Pukka Firewall Lessons from Jamie Oliver

In our office I’m willing to bet that food is discussed on average three times a day. Monday mornings will be spent waxing lyrical about the culinary masterpiece we’ve managed to prepare over the weekend. Then at around 11 someone will say, “Where are we going for lunch?” Before going home that evening, maybe there’s a question about the latest eatery in town. 

I expect your office chit chat is not too dissimilar to ours, because food and what we do with it has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years. Cookery programmes like Jamie Oliver's 30 minute meals, the Great British Bake-off and Masterchef have been a big influence. 

Our food obsession, however, might be putting us all at risk, and I don’t just mean from an expanded waistline. Cyber criminals appear to have turned their attention to the food industry, targeting Jamie Oliver’s website with malware. This is the second time that malware has been found on site. News originally broke back in February, and the problem was thought to have been resolved. Then, following a routine site inspection on the 13th of March, webmasters found that the malware had returned or had never actually been completely removed. 

It’s no surprise that cyber criminals have associated themselves with Jamie Oliver, since they’ve been leeching on pop culture and celebrities for years. Back in 2008, typing a star’s name into a search engine and straying away from the official sites was a sure fire way to get malware. Now it seems they’ve cut out the middleman, going straight to the source. This malware was planted directly onto JamieOliver.com.

Apart from bad press, Jamie Oliver has come away unscathed. Nobody has been seriously affected and the situation could have been much worse had the malware got into an organisational network. 

Even with no real damage there’s an important lesson to be learned. Keep your firewall up to date so it can identify nefarious code contained within web pages or applications. If such code tries to execute itself on your machine, a good firewall will identify this as malware.