Cyber_Bytes - Issue 4 2019

Welcome to Cyber_Bytes, a round up of key developments in cyber, tech and evolving risks over the last two weeks.

Labour party hit by cyber attacks 

Labour has been hit by two co-ordinated cyber-attacks through a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. As readers may be aware, a DDoS attack is designed to take a network offline by flooding it with a lot of requests from different areas. The party has said no data breach occurred. 

An AI company for cyber security, Darktrace, has commented "really this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the types of attacks that, not just the Labour Party, but all political parties are going to be without a doubt experiencing on a daily basis…".  

Richard Breavington of RPC has also been quoted in the Financial Times, commenting "perpetrators frequently attack when they expect organisations to be at their most busy and most stretched; as they are then most vulnerable, for political organisations it would be the election period".

For the full articles, please click here and here.


New figures published on business investment in cyber security

A software company, Specops Software, has published figures for the period 2018/2019 to see how serious businesses are about cyber security. The figures show that finance and insurance firms invested the most in cyber security, whilst firms in the hospitality and food sector invested the least. 

For the full article, please click here.


Report highlights lack of compliance with NIS regulations

A report has been published to uncover some of the latest trends in cybersecurity. The report highlights that 30% of businesses remain unaware of the NIS Regulations 2018, which set out a range of network and information security requirements for certain businesses. Out of the 70% businesses aware of the regulations, over a third had failed to implement the necessary changes in line with them and only 39% were confident that they were compliant in this area. 

Any businesses providing an online marketplace, online search engine or cloud computing service must comply with these regulations. It is therefore vital to be aware of them. 

To download the full report, please click here.


21-year-old Illinois man sentenced to prison for running multiple DDos-for-hire services

A man was sentenced last week to 13 months in prison for running multiple DDoS-for-hire services that launched millions of attacks over several years. In addition, he will forfeit $542,925 in proceeds from the attacks and the computer equipment that was used in them.

For the full article, please click here.