October 2021 was Cyber Security Month. Also this year GÉANT launched a campaign to raise cybersecurity awareness within the R&E community. After the success of “Become a Cyber Hero” CSM2020, which saw the active participation of 20 NREN organisations from Europe and beyond, we are delighted to inform you that Cyber Heroes returned bigger and better in October 2021! Working from home safely Due to the pandemic outbreak working from home has become commonplace for many organisations in the...
Tag - CyberSecMonth
Become A Cyber Hero, the first pan-European campaign organised by the GÉANT community, as part of the European Cyber Security Month 2020 activities, closed last month. The objective of the campaign was to encourage end-users to arm themselves against digital threats and feel empowered to protect (themselves and) their organisation. The initiative witnessed the active participation and fruitful collaboration of 19 NRENs whose diverse contributions also included original research papers from...
During Cyber Security Month 2020 CONNECT met Henry Hughes, Security Director for Jisc to talk about opportunities and challenges faced by Research & Education (R&E) in the current cyber security landscape dominated by the COVID pandemic. Words: Interview by Rosanna Norman, GÉANT The cyber security landscape is evolving all the time, what are today’s major challenges and opportunities for R&E? Because of the events that have been affecting our world in 2020 we have all become...
By Jon Hunt, cyber services delivery manager at Jisc Criminals always find a way to take advantage of disasters. In the case of COVID-19, there has been a surge in phishing emails and online scams by nefarious individuals and organised gangs who want to steal data. Now, more than ever, it’s important to set strong passwords and avoid reusing them across multiple accounts. Password managers make this much easier. A good way to provide an extra level of security above and beyond passwords is to...
Cyber-attacks were a key feature of the 2008 Russo-Georgian war; they affected websites of news agencies, the Georgian President and were implicated in the explosion of an oil pipeline. At that time in Georgia there was no governmental CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team). Today there is the CERT.GOV.GE national team which cooperates closely with CERT-GE – the team operated by GRENA, the Georgian Research and Educational Networking Association. Temur Maisuradze, System Administrator at...
By Guillaume Rousse, IT Security Engineer at GIP RENATER These days, passwords are a universal authentication method, because they are simple to configure on the server side, easy to use from any terminal, and simple to understand for the user. Nevertheless, for an attacker, they are just as easy to steal or guess… Faced with this risk, various recommendations are called for, eventually backed up by technical measures to ensure that they are effectively implemented. However, as with all...
The primary objective of the LITNET CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team of the LITNET networks is to tackle security incidents, but it is also fully dedicated to their prevention. In order to deal with shared security challenges, the CERT has been using honeypots since 2017 to improve password security, among other things. GÉANT spoke with Šarūnas Grigaliūnas, LITNET CERT IT team leader. What is a honeypot, and what are its advantages? A honeypot is a computer system that is set up as a...
By Urpo Kaila, Head of Security at CSC, Finland The password is dead, we have been hearing this for a very long time. ‘You need to use keys, certificates, tokens, biometrics, or at least passphrases, but not passwords, they are history’, it was said. But here we go, in the age of digitalisation we still struggle with our passwords, with our lousy keys to physical doors, whilst in the US people still carry their paper checks to the post office. Well then, how can one survive with passwords, or...
By Carolina Fernandez, Jordi Guijarro and Shuaib Siddiqui, i2cat Foundation Introduction of IdP environment in the context of identity security eduGAIN, pioneered and supported by GÉANT, interconnects research and education identity federations around the world. It enables the trustworthy exchange of information between service providers and Research & Education (R&E) institutions or other Identity Providers (IdPs) where more than 2600 identity providers access services from 1900...
By Andrea Pinzani, IT security expert at the Consortium GARR On average, each of us owns from 20 to 40 accounts. Unfortunately, however, we are not very good at creating strong passwords. We prefer short ones, often using personal information, common words, predictable strategies and composition or replacement schemes. We’re not even very careful at keeping them safe either. Despite being informed about password good practices, we do not make the right choices to protect ourselves, due to...
