{"id":11278,"date":"2016-02-29T15:38:21","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T15:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=11278"},"modified":"2016-02-29T15:38:21","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T15:38:21","slug":"blogathon-2916-its-when-not-if","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=11278","title":{"rendered":"Blogathon 29\/16: It’s When, Not If"},"content":{"rendered":"

The funny thing is, whenever I mention the words \u2018cyber security\u2019 to most folk, their eyes tend to glaze over for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n

The usual\u00a0reason is that most people think that cyber security is someone else\u2019s job.<\/p>\n

And up to a point, yes, they are right.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a moot point, especially when their own, home-based IT is penetrated.<\/p>\n

We expect banks, insurance companies, and in fact, every other \u2018commercial enterprise\u2019 to keep the data we have entrusted them with, secure.<\/p>\n

It is a reasonable expectation that the corporate custodians of our personal information meet extremely high levels of security.<\/p>\n

Why should we not expect the corporates to keep our personal data safe, and encrypted?<\/p>\n

Apart from the fact that our Prime Minister, David Cameron, has said he wants to ban encryption in the UK, that is.<\/p>\n

But, like all systems, the security in place on it, is only as good as the people who use it.<\/p>\n

All it takes is a member of staff in, oh, I don\u2019t know, pick a business department, finance?<\/p>\n

Yes, OK then.<\/p>\n

All it takes is a member of staff in finance to click on a link, or to open an attachment in an email, and whoops, nasty things happen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Poor old Solar UK.<\/p>\n

Or this sort of horrifying data breach<\/a>, as happened to\u00a0uKnowKids.<\/p>\n

Or how about this absolute shocker<\/a>\u00a0that happened to toy company VTech?<\/p>\n

Of course, it isn\u2019t just private companies who experience this internet pain.<\/p>\n

There was this incident that happened to poor old Lincolnshire County Council<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then there was this US hospital that was held to (and paid) a ransom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even\u00a0the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) isn’t immune to someone clicking on the wrong link, or opening an unchecked attachment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And hey, guess what, even your smartphone isn\u2019t immune<\/a>?<\/p>\n

My favourite hacking scandal in the last few months was what happened to ‘the cheating website’ Ashley Madison<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I loved that an analysis of the now-publicly available, hacked data, went on to prove that a staggeringly high percentage of the \u2018live\u2019 female accounts on Ashley Madison were in fact fakes.<\/p>\n

Yep, that\u2019s right you naughty cheating boys, it would appear that they could have been gaming you, for your membership money.<\/p>\n

However, even though it doesn\u2019t actually take much, by way of computing resources, to do any of these things, it takes even less effort (and computing) to expose a typical home network<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But as with the corporates, the typical person who grants access to all of your personal data, and your home systems doesn\u2019t usually look like this:<\/p>\n

\"Not
Not a typical hacker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

No, the typical person who opens everything up is the person\u00a0who clicked on the dodgy link.<\/p>\n

Or the person who opened that Word (or Excel) attachment.<\/p>\n

\"A
A typical hacker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The funny thing is, whenever I mention the words \u2018cyber security\u2019 to most folk, their eyes tend to glaze over for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}