The year is 2018 and cyber security is not a new topic. So why is it that every day hacking makes the front page? Why are we doing so badly with what is, at this point, not a new problem? There have been a couple of...
Over the years I’ve worked with a number of organisations who are struggling with an outsourced security monitoring service provider. These relationships can fail for a number of reasons, and it’s not always (or even most often) just the fault of the provider. Yes, there...
The NCSC, along with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) have produced some useful guidance on security and GDPR. The approach they use distill nicely into four aims; Manage security risk Protect personal data against cyber attack Detect security events Minimise the impact I will write blogs...
What is Wireshark and who uses it? As described on wireshark.org "Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many commercial and...
We see examples of failures in cyber security every day, frequently from organisations that should know better, such as this failure at the US Department of Defense: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/11/us_military_manual_dark_net_sale/ They should be doing a lot better. So what can a small or micro business do? TL;DR Secure the...
Security awareness training is a big topic, but something lots of organisations struggle with. While more or less everyone recognises that cyber security is not just a technical problem, and that good user behaviour is vital, actually deciding how to go about achieving this can...
All devices directly connected to the public Internet are regularly probed. The source is commonly an automated script of some type – depending on its purpose it could be described as a scanner, crawler, scraper, spider, bot or more. It’s important to remember that not all...
As 2016 closed, the US took the unusual step of releasing an report attributing a series of hacks, and subsequent leaks of stolen information, to Russian intelligence services (RIS in the vernacular of spooks). The report consisted of some technical analysis and indicators of compromise...
If you're at all interested in all things cyber security, then you will know this has been an interesting summer. Most notably, I think, have been the allegations (reasonably substantiated in my opinion) of Russian state backed hacking of, and subsequent leaking of material from,...
In this post I'm going to talk about the dark web. Even the name makes it sound scary - and a quick Google will confirm that impression. Lots of news stories about the horrors and bad things that lurk on the 'dark web'. But what...