UK cyber security: to be a leader in cyber security does not mean you are great at it

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Category: Cyber Security (Personal)

Shock horror, I will say it, cyber security in the United Kingdom sucks! From small enterprise to giant enterprise and even central government.

Let’s start off with trains, the first trains were in the United Kingdom and everyone followed. Now our trains are expensive, often late and there are constant track engineering works (the same with “imaginary” roadworks on motorways aka the 50 limit). In the 21st century the rest of Europe has trains which are often faster, cheaper and more reliable. Metro tickets in Spain and Greece are a fraction of the cost of what you pay in London and the service is as good or better.

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If you are going to threaten me and ask for a ransom then please do include a Bitcoin wallet address or email address

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Category: Blog

Spoofed email address and no Bitcoin wallet address - what a pointless email!

"Hello!
My nickname in darknet is des53.
I hacked this mailbox more than six months ago. Through it I infected your operating system with a virus (trojan) created by me and have been monitoring you for a long time.

Even if you changed the password after that - it does not matter, my virus intercepted all the caching data on your computer and automatically saved access for me.

I have access to all your accounts, social networks, email, browsing history.
Accordingly, I have the data of all your contacts, files from your computer, photos and videos.

I was most struck by the adult sites that you occasionally visit.
You have a very wild imagination, I tell you!

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Cyber security loopholes, just because you have invested in new “state of the art” defences it does not mean there are not ways round it

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Category: Cyber Security (Personal)

When you are researching new technical security controls you need to think like me and think how can it be broken and if it can, keep looking for a plug or new vendor till you have solved all possible eventualities which is of course next to impossible. We have all heard the term next generation security (often firewalls or UTMs) or military/banking grade security (encryption usually). In many cases these products are not amazing. Just look at InfoSec Europe in London and every year there is a “craze”, machine learning, artificial intelligence or threat intelligence crop up most years. How can 100+ products all doing the same thing work?

The problem is many people do not think about these loopholes and even if they did would they spend the extra cash trying to close them? In the past I have spent weeks researching a particular problem and during that time I read up and test out tens of products per category. E.g. email security gateways. Even the ones that do seem good, at times do not do what they are meant to do.

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