C is for…

CAT5

We don’t really hear this term very often any more, but it refers to probably the most common form of network cabling in offices and homes over the last 15-20 years. It’s the cable you may connect from your home router to your laptop if you don’t use Wi-Fi – it’s almost certainly been provided with the router and you may have left it in the box.

The picture below shows the ends of a CAT5 cable. Recognise it?

CIA Triad

This is a common term used to refer to the three main pillars of information security, Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Information Security is all about addressing these three topics when applied to data.

Cloud

“The Cloud” is a term used by many, and the common reference for it is “someone else’s computer”. That’s a pretty good explanation, in that cloud services are provided by a range of companies where they have buildings housing lots of servers, and you effectively rent out one or more of those servers. The benefits are that you don’t have to manage the servers, procurement of parts or maintenance. You don’t have to worry about ensuring the power is always on and quite often your backups are done for you. You can also generally flex storage space up and down as you need it, rather than having to own lots when you don’t always use it. Cloud can therefore seem quite attractive from a cost point of view. The disadvantages – which are actually things you need to ask about – are that you don’t know who has access to your physical servers, you don’t know who you’re sharing server space with, and you don’t necessarily know which country your data is being held in. You therefore need to have a good handle on the security of data, and make sure your Governance / audit processes take this into account.

Confidentiality

Part of the CIA triad, confidentiality is concerned with making sure only authorised people have access to data.

For example, you would not want just anyone to be able to read your medical records: your doctor’s surgery or hospital will keep that information confidential.

Cryptocurrency

Put simply, cryptocurrency is an electronic form of currency which is not regulated, managed or overseen by any banks or governments. Based on cryptographic techniques, it uses blockchain technology to validate every transaction. There is no single point of control. Some stock exchanges and banks are starting to recognise the various currencies, such as Bitcoin, Ripple and Ethereum, and to actively trade in them, while others are banning cryptocurrency altogether. At the time of writing this article, values for the various currencies have been fluctuating massively and it’s likely that they will take some time to settle down.

Cryptography

Cryptography is all about scrambling data to make it unreadable or impossible to understand without first unscrambling it. The technical terms for these processes are encryption and decryption. Many methods have been used over the years to encrypt data.

Manual manipulation of messages eg using one time pads (as the name infers, these were sheets of paper which were to be used only once: messages were scrambled using the random set of letters on the pad and the recipient would have to be using the same pad to decrypt the message) has been done for at least 2000 years or more.

Computers have been increasingly used for this process in the last 70 years. Enigma was a machine used by the Germans in WW2 to securely swap messages and was the name given to the code which was broken by Polish mathematicians in the 1930s and again by a team led by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park during the war, as dramatised in the film The Imitation Game. Later in the war, a code called Lorenz was broken using a machine devised by Bill Tutte and built by Tommy Flowers. The machine was called Colossus and was the first real computer in the world. It was destroyed after the war and its creation kept secret until many years later, so an American invention in the late 1940s called ENIAC has until recently been thought to be the first computer.

Modern cryptography relies on complicated maths and massive processing power, which can only be provided by computers. Techniques are continuously evolving, and manual cracking of codes is nigh on impossible now.

Cyber

We all use the term, but what exactly is cyber? There are many different definitions, all of which are right. The most basic is probably “something to do with computers”. It’s important that all people in a business share the same definition, so you all know exactly what you mean by the term.

I believe that in 5 to 10 years we won’t be talking about cyber- anything. Cybersecurity, cyberwarfare etc will have lost the prefix and we’ll just be talking about security, warfare etc.