Robert Hannigan, the new head of British signals intelligence agency GCHQ, has accused technology companies of aiding terrorists and criminals by providing them secure communications through their products…
- Head, The Cyber Academy, Edinburgh Napier University
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Computer security relies on a great number of links, hardware, software and something else altogether: you. The greatest threat to information security is…
An important milestone for political junkies is fast approaching: on Friday November 7 it will be six months to go until next year’s UK general election. At this stage it looks almost impossible to call…
How safe is Microsoft Windows? After all, the list of malware that has caused major headaches worldwide over the last 15 years is long – viruses, worms and Trojans have forced computers to shut down, knocked…
The computer operating systems and applications we use today have often evolved over many years, decades even, and contain tens or hundreds of millions of lines of code. Flaws in that code – and there…
Imagine if UK banks decided to send out new credit cards to all their customers, but they were all “lost in the post” and the details ended up for sale on some dubious website. The recently discovered…
The only question worth asking right now is, who’s going to win? Bookmakers’ odds should be fairly representative of movements in sentiment around the debate, so they can be a great guide to what is happening…
With the growth of internet-based cloud services, storage, social media and mobile devices, our activities increasingly leave digital shadows in our wake – social media activity, website visits, mobile…
The investigation of the hack that gave the world access to hundreds of nude celebrity pictures identified another massive gap in online security. Given Apple’s reputation of being among the more secure…
Debate in the referendum continues to rage over to what extent we can trust the opinion polls. While the Yes side have most recently being putting their faith in the circa one million undecided voters…
The growing extent to which our day-to-day infrastructure is computer-controlled and internet-connected leaves it open to the possibility that malicious hackers could intercept data or take control of…
With the sale of first its desktop PC business and now its server business to Chinese partner Lenovo, IBM has come full circle. By exiting the hardware business IBM leaves behind the low-end market it…
The smartphone continues its rise and rise as the device of choice for our everyday activities. Our keys used to be the one thing we would have to carry around with us at all times and losing them would…
The number of physical robberies on banks has fallen dramatically in recent years, but the amount of money banks are losing through electronic methods has rocketed. In 2013 for example, the annual fraud…
So, Facebook has been in the dock after publishing details of a supposedly sinister experiment it oversaw several years ago. It involved monitoring the moods of around 700,000 users based on their posts…
One big security issue that has arisen lately concerns control of news media. National boundaries have become blurred on the internet, and the control any nation can have over information dissemination…
TweetDeck, a Twitter app with millions of users, is back online after a rather surprising security scare. For several hours, the service was taken down all because a 19-year-old user tried to add a cute…
We need to watch out for headlines like the ones earlier this week warning that people had two weeks to protect themselves from a “powerful computer attack”. It can end up scaring people who have little…
Here is a puzzle for you. Why did shares in Yahoo! slide by nearly 10% in the days before Heartbleed was announced and then recover after the main news items broke? It has long been the case that security…
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