Cybersecurity Expert

Lloyds Banking Services were hit by a massive 3-day long DDoS attack in mid-January, impacting millions of Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customer’s ability to conduct online and mobile banking. Lloyds weren't the only UK business hit with a major DDoS attack in January, web hosting firm 123-Reg was taken down by another large DDoS attack. It seems major DDoS attacks are set to continue in 2017, their scale and capability fuelled by the rise of insecure IoT devices popping online. I think large scale DDoS attacks will be a major menace to the UK national and financial infrastructure for the years to come.  For the first time 'Cyber Crime' statistics were included in the England and Wales crime survey, with over 3.6 million fraud cases and over 2 million computer misused offences recorded in 2016, which is more than the typical 'physical world' recorded crime. It is worth considering that not all cybercrime is reported in England and Wales, in my view the ...

A decade ago I was walking into Boardrooms clutching newspaper clippings of half dozen data breaches which had occurred during the previous years, in a bid to warn of future threats and to persuade executives to increase their information security budgets. Those days are long gone, as most executives I encounter tend to be already worried about the cyber threat to their business, all reinforced by the mainstream media which today reports hacks most days. "Big Data" is a recent marketing buzzword used to usher in the age of businesses utilising the vasts amount of data which they process and store for increasing efficiently and profit. The problem is much of this "Big Data" is our personal data, and there are cyber criminals also seeking to profit from it. So here we are in the era of "Big Data Hacks", which sums up 2016 quite well. I have compiled a list of media headlines of data breaches in 2016 below, the volumes involved with these data theft hacks are...

Yahoo announced the largest ever data breach in history, with over 1 billion Yahoo user accounts compromised by a past cyber attack, which I covered in  Yahoo's Mind-blowing One Billion Data Theft Hack . This truly humongous data hack is distinct from the 2014 breach of 500 million accounts reported by Yahoo in September. Elsewhere KFC, Topps, The Daily Motion and LinkedIn’s Lynda.com also reported large customer data breaches of millions of records during December.  We need to be mindful of never to "get use to" and accepting these massive numbers of hacked online accounts, by businesses we entrust with our personal information, especially where these businesses have been found 'wanting' on the cyber security defences by under investing. The old spin doctor excuses of indefensible super hacks orchestrated by sophisticated nation-state backed dark forces tends not to stand up once the facts are uncovered. There is nothing sophisticated about ...