Magic seems to be very popular at the moment. Just look at last week’s Britain’s Got Talent, which featured an improbable number of magicians in its line-up. These included ‘X’, the masked magician who was wearing something that looked suspiciously like an anonymous mask and managed to supposedly hack Instagram. A lot of cyber security technology seems to work like magic, so is this a coincidence? Is ‘X’ a reformed hacker turned stage magician? Spoiler alert: no.

Many of you will remember the 25th of May 2018 as the day GDPR became legally enforceable. That week, our emails were bombarded with updates to privacy policies or requests for us to ‘opt-in’ to having our data processed. Funnily enough, many of these were unnecessary and, in some cases, missed the point entirely.

Here at Bulletproof we’re an international business. Though most of our work is in the UK, we’ve expanded our reach to places including the USA, Europe (I was in Zurich only last month) and most recently, Bangalore. Sometimes the life of a Bulletproof Compliance Consultant is as glamorous as you think.

When Gronk the caveperson chipped out the first wheel from a slab of granite only to watch it roll away down a hill at some speed, he discovered we could build things to make our lives easier. We took this idea and ran with it, and now we have internet connected shoes. However, we also have cybercrime, data theft, phishing, scams, ransomware... the list goes on.

Since GDPR came into effect, people tend to be a lot more aware of their personal data or rather, data breaches containing their personal data. Most data breaches that appear on the news tend to be what I call ‘big boy breaches’. These refer to massive breaches from the big companies consisting of millions and millions of data records.

Like many things in life, hackers are victims (and I use the word loosely) of stereotyping. You won’t find much stock imagery depicting hackers that doesn’t involve a hoodie, a dimly-lit room and several monitors full of scrolling binary text. And whilst that’s definitely sometimes true, it also makes several assumptions about hackers in general, which is at best misleading and at worst leaves you wide open to attack.

Computers are making humans now. Sort of. In a recent discussion at Bulletproof, someone casually mentioned ‘thispersondoesnotexist.com’. It’s a fairly harmless experiment in which AI randomly generates an image of a person who does not exist, thus solving the mystery of the name. This has since prevented me from sleeping at night, not least because I have turned up on it more than once.

80% of all human endeavour is committed to making money, with the remaining 20% spent finding interesting ways to spend it. These are figures that I’ve just made up, but I said it in the Bulletproof office, and everyone nodded, which either means it speaks a certain truth or, once again, everyone is doing their best to ignore me. With this in mind, it’s fair to say people tend not to put a lot of effort into something unless they know they’re going to be financially rewarded for it.

Having covered the start-up vs corporate question before, we thought we would look into which industry is currently most at risk of cyber attack. According to the Wikipedia entry ‘list of data breaches’, which contains a list of data breaches (spoilers), out of 255 data breaches over the last 15 years, historically, the hardest hit industry was ‘web’.