Prime Minister David Cameron has stated that the UK government will look at “switching off” some forms of encryption in order to make society safer from terror attacks. This might make a grand statement…
Looking back, 2014 was not a good year for keeping things safe under digital lock and key. If a score was being kept, it might seem that the cybercriminals are in the lead, despite the valiant efforts…
The computer operating systems and applications we use today have often evolved over many years, decades even, and contain tens or hundreds of millions of lines of code. Flaws in that code – and there…
A first and quite reasonable thought readers may have will be to wonder: what is bash? When you use a computer you probably interact with it through a point-and-click, visual interface such as Windows…
It’s been almost three months since the Heartbleed bug was revealed and many thousands of computer servers still need to be fixed. The Australian government’s Stay Smart Online initiative this week points…
The recently released Commission of Audit report recommends that the Australian government needs to become “digital by default”. The continued shift to digital service delivery is intended to reduce costs…
Here is a puzzle for you. Why did shares in Yahoo! slide by nearly 10% in the days before Heartbleed was announced and then recover after the main news items broke? It has long been the case that security…
Take a moment to jump back in your mental time machine to 31 December 1999. It was the biggest New Year’s Eve for a thousand years. The dawn of a new millennium. But as we prepared to party, the world…
Heartbleed, the bug that has preoccupied thousands of websites and millions of users over the past week, may well have been the biggest security flaw in internet history but it is unlikely to be the last…
The Heartbleed bug that’s potentially exposed the personal and financial data of millions of people stored online has also exposed a hole in the way some security software is developed and used. The bug…
The web is full of scare stories about the Heartbleed security vulnerability but panicking won’t help. Better to use this situation as an opportunity to clean up our acts. Few of us do it but we should…
If you’re struggling to understand the deluge of information about the Heartbleed vulnerability, you’re not alone. Some reports tell us to change all our online passwords immediately, others warn us that…