This Week's Gurus

The new tech levels: a solution for the cyber-security industry? By David Bloxham, Managing Director at GCS Recruitment At a time when a skills shortage threatens the future of the UK’s IT industry in general, and the cyber-security sector in particular, there is a worrying confusion when it comes to government policy. To put it into context, estimates suggest that by 2020, there will be a shortfall of approximately 1.5 million cyber-security professionals worldwide. If...

Building a framework for trustworthy connected cars Jason Hart, VP and CTO for Data Protection, Gemalto Recent events showing the vulnerability of connected cars to hackers have made it clear that there is a need to rebuild trust in connected cars and emissions monitoring.  The key to this is for manufacturers to ensure connected cars operate within trusted, secure frameworks, guaranteeing the best possible protection, authentication and authorisation between entities and devices exchanging data, both...

Cloud Computing can help organizations to bring innovations quickly and with relatively low costs to the market. It can also enable new and agile business models. However, if not properly provided it might as well disrupt your business to a severe extent. This latter case can be avoided by carefully reading the contract with the provider. Cloud Computing has undoubtedly a lot of advantages, especially for small and medium enterprises. First of all, it makes...

The Trouble with Encryption Invariably it seems that whenever a new data breach is revealed – and that appears to be almost a daily, or at least more than once-weekly event – that a number of so-called gurus and pundits will bemoan the fact that the data was unencrypted. There’s always been one good reason why this was irrelevant, but recent news has uncovered a second reason. The first reason, one I’ve gone on about...

Taking the risk out of the digital revolution By Matthew Eddolls, Head of Risk Change, CoreStream Risk, governance and compliance - three simple words that carry astounding weight and meaning for any business, anywhere in the world. Many businesses recognise the challenge of having risk management, governance policies and compliance procedures in place yet five years ago few would have foreseen the latest requirement on the horizon. Digital risk management. As our worlds of BYOD,...

 Short term savings can mean long term risk: Data Protection Officer Andrea Vosshoff warns against sending fitness app data to health insurance companies “Runtastic”, “Calory Counter” by FatSecret, “Zombies Run!”  these are only three of about 400.000 apps today that deal with medical, health or lifestyle topics. A growing number of private health insurance companies in Germany offer apps to their members for use as proof of healthy habits. They simply transfer data about their...

Passwords Will Never Die When I first joined Siber Systems in 2005 the internet was about 5% of the size it is now, but it was clear that its voracious expansion was not going to slow down any time soon. As the uses of the web multiplied year after year, it was equally clear that consumers wouldn’t be able to remember unique passwords for all the websites they visit. I attended my first RSA conference...

Anti-virus is dead and it’s all about the next-generation products that can detect, track and gather intelligence on sophisticated, targeted attacks. Or so Wall Street seems to think. If you also buy the hype then you might at least be interested to learn exactly how effective these new products and services are. Which of the extraordinary marketing claims contain a grain of truth and which are pure snake oil? It’s hard to know without independent...

The Ethics of Adblocking Eric Rand, Security Consultant at Brown Hat Security and Guest Blogger for AlienVault Adblocking is becoming a more and more contentious topic in recent days. Publications, understandably, do not want people to block ads - they derive much of their revenue from them. Users find them to be intrusive and often feel that they impede their usage of a site; and, given the recent meteoric rise of malvertising, ads can often...

To achieve success, we have identified 8 principles for successful collaboration. The move to a different style of work requires integrated thinking between the three key pillars of any organisation – its people, its workplaces and its technologies. By looking at the psychological, the physical and the virtual, a different set of behaviours can be established (such as collaborative work) with new processes supported by innovative infrastructure. ABW – the agile business People no longer...