This Week's Gurus

The Great Cyber Comparison: Anthropology of Modern Malware and Development of Civilizations Cyber Global Warming (6 Steps Towards Meltdown) Brian Laing, Lastline I began attending the RSA security conference in the late 1990’s. Back then the show had only a few thousand attendees and security companies were lucky to see a couple of public breaches in the news each year. Not only that, but you could count the companies focused solely on security on two...

What you don’t know, won’t scare you By Matthias Maier, Product Marketing Manager at Splunk Insider Threats, Advanced Persistent Threats, Spear Phishing: these terms are enough to keep CISOs awake at night. In days gone by, you could identify malware, add it to a threat list and eliminate. But the new generation of security threats is much harder to find: they’re new every time and often tailored to the victim. As a result, a new Quocirca...

Why We Need D*ck Pics to Make Privacy Relevant for Americans By Chris Latterell, VP, Open-Xchange If comedian and journalist John Oliver’s much-buzzed about interview with former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden wasn’t an eye opener for you, it certainly should’ve been. As one man-on-the-street interviewee in Times Square after another misidentified Snowden, it became increasingly clear that Americans have blinders on when it comes to the complex privacy and security issues surrounding the...

Biometrics: The time has come? By David Goodman, senior analyst, KuppingerCole Most IT professionals over the last ten to fifteen years when asked about the future of authentication would either confidently assert or otherwise quietly mutter that it would be some form of biometrics but ask not to be pressed as to when or how. And with good reason: we’ve been waiting for a long time and had all sorts of trials, experiments and promises...

Counting the Security Costs of Cheap Calls  The decision to move to SIP trunking appears straightforward: reduced costs, greater scalability, improved disaster recovery options and access to the productivity benefits enabled by Unified Communications (UC).  But, as ever in the world of technology, the truth about SIP trunking is a little more complex than it may appear at first glance. How much up-front investment is required to migrate from the existing ISDN trunk?  How big...

With more breaches sensationalized in the news each week, the question, “what can we be doing better?” is sure to come up. I've been glad to see more being written about user behaviour analytics (or UBA) over the past few months. To quote industry analyst Rob Enderle in an article on CIO.com, “I recently attended an event where I was surprised to learn that of a number of companies that had deployed a UBA solution,...

Cybercrime up-tick during school breaks by Stephen Gates, Chief Security Evangelist with Corero Criminals and cyber-criminals typically know no bounds, but there is an interesting trend to bring to light. Teenagers and college-aged students who have just been released from school for summer break have lots of available time on their hands; often with little supervision.  As a result, crimes committed by this age group always increases this time of year. For example, just this...

Practical Risks and Real Remedies in E-Banking: the biggest mistakes banks make in defending against hackers By Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of High-Tech Bridge Risk assessment needs to be comprehensive and global Many financial institutions fail to perform comprehensive risk analysis and assessment, exposing their companies and clients to enormous risk. For example, many banks tend to underestimate or even ignore the security of their websites, focusing instead on “more sensitive” web applications such as e-banking....

Risk Analysis: How To By: Dawid Czagan The goal of risk management is to deliver optimal security at a reasonable cost. This article introduces quantitative risk analysis. It also describes cost/benefit analysis, risk handling, and types of countermeasures. CIA Triad Risk is related with vulnerabilities, which threaten confidentiality (C), integrity (I), and availability (A) of the assets. This is described as the CIA Triad. Confidentiality is about not disclosing sensitive information to other people. Integrity...

The Great Cyber Comparison: Anthropology of Modern Malware and Development of Civilizations: The First Signs of Weaponized Malware By Brian Laing Jared Diamond states, “By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre.” This greater density of plant and animal domestication directly led...