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 Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

From the Spring 2022 Issue

Getting Offensive With Your Third Parties

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

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 Fall 2021 Issue

What Should Your Home Cybersecurity Set Up Look Like?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

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 , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

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 , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

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

DLP Technology – Why Does it Fail?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

DLP Technology

Long ago, before GDPR, there was a class of technology called DLP that claimed to solve all your data leakage and data protection issues.  An acronym that stands for “data loss prevention” (it can also be referred to as “data leakage protection” or “data loss protection,” depending on who you are talking to) was supposed … Read more

From the Spring 2021 Issue

How Much is Too Much When Paying Out a Reward for a Vulnerability?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

how-much-is-too-much-when-paying-out-a-reward-for-a-vulnerability

There has been a lot of publicity surrounding ‘bug bounty’ programs that pay out seemingly large rewards for finding vulnerabilities in web applications. This trend has increased over the years as crowdsourced security programs have matured since their inception almost 10 years ago and their adoption has become mainstream. Should we pay out large sums … Read more

Credentials: Check and Protect

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

Protect Credentials from Breaches

Today, breaches continue unabated at the same alarming rate to which we have grown accustomed. More than 36 billion records were exposed in 2020 alone and that’s only counting those we know about. The real figure will rise far higher. The rate of these data leaks is so frequent that it is hard to track … Read more

From the Winter 2021 Issue

Automated Pentesting – Can it Replace Humans?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , Cheshire Datasystems Ltd.

Automated Pentesting

In the past few years, cybersecurity automation in many spheres of Cybersecurity increased dramatically. However, pentesting remains stubbornly immune to this. While crowdsourced security has evolved as an alternative to pentesting in the past 10 years, it’s not based on automation. Rather, the alternative simply throws more humans at a problem and in the process, … Read more