Cyber-terrorism and GCHQ

Posted on by May 22, 2013

Cyber-terrorism is undoubtedly real, but are those responsible for keeping the home drives spinning pitching the risks to us in a realistic manner?

I read this excellent article by Glyn Moody on ComputerWorldUK this morning. Entitled ‘Is GCHQ Frighteningly Clueless or Fiendishly Cunning?’ it takes an analytical and rather sceptical look at GCHQ’s recent comments about the threat faced by the British economy from cyber attacks via email. If what Glyn Moody says is true (and I have no reason to believe it isn’t), GCHQ is displaying some quite frightening attitudes and beliefs.

Cyber-terrorism – good for business?

You’re a company selling security software – that proprietary stuff in which those poor souls on non-Linux systems place their trust. How best to increase sales but to pump up the scare stories about the level of threat, while implying that buying ever more heavy duty security software will solve the problem?

Cyber-terrorism and Windows

Returning to a well-worn theme both here and on numerous other technology blogs, the government’s blind adherence to Windows systems is exposing national systems to unnecessary risk. Glyn Moody suggests that perhaps GCHQ is secretly playing a bluff here and quietly replacing vulnerable Windows systems with Linux, but he doesn’t sound convinced.

I’ll leave you to read the article yourself and draw your own conclusions, but I have to quote this marvellous bit:

“have those boffins at GCHQ ever thought of turning to software like GNU/Linux that is rather less vulnerable to all those nasty, malicious emails in the first place?”.

What more can we say?

Newsbyte

Posted on by March 4, 2014

Have you totted up recently how many email newsletters you receive? I daren’t count, but I do know that I signed up to each one in the genuine belief that it would contain something useful. They probably do, but my heart now sinks so deep each time another newsletter arrives in my inbox that the pearls of wisdom are going unread. I now have a policy of sticking them straight into a dedicated folder on the basis that I’ll get round to reading them some time when things are a bit quiet – ha ha! It’s a shame as if only I could find the hours to spend combing through them I’m sure I’d learn a lot.

However, when people break the main points of their newsletters into individual tweets sent with a link, suddenly I’m interested and will often end up reading an article far longer than any newsletter, which makes no sense at all. Perhaps what it comes down to is this: in an environment where we’re constantly bombarded with information we need to be able to pick out the gems and leave the rest, and a system that enables us to do this, and Twitter is the paradigm, has to be a winner.

All of which is to beg the question – is the newsletter dead? We’ve talked about putting one together but have never actually done so, I suspect because we’re so hopeless at reading them ourselves. I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that long newsletters full of text are dead, but short snappy ones containing a few links have a lot to offer. The WiRE newsletter is a good example of the latter and one I always read, and it has the advantage of coming out once a month. UKBusinessForums is another one that takes 90 seconds to skim through and click on any links that look worth further reading. Infrequent mailings are an advantage – there’s nothing like being pestered with the same information on a weekly basis to have me unsubscribing.

So, the newsletter is dead, long live the brief email containing links to a few interesting articles – discuss!

The back-up is dead, long live the cloud

Posted on by March 4, 2014

I came across this article earlier on the always splendid IT Donut. It quotes Chris Lake, editor-in-chief of E-consultancy, as follows ““Technology is going into the clouds,” he concludes. “A lot of my data is stored not on my desktop or laptop, nor on my company’s servers, but on Basecamp’s servers, or in Google Documents. I think increasingly that’s where we’re going.””

This is a man after our own hearts. We’ve cleared up after a number of clients (and friends and relations, innit always the way?) who have had catastrophic computer failures and lost data stored on their hard drives. The inevitable conversation ensues about back-ups but really this is redundant – why these days bother to store information on a hard drive and manually back that up with all the scope for slips ‘twixt cup and lip when that same data could just have been stored in the cloud in the first place?

I store nothing on my hard drive these days, saving everything directly onto our servers. We advise anyone else to do the same (preferably onto our servers, but other companies do exist). I can’t speak for anyone else, but our servers are secured and protected to the hilt and I have never had one single problem storing or retrieving data. The chances, on the other hand, of my laptop meeting with disaster are huge. That wouldn’t be great, but at least I wouldn’t be worrying about getting to my data.

Obviously, being a company dedicated to delivering a service second to none, we’d suggest using a company that will respond to you swiftly, know who you are and understand the nature of your data and how you use it, rather than going to MegaCorp. We recommend the same for hosting, but if stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap works for you that’s great. If you’re more cautious about dipping a toe into the cloud however and would like some reassurance of how it all works, please drop us a line at info@opensure.net and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.