Author: Professor John Walker

2018 was the year in which we encountered thenewishterm ‘Digital Transformation’ take a grip in computing vocabulary, which on occasions has even crossed the conversational lines onto the lips of some involved in the Cyber Security Industry – and this I must admit concerns me deeply for multiple reasons. As we have observed in the last 12 months, banking systems have been brought to their knees by ill-conceived upgrades which clearly did not take account of the outcome, let alone any modicum of a backout plan, not to mention an outage which implicated global users of a telco-service, caused by,…

During the evolution of the Internet, we have encountered the darker side of the infrastructure’s wider potential. For example, the realization of the power a circuit board can harness as a low-cost Cyber Weapon, with which untold damage and chaos may be delivered to the unexpectant target. In fact we saw the evolution of the green shoots of Cyber War way back in 1993, and as a bet, I crafted the term Cyber Conflict to define the danger of this new electronic era, and as a side to prove just how easy it was to inject yet another buzz-word into…

As one who travels to the UAE on very regular occasions, and who has visited Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and worked in the Saudi Arabian MOD complex in Riyadh, as well as working on Special Projects at the Malaysian Military Academy in Kuala Lumper, I like to consider myself well versed, and tuned into in the various region’s ways of working. In fact, when I worked and travelled under the General Motors (GM) Flag, GM impressed on their international travelers the importance of tuning into the local culture of any country one may find themselves working in, and to ensure they…

Having just returned from presenting at a very successful, well attended ISMG Security Summit held in London on 23 October 2018, I was left excited and enthused by some of the presentations I sat in on. In particular a very interesting insight into the world of the National Crime Agency (NSA – who presented on some examples of their Cyber Operations which terminated illicit operations, leading to the arrest of two-man small-time, but nevertheless big earner Cyber Criminals working out of their squalid premises. For myself, attending to deliver a keynote on OSINT, Threat Intelligence, and Logical Investigative applied methodologies,…

Having encountered several friends and associates who have suffered, what seemed to be sustained Phishing Campaigns I decided to invest some time and bated-responses to set up a little research experiment to prove, or disprove a suspected theory – but for me, theories are only proven when they are put to the test, so I set the stage. All of those who I had spoken to, all had two factors in common, one of which was each one of them in a very small window of time had received multiple Phishing, Vishing communications with a hooked bait topic, ranging from…

I sat down today, relaxed and called my Cell-Phone Network provider Vodaphone to make my monthly payment – and again, as in previous months, after two attempts their Payment System was not working – thus pushing the call onto their over-stretched support desk with a long time wait to be attended to. And this, common Inconvenience got me thinking. Have we arrived at the Tipping Point of Commercial Technology, and has it become so very over utilised to support everything that is commercial known to man? Yesterday TSB had problems (again), and I won’t bore the readership with the list of names, from…

During the month of July 2018, I had the absolute pleasure to both attend and present at one of the very best, well organised events I have ever been involved with – the ISMG Cyber Security Summit, which was held in São Paulo, Brasil.  Image 1 – Round Table – Prof J Walker This is only the second such Cyber Summit to take place in a region who are clearly serious about their own, and the state of global cyber defences.  Attended by around 250 plus delegates, drawn from the Commercial Sector of the wider South American regions, through to…

I was slightly bemused when I saw the ex TalkTalk CEO was standing up at Infosecurity 2018 to give a presentation of Cyber Security – a presentation, I presume she was rewarded for. The first thing that passed through my mind was, Infosecurity is a security event, agreed very much focused on commercialized sales pitches, and wondered just how hearing how the TalkTalk debacle, and the post event PR disaster would help reinforce the Cyber Security mantra – but as a contact said to me, let’s see what the Baroness has to say. Baroness Harding As a refresher here to…

As a Security industry, we, as, what may be referred to as Cyber Security Professionals tend to engage in multiple inter-industry conversations with those who have been anointed into the world of IT, Digital, and Cyber Security. However, given the general-public, and the SME potentially make up a wide proliferation on the map of the Cyber Criminals Surface of Attack, but that same Public and SME would seem to be left on their own and exposed when it comes to any support in the arena of Digital Defence. And let us also consider those at the higher end of the…

As I am attending the Cyber Security Event (http://www.cybersecuritysummit.com.br/) running in Sao Paulo Brazil in July 2018 with a presentation entitled ‘Dark Matter’, given the number of recent insecurity debacles which have occurred in the Financial Sector, from Experian to Equifax, from RBS to TSB, and of course not forgetting the high-impact outages which implicated the Bank of England’s (BoE) Chaps Infrastructure in 2017, halting the transactional processing of part of the £277bn which passes through the wired tentacles of the system each day, when it went down for around 10 hours during peak trading hours: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/25/bank-england-payments-glitch-causes-delays-wholesale-bank-transactions/ Thus I saw…