The country of Russia has been forced to deny reports that state hackers broke into the Iranian Security Service’s hacking tools to launch worldwide attacks. It was speculated that Russian threat group Turla were behind the hijacked tools, but a spokesman for Russia said the claims were “an attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran”. The original reports were uncovered by US and UK intelligence agencies, suggesting the Russians piggybacked on an Iranian hacking group to target others.
Facebook has admitted that some users’ privacy may have been compromised as a ‘glitch’ was seen to activate cameras on iPhones as users scrolled through their feeds. The Facebook team claimed the bug was “inadvertently introduced” and have since released an update to prevent this from happening. The bug was first brought to Facebook’s attention when Twitter users reported their camera operating while viewing Facebook videos.
New findings from the latest Cybersecurity Workforce Study have suggested that organisations are struggling to find cybersecurity talent. There are currently 2.8 million cybersecurity professionals in the world, but with the increasing threat of attacks, the report says we need to employ more than 4 million to keep up. Fortune 500 companies, SMEs and even government agencies were all said to be under threat.
Despite the lack of talent, studies show that those working in cybersecurity are content in their roles. This is good news for employers, with job sites such as Indeed reporting a 15% increase in cybersecurity postings. In addition, the average industry salary has now risen by 3.2% in the UK, compared to an average rise of 1.9% for all other jobs. Experts cite companies’ digital transformation as the main reason for the spike in job opportunities.
New trends identified by research teams at Cybersecurity Ventures state that cybercrime will cost global businesses $6 trillion in the next two years, up from $3 trillion in 2015. Ransomware played a key factor in this, costing $11.5 billion alone, while state-sponsored attacks are on the rise. Experts also cited the changes with GDPR for the apparent increase in data breaches.
The forthcoming 5G movement is causing concerns among experts, who say it still has the potential to be hacked. While the wide consensus is that 5G is considerably stronger than 4G, thanks to encryption and verification of network users, experts say devices may be the problem. IoT devices such as baby monitors and factory assembly lines may be susceptible to attacks from hackers as they will soon be using the 5G network. David Ferbrache, global head of cyber futures at KPMG, said: “The likelihood of finding an IoT device that hasn’t been set up properly, or with a weak password, is quite high.”
