Amanda Watlington relates to USAToday article on Blogging and CEO on a post Blogs and Feeds: CEO Blogs — Where Angels(?) Fear to Tread. I am a CEO of a new venture company and a blogger for the last four months and I wanted to write down what do I get from it: 1) Feedback on my thoughts – As a CEO and a person in general I have different opinions on various subjects related…
It’s not hard to understand the concept of proactive cyber defense: acting in anticipation of an attack against a computer or network. The goal is getting in front of attacks by evading, outwitting, or neutralizing them early instead of waiting for the damage to start like reactive cyber defenses. It’s also not hard to understand the benefits of being proactive: preventing the negative effects of cyber attacks instead of trying to minimize the damage. The only thing hard…
Cloud usage is increasing rapidly. Analysts forecast growth of 17 percent for the worldwide public cloud services market in 2020 alone. This proliferation comes on top of already widespread cloud adoption. In a recent report by Flexera, over 83 percent of companies described themselves as intermediate to heavy users of cloud platforms, while 93 percent report having a multi-cloud strategy. With a growing number of companies planning on doing more in diverse cloud environments, cloud workloads are becoming…
In recent ten years, I was involved in the disclosure of multiple vulnerabilities to different organizations and each story is unique and diverse as there is no standard way of doing it. I am not a security researcher and did not find those vulnerabilities on my own, but I was there. A responsible researcher, subjective to your definition of what is responsible, discloses first the vulnerability to the developer of the product via email or…
Softbank acquired BostonDynamics, the four legs robots maker, alongside secretive Schaft, two-legged?robots maker. Softbank, the perpetual acquirer of emerging leaders, has entered a foray into artificial life by diluting their stakes in media and communications and setting a stronghold into the full supply chain of artificial life. It starts with chipsets (ARM), but then they divested a quarter of the holdings since Google (TPU) and others have shown that specialized processors for artificial life are…
Any opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employers. This blog and the posts published shall not constitute an offer to buy, sell, or solicit securities. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment, legal, tax or other advice nor is it to be relied on in making an investment or other decision. This may contain forward-looking statements and projections that are based on my current beliefs and assumptions. All…
Chatbots are everywhere. It feels like the early days of mobile apps where you either knew someone who is building an app or many others planning to do so. Chatbots have their magic. It?s a frictionless interface allowing you to chat with someone naturally. The main difference is that on the other side there is a machine and not a person. Still, one as old as I got to think whether it is the end…
Targeted attacks take many forms, though there is one common tactic most of them share: Exploitation. To achieve their goal, they need to penetrate different systems on-the-go. The way this is done is by exploiting unpatched or unknown vulnerabilities. More common forms of exploitation happen via a malicious document that exploits vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader or a malicious URL that exploits the browser in order to set a foothold inside the end-point computer. Zero-Day is…
Yet another new Ransomware with a new sophisticated approach?http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/crypvault-new-crypto-ransomware-encrypts-and-quarantines-files/ Pay attention that the key section in the description on the way it operates is “The malware arrives to affected systems via an email attachment.?When users?execute the attached malicious JavaScript file, it will?download four files from its C&C server:” When users execute the JavaScript files it means the JavaScript was loaded into the browser application and exploited the browser in order to get in and then…
Background Attackers are Stronger Now The cyber-world is witnessing a fast-paced digital arms race between attackers and security defense systems, and 2014 showed everyone that attackers have the upper hand in this match.? Attackers are on the rise due to their growing financial interest?motivating a new level of sophisticated attacks that existing defenses are unmatched to combat. The fact that almost everything today is connected to the net and the ever-growing complexity of software and…
Microsoft and Google are?bashing each other on the zero-day exploit in Windows 8.1 that was disclosed by Google last week following a 90 days grace period. Disclosing is a broad term when speaking about vulnerabilities and exploits – you can disclose to the public the fact that there is a vulnerability and then you can disclose how to exploit it with an example source code. There is a big difference between just telling the world…
