Cybersecurity Expert

A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, October 2020. London's Hackney Borough Council has been tight-lipped about "a serious cyber-attack" which took down its IT systems, impacting its service delivery to citizens. Providing scant information about the attack, but it does have all the hallmarks of a ransomware outbreak. The council says it is working with the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Ministry of Housing to investigate and understand the impact of the incident. Ransomware attacks continue to be a major blight for UK public services, with councils to hospitals struggling to defend their IT systems against ransomware. Earlier this year Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council said it had been hit by a ransomware attack, which cost it more than £10m. It looks like the ransomware will continue to pose a major threat to the UK for some time to c...

The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released its annual review . The report showcases the NCSC successes with its core mission to make the UK the safest place to live and work online. The NCSC is certainly having a positive impact in helping British businesses of all sizes with their cyber defences, and with their excellent ' CyberFirst ' initiative, which encourages and supports youngsters into the cybersecurity professional. NCSC Annual Review 2019 The NCSC reported it had  "handled" 658 attacks on 900 organisations, including schools, airports and emergency services, with many attacks were "from hostile nation-states ".  The NCSC said cyberattacks from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea pose "strategic national security threats to the UK", and  also warned that "large-scale global cybercrime" was a threat to "our social fabric, our way of life and our economic prosperity", despite often being "low in sop...

The final Cyber Security Roundup of 2018 concludes reports of major data breaches, serious software vulnerabilities and evolving cyber threats, so pretty much like the previous 11 months of the year. 5.3 millions users of "make your own avatar" app Boomoji had their accounts compromised, after the company reportedly didn't secure their internet connected databases properly. "Question and Answer" website Quora also announced the compromise of 100 million of its user accounts following a hack. A large data breach reported in Brazil is of interest, a massive 120 million Brazilian citizens personal records were compromised due to a poorly secured Amazon S3 bucket . This is not the first mass data breach caused by an insecure S3 bucket we've seen in 2018, the lesson to be learnt in the UK, is to never assume or take cloud security for granted, its essential practice to test and audit cloud services regularly. Amongst the amazing and intriguing space expl...

On Friday (7th September 2018),  British Airways disclosed   between 21st August 2018 and 5th September 2018, 380,000 BA customer's payment card transactions were compromised by a third party through its website and mobile app. This data included the customer's full name, email address, debit\credit card 16 digit number (PAN), expiry date and card security code i.e. CVV, CV2 Details of how the hack was orchestrated have now come to light.  In  a blog post RiskIQ researchers  have claimed to have found evidence that a web-based card skimmer script was injected into the BA website, very  similar to the approach used by the Magecard group, who are believed to be behind a similar attack against the  Ticketmaster website recently . Web-based card skimmer script attacks have been occurring since 2015. In this case, once the customer has entered their payment card details and then submits the payment either on a PC or on a touchscreen de...

In a statement, British Airways stated: " From 22:58 BST August 21 2018 until 21:45 BST September 5 2018 inclusive, the personal and financial details of customers making bookings on ba.com and the airline’s app were compromised ." The airline said they will be notifying affected customers, and if anyone has been impacted to contact their bank or credit card providers. The Telegraph reported 380,0000 payments were compromised, and that BA customers had experienced payment card fraud as a result before the BA breach disclosure, which strongly suggests unencrypted debit\credit cards were stolen. There are no details about the data theft method at the moment, but given the statement said the BA website and BA mobile app was compromised, I think we could be looking at another example of an insecure API being exploited, as per the  Air Canada breach  and the T-Mobile breach last month. We'll see what comes out in the wash over the next few days and weeks, but...