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A group set up to support civil service pension scheme (CSPS) members in difficulty has written to MPs and the National Audit Office (NAO) to offer support in ongoing investigations into Capita’s botched scheme administration. Delays in paying pensions has forced at least one former civil servant to use a food bank as many struggle financially. In a letter to MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (Pacac), the Civil Service Pensions Campaign group described Capita’s “systemic” failure. The group, which represents thousands of retired civil servants, has also requested that the NAO take direct contributions to its current investigation from group members, who are all members of the CSPS. Capita had a two-year period to prepare for the takeover of the administration of 1.7 million civil servant pensions, but since taking the wheel in December 2025, it has overseen a disaster. Retiring civil servants have seen long delays in being paid their pensions, with some still not in receipt of them despite retiring 10 months ago. About 4,000 emergency loans have been made to struggling members of the scheme, and people have died before receiving what they are owed. ## MPs listening In a submission to MPs on the PAC and the Pacac, the campaign group wrote: “This is a systemic failure. The evidence being reported to the Campaigns Group suggests that these problems can no longer reasonably be characterised as a collection of isolated administrative errors or particularly difficult individual cases.” The campaign group told Computer Weekly: “Various Facebook groups dedicated to sharing [CSPS] experiences reveal the anguish and anger of claimants forced to rely on food banks, reliant on the financial charity of friends and family, and the sadness of postponed retirement plans. “Some claimants have died whilst waiting for payment and bereaved relatives have endured months of contradictory guidance on claiming pensions,” it said. “Others have spent hours every week trying to obtain information from Capita call handlers who don’t appear to have access to the right IT systems and fob off callers with empty claims to “escalate issues”. “Members report problems across virtually every part of the service,” it added. The campaign group said these include longstanding unresolved cases, delayed retirement quotations, delayed pension payments, unresolved bereavement cases and problems with ill-health retirement. Members have also complained of unanswered correspondence, unanswered portal messages, inaccurate and incomplete information, repeated telephone calls producing little progress, ineffective escalation, and limited information available to telephone agents. The group added that MPs are struggling to get “meaningful answers”. “These are not simply administrative delays,” it said. “They have real financial and human consequences.” One pension scheme member recently said they have been forced to use a food bank and take their car off the road. ## Watchdog on the case The NAO announced last week that it will investigate the status of the scheme, transition arrangements at go-live, how Capita has performed, and the impact on member experience. It will also investigate how the Cabinet Office has exercised its responsibilities for oversight of the scheme. The group has written to the government spending watchdog requesting details of how it can contribute. “We ask the NAO to recognise the Campaigns Group as a stakeholder contributing direct member evidence and to agree a consultation process while the investigation is underway,” it said. ### Read more about Capita and the Civil Service Pension Scheme - Oct 2026: NAO to investigate what went wrong in Capita’s civil service pension takeover. - Oct 2025: Capita rubbishes Public Accounts Committee report claims. - Sept 2026: Capita boss gets ‘obscene’ pay packet while retired civil servants need emergency loans. - Sept 2026: Capita doesn’t get to ‘walk away from’ civil service pension mess, says minister. - Sept 2026: UK government to create team to validate Capita’s data on troubled pension scheme. - Sept 2026: UK government views the outsourcer’s overall performance as ‘unacceptable’ after it reports meeting a self-imposed target. - Sept 2026: Government has seen enough of Capita failure and Civil Service Pension Scheme to be moved in-house. - Aug 2026: Capita CEO receives scathing rebuttal from employee over botched contract. - July 2026: PAC raises more questions over Capita’s role in government. - July 2026: Capita to lose money on pension debacle but ‘has government’s private parts in its grip’. - July 2026: Capita civil service pension contract ‘prime candidate’ for insourcing, says government minister. - July 2026: Capita’s rush to hit civil service pension deadline risking errors, say staff. - July 2026: Union calls for insourcing of pension contract as Capita ‘shit show’ goes on. - Jun 2026: Cabinet Office states Capita set to miss Civil Service Pension Scheme deadline. - Jun 2026: Capita went live with its troubled civil service pensions administration without a basic Domain Name System security feature. - May 2026: Ministers refused to sign off £563m Capita contract amid civil service pension disaster. - May 2026: Civil servants to protest at Capita general meeting amid pension crisis. - Apr 2026: Was Capita’s Royal Mail pension contract a botch too far? - Apr 2026: Capita lacked ‘detail and thoroughness’ in planning botched Civil Service Pension Scheme takeover. - Apr 2026: MP committees to double up on Capita’s civil service pension crisis. - Apr 2026: Government should drop Capita from civil service scheme after it loses Royal Mail role, says union. - Apr 2026: Government terminates Capita’s Royal Mail pension contract. - Mar 2026: Capita left to deal with 13,000 civil service pension cases over a year old. - Feb 2026: Thousands of unread emails and 20 million database errors cause civil service pension hardship. - Jan 2026: Troubleshooter steps in as Capita and civil service bosses apologise for pension scheme problems. - Oct 2025: Capita rubbishes Public Accounts Committee report claims.

