A few weeks ago an announcement was made regarding the fact that Disney had acquired Lucasfilm, home of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. Anybody who, like me, is a Disney fan will know that all of this goes together like peanut butter and jelly. My most treasured pin is Minnie Mouse as the classic Star Wars Princess Leia but that’s just one example of how the two universes have collided. However, what surprised me were the negative remarks from many of my friends and colleagues about what a disaster this was. The comments focused on all the various ways that Disney would betray the Star Wars fans, from commercialisation to characterisation, but it was all negative.

As somebody who is both a lifelong Star Wars fan (I adore all of the films from I to VI. I was 5 when Star Wars came out and I went to the cinema 4 times to see it. My son was 7 when Episode I came out so he grew up watching those, with me enjoying his enjoyment) and a huge Disney...

Over the last few weeks we have been working with a number of customers who have large administrative overheads when protecting their IT Infrastructure.

When selecting a new service they have either gone to tender or bought an off the shelf solution upon recommendation from colleagues/friends. 

Whilst this may seem great at first, over the years this has built up a number of systems each requiring their own management systems, portals, update systems and most importantly, they lack integration between solutions. Whilst this may seem like a large problem, it gets worse - the issue with these customers was that they had multiple products performing conflicting tasks. 

One example from a customer who had one product that is designed to AV scan contents of a USB pen drive upon connection to the machine. Another product to encrypt USB pen drives upon connection. This is great if the admin could...

Over the past couple of weeks we have been working very closely with a customer who was the victim of a phishing scam. Specifically it was a whale phishing (or whaling) technique, a type of spear phishing attack that is directly targeted at senior individuals within an organisation. (The opposite of Whale Phishing is Minnow Phishing or Minnowing where the attack is specifically directed at the apparently less significant members of a company such as receptionists or call centre workers – as seen in the recent Norton & Yahoo Cybergeddon movie)

Phishing is a fascinating area of security as it typically relies on our humanity (or you can read that as stupidity) to be successful. I see this with family members who quite happily delete emails from banks they don’t have accounts with, yet contact me to ask whether ‘this email that’...

The analogy between computer viruses and biological viruses is well developed. Computer viruses spread across the world and within organisations in ways that are consistent with models developed to understand and predict the spread of biological diseases in epidemics.

However, viruses that spread from host to host aren't the only form of malware, targeted trojans are an example of malware that infect hosts but which does not spread. These particular malware are sent to individuals that have been specifically selected by the attackers in order to compromise the target's computer to steal high value information. Because, unlike computer viruses, these malware do not replicate, we cannot predict who will be hit by these types of malware by considering these computer infections as similar to a spreading epidemic.

We can, however, apply other techniques adapted from the understanding of human disease. If the recipients of targeted trojan...