Opinions & Analysis

As well as backdoors being used by governments to monitor web traffic and user activity, they are put in by attackers of retrieving data. In a recent story, it was revealed that software which is used to manage equipment in power plants, military environments and ships contained an undocumented backdoor that could allow malicious hackers to access sensitive systems without authorisation. I spoke to Adrian Davis, principal research analyst at the Information Security Forum, who confirmed...

This week saw the announcement of the draft Data Protection Directive and among the significant changes was the wording from “right to be forgotten” to “right of erasure”. 1980s pop jokes aside, but perhaps the EU Parliament made this change to get a little respect from the EC Council who will now review it ahead of potentially passing it in April 2014. While the wording differences between forgotten and erasure are pretty significant, I asked the industry...

This week I had the pleasure of meeting Emulex who made a formal step into the security sector with the acquisition of Endace earlier this year. A company with a 30 year history in sectors such as fibre channels and Ethernet, the acquisition allowed it to add network visualisation technology to its product offering. Meeting Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of corporate marketing and corporate development at Emulex, he said that the company’s mantra of...

his week saw three of the major web companies issue patches just to make life especially easy for administrators. As well as Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, which included eight security bulletins, three of which were rated as critical and addressed 19 distinct vulnerabilities, there were also patches from Adobe and Google. Possibly the most notable of the Microsoft patches was for the Internet Explorer zero-day, which implements a simple kill-bit setting that disables the affected ActiveX...

his week saw social network LinkedIn get itself into the headlines for the wrong reasons once again, as it wasreported that GCHQ created fake profiles in order to hack into a major Belgian telecommunications company. The attack on Belgacom was reported back in September but it was unknown how it had been carried out, but fresh reports claim that GCHQ used fake LinkedIn pages to redirect employees to sites containing malware. Security blogger Graham Cluley said that GCHQ’s Network Analysis...

The surveillance story has left a bitter taste in the mouths of users of some of the web’s biggest companies, but this week some of those companies got their chance to respond. Apple said that the US requests affected 2,000 to 3,000 accounts, adding it gave out data on zero to 1,000 accounts, while the UK made 127 requests and according to the BBC, since Apple’s main business was "not about collecting information", the vast majority...

While the industry is booming, an article claims that young people today aren’t interested in getting jobs in cyber security. The Vice article said that while working in this sector is “a growing and potentially secure, lucrative job”, a survey by Raytheon from last week found that only 24 per cent of millennials have any interest in cyber security as a career. It found that 40 per cent of respondents would want to be a "TV or movie entertainer,"...

We have talked in the past about the weak link in security chain, and after law firms and third parties, it may seem that the small and medium business (SMB) sector may be an easy target. Research by McAfee deemed SMBs to be “suffering from a false sense of security”, as 80 per cent of 1,000 respondents to its survey admitted to not using data protection and 91 per cent said that they do not use endpoint...

After his SSL certificate expired amidst the US government shutdown, this week didn’t get a lot better for President Barack Obama. One report claimed that the Syrian Electronic Army infiltrated his Twitter and Facebook accounts, and re-election website after a series of updates linked to a YouTube video from the pro-Assad hacktivist collective. Symantec claimed that rather than hacking passwords and taking control of the accounts, they compromised the URL shortening service ShortSwitch. In my last blog I talked of...

After it was criticised in Washington at the weekend, with a rare statement from whistle blower Edward Snowden who cited the fourth amendment from the US Bill of Rights, the NSA faced a pretty tough weekend. Ok so a gathering of people to be critical of the elected powers is hardly breaking news or going to cause a sweat on the brow of the government, but the“Stop Watching Us” Rally in Washington, DC on the weekend followed...