Cybersecurity Expert

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...

Aside from Brexit, Cyber Threats and Cyber Attack accusations against Russia are very much on the centre stage of UK government's international political agenda at the moment.  The government publically accused Russia's military 'GRU' intelligence service of being behind four high-profile cyber-attacks , and named 12 cyber groups it said were associated with the GRU. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said, " the GRU had waged a campaign of indiscriminate and reckless cyber strikes that served no legitimate national security interest ". UK Police firmly believe the two men who carried out the Salisbury poisoning in March 2018 worked for the GRU. What is Russia's GRU Intelligence Agency? The risks of cyber-conflict with Russia Russia accused of net hack attacks Russian spy: What happened to the Skripals? The UK National Cyber Security Centre said it had assessed "with high confidence" that the GRU was "almost certainly responsible...

In the wake of the global political fallout over the Salisbury nerve agent attack, there are reports of a growing threat of Russian state or Russian state-affiliated hacking groups conducting cyber attack reprisals against UK organisations, government officials have directly warned bosses at electricity, gas and water firms, Whitehall departments and NHS hospitals to prepare for a state-sponsored cyber assault .  Russian group Fancy Bear (APT28) were suspected of being behind an unsuccessful attack against the UK anti-doping agency , and China tied hacking group APT15 were found to have infiltrated a UK government contractor’s computer systems by NCC researchers . Large-scale data breaches were disclosed with Under Armour’s Fitness App MyFitnessPal (1.5 million personal records compromised) , Orbitz (880k payment cards at risk) , and at a Walmart partner (1.3 million personal records compromised) . The latter was caused when an AWS S3 bucket holding a Walmart dat...

One of the most notable data breaches disclosed this month was by Uber, given the company attempted to cover up the breach by paying off hackers. Over a year ago the transport tech firm was said to have paid £75,000 to two hackers to delete 57 million Uber account records which they had stolen . Uber revealed around 2.7 million of the stolen records were British riders and drivers . As a UK Uber rider, this could mean me, I haven't received any notification of the data breach from Uber as yet.  The stolen information included names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Uber can expect enforcement action from regulators on both sides of the pond, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it had " huge concerns " about the breach and was investigating. Jewson , Cash Converters , and Imgur all reported losing data due to hacks this month, while Equifax has reported suffering significant negative financial losses following their high profile hack of persona...

State-orchestrated cyber attacks have dominated the media headlines in October, with rogue state North Korea and its alleged 6,800 strong cyber force blamed for several cyber attacks. International intelligence scholars believe the North Korean leadership are using cyber warfare to up the political ante with their ongoing dispute with the United States. The North Koreans, as well as terrible security practices, were directly blamed by the UK National Audit Office for the recent  NHS WannaCry attack  ( despite North Korea denying it ). North Korea was also reported to be implicated in the  stealing US War Plans from South Korea , and for a spear phishing campaign against the US Power Grid . The possible Russian manipulation of the US election with cyber attacks and rogue social media campaigns is still a story not going away, while the Chinese are alleged to be behind the data theft of  Australian F-35 fighter jet, in what is described as an 'extensive' Cyberattack ....