Microsoft president Brad Smith has called on governments and artificial intelligence (AI) firms to work together to implement safety in AI systems. He believes the pace of AI development is moving forward faster than the ability of AI safety to keep up. Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Smith said: “Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI. Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection. We know how to do this for other products. We should build on that knowledge and start to think about how to apply it to AI.” He urged AI firms to build on knowledge of safety and apply this to AI systems. “You often get your best work done, especially on something like a safety break, for example, when the industry itself starts to develop common standards,” Smith told the Today programme. He said this requires identifying best practices and developing standards, which regulators can adopt to put in place a legal obligation for compliance. For Smith, the UK is well placed to advance AI safety standards thanks to the AI Safety Institute. “I actually think the country and the government that is in the best position to advance AI safety standards and even rules is the United Kingdom and the AI Security Institute,” he said. “You need capability to do this well and you need to have trained people.” Smith’s comments on the UK’s AI safety readiness preceded the UK government’s announcement to strengthen government cyber defences. Speaking at Imperial College London’s science and tech incubator, Base One, AI minister Kanishka Narayan argued for a whole-society approach to resilience in the face of emerging AI risks, so that this technology continues to serve British people’s interests and boost our prosperity, as well as our security. He warned that as frontier AI systems become increasingly powerful and capable of acting autonomously, the potential consequences of failures or malicious use could become far more serious. Narayan argued that Britain needs to act now to strengthen its defences and prepare for future serious incidents. “I want Britain to become one of the hardest countries in the world to attack using artificial intelligence,” he said. ### Read more AI safety stories - The AI kill switch: What actually happens when you press it: Talk of an AI kill switch abounds, but what would such a thing actually look like in practice, and what would it mean to ‘press’ it? - Fronter AI models: Industry or government control: The question for all governments is whether we need to legislate frontier AI models to keep the public safe. Narayan said the government plans to use every power at its disposal to reduce the risk of AI causing serious incidents, including legislation and working with the industry and academia. “We will legislate wherever necessary,” he said. “And we won’t look to law alone. We will look to British ingenuity: our scientific expertise, technological capabilities and institutions to understand these increasingly powerful systems.” The National Cyber Security Centre and the AI Security Institute are actively investigating how to respond to incidents involving AI agents, which requires new expertise and capabilities. The government also plans to look at how to identify and report on near-miss incidents to ensure lessons can be learned quickly, which it said reduces the risk of future harm. The government also sees the emerging field of AI verification as an important part of efforts to reduce serious AI risk. Cyber minister Liz Lloyd said: “Through scaling up projects piloting AI to protect public services and progressing a Cyber Bill to boost our defences, the government is putting cyber security and AI preparedness at the heart of the UK’s digital future.”

