Official Statement from Aura Information Security About the Recent Media Claims

content/images/gallery/random3/auralogo3.png Today, we came across a statement that was on pastebin.com that had come from a New Zealand based news site stuff.co.nz. In this statement it was lead to believe that a very well known security firm Aura Information Security from New Zealand was "out to get anonymous" mainly due to the title of the pastebin paste which was "Nz fights Anonymous" but turns out that paste is an exact copy of the article stuff.co.nz did. Well this alone got us a bit worried, as normally when a company does this it ends fairly bad for them, so we contacted them to confirm if it was indeed a real statement or not, which we can confirm it was a false statement and in the words of the Managing Director Andy Prow "As some people have noticed, there are inaccuracies in this article about us. The story’s title was to be on the subject of "Local NZ company proud to be in the Deloitte APAC Tech Fast 500 for the 2nd year running". Unfortunately our local Kapiti Observer reporter lost that focus and has misquoted our spokesperson by mixing up her statements. We’d therefore like to provide some corrections: 1) Aura helps organisations defend themselves against attacks from a range of hackers and cyber criminals that include lone individuals, competitors, disgruntled employees, through to hacktivist organisations like Anonymous, but not Anonymous exclusively. 2) Anonymous did not target MetService or Solid Energy as described in the article. 3) No comment was made about whether these organisations were Aura customers or not, they were just two companies in the NZ DomPost news last year. 4) PCI stands for Payment Card Industry. Aura RedEye is the only PCI ASV (Approved Scanning Vendor) in NZ – there’s a great range of PCI QSAs here in NZ. 5) Generally speaking, our experience is that New Zealand organisations are not as proactive with information security as many OECD countries, and this includes Australia. 6) Anonymous have not targeted Aura. We imagine they’re busy with a few more politically-important fish to fry overseas!" So once again we are seeing media making a bit of a mess with things and as you can see with point #1 that Aura does not have beef with anonymous and as #6 points out anonymous does not have beef with them.