Compliance should be an essential part of business operations, regardless of industry. Taking preventative measures to manage compliance and mitigate risk can feel like a hassle upfront, but it can save your organisation huge costs in the long run. Compliance violations can result in fines, penalties, lawsuits, loss of reputation, and more. However, your efforts should not stop at obtaining a compliance certificate, rather they should expand to accelerate your cybersecurity posture.

Telecommunication is the first, and most robust network ever invented. This may seem like a brazen and bold statement, but when examined closely, it is not the stuff of fantasy. Prior to the invention and development of the internet, what other way could a person pick up a device, and “dial” a few numbers and end up seamlessly connected to someone across the vast expanse of a countryside?

A recent survey conducted by IBM and Censuswide of the UK market explored some of the drivers for modernisation and revealed some interesting challenges that organisations currently face as more and more businesses expand their digital boundaries.

When you read your favorite cybersecurity blog, do you often wonder what it would be like to sit down with the authors and get their real thoughts about some of the topics they write about? Most blogs and articles are so carefully curated, edited, fact-checked, and linked to supporting evidence that they can seem somewhat stilted, and worse, heavily contrived. Perhaps this is why meeting some of the speakers and authors at public events is so much fun.

Agencies of the US Government have issued a joint warning that hackers have revealed their capability to gain full system access to industrial control systems that might help enemy states sabotage critical infrastructure.

There’s a saying in the cybersecurity community which states that just because you are compliant doesn’t mean that you are secure. Over the years, many images have been used to illustrate the point. One memorable image is that of a nude bicyclist wearing a helmet. By all standards, that is the epitome of “compliant, but not secure”. Many organizations have shifted the focus away from merely achieving compliance, to being both compliant and secure.

With the CIA Triad, confidentiality commands much of the attention. Organizations fret over the unauthorized disclosure of their data, so they try to reduce the risks of that type of an incident. In so doing, however, enterprises commonly overlook the other two, integrity in particular. Ron Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), thinks it’s a mistake for organizations to forget about integrity.

To say that data governance and data compliance are rapidly becoming areas of immense strategic importance for businesses would be an understatement. Governments worldwide already have data protection laws in place or are busy drafting these laws. Moreover, users have become increasingly aware and educated about their rights online, especially regarding what data businesses can collect about them.

A new report, which surveyed 1200 IT security professionals in 17 countries around the world, has shone a light on a dramatic rise in the number of organisations willing to pay ransoms to extortionists. The ninth annual Cyberthreat Defense Report (CDR), produced by CyberEdge Group, shows that not only has there been a substantial increase in the percentage of companies that pay ransoms, but the average size of ransomware payments also increased significantly.

In recent years, cyber espionage has been growing in magnitude and complexity. One of the most common targets is Industrial Control Systems (ICS) within critical infrastructure sectors. With many organizations relying more heavily on ICS networks, there has been an increase in threats and cyberattacks aimed at these systems. Not only do these attacks have an economic impact, but they also put national security at risk.