“The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” wrote Bill Gates in an essay last month. It’s the sort of hyperbolic artificial intelligence (AI) warning to which we are growing accustomed, fuelled as much by corporate reaction to AI as the technology itself. According to Gartner, businesses are turning to AI agents in droves with the promise of doing more with less. Around 80% of large organisations piloting or deploying AI agents, intelligent automation and other autonomous technologies have already reduced their workforce. But do these organisations really think that cutting people out of processes translates into better returns? Gartner’s answer appears to be no. Its research found little correlation between workforce reductions and improved returns from autonomous technologies. Cutting labour may reduce costs, but it does not necessarily make the underlying business work any better. The question, then, is whether organisations are using AI to rethink how work gets done, or simply inserting agents into processes built for people. “A 12-step approvals chain built for a paper-based world stays a bad process after you shave 40 seconds off each step,” says Jason Strambi, manager, AI advisory at BearingPoint. It’s a good point, and perhaps where process mining is finding a new relevance. Traditionally, process mining is used to monitor and analyse business processes. It uses event data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, for example, to identify bottlenecks, abnormalities and inefficiencies. So, in many respects, it is a backwards-looking, reactive tool – but this is where AI is starting to change the possibilities and what this could mean to an organisation. Rather than simply asking what happened to a process and why, organisations can increasingly use that understanding to anticipate what might happen next and provide AI systems with context about how work is supposed to get done. That’s the theory, anyway. “Process mining is undergoing a fundamental repositioning,” says Bernhard Schaffrik, principal analyst at Forrester, “from a retrospective analytics tool into becoming the operational infrastructure for agentic AI.” But Schaffrik is quick to point out that this is by no means happening overnight. “Technically viable; operationally nascent,” is how he describes the current state of autonomous AI acting on process intelligence. A Forrester survey of 15 process intelligence suppliers, he says, reveals “a clear execution gap”, with supplier messaging racing ahead of both product capability and customer adoption. Demand from prospective customers to use process intelligence as a precursor to AI averaged 52%, according to the survey, compared with average adoption among existing customers of 34%. Only a third of suppliers reported broad customer use across agent observation, training and performance improvement. ## Counter measures While AI can make process mining more accessible and potentially more predictive, process mining can also provide AI with an understanding of how work actually gets done inside a particular organisation. Think of it as an extra pair of eyes, keeping watch on the comings and goings of work processes, reporting back in simpler terms, thanks to generative AI. Rather than requiring specialist skills to interrogate event logs and build dashboards, users can increasingly ask questions in natural language. Michael Curry, president of data modernisation at Rocket Software, says AI can also take this further, enabling “predictions and simulation-based recommendations”, potentially moving process mining beyond identifying what went wrong towards anticipating problems before they occur. Peter van der Putten, director of the AI Lab at Pegasystems and assistant professor of AI at Leiden University, sees a change in expectations. Businesses, he says, increasingly want AI that “drives action, not just insight”, bringing process mining much closer to the execution of the processes it was traditionally used to analyse. > Knowledge graphs built from process data can provide “the semantic grounding that limits agent hallucinations or agents acting outside organisational intent” > > Bernhard Schaffrik, Forrester Things become more interesting when the relationship is reversed. Instead of asking what AI can do for process mining, businesses are beginning to ask what process mining can do for AI. An agent given access to company data may be able to retrieve information or execute a task, but that does not necessarily mean it understands where that task sits within a wider business process, what should happen next, or the rules and dependencies that govern it. Process intelligence potentially provides some of that missing operational context. The key word here is “potentially”. Schaffrik sees three emerging roles for process intelligence here. The first is helping to train agents using operational process data. Then it can help design them by providing a structured picture of processes and their rules. And finally, it can observe what agents do once they are deployed. As organisations give agents greater freedom, this last point becomes particularly important. Van der Putten points to another possibility. He says process mining can itself be applied to the execution trails left by AI agents, identifying recurring patterns that could then be converted into “simpler, more predictable and lower-cost workflows”. In theory, this gives an agent more than access to the underlying data. Process information can provide context around the sequence in which work happens, the relationships between different activities and the rules that have historically governed them. Schaffrik says knowledge graphs built from process data can provide “the semantic grounding that limits agent hallucinations or agents acting outside organisational intent”. That can only be a good thing, surely. Curry certainly sees the potential. “I think this is the promise of process mining in the world of AI,” says Curry. “Autonomous monitoring and agentic remediation represent an exciting future state for process mining. This really changes the nature of process mining, and transforms it into process governance and remediation. However, this is still aspirational for most organisations.” He also believes process mining can provide agents with something approaching a set of rails on which to operate. “Process mining can now be used as ground truth to instruct agents on the right steps to take under specific circumstances, making those decisions deterministic rather than probabilistic,” adds Curry. ## Black box But there is an obvious complication. AI agents