Latest Security Opinions

A University College London study recently ranked Deepfakes as the most worrying application of artificial intelligence for crime or terrorism. We asked Joe Bloemendaal, head of strategy at digital verification company Mitek, to break down the report’s findings Why does UCL deem fake audio and video content so pernicious? And what is the significance of… Read More

Attackers continue to use the same methods that worked for them long before 2020: find a way in, then target privileged access to unlock doors.

“The old way of doing security – creating rules for what employees are allowed to do and trying to predict what might go wrong based on history is useless in the face of rapidly changing, unprecedented circumstances.”

Hackers are becoming more sophisticated and determined than ever. According to a Clark School study, there is a cyberattack every 39 seconds – a stat reflected in estimates that put the global cost of cybercrime at $6 trillion annually,  

Among the many areas of concern are the risks of Intellectual Property (IP) theft, defined by the FBI as “. . . robbing people or companies of their ideas, inventions, and creative expressions . . . which can include everything from trade secrets and proprietary products and parts to movies, music, and software.”

Cybercriminals with access to an older adult person’s information via a computer, smartphone, or another networked device, can easily exploit it for nefarious intent. And they do. Every year, cybercriminals steal approximately $40 billion from older adults (senior citizens aged  60 and over) in the United States.

The scope of bad actors targeting senior citizens can be explained by the lack of experience and skills in using computers/technology among the elderly, against the growing popularity of computer systems held by people of the same age, and the fact that most of them have credit cards.

In the past, people in their 70s and 80s hardly ever used computers. Nowadays, people of the same age have social media accounts, surf the Internet, and of course use smartphones.

Last week, Europe’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield, a legal framework relied upon by thousands of US and EU companies to transfer personal data from the EU to the US.

The decision is perhaps no surprise, given the CJEU’s long-standing concerns about the ease with which the US government could access personal data of European citizens. Privacy Shield itself was an attempt to readdress the balance of privacy in favour of EU residents — but it has now been deemed inadequate.

“Right now IT and security teams should probably focus less on stacking security technologies designed to detect sophisticated threats, and more focused on implementing hardening technologies, such as patch management, devices control, and encryption.”

That’s the opinion of Liviu Arsene, Global Cybersecurity Researcher at security firm Bitdefender, a company which has been serving the enterprise market since 2013 with GravityZone, an environment-agnostic security platform that is regularly ranked #1 in independent security tests.

Reopening the economy while avoiding a second wave of Covid-19 is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Maintaining a low rate of transmission while opening up places of work and leisure is a delicate balance to strike, and localised outbreaks must be kept under control before they spread more widely. To do this requires a rapid, joined-up approach between regions, one which technology can enable.

With a raft of issues leading to the recent scrapping of the NHS’s contact tracing app, the pressure is on tech giants Apple and Google to provide a better solution. The apps currently provided are Bluetooth-based.

User data, secure server, firewall safety, online password protection, cybersecurity, ransomware, GDPR, cyberattacks, phishing, data privacy, license agreement…these are all words that have come to drive us crazy.

The theme of the online climate is security. Companies, governments, customers and people spend much time, money and effort trying to protect themselves online. But what exactly are we protecting? Our identities, our records, our personal data, social media posts, privacy or is it something more? 

In 2019 alone cyberattacks cost the healthcare industry $4 billion, making it the worst ever year for data breaches.

If healthcare organizations are to gain ground on modern cyber threats, they must follow certain key security strategies to build much needed cyber resilience.

Here are five security prescriptions to keep the industry healthy:

Finding a vaccine for the novel coronavirus is priority number one in the healthcare community. While an increasing number of countries appear to have joined China in getting the virus under control, there are legitimate fears that a second-wave could take many nations back to square one. Put simply, the surest way of preventing a Covid-19 resurgence is to develop and test an effective vaccine.

Developing a vaccine is a complex and challenging undertaking at the best of times. But to make matters even more complicated, experts on the frontline of these efforts have been subject to rampant cyber attacks in recent weeks. 

There has been a great deal of conversation around the similarities between the spread of the Covid-19 virus and that of computer viruses. And indeed, as the first global pandemic to occur during the age of connectivity, this comparison is valid. But while most focus on how we can leverage the knowledge gained in the “real world” in identifying and stopping the spread of plagues in the virtual world, I would like to offer another perspective.

Perhaps we in cybersecurity can return the favour. Perhaps the medical world can take the lessons learned in three decades of fighting “cyber viruses” and implement these in their fight to mitigate the coronavirus?