Small businesses are proving to be a locus for cybersecurity attacks, with security experts advising that better communication is necessary to keep SMBs protected and some warning that the relatively small IT organisations of SMBs make them particularly vulnerable to the proliferation of 'shadow IT'.
David Braue | 10 Nov | Read more
The issue of so-called 'shadow IT' – informal adoption of cloud-based applications independent of a company's official IT strategy – has continued to cause problems but is more pronounced in smaller businesses with little or no IT oversight.
David Braue | 06 Nov | Read more
Despite broad progress around the introduction of new security tools and architectures, IT decision-makers still see security as the biggest barrier to increasing their investment in mobility, cloud computing and big-data technologies, according to new research from Dell.
David Braue | 06 Nov | Read more
Consumers are more concerned about credit-card security than they are about their own health, a new survey has concluded. Take it as an indictment of our consumer culture or an indication that our overall health is good, but with California alone reporting a six-fold increase in data breaches the threat is getting bigger all the time. With cybercriminals having developed a tool to optimise their use of stolen credit cards, things are likely to get worse before they get better.
David Braue | 03 Nov | Read more
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has raised alarm bells over two Linksys router models that haven’t received security fixes that were released for other routers in July.
Australians are becoming less trusting of online banking services and other technologies as their reliance on those technologies continues to increase, according to the results of a Kaspersky Lab survey into consumer perceptions of security risk.
David Braue | 31 Oct | Read more
Australian companies may be among the most enthusiastic and progressive about cloud services in the world, but they're opening up new avenues for attack unless they complement cloud initiatives with efforts to identify control unmanaged privileged user accounts, a CyberArk executive has warned.
David Braue | 31 Oct | Read more
As federal Parliament considers data-retention legislation introduced this week, a survey of Australian businesses has found that despite majority support for the move, businesses are concerned that slack controls will compromise the security of, and control over use of, that information.
David Braue | 30 Oct | Read more
Australian customers may be happy that Microsoft has finally turned on Australian presences for its Azure cloud service, but some are warning that planned cloud adopters need to be careful not to be over-reliant on the company's internal security measures.
David Braue | 30 Oct | Read more
Microsoft has detected a huge spike relatively new member of malware that encrypts victims’ files until payment is delivered.
Organisations wondering whether data-security efforts are worth the effort will no doubt find motivation in new research that found consumers are more concerned about the security of their credit-card information than they are about their health or their retirement savings.
David Braue | 28 Oct | Read more
Security pundits were poring over Apple's new Yosemite operating system, with some noting that the revised Spotlight service was sharing search terms by default; Apple responded by arguing that the Spotlight Suggestions feature was in fact not violating user privacy, even as other onlookers warned that Yosemite's version of TextEdit would upload unsaved TextEdit document to the company's iCloud service.
David Braue | 28 Oct | Read more
If you’re using Apple’s latest desktop OS, Yosemite, you might want to adjust your iCloud settings to avoid unsaved documents ending up on Apple’s servers.
Australian security company Senetas is eyeing new government and commercial contracts after announcing this week that its encryption technologies had been certified to NATO security standards.
David Braue | 25 Oct | Read more
Developers that use an Amazon Web Service (AWS) identity service called Cognito can now let users sign in to their apps with their Salesforce credentials.
Back in July 2001 two security researchers, Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh from eEye Digital Security, discovered the Code Red worm - a piece of malware that targeted Microsoft's IIS software and propagated wildly until it was stopped. It was followed by more vulnerabilities and threats until Microsoft was forced to launch its Trustworthy Computing initiative in 2002.
Anthony Caruana | 24 Oct | Read more
The ongoing scourge of ransomware and a persistent lack of knowledge around proper security procedures are helping drive strong growth for Dell SecureWorks in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, according to the head of the company's regional security operations.
David Braue | 23 Oct | Read more
With Android 5.0 or Lollipop, Google has put in place a framework for improving the security of Android apps.
Some 100,000 photos taken from Snapchat users weren't the service's fault, although some observers were seizing on the leak to argue for an improvement in security by Snapchat and other online services. Ditto Dropbox, which was also denying it was to blame after hackers published what they claimed were excerpts from 7 million Dropbox credentials; the cloud-storage giant blamed a third-party service for the leak, but security experts were still using the event to push their case for users to adopt two-factor authentication – particularly given that cloud security and ubiquitous identity for cloud services is still over a year away.
David Braue | 21 Oct | Read more
The cloud computing industry is improving its security story – long based on installing intermediary encryption gateways – but is still more than a year away from having “ubiquity in terms of security controls”, a Symantec security expert has warned.
David Braue | 17 Oct | Read more