remain probabilistic systems, no matter how much context is wrapped around them. “Agentic AI will never be fully reliable as per its design. It will always remain somewhat of a black box since it is probabilistic in nature,” says Schaffrik. “Many decision-makers have this in mind when deciding about giving AI full autonomy over company operations.” Giving an agent process context is of limited value if that context itself is incomplete or unreliable. Schaffrik identifies data readiness as the first bottleneck, with process data often fragmented across legacy systems, inconsistently logged or simply incomplete. > As agents begin to operate across multiple systems, businesses need to know not only what an agent is doing, but what it is permitted to do and who is accountable when something goes wrong As agents begin to operate across multiple systems, businesses need to know not only what an agent is doing, but what it is permitted to do and who is accountable when something goes wrong. Schaffrik says most enterprises still lack the infrastructure needed to “register agents, enforce least-privilege access, maintain audit trails, and manage agent identity across heterogeneous environments.” There is also a danger that businesses focus on controlling the agent without questioning the process it has been asked to follow. “Enterprises are inserting agents into legacy, human-paced workflows and then wondering why step-change value doesn’t materialise because agents layered onto old processes inherit old constraints,” says Schaffrik. It is a problem recognised by BearingPoint’s Strambi, too. Automating a process does not necessarily improve it. The problem becomes greater as more technology is layered on top. Strambi warns that businesses may be creating systems whose individual components can be understood, but whose overall actions become more difficult to explain. “A process map feeding a prediction model feeding an agent that takes action is three layers of inference stacked on top of each other,” says Strambi. “You can explain each layer on its own, but it’s harder to explain the chain, and the chain is often what your customer experiences.” Strambi says organisations have to decide where a human sits in the whole structure at the point at which you build that structure. “If you leave it to chance, you get an architecture that works until the day it does not, and nobody can tell you why,” says Strambi. ## Agent energy There are examples of companies trying to put some of these ideas into practice. German energy company Uniper has put an AI agent built using Microsoft Copilot Studio into production in its recruitment and hiring operation, combining its HR data with operational context from Celonis. During testing, Uniper ran the same prompts with and without that additional process context. Asked to identify bottlenecks in recruitment, the agent working from raw HR data produced generic responses. With process context, it was able to identify specific problems, including 27 candidates who had remained on shortlists for more than 14 days. “With Celonis as our context layer, we’re building AI solutions that aren’t just tools we experiment with, but assistants we trust,” says Robert Daamen, head of Process Intelligence CoE at Uniper. > Design the human role before you deploy the agent. Every organisation has a threshold beyond which removing human judgement stops saving money and starts costing trust, and you have to find yours on purpose > > Jason Strambi, BearingPoint Trust, however, does not mean autonomy. Strambi’s question about where the human sits in the structure is still ringing in the ears, but Daamen at least says that as far as Uniper is concerned, “humans will always be in the loop and decision-makers – agents will only support”. Despite using AI agents within the hiring process, Uniper does not allow them to assess candidates or make decisions that affect them. “Our HR AI agents do not analyse candidate profiles or decide actions that affect candidates,” says Daamen. “Instead, the agents focus on process guidance and process management by automating administrative tasks, such as providing hiring manager briefings and reminders via Microsoft Teams and managing job requisition overviews.” The agents can also analyse position data, he says, including finding similar roles that are currently open or have been advertised previously. Uniper therefore illustrates both the potential and the current limits of the model. Process intelligence can give an agent a richer understanding of what is happening within a business process, but that does not necessarily mean handing the process over to it. For now, at least, the agent is helping people make and execute decisions rather than replacing them. Not every organisation will draw the line in the same place, of course. There are so many variables still, depending on legacy systems, data quality and the raison d’etre for an organisation to pursue automation in the first place. For Strambi, however, responsibility does not become any less human as autonomy increases. “Accountability stays with the human who decided what the agent could do, and no vendor contract or model card changes that,” he says. That makes deciding what an agent should not be allowed to do as important as deciding what it can do. For Strambi, organisations need to make those choices before deployment rather than discovering the limits of autonomy when something goes wrong. “Design the human role before you deploy the agent,” he says. “Which decisions can it take alone, which need a person to confirm, which are off limits? Every organisation has a threshold beyond which removing human judgement stops saving money and starts costing trust, and you have to find yours on purpose.” This perhaps brings process mining back to its original purpose. Its value has always come from making the workings of an organisation more visible. AI may allow it to predict, recommend and increasingly provide the context within which agents operate, but that same visibility could become even more important as those agents are given greater freedom. In that sense, process mining may be as important for understanding what organisations should not automate as it is for enabling what they can. ### Read more about process mining - Process mining is a technique that interprets logs from enterprise applications – find out about its use. - Process mining software comparison: What CIOs should look at. - Munich Airport turns to Celonis process mining software to optimise operations and passenger experience through real-time digital twins, focusing on baggage handling efficiency.

