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.

From the Fall 2021 Issue

What Should Your Home Cybersecurity Set Up Look Like?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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

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

DLP Technology – Why Does it Fail?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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 , IBS Software

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 , IBS Software

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 , IBS Software

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

From the Spring 2018 Issue

Crowdsourced Security – An Alternative to Pentesting?

Author(s):

Alex Haynes, CISO , IBS Software

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Crowdsourced security programs have grown in popularity to the point where some enterprises have dispensed with traditional pentesting, using the crowdsourced model exclusively for auditing the security of their applications and infrastructure. What is Crowdsourced Security? Crowdsourced security methodologies invite a group of people (a crowd) to test an asset for vulnerabilities. The number of … Read more