This Week's Gurus

Remember file cabinets?  Most businesses have auctioned them off or sent them home with employees.  For many, paper is a thing of the past.  An expansive communication network has collapsed a once-massive Earth into smartphones that fit into our pockets. Cloud computing has made all information available wherever our travels take us.  We communicate at near the speed of thought, share ideas with only a few keystrokes, and manage global business and financial transactions without...

There is a great deal of noise around the increasingly sophisticated threat that attackers now pose to organisations, and the restricted IT budgets with which to fight back. So much so that you'd be forgiven for thinking that IT professionals should just lay down and hand over organisations' data to cybercriminals. However, this is not the case. Sure, attackers are now better funded and therefore better equipped than ever before, but IT professionals have weapons...

In a landscape full of high-profile data breaches, such as Yahoo and Tesco Bank, we’re seeing more and more organisations looking to bolster their defences in order to protect their business critical assets. However, are organisations overlooking the smaller, intermediate devices in their network that could provide an access point for the craftier cybercriminal? One example would be that of water pumps in flood defences, which might seem a non-obvious point of entry. However, industrial...

It's that time of year when the vampires and witches start brushing the dust off their best suits in preparation for Halloween. While all kinds of monsters roam the streets outside, we may forget the spooky threats which face us in our homes and businesses – 2017 has provided the scariest security stories for this Halloween. This year has seen some of the largest attacks on record. WannaCry terrified the nation by crippling our NHS...

A managed service for the network requires a strong partnership. There needs to be integration; not just tools, but the right people. This reminds me of Ants and Aphids, who have a symbiotic relationship where they mutually benefit from their working bond. This is how I see a successful culture of managed services, where a partnership is formed.   Managed services have grown in popularity, pretty much in line with the shifting everyday consumer mentality...

It’s a familiar sight – the uniformed security guard patrolling the store on the lookout for shoplifters, ready to spring into action to stop thieves from getting away with the goods. Retailers have long known the value of proactive security to prevent loss and act as a deterrent in the real world. However, it seems that in the virtual world the retail security guard is out of shape, unable to keep up with the almost...

The recent global ransomware attacks that have dominated television news and headlines across the UK and Europe should be a call to arms for organisations around the world. Hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries have been affected and organisations are clearly under siege as cybercriminals execute campaigns that spread fast and cause damage. But, why have so many organisations been affected? Most organisations tend to build their security strategy on defence-in-depth,...

Beyond the accessible surface of the open web, anonymous users exchange illegal goods and plan criminal activities away from prying eyes. Known as the Deep & Dark Web, these covert regions of the Internet are unindexed by search engines and far greater in volume than the open web. Here, among the forum chatter of cybercriminals and other adversaries, emerging threats and business risks frequently take shape. Shedding light on these secretive communities and the topics...

Despite the gloomy cyber attack headlines, many organisations are moving along the cyber security maturity curve and the adoption of intelligence led security strategies has increased. One of the main drivers is the sheer volume of data that comes in and out of a business, which makes it difficult to divulge actionable insight. A lot of data that is not conveyed in the right way can be just as bad as not enough and this...

They’re called superforecaster. A subset of human study volunteers who have an uncanny ability to predict the future better than the general populous. Who are these individuals? According to The Washington Post, the superforecaster term was coined by University of Pennsylvania professor Philip Tetlock. His 20-year study — explained in detail in “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” — found that the average person couldn’t predict the future. But the superforecasters...