This Week's Gurus

It has been described by the government as “the second digital revolution” and received £32m in funding to promote its benefits and development across the UK, so it’s no surprise that the Internet of Things (IoT) is high on the public sector agenda. And it’s growing: it’s predicted that by 2020 there will be an estimated 24 billion connected IoT devices globally helping consumers and businesses to augment their “smart” lives with an endless array...

IT defenders face the increasing sophistication of adversaries who are responsible for the growth in size and frequency of cyberattacks – and alarmingly, many attackers have infiltrated corporate networks without IT even knowing.   According to a new report, nearly half (47 percent) of global IT decision makers say their company has suffered a data breach at least once – with 11 percent not knowing if they’ve been victimised or not, according to feedback from...

Theresa May’s speech to the great and good assembled at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos tackled key topical issues such as big data, the responsibilities of technology companies and online abuse.   These are significant areas of concern which will prevail for some time. Indeed, the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation will have a significant impact on the legal landscape, which lenders and companies will have to navigate.   The GDPR...

Today’s students have tremendous intellectual and technology skills they can be harnessed to achieve in many areas of American culture and business. What they lack are genuine real-life (“RL”) skills honed through practice and competition that can take them to the next level. If you consider a generation brought up in Internet-based and technology-based communication and interaction, it’s easy to see where this gap between what has been dubbed “RL” and electronics grew. I want...

By Jackson Shaw, VP of product management for One Identity Facial recognition and fingerprint scanning for device authentication are no longer futuristic concepts reserved for James Bond movies. In fact, biometrics seem to be gaining ground over their inferior cousin, the password, by the day. So, why do we all still have more passwords than we would care to remember? And whatever happened to the much-hyped “death of the password”? Three burning questions that dog...

Following a recent report stating that cyber-attacks are pushing corporate fraud to an all-time high, with 86 percent of companies around the world reporting that they had experienced a cyber incident in 2017, it is becoming ever more apparent that most businesses have failed to comprehend the scale of corporate hacking. According to Simon Bain, CEO at BOHH Labs, one solution to help organisations combat this and help prevent data breaches in a corporate environment is...

One of the most valuable weapons in any cybersecurity specialist’s arsenal is insight. Accessing and analysing data about threat types, volumes, methods and motivations offers a critical edge when designing an effective security posture. At Carbon Black we consider our Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) to be a vital part of what we do to help customers counter the threats they face. The latest intelligence to come out of TAU shows us that 2017 was a...

Most information security managers are well aware of the need to comply with GDPR – the EU’s regulations on how organisations manage, store, transfer and delete customer data Andy Barratt, UK managing director at cybersecurity specialist, Coalfire, examines how the intense focus on compliance with these new requirements, especially at board level, could be leaving some businesses at greater risk rather than less. The implementation of GDPR next April will undoubtedly encourage firms to tighten...

When an organisation is hacked, its customer data or other stolen information will often end up being sold on what’s known as the dark web. As I’m sure most readers will know, the dark web is a part of the internet where websites are not indexed by search engines and can only be accessed if you know the site address, effectively hiding them. Inside the dark web, ‘dark net’ markets sell contraband such as drugs...

Distributed denial of service, or more commonly abbreviated as DDoS, is a classic form of cyber-attack in the world of enterprises. The last 18 months has ushered in the era of supercharged, colossal DDoS attacks capable of reaching 1Tbps and more. IT professionals across the world have taken notice and are ready to combat this. Whilst there are many ways to fight DDoS attacks, like scaling and bandwidth metric analysis, in my experience the best...