Being the grinches that we are we thought that instead of giving you a gift this Christmas we’d give you a warning! You’ll get a lot of messages over the next few days and weeks wishing you season’s greetings. Amongst them though, will be well-wishers with more sinister motives. My family has already received a scam SMS: it told us we had a package with an outstanding duty payment on it (of $2) and we just needed to follow the link to pay the amount and release our package. This is pretty typical of delivery scams that many kiwis are receiving at the moment. Luckily we had a bit of skepticism and a handy cybersecurity expert to seek advice from!
The Blog
Cake, Depression and Cybersecurity: One Man’s Journey into Artificial Intelligence
It seems like everyone is talking about applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to security data, if you believe the hype you’d think that all you need to do is install a vendor’s product, and hey presto your problems are solved. My experiments with a manic depressive chatbot showed me that perhaps, it’s a bit more complicated than that!
Privacy Reloaded
The new Privacy Act comes into effect today (1st of December 2020) so it’s a great time to make sure you understand your new obligations. Being on top of these changes allows you to remain compliant and do the right thing by the people you hold data on. So we’d like to remind you about some tools and resources we’ve found useful.
Our Journey to becoming PCI QSA Registered
Lame names for Cybercriminals
Sometimes I think my cybersecurity colleagues believe they are living in a spy novel. I mean, we are all guilty of trying to make our day jobs sound more interesting or trying to make them sound more ‘sexy’, but this industry in particular takes the cake. Even the name “cybersecurity” is like “oooh, I work in a William Gibson novel!” Though we can’t fault someone trying to make their job sound better than “security guard at an online shopping mall”.
Are the latest cyber attacks just fuelling the new buzz on security?
Stop, drop, and roll, is everything on fire?
Now that the media hysteria has abated on the topic of DDoS, it seems timely for us to provide some commentary on this long standing topic from the perspective of security professionals.
The recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on NZX, Stuff, RNZ, and many more have had the media bombarding us with updates and semi-new information aimed to keep us, the general public informed. Reading some articles on RNZ, Stuff, and NZHerald provide similar information on the attack.
There is no denying that the threat of sophisticated cyber-attacks are real, and while raising awareness about what is currently happening is a good thing, doing so without care may not be helpful.