Editor's News

Independent technology consultancy 6point6 Cloud Gateway warned today of faith in “the cloud” peaking in 2019 before collapsing in 2020, then recovering from 2022 with better business analysis, more realistic expectations and a greater appreciation of hybrid cloud environments. Justin Day, managing director of Cloud Gateway, said: “Essentially, what we’re witnessing – and I see evidence of it every day – is something like Gartner’s Hype Cycle in action, for the cloud.  We’re in the...

Last fall, energy companies in several countries, including Germany and the United States, found out via a cybersecurity report from Symantec that hackers had figured out a way to breach their infrastructures. These hackers could potentially switch off the power grids at those establishments and wreak havoc on their computer systems. Now, more recent news includes allegations that Russia was the country behind the scheme.  Hans-Georg Maassen is the president of the Federal Office for...

Anyone who has ever held an ATM card, created an email address, opened an online bank account, or joined a social media website know how important passwords are. We know that passwords open the gates to our digital life, and we should never share them to just about anyone, or any person at all if we can help it. But even if we don’t tell anyone our passwords, we are still vulnerable to cyber attacks....

Research released today from F5 Labs has found Telnet brute force attacks against IoT devices, led by Chinese hackers have risen a staggering 249% since 2016. Findings from the latest Threat Intelligence report shed light on the challenges vulnerable IoT devices place on businesses, as the proliferation of brute force hacks both intensify and become harder to monitor.   F5 Labs’ research reveals 44% of attack traffic originates from China and IP addresses in Chinese...

Political and social instability in the world is spilling over into businesses, which more than ever must contend not only with hackers targeting valuable corporate data, but also how geopolitical conflicts will affect the reliability of digital networks supporting commerce, how policy is formulated and enforced, and how investments are executed. The relatively quiet first six months of 2018 could turn on a dime as midterm elections loom, tense relations in the Middle East persist,...

As attacks are getting more sophisticated, so must our defences   The threat to corporate networks from DDoS attacks has never been greater. Despite some wins of recent, such as the takedown in April of Webstresser – an online DDoS-as-a-service website, organisations cannot take their guard down.   Such a service meant that criminals could flood servers with traffic for as little as $18 per month. With no technical expertise, criminals were able to launch...

More than a third of senior executives believe that younger employees are the “main culprits” for data security breaches in the workplace according to a new independent study into attitudes of the next generation workforce about cybersecurity, commissioned by Centrify, a leading provider of Zero Trust Security through the power of Next-Gen Access. More worrying is that the study also reveals that these same decision makers are doing very little to allay their own fears,...

Phoenix Contact, a German electrical engineering and automation company, has disclosed four vulnerabilities in FL SWITCH industrial switches. These devices are used for automation at digital substations and in oil and gas, maritime, and other industries. The vulnerabilities were discovered by Positive Technologies experts Vyacheslav Moskvin, Semyon Sokolov, Evgeny Druzhinin, Ilya Karpov, and Georgy Zaytsev. The most hazardous of the vulnerabilities is CVE-2018-10730 (CVSS base score 9.1), which enables an attacker to run arbitrary commands...

New insight from global cyber security and risk mitigation expert, NCC Group, has revealed that two thirds of MPs consider the compromise of critical national infrastructure to be the biggest cyber security threat facing the UK.   A year on from the cyber attack on parliamentary emails, a YouGov survey commissioned by NCC Group has gauged the opinions of MPs in the House of Commons with regards to their personal cyber security, the cyber risks associated...

Kaspersky Lab researchers tracking the Olympic Destroyer threat that famously struck the opening of the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang with a destructive network worm have discovered that the hacking group behind it is still active. It appears to be targeting Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ukraine and Russia, with a focus on organisations involved in protection against chemical and biological threats.   Olympic Destroyer is an advanced threat that hit organisers, suppliers and partners...