CND News and Blog

Top Tip - Start Looking Early in Your Second Year So, you're a university student dreaming of a third-year cybersecurity placement. You've survived fresher's week, learned that "phishing" isn't about trout, and mastered the art of submitting assignments 3 minutes before the deadline. Progress! But now comes the real boss level: finding a cyber...

Celebrating Neurodiversity As our company name, Computer Network Defence Ltd, suggests, we monitor business networks and catch computer hackers. When an incident is detected, we need our highly trained analysts to investigate the activity and triage the threat as quickly as possible. We feel this is best achieved by embracing diversity in all its f...

Scams have been around for as long as people have been trading, but the rise of the internet has opened the floodgates for increasingly sophisticated cons. One of the latest and most devastating types is known as the "pig butchering" scam. Despite its unusual name, it doesn't have anything to do with farm animals. It's a financial fraud that preys ...

Computer Network Defence proudly celebrated its 20th anniversary with a Garden Party. The celebration, held at the Digital Mansion, Corsham, brought together employees, their families some travelling in from America, Isle of Man and various areas of the UK to commemorate two decades of dedication, innovation, and success. Founded in 2004, CND has g...

 CND sent two senior members of the team to Splunk Conf.24 in Las Vegas. The following is their account. 'We started the conference by attending talks by Splunk CEO Gary Steele who delivered the opening keynotes along side Cisco Present Chuck Robbins. With Splunk's recent merging with Cisco everyone was intrigued to see whether there would be ...

Ethical hacking, penetration testing, red teaming, offensive security. Those words evoke an image of someone with a black hoodie up, coding whilst a wall of binary scrolls slowly behind. The binary is usually green for good measure. So, over the last few years this has become to de facto 'cool' job. The idea of using malicious techniques, developin...

In today's modern world, the risk of cyber threats have increased significantly. With 5.16 billion people globally using the internet, you can understand how the use of hacktivism has increased The question we are asking today, is hacktivism a threat and what is it's impact on everyday society? In today's blog, we will explore this question further...

There is no doubt you have heard the word 'hacker' in recent years, but are you familiar with the word hacktivist and what this means? Today we are going to explore what is a hacktivist, what is their purpose, why they perform some of their acts and what the difference is between hackers and hacktivists.  What is a simple definition of hacktiv...

 As Gold ERS holders, we are lucky to have access to unique opportunities. In Summer 2023 CND were invited to attend the RAF Halton 'Employer Engagement Management and Leadership Experience'. This was a national event with over 50 participants from a variety of industries, taking part. Upon arrival, on a rather drizzly day the attendees were s...

During Summer 2023, members of the CND team had the privilege of attending the Defence Academy in Shrivenham. The aim of the visit was for members from private sector organisations and businesses who employ or sponsor RFCA personnel to view the facilities and receive an introduction to the purpose and function of the Defence Academy, arranged by We...

 Last week I was able to attend the CyberThreat 23 (CT23) conference in London, held by SANs and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) The conference has been running for a few years now and from SANs marketing material the event is: Designed for security practitioners and spanning the full spectrum of offensive and defensive discipline, t...

This simulated phishing email had two possible failure actions – clicking on the link or opening the PDF attachment. It was a particularly difficult scenario as it appeared to come from a real member of the CND team, however, there were a few indicators (red and amber flags) which could have been spotted. The reason we have labelled some of these a...

With digital landscapes evolving, cyber security has become a critical concern for businesses and organisations across the UK. As cyber threats continue to emerge, the demand for skilled professionals in this sector has skyrocketed. This article will cover serval topics around how the UK is ranking in cyber security across the globe, the best citie...

There is no doubt you have heard the word 'hacker' in recent years, but are you familiar with the word hacktivist and what this means? Today we are going to explore what is a hacktivist, what is their purpose, why they perform some of their acts and what the difference is between hackers and hacktivists. What is a simple definition of hacktivist? A...

For several months we have been seeing a huge interest in the capabilities of ChatGPT and with a high school teacher in the family, we have looked a little deeper in detecting it's use. At Computer Network Defence Ltd (CND) we will often test the resourcefulness of our new cyber security candidates by asking them to research a topic and d...

Drones have presented a problem to superyachts for some time, diminishing the guest experience and impacting the privacy of both guests and crew. The impact of this is debatable and some are more accepting of drone attention than others. Although for some VVIP owners and guests, privacy is precious and they do not want their time with family and fr...

UPDATE 13 July 2022 As part of our research into writing this post, we noticed that IACS UR E26 (below) had been released at exactly the same time as the amendment to IACS Rec 166 Recommendation on Cyber Resilience.   Interestingly, the Rec 166 document was amended to replace mandatory wording such ...

Maritime Executive produced an interesting article which references some great work by Marie Larsen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, around the perception of cyber risk in the maritime domain. I feel that the Maritime Executive title of "Maritime Cyber Security Starts With The Crew" is inappropriate, as the technical co...

As things have changed rapidly over the past couple of tumultuous years, we've largely become accustomed to a new style of working. Whether businesses were keen on the idea initially or not, the idea of home working fast became an unavoidable reality for most within the world of cyber security. But now, at the point where office working can once ag...

All cyber security practitioners will be familiar with that glazed look in the eye of a non IT muggle when you start talking in cyber to them. The same happened when I mentioned the SolarWinds hack yesterday, so I used an analogy based on castles in England 1000 years ago, it went like this: "...King Putinski's greed in stealing the siege weap...