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Capital One Data Breach: A Reminder to Lock Your Back Door

In July 2019, leading financial organization Capital One received an anonymous e-mail revealing some bad news: “There appears to be some leaked data of yours in someone’s Github.” This leaked data was revealed to be the personal details of about 106 million individuals across the US and Canada, mostly consumers and small business owners that have applied for credit card products, including their...
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The Unthought About Risks of Encryption

We hear a lot about encryption in this day in age, particularly around it being the panacea for compliance with data protection regulations. It’s true it can be a component of an information security and compliance strategy, but there are a variety of different encryption options available on the market today, so care needs to be taken with selecting the right solution to ensure it doesn’t turn...
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Next Generation Cyber Threats: Images

Traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technology provides protection against the traditional threat of someone trying to send a file to an unauthorized individual, but it required a step change to enable Adaptive Data Loss Prevention with Deep Content Inspection (DCI) to address threats such as ransomware that is delivered embedded in innocuous-looking documents. Clearswift delivered our first...
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From Pesky to Dangerous - Image-based Spam

Those of you that can remember back to 2006 may recall that High School Musical was the highest selling album of the year. “We’re all in this together” was one of the most popular songs played at the time and, some would say, a pesky tune that would stick in your head. It also happened to be the same time when image-based spam was at its peak, another pesky occurrence that was hammering our...
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A Business World in the Clouds

Safeguarding Against the Security Pitfalls of Cloud-Based Platforms Majority of us are intimately familiar with the concept of ‘the Cloud’, the seemingly omnipresent information sharing and storage solution. But how much do you know about the security systems that defend it? Most of you may already be using cloud-based programs such as GoogleDocs, DropBox or, more commonly, Microsoft 365 – the...
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Enhancing Cyber Threat Protection in Microsoft 365

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has recently published an advisory report that explores the ways M365 can be compromised by malicious parties, explaining how cybercriminals can use compromised M365 accounts to obtain financial profit. Integrating advanced threat prevention and data protection features to a M365 platform can enhance the existing security capabilities it offers. Clearswift...
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Weaponizing GDPR: When Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) Gets Ugly

An inadvertent and unfortunate consequence of the new GDPR rules is that the right to erasure is now free to submit meaning it is much easier to have your data removed. With our research revealing that only 34% of organizations have actually successfully completed a ‘right to be forgotten’ (RTBF) request, there is a potential to weaponize the regulation, giving hacktivists a new opportunity to...
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Has Your Multifunction Printer Become A Data Loss Risk? Consider DLP For Images.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) as a technology has been around for a long time. It inspects images for text and then decodes them. While the human eye is fantastic at recognizing text, be it upside down or at an angle, it is computationally intensive to do this by machine on a regular basis. However, new algorithms now exist to deal with skew (angled text) as well as being able to handle...
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#1 Cyber Security Threat: Protecting Your Organization Against Email Based Attacks

On Friday 12 th May last year, a global ransomware attack, aptly named WannaCry, infected over 200,000 computers in at least 100 countries. It began with an email at roughly 8:30am London time. By midday, employees at Spain’s mobile operating giant Telefónica were being shut out of their work terminals and in the UK, emergency services were being pulled and hospital facilities were being shut down...
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Preparing for the Inevitable: A Guide to Handling a Data Breach

Cyber-attacks and data breaches are now so widespread that it isn’t a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ your organization gets hit. According to the UK Government’s latest Cyber Security Breaches Survey , nearly seven in ten large businesses identified a breach or attack in the past year. When taking into consideration all sizes of businesses in the UK, nearly half had suffered a breach or attack. The...
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Microsoft Deal Is a Start, But More Needs to be Done to Protect the NHS from Cyber Threats

Following the recent WannaCry attack that affected so many organizations, both public and private, across the globe, many firms are now taking steps to protect themselves from potential threats in the future. One establishment in the UK that the WannaCry attack had ramifications for was the NHS. The incident meant multiple hospitals across England and Scotland had to cancel procedures after vital...
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WannaCry Fallout: What the Ransomware Epidemic Means for the Future of Business

Cyber security is now an agenda item in the boardroom, not just the IT department, in the wake of May’s Ransomware attack and the countdown to GDPR compliance well underway. In May, multiple organizations including the NHS, Spain’s Telefónica and Deutsche Bahn were struck with what is arguably the world’s most publicized cyber-attack. Within a day, the ransomware cryptoworm known as WannaCry...
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Security vs. Productivity: The Office Macro Dilemma

There is no doubt that macros are being increasingly used to execute malicious code around the world and we have all know what impact it can have on an organization when they strike. But sometimes team members just need to run macros to get their work done. So, what do you do? As a security professional, you want to prevent macros from running because it's safer and you don’t have to work until 3...