Google Project Zero has debuted with the aim of solving the vulnerabilities problem by identifying zero-day vulnerabilities, notifying the company which owns the software, and giving them 90 days to solve the problem. After 90 days they publish the exploit. And they just did it to Microsoft. I remember quite a while ago when we decided at the cyber labs at Ben-Gurion University to adopt such a policy following our discovery of a vulnerability in…
The surging amount of cyber attacks against companies and their dear consequences pushes companies to the edge. Defensive measures can go only so far in terms of effectiveness, assuming they are fully deployed which is also far from being the common case. Companies are too slow to react to this new threat which is caused by a fast-paced acceleration in the level of sophistication of attackers. Today companies are at a weak point. From a…
Sony hack has flooded my news feed in recent weeks, everyone talking about how it was done, why, whom to blame, the trails which lead to North Korea, and the politics around it. I?ve been following the story from the first report with an unexplained curiosity and was not sure why since I read about hacks all day long. A word of explanation about my “weird” habit of following hacks continuously, being a CTO of…
The last decade, 2000-2009, flourished with new content creation tools: blogging, tweets, videos, personal pages/profiles, and many others. One thing that did not catch the speed of innovation on the content creation side is content discovery tools. We are still mainly using Google’s interface of search results to find stuff interesting. There were few tryouts for visualizing things differently but none of them prevailed. The feeling of something missing always happens to me when I…
I had my twitter account for quite a while but never really twitted. I guess I was part of the million accounts out there, just idle. I did not find a time to blog so automatically I considered tweeting as something I won’t have time for it also. Last week I started tweeting and it is very nice. I enjoy it. Same as blogging but faster, shorter and more in sync with the so many…
I have been reading about the whereabouts of News Corp., Google, and Microsoft in recent two weeks and I noticed something weird happening here about but could not put my finger on it. To those who do not know the storyline here is a short description posted on Hitwise today: Two weeks ago we posted on Rupert Murdoch’s threat to block Google from Indexing News Corp. content. While at first it seemed as though Murdoch…
RSS is a protocol for transmitting changes within blogs that has been widely adopted and provides a solution for a big problem people had in tracking changes in content effectively. RSS is doing a perfect job in providing updates to content based on time of change but still lacks support for providing other criteria for ordering changes. At first RSS has been used solely for providing list of recent changes whether for blogs or other…
Strategic Board was initially an idea about a new competitive intelligence/market intelligence tool for enterprises in the IT sector. Since then many things have changed including our concept and vision and probably the only permanent thing here is me and Strategic Board the name itself:) One of the building blocks a competitive intelligence tool is required to have in order to be effective is comparisons and more specifically product comparisons. Product comparisons, whether it is…
Microsoft completed the acquisition of Sybari Software, their new anti-virus and anti-spyware line of business – The Windows Observer–Antivirus, Anti-Spyware Strategy Moves Forward for Microsoft. One line from the news caught my eye as something that makes immediate common sense but may not be right strategically after all “Not surprisingly, Microsoft will discontinue new sales of Sybari’s products for the Unix (Solaris and AIX) and Linux operating systems. It will, however, continue to sell and…
Many news sites require a username and a password, which is understandable in terms of specific business model requirements. Still, the burden for newsreaders, who are required to register and maintain account information for each individual site becomes a real problem. Especially considering the huge cross-linking the blogosphere offers for online news sites. I think that a central identity management service, which will provide a single sign-on service for these sites will be very popular.…
Yesterday I wrote about the news that Microsoft opened their tech support knowledgebase via RSS feeds Structured Corporate Feeds? with a new concept of structured RSS and I thought to elaborate on it further to make the idea more useful. RSS feeds in the perspective of infrastructure tools enable today an efficient mechanism for detecting changes in distributed content and it mainly serves for personal publishing via blogging tools serving publishers and news reading tools…