Security Awareness — News

The week in security: Google fights app malware, long-term PCI compliance plummets

Government requests for Facebook continued to grow in the second half of 2014, the company's latest transparency report has confirmed. And, speaking of transparency, some vendors were worried by findings by Verizon that 80 percent of PCI DSS-compliant firms fail to stay compliant in the year after their certifications – leading some to push the PCI Council to accept software-based encryption]] as well as the current hardware-based encryption it requires.

David Braue | 23 Mar | Read more

What the private sector could contribute to the data retention debate

It is impossible to discuss the recent debate around data retention in Australia without eventually coming back to information security -- encryption, the secure storage of digital records, and meta data are just some of the topics that are traditionally security issues. However, they are the same issues that have been addressed time and time again in the private sector.

Michael Lee | 18 Mar | Read more

The week in security: Security skills squeezed as human soft spot persists

The importance of the human element in information security is sometimes lost amongst all the discussion about new technologies, but the usage of insecure email services by former US secretary of state Hilary Clinton has brought the issue into fine focus after it was revealed that her email remained unencrypted and unauthenticated for three months. Indeed, despite years of user education experts continue to warn that the 'human firewall' is continuing to suffer from significant weaknesses.

David Braue | 17 Mar | Read more

The human firewall has a soft spot: you

For all the talk about the importance of new security technologies, the importance of staff buying into corporate security strategies is often underestimated. In every case, the predictable result is the same: a strong technological barrier whose effectiveness is immediately compromised once a legitimate user, with legitimate access to internal resources, clicks on a phishing email designed to load malware onto their computer.

David Braue | 12 Mar | Read more

The week in security: FREAKing out as bug joins human, nation-state threats

Even as DDoS attacks were outed as the biggest security concern for a range of businesses, the FREAK vulnerability spawned all sorts of puns and had security pundits concerned about the integrity of secure connections between computers and Web sites. CSOs were encouraged to check if they were vulnerable to the bug, while Apple moved quickly to squash it in its latest version of iOS and Microsoft confirmed that Windows is also vulnerable.

David Braue | 11 Mar | Read more

Stuxnet, Snowden and Sony: Why we've passed the cyber security tipping point

Heavy-handed pressures from tech-unaware legislators, successful strikes by laterally-thinking hackers, a growing tide of dissent about government intervention and corporate concerns about last year's massive hack of Sony Pictures corporate documents have pushed us past the security tipping point into an environment where cyber-attacks will increasingly become favoured tools of nation states and terrorist groups, a leading security journalist has warned.

David Braue | 06 Mar | Read more

Message security in spotlight as 'Minister for Encryption' Turnbull reasserts importance of privacy

Efforts to improve the security of internal business information, particularly in the context of the government's push to improve its access to data, are driving new investments in secure communications tools as no less than Australia's Minister for Communications came out this week in support of using encrypted communications channels to protect sensitive information.

David Braue | 04 Mar | Read more