This Week's Gurus

When the UK government published its report “Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain” this attracted some sceptical comments on various internet forums.  Is Blockchain the answer to many problems or is it just another over-hyped technology looking for problems? Well there are plenty of problems around trust in information that need to be solved and the report provides plenty of examples.  Some of these examples refer to existing solutions and these provide some confidence that...

Today is Data Privacy Day. Guy Bunker, SVP products at Clearswift, joined us for a Q&A. How will the EU Data Regulations affect businesses? There have always been regulations, this is just an update, however it is a very important update as the level of fines has substantially increased and is now based upon global turnover. For most organisations, 4% of global turnover (or 100M EUR) would substantially impact their business and could result in it going...

From Deep Blue to Xbox and beyond: deep learning and the implications for cyber security Aingaran Pillai, CTO and founder of Zaizi If you want to play chess against a computer, the stakes have recently got significantly higher. Giraffe, an artificial intelligence machine created by researchers at Imperial College, London, has taught itself to play. Using deep learning algorithms, the new machine evaluates the board and understands the context of the game in just the same...

Why relying on standards is best for secure Cloud Computing Martin Kuppinger, Kuppinger Cole Who will have access to what? In a complex world where soon everyone and everything – people, things and services - will be connected everywhere and anytime through a global cloud, IAM is one of the best means to protect enterprise security, especially when firewalls are not sufficient any more. However, to guard cloud computing, the IAM technology must be further...

Going Beyond Usernames and Passwords Phil Turner, VP EMEA, Okta  As businesses increase their usage of cloud applications and services, security concerns are rapidly taking centre stage within IT departments. Today’s organisations not only have to maintain visibility over who has access to what in a time when more and more employees use phones and tablets to access both personal and work related information; they also have to protect a mix of on premises and...

Security breaches are inevitable, so how are you going to contain them? Cyber security isn’t working. Too many companies are being breached; and governments globally are recognising the need to invest heavily to protect vital services and infrastructure. However, today’s defence in depth security models are not completely flawed; they are, perhaps, naïve. When firewalls are being easily bypassed and it’s taking upwards of six months to detect a breach, the reliance on traditional access...

On the 15th of December, after much debate, what was first proposed back in 2012 will finally be established: the European Union has come to agreement on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which updates and replaces Europe’s Data Protection Directive – rules that were first defined in 1995 (directive 95/46/EC). As business and cybersecurity leaders, what’s critical is the way in which we choose to interpret and respond to these changes that are now...

Cybersecurity Predictions 2016: Luck or Leadership? By Simon Crosby, Co-founder & CTO, Bromium In the blink of an eye, 2015 is almost over. When looking back at it and what it meant for the cybersecurity industry, this year has been predictably busy. We saw large acquisitions, including those of EMC by Dell and Websense by Raytheon, while companies such as Rapid7 and Sophos went public. Large funding rounds were a near weekly occurrence, and as...

Guarding Against Spear Phishing Threats By Chris Stoneff, VP of technical management at Lieberman Software Corporation  In the wake of this year’s devastating data breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), calls for heightened IT security at federal government agencies intensified. Blame for the breach points everywhere from Katherine Archuleta, the Director of OPM, down to the agency’s stunning lack of proper encryption of sensitive data. The outrage is understandable. Cyber security researchers call the...

When your everyday life is all about information security, you start to see patterns that may not be so obvious to others. Each year, I take my best shot at describing these trends and making predictions for the coming year. In this annual article, we also go back retrospectively and review the predictions we made the previous year to see how clear or cloudy our crystal ball was in helping us create our forecast. 2015...