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How bad is it really? Very bad, if some key BYOD and mobile security trends that have surfaced from a recent study (see page 18) are to be believed. It states that:

• Security (39%) and employee privacy (12%) are the biggest inhibitors of BYOD adoption. In contrast, management opposition (3%) and user experience concerns (4%) rank far lower
• One in five organisations suffered a mobile security breach, primarily driven by malware and malicious WiFi
• Security threats to BYOD impose heavy burdens on organisations' IT resources (35%) and help desk workloads (27%).

At the same time, there are strong indicators in our Mobile-BYOD feature that the tide can be turned, putting the aggressors on the back foot again. Apart from the new technologies available to make this happen, it is also heartening to hear of a new partnership forged between cyber security specialists at Coventry University and its industry counterparts to create a new commercial venture to tackle virtual threats. The university and Crossword Cybersecurity - an ISDX listed tech transfer company - joined forces last year to investigate early warning systems for cyberspace through 'target-centric network monitoring.'

As a result of this partnership, a new company called CyberOwl has now been created to test and develop cyber threat alert raising for commercial use. Coventry University has assigned intellectual property rights to CyberOwl to carry out this work and Mercia Fund Management has provided seed funding. Using 'Bayesian analytics' to attribute threat levels and to assess the probability and risk of certain types of attack, CyberOwl's work will focus on creating an early warning system to detect breaches such as insider attacks, and to develop appropriate counter attacks and evasion techniques. This work is based on research shortlisted for the Lloyd's Science of Risk Prize 2015 under the 'Cyber Risk' category.

Dr Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, reader in cyber security at Coventry University and director of CyberOwl, comments: "It is vital that leading edge British cyber security research has real-world impact and the work we're doing here is directly applicable to the so-called Internet of Things of networked applications and devices that we rely on in our increasingly connected communities. Our new venture with Crossword will help ensure that modern digital systems can take advantage of major advances in the very large-scale network monitoring approaches that we have pioneered at Coventry University."

Initiatives like this between academia and business are positive signs that the hackers' growing stranglehold can be broken. We will need more of them in the days to come.

Brian Wall
Editor
Computing Security
brian.wall@btc.co.uk