This Week's Gurus

Who knows more about you – The US, or China? By TK Keanini, CTO, Lancope On Thursday night, U.S. officials said that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had suffered a breach. Data from four million current and former federal employees, across numerous government agencies, may have been stolen by Chinese hackers. It does not take a security expert to see a pattern taking place here.  Most of the attacks allegedly from China over the...

 Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Threats Tony Berning, Senior Product Manager, OPSWAT  According to Aegis London, “in the first half of the 2013 fiscal year, the US Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems–Computer Emergency Readiness Team responded to more than 200 incidents, 53% of which were in the energy and utility sector”. Efforts to improve security of critical infrastructure systems have accelerated since the 2013 issuance of US Executive Order 13636, “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity”....

I'm in London today for the Information Security 2015 conference, and like RSA, it is big and overwhelming. If you recall, this last RSA in San Francisco had approximately 800 vendors! And every one of them is using the same terms to describe products that are incredibly different. If I were a consumer in this marketplace, I wouldn’t know where to start or what to consider. I have two analogies to share with you around...

The Great Cyber Comparison: Anthropology of Modern Malware and Development of Civilizations By Brian Laing In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond investigates 13,000 years of human society and how it unfolded differently across the continents. He poses questions such as, “Why didn’t capitalism flourish in native Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Sahara Africa, scientific inquiry in China, advanced technology in Native North America, and nasty germs in aboriginal Australia?” Mr. Diamond concludes that...

Why insider threats are succeeding TK Keanini, CTO, Lancope Data leaks and other news events over the past few years have brought insider threats to the forefront of public attention, but most companies still lack the means or motivation to protect themselves from malicious insiders. The effects of insider threats are simply too big to ignore. In the most recent year on record, U.S. organizations suffered $40 billion in losses due to employee theft and...

Contact centre workforces are typically susceptible to coercion from criminal elements that want access sensitive customer data. According to CIFAS, the UK’s Fraud Prevention Service, the number of confirmed contact centre insider fraud incidents is rising fast. In 2012 it leapt a massive 126% and in 2014 CIFAS announced members had reported 48 cases of employees unlawfully accessing or disclosing customer data – with over 129,500 cases of identity-related fraud report also being reported. CIFAS...

Cutting Through the RSA Conference Jargon: Cybersecurity Lessons for the C-Suite By Mike Potts, CEO, Lancope Another RSA conference is behind us, and as always, we overheard security professionals speaking their own language using terms like “APTs“ and “zero-day threats." While these words and numerous other terms sound like jargon, they represent important cybersecurity concepts that have typically flown over the collective head of C-Suite executives and board members -- until today.  At this year’s RSA conference, I...

From Dropbox to Twitter to WeTransfer and Salesforce, the use of cloud-based applications has become an everyday part of the modern business ecosystem. Research has shown that the average employee uses a staggering 27 apps at work. To accommodate this trend, most companies are now deploying cloud-based solutions; the expectation being that by 2018 around 59 per cent of companies will be using software-as-a-service (SaaS). As the understanding of the cloud has matured, progressive organisations have...

We live in a world where everyone expects instant, always-on access to information where if you haven’t already got ‘an app for that’, you can download one within minutes. Alongside every development team are user interface and graphic designers as well as user experience experts. Product Management and Product Marketing think as much about ease-of-use as they do about features. Convenience sells. But unfortunately, when it comes to security, convenience can also come at a...

Paul Lipman, CEO at iSheriff explains why cloud-based web security is a must for mobile workers We have become a world of roamers. Today’s roamer is no romantic adventurer travelling the globe in search of  adventures, but rather a knowledge worker,  shuttling from office to client site to home; often hopping on a Wi-Fi network at a café or hotel. Experienced travellers know when to get vaccinated in advance against the risk of infection. So...