Category: Blogs

Sometimes the old ones are still the best ones, even in cyber security.

When you read that two of the high-ranking officials in the campaign of Hilary Clinton both suffered at the hands of cyber-criminals you’d be forgiven for thinking what hope there is for the rest of us.

One would like to assume that if you were the campaign Chairman and a high-ranking campaign organiser for the potential future inhabitant of the most powerful office in the world, then your cyber skills, cyber advice, cyber mitigation strategies and anything else you can prefix with the word cyber would be of the highest calibre of technical sophistication.

Sadly not; both the individuals identified, John Podesta the campaign Chairman and William Rinehart, a campaign organiser both suffered from a similar style of attack – where you are told in an email to change your password immediately – essentially one of the oldest tricks in the cyber criminals book.

 

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.

Cyber security is decimating businesses globally. Cyber crime is syphoning off billions of Pounds, Euros, Yen and Dollars from their respective economies. Hackers and cyber criminals seem to be impervious to capture and prosecution. Who is to blame for all this?

‘Where there's blame there's a claim’ is a phrase that seems to have entered the public lexicon enabling many to believe that failures in all forms are the fault of others. This includes cyber security. Many business leaders with overall responsibility for cyber security would like to find fault with the software vendors who provided their management information systems, ERP systems, or other major infrastructure elements that continually suffer from security compromises. The sad truth is, the person who is to blame for cyber security, if we need to point the finger, is not the vendors, not your IT team, not your external consultants, not the criminals, not even the current business climate, it’s you.

 

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.

Are you tired of security procedures punctuating even the simplest of tasks? You are not alone. 

Did you go for a run this morning or last night? How about managing to eat your ‘five a day’ yesterday? or drinking at least eight glasses of water and getting the magical eight hours of sleep! Did you do any of those? Don’t worry, I didn’t either. I know that I should do, I know that it can all add up to me living a healthier and happier life but I’m just suffering from fatigue over it all.

We are bombarded with valid advice on an almost continual basis to the point that we just tire of it all. Health, lifestyle, how to bring up children, how to care for the elderly, the economy, where to go (or not to go) on holiday, what to look for in a partner. Google any of those and reams of advice will blind you into a state of tired submission.

And if you suffer fatigue from the barrage of lifestyle advice then quite understandably when somebody starts banging on about cyber security and all the new hoops that you have to jump through at work, just to possibly prevent some nefarious individual from taking a quick look at your Excel spreadsheet, then you might actually be suffering from security fatigue! Yes, it’s a thing!…

 

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.

How many cars does Uber own in order to maintain its current value of over $60 billion? How many rooms does AirBnB own? The answer to both is zero. In this day and age utilising the skills and equipment of a wider community is cutting-edge business thinking. This crowd source approach, which was spearheaded by KickStarter and then morphed into the sharing economy with Uber and AirBnB, can teach those who are wrestling at the sharp end of cyber security a thing or two.

 

Software has vulnerabilities in it : Bugs; legacy code, shortfalls are all hidden away in there. Why? Because it is still primarily hand written, crafted by individuals and teams who are forever adding new functionality to capture our imagination. All of this software running on your desktop, laptop, mobile or tablet is not finished, not yet. It’s good enough for release and as and when issues are found the software company will issue updates in the form of software patches. This process relies on those bugs being reported, logged, evaluated, verified and then assigned to usually a relatively small team of engineers who will labour to their best of their ability in order to resolve them.

Companies who integrate many different software platforms, from firewalls and virus control to their choice of email service or cloud provider, equally has collective vulnerabilities. Their corporate software ‘footprint’ will be unique to them. A combination of hardware and software that will not be replicated exactly anywhere else. Hence their vulnerabilities will be equally unique. Here again a relatively small team of engineers will be diligently working to maintain uptime on all systems, patching where needed, keeping their own IT monster under control…

There are thousands of highly skilled engineers out there willing to squash bugs and plug security holes – for a price! 

 

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.

Who is your DPO? Come May 2018 and the introduction of GDPR you are going to need one.

If you are a business owner, a board member, an HR professional or an IT manager can I ask you to do just one thing before the end of the day? Just put a note in your diary for Friday 25th May 2018 and label it ‘GDPR Day’.

