All posts by Sam Richardson

Kmart Suffers Data Breach

October 14, 2014 Sam Richardson

Kmart which is a chain of discount department stores has been the latest company to disclose that they have suffered a data breach which has compromised customers’ credit and debit card information.

Cyber-thieves managed to infect cash registers at 1,200 Kmart stores with malware which collected the debit and credit card details. It has been reported that the malware remained undetected for over a month and was discovered on the 9^th October.

In a statement that was released by Alasdair James who is the President and Chief Member Officer, it was confirmed that they have launched a full investigation and that confidential data has been compromised.

James stated, “On Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014 our IT team detected that our Kmart store payment data system had been breached and immediately launched a full investigation working with a leading IT security firm. The security experts report that beginning in early September, the payment data systems at Kmart stores were purposely infected with a new form of malware (similar to a computer virus). This resulted in debit and credit card numbers being compromised.”

Alasdair James also stated that the initial investigation has revealed that no personal information such as social security numbers or PIN numbers has been compromised and that the malware has been contained and removed.

James added, “Based on the forensic investigation to date, no personal information, no debit card PIN numbers, no email addresses and no social security numbers were obtained by those criminally responsible. There is also no evidence that kmart.com customers were impacted. This data breach has been contained and the malware has been removed.”

In an attempt to help protect and appease the affected customers, Kmart are offering free credit monitoring protection for the affected customers to ensure that any fraudulent use of their cards doesn’t affect their credit score.

Kmart have become the latest American company to have suffered a data breach which has resulted in confidential data being compromised. Other companies such as Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase have also been successfully targeted by cyber-thieves in recent times which shows the importance to remain proactive when it comes to security of systems and data.

Home Depot Confirm Data Breach

September 10, 2014 Sam Richardson

American retailer Home Depot has confirmed that they have suffered a data breach after conducting an investigation.

Even though the overall number of those affected is yet unknown, it is being reported that the data breach could be one of the largest ever seen.

Home Depot chairman Frank Blake has said that they owe it to their customers to inform them that a data breach has occurred.

Blake stated, “We owe it to our customers to alert them that we now have enough evidence to confirm that a breach has indeed occurred. It is important to emphasise that no customers will be responsible for fraudulent charges to their accounts.”

As previously reported, Home Depot had confirmed that they were conducting an investigation after Brian Krebs reported on his website that several banks believe that Home Depot is the source of the data breach which has exposed credit and debit card information.

Krebs has also confirmed that some of the stolen details have already emerged for sale on Rescator which will allow fraudsters to counterfeit cards and possibly personal identities.

Krebs stated, “The zip code data is important because it allows the bad guys to quickly and more accurately locate the social security number and data or birth of cardholders using criminal services in the underground that sell this information.”

Microsoft urges users to uninstall BSOD update

August 19, 2014 Sam Richardson

Microsoft’s latest round of Tuesday updates brought about a subtle U-turn from the software giant after some users experienced the blue-screen of death (BSOD) following its installation.

The update MS14-045 was supposed to fix three separate issues, among other things, but it wasn’t long after its release that users were complaining that their PCs, mainly Windows 7 PCs, were getting stuck in the blue screen mode when the PC was next switched on. The severity of the issue was such that many users were unable to get out of the blue-screen mode without booting up the machine using original install media.

The issue sparked a raucous response on the Microsoft support forum website, with nearly hundreds of comments being made to a single thread. The comments also mentioned similar issues with other updates released as part of the same round of updates.

Since the alarm was raised Microsoft have removed the affected patches from its website, but they are still being pushed out by Windows auto-update, and so many users will still be able to download the faulty packages.

Microsoft released this statement; “Microsoft is investigating behavior associated with the installation of this update, and will update this bulletin when more information becomes available”. The company then revised the FAQs for the update itself, stating “Microsoft recommends that customers uninstall this update. As an added precaution, Microsoft has removed the download links to the 2982791 security update.”

However, the patch wasn’t erroneous in all cases, with many reporting successful updates to individual PCs as well as to hundreds of client machines.

Unfortunately for users, bad updates appear to be all too frequent with the latest Windows products. 2013 was a particularly bad year for faulty updates with more BSOD issues reported as part of an April 2013 update, multiple problems with MS Office updates in August and September, and problems with a Windows 8.1 update issued in October.

This incident, and others like it, all emphasise the importance of having a sound backup of important data, regardless of its nature. Through using Asigra, Backup Technology can provide you with a reliable service to backup your critical data. Asigra’s versatility makes it ideal for backing up all major data types, whilst its automated nature means it can be configured and forgotten about until its needed.

Make an enquiry today on our website!

