Author: Alex Haynes

Alex Haynes is an independent researcher with a background in offensive security. He is credited for discovering vulnerabilities in products by Microsoft, Adobe, Pinterest, Amazon Web Services and IBM. He is a former Top 10 ranked researcher on Bugcrowd and a member of the Synack Red Team. He is also a frequent contributor to InfoSec publications and speaks regularly at conferences on the topics of offensive security, vulnerability management and crowdsourced security. He is currently the CISO at IBS Software.

Other People’s Data Breaches: They Can Help You Too

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Data Breaches

Over the past few years, numerous well-known brands and major corporations have been targeted by cyber-attacks resulting in the exposure of millions of customers’ personal and sensitive information, making data breaches an increasingly common occurrence. Although the immediate effects of these breaches can be severe for both affected individuals and companies, there is potential for … Read more

From the Winter 2023 Issue

Teaching Kids How to Hack

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Teaching Kids How to Hack

Many industry professionals bemoan the lack of qualified candidates within information security and resource scarcity is a common issue for many companies. According to latest estimates and depending which numbers you follow, there is a potential shortfall of up to one million cybersecurity professionals globally and this is just getting worse. Granted, geo-political issues like … Read more

From the Fall 2022 Issue

Zero Trust is Not a Product

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Zero Trust is Not a Product

Every year at the bevy of conferences that dot the Information Security landscape you can always detect an inherent theme. This may be influenced by acute threats (i.e., Ransomware), a new regulatory environment (i.e., GDPR) or even just a sudden change in how we work, as we all experienced during the pandemic. The issue Zero … Read more

From the Summer 2022 Issue

Ukraine is Winning the Cyberwar Against Russia

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Ukraine is Winning - Alex Haynes

During the build-up to the illegal invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, there was consternation among information security professionals about what would happen on the cyber front. The prevailing groupthink at the time was that if countries in the West imposed sanctions, then they would suddenly be subjected to blistering Russian cyber-attacks that would … Read more

From the Spring 2022 Issue

Getting Offensive With Your Third Parties

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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ah-sp22 Feature Image

Third-party onboarding today isn’t easy and with the rise in supply chain attacks, the importance of auditing and ensuring your third parties won’t impact your infrastructure from a security perspective remains a burning issue. Many companies still maintain a tick box approach when onboarding or managing third parties and mainly consist of sending out questionnaires … Read more

From the Winter 2022 Issue

Releasing 0-Days Through Public Disclosure Only Helps Attackers

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Zero Day Disclosure

At 2:25pm, on the 9th of December 2021, an infamous (now deleted) tweet linking a 0-day proof of concept exploit for the vulnerability that came to be known as ‘Log4Shell’ on github (also now deleted), set the internet on fire and kicked off a holiday season of companies scrambling to mitigate, patch and then patch … Read more

From the Fall 2021 Issue

What Should Your Home Cybersecurity Set Up Look Like?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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What Should Your Home Cybersecurity Setup Look Like_

As we enter National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s easy to forget that your personal security posture in your home environment is just as important as your enterprise environment. There’s so much focus today on enterprise security that it’s easy to overlook something that can have as much impact on your day to day as in … Read more

From the Summer 2021 Issue

Cybersecurity in Virtual Worlds – Are the Problems the Same? The Identity Paradigm in Online Games

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Cybersecurity-in-Virtual-Worlds

Over the past year, online gaming has been extremely popular, boosted by the many people in various parts of the world who were stuck at home during lockdown, but still keen to engage in social contact. These social interactions based in virtual worlds resemble our own and the research presented below is based on the … Read more

Endpoint Security – Cutting Through the Complexity With Clear-Cut Requirements

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Endpoint Security

Endpoint security has evolved drastically over the past 10 years. While previously it only referred to ‘anti-virus’ and typically only on workstations, endpoint security has been replaced by a bewildering array of options that can do dozens of things. With the increase in options, we naturally get an increase in complexity, and combine this with … Read more