If you are not aware of what I’m talking about, GDPR, The General Data Protection Register, is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission intend to strengthen and unify data protection for individuals within the European Union (EU). It also addresses export of personal data outside the EU. I can already hear you turning off and going back to your emails or other more pressing business matters.

…and that’s ok, because if you employ a Data Protection Officer (DPO) in the next few months, their role is going to ensure that you are compliant and in a fit state to meet the requirements of the GDPR come that Friday in May 2018.

 

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.

Supply chain management within a business is a complex and highly skilled disciple. It’s a two-way street, companies provide products and services to their customers, but also provide information to third parties who are providing them with products and services. Should that supply chain break due to a cyber attack, breach, or criminal activity, then its much harder for a business to recover in comparison to me just switching coffee shops.

It doesn’t take long as a business starts its cyber journey to realise that having a cyber secure supply chain in as important as having strong cyber controls in place at ‘HQ’. Imagine the scenario, you decide to utilise the services of a third party marketing company, or a telesales company, to do a seasonal campaign to boost sales. This isn’t something you do very often, so there has not been a compelling business need to have this facility in house. You hand over your data to this third party and they lose, leak or misplace it, or worse still they get hacked. That’s a breach and you are liable for it…

All it takes is one weak link in your supply chain and you have a cyber breach on your hands.

 

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.

Cyber security challenges could benefit from an utterly immovable deadline.

How are you with deadlines? Do you meet them head on each and every time, or do issues get in your way, from poor project management, lack of skills or that old bug bear procrastination? Every industry has seen major projects slip, cost overruns, products coming to market months, even years after they were originally promised. It seems that deadlines, even those that were set with the best intention, are flexible.

But what if they were not? What if the deadline for your next major IT project had an immovable date, set in stone, that no individual, company, government or deity could move? Could the collective skills, experience and determination of the IT industry hit it? Yes, it could and it has done in the past. When? Just over 17 years ago.

The Millennium Bug, or Y2K as was also called, threatened global computing systems due to a shortfall in the way it stored dates. Older computer systems stored dates as two-digit numbers instead of the four digits needed to properly represent years. This meant that they would treat the year ’00’ as coming before ’99’, then as the millennium dawned computer systems may think they were in 1900, not 2000 and would potentially crash, or at the very minimum act abnormally…

 

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.

Working in the cyber industry is to work in an atmosphere of professional pessimism.

As the medical industry puts more and more services online do they need a healthy dose of pessimism just to be on the safe side? 

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.

It appears that all the building blocks are now in place to tackle the threat of cyber security.

The IT industry is not one known for looking back in the misguided sense that things were better in its past. Why? Because they weren’t. Some of us ‘computer boomers’ from the 1980s may have dewy-eyed memories of our first Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64 but if truth be known they were severely restricted in all elements of computing.

Therefore, we look forward to what is next. The forthcoming release of software, the speed hikes in processor speed, the continual expansion of storage, the increasingly vivid graphics and the stunning sound reproduction that comes out of the hunks of aluminium and glass that adorn our desks.

But is this wise? Would it be a useful exercise to sometimes just pause, take a breath, assimilate all the information that has passed through our inboxes and see if we are perhaps further forward that we thought we were…

 

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.

The next twelve months will bring more change to cyber security, but it's always been that way with technology.

It’s difficult not to reflect at this time of year, over the situations, events and experiences that have punctuated your life over the last fifty weeks or so. Technology, in all its forms, continues to evolve a fact that is not exactly new, but one that sometimes just requires renewed acknowledgement.

When I received my first ever computer back in the mid 1980’s I thought that the pinnacle of technological achievement had been reached. In my mind, there was no way that it could be improved. I completed it with a range of peripherals and developed it into my teenage self’s version of ‘mission control’. Within a scant few months, the unstoppable evolution of technology had progressed and I had been disappointing left behind.

This trend has not ceased and has no signs of ever changing pace, meaning that even after thirty years of chasing the leading edge of technology, I will be forever caught in its wake.

The entire technological ecosystem that comprises cyber security is not impervious to this trend of perpetual progress and continual change and for me, there have been a few stand out developments that require acknowledgement.

 

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.