Pick up any industry and you will realize that every one has gone through an evolution – from being entirely dependent on humans to being now run majorly by machines and automated processes. There comes a point, for every industry, where in order to function efficiently and effectively operate, automation becomes a necessity.

Organizations in the United Kingdom’s public sector face several challenges in terms of their digital security. Today, these companies must meet an increasing number of regulatory compliance obligations. GDPR likely sits near the top of UK public sector organizations’ list of responsibilities given the penalties they could incur should they fail to adequately protect EU citizens’ personal data.

If you are embracing DevOps, cloud and containers, you may be at risk if you’re not keeping your security methodologies up to date with these new technologies. New security techniques are required in order to keep up with current technology trends, and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) provides free cybersecurity best practices for many newer platforms.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Big news out this week of a serious chained fault on WordPress. If you are running WooCommerce then you had better dive in and check this article to make sure you are not exposed.

Details of a Virtual Box 0-day privilege escalation bug were disclosed on GitHub earlier this week. This was the work of independent Russian security researcher Sergey Zelenyuk, who revealed the vulnerability without any vendor coordination as a form of protest against the current state of security research and bug bounty programs.

Throughout my years working with Unix flavoured environments, one of the headaches I’ve had to deal with is cron. Don’t get me wrong, I love cron, it’s a necessity for any operation of such servers, however, there usually comes a point when the size of list reaches a critical mass that makes visualising the execution times a challenge.