Yearly Archives: 2018

Several U.K. government websites and thousands more globally were hijacked by code which made visitors’ computers run cryptocurrency mining software.

The government websites affected include The Commissioner’s Office, The Student Loans Company, the Financial Ombudsman Service, and many more.

Security researchers traced the issue to BrowseAloud software that makes it easier for blind and partially sighted people to use the internet. The cybercriminals compromised the software by adding a crypto jacking script to it.

Resulting in everyone who visited websites that ran BrowseAloud to secretly have their computer’s processing power used to earn money for cybercriminals, by mining the cryptocurrency known as “Monero”.

Texthelp, the company behind the BrowseAloud plugin says the service was temporarily taken down and resumed service as of midday Tuesday. The company also say that the exploit “was active for a period of four hours on Sunday” and no customer data was stolen or lost as a result of the hack.

Cryptocurrency hacks such as these are becoming increasingly common since bitcoin’s significant price rise in 2017. The trend is also likely to continue as every successful attack earn a large amount of money for these criminals.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has confirmed the attack and that their technical experts are examining the data involving these incidents of malware being used to illegally mine cryptocurrency.

Having trusted security software installed on your machine is essential and will help identify and warn against affected websites. If you would like to discuss our Security services, please be in touch at — [email protected].

Happy New Year! We are almost one month into 2018 and at the beginning of a new year, many people decide to make one or a number of positive goals to kick the year off.

If this year you are thinking of building or refreshing your digital platforms, we can help you create the look and feel to best promote yourself online.

Having a strong online presence is a crucial component of your marketing strategy, no matter what size your business is or what industry it belongs to. An online presence is important because it reinforces your brand and what you offer to your target market.

We offer a range of services to help you with the many tasks of creating and also managing your presence online:

— Your site will be custom built and fully personalised and can be based on the architecture and platform of your choice.

— The process of creating, publishing, distributing, marketing and eventually archiving content is an important lifecycle; which can be very beneficial to your online presence, if conducted effectively.

— Social media is key to a successful modern online presence — it allows you to easily post updates in an international forum and engage with existing and new visitors/users.

If any of these areas in relation to Online Presence are something you are thinking of and want to discuss and learn more on, please be in touch with us at: [email protected].

We hope you are starting the year off well and look forward to being in touch with you very soon!

Last week, security researchers uncovered security issues known by the names, Meltdown and Spectre. The threat that has been uncovered applies to all modern processors and affect all computing devices and operating systems.

All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected but there has not been any known issues or exploits impacting customers to date.

To protect your Apple devices from encountering any exploitive issues, we advise that you only download software from trusted sources such as the App Store and ensure you update your Apple devices immediately.

The most recent updates, released to mitigate the security issues are:

Please note, Apple Watch is not affected by either Meltdown or Spectre.

For reference, below is a quick explanation on Meltdown and Spectre:

–– Both attacks use side channels to obtain the information from the accessed memory location.

We STRONGLY encourage and recommend that everyone update their Apple devices to the most current version immediately.

If you have any questions regarding Meltdown and Spectre or would like to discuss our security software, please be in touch at [email protected].

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered chip design flaws allowing security vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre, which could affect almost every modern computer processor. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to obtain access to sensitive information such as passwords on computers, servers, and smartphones.

The Meltdown and Spectre flaws are found in many modern computer processing units (CPU) or microchips — made by Intel and ARM, and together the firms supply almost the entire global market.

What do Meltdown and Spectre mean?

–– Both attacks use side channels to obtain the information from the accessed memory location.

Patches or fixes are currently being raced out in system updates in order to protect machines before this major vulnerability allows hackers time to steal data.

We STRONGLY encourage and recommend that everyone update their smartphones and machine’s security and operating systems to their most current update. Microsoft has already included a fix in their latest update which was sent out on Wednesday — if you use Windows 10, check in Settings > Update & Security — that your machine has downloaded and installed this update and if not, please do so as soon as you can.

Android Google phones have been protected in its latest software update so please ensure this update has been downloaded and installed.

Apple has also confirmed that iPhones, iPads and Mac computers have been affected and that they have already released fixes in their most recent iOS update and that there has been no evidence to date that the vulnerability has been exploited. If you have an Apple device, ensure you are using iOS 11.2 or later on iPhone and iPad and Sierra 10.13.2 for iMacs, Macbooks, Macbook Pros and Mac Minis.

Google Chrome is releasing an update on 23 January but if you want to add an additional security measure in the meantime, please go to — chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process, then click “enable” for “strict site isolation”.

The main thing you can do for now is to ensure that your device’s security and software is up-to-date and to keep checking for updates in the coming days as manufacturers release more fixes as they learn more.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss our security software, please be in touch at [email protected].