Category: Blogs

After another challenging day at the office, you come home to find a letter from the school that your child attends. Concerned, as they normally email, you open it and are shocked at what you read. The school has suffered a cyber breach the consequences of which are that data about your child has now found itself onto the dark web and is being traded by criminal gangs. The source of this breach has been traced to a member of staff who had their password compromised.

Shocked by this news you contact the school for further details and explanation. You attend a meeting with member of the school leadership team and a professional digital investigator who is assisting the school with mitigating any further risk. This investigator is part of the team that is provided by the cyber insurance cover that the school (thankfully) had in place.

During this meeting you learn that the password policy at the school was the identified weak link, as in the past staff had routinely complained that remembering complex passwords was ‘a pain’ so they were only changed once a year, at the start of term, and most staff wrote them down on Post-It notes for all to see. This one teacher had provided their password to a pupil as that pupil ‘couldn’t log on’ one day and rather than go through the process of getting IT involved ‘just this once’ it seemed ok….

Cyber security only ever 'hits home' when it becomes personal.

 

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs Click here.

In 1964 as the then Cassius Clay beat the fearsome Sonny Liston, his eyes became bright and his voice pushed out a message that was compelling. “I shook up the world”, he cried, “I shook up the world”. From here he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and continued to change the world. He was a disruptor, loved by many, loathed by others, but there is no doubt about how he changed things.

In 2004 Muhammad Ali appeared in an IBM commercial, regarding Linux, encouraging those who adopted this ‘new’ open source operating system to go and do something great, go and disrupt, go and push technology forward for all humanities sake. This cry, this call to arms is never more relevant than today. We need some serious technology disruption in order to stem the increasing threat from cyber crime, but where is it going to come from? 

The world needs a technology disruptor to shake up the world and become the Uber of cyber security.

 

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs, Click here.

A new Cold War is erupting between two old adversaries with cyber security at its heart.

After an appropriate amount of time has passed concepts from the past seem to reappear. Not in their former guise but updated, with a different cast and a slightly refined agenda. I’m led to believe that this process of ‘rebooting’ as its come to be known is a good thing. Not when it comes to war it isn’t, and especially when it’s starting to distinctly resemble The Cold War.

The original Cold War, as I’m going to refer to it as concluded just over 25 years ago with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, however within weeks of its silver anniversary stories emerged about the former adversaries of Russia and the USA starting to lock horns again. The Obama administration claimed that their intelligence agencies had evidence pointing to the involvement of state-sponsored Russian hackers attacking the Democratic National Committee and other political organisations of the Democratic Party. This activity resulted in thousands of stolen emails, which cast the Democratic Party and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a less than favourable light.

The popular belief and one that the CIA announced to a group of US senators were that this was done by the Russians to bolster the chances of Donald Trump becoming president.

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs, Click here.

If you could sit down and have a face to face open conversation with a cyber criminal what do you think they would tell you?

 

How did it all start?

I can’t say that it was a planned career move or anything like that, in fact quite the opposite. Maybe more a case of ‘right place at the right time?’ But even that sounds wrong. Perhaps myself and the others are just members of the disenfranchised millennials who found that traditional IT work was relatively mundane and our more modern technical skill sets were totally undervalued in the offers of employment we had, so we looked elsewhere.

What you have to remember is that so much of cyber crime goes unreported due to its relatively low value. I mean companies can lose £200 here, £1000 there, it’s not going to bring them down, but the time and effort it will take them to investigate it, report it, is too much for the value of what they have lost. Is this just ‘luck’ on their part? Of course not, it’s designed that way. Our focus is not about stealing £100,000,000 from one company, but a few thousand pounds from a few thousand companies. The beauty of cyber crime is that it scales…

 

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs, Click here.

There is a new breed of ‘thing’ ready to compromise your security.

Back in 1982 long before the world got connected a horror film called ‘The Thing’ hit the big screen. The ‘thing’ in this instance was an extraterrestrial lifeform that assimilates other organisms and in turn, imitates them. In this story, it manages to infiltrate an Antarctic research station, taking the appearance of the researchers that it absorbs, and paranoia develops within the group.

Was this a warning as to what would come 34 years later? You would be forgiven for thinking so. As collectively we sit here now allowing many, many ‘things’ to connect to the internet in both our homes and offices, containing information that may be used to harm us. The Internet Of Things (IoT) has been around now for a handful of years, but it’s rapidly entering the mainstream.

With the holiday season just around the corner, all manner of high street consumer electronics vendors are tempting us with ‘connected’ devices, from thermostats to security cameras, smoke detectors, entertainments devices, lighting, washing machines, coffee makers; need I go on? They are marketing them as ‘smart’ devices, ‘connected’ devices, or part of a ‘smart home’. It is time to live like the Jetsons, where at the swipe of a finger on your smartphone you can control every labour-saving device and appliance in your home…

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs, Click here.

I was very fortunate to attend last weeks North West Cyber Security Conference. Events like these, and there are more and more of them cropping up, are always a good opportunity to get a feel for the cyber landscape. With a wide range of cyber professionals, technology companies, support organisations, training companies and more it’s almost impossible not to be inspired and motivated by the immense range of skills and talents that are focused on managing and reducing the threat from cyber criminals that we all face.

