Cyscon is an IT consultancy with its main headquarters in

Düsseldorf Düsseldorf is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in the state after Cologne and the List of cities in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, seventh-largest city ...

, Germany, founded by Thorsten Kraft and Thomas Wolf. Cyson was a member of a group of companies in taking down the computer virus Conficker as part of the Confiker Working Group and is a founding member of Botfrei, the German anti-botnet advisory centre. Since 2013, Cyscon was a founder of the online security audit Check & Secure and is an official partner of the (English: Federal Office for Information Security)

Cyscon SIRT (C-SIRT)

Cyscon is responsible for C-SIRT, an online incident reporting team that works with a variety of partners to identify domain hacking and incidents of malware across the internet. Cyscon's C-SIRT is part of the VirusTotal scanning engine.

Check & Secure

In 2013, Cyscon, alongside

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public Limited Company () is a British Multinational company, multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates Service (economic ...

, founded Check & Secure as part as an end-user safety initiative. The test is divided into four parts, a Router Check, a

Botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more Internet bot, bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send Spamming, sp ...

check, a Browser and Plugin check and a "Cyber Vaccination", which includes the software of SurfRight's HitmanPro.

Press coverage

In January 2014 and again in April 2014, massive

data theft Data theft is the unauthorized duplication or deletion of an organization's electronic information. Data theft is a growing phenomenon primarily caused by system administrators and office workers with access to technology such as database server ...

s, mostly of email addresses and passwords, were discovered in Germany, causing panic amongst the general public. Check & Secure was cited in German magazines such as Spiegel and Stern as a solution to the issue, as users were advised to update their browsers and plugins using the tool.

Co-operation with BSI

As part of the reaction to the issue of 18 million email accounts being lost, the Federal Office for Information Security set up a service with which the general public could check whether their own address had been compromised. Although cyscon were initially critical of the methods used by the BSI in an article on the Check & Secure blog, the company has since worked with the ministry to improve consumer safety in Germany, becoming a member of the newly formed (English: Alliance for Cyber Security).

STOP. THINK. CONNECT

Early in 2014, Check & Secure announced its partnership with the STOP. THINK. CONNECT program, powered by the National Cyber Security Alliance. Check & Secure is an international partner of the program and will as such focus on consumers in Germany and Russia.

Swiss Internet Security Alliance

In September 2014, Cyscon was named as the technical provider for the Swiss Internet Security Alliance. The partnership between cyscon and partners such as Swisscom and Sunrise was a national online project focusing on end user security. The SISA portal followed the template set by Check & Secure.

PhishKiller

Cyscon partnered with

Opera (web browser) Opera is a multi-platform web browser developed by its namesake company Opera. The current edition of the browser is based on Chromium. Opera is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS (Safari WebKit engine). Opera offers two m ...

in June 2015 to create PhishKiller.Opera integrates cyscon's security software to protect German users from phishing attacks
/ref> PhishKiller was a collaborative project with partners from several European countries as well as Australia. The project was intended to provide National online incident reporting teams, security vendors and end users with tools for the recognition of

Phishing Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticate ...

. The initiative was ended in 2016.

References

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External links

Official website
Technology companies established in 2001 Companies based in Düsseldorf