Tag: John McLoughlin

Regulation is meant to protect customers, curb risk and keep businesses accountable. However, too often, today’s laws do the opposite. They create impossible trade-offs, criminalise good-faith defenders and punish organisations that try to do the right thing.

Consumers are familiar with phishing emails, fraudulent SMS messages and social media scams. However, the scale and complexity of cyberattacks on critical sectors far exceed these relatively simple threats. Entire industries and governmental bodies face increasingly sophisticated attacks. These attacks can cripple essential services, cause significant economic damage and compromise sensitive data on a massive scale.

Insider risks pose a growing and formidable threat to organisations. The DTEX 2023 Cost Of Insider Risks Global Report sheds light on the alarming surge in the costs associated with insider risks, urging a shift from reactive to proactive strategies.

Traditional payment fraud has been rife for some time, where the cybercriminal impersonates the CEO, or other senior member of staff, to convince the finance department to make an urgent payment to either a new supplier or update their bank details.

Law firms remain targets of cyber-criminals, largely due to the vast amounts of client data, information and money that they retain and the continued refusal of most law firms to take basic precautions when it comes to their cyber security posture.

Multi-vector attacks, phishing, BEC, insider threats, and brand impersonation require a pervasive security strategy. It involves a combination of proactive defence to stop threats even before they’re deployed, blocking threats from email and the web, and remediating internal incidents to return to business as usual as quickly as possible.

Digitalisation is impacting nearly every single aspect of our lives. There is not only a rapid adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, but everyone is becoming more dependent on software, hardware and cloud infrastructure.

There is a significant decrease in the sheer number of ransomware attacks due to improved security, better backup strategies and faster data recovery measures. This has meant that the spray and pray approach is no longer effective for ransomware distribution. Although fewer ransoms are being paid, it doesn't mean less risk.

Another day, another data breach. South African businesses are becoming more susceptible to cyberattacks and seem to be easy targets for criminals. Data breaches are now a common phenomenon with Nedbank, Momentum, Lombard Insurance, Experian and Stefanutti Stocks making headline news.

Cyber security and privacy risks should be the top priority for any business at present, especially whilst trying to accommodate all staff in their new remote working environments. In the rush to get everybody working from home, security probably wasn’t top of mind and this presents a major threat for many businesses and people working from home for the first time.