Cybersecurity Expert

Guest article by Adrian Taylor, Regional VP of Sales for A10 Networks  Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are now everyday occurrences. Whether you’re a small non-profit or a huge multinational conglomerate, your online services—email, websites, anything that faces the internet—can be slowed or completely stopped by a DDoS attack. Moreover, DDoS attacks are sometimes used to distract your cybersecurity operations while other criminal activity, such as data theft or network infiltration, is underway.  Why are DDoS attacks bigger and more frequent than ever? DDoS attacks are getting bigger and more frequent The first known Distributed Denial of Service attack occurred in 1996 when Panix, now one of the oldest internet service providers, was knocked offline for several days by an SYN flood, a technique that has become a classic DDoS attack. Over the next few years, DDoS attacks became common and  Cisco predicts that the total number of DDoS a...

September 2018 started with a data breach bang, with  British Airways disclosing a significant hack and data loss . 380,000 of the airlines' website and mobile app customers had their debit and credit card details lifted via a maliciously injected script.  The breach even caused BA owners, IAG, to drop in value 4%. And to compound matters, there were several claims made that  the BA website wasn't PCI DSS compliant , implying if they were PCI DSS compliant, their customer's personal and payment card information would still be safe.  For further details about this breach see my blog posts;  British Airways Customer Data Stolen in Website and Mobile App Hack  and  British Airways Hack Update: Caused by Injected Script & PCI DSS Non-Compliance is Suspected . Facebook continues to make all the wrong kind of privacy headlines after a massive user data breach was confirmed by the social media giant at the end of the month. Facebook said at ...

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...