This Week's Gurus

By Greg Sim, CEO, Glasswall Solutions Energy, transport, water, health and other critical services firms are at risk of being fined up to £17m in May, if they don’t adopt best-practice cyber-security methods. In an attempt to boost the cyber-protection of the UK’s most critical industries, the government is pushing firms to turn to the best standard of cyber defence available. But will these fines be enough to encourage the C-Suite to take action? Over...

By Roman Sannikov, Director of European Research and Analysis, Flashpoint   The tumultuous state of global politics that defined 2017 continues to shape the motivations and schemes of a wide range of adversaries. In October, CNBC reported two Czech election websites were hacked and that, after Catalonia’s independence referendum was ruled illegal, the website for Spain’s Constitutional Court was taken down by a DDoS attack. These are just two of many examples that align with...

Cryptojacking targets both endpoints and servers – both on-premises and in the cloud. The goal is the same: enslave a massive botnet of devices and harness CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency with minimal cost or investment. I briefly introduced the concept in the previous Digital Vikings blog post and the threat has grown month after month, likely coinciding with the run-up in the crypto market. We’ll look at crypto mining and at some mitigations to prevent and detect...

The role of IT in defending against cyberattacks is more difficult than ever. It becomes even more challenging when IT departments are forced to tackle the lack of willingness by employees to take precautionary steps against attacks.   Based on new research involving more than 2,000 business and IT professionals at companies from various industries around the world, A10 AIR addresses the challenges IT decision makers face with the rise and complexity of cyberattacks, and...

Only days into the Winter Olympics and reports of cyber attacks are making headlines. Officials have confirmed that a cyber attack is to blame for an internet and Wi-Fi shutdown during the opening ceremony.   Noncritical systems were impacted – including the official Olympics website, which according to reports, went offline when organizers shut down servers to address the attack. Wi-Fi service also stopped working.   This follows the Department of Homeland Security’s recent warning...

Recently, we hosted a GDPR roundtable discussion for more than 20 CISOs, senior compliance and risk directors from enterprise organisations. The conversation ranged from readiness, to the New Data Protection Bill, to insights around various different Articles within GDPR and the tools companies need. Below are five key takeaways from the fascinating discussion.   Key GDPR challenges When asked what their biggest challenge is relating to GDPR, various participants talked about their concerns surrounding telemarketing,...

Be honest, have you ever indulged in adult content in the office? No? Well look around you, because recent statistics prove that at least two in five workplaces are witnessing their employees doing exactly that. Gone are the days when an employee’s occasional procrastination simply amounted to twiddling their thumbs and staring blankly out the window. Now our instant access to the Internet has the potential to cause harm to corporate networks. A new study...

I have recently been writing a series of articles that tackle the various questions CEOs should be asking their teams when it comes to cybersecurity prevention. Previously I’ve written about how organisations are managing risks, the evolution of the budget and understanding the top five risks or high-risk areas within the business. In this article I am going to address why CEOs should have training and safety programmes in place and prioritise them accordingly.  ...

According to a recent report from cybersecurity firm Norton, hackers stole a total of £130bn from consumers in 2017. These attacks hit over 978m victims around the world and include large scale attacks on the NHS like WannaCry. However, surprisingly, still more than a quarter of those compromised believe they are safe from future attacks.  Norton warns cybercrime victims that they’re not doing enough to protect themselves against these types of attacks and that attacks...

According to Reuters: “Japan’s financial regulator said on Friday it had ordered all cyrptocurrency exchanges to submit a report on their system risk management, following the hacking of over half a billion dollars of digital money from Coincheck.” Whilst the whole premise of blockchain technology and crypto currencies revolves around it being essentially unhackable, the exchanges that trade these currencies are vulnerable. The introduction of system risk management (which we assume to be risk management...