Advice

Who Are Magecart?

You may have heard talk about a shadowy entity called ‘Magecart’. You may know that whatever or whoever this ‘Magecart’ is, it’s not good, but you may have other questions: who or what are they, what do they do, and how can you defend against them? This article shall attempt to answer those questions.

Who Are Magecart? Read More »

Automated Security Tools Are No Substitute for Educated Employees

As in every industry—particularly technology-centric ones—the history of the cyber security industry has been one of task automation. From the early days (some may say Gen I days) of firewalls and pattern-matching antiviruses to modern techniques of machine learning-based malware detection and traffic analysis, the tools available to a security-minded business are constantly growing in complexity, in an arms race with cybercriminals whose malware has been doing the same.

Automated Security Tools Are No Substitute for Educated Employees Read More »

Privacy By Design is Here to Stay

One of the most seismic events in information security last year was undoubtedly the entry into force of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), perhaps the most radical shift in data protection thinking since people started to require secret passwords to access a person’s account. The GDPR hysteria has settled down somewhat since May, but it has become clear that the Regulation represents a wider shift in approach to data protection and consumer privacy, and things will not end here.

Privacy By Design is Here to Stay Read More »

SMEs and Cyber Security: A case study

With data breaches of major tech. firms—your Googles and your Facebooks, for example—eating up all of the news coverage throughout the year, it’s easy for owners and employees of smaller to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to grow complacent. ‘They wouldn’t bother to attack little old me’, you might be thinking, but security through obscurity is no security at all.

SMEs and Cyber Security: A case study Read More »

Authentication as a Life Skill

A recent article in IEEE Security & Privacy—“Teaching Authentication as a Life Skill”—detailed the results of a team of Swiss researchers and their attempts to teach authentication to high-schoolers as a ‘life skill’. Choosing to focus on high-school students because as ‘it is crucially important that security be taught at an early age, before users

Authentication as a Life Skill Read More »

The Psychology of Security

Talk to any cyber security professional and one of the first things you’ll notice is frustration. Despite all the advice out there on how to avoid phishing attacks, or choose secure authentication methods, and so on, the problems persist—people continue to click suspicious links in emails and use ‘password’ as a password. As a result,

The Psychology of Security Read More »

2018 in Breaches

2018 proved to be an expensive year for a number of firms, both major and minor, around the globe. An IBM report suggested that the average cost of a breach last year reached almost $3.7m, and the nature of averages means that half were above that. Here we will present a brief run-down of some

2018 in Breaches Read More »

Mobile Malware

Europol’s 2018 Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment reported that ‘[m]obile malware [was] absent in law enforcement reporting, but industry reports [a] growing volume’ of such attacks. The authors suspected that the cause of the low law enforcement figures may have been that ‘[v]ictims of mobile malware are more likely to approach their provider in relation

Mobile Malware Read More »

Breaches and Butterfly Wings: How data loss fuels further phishing

The ‘butterfly effect’ is a popular way of explaining chaotic systems to non-mathematicians—the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one country contributes, however slightly, to a change in wind patterns that can cause a tornado in another weeks later. It’s important to be aware that our Internet-connected world is just as prone to producing these

Breaches and Butterfly Wings: How data loss fuels further phishing Read More »

Scroll to Top