Security Flaws Across UK Government Sites Exposed ‘God-Tier’ Information

The UK government has defaulted to openly publishing code it produces with public money for around a decade because it’s transparent, and making it easier for code to be reused is cost-efficient. This includes within the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Home Office, as well as local authorities.

But funding squeezes have left departments neglecting maintenance and improvement of their technology estate. While ControlPlane security researcher Chris Nesbitt-Smith found the vulnerabilities using Claude’s Opus and Sonnet AI models, he says that he used consumer-grade models on a laptop and that many of the issues could have been caught by a routine IT health check. “None of this is the level of sophistication that general media is worried about in terms of cyber attacks,” he tells WIRED.