The Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics website went down just before the opening ceremony in South Korea after it was hacked. The website was down for around 12 hours and as there was no official word forthcoming on the day, it looked as though it was not accidental. The outage left users unable to print tickets or view information about the games. The networks around the games venues also went down.
So, as you probably know, there’s a bit of a hoo-ha going on about two vulnerabilities called Spectre and Meltdown which basically impacts any machine with an Intel, AMD or ARM processor inside it going back to about 2007. Yes, that’s a fair few machines!
The flaws were initially identified towards the end of last year by various groups who, responsibly, started working with all the major chip vendors to scramble a few fixes out the door before going public. Such are the complexities of the issue, funnily enough, it seems at least one of the fixes did not go through enough vigorous testing before being released. So much so that Intel themselves on Monday 22nd Jan advised to not patch with the latest fix until they could get to the bottom of the mess.
More information from the NIS Directive (Network and Information Systems) has been released by the government today with the aim to achieve a common level of network and information systems security across the EU. These changes set new rules and apply to Operators of Essential Services (OESs).
The government has warned businesses in the most critical industries to boost their cybersecurity. Otherwise, they risk receiving big fines for leaving themselves vulnerable to an attack.
Happy New Year everyone! No doubt the new year brings a new you, right?!
Perhaps a new diet, new exercise regime or new skill is in order for the start of 2018? There are plenty of New Year’s resolutions you could take up, but we’d like to suggest a few that you may be able to (and should!) actually maintain for the whole of 2018!
These cybersecurity resolutions are built to last and will help to protect your business from the ever increasing threat to your prized assets (we did warn you in our 12 days of Christmas!).
Welcome to the final day of Christmas and our last prediction for 2018. This time it comes from Verizon. It is unique compared to the other breaches we have reported on in the past 11 days. It may be a good time to check your cloud services.
