I have to admit, it’s hard to believe that 2022 is already over – I’m still in that start-of-the-year phase of writing the date wrong on the first attempt…

Regardless, this month has been a great start to the year for the Babel team and our clients. The team has worked hard to make sure that we hit the ground running and get our clients at the forefront of the media agenda as it begins to unfold. Stick around to read more about the conversations our clients drove in January!

Silicon Valley 2.0: Britain’s breakthrough as the next Silicon Valley 

Towards the end of January, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt outlined his four pillars to grow Britain’s economy as he aims to lay solid foundations for the future – Enterprise, Education, Employment and Everywhere. Hunt’s plan aims to make Britain the “next Silicon Valley” and turn it into a hub for technology innovation, responding to the idea that the future is digital.

The Chancellor’s speech appeared to be a call for help from the technology industry while highlighting that there are still key problems that need to be mitigated in order for the technology industry to excel, including the skills gap and a lack of funding for start-ups.

In response to the Chancellor’s speech, Chief Executive at data lineage company and new Babel client Solidatus, Philip Dutton, spoke to ITV News about the tremendous growth that the company had experienced. Dutton told ITV News that London has played a critical role in the success of the company and that without being based in London, Solidatus’ journey could have taken more than 20 years, or may not have happened at all. Dutton suggested this is largely due to London’s large and diverse network of clients along with the abundance of talent that is available to businesses. 

Protecting privacy in the digital age: the growing need for Privacy Enhancing Technology 

As data regulation begins to shape the technology landscape, and consumers become increasingly aware of how their data is being used, privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETs, have become more important than ever before. 

PETs come with a wide range of advantages, the most prominent being that this set of technologies allows businesses to extract relevant data while allowing individuals’ privacy to remain intact. As we welcome a cookieless future, with the downfall of third-party data and the rise of first-party data, PETs will come in useful for (ethically) gathering customer data. Big tech companies such as Meta have already embraced this movement, and have incorporated the use of PETs in their digital advertising initiatives.

The possibilities for PETs have also been noticed by both the UK and US governments, who announced that they have introduced a joint initiative to help boost the adoption of PETs in businesses – who will now consider how PETs can be integrated into their current processes.

One of the key features of PETs is homomorphic encryption, which simply allows complex mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data without first having to decrypt it. CEO Dr Ellison-Anne Williams at client Enveil, which is a leading PET company, discusses the power of this technology in ITPro, you can read the full article here.

A ransomware attack turns into data theft at The Guardian 

The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving alongside technology, and as such attacks are becoming increasingly severe. 2023 has been no exception to this growing trend, and towards the beginning of the month, The Guardian confirmed that they fell victim to a ransomware attack. This attack involved threat actors gaining access to personal data about The Guardian’s UK staff members, with executives at The Guardian describing the incident itself as a “highly sophisticated cyber-attack involving unauthorised third-party access to parts of our network”.

Dominic Trott, head of strategy at Orange Cyberdefense, commented on this attack in Infosecurity, stating that, although many attacks of this nature are described as being ‘sophisticated’, they are fairly common and easily executed. With this in mind, Trott believes that we need to stop referring to simple ‘spray and pray’ phishing attacks as sophisticated attacks. In reality, it does not require a lot of effort to gain access to a large organisation’s network. Trott stated that it is more important than ever before to implement training programmes to build awareness of simple cybercrime techniques and reduce the human element in cybersecurity – to help prevent issues like this in the future.

Ransomware is a barrier to digital transformation, Veeam reports