This Week's Gurus

By Keith Tilley, EVP, Global Sales & Customer Services Management, Sungard Availability Services Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise, with the UK having suffered numerous incidents over the past few months; the BBC has been a victim, while code-sharing site GitHub is also suspected of having been brought down by DDoS. Though they are not the most sophisticated form of cyber threat, DDoS attacks still have the potential to bring an...

Paying Up: An Answer to Ransomware—or a Questionable Choice? Richard Walters, SVP of security products, Intermedia Ransomware attacks are on the rise. This “spray and pray” type of malicious software blocks access to compute systems and encrypts computer files until money is paid. This standstill approach has made ransomware a serious and costly threat to businesses today. In fact, CrytpoWall reportedly brought in roughly 18 million dollars from victims between April 2014 and June 2015....

Are your incident response capabilities up to dealing with a breach?  By Justin Harvey, CSO at Fidelis Cybersecurity Security teams receive alerts on a daily basis, all of which indicate a potential incident.  Tasked with reviewing and triaging these suspected incidents, analysts are often unable to quickly validate whether an incident is real or not, not least because they receive little context from the alert and, therefore, cannot assess the potential impact.  In fact, it...

By Chris Dye, VP Alliances, Glasswall Solutions It’s hard to understate the importance that small to medium-sized enterprises have for the UK economy. Making up 99.3 per cent of private sector business, these companies bring a collective £1.6 trillion to the UK each year, according to the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. But just as SMEs are vital to keeping the national economy afloat, they are also a major source of income for cyber...

By Steven Chabinsky, CrowdStrike’s General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer Network intrusions have become a fact of corporate life. A breach can not only be damaging to a brand’s reputation, but is increasingly factored in as one of the many costs of doing business. The impact of a breach depends upon a number of factors, including what assets are at stake and how quickly the breach is detected, contained, and remediated. Here are some mistakes...

Hacker 101 - How to Execute the Perfect Cyber Attack By: Chris Stoneff, VP of Technical Management at Lieberman Software All networks are vulnerable to cyber attack, every single one of them. Industry research has shown that on average advanced attacks nest inside organisations for 200 days before discovery. That’s a long time for an attacker to stealthily gather private data, monitor communications and map the network. So in order to at the very least,...

The mainstream adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) is on track to develop exponentially. Across all sectors, businesses are set to embrace IoT through connected devices of all calibres from remote working using personal devices to industrial controls streamlining manufacturing, in the strive to improve efficiency, quality and customer experience. However, while there are likely many benefits of IoT adoption, it will undoubtedly bring issues of security to the forefront. There have been a...

Forewarned is Forearmed Cyber threats are evolving, fast. From social engineering to exploring the dark web for company specific information, even placing rogue individuals into an organisation as employees, criminal gangs are embarking upon increasingly targeted attacks. The implication for organisations is serious: while the tools employed by IT teams to secure the business are increasingly sophisticated, they are also generic and simply cannot counteract the specific, increasingly intelligence led attacks now in force. Organisations...

News from SentinelOne today has announced a new variation of the CryptXXX Ransomware, which they've clocked earning over $50,000 in Bitcoin payouts for its proponents thus far. As with other popular ransomware strains that have been improving with each iteration, the new CryptXXX is unbreakable by decryption tools and has already proven to be very successful in forcing ransom payments. Encryption flaws from old versions have been fixed, and the malware is now better at...

33 years ago yesterday, Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the Internet Domain Name System  watched the DNS take its first steps.  This critical development would open up what may be the world’s most utilized and important technological development for a mass audience. Did he understand the importance or impact that DNS would have when it was created? “I think I saw the potential importance more clearly than the traditional ARPAnet era folks, who were busy replacing...