Cybersecurity Expert

As Christmas fast approaches, CISOs and cyber security experts around the world are busy putting plans in place for 2019 and reflecting on what could have been done differently this year. The high-profile data breaches have been no secret - from British Airways to Dixons Carphone to Ticketmaster - and the introduction of GDPR in May 2018 sent many IT professionals into a frenzy to ensure practices and procedures were in place to become compliant with the new regulation. What the introduction of GDPR did demonstrate was that organisations should no longer focus on security strategies, which protect the organisation’s network, but instead focus on Information Assurance (IA) which protects an organisation’s data. After all - if an organisation’s data is breached, not only will it face huge fallouts of reputational damage, hits to the organisation’s bottom line and future prospecting difficulties, but it will also be held accountable to regulatory fines - up to as much as €20 million, or...

A guest article authored by Bernard Parsons, CEO, Becrypt Whilst I am sure more details behind the Marriott data breach will slowly come to light over the coming months, there is already plenty to reflect on given the initial disclosures and accompanying hypotheses. With the prospects of regulatory fines and lawsuits looming, assimilating the sheer magnitude of the numbers involved is naturally alarming. Up to 500 million records containing personal and potentially financial information is quite staggering. In the eyes of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), this is deemed a ‘Mega Breach’, even though it falls short of the Yahoo data breach. But equally concerning are the various timeframes reported. Marriott said the breach involved unauthorised access to a database containing Starwood properties guest information, on or before 10th September 2018. Its ongoing investigation suggests the perpetrators had been inside the company’s networks since 2014. Starwood disclosed its own...

One of the largest data breaches in history was announced by Marriott Hotels at the end of November. A hack was said to have compromised up to a mind-blowing "half a Billion" hotel guests' personal information over a four year period.  See my post,  Marriott Hotels 4 Year Hack Impacts Half a Billion Guests  for the full details.  The Radisson Hotel Group also disclosed its Rewards programme suffer a data compromise . Radisson said hackers had gained access to a database holding member's name, address, email address, and in some cases, company name, phone number, and Radisson Rewards member number. Vision Direct reported a website compromise , which impacted users of their website between 3rd and 8th November, some 16,300 people were said to be at risk  A   fake Google Analytics script  was placed within its website code by hackers.  Eurostar customers were notified by email to reset their passwords following presumably successful a utom...