Cybersecurity Expert

Article by Paul German, CEO,  Certes Networks   Why is it that the security industry talks about network security, but data breaches? It’s clear that something needs to change, and according to Paul German, CEO, Certes Networks, the change is simple. For too long now, organisations have been focusing on protecting their network, when in fact they should have been protecting their data. Paul outlines three reasons why the security industry has been protecting the wrong thing and what they can do to secure their data as we move into 2021. They’re called data breaches, not network breaches, for a reason Looking back on some of the biggest data breaches the world has ever seen, it’s clear that cyber hackers always seem to be one step ahead of organisations that seemingly have sufficient protection and technology in place. From the  Adobe data breach  way back in 2013 that resulted in 153 million user records stolen, to the  Equifax data breach  in 2017 that exp...

  A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, February 2021. Serious Linux Vulnerability Last month  a newly discovered critical vulnerability in 'sudo', a fundamental program present in all Linux and Unix operating systems caught my eye. The sudo vulnerability aka  CVE-2001-3156 , seemed to go under the radar after it was announced and patches were released on 26th January 2021. I  wrote a blog post  about my concerns given Linux is embedded everywhere, yet many of these systems are rarely, and even never updated with security updates. From IoT devices to internet-based services, the security of countless devices and web-based services' are dependant upon a secure Linux account privilege model. While these Linux operating systems remain unpatched to prevent exploitation of the CVE-2021-3156 vulnerability, there are waiting to be hacked. Npower App Hack Npowe...

On 13th December 2020, it came to light SolarWinds IT systems were compromised by hackers between March 2020 and June 2020. SolarWinds provides software to help organisations manage their IT networking infrastructure. The attackers exploited their SolarWinds IT access to covertly insert a vulnerability, coined 'Solorigate' or 'Sunburst', within the SolarWinds Orion platform software builds.  The following SolarWinds Orion versions are considered to be compromised.  Orion Platform 2019.4 HF5, version 2019.4.5200.9083 Orion Platform 2020.2 RC1, version 2020.2.100.12219 Orion Platform 2020.2 RC2, version 2020.2.5200.12394 Orion Platform 2020.2, 2020.2 HF1, version 2020.2.5300.12432 The vulnerability within these 'tainted' SolarWinds Orion versions permits an attacker to compromise the server on which the SolarWinds Orion product is installed and runs.  Given that SolarWinds is a popular network traffic monitoring product, thousands of organisations are said to be i...