Latest Security Opinions

As many of us stay home, we are relying more than ever on apps and online services to stay connected. But recent headlines have highlighted that the vulnerabilities within apps downloaded to our devices can leave them open to exploitation.

To add fuel to the fire, even the very connected devices we use are susceptible to attack. High profile breaches have come to light over the past year, notably a hacker being able to talk to a young girl via a home security camera in her room.

For organisations, this presents significant challenges when dealing with internal security. With the traditional security perimeter already weakened as a result of mass working from home, it’s crucial steps are taken to ensure the devices and online platforms we use to work remotely are robust and secure. 

The pandemic has demonstrated just how much we depend on our online devices. From being able to work in the safety of our homes, to buying groceries online and booking virtual workout classes, it has proved that the move towards a fully digital world is within reach. Our dependence on the internet has also reminded us how much personal information we share – whether on social media, online banking and shopping, or our own professional profiles.

These characteristics that we openly disclose are exactly what fraudsters are looking for to exploit us – from using this information to pull our heartstrings in online dating scams to tricking our banks to gain access to our savings. We often overlook the trail of breadcrumbs of information we are leaving behind us, making it all too easy for a fraudster to take advantage.

For the first time in history, many elections will have to happen without in-person voting. In the US, we have already witnessed the pandemic’s impact on the Democratic Primaries, many of which continue to be postponed and mired in massive legal controversies. Throughout the ongoing pandemic, leaders continue to hotly debate whether or not elections that rely on in-person voting ask citizens to make a decision between civic participation and personal safety.

Dr Roger G. Johnston’s “Backwards” security maxim states: “Most people will assume everything is secure until provided strong evidence to the contrary.” The observation reflects our collective tendency to ignore potential vulnerabilities in products, services or technologies if acknowledging them interrupts our enjoyment of them or the utility they carry.

Of course, this pathology is rare in security teams, but highly present in users and consumers, who see technology as a means to an end and relish any new tool that promises to shave seconds of their daily routine. The most potent example this side of the millennium was Cambridge Analytica’s covert harvesting of our personalities via innocuous quizzes. But for today’s organisations – right here, right, now – what is the “Backwards” blindspot?

Businesses quickly adapted to enable their employees to work from home when the Government’s Covid-19 lockdown was imposed. But four weeks later, what have we learned? Is there room for improvement to keep organisations secure, productive and engaged? Tim Mercer, CEO of Vapour Cloud, advises how companies can take remote working strategies up a notch…

We all use email everyday both in our personal life and within business.  The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 306 billion in 2020 and is forecast to grow to over 361 billion by year-end 2024 according to The Radicati Group.  That is over half the world population using email.  

But do we understand the importance of ensuring our emails are secure and why?

Here are five reasons why email security must be a priority for your business.

Concerns about Deepfakes are nothing new, but the technology has advanced far faster than many anticipated and has given rise to a medium that’s terrifying in its potential.

Though watching Jim Carrey’s face on Allison Brie’s body is, admittedly, delightful, the implications for forgery are sobering.

Consider, for instance, the recent Deepfake using Vladimir Putin’s face over MIT Technology Review’s editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield’s body. Though it’s clear that Putin himself isn’t being interviewed, it isn’t a bad effort. It also doesn’t take a big imaginative leap to envision how the technology can be further enhanced and used with nefarious intent.

In the meantime, here are five useful tips to separate digital sophistry from the real thing:

Now that the COVID-19 crisis has ushered in an indefinite period of remote work, many IT leaders are tasked with keeping security operations running smoothly from a distance for the first time.

If your organisation has both Apple and PC devices, you might be focusing your energy on Windows security and overlooking Mac and iOS vulnerabilities in the process. 

The good news is that your employees’ Apple devices already have strong security systems built in. They’re just different from a PC’s lines of defense, which may be the root of several misconceptions. Here are three Apple device security myths and the features you should proactively manage instead.

Whatever the company, whatever the sector, there’s one phrase at the top of the agenda for every IT director: the ‘skills crisis’.

Undeniably, the crisis is a very real problem for IT, with significant consequences for the competitiveness of UK businesses and the economy at large. Recent Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) research starkly illustrated this problem, revealing that 40 per cent of organisations believe their efforts to implement digital transformation are hampered by a lack of staff and skills.

As the coronavirus emergency develops, these skills challenges are set to aggravate further. Mainframe operations, in particular, may be put under pressure, creating issues for mission critical workloads like on-premise SAP.

Some have them openly saved on a notepad. Others prefer to add them as a random contact on their mobile phone. A few try to remember them off by heart – but ultimately most people have to go through the rigmarole of resetting passwords on a regular basis.

Since the early days of computing back in the 1960s, passwords have been the go-to method for computer security. They are simple and straightforward to implement, enabling a user to keep files and data secured by requiring a specific and unique string of characters for access.

At the time of writing, the majority of the world’s governments have effected stay-at-home measures, mass confinements which would be unnavigable for businesses without cloud software and infrastructure. If we didn’t appreciate it before, the sheer power, necessity, even, of cloud computing has been keenly felt in recent weeks. 

Zoom, the free to use video conferencing app, has exploded in the last month. It quickly became a household name and more than doubled its share price. However, Zoom has come under fire recently from the security community. Accusations and concerns around privacy and security features have been raised. Zoom is not alone here though. In fact many of the webinar and conferencing applications have attracted widespread criticism. Zoom has proved to be one of the most popular platforms and was therefore placed under the security microscope.