Tag: sophos

Sophos has announced the opening of its second UK office in Manchester which the cybersecurity vendor says will expand its sales presence in the region.

Sophos vice president of sales Jonathan Bartholomew said the new office was an exciting move to support Sophos’ strategic growth.

“With the additional sales resources, we can further our plans already well underway to focus on the fastest-growing part of our business – our next-gen cybersecurity portfolio. “Manchester is a vibrant city, the National Cyberforce recently announced an office there, and the location is rapidly becoming the biggest technology hub in the UK outside of London”, Bartholomew said.

Located in the Deansgate region of Manchester, the office will house sales, technical and account management positions. Read more…

Security outfit Sophos noted how security challenges during the pandemic offered IT teams a unique opportunity to build their cybersecurity expertise.

In a glass half full report entitled he IT Security Team: 2021 and Beyond, Sophos noted that IT teams faced a rise in cyberattacks (82 percent) and a heavier security workload (84 percent) over the course of 2020 strengthened their security skills and knowledge. Despite the challenges created by the pandemic, 52  percent of the IT teams surveyed said team morale increased during 2020. Read more…

Security outfit Sophos has added up some numbers and worked out that the average total cost of recovery from a ransomware attack has more than doubled in a year.

In its The State of Ransomware 2021 report, Sophos found that the cost increased from $761,106 in 2020 to $1.85 million in 2021.

The average ransom paid is $170,404. The global findings also show that only eight percent of organisations managed to get back all of their data after paying a ransom, with 29 percent getting back no more than half of their data. Read more…

UK cybersecurity firm Sophos has notified customers that data has potentially been leaked online due to a misconfigured database.

The company said it was alerted to the misconfiguration by a security researcher, and that it fixed the issue immediately.

The outfit insists that only a “small subset” of the company’s customers were affected, with first and last names, email addresses and phone numbers thought to have been accessed. However, this is the second time this year that Sophos has been hit by a security leak, which is rather bad for a security company. The earlier attack came after cybercriminals exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the firms XG firewall in April. Attackers used this to deploy ransomware but were eventually foiled by the security firm. Read more…

There is a significant risk awareness gap between IT leaders like CIOs and CISOs who are charged with protecting the UK’s public sector organisations and their frontline IT teams.

A survey from Sophos said that some of these gaps have a direct impact on IT security. Among the most critical differences, a worrying 55 percent of public sector IT leaders believe their organisation’s digital data is less valuable than that of the private sector, despite the fact that they handle highly sensitive, confidential, personal, and government information. Read more…