At a recent talk, BlackHat Europe 2019, A.P. Moller Maersk A/S Chief Information Security Officer, Andrew Powell, narrated Maersk’s response to NotPetya, which provided a very interesting insight into how Maersk dealt with falling victim to such an attack. According to Andrew Powells’ methodology, the key to this is plain and simple; ‘transparency.’

Rise in sovereign data laws shows how weaponised data has become. Data continues to grow day by day, driven by 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, Smart Cities and network evolutions. This rise in data is resulting in a large emphasis being placed on Edge technologies, cloud storage solutions and big data in the form of data lakes. All of this is in an effort to handle the enormous amounts of data that is being generated every second with an attempt to limit the on premise resources required by organisations across the globe. It has been estimated that by 2025, as much as 463 exabytes of data will be created globally, every day

As 5G is rolled out globally, mobile carriers will benefit from significant revenue opportunities driven by growth in the mobile market, from better customer service to new 5G-enabled business models. However, the industry also recognises that 5G will dramatically raise the stakes for those who are tasked with ensuring the security and reliability of these networks.

As the demand for bandwidth continues to grow, the migration from 100G to 400G will be the next developmental step in data centre architecture. Research from Crehan Research Inc. shows that shipments of 10GbE and 40GbE data centre switches each declined in 2018, while 25GbE and 100GbE continued to grow significantly, signalling that we are now solidly in the 100/25GbE era.

Data exfiltration is a form of security breach that occurs when an organisations data is copied, transferred or retrieved from a computer or server without authorisation. Data exfiltration can be difficult to detect, as it is often the last stage of a cyber security attack, once compromised the malware orchestrating the attack can lay dormant until the point of data exfiltration or it can take data little by little over time. It can do this because it involves the transfer or moving of data within and outside a network, which closely resembles or mimics typical network traffic, allowing substantial data loss incidents to fly under the radar.

NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) migration continues on our large scale, country-wide national network infrastructure.  This reduces previously proprietary network functions that ran on dedicated hardware into software building blocks that run on commodity hardware.

Security analytics and network visibility tools used by defenders collect as much useful data as possible to improve anomaly detection accuracy. This gives defenders proactive network security monitoring and alerting for attempted cyber-attacks or incidents that are in progress.

A new report found that last year there had been a 400% increase in SSL-based phishing threats, criminals are increasingly using encryption as part of their toolkit to evade detection and launch malware

In terms of DDoS attacks, 2019 has started with a bang! At the end of January reports surfaced of a massive DDoS attack that generated over 500 million packets per second, which was significantly larger than last year’s GitHub attack, which peaked at 129.6 million packets per second.

The report explores and analyses the risks, costs and damage that would be caused by a coordinated global ransomware attack. The scenario outlined predicts that from the time the attack is launched it would encrypt all data on nearly 30 million devices worldwide.