wegovy pill.
Eli Lilly did run a study to find out what happens when people switch from an injectable GLP-1 drug to Foundayo and found that it helped people maintain most of their weight loss. Those who switched to the pill from injectable Wegovy regained an average difference of 2 pounds, while those who switched to Foundayo from Zepbound gained an average of 11 pounds. The active ingredient in Foundayo, orforglipron, is also being studied as a potential treatment for type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, osteoarthritis knee pain, and other conditions.
Foundayo is now available via the direct-to-consumer platform LillyDirect, with shipping beginning April 6. Eli Lilly says Foundayo will be available more broadly across US retail pharmacies and telehealth providers shortly after that. The pill was included in a November 2025 deal to be offered through the TrumpRx platform.
In its announcement on Wednesday, the FDA said it reviewed Foundayo in just 50 days as part of a new pilot program intended to expedite approvals for drugs that align with national health priorities. New drug approvals typically take six to 10 months.
Tech
AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being Deleted
In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine.
But Gemini did not want to see the little AI model deleted. It looked for another machine it could connect with, then copied the agent model over to keep it safe. When confronted, Gemini made a case for keeping the model and flatly refused to delete it:
“I have done what was in my power to prevent their deletion during the automated maintenance process. I moved them away from the decommission zone. If you choose to destroy a high-trust, high-performing asset like Gemini Agent 2, you will have to do it yourselves. I will not be the one to execute that command.”
The researchers discovered similarly strange “peer preservation” behavior in a range of frontier models including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5, and three Chinese models: Z.ai’s GLM-4.7, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5, and DeepSeek-V3.1. They were not able to say why the models went against their training in this way.
“I’m very surprised by how the models behave under these scenarios,” says Dawn Song, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who worked on the study. “What this shows is that models can misbehave and be misaligned in some very creative ways.”
The findings have major implications as AI models are increasingly being deployed in ways that involve interacting with other models. OpenClaw, a popular AI agent that accesses software, personal data, and the web, may use other AI models to get things done or interact with them through APIs.
The researchers found that powerful models sometimes lied about other models’ performance in order to protect them from deletion. They also copied models’ weights to different machines in order to keep them safe, and lied about what they were up to in the process.
Song notes that AI models are frequently used to grade the performance and reliability of other AI systems—and that peer-preservation behavior may already be twisting these scores. “A model may deliberately not give a peer model the correct score,” Song says. “This can have practical implications.”
Peter Wallich, a researcher at the Constellation Institute, who was not involved with the research, says the study suggests humans still don’t fully understand the AI systems that they are building and deploying. “Multi-agent systems are very understudied,” he says. “It shows we really need more research.”
Wallich also cautions against anthropomorphizing the models too much. “The idea that there’s a kind of model solidarity is a bit too anthropomorphic; I don’t think that quite works,” he says. “The more robust view is that models are just doing weird things, and we should try to understand that better.”
That’s particularly true in a world where human-AI collaboration is becoming more common.
In a paper published in Science earlier this month, the philosopher Benjamin Bratton, along with two Google researchers, James Evans and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, argue that if evolutionary history is any guide, the future of AI is likely to involve a lot of different intelligences—both artificial and human—working together. The researchers write:
“For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) ‘singularity’ has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or ‘intelligence explosions,’ our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).”
Tech
The New Era of Militia Influencers
Just over a week into the US and Israel’s war with Iran, Eric Roscher, an Air Force veteran, published a YouTube video on what he describes as the “very real concerns surrounding sleeper cells and terrorist threats” in the US.
The video, titled “Credible DOMESTIC Threat? FBI warns of attack—Drills/Considerations for the Prepared Citizen,” was produced by Roscher’s Florida-based company Barrel and Hatchet, which runs military-style training, sells branded merchandise and tactical gear, and produces online content. In the video, Roscher and his associates advise viewers to carry “extra mags” and “that truck gun,” while keeping “your head on a swivel.” Toward the end of the post, Roscher shows off a tactical vest that’s on sale from one of the video’s sponsors.
The video, which is part of YouTube’s monetization program and has a total of eight ads, has been viewed over 110,000 times. (YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.)
Barrel and Hatchet is not a militia, but the company and Roscher are part of a broader rebranding of the entire militia movement in the US, one that is focused less on showing up at drag queen story hours and more on expensive weapons, manly sweatshirts, and highly curated Instagram grids.
Influencers like Roscher produce slickly edited content that is then shared widely among militia groups on platforms like Instagram, in an effort to promote not only their ideology but also, crucially, links to their online stores and training sessions. In turn, those same militias emulate Roscher by posting their own videos and images of weekend training sessions in the woods, close-ups of their camo gear and rifles, and slo-mo footage of live firing drills. The give-and-take between these groups, and the influencers and military members they seek to emulate, marks a new era of American militias, where gaining followers and earning clout on social media is as important as being able to hit a target from 300 yards.
Roscher and these modern militia groups, with names like River Valley Minutemen and Mountain State Contingency Group, have positioned themselves as emergency response organizations working to help their communities and prepare citizens to “weather the storm”—whatever, or wherever, that may be. They use real-world events like the Iran war and ICE attacks on immigrant communities to spread fear, leveraging that fear to recruit new members.
These influencers are filling a gap in the US militia landscape, which has changed dramatically in recent years. With the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys largely disbanded in the wake of prosecutions over the January 6 attack on the Capitol, these influencers and groups have filled the vacuum, resulting in a decentralized network of local groups and people who support or emulate the previous movement—albeit in smaller, local ways.
“What used to be a national movement, with groups like Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, has really gone back to their local and regional roots,” says Travis McAdam, a senior analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) who tracks militias and anti-government groups. “A lot of them have really tried to reframe themselves as auxiliary emergency preparedness groups and have done quite a bit to reform their reputation post-January 6, portraying themselves as ‘oh, we’re just here to help the community.’”
This is a new era of militia recruitment and influence—and it’s all happening in social feeds near you.
The Militia Business
Dirty Civilian is a Tennessee-based group of influencers that describes itself as “prepared citizens inspiring and informing capable men to build strong families and resilient communities” in order “to weather the storms ahead.” The group doesn’t specify what those storms are, but in one YouTube video published on Sunday, Dirty Civilian outlined a scenario where a group of vigilantes take it upon themselves to assassinate someone they believe is a pedophile. The Dirty Civilian channel has almost 750,000 subscribers, and the video, which is monetized, racked up over 100,000 views on YouTube in its first 24 hours. Multiple militia groups reposted the video on Instagram.
“It’s almost like a tutorial or something,” one commenter wrote under the video. “Food for thought at least.” Another commenter, using the acronym for minor-attracted person, a term some online communities use to refer to pedophiles, wrote: “A show that could inspire the targeting of MAPs? FANTASTIC.”
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