Security Insights

Critical National Infrastructure: changing threats

How are the threats to critical national infrastructure evolving, and how do we counter them?

And are we seeing a shift from attacks based on data and ransomware, towards disruption.

In this episode, we welcome back a previous guest, Trevor Dearing.

Trevor is Director of Critical Infrastructure at Illumio.

Trevor’s work is increasingly focused on resilience, and helping organisations to survive and recover from attacks.

We discuss how organisations in the CNI space need to improve their ability to react to, and survive, a cyber attack.

After all, a failure to do so could cause widespread economic and social disruption.

 

DORA: one year to go

The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA, comes into force in January 2025. So there is not much time for affected organisations to prepare.

DORA sets out to improve cybersecurity — or ICT risk management — across the EU’s financial services sector.

The Act covers both regulated firms and what the EU terms “critical third parties” in their supply chains. In fact managing third party risk is a big part of DORA, along with measures such as improved resilience testing, incident management plans, and strict reporting requirements.

Our guest is DORA expert and director of consulting firm SECFORCE Rodrigo Marcos.

Cyber governance: a new UK code of practice?

The UK Government's Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is consulting on a new code of practice for business leaders, which aims to "improve cyber resilience across the UK economy".

But how will this operate, and will another code of practice -- alongside a host of existing laws and industry regulations -- help organisations be more secure?

We discuss this with our guest Amanda Finch, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Information Security.

Listeners can find out more about the proposed Code of Practice and the consultation on the UK Government's cyber security site.

Web apps and security weaknesses

As many as a third of serious vulnerabilities could be in web applications. But securing web apps, APIs and web-based interfaces is a challenge.

In this episode, we look at why vulnerabilities have seen a steady uptick over the last few years, how identifying and securing vital web applications is essential to enterprise security, and why a fixation on technical CVEs does little to boost defences.

Plus, why both security pros and reporters like a pie analogy.

Our guest is Alex Kreilein, vice president for product security at Qualys. Interview by Stephen Pritchard.

Listeners can also view the Qualys research on the firm's blog.

Security in 2024: AI, skills, and a seat on the board

What are the key security challenges for 2024? And how will CISOs address them?

In our first episode for Series 5, Security Insights is joined again by Chris Dimitriadis, Chief Global Strategy Officer at ISACA.

He explains why AI both poses risks, and offers benefits, why the cyber skills shortage is not going away, and how cybersecurity's voice needs to be heard by the board.

 

Interview by Stephen Pritchard.

Security Insights: 2023 year in review

In our final episode of this season, and indeed for this year, we look at some of the key trends in cybersecurity during 2023. And we discuss some of the steps CISOs might need to take, to safeguard their organisations in 2024.

Our special guest is the CEO of the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec), Amanda Finch.

Cyber: crime’s digital economy

Nothing seems able to stop the growth of cybercrime. And ransomware, above all, has woken up boards to the threat.

But there is more to cybercrime than ransomware, and the drivers behind online crime are varied too. And the scale of the problem means that few, if any, organisations can tackle it alone.

Our guest this week is security expert, chief scientist at Rapid 7 and Europol EC3 adviser Raj Samani. He talks to Stephen Pritchard about why cybercrime is far more than an IT security issue, and why a range of responses will be needed to reduce the threat.

Quantum computing: a security risk?

Could quantum computing threaten our day to day security, and even the fabric of the internet? Researchers are increasingly concerned about the risks quantum technology poses to encryption.

Organisations need to act now, if they are they are to secure their data and their operations, argue this week's guests.

Ramy Shelbaya is CEO and co-founder of Quantum Dice. That’s a business spun out of Oxford university’s quantum optics lab –  and which is now using quantum mechanics to create a self-certifying quantum random number generator.

And Axel Poschmann is a cybersecurity expert with a background in both the industry and academia. Currently, he works at PQShield, another business with links to Oxford, and which specialises in quantum-resistant cryptography.

We asked them to explain why quantum threatens security, and what CISOs can do about it.

Interviews by Stephen Pritchard

The Cyber Resilience Act: a law with unintended consequences?

The upcoming European Cyber Resilience Act sets out to boost security for anything with “digital elements”.

The Act will apply to hardware and software. The idea is to make it easier to update devices, and to fix any vulnerabilities.

Why, then, has a group of cyber security professionals written an open letter to the European Commission asking them to change a key part of the proposed rules?

Experts are concerned that, by requiring organisations to disclose vulnerabilities within 24 hours, the Act could increase, rather than reduce, risks.

Our guest today is Christine Bejerasco, CISO at WithSecure and one of the signatories of the letter.

We asked her to set out the background to the Act, and why so many security professionals fear it could have unintended consequences.

Interview by Stephen Pritchard

Open source: a security risk?

As many as 96 per cent of vulnerabilities in open source software are because developers use an outdated, or unpatched version of the code.

And this matters, because open source is now the building block of almost all enterprise software, web applications, and even the code that runs consumer technology.

But open source can be secure. It just needs developers, and the organisation they work for, to think about security throughout the software lifecycle.

With guest Brian Fox, CTO and co-founder at Sonatype.