Cybersecurity Expert

The good folk at  The Best VPN have put together an Infographic summarising ten of the worst "known" cyber attacks and data breaches to date, its a good recap of the high stakes when cyber security goes wrong.

How much does a payment card breach cost? How large are the potential fines? What happens if we aren't PCI DSS compliant and suffer a cardholder breach? Those are common unanswered questions which businesses accepting and processing debit and credit card payments rise, businesses which are required to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). In recent years a growing number of UK  businesses are taking out cybersecurity insurance, and are more pressingly wanting to know whether their insurance coverage is sufficient enough to cover the cost of a payment card data breach. It is not possible to produce a formula or calculator to provide precise payment card breach costs on a per card compromised basis, as no two business payment operations are ever the same, and there are just too many factors that can impact the overall cost of a breach.  So instead I have put together the following six pointers to aid the estimation of a payment card ...

Earlier in the month of February, a grey hat hacker named " Stackoverflowin " ran a simple script which resulted in over 150,000 printers, mainly in businesses, printing out pages with some nice ASCII art and a message saying the printer was owned. Many in the media pointed the blame as a printer security issue, but the main reason was horrendously poor firewall configuration. These printers were made vulnerable due to the presence of a highly insecure rule  in their network's firewall, which allowed internally networked printers accessible across the entire internet. It didn't matter if the printers were large sophisticated multi-functional devices or simple till receipt printers, they all received rogue print jobs directly from the internet thanks to terrible firewall management. Makes you wonder what else is vulnerable on these business' networks as a result of poor firewall configuration and without the security management safety net of regular network vul...