Information security plays a key role in enterprises management, as it deals with the confidentiality, privacy, integrity, and availability of one of their most valuable resources: data and information. Small and Medium-sized enterprises (SME) are seen as a blind spot in information security and cybersecurity management, which is mainly due to their size, regional and familiar scope, and financial resources. This paper presents an information security and cybersecurity management project, in which a methodology based on the well-known ISO-27001:2013 standard was designed and implemented in fifty SMEs that were located in the center region of Portugal. The project was conducted by a business association located at the center of Portugal and mainly participated by SMEs. The Polytechnic of Leiria and an IT auditing/consulting team were the other two entities that participated on the project. The characterisation of the participating enterprises, the ISO-27001:2013 based methodology developed and implemented in SMEs, as well as the results obtained in this case study, are depicted and analysed in the paper. The attained results show a clear benefit to the audited and intervened SMEs, being mainly attested by the increasing of their information security management robustness and collaborators’ cyberawareness.

Information security and cybersecurity management play a key role in modern enterprises. There is a plethora of standards, frameworks, and tools, ISO 27000 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework being two relevant families of international Information Security Management Standards (ISMSs). Globally, these standards are implemented by dedicated tools to collect and further analyze the information security auditing that is carried out in an enterprise. The overall goal of the auditing is to evaluate and mitigate the information security risk. The risk assessment is grounded by auditing processes, which examine and assess a list of predefined controls in a wide variety of subjects regarding cybersecurity and information security. For each control, a checklist of actions is applied and a set of corrective measures is proposed, in order to mitigate the flaws and to increase the level of compliance with the standard being used. The auditing process can apply different ISMSs in the same time frame. However, as these processes are time-consuming, involve on-site interventions, and imply specialized consulting teams, the methodology usually adopted by enterprises consists of applying a single ISMS and its existing tools and frameworks. This strategy brings overall less flexibility and diversity to the auditing process and, consequently, to the assessment results of the audited enterprise. In a broad sense, the auditing needs of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are different from large companies and do not fit with all the existing ISMSs’ frameworks, that is a set of controls of a particular ISMS is not suitable to be applied in an auditing process, in an SME. In this paper, we propose a generic and client-centered web-integrated cybersecurity auditing information system. The proposed system can be widely used in a myriad of auditing processes, as it is flexible and it can load a set of predefined controls’ checklist assessment and their corresponding mitigation tasks’ list. It was designed to meet both SMEs’ and large enterprises’ requirements and stores auditing and intervention-related data in a relational database. The information system was tested within an ISO 27001:2013 information security auditing project, in which fifty SMEs participated. The overall architecture and design are depicted and the global results are detailed in this paper.

Bitcoin continues to get more and more attention from the media, mainly because of the volatility of its value and insignificantly associated with the technological innovation. This cryptocurrency is supported by an immutable database and is distributed throughout a network of thousands of nodes, known as Blockchain. One way to ensure that all the concepts behind the Blockchain technology and infrastructure are seized is to conduct the development of one of the most popular context applications for it: a wallet for well-known cryptocurrencies. Yet Another Bitcoin Wallet (YABW) is a hybrid application available for both Android and iOS, which was developed with the Ionic and Angular frameworks. This application communicates with Bitcoin Blockchain to send, receive and store bitcoins; provides a set of features focused on security and user experience, and is available on the Play Store and Apple Store. A rather relevant issue that is becoming a major subject of current research is the application of the Blockchain infrastructure to other contexts that are neither directly connected to cryptocurrencies, nor are finance related. The implementation of a proof-of-concept application proposes the use of a blockchain for a specific case study: the exchange of meal vouchers of an institution amongst students. This is achieved using the decentralized platform Ethereum, which allows us to create a Smart Contract using the Solidity programming language to create a token that follows the Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC), the ERC-20 standard and represents the meal vouchers. This second application uses the architecture defined for YABW, reusing major components and custom developing specific modules to enhance the required features. There is still a lot of research to be done on the non-financial applicability of the Blockchain infrastructure and technology, but for the moment, we have left further evidence that it is possible and is a relative straight-forward process to accomplish from the technological perspective.