Cybersecurity Expert

The potential threat posed by Huawei to the UK national infrastructure continues to be played out. GCHQ called for a ban on Huawei technology within UK critical networks , such as 5G networks, while Three said a Huawei ban would delay the UK 5G rollout , and the EU ignored the US calls to ban Huawei in 5G rollouts , while promoting the  EU Cybersecurity certification scheme to counter the Chinese IT threa t, which is all rather confusing.  Meanwhile,  Microsoft Researchers found an NSA-style Backdoor in Huawei Laptops , which was reported to Huawei by Microsoft, leading to the flaw being patched in January 2019. Is Huawei a Threat to UK National Security? Huawei: The company and the security risks   The assessment of the Chinese state as hostile towards Western nations is key in understanding why Huawei is considered a risk  Should we worry about Huawei?  Why has the UK not blocked Huawei? Why Huawei matters in five charts EU Cybersecurity ...

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...

UK supermarket giant  Morrisons, lost a landmark data breach court case  in December after a disgruntled Morrisons employee had stolen and posted the personal records of 100,000 co-workers online, the supermarket chain was held liable for the data breach by the UK High Court. The High Court ruling now allows those affected to claim compensation for the "upset and distress" caused. Morrisons said it believed it should not have been held responsible and would be appealing against the decision. If the appeal is lost it could open up the possibility of further class action lawsuits cases by individuals. Pending the GDPR becoming law in May 2018, such a court ruling sets a legal precedent for individuals to claim damages after personal data losses by companies through the courts as well. After May 2018, the GDPR grants individuals the right sue companies for damages following personal data breaches. So we can expect 'ambulance chasers' lawyers to pick up on this aspect of...

A massive data breach at Equifax dominated the UK media finance headlines this month, after 143 million customer records were compromised by a cyber-attack, 400,000 of which were UK customer accounts. Hackers took advantage of Equifax’s negligence in not applying security updates to servers. The data breach has already cost the CEO, CIO and CISO their jobs. In the UK Equifax faces investigations and the prospect of significant fines by both the Financial Conduct Authority and the Information Commissioner's Office over the loss of UK customer financial and personal data respectively. Hackers stole a quarter of a million Deloitte client emails , follow the breach Deloitte was criticised by security professional for not adopting two-factor authentication to protect the email data which they hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. September was an extremely busy month for security updates, with major patches releases by Microsoft , Adobe , Apache , Cisco and Apple to fix a...