A joint US-Israeli national who took advantage of ransomware victims to extract millions of dollars under false pretences has made his first appearance in a New York court. Zohar Pinhasi, aka Zack Silver and Zack Green, aged 50, stands accused of multiple charges relating to a scheme in which he allegedly claimed he could decrypt ransomware on the victim’s behalf so that they could avoid paying off the cyber criminals. To do this, Pinhasi operated a company called MonsterCloud, offering a ‘principled’ alternative to giving in to extortion. He made representations to distraught business owners who had been victimised by ransomware gangs, claiming he had access to ‘proprietary tools’ and ‘advanced decryption techniques’ that could help them out of a pickle. The court alleges that in reality, Pinhasi had access to no such technology. All the time he was actually charging MonsterCloud clients a recovery fee that was significantly higher than the original ransom demand, and then secretly paying the ransom himself. In one case, the court heard how in August 2023 Pinhasi made a ransom payment of $8,200 while charging the client $150,000. It is thought that over the years, he charged clients over $19m and paid out $8m to cyber criminals, equating to a profit of approximately $11m. “The defendant is charged with offering an alternative to ransom payments, but instead is alleged to have victimised the victim again and committed additional fraud, harming the victim again,” said assistant attorney general A Tysen Duva of the Criminal Division of the US Department of Justice (DoJ). “This prosecution underscores the Department’s commitment to protecting ransomware victims, regardless of how these cyber ransoms occur.” “As alleged in the indictment, by falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself,” said US attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. of the Eastern District of New York. “Our Office will vigorously prosecute ransomware attackers who prey on Americans from across the world and those who cynically profit from their criminal activity.” “As alleged, Zohar Pinhasi claimed to fix ransomware while never remediating the underlying threat. Instead, he turned the victim's crisis into his own profit centre,” added assistant director James Barnacle Jr. of the FBI. “This deception is unacceptable, and the FBI is committed to ensuring accountability for those who choose to victimise the very people who trusted them for help.” Pinhasi, who was the subject of a ProPublica investigation in 2019, has been charged with two counts of wire fraud and one of wire fraud conspiracy, and faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each offence, should he be convicted. Official guidance from the US authorities recommends that ransomware victims do not pay off their attackers as this does not ensure the data will be decrypted and not leaked. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) takes the same position, saying that to pay ransoms also heightens the probability that victims may be targeted again in the future. ### Read more about ransomware - Proposals to ban UK government organisations from paying ransomware gangs appear to have lost momentum. The conversation should move towards making critical systems more resilient to attack. - Data from the UK’s Report Fraud service reveals the scope of ransomware attacks is going underreported, with few businesses confident enough to identify themselves as victims. - National Federation of Subpostmasters suffered a ransomware attack in April after hackers exploited a bug in the web hosting software it uses.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has joined its Five Eyes partners from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US, and counterpart cyber agencies from Japan and Spain, to reveal how a supposedly legitimate technology business is brazenly acting as a front for Chinese cyber spooks. In a joint advisory published today, the NCSC accused the Integrity Technology Group already-sanctioned Integrity Technology Group – a China based cyber security software supplier – of enabling state-backed threat actors to target western organisations using AI-enabled tools, large-scale botnets, and hands-on exploitation techniques to compromise networks and steal data on behalf of Beijing. The advisory details how Integrity employs individuals to support a range of malicious cyber activities, including developing tools for use and sale, and acquiring and hosting infrastructure. The activity supported by Integrity appears to be consistent with campaigns run by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups such as Flax Typhoon, also known as Ethereal Panda and Red Juliett. “The extensive malicious cyber activities, and services by Integrity Tech, that have been