School network manager wins £10,000 in NCC Group Cyber 10K challenge The second edition of a business-development focused cyber security challenge, the Cyber 10K, has concluded – with the worthy winner receiving £10,000 to further develop an innovative security dashboard tool. The challenge was run by the information assurance firm NCC Group supported by a judging panel including your …
And a school network manager should already be on top of such things and aware of several products that do just that.
Hell, even Windows Network Authentication (RADIUS etc.) can deny access if you don't have the latest patches, or an up-to-date antivirus, before you even get into products aimed at this.
Even previously, there are tons of freeware and other things that will warn about out-of-date software, including Windows patches, bad copies of Adobe Flash or Java, etc. and recommended upgrades. Any decent Enterprise Console antivirus can do the same. Any decent patching or software update system. Any device MDM solution.
Sure, it may not be "home" use, but that's hardly a groundbreaking insight to say "normal users need this too". Hell, I've seen any number of software installers that will refuse to run if certain components are out of date or insecure - some of them even for games!
And I speak as a school network manager myself.
If by default software was kept up to date and "home" versions continually rolled forwards with a central registry built into the OS (yesterday my flash (Tv catch up player alas, click to flash installed though), java (minecraft unfortunately, though the web plugin is disabled) and windows (10) all updated in three differing processes). I understand perfectly that the commercial world requires staggered updates, but home versions should have a continual update and emergency partition should an update be pulled to recover the system.
But the main thing here is you can see it's come out of education and Joe Public and Jane Workforce don't want to learn and have refused to do even after many of years of being told not to click on that document / link in the email. In fact you really want people to learn, have an alert every time in email programs that can never be disabled asking the user if they really know the sender, trust the sender, if this is a typical message? because attempting to teach people hasn't worked since before Kournikova.
In fact you really want people to learn, have an alert every time in email programs that can never be disabled asking the user if they really know the sender, trust the sender, if this is a typical message?
All this will do is teach people that whenever they read an e-mail, there's an extra pop-up window they have to get rid of. They won't learn anything about security - they'll just learn that computers are now a little it more annoying.
I'm one of those weirdo's who liked Vista *because* of that pop-up.
Didn't bother me that every time I went to do something that required admin rights I had to authorise it. Annoying for a bit, but you get used to it and it's a lot easier than a tidy-up exercise for clicking the wrong link.
I suppose we should be grateful someone entered and won a prize as its so easy I can see why the armchair experts didn't enter.
Next time Linus & Bill won't have a look in.
Its a simple idea and it has been done partially already but a few more competitors are a good thing in such a market.
Congrats Ross - Icon is obvious
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