Andy Swift

Open-source software (OSS) is now so widely used that it is incredibly difficult to find an organisation that doesn’t incorporate OSS in some form or another – whether that be in a standalone open-source product, or more commonly, in the form of OSS packages. Though its usefulness cannot be doubted, the prevalence of this software is exactly what makes it a major target for cyber-attacks.A prime example of this is Log4j, a popular logging utility used by scores of organisations for recording events such as status reports and errors. In a situation which came to be known as ‘Log4shell’, a…

Businesses today are facing two acute challenges – the economy and cybercrime. This is forcing CISOs to make some tough decisions about spending. The UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2022 found that in the last 12 months, 39% of UK businesses identified a cyber-attack, while 31% of businesses estimated they were attacked at least once a week. Amidst these rising threat levels, never before has it been more important to stay secure while managing costs on a budget. As cyber risks continue to increase, budgets remain stagnant – in fact, a report into cyber threat defence in 2022 highlights that security budgets…

New Year’s resolutions are notoriously hard to keep. In fact, according to this YouGov poll, most Brits failed to keep all the resolutions they made for 2019. It may be hard to believe but we’re now firmly into 2020. In a cyber security context, many organisations will be looking back on another year and another set of lessons learned in what continues to be a challenging cyber security landscape. Five Cyber Security Resolutions It isn’t getting any easier for individuals and organisations to remain safe from data breaches. Over the course of 2019 I worked on a number of interesting…