The UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU) of the National Crime Agency (NCA) has published the March 2025 edition of the SARs Reporter Booklet, highlighting recent cases where Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) led to successful law enforcement outcomes. The document details multiple cases involving money laundering through shell companies, carousel fraud and invoice redirection scams, resulting in Account Freezing Orders totalling over £470,000.

The National Crime Agency (NCA), Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), HMRC, Home Office and HM Treasury have published nine 2026 economic crime system priorities for the regulated sector, under Economic Crime Plan 2. The priorities, which are considered equal and are not ranked, cover international fraud and international money laundering, criminal cash, money mule herders, fraud and professional enablers, terrorist financing, politically exposed persons and digital assets.

The National Crime Agency (NCA), Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) and Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) have jointly published a Red Alert warning financial institutions about a sophisticated Russian oil sanctions evasion network. The alert details how the network operates through 'blue' companies interfacing with Western institutions and 'red' companies trading directly with Russian oil firms. It follows UK sanctions imposed on key network entities 2RIVERS DMCC and 2RIVERS PTE in December 2024, and NORD AXIS in May 2025. The alert provides red flag indicators to help identify potential sanctions breaches.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) published a report proposing measures to address governance gaps in neural organoid research, including short-term best practice guidance and longer-term reforms to the regulation of emerging biotechnologies. The Health Research Authority (HRA) welcomed the report and says it will continue to support clear and consistent governance as the field develops. Neural organoid research uses stem cells to create models that mimic aspects of human brain development and function. The NCOB says the research could improve understanding of neurological disease and reduce animal testing but warns that more advanced organoids may raise ethical concerns, including possible sentience and risks linked to transplanting human neural organoids into animals. The NCOB states that current governance arrangements lack clear ethical safeguards, creating inconsistency and uncertainty for researchers, and recommends developing best practice guidance, updating Home Office guidance on the use of human material in animals, improving consent processes for tissue donors, and establishing a central system to monitor developments in the field. Responding to the report, HRA Director of Policy and Partnerships Becky Purvis says transparent consent processes are important to ensure people understand how their data and tissue may be used and can make informed decisions about participating in research.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published its annual review 2024, revealing a significant increase in cyber incidents and sophisticated threats. NCSC's head, Richard Horne, emphasised the widening gap between cyber risks and the UK's defence capabilities. The review highlights state actors, particularly Russia and China, as major threats, while ransomware remains the most pervasive danger to UK organisations. The NCSC handled 430 incidents in the past year, up from 371, with 347 involving data exfiltration. The organisation issued 542 bespoke notifications, more than double the previous year, warning of potential cyber attacks. In response to these escalating threats, the UK government has announced a new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill to bolster protection of critical national infrastructure.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued an alert following increased targeting of operational technology (OT) systems across multiple sectors globally, including in the UK, by a range of threat actors, resulting in some limited real-world disruption. It warns that any organisation with internet-exposed OT could be affected and that unintended exposure may arise through misconfigurations, legacy connections or unmanaged assets. Organisations that use, deploy or maintain OT should review their security posture, including by identifying OT assets, communications pathways and external connections, ensuring OT devices are not directly accessible from the public internet, replacing default credentials, strengthening access controls, maintaining secure and supported boundary devices, using secure protocols, monitoring connectivity, separating OT, management and business networks and maintaining tested backups and recovery procedures. The NCSC also highlights a broader pattern of disruptive cyber activity affecting internet-exposed systems and edge devices across all sectors and advises non-OT organisations to maintain visibility of these assets, apply vendor security updates promptly and retire end-of-life equipment.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published guidance for high-risk individuals who already have their own website or custom email domain, or who intend to set one up.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published guidance for organisations on how they should manage their communications strategy before, during and after a cyber security incident. Three core principles are outlined in the guidance, namely the need to prepare a communications strategy in advance, communicating clearly with different parties and tailoring messaging as required, and managing the aftermath in the medium and long term.

GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has announced the publication of joint guidance on considering payment in ransomware incidents from the Association of British Insurers, British Insurance Brokers’ Association and International Underwriting Association. The guidance is general in nature and aims to help minimise the impact a ransomware attack may have on an organisation in terms of the interruption to the business and the cost to the victims and the business. The NCSC and the industry bodies recommend that victim organisations review the guidance before attempting to pay any ransom to a criminal group.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published a joint statement by the Five Eyes cyber security agencies urging organisational leaders to act on rapidly transforming cyber risk driven by advances in artificial intelligence (AI). The agencies warn that frontier AI models are expected to accelerate the speed, scale and sophistication of cyber threats within months while also offering opportunities to strengthen cyber defence. They call on leaders to assess cyber risk and readiness, prioritise foundational cyber security controls, strengthen identity and access controls, accelerate patching, address legacy systems, prepare for incidents and use AI to improve cyber resilience and business continuity.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published guidance on cross-domain approaches and architecture, explaining how organisations can safely enable data flows between systems operating at different levels of trust. It describes cross domain as an approach for managing risks where data moves between ‘zones of trust’, being systems or services with a similar security posture, separated by trust boundaries.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published guidance to help organisations respond to and recover from highly disruptive cyber attacks. The guidance sets out a three-stage framework covering the immediate response to an incident, recovery to minimum viable operations and longer-term rebuilding to restore business as usual and improve organisational resilience. It recommends establishing effective governance and communication arrangements, taking swift defensive actions, prioritising the restoration of critical business functions, engaging NCSC-assured Cyber Incident Response (CIR) firms where appropriate and securely rebuilding systems by addressing weaknesses that contributed to the incident. The guidance also encourages organisations to develop, practise and test incident response and recovery plans in advance to improve preparedness and support faster recovery from future cyber incidents.