CyberSecurity World

With Christmas in 7 weeks (today) I have put together some of the adverts that will be on our screens soon. Enjoy...

Now I am coming off IT/Cyber Security news for a moment to quickly discuss my thoughts around Tesco's recent reported huge loss in profits -  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32408661   Tesco has reported the worst results in its history with a record statutory pre-tax loss of £6.4bn for the year to the end of February. Let me start this article/blog by saying, I am no writer and admittedly my grammar is terrible but I will swallow my pride and type away to my hearts content. This is a small piece that doesn't cover everything just thoughts. Taking a step back a moment:  I spent my time at University studying Business and Marketing and I don't claim to be a genius in my field but after watching a BBC report on the recent news made by Tesco, I was dumbfounded to find out Tesco's first grocery store opened nearly 100 years ago.  In the ongoing 'Store wars' with rivals such as Lidl, Aldi, Asda, Morri...

Security professionals are faced with the on-going problem of stakeholders under-estimating the security flaws within their organisation. In most cases this is not the failing of the security team but depending on the market/vertical, teams are faced with budget constraints, redundancies, or most commonly, companies not taking responsibility that Security starts within. This means educating internal staff to take responsibility from the moment they walk into the office; I.e. The devices they bring, the doors that they open to 'guests',  the confidential conversations they have in open areas and the general ethos. Furthermore, there is the responsibility of your key suppliers and other third parties that you share information with.  You may have all the IT/Cyber security gadgets and resources you need but what are your suppliers doing with that data? Do they share the same vision for security and are they as vigilant as you? How do you measure that in an effici...

Money is urgently needed from the Government's £860 million National Cyber Security Programme to plug big holes in the police's ability to combat cyber-crime, which is now reaching crisis levels. That's the key finding from an authoritative new  survey   by PA Consulting which finds that only 30 percent of UK police analysts believe they have the skills and tools to effectively combat cyber-crime. “The UK has reached a ‘tipping point' on cyber-crime and tackling the challenges is now urgent,” the report reads. PA Consulting finds that one-third of the 185 analysts questioned from 48 law enforcement organisations have been unable to share information about the cyber-threat, and just five percent believe they have ‘considerable knowledge' of cyber-crime. The respondents predict that the time they will spend analysing cyber-crime will treble over the next three years – yet they already have limited scope to deal with the problem, spending only 10 percent of th...

DNSimple says that it was hit by a ‘massive' DDoS attack, believed to be the work of Chinese hackers, on Cyber Monday. The Florida-based company revealed on  Twitter  that it had been targeted by a volumetric DDoS attack overwhelming DDoS defences, and was working with its network provider to restore service. After first posting it was seeing a ‘system-wide' DNS outage, the firm added: “We are experiencing a massive DDoS. We are working with our network provider to mitigate it. Apologies.” In a series of posts later on Monday and early Tuesday morning, the firm revealed that it was working with its network provider to mitigate the volume of UDP traffic, including increasing service capacity. Most servers at data centres were fully operational briefly on Tuesday morning, only for attackers to return to target the US west coast data centre before ‘ramping' up DDoS attacks internationally. Cited and more on this story at SC Magazine

Some of the world's biggest security companies are working together to develop 'Let's Encrypt' - a new certificate authority (CA) offering free and automatically renewable HTTPS web encryption. Due to launch next summer,  Let's Encrypt  has been established by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust as well as researchers at the University of Michigan  - who are working through the California-based Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). The aim is for the CA to drive the adoption of HTTPS web encryption and to do this by making obtaining the SSL certificate as easy as clicking a button or issuing a simple shell command. The accreditation is free to anyone who owns a web domain, certificates can be reviewed for transparency, while the security companies behind the project say that the management software installed on web servers proves that the domain holder controls the website, has obtained a browser-trusted certificate and h...

Faults with Microsoft's cloud computing platform have knocked many third-party sites offline, as well as disrupting the US firm's own products. Microsoft Azure's status page  says problems began at 00:52 GMT across the globe. Its European operations are taking the longest to fix. Access to Microsoft's Office 365 on-line suite of apps and its Xbox Live gaming facility are among services affected. The faults could set back the company's efforts to sell Azure. Microsoft is attempting to make gains on the market leader, Amazon Web Services, as well as IBM, Google and others offering rival products. Their pitch is that it is more efficient for companies to rent computing power from a large tech firm than owning and managing their own computer servers or going to a smaller provider. "Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services," said Adrienne Hall, general manager at the company. "We are working to restore ...