Opinions & Analysis

his week saw social network LinkedIn get itself into the headlines for the wrong reasons once again, as it wasreported that GCHQ created fake profiles in order to hack into a major Belgian telecommunications company. The attack on Belgacom was reported back in September but it was unknown how it had been carried out, but fresh reports claim that GCHQ used fake LinkedIn pages to redirect employees to sites containing malware. Security blogger Graham Cluley said that GCHQ’s Network Analysis...

The surveillance story has left a bitter taste in the mouths of users of some of the web’s biggest companies, but this week some of those companies got their chance to respond. Apple said that the US requests affected 2,000 to 3,000 accounts, adding it gave out data on zero to 1,000 accounts, while the UK made 127 requests and according to the BBC, since Apple’s main business was "not about collecting information", the vast majority...

While the industry is booming, an article claims that young people today aren’t interested in getting jobs in cyber security. The Vice article said that while working in this sector is “a growing and potentially secure, lucrative job”, a survey by Raytheon from last week found that only 24 per cent of millennials have any interest in cyber security as a career. It found that 40 per cent of respondents would want to be a "TV or movie entertainer,"...

We have talked in the past about the weak link in security chain, and after law firms and third parties, it may seem that the small and medium business (SMB) sector may be an easy target. Research by McAfee deemed SMBs to be “suffering from a false sense of security”, as 80 per cent of 1,000 respondents to its survey admitted to not using data protection and 91 per cent said that they do not use endpoint...

After his SSL certificate expired amidst the US government shutdown, this week didn’t get a lot better for President Barack Obama. One report claimed that the Syrian Electronic Army infiltrated his Twitter and Facebook accounts, and re-election website after a series of updates linked to a YouTube video from the pro-Assad hacktivist collective. Symantec claimed that rather than hacking passwords and taking control of the accounts, they compromised the URL shortening service ShortSwitch. In my last blog I talked of...

After it was criticised in Washington at the weekend, with a rare statement from whistle blower Edward Snowden who cited the fourth amendment from the US Bill of Rights, the NSA faced a pretty tough weekend. Ok so a gathering of people to be critical of the elected powers is hardly breaking news or going to cause a sweat on the brow of the government, but the“Stop Watching Us” Rally in Washington, DC on the weekend followed...

After yesterday we were made aware of the threat of DDoS attacks, today is about having a paper free environment. As we are in “World Paper Free Day”, a timely email dropped into my inbox informing me that only one in ten office workers in the UK could describe their workplace as “paper free”, while 45 per cent of office workers across the UK have seen confidential employee or business records left behind on photocopiers and printers, or...

This week a report emerged which claimed that teenagers are not only shopping online, but they are meeting strangers in the real world too. The report from (ISC)2 revealed that of the 1,162 pupils it surveyed, 43 per cent use the internet every day, 42 per cent have used a web cam and six per cent have posted a picture of themselves online or sent a picture to someone by text message that they would not want...

Now four months on from the revelations of Prism from Edward Snowden, it seems that businesses are the next to respond to the surveillance. This week it has been reported that both Germany's Deutsche Telekom and Brazil's Government have announced plans to offer services that deliberately bypass the United States and UK to avoid surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ respectively. According to the German news website Spiegel, Deutsche Telekom is proposing a specified data path...

If you are prepared to put in the time and effort, there can be great reward in vulnerability research and disclosure, not to mention credit and kudos in the security community. This week that sits in the shape of a blue hat sitting firmly on the head of Brit James Forshaw, head of vulnerability research at Context Information Security, who discovered a mitigation bypass technique in Internet Explorer 11 during its beta testing period in the summer....