When we began building a Cyber Risk Research team at UpGuard, we knew there were unavoidable risks. We would be finding and publishing reports on sensitive, exposed data in order to stanch the flow of such private information onto the public internet. It seemed likely the entities involved would not always be pleased, particularly as the majority of the exposures we discovered would be attributable to human error and/or internal process failures.
The European Union’s GDPR regulations go into effect in May of this year. In essence, GDPR is a strict data privacy code that holds companies responsible for securing the data they store and process. Although GDPR was approved in April 2016, companies affected by the regulations are still struggling to reach compliance by the May 2018 deadline.
Meltdown and Spectre are critical vulnerabilities affecting a large swathe of processors: “effectively every [Intel] processor since 1995 (except Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013),” as meltdownattack.com puts it. ARM and AMD processors are susceptible to portions of Meltdown, though much less at risk than the affected Intel hardware. Exploiting Meltdown allows attackers to access data from other programs, effectively allowing them to steal whatever data they want.
