A recent Freedom of Information request by TaxPayers Alliance has revealed that many crucial government services, including HMRC, DHSC, and UK Atomic Energy, are using vulnerable and outdated services that are no longer supported by Microsoft, posing a significant cybersecurity threat. Considering that hardware is almost always immutable, no number of updates can improve a device's hardware capability, thus seeing such devices fall behind with the times. Replacing the systems being used by these government institutions would be extremely high, and upgrading to new software is no small feat. To make matters worse, some of the vulnerabilities in the hardware used by the institutions could easily be exploited by novice hackers. Furthermore, cloud-based services are often hardware agnostic, meaning that services can quickly be moved across different platforms at speed.

Source: The Guardian June 26, 2023 14:14 UTC