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online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Adults who work with Young People News

26 August 2014

 Challenge Regional Cyber Day Event1: Girls into Cyber: panel and exhibition, Northumbria.

On Thursday 9thOctober at Gateshead Northern Design Centre, Cyber Security Challenge and Northumbria University will be holding the first Event1 in their series Regional Cyber Day.

We are delighted to announce that Lucy Winskell, Northumberland University's Pro Vice Chancellor has confirmed she will open the day's activities, introducing the women on the panel to highlight the myriad of back grounds and pathways that women have found into cyber roles and the exhibitors to inspire the audience of career changers and students during the day where attendees can network with regional employers, women in the industry and find out about the community.

The panel is to be opened by the Dr Jessica Barker, Cyber Security Consultant, starts off the discussion: Why is everyone talking about Cyber Security?

There will be speakers from GCHQ and IA Professional Bodies too [TBC]

Stands and activities include:

• Regional business stands: showcasing local cyber roles and pathways into work.

• Cyber 'Surgeries': 10 minute Q&A with students with the cyber community to discuss future job roles, memberships and the benefits of groups and networking.

• Enigma Machine: Bletchley Park's Education Officer demonstrates a real, working Enigma machine, providing drop-in activity sessions.

• Cyber-card game –Students and Career Transitioners can create teams to battle it out on a leader board during the day

• Cyber Community: UK wide network communities: (ISC)2., BCS., IISP.,to be available to talk about networking and membership opportunities.

More details and booking form here.

12 August 2014

Researchers at Microsoft and Ottawa's Carleton University set out to to take a cold hard look at passwords and here's what they found: the way we traditionally measure password strength is inconsistent—and often say nothing about how hard it might be to guess a password.

Here's an example: some systems force you to chose an eight-character password, using capital letters, numbers and at least one number. That sounds pretty secure, but it's not. The word P@ssw0rd fits these criteria and password cracking tools such as JohntheRipper or hashcat will guess it in minutes. That's because they use something called "mangling rules" which take dictionary words and substitute letters such as a for @ or s for $.

Read the article 

06 August 2014

 All 500,000 victims of Cryptolocker can now recover files encrypted by the malware without paying a ransom.

The malicious program encrypted files on Windows computers and demanded a substantial fee before handing over the key to the scrambled files.

Thanks to security experts, an online portal has been created where victims can get the key for free.

 

Read the BBC article here

04 August 2014

'Google has revealed the identity of a user after discovering child abuse imagery in the man's Gmail account ...

It alerted a child protection agency, which notified the police and the man was arrested,..

The arrest raises questions over the privacy of personal email and Google's role in policing the web...

Google also refused to say whether it searched its users' Gmail content for other illegal activity, such as pirated content or hate speech.''

Read the article here.

31 July 2014

 A schoolgirl has received a police caution after texting an explicit photograph of herself to her boyfriend, it has emerged.

The teenager sent the image via her phone, but after the couple had a row, he forwarded it to his friends.

Police were called in because she was under the age of 18 and therefore both were committing an offence of distributing an indecent image of a child.

 

Read the article here.