SolCyber Blog

Imagine if you had to pay a personal visit up front to the head office of every website you planned to use, in order to pick up an encryption key to keep your traffic secure.

Up to about 1970, ‘received wisdom’ said that was the only way to do digital communications securely… until mathematicians on both sides of the Atlantic decided to challenge that orthodoxy.

The rest is history, and this is that history.

How do you share encryption keys securely, even with people you’ve never met, when all you have is an insecure network to send and receive data?

For decades, received wisdom said it couldn’t be done.

Join us for the fascinating story of how researchers in the UK and the US independently confronted and solved this vital problem…

Data breaches are at an all-time high, with the number of breaches almost doubling from 2022 to 2023. Most recently, CBS reported on a massive data breach that could likely contain the social security numbers (SSNs) of every US citizen. It’s a major leak of personally identifiable information (PII) and only adds to the amount of sensitive data, such as passwords and addresses, that has been leaked over the last decade. Although it’s easy to think that leaked PII in […]

Romance scams, which are pretty much what their name suggests, often lead to victim blaming, where those who fall for them are derided for what other people consider plain old gullibility.

What can we do to avoid them, and to keep our own vulnerable friends and family safe?

Startup valuations are the scoreboard of success, and the podium for winners is Unicorn Status—when a company reaches a valuation of $1 billion. Achieving unicorn status is the dream of any startup, and it typically signals the startup’s strong potential to either go through an IPO or become acquired by a larger firm in an M&A deal. A start-up achieves unicorn status if: Unfortunately, because it might have vulnerabilities that more established, public companies don’t, achieving unicorn status also puts […]

AI has exploded in the last two years, both in public adoption and in company valuations. So far in 2024, the AI sector has the highest valuations of any sector, even beating fintech, one of the most innovative and investment-heavy sectors around. The first six months of 2024 saw 13 new unicorns—a company valued at $1 billion or more—in the AI sector. New generative AI (gen AI) tools have improved the mainstream visibility of AI. Tools such as ChatGPT and […]

Despite more security tools, safer operating systems and stronger data protection regulations, data breaches often seem to be getting bigger and worse.

It doesn’t have to be that way, so what can we change to reduce the frequency and severity of data breaches, especially when we didn’t choose to have our data collected in the first place?

If HTTPS provides true end-to-end encryption, how do web firewalls crack into your network traffic to do their filtering?

And if a legitimate firewall can do this when you want, what stops random cybercriminals somewhere further down the line from doing it when you don’t?

Some cybercriminals don’t probe your network or trick your users in the hope of initiating a huge campaign of intellectual property theft, or of unleashing a giant ransomware attack.

Some of them just want to find out how they could carry out those attacks if they wanted to, and then to sell that information on to cybercriminals who do.

Vulnerability management is an essential element of every cybersecurity plan. It involves the ongoing monitoring of a company’s digital footprint to find and fix any vulnerabilities in devices, systems, and applications that bad actors could exploit. It decreases a company’s risk exposure and is a proactive way of ensuring threat actors can’t gain access to a company’s private data. It’s also a huge undertaking. Many applications, including those that are cloud-based, that companies use need to be checked and patched […]

Does the cybersecurity industry really need as much esoteric jargon and as many complex components as it has?

Or is the burden of “more tools, more tools” weighing us down?

Imagine if you had to pay a personal visit up front to the head office of every website you planned to use, in order to pick up an encryption key to keep your traffic secure.

Up to about 1970, ‘received wisdom’ said that was the only way to do digital communications securely… until mathematicians on both sides of the Atlantic decided to challenge that orthodoxy.

The rest is history, and this is that history.

How do you share encryption keys securely, even with people you’ve never met, when all you have is an insecure network to send and receive data?

For decades, received wisdom said it couldn’t be done.

Join us for the fascinating story of how researchers in the UK and the US independently confronted and solved this vital problem…

Data breaches are at an all-time high, with the number of breaches almost doubling from 2022 to 2023. Most recently, CBS reported on a massive data breach that could likely contain the social security numbers (SSNs) of every US citizen. It’s a major leak of personally identifiable information (PII) and only adds to the amount of sensitive data, such as passwords and addresses, that has been leaked over the last decade. Although it’s easy to think that leaked PII in […]

Romance scams, which are pretty much what their name suggests, often lead to victim blaming, where those who fall for them are derided for what other people consider plain old gullibility.

What can we do to avoid them, and to keep our own vulnerable friends and family safe?

Startup valuations are the scoreboard of success, and the podium for winners is Unicorn Status—when a company reaches a valuation of $1 billion. Achieving unicorn status is the dream of any startup, and it typically signals the startup’s strong potential to either go through an IPO or become acquired by a larger firm in an M&A deal. A start-up achieves unicorn status if: Unfortunately, because it might have vulnerabilities that more established, public companies don’t, achieving unicorn status also puts […]

What if we look beyond cybersecurity automation and algorithms?

What if we start out with a focus on cybersecurity culture, not on rules and rote?

Encryption is a vital part of our digital world these days, to the point that it’s impossible to imagine online life without it.

Many of us use it when we’re storing or sending data, for example via BitLocker on our hard disks and HTTPS in our browsers.

Has this given us a false sense of security, by luring us into assuming that if our data is safe a lot of the time, we can act as though it is safe all of the time?

Despite more security tools, safer operating systems and stronger data protection regulations, data breaches often seem to be getting bigger and worse.

It doesn’t have to be that way, so what can we change to reduce the frequency and severity of data breaches, especially when we didn’t choose to have our data collected in the first place?

If HTTPS provides true end-to-end encryption, how do web firewalls crack into your network traffic to do their filtering?

And if a legitimate firewall can do this when you want, what stops random cybercriminals somewhere further down the line from doing it when you don’t?

Some cybercriminals don’t probe your network or trick your users in the hope of initiating a huge campaign of intellectual property theft, or of unleashing a giant ransomware attack.

Some of them just want to find out how they could carry out those attacks if they wanted to, and then to sell that information on to cybercriminals who do.

Vulnerability management is an essential element of every cybersecurity plan. It involves the ongoing monitoring of a company’s digital footprint to find and fix any vulnerabilities in devices, systems, and applications that bad actors could exploit. It decreases a company’s risk exposure and is a proactive way of ensuring threat actors can’t gain access to a company’s private data. It’s also a huge undertaking. Many applications, including those that are cloud-based, that companies use need to be checked and patched […]

Does the cybersecurity industry really need as much esoteric jargon and as many complex components as it has?

Or is the burden of “more tools, more tools” weighing us down?