Opinions & Analysis

These might be boom times for anyone involved in application containerisation but lurking just under the surface are a host of security issues that development teams are only now starting to get to grips with. It’s an old story for the security industry that has played out numerous times in the past: a new technology arrives on the back of big promises and for a while security gets pushed to the side in the excitement....

Paying ransom fees to regain access to data in the vague hope that criminals will release files from hostage is a known phenomenon that continues to demand regular column inches. But currently, with ransomware on the rise, no company wants to get into the habit of paying out a ransom fee to access their own services. Ransomware threats reached an all-time high in 2016, increasing by 752 per cent compared to the previous year and...

Take security seriously The end is nigh. More and more data breaches are happening each day and more information is being stolen than ever before. Attack vectors such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Ransomware are on the rise. The former taking out half of the Internet last October when global DNS server Dyn got hit by a huge DDoS attack. Now is not the time to bury our collective heads in the sand,...

From mobile phones to WiFi door locks and ingestible smart pills, connected devices that make up the Internet of Things are entering our offices, home, and even bodies at an astonishing rate. Such devices were once a distant figment of our imagination or something only dreamt up in a Sci-Fi film, but we’re quickly becoming dependent on them to track our exercise, unlock our homes, or diagnose our illnesses. IoT has added momentum to the...

According to Nuix’s recent Black Report, 75% of organisations only perform limited remediation after a penetration test. To take the positives, it’s good that organisations are paying attention to critical vulnerabilities. However, the report also shows that 64% of penetration testers say their biggest frustration is that organisations do not fix the things they know are broken. Product and system owners face a few options when they learn about a vulnerability and the risks it...

Maybe you’ve only heard about shadow IT in passing or think it’s not very likely to impact your workplace, so it’s not important. It’ll soon be clear shadow IT is wreaking havoc in ways most people aren’t aware of, making it a worthwhile subject to discuss. Shadow IT Weakens Organizational Standards When you first started working at a new place, you were probably given a computer that was set up in certain ways and only...

As service providers fortify infrastructure for the transition to 5G and to better defend against the increasingly menacing threat landscape, you need to ensure your networks and services are not only secure today, but well into the future. And it must be done while you continue to add new services to draw new customers and grow revenue. It’s a perfect storm and presents the opportunity to break away from the competition and lead the pack....

With the recent surge in fake apps tricking consumers out of personal data, experts are warning that manufacturers and developers of mobile devices need to make security a top priority in the design process to mitigate the serious risks posed by hackers. As recently as last month, numerous consumers fell foul of a fake Netflix app that infiltrated devices via a trojan allowing hackers to secretly spy on conversations, use the camera and microphone, and...

The active base of fingerprint reader-equipped devices is set to surpass one billion in early 2017, as stated by Deloitte, highlighting the rate that end users are warming to biometrics as a means of authentication. According to cyber security specialist Secure Cloudlink, organisations should follow this growing trend and incorporate biometric technology to authenticate employees in order to mitigate the high security risks that come when using passwords. According to forecasts from Deloitte, fingerprint technology...

Ransomware is the software phenomenon that has come to define the bleakness of our age. Where previous forms of malware – viruses, remote access Trojans, spyware – were seen as alien forms that had to be kept out at all costs, ransomware seems gradually to be overturning belief that defence is even possible. Symptomatic of this is the pragmatic way many businesses roll over and accept it as a sort of ‘gotcha’, an overhead to...