Opinions & Analysis

Dear Editor, The Panama Papers leak may have been the work of an insider or an external hacker; news reported today suggests it could have been an external hacker. But in either case, this massive leak represents three major IT security trends that every enterprise needs to be aware of. It shows the perils of digitisation of sensitive data without adequate controls over who can access it. This is a common vulnerability that has been...

Bernard Hogan-Howe’s comments are a recognition that things cannot continue as they are: banks are fighting an expensive, losing battle against cybercrime, and carrying the can for the overall slow response to the explosion in online fraud. Cybercrime has moved on, and while people do need to take more responsibility for their use of technology, his proposals aren’t the solution. In the last decade, cybercrime has industrialised. It’s no longer the preserve of a small...

Apple Should Not Comply with the FBI, say IT Security Pros Two-thirds IT security professionals believe that government surveillance is so pervasive that they do not expect to be able to have a private conversation on any device, according to new research from AlienVault. The research analysed the views of over 1,500 IT security professionals about privacy issues and the Apple vs. FBI debate, in which the FBI wants Apple to provide access into an...

I had a very interesting conversation recently about emails, and what the difference between Spam and Phishing actually is. One person openly stated that all messages received were treated with suspicion, which is of course the ideal approach, but that anything that was even remotely dodgy was immediately labelled as Phishing and deleted. Here’s the rub – is it one and the same? Previously I’d argue not, as actually I see them as two very...

Cyber security firm Imperva has released a new behind-the-scenes report into the infamous CryptoWall 3.0 ransomware, which show just how much cybercrime pays. CryptoWall is one of the most dangerous pieces of ransomware around today and it is estimated to have resulted in $325 million in damages. While many reports and research publications go into great detail explaining the anatomy of different ransomware malware. Imperva’s report clearly demonstrates that peeling the layers behind the financial...

More than 3,000 Organizations Rely on AlienVault to Detect Threats and Mitigate the Impact of a Breach  AlienVault™, the leading provider of Unified Security Management™ solutions and crowd-sourced threat intelligence, today announced that it ended 2015 with unprecedented momentum. The company closed out the year with more than 55 percent year-over-year sales growth and increased its install base to over 3,000 commercial customers. AlienVault’s new customer wins came from a broad range of industries around...

UK cyber security innovator Glasswall Solutions sees data security rising to the top of the corporate agenda as organisations fail to cope with new threats and regulations Glasswall Solutions, the acclaimed UK cyber security company, today issued its top five predictions for 2016. The list covers the five key developments that Glasswall’s team of experts believes will have biggest impact on cyber security over the next 12 months. “Businesses around the globe now face unprecedented...

Gavin Millard, EMEA technical director, Tenable Network Security shares 2016 predictions with IT Security Guru The Internet was never designed to support the needs of the modern enterprise. It is too insecure, and was always intended to be so. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, designed the Internet to make computers talk to each other and share information. Sir Tim has said that, at the point he invented the World Wide Web...

The data winners and losers of 2015 James Pattinson, Vice President, EMEA, Absolute  2015 will be remembered as the year corporate data loss entered the mainstream. Throughout the year, it seemed like every week there was news around a new data breach or cyberattack. Research from a number of sources, including the 2015 Cyberthreat Defense Report and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, has shown a steady increase in breaches since 2014. As a result, data security...

Messaging security startups are suddenly pulling in investors – what is going on?  Encryption is turning messaging apps into 2016’s hot trend  Of all the trends worth talking about for 2016 none is surely as intriguing as the sudden and largely unnoticed rise of communication apps that use strong encryption to secure messages, voice calls, video, file transfers and even route SMS texts. Usually marketed for communication rather than security, these apps have quietly spread...