Insight

Almost every day, no matter where we go or what we do, we often have to provide proof that we are who we say we are. This can be when you open up a bank account, collect a parcel from the post office, or when you make certain purchases. What all these situations have in common is that we, as citizens, currently have to produce physical documents, whether it is a passport or driver’s license,...

With the steady stream of recent ransomware headlines from Colonial Pipeline to the Irish Health Service, it is clear that attempts to stem the wave of successful attacks are not working.  The worry of waking up to a ransom message is what keeps many IT security managers and their bosses awake at night. For cybercriminals, ransomware is a low-risk, high reward activity, with a virtually unlimited supply of potential victims. To make matters worse, the...

The evolution of the workplace has accelerated over the past year for reasons too painfully obvious to mention. In light of the office exodus, employers have been set the enormous task of adapting and accommodating a remote workforce and managing morale in the face of furloughs. Among the many practical challenges is shoring up your cybersecurity defences. The several risks posed by furloughed and remote workers may not occur to many employers, so here’s a...

A CISOs workday is riddled with high-stress situations as they constantly battle the deluge of threats emerging from the ever-expanding threat landscape. Therefore it is no wonder that the majority of technology leaders are feeling stressed.    In recent years the challenges that CISOs face have only intensified. Since the pandemic, security professionals have had to carry out a mass overhaul of their companies systems and infrastructure in order to facilitate a work-from-anywhere environment. When...

DevOps is fast becoming a central part of enterprise IT. For entirely understandable reasons, too. As organisations mature and grow, unintended IT silos often prevent the innovation of new products and services from taking flight. DevOps represents the unification of Development and Operations teams and, within that, huge gains for productivity, efficiency and innovation in the world of software development. DevOps automates much of the labour and time intensive processes that historically burdened software development...

When you look at the root causes of a breach – the most prevalent cause is human error.  But dig a little deeper and that human error is often failure to patch known security vulnerabilities – many of which have gone unnoticed for not just a few days, but often months and years. This past years’ bout of VPN related breaches is a great example, especially as patches were available over a year ago. Yet,...

The online gaming industry has exploded in recent years and is expected to generate close to $200 billion in revenue by 2022. Popular games are reporting revenues in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars per month.   This booming industry is seeing significant growth, largely due to the pandemic, with many turning to online gaming to escape some of  the realities that consumed many of us over the past year. Coupled with the...

Our latest research into consumer behaviour has unearthed a conundrum: people knowingly take risks online even though they understand the dangers. On the one hand, we’ve got two out of three saying life is riskier now than it was five years ago, with serious concerns about losing data or being hacked. But on the other hand, one third of people are still neglecting basic cybersecurity hygiene. Consumers seem somehow unable or unwilling to protect themselves....

A report released this week by Outpost24, that examined the security posture of web applications amongst the Top 10 US Credit Unions, has revealed that they all have security issues. Using Outpost24’s attack surface discovery tool called Scout, Outpost24 was able to analyse each Credit Union’s public-facing web security environments against the seven most common attack vectors used by hackers during reconnaissance, to ascertain a risk score that is measured 1-100. The attack vectors are labelled as...

Q1/21 a symposium was hosted in the US under the title ‘Thinking Outside the SCIF’ (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to put forward the case for the utilisation of OSINT (Open Source) within the US Military and Intelligence Communities. John McLaughlin (CIA) kicked off day one by correctly pointing out that there was nothing new about open-source (OSINT), and paid tribute to how, in the conditions of the Pandemic, the utilisation of OSINT methodologies within the...