Do you take a fatalistic approach to cyber attack? ‘Whatever will be, will be’ is an attitude in life (and movies) that is well suited to events that evoke a spontaneous response—like who will you marry? These are the questions posed in Doris Day’s song from the Hitchcock movie ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’. They’re not appropriate for incidents which inspire fear, which Doris learns when her son is kidnapped.
Dr Claudia Johnson | 23 Oct | Read more
When it comes to network security, preventive measures like firewalls are necessary, but they’re not enough.
Jason Riddle | 22 Oct | Read more
Security breaches are rarely out of the news and with these reports come the significant costs resulting from each attack. However, the immediate thought is often associated with a dollar amount; for example how much money are we forfeiting through lost sales? Consequently, many think that private enterprises are the only ones that are prone to be at risk of attacks on their networks. The fact is public sector, educational institutions and non-profit organisations are just as much at risk and the potential costs are both great and varied.
Brett Moorgas | 08 Oct | Read more
While the rise of mobile enterprise adoption and BYOD means more flexibility for employees and generally higher productivity for organisations and businesses, it also poses security challenges, in particular around identity and access management (IAM).
Travis Greene | 07 Oct | Read more
Unified Threat Management (UTM) has become popular among organisations since its emergence over five years ago. The security solution gained traction with its all-in-one approach, combining several security tools into a single device. Running UTM also saved companies, especially the smaller ones time, money and manpower. Most UTM today include a firewall, intrusion detection system (IDS), virtual private network (VPN), anti-malware, anti-spam, content and web filtering, while some vendors include other features such as advanced routing.
It goes without saying that government surveillance news dominates our media. From a global standpoint, the NSA leaks brought international attention to state organised spying. Locally, the Australian Government has been making headlines over its plans to develop legislation that will allow it to more easily access metadata from large organisations and telecoms providers to gain information on the consumers using their services in a bid to prevent acts of terrorism
David Balazsy | 03 Oct | Read more
What is cyber crime? There are a number of different ways that criminals are trying to target financial institutions. There is social engineering exploits, which is when an end-user gets an email claiming to be from their bank, but it’s really a cyber criminal. Within that email there is a link asking the end-user to confirm their account information. Cyber criminals then leverage the credentials to gain access to the user’s financial records and banking accounts. Malware is another piece to it, where criminals distribute malicious software and a user is tricked into installing a keylogger or screen scraper program on their device. This means that when an end-user enters their credentials, the program can capture all that information, allowing criminals to gain access to the account.
Crispin Kerr | 03 Oct | Read more
Lack of cybersecurity talent coupled with the increasing complexity of threats and networks, a heightened regulatory environment, and an accelerating pace of innovation is driving many organisations to look outside their walls for cybersecurity protection.
Ammar Hindi | 27 Jun | Read more
In March 2013, the Reserve Bank of Australia confirmed that hackers had penetrated its computers but failed to steal sensitive data or corrupt networks, amid growing alarm that sophisticated cyber attacks may leave banks and other organisations unaware they have been compromised.
Geoff Webb | 02 Jun | Read more
Enterprises and online businesses face mounting challenges as the use of secure web based content and applications continue to grow. Easy-to-access, highly mobile, and social are the new user mantras of today’s IT.
Jonathan Andresen | 09 Apr | Read more
With cloud computing continuing its journey as arguably the dominant technology of the current era, so too the way we use it and manage its capabilities continue to evolve. The cloud has given us new ways to think about lots of traditional IT habits and practices, and as more and more data finds its way into the cloud, this extends to subjects like business continuity, disaster recovery and general data security.
Gordon Makryllos | 03 Mar | Read more
Many casualties resulted from the many wars that were fought during the last century. A high percentage of those soldiers were engaged in combat because there was no ability to opt out. Most of us would not want to go to war, but unfortunately war has a way of finding us.
Andrew Bycroft | 11 Feb | Read more
Every day there is a story in the news of a security threat causing havoc to even the largest of enterprises. It may be website defacements one day, denial of service the next and credit card data exfiltration the day after.
Andrew Bycroft | 11 Feb | Read more
Balancing security priorities with business flexibility and agility is a tough challenge. But it’s a challenge every executive management team faces as it strives to drive business growth, achieve competitive advantage and maximise operational efficiency.
Ammar Hindi | 06 Dec | Read more
It used to be easy enough to spot a bank robber. With their balaclavas and weapons of choice, the criminals would simply storm in demanding money and everyone knew exactly what was happening. While criminals still occasionally resort to traditional methods, it’s rare to see the dramatic Bonnie and Clyde-style bank heists of the 20th century.
Geoff Webb | 06 Dec | Read more
Each day, as the speedy evolution of technology emerges, newer, more complex and increasingly dangerous cyber threats come onto the battlefield, thus presenting an ever-thriving danger to organisations, governments and enterprises everywhere.
"How do you teach a person to duck a punch? You punch them in the face until they get it," said freelance information security consultant Dan Tentler, who designed Twitter's internal anti-phishing training program, at last week's Breakpoint security conference in Melbourne.
Stilgherrian | 01 Nov | Read more
The attractiveness of adopting cloud services continues to grow. Who can argue against access to the latest technologies, a pay as you go model, rapid provisioning/de-provisioning and on demand scaling? All of these benefits lead to improved agility, faster time to market and a business focus on the business (not managing IT). Many of the risks of cloud computing have become less frightening as organisations have become more comfortable with data sovereignty and availability issues.
Wayne Tufek | 16 Oct | Read more
Some antivirus vendors recommend against scanning inside archives to avoid a performance impact. This is because scanning the archive can mean the computer appears unresponsive or slow, but following this advice creates an opportunity for malware authors.
Brad Ellis | 21 Aug | Read more
In the age of cloud, internal IT departments are being continuously challenged to demonstrate value and alignment to business requirements and business needs.
Puneet Kukreja | 05 Aug | Read more