Cybersecurity Expert

A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, June 2020. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a sophisticated nation-state actor is causing increasing havoc by attacking the country’s government, corporate institutions, and his country's critical infrastructure operators . He said,  “We know it is a sophisticated state-based cyber actor because of the scale and nature of the targeting and the tradecraft used". While Morrison didn't actually name the specific country responsible in his statement, Reuters said its sources confirmed China was the culprit.  Political t ensions have ramped up between Australia and China in recent months after Australia called for an investigation into China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. China then reacted by placing tariffs on Australian exports and banning shipments of beef from Australia . Why am I leading a UK cyber...

You may not know much about the dark web, but it may know things about you. What is the Dark Web? The dark web is a part of the internet that is not visible to search engines. What makes the dark web, dark? it allows users to anonymise their identity by hiding their IP addresses. This makes those using the dark web nearly impossible to identify. Only 4% of the internet is available to the general public, which means a vast 96% of the internet is made up of the deep web. It’s important to note here, that the dark web is just a small section of the internet but it’s a powerful small sector. How much are your bank details worth? The dark web is full of stolen personal bank credentials. It’s common to see MasterCard, Visa, and American Express credentials on the dark web from a variety of different countries. Credit card data in the US, UK, Canada and Australia increased in price anywhere from 33% to 83% in the time from 2015 to 2018. The average price for a UK Visa or Mastercard ...

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...

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...