Mobile and Internet Banking Transactions Total £1bn a Day

July 15, 2014 Sam Richardson

Recently, a study called “It’s In Your Hands” has revealed that the total transactions made by consumers has reached £6.4bn a week, reaching a peak of £1bn a day of money being transferred through only digital means in the UK alone. And, in the current climate of hacking scandal after hacking scandal, is it really wise of consumers to be putting so much faith into the internet?

It turns out that an amazing number of people are relying on technology to manage their money, with 7 million log ins a day are made to online banking services, and what if just one happened to be on a network which had a hacker on it? Or if you had a key logger on your computer? This could have disastrous consequences for you, as it could potentially give a hacker access to a lot of your money.

Another form of technology based payment is contactless payment, or NFC. This is a low-cost method of paying for shopping or car parking without needing to use money or get out your card – all you need is an NFC enabled smartphone or bank card. But what if you lose your phone? No, the thief wouldn’t be able to access your bank details. But would they? It turns out that they would. As recently revealed, it is possible to trick an NFC bank card into giving out all the details of the card and/or the account it is linked to by using a smartphone and reverse engineering it. This means that if you walk past someone with one of these devices in their pocket, they would then be able to use your card online to buy things and effectively scam you out of a lot of money. And your bank probably wouldn’t protect you from it as there is no proof it wasn’t you who bought these items.

In conclusion, internet banking has many risks but it is still growing with an amazing rate, with only 10% of all transactions reckoned to actually be made in branch this year, compared to 24%last year. And, it seems, there is no fighting progress.

Awards at the Double for Backup Technology

June 18, 2014 Sam Richardson

We’re delighted to have picked up two major awards at the Asigra Partner Summit in Toronto last night. We came away with the awards for Unsung Cloud Backup Hero and Brand Advocate.

The Asigra Partner Summit recognises the ability to drive innovation and deliver business value to a range of organisations including Fortune 500 Companies through successful public, private and hybrid cloud backup and recovery deployments.

David Farajun, CEO of Asigra, said: “2014 has been an excellent year for cloud-based data protection as businesses of every calibre are challenged with protecting more data than ever spread across an increasing number of computing endpoints. As our service providers prove on a daily basis, these challenges are easily overcome with the right technology and team in place.

The Asigra 2014 Partner Awards Program is a showcase of those partners who have demonstrated exceptional prowess in the market and we applaud their efforts as we ensure business uptime for our mutual customers.”

Rob Mackle, Sales Manager EMEA for BTL, said: “This is fantastic recognition for the work we do with Asigra to provide secure and reliable protection for the huge amounts of data being created by enterprise business.”

Asigra is the world’s leading Cloud Backup software developer and BTL is its largest global partner.

BTL’s Cloud Backup offering based on Asigra software fits the Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Hybrid Cloud requirements for any size of environment, on and offsite. It provides an Enterprise and WAN optimised solution, allowing large amounts of data to be protected over small bandwidth connections. BTL’s proprietary portal enables centralised web-based monitoring and consolidated daily emails giving customers full transparency of backups on a real time basis.

For more information email sales@backup-technology.co.ukor Tweet us @backuptech

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UK Home Secretary Opens Our Newly Expanded Data Centre

June 9, 2014 Sam Richardson

We are proud to announce that the UK Home Secretary, The Rt Hon Theresa May MP, has officially opened a £multi-million extension to one of our data centres.

The Home Secretary was given a guided tour of the new facility in Maidenhead, Berkshire, by Angus MacSween, the CEO of our parent company iomart. It was the first time Mrs May had been inside a data centre.

The Rt Hon Theresa May said: “Data centres are an important part of the global economy, so I’m delighted to be opening this new facility for iomart. The technology on show is impressive and will allow businesses to be better connected than ever. It is interesting to see that the cloud has a physicality to it and isn’t just something up in the ether.”

The 1500 square metre extension took 12 months to complete. It features the first major deployment of Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA), which enables iomart’s network infrastructure and services to be dynamically and automatically provisioned alongside Cisco’s proprietary Bi-Directional (BiDi) Transmission technology, which allows 40 Gigabit Ethernet transmission over small form factor, duplex connectivity, which was previously only possible with more expensive MTP Fibre technology. The result is a greater level of scale-out without congestion points while providing optimised forwarding for all types of applications, and a network enabled for secure multi-tenancy at scale.

Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart, said: “We are delighted that The Home Secretary has officially opened our next generation data centre and seen first-hand the technology involved in creating the infrastructure needed to support the dynamic and ever-changing web hosting and data storage needs of SME and enterprise business.

“By investing in the latest Cisco technology, we are creating data centres that are not just software defined but customer defined. We are transforming our network to deliver the highest levels of agility, performance and flexibility.”