This Week's Gurus

As the Chief Cybersecurity Officer for Carbon Black, I am witnessing a brave new world in cyberspace. Global cyber insurgencies continue unabated with reports of wide-scale data breaches and politico-hacking happening quickly and often. Personal data and financial information is regularly being hijacked. The energy sector is increasingly vulnerable to risk, with the recent cyberattack on the Energy Services Group (ESG) knocking systems offline. Here at Carbon Black we firmly believe that decreasing dwell time...

Imagine you’d spent a fortune making your home physically secure, only to discover you’d been quietly robbed by thieves who never set foot on your property. You thought you’d built a fortress, but didn’t notice the gap in the fence that left you wide open to intruders. It’s every homeowner’s worst nightmare. But it’s also a real-world metaphor for many UK businesses who, despite being increasingly vulnerable, have left the door to cybercrime unwittingly ajar....

Ever wondered what the role of a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) encompasses? To put it simply, they are the guardians and protectors of everything information security related to a business. However, the tasks are far from simple as their teams work around the clock to respond to incidences that directly affect the safety of the company and its data. As the issues in cyber have evolved, so too has the role of the CISO,...

A recent survey shows 64 percent of organisations have deployed some level of IoT technology, and another 20 percent plan to do so within the next 12 months. This means that by the end of 2018, five out of six organisations will be using at least a minimal level of IoT technology within their businesses. This is an astonishing fact when you consider the lack of basic security on these devices, or any established security...

IT and security conversations are moving away from the confines of remote IT departments and are finding their way to the top of boardroom agendas. As they do so, CIOs need to carefully consider the way they communicate with other senior executives if critical IT initiatives are to receive that all important buy-in from the Board.  In this article, I will offer guidance to CIOs who are required to obtain Board-level approval before implementing strategic...

By Keiron Shepherd, Senior Security Specialist, F5 Networks  With automated tools and hackers for hire, cybercrime has turned into a game for profit. Recent research from F5 Labs shows that out of 429 reported breaches studied between 2005 and 2017, hackers gained $2.75 billion on the black market. The digital world has opened the door to unprecedented levels of malicious attacks putting applications, corporate data, operational infrastructure, and reputations at risk. The consequence is that...

Ever wondered what the role of a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) encompasses? To put it simply, they are the guardians and protectors of everything information security related to a business. However, the tasks are far from simple as their teams work around the clock to respond to incidences that directly affect the safety of the company and its data. As the issues in cyber have evolved, so too has the role of the CISO,...

Innocuous-seeming online activities put your organization at risk on a daily basis. A bug recently discovered in the popular web-based grammar checker Grammarly, for instance, leaked the authentication tokens of millions of users. Not many people would predict that installing a widely-used app plug-in or browser extension to help improve their spelling could result in strangers being able to access all their data, including logs and documents, at other websites they visit. Fortunately, Grammarly closed...

For those of you who haven’t come across one yet, I have written a series of articles recently focused on CEOs. In these articles I have been looking at a number of questions a CEO should be asking when thinking about the cybersecurity stance of their organisation. So far, I have discussed the importance of critical data encryption, safety programmes, and how to create a healthy company culture towards cybersecurity, among other topics. In this...

"Everyone is part of our cyber security team," said the chief information security officer at a private trust company in New York. "It doesn't matter what myself or my colleagues do from a technical perspective. If I have one user who clicks a bad link or answers a phisher's question over the phone, it's all for naught." These are sage words from someone in the frontline against the onslaught of cyber crime. Such chief information...