Many presentations on cyber often look at parallels on how previous challenges that have blighted business have been addressed. By taking this approach cyber risk can take on the mantle of being manageable to even the wariest executive. During one such presentation, delivered expertly by an individual working in law enforcement, he compared todays cyber security challenge to that of car crime and made a couple of statements that really grabbed my attention. He stated that in the late 80s and early 90s, due to the rise of the ‘hot hatch’, car crime soared and then started to drop significantly. Despite what we may have thought, he pointed out that the Police were not responsible for this reduction in car crime.

The way in which car crime has been significantly reduced gives us a template on how cyber crime can be addressed… 

 

Read more over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs Click here.

Within your IT department, assuming you have one, somebody has access to everything. All the emails. All the financial systems. All the document stores. All the contracts. All the suppliers details. All the HR records. All the passwords. Do you know who that is? And do you know exactly what access they have? And when did they last use that access? And for what reason? This individual, or individuals are referred to as privileged users and according to CESG (the information assurance arm of GCHQ), they are one of the top 10 cyber risks to your business.

You have seen the movie, where a good guy goes rogue. They had access to privileged information, usually of national importance and through a set of circumstances uses this information against their former colleagues to obtain some form of gain – financial or otherwise. Now depending on what side you are on this can be a good thing or a bad, but for the sake of argument, we will stick with it being a bad thing to happen. You don’t have to look far for real world examples of this occurring, does the name Edward Snowden mean anything to you? Of course, it does, he had access to information and then used it against his former employers. Was his access privileges checked? I’m guessing not.

Who inside your organisation is a ‘privileged user’ and do you know what they can do?… 

 

Read more over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

 

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs Click here.

Has the recent Wikileaks revelations started the process of digitally disrupting the defence industry?

I can’t even count the number of movies I’ve watched where there is a ‘secret’ item that the heroes are trying to ether prevent from falling into the wrong hands or obtain from their nemesis in order to prevent some global catastrophe.

These items can be a mutated virus developed in a highly secret lab, maybe the codes to some new technology. In the latest Star Wars film, Rogue One, it was about obtaining the plans to the Death Star, so it could be disabled and if I’m not mistaken in the Jungle Book King Louie was keen to get his furry hands on ‘mans read fire’ and wield its considerable power.

Never once in all of these films could a weapon be simply obtained by doing a quick copy and paste in a text editor, but after the revelations from Wikileaks last week it can now.

As todays agenda seems to move at a breakneck speed, let me just remind you of what Wikileaks released into the public consciousness on Tuesday March 7th 2017, a day that may just be noted as hugely significant when the history books on early 21st century cyber warfare are written a generation from now.

 

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs, Click here.

Irrespective of how hard you may personally resist it, evolution keeps on – well, evolving! Call it innovation, research and development or just the desire to make things better, evolution in all aspects of technology is happening right now. 

Security continues to evolve. Take the security of your car for example. My first little car had a key, that you popped in the door, turned it and a little peg like structure popped up so you could get in. Once in the drivers seat I’d have to lean over to the passengers side, pull up the corresponding peg and let in the passenger! – remember? It was not the most secure of locks, as a well placed screwdriver, coat hanger, or other applied mechanical device could circumvent it quite easily. Then along came central locking, pop the key in turn it and all the doors opened. Then before I knew it I had remote central locking, press a button on the key fob and the doors unlocked. Now we have keyless entry and I’m sure the evolution of car security will continue to evolve. 

For a few years now there has been an evolution on IT security, that even though it’s free and readily available to most of us, very few are using it. Most people are still on ‘the keys in the locks and watch the peg pop up approach’, by using a single password – that in so many cases is still ‘password’ or ‘abc123’.

As cyber crime in both professional and personal life continues to grow, now would be a very good time to implement two factor authentication.

Read more over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs Click here.

Will we one day look back and be pleased that cyber security appeared when it did?

Have you ever been told that “Everything happens for a reason”? I know I have, many times. Usually involving some challenging aspect of my life that has cropped up without warning and now requires a huge amount of effort to resolve.

The theory is that for whatever reason these things were ’meant’ to happen in order to allow future events to unfurl with ease.

Don’t’ worry, I’m not going to get all new age on you here, but having pondered on all aspects of the cyber security world for a considerable time now I have concluded that it’s timing is perfect and in years to come businesses and consumers alike will look back on this period of time when, as the RSA Conference called it last week, ‘Peak Cyber’ occurred.

Just to backtrack slightly, have you ever pondered why the bubble of cyber security has occurred? What caused it? Why has it gone from a slightly niche subject in computer science to front page news in a handful of years? Well despite talking to many, many cyber security experts, specialists, consultants and trainers they’ve not been able to say exactly ‘why’. So, I’ll take my own stab at it…

 

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

Certes specialise in IT staffing for all sectors and industries. We are now working with the National Cyber Skills Centre in order to provide staffing to companies in need of cyber security. For cyber security jobs, Click here.