The 12 Themes of 2014

Rather than bring you the 12 Days of Christmas, we’ve done the 12 themes of 2014 instead! A look back at what has been making the headlines in the world of Information Security (and beyond) this year. Take a moment to relive the year…… 

On 29th of January, Nexor hosted a regional cyber security forum meeting. Joanne Miller from the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills gave the first presentation on the Organisation Security Standard that had been drafted following a long industry consultation process. The first glimpses of Cyber Essentials.

In February, Safer Internet Day, was the perfect moment for us to blog around the need for educating all users about being online and to promote the Cyber Champions scheme that several Nexor employees participate in.

As we rolled into March, the first big cyber breach of the year was well underway – would anyone ever trust a virtual currency again as Bitcoin suffered a major attack?

And in April it was straight into possibly the biggest cyber vulnerability of the year, at least in terms of mainstream media exposure, Heartbleed. On Cyber Matters we looked at the impact on passwords, biometrics and Certificate Revocation Lists.

Using a bit of our own creative classification we’re going with three stories in April, as the UK Government introduced a revised security classification scheme as the multi-layer model collapsed to just three tiers of TOP SECRET, SECRET and OFFICIAL.

At the end of April the 2014 Information Security Breaches survey report was launched at InfoSec, and the headline grabber was that although the number of breaches had dipped slightly since the previous year, the average cost of those breaches had almost doubled.

In May, there was a lot of discussion about TrueCrypt and whether it was still a viable security technology. On Cyber Matters we discussed the way in which the industry reacts to these kind of “scares”.

Just as everyone was digesting the implications of this, on the 5th of June, the previously mentioned Cyber Essentials scheme was officially launched. One of our most popular blogs of the year was about Nexor’s experience of being in the first batch of organisations to achieve the standard.

As we hit a slightly quieter time in the summer, we took a trip back in time to discover how Nexor invented the first search engine, way before Google got there.

In September, the iCloud hack gave us the chance to use this header “The Day the Technology and Entertainment News Headlines Were the Same: Hackers and Nude Celebs”.

The next big vulnerability to break, in October, was Shellshock. One of our posts looked at how SELinux offers protection and that’s why we use it in our High Assurance Guards.

As 2014 drew to a close, in November we looked at securing the Internet of Things. Whilst some say it’s just hype, others feel that 2015 will be the year that it goes mainstream.

So I hope you enjoyed that rollercoaster of a re-run of 2014. Let’s see what 2015 has in store for us all…..