We live in an age where cyber security threats are (or at least should be) at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Very recently, British Airways suffered a huge security breach that led to over 300,000 payment cards being compromised, showing that even the big players can still get hacked if they’re not 100% vigilant.
Artificial intelligence and its cousin machine learning are words that keep cropping up in almost every industry at the moment. Sometimes as buzzwords, sometimes with real innovation, but always with the outlook that both Ai and ML are going to be employed a lot more across a whole spectrum of businesses.
We are all no doubt aware of phishing. That age-old practice of sending fraudulent emails with the hope of gaining financial details, obtaining account credentials or tricking a user into installing malicious software. The practice is not new. In fact, before the wide-spread use of the internet, people would often receive letters claiming that they had won some sort of competition and to claim their prize, all they had to do was send some cash to front the delivery costs.
The recent hack on British Airways is alarming to say the least, and it’s not just because roughly 380,000 payment cards were compromised. British Airways is a huge company earning millions each year. These sorts of companies are heavily regulated and are required to be Level 1 PCI complaint (the highest level of compliance).
A company’s first few years can often give an indication of where it’s going, allowing us to make assumptions about its future. Bulletproof is still in its early phases, being just a couple of years old, but having been privy to the first official quarterly update, it’s clear that the business has a great deal of potential.
Recently, when discussing Chrome’s current push to get everyone onto HTTPS, we touched upon the TLS handshake, mentioning that the latest version of TLS was version 1.2. Since then, TLS version 1.3 has been made available for use, successfully dating our literature that was previously held with such high esteem. Of course, TLS v1.3 still has to be adopted and implemented by the Internet in general, so for the most part 1.2 will still be the most prominently used version for a while yet.
A Data Protection Officer (DPO) is a lot like a little angel on your shoulders, except instead of a little harp, they have a complete understanding of GDPR and other data protection laws. Their job is to make sure you don’t listen to the devil on your other shoulder encouraging you to do all sorts of non-compliant things, like process data unlawfully or without permission.
Last month, Google Chrome started marking all non-HTTPS sites as not secure. The main reason for this is because all non-HTTPS sites are insecure, so there is some logic to it. It was part of a plan announced way back in 2016 that sought to improve security across the Net. The first stage of this was to mark all HTTP sites that collect passwords or credit card details (and the like) as being insecure.
Despite living in a world where the internet is becoming ever-more fundamental to everyday life, there is currently a world-wide shortage of cyber security professionals who are able to keep it all secure. Within four years this shortage is expected to reach 1.8 million. According to a recent study, only 35% of the enterprises involved felt they were adequately staffed to deal with cyber-attacks. 35% is not a good percentage.
An ominous flashing red light on a blacked-out computer screen means the promise of a threat. It was 21:26 on a Sunday night and an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) alert shot across one of our screens. A security analyst usually has just minutes to respond, carry out an investigation on behalf of the organisation under threat and make a critical decision.
