Cybersecurity Expert

History shows with economic downturns comes increases in fraud , as the economy continues to slide there are real rises in online fraud targeting citizens. According to a recent survey by the UK Office of Fair Trading , one in four UK citizens either have, or know someone who has been a victim of an online phishing scam in the last 12 months, increasing from around one in six in the previous year. The reason why internet concern ticket scams are proving successful and are on the increase in the UK, is its child’s play for a fraudster to setup very genuinely looking website on the internet in no time at all, which dupes the victim into trusting the website’s ticket offerings and parting with their money. It’s near impossible for the authorities to police and remove such websites until it’s too late, while it’s relatively simple for fraudsters to remain anonymous and make off with the victims money without risk of being caught. Furthermore some of these ticket scam fraudsters go on to u...

During the week I was advising a group of techies about free anti-virus applications and free network vulnerability scanning applications and tools. I was asked, "What is the best free security application I have used to date?  Without any hesitation I replied TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is an example of an Open Source application at its best.  In TrueCrypt we have a multi-platform application of real commercial quality, providing seamless “on-the-fly” encryption; encrypting folders (mounted as volumes), disk partitions and entire hard disks to rigorous industry best practice standards. Yet TrueCrypt is completely free for anyone to download and use, local country laws permitting of course. TrueCrypt is less than 3Mb download and is compatible with just about any version of Microsoft Windows, including the 64-bit versions and Vista, as well as Mac OS X, and Linux distributions. Taking well under a minute to install, TrueCrypt doesn’t even require a system reboot and is quickly...

I have been quoted (more like misquoted!) in several national newspapers in relation to the Woolworths Credit Card Blunder, where I understand a batch of payment card details were found in a bin. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/02/09/the-blunder-of-woolworths-115875-21109011/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1139484/Woolworths-customers-risk-ID-fraud-staff-dump-banking-details-skip.html The important points which didn't make it into these articles were... 1. Concerned former customers of the Woolies store should not panic about losing money!  Where a merchant (Woolies) are found to have been sloppy in their protecting their customer payment card details, which results in fraud against the card holders, the card issuers/banks normally fully reimburse all the fraudulent transactions. This is especially so when fraud occurs on mass, as it is a lot easier to trace back to the original merchant responsible. Therefore customers would be protected against frau...

Twittering is really taking off in the UK at the moment, thanks to celebratory endorsements by regular twitters such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Phillip Schofield, Andy Murray and Alan Carr to name a few.  In simple terms, Twitter allows you to write and share 140 character statements with other Twitters, which is a kind of a current status update, with the majority tweeters using mobile devices to provide regular updates of what they are currently doing or thinking about. It's as not as boring as it sounds, for instance Stephen Fry just posted " Just landed in a rainy LA. Phones banned in customs hall these days. Will confiscate them if used. Gulp." , while Alan Carr posts "Get back to school you little s**s and stop throwing snowballs at my hanging baskets." I’m not one for social networking as I don’t like the idea of sharing all my personal details with the whole world, only my views on information security.  However I have been giving Twitter...