Cybersecurity Expert

A roundup of UK focused cyber and information security news stories, blog posts, reports and threat intelligence from the previous calendar month, January 2020. After years of dither and delay the UK government finally nailed its colours to the mast, no not Brexit but Huawei, permitting 'limited use' of the Chinese Telecoms giant's network appliances within the UK's new 5G infrastructure . Whether this is a good decision depends more on individual political persuasion than national security interest, so just like Brexit the general view on the decision is binary, either its a clever compromise or a complete sell out of UK national security. I personally believe the decision is more about national economics than national security, as I previously blogged in ' The UK Government Huawei Dilemma and the Brexit Factor' . The UK government is playing a delicate balancing to safeguard potentially massive trade deals with both of the world's largest economic superp...

Marked by a shortage of cyber security talent and attackers willing to exploit any vulnerability to achieve their aims, this year emphasised the need for organisations to invest in security and understand their risk posture. With the number of vendors in the cyber security market rapidly growing, rising standard for managing identities and access, and organisations investing more in security tools, 2020 will be a transformational year for the sector. According to Rob Norris, VP Head of Enterprise & Cyber Security EMEIA at Fujitsu: “We anticipate that 2020 will be a positive year for security, and encourage public and private sector to work together to bring more talent to the sector and raise the industry standards. As the threat landscape continues to expand with phishing and ransomware still popular, so will the security tools, leaving organisations with a variety of solutions. Next year will also be marked by a rush to create an Artificial Intelligence silver-bullet for cyber se...

In the last couple of days, Google announced it will be putting restrictions on Huawei’s access to its Android operating system , massively threatening Huawei's smartphone market. Meanwhile,  UK based chip designer ARM has told its staff to suspend all business activities with Huawei , over fears it may impact ARM's trade within the United States.  Fuelling these company actions is the United States government's decision to ban US firms with working with Huawei over cybersecurity fears. The headlines this week further ramps up the pressure on the UK government to follow suit, by implementing a similar ban on the use of Huawei smartphones and network devices within the UK, a step  beyond their initial 5G critical infrastructure ban announced last month. But is this really about a foreign nation-state security threat? Or is it more about it geo-economics and international politicking? Huawei: A Security Threat or an Economic Threat? Huawei Backdoors It’s no ...

On 19th July 2018 the UK government, through the GCHQ backed Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre , gave “limited assurance” that Huawei poses no threat to UK National Security . Since then the UK, EU, and NATO member government politicians and security services have all raised concerns about the nation-state cyber threat posed by the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.  There has been particular political unease around the Huawei provision of network infrastructure devices (i.e. switches and routers etc.) within the UK national infrastructure, devices which controls network traffic and capable of accessing the data that traverses them. Huawei has been operating in the UK market for 18 years, whether its their smart phones or a network devices, Huawei products are generally far cheaper than their competitors' equivalents. This has led to major telecoms providers such as BT, purchasing and implementing Huawei network devices within their telecommunications infrastructure and data...

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...