Shane Chambers No Comments

Small Businesses Experiencing More Cyber Attacks Than Large Organisations

We’ve all seen the headlines when a large multi-national corporation suffers a data breach, but are small businesses able to ‘fly under the radar’ for cyber crime? Well, according to Verizon’s annual data breach incident report, the opposite may be the case. While large organisations make headlines, the report found that 58% of data breaches actually occurred in small and medium-sized companies.

“Many small businesses don’t have the resources focused on security and training, and employees are not cognizant of being at risk,” according to the Vice President of Experian Data Breach Resolution, Michael Bruemmer. “Some of these businesses, especially startups, may have no or small revenue, but they may be processing credit cards or holding personal data for other companies, and they don’t realize they have to protect it.”


Half of all cyber attacks are currently believed to target small businesses (Source: Verizon Annual Data Breach Report)

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Shane Chambers No Comments

Cyber Attacks Rarely Change Tactics, According to NSA

According to Dave Hogue, the technical director of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center, the technology used to implement cyber attacks evolves over time but the tactics used to carry them out rarely changes. Hogue told the crowd at the CyberUK conference in Manchester, “Every day we’re battling a new cyber-threat, but the more that things change the more that they stay the same.”


Dave Hogue is the technical director of the NSA CTOC, and claims that they have not responded to any ‘zero-day’ cyber attacks in two years.

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Shane Chambers No Comments

ALL 2.2 Billion Facebook Users May Be Open to Social Engineering Attacks

It’s been a bad year for Facebook so far. They recently revealed that they may have improperly shared the details of 87 million users with a third-party, the now-infamous political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Then, on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted during a press conference that “malicious actors” may have took advantage of Facebook to obtain the public data of all or most of Facebook’s 2.2 billion strong user base.


Social Engineering is becoming a larger problem for businesses and consumers alike over the past years. So what does it mean if cyber criminals have access to your public data?

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Shane Chambers No Comments

Meltdown and Spectre Attacks Expected to Surge in 2018

The world has not seen the last of Meltdown and Spectre, according to a recent report by cyber security and firewall specialists SonicWall. By January 2018, the company had already come across 500 ‘zero day’ malware programs designed to take advantage of various processor vulnerabilities. On Meltdown and Spectre, SonicWall has said, “It’s likely these are just two of many processor vulnerabilities already in play. We predict the emergence of password stealers and infostealers to take advantage of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities”.


Meltdown and Spectre are just two CPU vulnerabilities among many that criminals are expected to continue exploiting throughout 2018 and beyond.

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Shane Chambers No Comments

Cyber Report Shows Majority of Paying Ransomware Victims Still Don’t Get Data Back

Have you been hit by ransomware recently? According to a recent survey by CyberEdge, the most reliable approach (by far) to defending against ransomware is proactive rather than reactive. That is to say, having a robust backup and disaster recovery system in place is far more likely to result in minimal disruption and data loss than trying to pay the criminals in the hopes that they do the ‘honourable’ thing and decrypt your critical data. For the report, CyberEdge surveyed IT security professionals and found that more than half (55%) had been hit by ransomware in 2017. The study found that of those who had prepared for ransomware using backups and other business continuity procedures, 86.9% were able to successfully recover their data. However, of those who didn’t have backups to rely on and instead paid the ransom, only 49% actually had their data decrypted and recovered.


Thinking of paying ransomware demands? Think again, as less than half of ransomware payments result in successfully decrytped and restored data.

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