The week in security: High-security local clouds woo sensitive government data

The increasing number of firms operating on-shore Australian cloud facilities continues to grow, with Microsoft’s Azure making the latest step to offer high-security cloud to government organisations.

That security will be crucial as preparations for GDPR legislation enter their final few weeks, with new figures suggesting most companies still haven’t adopted mechanisms to review and classify their data to ensure it remains accessible.

Google took a stab at cryptojacking malware by banning all crypto-mining extensions from its Play Store, after a review found that authors just couldn’t bring themselves to comply with the rules the company had imposed on such tools.

Also fighting online nasties was Microsoft, which added ransomware protections to bolster the security of OneDrive and Outlook.com.

Intel threw in the towel on its Spectre patching, abandoning efforts to patch some older CPUs against the insidious bug and scaling back its Spectre patching project.

This, as it was revealed that hackers can take control of a Windows 10 PC using an old bug in Windows Defender security software.