Interesting, giving that the greatest threat to cyber security lies in the hand of the government. Their data gobbling, combined with lacking security makes them a juicy target for many a hacker.
Home Office launches £4m cyber security awareness scheme
The UK Home Office has launched a new £4m information security awareness campaign, designed to educate businesses and consumers about rising hacker threats. The first stage of the campaign is due to get underway in the autumn. The scheme will sit alongside other more established information security initiatives, such as Get …
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Monday 24th June 2013 08:12 GMT Khaptain
Re: @Martijn Otto
I would argue that the greatest threat is actually the gullibility of a very large percentage of internet user. Unfortunately it is not so easy to repair that problem.
The first major hurdle lies in the "education" of said Gullible Crowd. If they were to be educated correctly then they would then start to think critically about what the governement are actually doing and we don't really want them to start doing that.
4 Million, sound more like a cheap marketing campaign than a serious attempt to make a difference.
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Monday 24th June 2013 08:26 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: @Martijn Otto @Khaptain
There is a way to make users like the ones you indicate safe, but it means locking down their computers so that they can't install software, and are completely removed from any decisions about installing patches.
Whilst it would appear that Microsoft and Apple may be moving to that mindset, it is gathering some opposition from computer users, especially those who understand how things work.
I'm sure that there are other organisations that would like there to be this level of control, especially if they can recruit the vendors into installing other software components as part of the patching process.
The problem is one of balance between on-line liberty and security (and I'm not specifying whose!)
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Tuesday 25th June 2013 05:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Locking down the computers?
> There is a way to make users like the ones you indicate safe, but it means locking down their computers ..
And in the process making it totally unusable for any real work as you can't even change the home page and right-click is disabled for most tasks and desktop customization is disabled. Of course this only applies in the Windows land ...
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Monday 24th June 2013 08:03 GMT Vimes
Re: All of £4m?
I seem to recall one article somewhere indicating that a lot of the technology being used by GCHQ for the tapping of international communications had actually originated from within the NSA. Hardly surprising really when you consider how well they've run other initiatives.
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Monday 24th June 2013 08:21 GMT jake
Re: All of £4m?
Listening into phone calls[1] ain't rocket science. Plug into the test/monitor port of the telco gear of your choice.
This has existed since analog T-carrier gear.
The only problem is figuring out which bit of twisted-pair/fiber to listen in on ...
[1] For largish variations of "phone calls", of course.
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Tuesday 25th June 2013 06:38 GMT jake
@Dr U Mour (was: Re: All of £4m?)
£4m is a lot of money (and probably more than 99.999% of the folks reading this will earn in a lifetime!), but it's peanuts to any largish town or small city. Much less a metropolis or country.
Data center needs (including bandwidth) consume loot at a ferocious rate ...
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Monday 24th June 2013 07:59 GMT weebs
The weakest point in the chain is the wet squishy one, badly educated end users who have the same password for everything. It's about time people realise that this is the worst thing possible, who always are under the age old adage of "it'll never happen to me" until they realise someone just wired all their PayPal money somewhere in China.
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Monday 24th June 2013 08:00 GMT Vimes
Crimes against UK businesses?
Perhaps they could actually be taken seriously if they stopped turning a blind eye to UK citizens and businesses being shafted by US companies. They could also stop ignoring the spying activities of a company whose owner has links to the Russian military and whose systems were trialled by BT. And how about encouraging ISPs to stop offshoring services to the US? (rather than encourage it - which is probably what they are doing at the moment since it makes it easier to spy on the usage of such services).
I'm sure that the likes of GCHQ couldn't believe their luck when BT moved their email to Yahoo.
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Monday 24th June 2013 12:07 GMT Andrew Jones 2
Step1 -
Don't click on any links in any email. EVER. And don't download any attachments EVER.
Step2-
Don't visit the less popular porn sites that are completely surrounded by advertising.
Step3-
When watching illegal copyrighted material - if the video player on the page says "you must download super wonderful video codec 2030" or any other wording indicating you must download something to continue, simply click the small play button at the bottom left of the player, NOT the one in the center.
Step4-
If while browsing around the internet a you see a window that says something like "your computer has been scanned and has 235 problems, click here now to fix them" DON'T EVER!
Step5-
If your computer comes with McAfee or Norton pre-installed - immediately locate the nearest heavy implement - like a sledgehammer - and KILL IT!