Posts By: Jacob Charles

Protect duty

Paul Haggerty looks at the results of the UK Government’s consultation on the Protect Duty and what the planned legislation will mean for businesses. With a number of high-profile terror attacks in the UK in recent years, in February 2021 the Government launched a public consultation on the implementation of a legal ‘Protect Duty’ for… Read more »

Time to upskill?

James Hadley reveals why the defence sector must optimise its workforce with cybersecurity upskilling We know that a single phishing email is all it takes for bad actors to launch an attack that could take down a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. This is one of the reasons cybersecurity professionals often talk about humans as a weakness in… Read more »

Machine learning

Tim Wallen discusses what is needed to lay the foundations for the success of next-gen cybersecurity technologies. The expanding scope and sophistication of cybercrime is a significant problem. When we hear the word ‘cybercriminal’, there’s a tendency to picture a single individual hidden away in a dark dingy garage, operating from an old-school laptop. And… Read more »

Strategic planning

Jawhar Farhat examines the need for a national security plan in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine The establishment and maintenance of a secure society requires a strong, and professional security state. As a result, governments will strive to integrate law enforcement agencies’ work and coordinate it to increase impact, focus duties and reduce… Read more »

Play it safe

Craig Swallow wonders how, in an age of hybrid working, organisations can ensure employees are safe Every employer organisation has risks and a duty of care to ensure its employees are safe within the workplace. Many employees do not work in one fixed place and this situation can change day to day, a factor that… Read more »

Looking forward

Henry Wilkinson presents a strategic outlook for the year ahead The state of international relations could scarcely be less conducive to meet the global threats and many other security, crisis and stability risks the world faces in 2022. Amid an uneven and shaky global economic recovery and ongoing pandemic, the coming year will almost certainly… Read more »

Looking back to move forward

How the teachings of the past year can be used to bolster security in 2022 If 2021 has taught the security industry anything, it’s that we’re still far away from reducing the impact of ransomware attacks. Initial access points to networks pervade the internet and threat actors exploit them using three primary techniques. Firstly, via… Read more »

Let there be light

Paul D Turner examines the historical developments and emerging use of visible light communication (VLC) and – from a radio perspective – visible light modulation (VLM) Optical communication technology has been commercialised in the form of LIFI and has become widely utilised in government and military circles as an inherently or at least seemingly more… Read more »

Peace of mind

Jon Fielding reveals why we should all be encrypting our data as standard The UK Ministry of Justice (MOJ) lost 184 mobile phones, PCs, laptops and tablet devices between September 2020-2021, according to its response to a recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request. NHS Digital recorded 393 lost or stolen devices in the same time… Read more »

Cashing in on holigrams

Dr Paul Dunn considers the anti-counterfeiting role holography has played in 20 years of the Euro To understand why the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to place holograms onto the Euro as an anti-counterfeiting feature, you have to go back to the first reports of colour photocopiers being used to counterfeit banknotes, which came at… Read more »