Opinions & Analysis

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...

After yesterday we were made aware of the threat of DDoS attacks, today is about having a paper free environment. As we are in “World Paper Free Day”, a timely email dropped into my inbox informing me that only one in ten office workers in the UK could describe their workplace as “paper free”, while 45 per cent of office workers across the UK have seen confidential employee or business records left behind on photocopiers and printers, or...

This week a report emerged which claimed that teenagers are not only shopping online, but they are meeting strangers in the real world too. The report from (ISC)2 revealed that of the 1,162 pupils it surveyed, 43 per cent use the internet every day, 42 per cent have used a web cam and six per cent have posted a picture of themselves online or sent a picture to someone by text message that they would not want...

Now four months on from the revelations of Prism from Edward Snowden, it seems that businesses are the next to respond to the surveillance. This week it has been reported that both Germany's Deutsche Telekom and Brazil's Government have announced plans to offer services that deliberately bypass the United States and UK to avoid surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ respectively. According to the German news website Spiegel, Deutsche Telekom is proposing a specified data path...

If you are prepared to put in the time and effort, there can be great reward in vulnerability research and disclosure, not to mention credit and kudos in the security community. This week that sits in the shape of a blue hat sitting firmly on the head of Brit James Forshaw, head of vulnerability research at Context Information Security, who discovered a mitigation bypass technique in Internet Explorer 11 during its beta testing period in the summer....

Yesterday saw the “opening” of the National Crime Agency that will centralise crime investigation and fighting, and tackle all types of misdemeanours. The concept was originally proposed as part of the government’s Cyber Security Strategy, announced in 2011, and with this latest move it is positive that the actions are still being completed. The plan then was for a cyber crime unit within the National Crime Agency that will build on the Metropolitan Police's eCrime Unit, giving...

This week marked the first week of the now annual ENISA cyber security month and as part of the agency for network and information security's activities, awareness of citizens is key. Speaking to IT Security Guru, head of core operations at ENISA Steve Purser, said that after the “pilot exercise” in 2012, he felt that the effort was going very well on its fourth day and after a lot of preparations and effort, there was a lot...