Cybersecurity Expert

The latest GCHQ revelation courtesy of The Guardian and Edward Snowden, is arguably the most privacy damming of them all. A GCHQ surveillance program called 'Optic Nerve', collected more than 1.8 million webcam imagines from Yahoo chat accounts between 2008 and 2010. The program saved one webcam image every five minutes from unknowing Yahoo users using private webcam chat.  One of the stolen GHCQ memos made no bones that the service struggled to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected from the eyes of its staff. The fact these images were collected on mass and indiscriminately without the knowledge of Yahoo's users, the vast majority of which are law abiding, is a real privacy invasion. Most worryingly is that such an undertaking could be "green lighted" by senior officials, this beggars belief, pointing to a general lack of human morality and to the uncontrolled power our security agencies have. This is what happe...

The relentless stream of data breaches by big business continues, with the likes of Vodafone ,  Tesco , Sony , Adobe and Yahoo , all losing their customer's personal data on mass due to their inadequate security. How do you know if your username, email address and password have fallen into the hands of a cyber criminal due to these breaches? There is one website that seeks to provide some assurance to that question,   https://haveibeenpwned.com  appears to be have acquired the stolen data from the Internet's criminal underworld and allows anyone to freely search it for their own username and email, the website returns a response which states if the account is known to have been compromised or not, namely listed within the stolen database. The website says it has over 161 million stolen accounts that are searched, all this data has been compiled from several of the high profile data thefts. Although the hacked businesses are responsib...

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, as usual Microsoft released a series of monthly security patches for its software. Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for February 2014 . Most notable in February's patch list, are the several 'Critical' patches, which resolve Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities in all versions of Microsoft Windows. This includes a specific security patch download for Microsoft Windows XP systems, demonstrating Windows XP vulnerabilities still keep on coming, but there is another really interesting point with these monthly Microsoft Security Bulletin announcements, which is they will aid hackers in attacking the Windows XP operating system. How Microsoft will help Hackers attack Windows XP Post 8th April 2014, Microsoft will be advertising to hackers a list of Windows XP vulnerabilities which will remain unpatched. As every time Microsoft announce fixes for newly discovered vulnerabilities within multiple versions of Windows operating systems, as Mi...

Post Snowden it is easy to jump on the media bandwagon, cry foul that GCHQ and the NSA have gone too far, forsaking our Privacy for Security. Yet if you take a walk through any city or town in the UK, and your image and actions are recorded by hundreds of CCTV cameras, no permission is ever sort, and you have no idea who is watching you without your knowledge, yet this invasion of privacy is socially accepted.   Millions of people in the UK willingly give up their privacy on social networks, sharing almost every aspect of their private lives. This private information is commercially exploited through targeted advertising, this invasion of privacy is socially accepted. The same is true with smart phones where considerable user privacy is given up, just read Apple’s agreement and your mobile phone contract to see the extent, it goes well beyond personal details, phone calls and text messaging. These companies track the applications you use, the websites you browse and where you p...