Our stories

Artificial Intelligence: what is your policy?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already here and it’s in use in business and cyber security every day, including for spam filtering, malware detection, and intrusion detection and prevention systems. The recent flurry of activity around AI is around generative AI, in particular ChatGPT and GPT-4, as these tools are becoming publicly available and easy to use. Even in these relatively ...

Encryption is not just for spies

When we talk about food or walks around our pets, we spell out the words so that they don’t understand what we are talking about. Some dogs can work out what W-A-L-K means though, so you might have to mix it up a bit, and randomly use the letter sounds as well as the letter names to make it more ...

Preparation and practice: problem solving

Pilots practice solving problems under pressure. They practice things going wrong, unpredictably. Sometimes they practice several things going wrong together – or one after another. And, they are assessed on how well they handle the situation.  This is an important part of the continual training that pilots undergo: practicing how to identify a problem quickly and deciding how to handle ...

One bank transaction: six potential attacks

One of our colleagues had a call from their bank’s fraud team this week, because the fraud team were concerned that she was being scammed. We’re sharing the story because it covers a number of possible frauds that could happen to you, or to your business. The payment she’d requested was to go to a newly set up payee at ...

Don’t let your cyber security slide

The UK Government has recently issued the latest version of its cyber security breaches survey, and we’d like to talk about two of their findings today:
  1. Although the threat of a cyber attack hasn’t dropped, small organisations are identifying fewer cyber security breaches and attacks this year than they did last year.
  2. The proportion of micro businesses (those with fewer than 10 ...
two avocado halves representing the difference between admin accounts and user accounts

Are you a user?

When you bought your new laptop, did you take much notice of whether you were setting up an administrator account or a user account? Probably not. Most people are just too excited to get their hands on a new device to think about cyber security when setting it up. But here’s the thing: an administrator account (or admin) has permission ...