Articles by Paul Bryant

Cyber Smart Week Continues We are partnering with Cert NZ this week to share some practical tips to help keep you and your data safe, by looking at some of the simple steps you can take to keep yourself safe online. Let’s challenge ourselves to think again about the assumptions we hold about our level of risk. Privacy Settings? Keep On Top Of Them! We love to share online – what we’re eating, our holiday snaps, where we are going. But is your personal info being over-shared? Why not check your privacy settings this #CyberSmartWeek. If you’re sharing lots of

Cyber Smart Week Continues During Cyber Smart Week we are partnering with Cert NZ to share some helpful tips as to ways you can review and strengthen your cyber security to stay ahead of cyber attackers and remain safe. Your personal information is highly valuable to attackers who are looking for easy ways to get information to use to their advantage, often to get money. Updates Are Easy, But Really Important Updated apps keep you, your data and your devices safe from attackers. Updates close the gaps in your system that attackers can sneak through. If you don’t apply updates,

Cyber Smart Week Continues We are partnering with Cert NZ this week to share some practical tips to help keep you and your data safe online. Many New Zealanders feel as though a cyber attack won’t happen to them.  Unfortunately, we are all potential targets for cyber attacks. However, making sure you’re more secure online is as easy as just doing a handful of things. Each step you take means your security is stronger than it was before. What’s 2FA when it’s at home then? Think of it as another layer of security you can wrap around your important accounts.

It’s Cyber Smart Week! We’ve teamed up with CERTNZ to bring you some simple steps to help you protect yourself on the internet. Think you’re secure online? Why not make sure of it? By just doing a few simple things you’ll be a whole lot safer online. Follow along this #CyberSmartWeek to find out how you can #makesureofit. First Up – Use a Password Manager Having unique passwords for all your accounts is important, and makes it much harder for attackers to get your online stuff. But it’s hard to remember them all. Password managers are an easy and secure

What’s New? Cert NZ has released its second quarterly report for 2019. The Cert NZ reports provide an interesting snapshot of recent cyber security incidents reported in New Zealand by both individuals and organisations. The latest report shows that cyber security incidents continue to increase quarter-on-quarter: 1,197 incident reports were made to CERT NZ in the second quarter of 2019, up 21% from Q1, and losses of $6.5 million were reported, the highest amount of losses ever reported. Notable Increases Reports of scams and fraud increased significantly once again, making up over a third of the total number of reports

The New Report from Rapid 7 Security vendor Rapid 7 has released a new report analysing the results from penetration tests conducted by it between September 2018 and May 2019. The report is based on data is taken from 180 real-world internal and external penetration tests conducted on enterprise organisations. What are the Key Findings? Domain Admin Access The report finds that cybercriminals who manage to get access to an internal network have an opportunity to then gain domain administrator access in more than three quarters of cases. Finding Vulnerabilities The report also showed that penetration testers are almost always

What is BlueKeep? BlueKeep is the name given to a severe vulnerability that Microsoft recently identified in its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) service. This is being tracked under CVE-2019-0708. The vulnerability impacts the RDP service included in older versions of the Windows OS, such as XP, 7, Server 2003, and Server 2008. Although only older versions of Windows are affected, at the time of writing this equates to around one million devices. Devices running these older versions are exposing RDP to the internet, leaving them vulnerable to attack. What’s the problem? The problem is that the vulnerability can be abused

What’s the Difference? If your business finds itself in the unfortunate position of being hit with a cyber attack, you might suddenly find semantics important. In two cases currently being played out in court in the United States, Zurich Insurance is arguing that malware attacks suffered by two of its customers should be deemed acts of war, as opposed to typical cyber attacks. What this means is that those costly attacks would not be covered by a standard insurance policy. This is due to the “war” exclusion which commonly protects insurers from having to cover costs that relate to damage

The Cisco report Cisco have released a new cybersecurity report looking at how smaller companies can help defend themselves against cybercrime. Their  “Small and Mighty” Cybersecurity Special Report draws on data gathered from hundreds of respondents across 26 countries. The report reveals that small and medium sized businesses are just as vulnerable to cybercrime as their bigger counterparts. In fact, in 2018, more than half of mid sized companies suffered a security breach. Smaller companies often use more basic security protections, and they lack specialist security staff. This means that they are not only just as vulnerable to attack as