CS1701

case study
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AKAMAI ACQUIRES CYBERFEND
OUTLOOK BLEAK AS PASSWORDS CRACKED
Akamai Technologies has acquired Cyberfend,
an innovator in bot and automation
detection solutions for web and mobile
environments, in an all-cash transaction. The
acquisition is intended to further strengthen
Akamai's existing bot management and
mitigation services. Credential theft and abuse
is a significant problem for online businesses
and their customers.
Recent industry estimates place the number
of compromised user credentials (eg,
usernames, passwords, email addresses)
exfiltrated during major breaches and
currently in circulation in the billions. The
value of these stolen credentials can be worth
as much as two to five times more than basic
credit card information.
NEW POSTGRADUATE I.T. DEGREES
Charl van der Walt
Thousands of UK businesses are immediately
at risk from potential compromise of their
Outlook Web Access platform. That's
according to new research from SecureData.
This suggests close to 0.5% of all organisations
in its study could be cracked using a
combination of publicly available email
addresses from previous data breaches and
poor password security behaviour by users, as
they reuse passwords between professional
and personal applications.
The researchers analysed 1.5million
compromised email addresses from 173,000
individual organisations in the UK. SecureData
could crack 92% of passwords where the
compromise included the hashed or one-way
encrypted password. From this sample of
organisations, 1,226 could be identified as
using Outlook Web Access.
Charl van der Walt, head of security strategy
at SecureData, commented: "We developed
this research as a vehicle to illustrate the
increasing security challenge, as employees mix
their corporate and personal online universes.
This is exacerbated by enterprise risk models
that fail to appreciate how attackers view their
business, reflecting instead their own view as
to what is valuable."
'BREAKTHROUGH' DATA GOVERNANCE AND PROTECTION
New cybersecurity degrees have been
launched to help fight hackers and online
criminals, as demand for skilled specialists
grows. With billions of pounds being lost to
the economy through cybercrime, Arden
University has been working with industry
specialists to develop four new IT
postgraduate degrees to give graduates
skills to fill vacancies in high-demand
sectors such as strategic IT management,
telecoms and cybersecurity.
The launch of the courses comes as the
UK government recognises the need to
improve national cybersecurity, with
chancellor Phillip Hammond pledging to
spend £1.9bn to upgrade resilience. At the
same time, cybersecurity vacancies have
grown by 73% in the last year alone.
QinetiQ's data security company Boldon
James and Varonis Systems, provider of
software solutions that protect data
from insider threats and cyberattacks,
have announced the integration of
Boldon James Classifier data classification
solution suite with the Varonis Metadata
Framework platform. This, it is said, will
enable organisations to ensure their
most valuable data is monitored and
protected against the rapidly growing
threats arising from both insiders and
external cyberattacks.
"The combined value of the Varonis and
Boldon James solutions helps to reduce
the business risk of valued and sensitive
information ending up in the wrong
hands, while enhancing decision making
and increasing the effectiveness of
enterprise search and retrieval," stated
the two vendors.
"The combined offering of Varonis
and Boldon James Classifier enables
Martin Sugden
organisations to identify, protect and
monitor their most valuable data,
wherever it is located," said Martin
Sugden, CEO at Boldon James. "This
partnership adds significant value to our
mutual customers… offering the widest
range of products and best-of-breed
integrations."
Ste
www.computingsecurity.co.uk Jan/Feb 2017 computing security
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