One advantage of running a small boutique consultancy is I get to steer the business activity towards subjects I personally find interesting. Throughout my career, I have always been fascinated with frauds and that is where my focus normally lies. It’s that magic-like performance for me that has a very similar feeling to the showmanship of great...

Another change of the seasons is upon us. An interesting correlation is that these quarterly seasonal changes also follow the password change schedule in use in many organizations. If you work in an office, you probably receive a notice to change your password every 90 days. The odd correlation of requiring a password change every 90 days in a...

Security incidents pose a real threat to industrial networks. In 2014 alone, organizations in the energy, utilities, industrial, and oil and gas sectors encountered 245 unique industrial control system (ICS) incidents, with more than 800 security advisories published that same year. To make matters even more daunting, only a fraction of those events...

In the last year, change management has been one of the top challenges customers want to solve. The problem is complex, and integration is essential to producing a sustainable solution. There are multiple drivers behind the challenge. First of all, there must a compliant change management process that produces supporting evidence. For high-impact...

Imagine we’re sitting at a Starbucks on a Friday afternoon. The coffee shop is pretty busy and full of aspiring hipsters sipping soy lattes and typing away at their MacBooks while loudly listening to Miles Davis. Suppose we really dislike Miles Davis for some reason, and we really want to turn that music off. We could connect to the open WiFi...

A new report reveals that cyber insurance premiums are on the rise in response to a growing number of high-profile hacks and breaches. According to Timetric's Insight Report: The Future of Cyber Risk Insurance, insurers are raising the deductibles on existing companies' information security policies, whereas others are limiting the amount of...

In December 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, concerned about privacy implications of the new “instantaneous camera,” penned The Right to Privacy, where they argue for protecting “all persons, whatsoever their position or station, from having matters which they may properly prefer to keep private, made public against their will.” 125 years...

On Tuesday, the European Court of Justice ruled the 'safe harbor' data transfer agreement between the United States and the European Union invalid. According to BBC News, the United States and the EU adopted the 'safe harbor' framework back in 2000 in order to provide a "streamlined and cost-effective" means of transferring data from Europe to U.S....

In today's world, our notion of endpoints has evolved from something with a user and a keyboard to something with exploitable vulnerabilities. This conceptualization therefore covers network connections beyond laptops, personal computers and mobile devices. Indeed, vulnerabilities arising from Internet of Things (IoT) appliances; automobiles, such...

Businesses have some serious problems on their hands when it comes to security. Major breaches seem to be occurring at an alarming pace – every other week seems to bring headlines of another large company suffering a security breach, and that doesn’t even begin to touch the thousands of breaches that don’t get media attention. With cyber attacks...

Our security roundup series covers the week’s trending topics in the world of InfoSec. In this quick-read compilation, we’ll let you know of the latest news and controversies that the industry has been talking about recently. Here’s what you don’t want to miss from the week of September 28, 2015: A massive data breach at Experian – one of largest...

I recall engaging into a conversation with a fellow security professional this year on the subject of where the CISO role should reside and to whom they should report.My opponent’s opinion was very much contrary to my own, vocalising the value of the CISO having full alignment with the main board and the company executive.I, on the other hand, feel...

Tripwire recently hosted a webcast entitled, “Talking To The Board: How To Improve Your Board's Cyber Security Literacy -- UK Edition.” For the presentation, Amar Singh, Interim CISO and Founder of both Cyber Management Alliance and Give01Day, an organization that connects volunteer information security professionals together with charities seeking to...

Our smartphones know everything about us – who our friends are, where we have been, our financial details, our health information and other intimate details of our lives. But can we trust our phones to keep these our personal information secret? One of the biggest security and privacy challenges of smartphones are the very apps we install on them...

Android users are being warned of a newly discovered type of malware that has recently infected hundreds of thousands of devices each day. Security researchers at Android developer Cheetah Mobile claim to have found a virus – dubbed ‘Ghost Push’ – being packaged in seemingly legitimate applications downloaded from non-Google app stores. “This is the...

Earlier this week, a U.S. judge ruled that banks can proceed with a class action suit filed against Target for a data breach that occurred in 2013. A U.S. District Court judge in St. Paul Minnesota affirmed Target's negligence in the data hack, which compromised upwards of 40 million credit cards. This decision enables the $5 million class action to...

A recent report by Panda Security revealed a record high in the creation of new malware samples, reaching more than 21 million new threats over the course of just three months. In the second quarter of 2015, the Spanish security firm saw an average of 230,000 new types of malware each day – an increase of 43 percent compared to the same period last...

Researchers at BAE Systems have published a report investigating the return of the Qbot network-aware worm, revealing infections on some 54,517 PCs. 85% of the affected systems are based in the United States, with academic, government and healthcare industry networks particularly badly hit. Earlier this year, for instance, the media reported that...

In mid-March, news first broke about a ransomware attack at The Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario. The hospital released a statement soon after the attack confirming ransomware had infected four of its 9,800 computers. It is believed a staff member clicked on a suspicious link that in turn downloaded the ransomware onto the hospital's computers....

Despite the operating system reaching end of life exactly two years ago today, statistics show Windows XP still runs on one out of every ten desktops around the world. According to IT security firm ESET, however, the statistics have lowered significantly since Microsoft pulled support for its once dominant platform. Compared to April 8, 2014, nearly...