This Week's Gurus

The Internet of Things promises to connect products and industries - it’s in our cars, our cities and our homes, here to make our daily routine that little bit more convenient. The ongoing innovation by developers and manufactures, paired with the endless opportunity in the industry, shows to all that IoT certainly has huge headroom for growth. However, with this eagerness to get hi-tech products to the masses, security models are unfortunately often overlooked and...

Your approach to information security isn’t just about preventing data breaches. It can also help you streamline business operations, increase customer and stakeholder trust, and reallocate risk – all of which affect your organisation’s costs, growth and innovation. Directors and shareholders in particular pay close attention to these kinds of business values. If your approach to security keeps stakeholders in mind, you will ensure your resulting security programme is connected to the business as a...

Some organisations dispose of their IT assets by recycling what they can and discarding the rest. For others, the process involves reselling parts that still hold some market value. And although today’s IT disposition industry claims to have a strong focus on compliance, governance and security, there are still several accounts of sensitive business or personal data falling into the wrong hands due to improperly disposing of IT assets. As CIO reports, Kessler International conducted a 2009...

FinTech and Financial Service institutions talk a lot about consumer orientation. But if you look at their actual behavior they mainly approach this with an internal perspective and with a focus on innovation in the enterprise, industry or branch. They look what they did before and what they could do better within their existing organization.  The most common innovation is to build mobile applications for their sales channel. Without any doubt, this is important for...

Identity and verification (ID&V) are two closely linked concepts that play an increasingly critical role in consumers’ day-to-day lives. Identification systems use a trusted ledger, process or token to identify a person or entity. Verification is answering the question “is this person who they say they are?” They are familiar to us in our everyday lives. From showing our passports when entering a country to showing proof of address and identity when applying for a...

Multi-factor authentication is already being used by enterprises around the world to protect their digital gateways to remote access VPN and cloud services. ‘Why then are so many others still using digital certificates to do the same job?’ asks Rob Allen, Technical Pre-Sales Manager, Swivel Secure. For some reason, the notion that ‘we don’t need multi-factor authentication – we’re already protected by digital certificates’ continues to pervade corporate IT departments. But in today’s multi-device and...

In recent years, we have witnessed a new kind of security threat which all businesses need to be aware of – the cyber drive-by attack. It is a term that has evolved over time. In the early days of the web, most online access was through a modem, and users were charged for the time they spent connected. Opportunists, looking for free online access would literally drive the streets of a town waiting for a...

Technological evolution yields a constantly changing threat landscape. Those who learn survive, and those who don’t evolve and grow their knowledge, are left behind. Just a couple of weeks ago at Black Hat, we heard a number of different conversations on the four key areas below, cementing their role as the cybersecurity hot topics of the near future. Behavior Baselining Time and time again we see undetected attackers lurking in organisations’ networks for months – even...

In conjunction with the Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM), M-Files recently conducted a survey regarding information security. Before conducting the study, I envisioned the perfect metaphor for information security to be organisational stone fortress, a barricade—if you will, used to keep out unwanted attacks. And I still have this view for certain use-cases. However, in researching context for the survey results, I discovered a more nuanced metaphor developed by Computer Weekly’s John Riley–who likened...

Security threats continue to evolve at a breakneck speed. While organisations need to be aware of the entire landscape of adversaries looking to breach their networks, often, certain trends highlight threat exposure for specific sectors, economic or political groups, and even end-users. Criminal activity continues to thrive, eCrime threat actors have developed sophisticated tools and techniques that affect a wide range of organisations and enterprises, often opportunistically. Many of these criminal actors over time have...