Security

When a book goes out of print the publishers don't pop round and remove old copies from your shelves. Similarly, when an app is discontinued it can be taken off the app stores but continues to linger on users' devices.

Mobile security company Wandera has been taking a look at what happens to these with an analysis of six-months' worth of apps that were removed from the app stores, along with apps that were installed on customer devices prior to the six-month period and, subsequently, removed.

It's estimated that there could be as many as 75 billion connected devices worldwide by 2025, but the increased popularity of 'smart' equipment comes with risk as many products currently on sale lack basic cybersecurity.

In response to this threat the UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is launching a £400,000 ($490,000) fund for innovators to design schemes to boost the security of internet-connected products.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has created a cybercrime playground. From phishing scams to ransomware to social media attacks, COVID-19-focused malware campaigns are on the rise. In fact, according to research from Zscaler, there's been a 30,000 percent increase in coronavirus-related attacks.

We talked with Mike Kelley, CSO at Navisite, to discuss why the current crisis is causing such a dramatic spike in cybersecurity activity, as well as ways organizations can secure their remote workforce and protect their organization from cyberthreats both now and after the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end.

There has been a 123 percent increase in the volume of data downloaded to USB devices by employees since working from home has become widespread due to coronavirus.

What's more, according to a report from SaaS data protection company Digital Guardian, 74 percent of that data is subject to organisation data governance policies.

Multi-cloud environments tend to be harder to secure because teams and applications are much more distributed resulting in a larger attack surface.

A zero-trust approach deals with these threats but can introduce overheads that make it hard to manage. Morpheus Data is integrating VMware NSX-T and Unisys Stealth technology into its cloud automation framework to enable microsegmentation and dramatically simplify the implementation of zero-trust processes.

Zoom has been one of the most used, yet most lambasted, contestants in the video conferencing arena during coronavirus-driven lockdown times, and much of the focus has been on privacy and security issues.

Having acknowledged that it had work to do, the company promised to take steps to improve its service and has issued numerous updates to its app in recent months. The release of Zoom 5.0 in April was a major step, and you only have days to upgrade or risk being cut off from the service completely.

The C-suite is the most likely group within an organization to ask for relaxed mobile security protocols (74 percent) -- despite also being highly targeted by cyberattacks according to a new study.

The report from zero-trust platform MobileIron finds that executives feel frustrated by mobile security protocols and often request to bypass them.

Almost half of employees are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home according to a new report from email security firm Tessian.

While 91 percent of IT leaders trust their staff to follow best security practices when working remotely, over half of employees (52 percent) believe they can get away with riskier behavior when working from home.

With millions working from home for the first time thanks to coronavirus, many businesses have had to act quickly in order to facilitate remote communication which may never have been an option before the virus struck. Though these businesses may have already made the switch to internet-hosted calls and communications at work, providing access to all employees from home will not have been common. One of the most common concerns of using internet communication software is its security capacity, so how secure is it? And how can business leaders ensure the highest levels of safety for a remote workforce?

From news stories of vulnerable video conferencing software to threats from less secure home networks, navigating the security issues of a remote workforce may be a trial by fire for businesses attempting to maintain levels of normality during this time. Therefore, it will be important to understand both the benefits and drawbacks of internet communications to know what to look out for and how to inform staff of the best practice.

The current crisis has led to a big increase in numbers of people working remotely. Many businesses seem set to continue that when normality returns, but a new report suggests they're not equipped to do so securely.

The study from cloud security company Bitglass shows that 41 percent have not taken any steps to expand secure access for the remote workforce, and 50 percent are citing proper equipment as the biggest impediment to doing so. Consequently, 65 percent of organizations now enable personal devices to access managed applications.

New research from DNS intelligence specialist Farsight Security, focusing on over 300 leading websites, finds that between March and April there has been an increase in DDoS events involving popular brand names.

It also reveals that DNS cache misses (which occur when the data fetched is not present in the cache) showed an increase of between four and seven times.

Android is the most popular smartphone OS, but new research suggests that its security landscape is fragmented due to region-specific issues that affect users in some countries but not others.

Researchers at F-Secure examined devices including the Huawei Mate 9 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy S9, and the Xiaomi Mi 9 to understand the exploitation process for vulnerabilities and configuration issues, as well as the impact, and found it varies from device to device.

Two percent of transactions in online banking and online retail were carried out by fraudsters, and 16 percent of transactions were suspicious and required further investigation according to new analysis by Kaspersky.

Based on anonymized statistics of events detected by Kaspersky's anti-fraud solution from January to December 2019, the most common case of fraud (63 percent) was attempts to access personal accounts using malware or legitimate remote control software.

With the current focus being very much on the shift to remote working and the challenges and opportunities it offers, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there's a whole world of other security issues out there, and it isn't standing still.

Ireland-based telecommunications company Paradyn has created an infographic looking at what it sees as the important cybersecurity trends of this year.

Cybercrime can hit any business and the costs of an attack can prove crippling. In order to protect themselves companies need to adopt best practices, but where to start?

Cloud-based customer identity access management (CIAM) platform LoginRadius has created an infographic looking at the risk and what organizations can do to protect themselves.