The business of cyber security
Making money – serious money – from a cyber breach is nothing new. Cyber-attacks are yielding record revenues for organised crime, and business is booming. But what if you could profit with without the usual extortion, theft, cryptocurrencies – or even without hurting a real victim. Is it possible? And if so, does it happen? …
Right now in April, the short term view for cybersecurity involves securing remote working infrastructures while responding to skyrocketing Covid-19 phishing lures. Essentially, doing what it takes to keep the organisation going, while staying safe and healthy. But as always in cyber, having an eye on the mid-to-long term is so important. Covid-19 is a …
This is a story about the Blue Team winning. These stories are few and far between – not least because the Red-Team, the attackers, have long been seen as the glamour side of cyber security. But also, generally when the Blue Team wins, nothing happens. The business just keeps on going, doing what it does. …
What if there was a publicly available document that told you the relative importance that any given firm assigns to cyber security. Not just a passing nod, but genuine, top-down indication of board-level buy in. That you could just access online, for free. Could you even use it to predict the likelihood of one firm …
Cyber security and industry maturity are two phrases rarely heard together. The vendor hall gimmicks, perennial vaporware and billion dollar valuations always draw a wry smile from seasoned InfoSec professionals. Despite all this, if we look closely there’s signs emerging that the industry may actually be starting to mature. The best – and perhaps only …
If you ask a security professional ‘what is threat hunting?’ you are guaranteed to get a wide range of answers, including: “Responding to AI-generated security alerts” “A new term for incident response” “Looking at the dark web to see if anyone is going to attack us” In fact, threat hunting is none of these things – although …
As in many industries, work in a fast-growing cyber-security firm can blur the lines, with conference calls at 10pm, proposal writing at midnight and 3am incidents a pretty common occurrence – traded against late morning starts and quiet days. Shortly before the arrival of my first child a year ago, I was worried about how …
The 2016 US Government report detailing Russian malicious cyber activity named 40 separate Russian state-aligned cyber threats, drawn from security vendor marketing and research. Indeed, the advisory came with its own monicker ‘Grizzly Steppe’, bringing the names involved to 41 (plus suspected civilian groups). Despite this apparent proliferation, Russian state-aligned cyber activity is suspected to …
The time it takes for firms to go out of business due to cyber attack is decreasing. In 2000 it took ten years, in 2017 it took just eight months. In fact, since 2010 the cyber attack ‘time to Terminal Impact’ (bankruptcy) has pretty much halved every two years in a twisted inversion of Moore’s …
Is it ever possible for security to be more than just an insurance policy? Every so often a security firm will have a go at trying to change perceptions – to convince its C-level target market that security can actually be more than just a cost-centre. For security to actually be an enabler – and …