Articles by Paul Bryant

The Latest from CERT NZ What’s New? CERT NZ is a central organisation that receives cyber incident reports from both individuals and businesses. It tracks attacks and incidents, and provides advice and alerts. The quarterly updates from CERT provide a valuable snapshot of what’s going on with cyber security in NZ, and give us a useful insight into trends and concerns. Their latest update was released last week. It shows a decrease in the number of incidents reported from last quarter, but an increase in the type and complexity of scams. Decrease in Incidents isn’t the Whole Story There was

Background Software is constantly changing. Application and package authors tweak and update existing code more or less continually to provide features, improvements, fixes and workarounds. Also, most software is constructed, at least in part, from third party or open source components or packages, such that large parts of the code are integrated by, but not actually written by, the developer or vendor of the overall application. Given this continual change, and these varying sources of code, it is incredibly common for applications of all types to have as yet unknown security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities come to light over time, either