Security Insights

According to the NCSC, there were over 200 attacks against UK critical national infrastructure last year. Some three quarters of these are thought to be linked to state actors.

On the surface, that number of attacks might seem small. But their impact could be significant. Attacks against power, water and transport can quickly bring the country to a halt. And no advanced economy can operate for long without banking and telecoms services.

And the cyber risks faced by CNI operators are worsening, not least because of AI. As our guest explains, AI doesn't have to be smarter. It's enough that it's fast, works at scale, and doesn't need to take a break.

This, in turn, demands a different response from cyber defenders, including their own sovereign AI capabilities.

Our guest is Rob Demain, founder and CEO at e2e-assure.

In this episode, we hear how security researchers and law enforcement worked together to disrupt Tycoon 2FA, a phishing as a service group.

How did they discover, and then counter the group's activities? And what were the results?

Our guest is Robert McArdle, director of forward threat research at TrendAI.

In this episode we welcome back the Cyber Agony Aunts, Amelia Hewitt and Rebecca Taylor.

As the UK's Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill works its way through Parliament, has the debate about cyber resilience changed? What does a resilient organisation look like? And above all, how do we create one, without putting cybersecurity professionals under extreme pressure?

As Amelia and Rebecca explain in their second book, Resilient You, we need to take control of our own resilience and wellbeing, even as we try to build those more robust operations.

Cybersecurity has its share of innovators, inventors and, of course, entrepreneurs.

Benny Czarny created OPSWAT more than 20 years ago, to develop a common language for security applications. Today, the business is best known for its “firewall of data” approach to detecting and removing malware.

In the first of an occasional series of interviews with founders, we speak to Czarny about his journey as an entrepreneur and as a business leader in cybersecurity. And we discuss his new book, Cybersecurity Upside Down.

 

Security researchers have found millions of hard-coded secrets, in plain text, across both public and private code repositories.

These include credentials, API keys, AI tokens and MCP configuration files.

And AI is making the problem worse, with AI-assisted commits adding to this "secrets sprawl".

Unless developers control how they manage secrets in their code, we are leaving the door open to malicious actors. And the growth of non-human identities (NHIs) only makes it worse.

Our guest is Dwayne McDaniel, principal developer advocate at GitGuardian, which recently published their research into secrets sprawl.

How can cybersecurity professionals "engineer" resilience? And why is an effective community an increasingly important part of our defence against cyber attacks?

In this episide, editor Stephen Pritchard caught up with Ameet Jugnauth, president of ISACA's London Chapter at their recent conference.

They discuss building resilience, why we have reached a tipping point in boards' understanding of cyber risk and why, despite a growing threat landscape, Jugnauth's outlook for the industry is positive.

How do you live through a cyber attack, and recover from it?

What lessons can you learn?

And why is resilience moving up the cybersecurity agenda?

In this special episode, we speak to Edwin Moraal, CISO at Dutch public safety body Veiligheidsregio Noord- en Oost-Gelderland (VNOG), about his experiences. And he's joined by Tim Pfaelzer, Veeam GM for EMEA, whose team helped with the recovery.

However prepared you think you are, there are always lessons to learn.

 

Soon, quantum computers will be able to decrypt "production grade" encryption, putting both privacy and security at risk.

But how close is "Q Day", and is a cryptographically relevant quantum computer a realistic prospect?

Is it something malicious actors will be able to obtain, and if so, how would they use it and what threat does that pose to confidentiality of our files, as well as our communications?

Our guest today is Moona Ederveen, an author, speaker and consultant who has been studying the impact of quantum computing on security.

Here, she discusses the scale of the threat, the steps organisations need to take to mitigate it, and why cybersecurity teams need to act with urgency.

Listeners can also access the Post-Quantum Preparedness Framework mentions in the episode here.

 

 

DDoS attacks have posed a threat since the late 1990s. And distributed denial of service attacks have proven to be hard to prevent, and to deter.

Security teams are better at detecting and blocking DDoS attacks than they were. But malicious actors have not stood still.

They are now using complex, multi-vector attacks rather than relying on volume alone; they are using AI to design attacks, and compromised IoT devices to launch them, according to research from NETSCOUT.

In this episode, we look at how DDoS is evolving, and what CISOs can do to reduce their impact.

Our guest is Darren Anstee, CTO for security at NETSCOUT.

In this CISO interview, we discuss the role of a CISO in a global technology services business, the changing threat landscape -- from geopolitics to the growth of AI -- and the importance of skills,  learning and cybersecurity education.

Our guest is Mike Baker, vice president and global chief information officer at DXC Technology.

Above all, he says, the CISO's role is to build a resilient team.

Interview by Stephen Pritchard.