In the beginning of May, a U.S. pipeline company suffered a ransomware attack. The company decided to respond by halting operations while it investigated the incident. This delayed tens of millions of gallons of fuel from reaching their destination all along the East Coast. Less than a week later, Bloomberg reported that the company had paid millions of dollars to a ransomware group in order to regain access to their systems. U.S. government officials were…

UK banks led the way in Europe last year with fraud protection efforts, driving an overall drop in associated losses of £77 million (€90 million) year-on-year, according to new data from FICO. The predictive analytics firm claimed that British financial institutions cut fraud losses by an impressive £46 million (€69 million) in 2020, the equivalent of a 7% reduction on 2019 figures. They were joined by their counterparts in Denmark, who managed to drive down…

More than half of SMB contractors in the US defense supply chain are critically vulnerable to ransomware attacks, a new report has claimed. Cybersecurity vendor BlueVoyant chose to analyze a representative sample of 300 smaller contractors from a defense industrial base (DIB) estimated to have anywhere from 100,000-300,000 suppliers. The resulting Defense Industry Supply Chain & Security 2021 review uncovered concerning signs of weaknesses in this complex ecosystem of contractors — potentially putting national security at…

Hundreds of councils across the UK suffered data breaches last year, according to new Freedom of Information (FOI) research from Redscan. The managed security services provider used official FOI responses from over 60% of the country’s 398 local authorities to compile its new report, Disjointed and under-resourced: Cyber security across UK councils. Extrapolating these results, Redscan estimated that there were over 700 breaches reported to data protection regulator the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) last year. The average number…

As part of your ISO 27001 certification project, your organisation will need to prove its compliance with appropriate documentation. ISO 27001 says that you must document your information security risk assessment process. Key elements of the ISO 27001 risk assessment procedure Clause 6.1.2 of the Standard states that organisations must “define and apply” a risk assessment process. An information security risk assessment is a formal, top management-driven process and sits at the core of an…

What do Burger King and the popular “Doge” meme have in common? They both have cryptocurrencies named after their likeliness. WhopperCoin and Dogecoin are just two examples of the thousands of types of cryptocurrencies that have caught users’ attention over the past few years. Cryptocurrencies are digital tokens generated by a computer after solving complex mathematical functions. These functions are used to verify the authenticity of a ledger, or blockchain.   Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency today, increasing its…