Cyber Essentials Scheme explained

Cyber Security is of increasing importance to private companies, SMEs and organisations. Becoming certified against a cyber security standard can be proven a trivial task. Getting familiar with the Cyber Essentials Scheme might proven invaluable when it comes to the cyber security of a business/organisation and to obtaining government contracts. Becoming certified to a cyber security standard significantly lowers the risk of becoming the victim of a data breach. 

According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (2013-2015) most of the attacks require very little skill or experience to be carried out. Consequently, the UK government in order to roll out a basic level of security for protecting businesses against these widely spread cyber attacks (usually low-tech attacks) introduced the Cyber Essentials Scheme on the 1st of October 2014.

Guest Speaker for University of South Wales (Information Security Research Group) - CyberSecurity and the Payment Card Industry

I had the pleasure to be invited as a guest speaker to the University of South Wales in order to give a talk about CyberSecurity and the Payment Card Industry more specifically for the Information Security Research Group (ISRG).

The talk included an introduction to the Payment Card Industry (PCI),  Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). The participant had an opportunity to understand what is an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV), a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) and last but not least a PCI Forensics Investigator (PFI).

Download videos from online resources, such as YouTube, Dailymotion, etc..

Among the most popular video hosting resource on the web is YouTube, being the third most popular website in the world. Sometimes we find ourselves in need to download a video in order to be able to watch it offline. 

There are several online services which allow us to save a copy of our favourite videos but not all of them allows you the option of downloading in different qualities and formats.

BSides London 2015 - CFP

I hope you all look forward to BSides London 2015, https://www.securitybsides.org.uk. In case you want to tweet about it, this year we are using the #BSidesLDN2015 hash tag. The event will take place on Wednesday 3/Jun/2015 at the ILEC Conference Centre, 47 Lillie Road, SW6 1UD, London (see the MAP). 

As a side note, this year InfoSecurity Europe in London will take place between the dates 2nd and 4th/June/2015. Usually, Security BSides London is in line with InfoSec and the event takes place on the first day of InfoSec. However, this year, make sure you note down that the event will take place on the second day of InfoSec (see InfoSec). 

I am happy to see that my talk for this year is number 2 on the list of submissions (CFP Submissions). Voting for the talks opened today 20/Apr/2015 and it will be running until 1/May/2015. Please find some more information about my talk in the section below (click Read More). You can find/follow me at twitter @drgfragkos and I really hope you spread the word regarding this talk to your friends and followers. 

How to quick split an .mp3 file using Linux

Sometimes you just need to split an .mp3 file and it is convenient to know how to do this under Linux. When you simply need to split (cut) an .mp3 file there is no need for advance editing and/or transcoding tools. 

Using my Kali distribution, I installed the mp3splt application.

$ apt-get install mp3splt

After that, everything was easy enough. Just run the following command. As you can see I wanted to split the file and get the chunk from the beginning (00.00.00) until the 3 minutes and 43 seconds (03.43) into the song. The original file was the live.mp3 and the new file to output is the live_new.mp3 but all that is straight forward to the trained eye. 

$ mp3splt live.mp3 00.00.00 03.43 -o live_new.mp3

Beat in mind that mp3splt is powerful tool and can do many things for you if you want to play around with mp3 files. Find out more at its on-line man page here.

If you want to play your .mp3 file from the command line one of the tools you can is mplayer. You can find a list of short-cuts this tool supports here.