Editor's News

A simulated national cyber forensic investigation tasked 22 amateur defenders with stopping a simulated cyber strike on a fictitious multi-national energy firm at the weekend. The PwC-hosted Cyber Security Challenge tasked candidates to lead a cyber-forensics investigation against the recurring nemesis “The Flag Day Associates” who were planning to launch a malware attack. Participants were provided with a forensics lab environment and given authentic PwC cyber-forensics technology to investigate and stop the mock attack. Andrew Miller,...

The Information Commissioner's Office has the right to force NHS authorities to be audited for compliance with the Data Protection Act. Enforced as of yesterday (1st February), the ICO welcomed the legal change that will give the office the ability to subject public healthcare organisations to a compulsory audit which previously only applied to central Government departments. In August 2014, the ICO issued a £180,000 fine on the Ministry of Justice following the loss of...

The Government and Information Commissioner's Office have confirmed that they are investigating the loss of three independent inquiry notes. Relating to the Azelle Rodney Inquiry, the Robert Hamill Inquiry and the Mark Duggan Inquest. Documents of all three have been completed, although the Hamill Inquiry has yet to publish its report. A Government statement said that there is no evidence to indicate that the information loss arose from malicious intent, but it is essential to...

There are three cyber employers out there: police, tech companies and attackers, who are all after the same style of graduates.   According to Rob Wainwright, who was appointed director of Europol in 2009 after a career in international law enforcement, organised gangs are this generation’s most-talented computer programmers and national police forces are struggling to keep up.   In an interview with the Independent, Wainwright said that some of graduates “took a left turn...

File-sharing website The Pirate Bay has been resurrected once again, and businesses have been encouraged to take it very seriously. According to the Guardian, despite being shut down by Swedish police forces shortly before Christmas, the BiTorrent site is back online, relaunching a day ahead of its teased 1st February deadline. The core service is as it was on 9th December, but some functionality is missing. Skyhigh Networks EMEA director of strategy, Nigel Hawthorn, said:...

OPSWAT today announced the release of their latest market share report, which includes detailed analysis of the market share of antivirus vendors and products. The report also takes a look at the use of real time protection (RTP) by users of top antivirus products and the number of devices with persisting threats or potentially unwanted applications (PUAs). The report includes extensive data on the market share of various antivirus vendors. Market share for the top...

Researchers at Qualys recently revealed a critical vulnerability in the Linux GNU C Library (glibc), that allows attackers to remotely take control of an entire system without having any prior knowledge of system credentials.   The vulnerability is known as GHOST (CVE-2015-0235) as it can be triggered by the       gethostbyname functions. It affects many systems built on Linux starting with glibc-2.2 released on November 10, 2000. Qualys researchers also identified a number of factors...

With every email now a target and every piece of data at risk, the need for data protection maturity has never been higher. According to the new Data Protection Maturity study released today by Lumension®, a global leader in endpoint management and security, IT security departments are responding with better policies, improved technology approaches and financial commitment.   More than 700 IT professionals from around the globe responded to the study, now in its fourth...

Give01Day has joined with the Government’s Cyber Streetwise campaign and the IASME Consortium to bring the Cyber Essentials certification to all UK charities.   The initative to offer security experience and advice to smaller businesses, will begin with a series of free webinars for charities from February onwards. These will teach the audience on how to ensure they are compliant with and eligible for the Cyber Essentials certification. Each webinar will include a live Q&A...

Just after 6am this morning, Facebook as well as photo sharing site Instagram suffered outages, leading to speculations of a hack. Amidst the droves that took to Twitter to complain about the outage, the infamous hacking group Lizard Squad also tried to lay claim to the attack, stating: “Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad".   However, Facebook denied that it was an attack in a statement that read: "This was not the result of...