Cybersecurity Expert

TalkTalk yet again made all the wrong cyber security headlines in the UK this month, after it was handed a £100,000 fine by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for not adequately protecting customer records from misuse by its staff. The ICO investigated the Internet Service Provider after receiving complaints from customers, who said they received cold calls from scammers who knew their TalkTalk account information. Second-hand goods firm CeX disclosed a compromise of up to 2 million online customer accounts due to a hack, however, CeX has yet to disclose any details about the cyber attack. My blog post and advice about this is here  http://blog.itsecurityexpert.co.uk/2017/08/up-to-2-million-cex-customer-account.html Hackers had a field day taking over social media accounts, from Real Madrid and FC Barcelona to Game of Thrones , much embarrassment could have been avoided if they had adopted multi-factor authentication on the accounts, aside from the spate of...

If you are a CeX online customer, change your account password now, as the second hand UK goods chain has been informing over two million of its customers their personal details have been hacked. In a customer email CeX discloses they have been the subject of a security breach by a third party, and that's about as much detail as CeX are presently admitting about the cyber attack at the moment. Despite the CeX email referring to a " sophisticated breach of security " without any further detail about what happened, it is impossible to judge whether it was actually a sophisticated cyber attack or not. Rather oddly CeX have not forced a password change on their compromised customer accounts despite admitting account passwords were at risk.   My CeX Customer Advice Change your CeX password straight away. Ignoring the CeX website advice of using a 6 character password, which is too weak - see the Account Password section of this post below.  Alternatively you could als...

Apologises for the delay in this month's Cyber Security Roundup release, I been away on holiday and taking a breach for monitor screens and keyboards for a couple of weeks. The insider threat danger manifested at Bupa where an employee stole and shared 108,000 customer health insurance records. Bupa dismissed the employee and is planning to take legal action. The Bupa data breach was reported both to the FCA and the ICO, it remains to be seen if the UK government bodies will apportion any blame onto Bupa for the data loss.  The AA was heavily criticised after it attempted to downplay a data compromise of over 13 gigabytes of its data, which included 117,000 customer records. The AA’s huge data cache was incorrectly made available online after an AA online shop server was “misconfigured” to share confidential data backup files. A customer databreach for the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) should serve as a stark warning for businesses to adequately assure third ...

I've been away on holiday in sunny Bulgaria for the last couple of weeks and working on a few articles for IBM, delaying my monthly security roundup post this month. While away I was proud to learn the blog and website had been given a couple of awards.  Best Technology Blogs of 2017 by Market Inspector and an award by a panel at Feedspot . I'm not usually one for bleating on about awards as that's not the reason I started writing the blog over ten years ago, so lets put this rather narcissistic post down to having too much sun on my hols!

Another large scale ransomware cyber attack caused chaos and dominated the media headlines around the world this month. The Petya ransomware, a copycat of WannaCry, caused major operational impact to organisations neglecting to apply Microsoft Windows critical security updates. There were reports of the malware significantly impacting British marketing firm WPP, a Jewson hardware store, Ukrainian national infrastructure associated firms, and even halting production at a Cadbury chocolate factory in Australia. Aside from the Peyta ransomware outbreak, it was another busy month of significant cyber security attacks and data compromises across the UK. The UK Parliament's email system was hacked with around 90 email accounts compromised due to the usage of weak passwords by parliament staff, it is not certain how many of 90 were MPs or not, but I wouldn't surprised if there were more than a few using weak passwords. There were further cyber troubles for the  UK gover...

Here we go again, another large scale ransomware attack is causing chaos across the globe, including at British marketing firm WPP, a Harpenden Jewson hardware store, several Ukrainian national infrastructure firms, and even causing a halt in production at a Cadbury chocolate factory in Australia. The ransomware in question is a new strain of the Petya ransomware family, modded to take advantage of the same EternalBlue SMB (Server Message Block) vulnerability ( CVE-2017-0144 ) as the WannaCry ransomware . EternalBlue was leaked by the Shadow Brokers hacker group in April 2017 and is believed to be developed by the NSA.  The malware also uses another exploit for vulnerability CVE-2017-0145  known as EternalRomance. Both of these Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities enables the Peyta ransomware to spread rapidly across local area networks, potentially self-infecting any other Windows systems without the MS17-010 security update applied. It is this rapid spr...

PDF version of this blog post is available here -  ITSE-GDPR-InfoSec-Guide-Jun17.pdf There are plenty of Cyber Security Sales and Marketing teams jumping on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) bandwagon at the moment, often peddling fear of massive fines and in far too many cases spouting nonsense and unnecessary guesswork about the GDPR's information security requirements. You do not need to be a lawyer or a fancy pants security consultant to understand the GDPR's information security requirements, they are freely provided by the European Union. It is just a matter of taking the time to actually read and digest each of the GDPR's requirements and then interpreting how your organisation will comply, albeit some requirements result in full blown project plans. I recommend reading the bite-sized formatted and section headed version of the GDPR on www.privacy-regulaton.eu rather than the  EU released GDPR paper .  Everything in this blog post is no...