In the first of a four-part series looking at the finalists for the Cork Company of the Year Awards, Munster Business Hub editor Alan Healy casts an eye over the contenders in the Emerging category.

It took just five minutes for Edward Skrba and Christopher Galicki to hack a password from the stage in the Cork Opera House at the international FutureSec gathering.

The world is changing fast. New technologies are disrupting traditional ways of doing business, new markets are being created and innovation is turning the world into a more connected place.

These are busy times for Ronan Murphy and Smarttech247.

Cork will host a major conference on cybersecurity in September with the burgeoning cybercrime industry’s exponential growth expected to exceed €4.5 trillion in two years.

As the incoming Chair at it@cork, Anthony O’Callaghan is well qualified for the challenge, having spent four years as vice chairman alongside his predecessor, Caroline O’Driscoll, who steps down as chair in next month.

SMEs have been urged to beef up their cybersecurity defences as attacks increase exponentially.

Mass-scale ransomware demands will become all the more common, while firms will struggle to repair reputational damage in the event of a cyber attack, Irish cybersecurity experts have warned.

The hacking of hundreds of German politicians’ data, including that of chancellor Angela Merkel, should be a wake-up call for Irish public representatives to better protect their most sensitive records, a cybersecurity expert has said.

Irish artificial intelligence startup Getvisibility has announced an expansion and opening of an office in Boston, Massachusetts, which positions it to sell its data protection software platform into the US market.

Cybercrime is worth trillions of euro and Cork-based Smarttech247 is at the coalface of the battle against the online underworld. Pádraig Hoare speaks with chief executive Ronan Murphy.

In the rapidly expanding domain of global cyber security breaches, 2017 set a new bar for computer network attacks.

Increased Garda investment against cybercrime will see the introduction of dedicated regional units within the next two years, a conference on cybersecurity has heard.

Cybersecurity experts have warned so-called ‘whaling attacks’, in which company CEOs are targeted by scammers, have tripled in the past year.

A leading cyber-security firm has unveiled ambitious expansion plans after opening a new €1.5m hi-tech security operations centre in Cork.

Irish people need to be more guarded in their social media activities, and businesses are not investing enough in their IT security, one of the Garda’s top cyber crime detectives has warned.