LRQA Nettitude Blog

Take a guess at how many days it takes the average company to detect a cyber breach? Would you believe that it sits around the 214 day mark? That’s over 7 months where your data, your assets are at the hands of cyber criminals. Not to mention, once that attack has been spotted it can take a considerable amount of further days for that breach to be contained. By that point your business could have suffered irreparable damage, both from financial and personal data loss. 

Red Teaming is flavour of the month within the cyber security industry. But what does it mean? And should I really be considering it for my organisation/business?

Reading through the British Army Military Doctrine manual the other day (as you do!) the concept of Fighting Power in the context of cyber warfare got me thinking. How could a traditional approach from a historically renowned army be applied to the cyber world? Cyber, or the internet - if we remove the hyped buzz word - has been described as the fifth military domain after land, sea, air and space, and is certainly at the forefront of the attacks reported in the media these days.

We know that our mind-sets need to shift these days and we must start by expecting to be hacked, but what then? How do we really manage an effective, secure environment? What steps do we need to consider?

Cyber threat intelligence provider ‘iSIGHT Partners’ has today announced* the discovery of a serious vulnerability that affects all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and Windows Server 2008 and 2012.

Data theft is in the headlines again as news speads that a Russian gang has reportedly stolen 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from various companies. The exact details of what and how much data has been exposed is unclear, but if such a large amount of customer data has indeed been amassed, it reminds us that companies are still being breached. While on the one hand reports of data breaches such as this keeps the cyber threat in the public eye, there is also a risk that the frequency of these incidents creates a certain amount of ‘cyber fatigue’ and a dangerous sense of complacency.

Domino’s Pizza is the latest victim of a breach and ransom demand. The recent Evernote and Feedly DDoS ransom demands, along with the efforts of Cryptolocker and other tricks to extort hard cash from unsuspecting users, are being tested to the max. These brazen attempts to make a quick profit will only be fuelled for as long as they remain successful.

You can’t fail to have noticed that eBay has become the latest high-profile company to fall victim to a data breach incident, thanks to the global media attention and commentary that the incident has attracted.  In a post on eBay’s corporate site, the online auction site urged its customers to change their passwords following a cyber attack that compromised one of its databases earlier this year.  According to eBay, attackers successfully “compromised a small number of employee log-in credentials, allowing unauthorised access to eBay's corporate network”, which enabled them to access customer information, including names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, contact details and dates of birth.  Despite eBay hastening to add that no financial information had been stolen, data breaches involving customer information can be extremely damaging for any business, as lost customer confidence can be hard to regain.  Particularly, when you are responsible for 233m customers’ details.  The fact is that all companies that store client data must ensure they have a rigorous cyber security plan in place, that they identify and manage any areas of high risk and that they are fully prepared with an incident detection and response strategy should the worst happen.

You can’t have failed to notice the media storm in the IT and security press around the recent vulnerability in the bedrock of the internet – SSL. The service designed to be protecting our data when sent over the big bad public wire has been wide open since early 2012 within many OpenSSL deployments (unpatched OpenSSL 1.01 or 1.02beta).

Some interesting and rather alarming findings from a recent survey around Security Awareness Training (SAT): source 1,000 people surveyed by One Poll for PhishMe.