Habituation as cybersecurity nightmare and panacea

A number of studies confirmed that people often have a tendency to find ways to work around organisational cybersecurity policies. This     is actually not something that they    do on purpose but rather based on their habits. In other words, this behaviour is an effect of bad habituation. Achieving individual objectives and finding the way of …

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Building cybersecurity culture: are we locked into “Cyber Autism”?

“The problem is that we have a huge population that suffers from a form of cyber autism”-   Eh'den Biber. After a number of serious complaints in recent months, Facebook says that they are all about privacy now. A very recent survey presented at the RSA Conference 2019 claims that data privacy was a top concern …

Looking Into the 2019 Cybersecurity Crystal Ball

Our crystal ball forecasts that the cyber-attacks and data breaches in 2019 will continue to increase in both frequency and intensity. The ransomware,cryptojacking, more focused spear phishing, IoT infiltration, shadow IT, cyber warfare, new online identification ways, push for better education and training, boards and executives involvement are just some of the predictions. It is …

It does not help to solely blame CISOs for failed organisational security

The security professionals are, often wrongly than rightly, blamed for the failure of organisational information security. Instead of the blame game, we should learn to work together and share the responsibility. A typical scenario in a South African organisation: the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) complains to a colleague from another company that the information …

Coffee vs Digital Prosperity

“If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked”. ― Richard Clarke Contemporary information and communication technologies (ICT), often called digital technologies, are firmly embedded in modern societies. The space hosting these technologies, also known as a cyberspace, is continually shifting as new …

Insider Threat: Often neglected cybersecurity hazard

Although there might be numerous combinations of human circumstances and unfortunate contexts that can trigger an insider threat, the main drivers behind these kinds of threats are human greed, anger, curiosity and unawareness or carelessness. Bizarre stories Immigration officer An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a …

Digital MOSQUITO can bite your precious data

A recently discovered hacking technique allows adversaries to extract precious data from your computers even if  the devices are physically disconnected from any network, including the Internet. This is a must-read for those mandated to protect sensitive organisational data. Digital MOSQUITO at work In computing, an ‘air gap is a network security measure which ensures …