Category: Cybersecurity Basics

You know what it’s like, you have just hit the ‘Register’ button on a website and you’re being asked to provide a password to set up an account. So you try to come up with something that you can remember and meets the website’s password policy which dictates the characters to use and its minimum length. I have posted a link in previous LinkedIn updates of a video of British comedian Michael McIntyre giving a perfect example of the thought process you may go through to come up with a password. It’s worth watching because it is very funny, but…Continue readingPassword hell!

Data is big! Big data is even bigger! Organisations across the world collect a lot of it: customer data, employee data, supplier data, competitor data. Organisations collect customer data in order to gain advantage over their commercial rivals. They use it to learn how customers spend money: which products they are likely to buy based on their spending habits, demographics, location, politics, what they eat and drink and who they socialise with. This information is powerful: it fuels the engine behind targeted advertising to accelerate sales. Furthermore, organisations collect other data during the course of a transaction, such as credit…Continue readingCustomer data: a moral obligation to keep it secure

Listen to a news report or read a news headline in the paper about a security breach and you are likely to hear from the affected company that it was a victim of a sophisticated attack. The reason for this is simple: no-one wants to admit that they were actually the victim a rather simple attack. They like to portray their organisations as being so secure that it took a bunch of complex measures by a hacker to breach their systems. In reality, many sophisticated attacks rely on hackers identifying easily exploitable vulnerabilities either within the software or, more likely,…Continue readingSophisticated attack? Really?