Accenture, Ransomware, and Ambulance Chasers

The Lockbit 2.0 ransomware gang have been stepping up their game over the last year, and yesterday they claimed a big scalp: Accenture. With a haul of 6TB of data, and clearly wanting to pile on the pressure for a pay-out, the Lockbit crew went public and gave Accenture only 7 hours to pay up, instead of the usual couple of days.

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Niloufar Namvar
How Do I Get Into Cyber Security?

Along with “You can’t say that” and “Hey, how’d you get in here?”, one of the things I’ve been hearing from people recently is “How do I get a career in Cyber Security?” I thought I’d throw my notes from those conversations in a sort of Liber Primus for those interested in moving into Cyber Security — either as a side hustle or a career.

First: what is it you actually want?

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Niloufar Namvar
The Matryoshka Dolls of IT

I often get complaints from clients that their IT projects are always cumbersome, delivered late and over budget. They’ve had an impact on the business, certainly, but it’s far from a positive one. There’s a lot of blame to go round for this, and finger pointing can be fun, but what needs to be done is to get our C-level stakeholders and project sponsors to understand the implications of proposed work versus timelines.

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Niloufar Namvar
The DAOO Loop

Everyone should be familiar with John Boyd’s OODA loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. There are a number of variations (pick a favourite!) but the basic premise remains the same: you gather information before acting.

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Niloufar Namvar
On the S3 Outage and Agile Cloud Native Serverless Failures

Our newsfeeds are filled with hundreds of articles about Amazon’s S3 failure on Tuesday. Doom, gloom, S3 down in US-East-1 and cascading failure — dogs and cats, living together: mass hysteria! It’s been covered on Forbes, Business Insider — even The Daily Mail and The Sun (hardly bastions of technology reporting, but “OMG Instagram is down!” cuts off their supply of click bait).

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Niloufar Namvar