exposed today should be extremely concerning for all network defenders,” said NCSC operations director Paul Chichester. “The breadth of sectors that have been targeted across the globe demonstrate the extent of the threat and all organisations should take note of this warning and engage with NCSC advice and guidance. “We will continue to call out malicious actors and the malevolent ecosystem they operate in,” said Chichester. ## Well-known threat Integrity Technology Group has been a thorn in the side of western security agencies for some time. Back in 2024, it was exposed as the operator of a malicious Mirai botnet composed of hijacked internet of things (IoT) devices that Flax Typhoon used in cyber attacks against western targets. Of the 250,000 total compromised devices that comprised the botnet, approximately 8,500 were physically located in the UK. Then, towards the end of 2025, Integrity – along with another company known as Sichuan Anxun Information Technology Co Ltd – found itself sanctioned amid accusations of involvement in 80 cyber attacks, some of them against British public sector targets. ## Americans seize hacking tools At the same time, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced a series of court-authorised domain seizures intended to deny Integrity access to two hacking tools known as Microscan and FishHub. Integrity is accused of operating these tools against operators of critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the US , according to court documents unsealed in the Western District of Pennsylvania. “Integrity Technology Group provided China-linked threat actors with capabilities used to conduct widespread vulnerability scanning and, in some cases, intrusions targeting U.S. and foreign critical infrastructure,” said FBI Cyber Division assistant director Brett Leatherman. “The PRC relies on contractor and enabling companies to expand the reach and scale of its malicious cyber activity. By exposing and disrupting these enablers, we make it harder for the PRC to target American networks and infrastructure.” The Americans accused Integrity of operating another Mirai botnet to conduct vulnerability scanning and reconnaissance using Microscan, with targets including a South Carolina-based electricity company, a multinational non-governmental organisation (NGO), airports in Japan and Poland, and Taiwanese universities and CNI operators. FishHub, meanwhile, was allegedly used by Integrity to download malware to its victims’ networks after having compromised them in spear-phishing attacks, and access and exfiltrate sensitive data. Confirmed FishHub victims include multiple academic institutions in Taiwan. ## Next steps The advisory – which can be downloaded here – details a number of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), some of them dating back to the mid-2010s, that Integrity has been taking advantage of, primarily by using scanning tools, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, and password spraying against unpatched Microsoft Exchange servers. Defenders are advised to take the following key actions. First, unused services and ports such as automatic configuration, remote access, or file sharing protocols, should be disabled. Second, user input in web apps should be sanitized to prevent possible XSS payload injection. Third, identity and access management (IAM) policies should be audited and implemented, and multifactor authentication (MFA) enabled to the fullest extent possible. Nick Hann, field chief technology officer (CTO) at Claroty, said: “Manufacturers and healthcare providers need to take this threat seriously, as the latest advisory names them as specifically targeted sectors. “These actors use password spraying and covert VPN connections to steal credentials and email, but once inside, they could reach the systems keeping factories running and patients safe. Getting that far would turn a data breach into stalled production lines, broken supply chains and delayed patient care.” Hann said that Integrity’s success with older flaws demonstrated how legacy technology continues to be a weak point, particularly in industrial and clinical environments where devices can remain in service for many years. ### Read more about China's cyber activity - Although the UK and Europe have laws to restrict Chinese technology from critical infrastructure, implementation is patchy, according to a think tank report. - UK needs to treat cyber security 10 times more urgently in the wake of threats from Russia, China and other adversaries, says GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler. - Former NCSC boss Ciaran Martin talks about nation-state attacks, why the UK has become so exercised about cyber espionage, and how our leaders are in danger of misunderstanding their adversaries.