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    Ward Solutions announces 22 new jobs and €1.8M investment

    Ward Solutions, Ireland’s leading information security provider, today announced the creation of 22 new jobs at its Dublin and Belfast offices. These jobs are being created as part of a new €1.8M investment to fund significant expansion and upgrade of all services delivered in Ward’s Security Operations Centre in Citywest, Dublin. This includes the enhancement of services such as managed security, digital forensics, e-Discovery and security analytics.
    Founded in 1999, Ward Solutions provides a comprehensive range of information security services to more than 300 customers across the island of Ireland. Key services include security consultancy, secure managed services and software development.
    Ward Solutions will begin recruitment immediately and will have all 22 new employees on board within two years. This will bring total employee numbers to 80 before the end of 2016. 16 of the new hires will be based in Citywest, Dublin and 6 will be based in its new office in Belfast city centre. The new roles will include information security engineers, developers, information security consultants, customer services and sales positions.
    The investment is focused on all areas where Ward is experiencing and anticipating growth. This includes adding significant capability to its security operations and secure managed services centre, which is being equipped with highly advanced information security technologies. This includes risk assessment, monitoring, analysis and remediation capabilities, identity and access management, online policy and compliance management, as well as the key personnel to deliver the services securely.
    Reflecting the increasing compliance and litigation demand, Ward is also enhancing its digital forensics, e-Discovery and security analytics services at both a platform and capabilities level.
    Ward Solutions has experienced an average year-on-year growth rate of 20% over the past two years and predicts that this growth will accelerate further to 30% per annum for the next two years. It expects to achieve revenues in excess of €10M by 2016.
    While most of Ward’s existing customer base is in the Republic of Ireland, it sees significant growth opportunities in Northern Ireland, following the opening of its new Belfast office. Ward also serves a small number of customers in Britain and will target considerable growth in the UK market over the next two years.
    Ward’s customer base includes a wide range of private and public sector organisations, such as CIE, Vodafone, National College of Ireland, Bord Gáis, Fleetmatics and the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.
    Pat Larkin, CEO, Ward Solutions, comments, “This investment in new employees, technologies and services will provide us with a very solid and scalable platform to achieve our aggressive growth plans. There has been a huge rise in demand for our services as the security threat landscape has continued to evolve and become increasingly difficult for businesses to manage. Customers like the fact that they deal with a provider who can deliver on all of their information security requirements.”
    “We have the largest and most capable team of information security resources in Ireland and can mobilise quickly to solve any IT security problem. We continuously invest a lot of time and budget in R&D, developing new solutions to increase our customers’ security and compliance, and reduce the complexities caused by information security management and incidents. We’re really looking forward to bringing in new talent to our Dublin and Belfast offices to add to our existing highly experienced team. By the end of this investment, we will have the largest information security resource on the island, with the widest range of capabilities.”
    Paul Hogan, CTO, Ward Solutions and Pat Larkin, CEO, Ward Solut
     

    Insights

    Did someone just steal my password again?

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    Did someone just steal my password again?
    I was reflecting on last week’s news that a Russian gang had stolen over 1.2 billion passwords from 420,000 different sites, mainly through security vulnerabilities exposed using code injection techniques such as SQL injection. Although there is some scepticism to the veracity of this story, it’s clear that large scale security breaches are becoming more and more prevalent.
    For example: In 2011, Sony announced that personal details of over 100 million accounts were compromised. In December 2013 we learnt that Target (a large American retail chain) was hacked resulting in over 40 million credit cards and 70 million addresses being compromised. In May of this year, eBay announced that 145 million accounts were compromised in a massive hack. Although these are not quite a ‘tip of the iceberg’ stories there are lots of further examples out there, some closer to home.
     
    What do you as a user do?
    So as a user when you hear these stories what should you do? Well the best reactive measure when you hear that a website where you have an account has been hacked is to change your password immediately. However even before that happens, and hopefully it won’t, there are some guidelines to help minimise your exposure.
    1. Use strong passwords, ideally a minimum of 8 characters with combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
    2. Don’t use the same password for different sites. The issue here is that a compromised account on one site may lead to your account on another site also being vulnerable.
    3. Use 2 factor authentication where possible. A number of online services now offer alternatives to passwords, see here for further details.
    4. It’s difficult to remember lots of different usernames and passwords so consider using a local password manager or wallet.
    5. Change your password at regular intervals.
     
    What do you as an organisation do?
    First work on prevention; security should be part of your strategic thinking so adopt a security approach designed to protect you by reducing the attack surface area that you present. This typically results in deploying a range of security solutions such as firewalls, intrusion prevention system and advanced threat detection systems. Once in place perform threat based risk and vulnerability assessments at regular intervals to determine just how well your defences are working and what other forms of protection you may need. Finally as a last line have secure incident and event management solutions in place to quickly identify if someone is trying to compromise you and how they are doing it.