The PlanetRecruit Blog

Cybercrime: How to prevent it breaching your defences

BrightTalk Webinar

Organised cybercrime is a serious issue for private organisations and government agencies alike. As new technologies emerge, so do new ways to exploit them. Cybercriminals have shifted the way they target organisations, abandoning large-scale, generalised attacks, such as phishing, in favour of more targeted, lucrative techniques with bigger payoffs. Because targeted cybercrime is so profitable, perpetrators are highly motivated to find new ways to gather sensitive data for illicit monetary gain or to give a competitive leg up to governments or companies. 

In the last several months M86 Security Labs has seen a surge in targeted attacks against organisations for a variety of reasons - whether they are after customer information, intellectual property or simply to monitor a particular email address. 

Watch this webinar to hear more about the methods and tactics used in these recent attacks. Bradley Anstis, VP Technical Strategy at M86 Security, will look at how and why these attacks are successful, even against world leading IT Security organisations, to help you identify any potential holes in your organisation’s security architecture. 

What delegates will learn at this session:

• The two different types of attack methods used to hit intended target organisations

• Email and Web methods that have been used to successfully steal information from organisations

• The role of social engineering for targeting and manipulating individuals

• Recent examples of targeted attacks to illustrate common vulnerabilities.

 

Webinar: Virtualization and Security - Getting a Seat at the Table

Security professionals need a seat at the cloud and virtualization table, but how do you get that seat? Security is not about ROI so to speak, nor is it about compliance, but it is about protecting data. Can you achieve security by meeting the minimum requirements of compliance? How can you get the most out of your security environment with very little cost? 

In this webinar, Edward Haletky, Managing Director of The Virtualization Practice, answers these questions and shares his expert knowledge on all things cyber security. 

The Hargreaves Report and the Challenges of New Technologies

The recent Hargreaves report responds to the government’s instruction last autumn to look at whether current copyright laws are hindering innovation in this country. The short answer is, as Hargreaves succinctly puts it, “yes”; reform is needed (p1).

His reflection on the existing Digital Economy Act is that strong online enforcement should be carefully monitored. He suggests a tough approach on enforcement of copyright balanced with education.

In his 10 recommendations he advocates, among other things, that the UK align its laws more with EU laws to make full use of existing exceptions, such as for format shifting, non-commercial research, parodies and library archiving. His ambition is to create the “world’s first Digital Copyright Exchange”, allowing rights owners to sell licences in their work and to make market transactions faster.

Copyright and Linking, Post-Meltwater

Linking has always been a fundamental part of the internet. People think nothing of publishing a link to anything they please and would not consider it necessary to ask permission first. However, the courts have struggled to balance the interests of the public to freely link with the news industry’s economic interests to exploit their intellectual property rights. The decision in Meltwater has now tipped the balance in favour of the news media industry.

Background: The Meltwater Decision

Meltwater provide an electronic press cuttings service, notifying PR agencies whenever their clients are in the news. The question that arose in the case was whether Meltwater’s End User License authorised its customers to access the links to articles which they received.

The judge decided it did not, ruling that merely by clicking on the links provided by Meltwater, end users had infringed the original publisher’s content. She refused to accept that receiving a link and clicking on it was merely incidental copying, exempt from copyright infringement. Simply to receive the links would require each user to have their own license.

iPhone the spyPhone

Last quarter, Apple's profits rose by 95 per cent and revenues grew by 83 per cent on the same period a year ago. The latest figures show profits of US$6 billion on revenues of $24.7 billion.The iPhone remains immensely popular, with sales of 18.6 million units, more than double that achieved 12 months ago, whilst the company cannot make enough iPads to keep up with demand.

Great stuff by any standards, but the results are overshadowed by the remarkable revelation that the iPhone automatically (and secretly) records and stores exactly where a user is and then time-stamps the data. In other words, your iPhone is watching you, tracking you and keeping detailed records of where you are and when you are there. What's more, if/when users synchronise the iPhone to a Mac, the data is copied over to the computer and secretly archived there as well.

However, whilst the data is hidden away from the average user, it is stored in unencrypted form so that it could be read anyone (or any agency) who actually get their mitts on the device.

Copyright Enforcement and Privacy Online: The Swiss Federal Court Weighs In

This month, the Swiss Federal Court ruled that Logistep, an anti-piracy company in Switzerland, must cease collecting the IP addresses of users sharing files on peer-to-peer networks. The Court held that the practice was in breach of privacy legislation, finding that IP addresses constitute personal information, and that the data was being collected without the owner’s knowledge or consent. 
 
Logistep had been collecting the IP addresses of those they believed to be sharing files unlawfully and forwarding these, along with information about when and what they were sharing, to copyright owners to be used as evidence in Court. 
 
This is not a new strategy, and has been employed on numerous occasions as a means of discouraging piracy. The information collected is generally used by rights holders, to apply to the Court for an order forcing ISPs to disclose details of the file-sharers’ identities. With these addresses in hand, law firms are instructed to send threatening letters, seeking settlement in cash to avoid further legal action for copyright infringement.