The annual Security Christmas calendar

Security is a hot topic, both in various projects we work on and in the mainstream news, both national and internationally. What just a few years ago was an obscure topic discussed only by those in the know, is now on everyone's lips. We hear people talking about ransomware on the bus, and the news regularly reports on international cyber-attacks and crimes.

One of the most profiled incidents in Norway this year was a ransomware attack. As the days were getting longer in March, industry giant Hydro was under siege, probably by the Lockergoga ransomware. The assumed attack vector is email. It is likely that the network was infected by one or more people clicking a link in an email or something to that effect. This snowballed into a major breach which caused Hydro to shut down many of its networks and cost them hundreds of millions NOK. During the outage many industrial plants had to be run manually or some even shut down. Sadly, this is just one example where lack of security causes millions in loss.

Even our personal devices are under attack. We keep our most personal information, which we would like to decide who can access and not, on our smart phones. Even if there is great work being done on the operating system of these devices, there seems to be an endless storm of security updates after each major upgrade. Most users feel safe by using the recommended app stores for their devices. But an increasing number of applications for mobile operating systems have been proven to contain malware, also in the official app stores. There are numerous reports of this, both on Google’s Android and Apples’ IOS.

We hope you will enjoy this years security.christmas as much as we had fun creating it. Please spread the word and please help use make the last weeks of the year a safe one. Remember to visit our other calendars.