With the usual consternation, we see the end of the year is approaching apace*. That means it's time to review what Father Christmas and his elves, gnomes and reindeers, if you happen to believe in them, have put under the computer security tree. Time to see what gadgets you can expect to protect you in 2023, and what goodies you can use to make your personal and professional life more secure.
Neither this year's annual closure nor the New Year fireworks will stop any bad witches from poking into CERN. Like in 2022, when they kept the Computer Security team busy with the alleged extortion of 200 GB of data by some red-nosed script kiddies (where these 200 GB were found to be public files linked to CERN's "root" software), two one-hour distributed denial-of-service snowball attacks against CERN's outer perimeter firewall (which was nicely absorbed by the latter) and a "CEO-fraud" attack against one of our account managers aiming to steal some money (which was spotted before any transaction was approved). Internally, too, CERN was facing some "trouble": remember our annual phishing campaign?
So, it's time for some big presents! This winter, our elves and gnomes have filled your stocking with new anti-malware software for your personal devices used at home or at CERN for professional duties. Just take their voucher and install that protective software from the CERN app store for Windows ("ESET Endpoint Security") or via the Mac Self-Service ("ESET Endpoint Antivirus"). On top of that, you'll find some hardware tokens in your Christmas hamper. They call them "YubiKeys", in either USB-A or USB-C style, ready to better shield your CERN computing account. Join the community of 1500+ people who have already enrolled for the CERN two-factor authentication scheme
