Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: IT

  • Protecting yourself online

    Protecting yourself online

    What can consumers do to protect themselves online? Nuix’s Chief Information Security Officer, Chris Pogue, believes it’s all about sticking to the basics.

    “It’s honestly easier than you think. It’s basic IT hygiene.” “Just the basics – bad passwords, reutilisation of passwords. There’s password managers available for ten dollars a year. Don’t reuse passwords.

    “Close your wi-fi, don’t broadcast your Wi-Fi SSID. Make your PSK password longer than normal. Just make sure that you’re being smart and you’re exercising due diligence and you can stop a lot of attacks.”

    Pogue also points out no computer, or device, is unhackable. The point with security is to make your devices less attractive to opportunistic cybercrooks.

    “If you make it a little bit harder, the attacker have an ROI for their time. It’s a business, a multi-billion dollar business. They’re not going to mess around with you if you’re messing up their gross margin. Just make it not cost effective.”

    “Nothing is unhackable but you just make it so it takes too much time,” he says.

    One useful resource for home users is the Australian Signals Directorate’s Top Security Tips for the Home User. While basic, that advice is well worth while for those looking at protecting their systems.

    Paul travelled to Las Vegas for the Black Hat conference as a guest of Nuix

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  • Burning the boxes

    Burning the boxes

    “I cater to their crazy and the results are tremendous. Hire the crazy, because you need them. Those are the ones that don’t think outside the box, they burn the box and stomp on the ashes,” says Chris Pogue, Chief Information Security Officer at Nuix who I interviewed at the Black Hat conference at Las Vegas last week.

    Chris was talking about hiring information security people and, as the attendees at the Black Hat and DefCon conferences show, show that philosophy is important in hiring good technology people who tend to be people who don’t recognise the boxes, let alone tick them.

    That point though could be made for many occupations, many businesses that claim they value ‘creative thinking” should be thinking about burning the boxes.

    In a much more competitive environment having management ‘thinking within the box’ may be one of the greatest disadvantages facing an organisation, not just in recruitment but also in identifying threats and opportunities.

    Burning the boxes may well be one of the best things business leaders could do for their organisation in finding and cultivating the talent to compete in tomorrow’s economy.

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  • Cracking open the black box

    Cracking open the black box

    One of the things confronting technology vendors in the past five years has been the commoditization of hardware and the opening up of standards. As software has eaten the computer hardware industry, those companies are being forced to make their systems more open.

    In that world of open systems, it’s the ecosystem of developers and products around platforms that drives success. The best example being the iPhone where the range of third party apps available made Apple’s product the most compelling on the market.

    At Cisco Live in Melbourne last week Susie Wee, the company’s Vice President in charge of the company’s DevNet developer relations program, described how the networking company is opening their systems with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to build an ecosystem.

    “What we want to do is help people with this transition,” says Susie. “With the network, with the infrastructure and with the cloud we want people to get more out of it.”

    Cisco, like most hardware companies, are finding the shift to opening their data streams to be wrenching. The business model of a decade ago involved mysterious black boxes running on proprietary software with the data dished out sparingly.

    While the the ‘black boxes’ still remain, becoming a ‘platform’ and making data available to all comers is very much a cultural shift for once dominant hardware companies like Cisco.

    The question for IT hardware companies is how long they can defend their proprietary software systems – the hardware side is already slowly declining as software defined equipment takes over – while establishing dominance with their software and data feeds.

    Users too need to be treading carefully as those APIs and the data being fed through them is subject to the business imperatives of the

    Cisco hopes they can achieve this through their current market power and business networks, it is a hard ask for them though. For the entire tech industry, the shift to an API driven marketplace is going to be testing.

    Paul travelled to Cisco Live in Melbourne as a guest of Cisco

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  • Bringing cybersecurity into the mainstream

    Bringing cybersecurity into the mainstream

    “Cybersecurity is out of the dungeon and now selling itself as a business service,” says Cisco’s Chief Security and Trust Officer, John Stewart.

    Stewart was discussing his company’s security challenges at a Cisco Live briefing at their Melbourne conference yesterday.

    The shift to security as a business service follows the pattern of computerisation in business believes Stewart, “at first businesses said you can’t keep important documents on computers, then they said you could only keep important data on computers”

    For Stewart, the fact c-level execs recognise the importance of cybersecurity is a positive sign that indicates organisations are taking IT and communications security seriously.

    When asked what keeps him up at night, Stewart said it was worries about infrastructure security, the Ukrainian power network’s experience after an attack from a seriously motivated group of hackers indicates just how serious this is.

    Interestingly Stewart remains focused on the risks of security breaches, as the Internet of Things rolls out it may well be the integrity of data streams becomes a far greater focus for system administrators and security officers.

    Paul travelled to Cisco Live in Melbourne as a guest of Cisco

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  • Designing and the IoT

    Designing and the IoT

    A piece I wrote for IoT hub looks at how the design industry is changing as every day devices, even clothes, can start communicating with the world.

    In researching the piece, it was interesting just how broad the possibilities are, particularly when we start considering main devices will be able to change their roles depending on the commands they receive or the environment they detect.

    What’s clear is the design industry is facing a world of opportunities, and challenges, as not only do objects start talking to each other, but also new materials and manufacturing processes start changing how we think ordinary items should be made and used.

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