Insight

Marak Squires is the maintainer of the ‘colors’ and ‘faker’ libraries. The two projects accumulate ~23 million weekly downloads and support ~23,000 projects. In January of 2022, he intentionally introduced an infinite loop that bricked every project relying on either one of these libraries. Consequently, GitHub suspended the developer’s account. The justification provided by the developer is one of retaliation to “Fortune 500s (and other smaller sized companies)” who extensively rely on cost-free and community-driven...

All businesses carry an inherent risk. Entrepreneurs expose themselves to different types of risks that may affect their business. For example, a natural calamity, fire, or lawsuit can severely impact the establishment. It can decimate the business model and cause the entrepreneur many problems and create a loss of reputation. This is one of the many reasons why businesses must carry tailored small business insurance. This is an insurance policy that business owners can customize based...

The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to go down in history as one of the defining moments of our lifetime. From a business perspective, it transformed business models, changed customer expectations, and disrupted the networks that run businesses. These changes are long lasting and accelerated the digital transformation journey, a journey that is now driven by cybersecurity impacts and needs.   It’s no secret that the shift to remote working at the start of the pandemic...

With work still to be done to boost diversity and inclusion in cyber security, KPMG UK’s Katie Diacon unpacks where some of the challenges exist, and what could make a difference. Cyber security is one of the most innovative and dynamic sectors to work in, and it is increasingly vital to the operational resilience of organisations. Katie Diacon, Director, TMT Cyber Security, KPMG in the UK, says success in the sector requires “a great combination...

Most careers might take an unexpected turn from time to time but very few people see the path of their entire professional existence re-wired, without warning, in a single morning.   One who did is Tracy Reinhold, now the chief security officer at critical event management company Everbridge, which has been described as the most successful security company nobody has heard of.   The morning was September 11, 2001, probably the first time in world history when a billion human beings alive at the time will be able to say without hesitation what they were doing on a single day. Most of us remember very little but this was an unwanted reminder that there are a few things about...

What keeps OT security specialists up at night? It’s mostly problems from the IT world, says Andy Norton, European Cyber Risk Officer at Armis.   Operational technology (OT) used to be the specialist networks nobody in IT bothered with, or perhaps thought they didn’t need to. For a while, that seemed reasonable; OT networks were usually isolated from IT operations, sat behind air gaps, and ran on obscure operating systems.   Then organisations across every...

Many organisations are working to modernise their existing applications and integrate secure apps across their environments to keep pace with business demands.  Modern application development relies on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which enable services and products to communicate with each other and leverage each other’s data and functionality to support business operations.  APIs are business critical – the most popular web applications and innovative services run on APIs.  While APIs help businesses accomplish many strategic...

The pre-COVID-19 CISO. The global COVID-19 pandemic has been a tumultuous time for Chief information security officers (CISOs) who on any given day have a long and complicated list of responsibilities. CISOs are no strangers to disruption and challenges, but during the pandemic they have faced many disruptions it has caused and created a wealth of new challenges. Securing a rapid transition to a remote workforce. COVID-19 accelerated the shift to remote working globally and,...

Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based non-profit organisation that seeks to ensure the freedom of speech of journalists, recently announced that the Pegasus Project surveillance solution by the Israeli NSO Group selected 50,000 phone numbers for surveillance by its customers following a data leak.  The NSO Group has always maintained that the purpose of the Pegasus Project was for governments to monitor terrorist activity. However, this recent story, if true, could suggest that the solution has been...

Being struck by ransomware has been compared to having a heart attack. It’s something that stalks everyone in theory and yet when it happens the shock of the experience is always a surprise. For the first seconds, minutes - and sometimes hours - organisations are on their own. It’s a moment of unexpected trauma which many organisations find paralysing, something attackers plan for. This makes the attack’s effects even worse. Eventually a growing number call...