GCHQ battles against cyber espionage

According to the Gloucestershire echo, spies at GCHQ face an uphill battle against cybercrime. Reports suggest that the Cheltenham based listening post faces up to 70 cyber-attacks a month from foreign hackers. 

Concerns first began when Director of GCHQ, Sir Iain Lobban made comments on the BBC regarding the subject, stating that the secrets were being exposed on an ‘industrial scale’ after being sanctioned by foreign powers. Sir Iain estimated that some firms had been penetrated for around two years, and denied any reports that the organisation had broken the law in receiving information from the prism spy program.

Problems seem to persist and in early February social media giants Twitter stated that as many as 250,000 users accounts, user names, email addresses and passwords may have been gained access to by hackers. The company said it took a week to discover the live attack, but then immediately shut it down, ensuring the safety of all its current users.

Despite all the efforts from GCHQ and the police, cybercrime is a very time consuming process and isn't easily be get under control. Cyber-attacks are seen as a consistent threat to both government and industrial companies. It’s thought to be far healthier to use high quality security software and to follow the careful safety steps online that can greatly reduce the likelihood of becoming one of the 7 in 10 global cybercrime victims last year.

Here at Frank Domains we are the first UK domain company to offer our customers with a preventative solution to cybercrime. Our new key fob system called “Domainsafe” offers an additional security when logging into our consumers domains.  It works in a similar fashion to online banking and uses the same security concept. All that is required is to just type in the one-time password when you log in. The key fob is just one of the preventable measures that companies can use to prevent acts of cybercrime on their company.

Despite the really frightening statistics on the scale of these attacks, cybercrime is still largely an avoidable crime. Most of these attacks are largely preventable by following good security practises and using updated security software. In our last blog post we discussed the “Top 5 tips for preventing cybercrime” and we hope that these tips and new measures can help put a stop to the on-going battle with cybercrime.