cybersecurity

WHAT IS PROACTIVE CYBER DEFENSE?

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…

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cloud cybersecurity

What is Cloud Workload Protection?

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…

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cybersecurity innovation privacy regulation

Solving Data Privacy Once and For All

The way online services are setup today implies that the only technical means to provide a more personalized experience to customers is to collect as much as possible personal data into a server and then to put it into some machine that offers recommendations. Personalization is convenient, and we all want convenience, even at the price of compromise of our personal lives. This line of thought started with Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and today it…

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innovation

Digital Transformation Is Hard and Existential

There is no large corporation on the planet which does not have digital transformation as one of the top three strategic priorities, and many have already deep-dived into it without necessarily understanding the meaning of success. Digital transformation is highly strategic, and many times existential due to the simple fact that technology changed everyone’s life forever and kept on doing that. A change that gave birth to a new breed of companies with technological DNA…

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cybersecurity iot

Unpredictions for 2020 in Cyber Security

The end of the year tradition of prediction is becoming a guessing game as the pace of innovation is increasing towards pure randomness. So I will stop pretending I know what is going to happen in 2020, and I want to write on areas that seem like the most unpredictable for 2020. Below you can find an honest review of my?2019 predictions. 2020 Unpredictions 5G A much talked about topic in 2019 with billions poured…

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cybersecurity

The ACCEPTABLE Way to Handle Data Breaches

LifeLabs, a Canadian company, suffered a significant data breach. According to this statement, the damage was “customer information that could include name, address, email, login, passwords, date of birth, health card number and lab test results” in the magnitude of “approximately 15 million customers on the computer systems that were potentially accessed in this breach”. It is an unfortunate event for the company, but eventually, the ones hurt the most are the customers who entrusted…

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cybersecurity innovation regulation

Spanning the Chasm: The Missing Link in Tech Regulation – Part 1 of 2

Mark Zuckerberg was right when he wrote in his op-ed to the Washington Post that the internet needs new rules, though naturally, his view is limited as a CEO of a private company. For three decades, governments across the globe have created an enormous regulatory vacuum due to a profound misunderstanding of the magnitude of technology on society. As a result, they neglected their duty to protect society in the mixed reality of technology and…

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cybersecurity iot

My Ten Cyber Security Predictions for 2019

Well, 2018 is almost over and cyber threats are still here to keep us alert and ready for our continued roller coaster ride in 2019 as well. So here are some of my predictions for the world of cybersecurity 2019: IoT IoT is slowly turning into reality and security becomes a growing concern in afterthought fashion as always. This reality will not materialize into a new cohort of specialized vendors due to its highly fragmented…

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cybersecurity

How to Disclose a Security Vulnerability and Stay Alive

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…

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AI blockchain cybersecurity

Risks of Artificial Intelligence on Society

Random Thoughts on Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Future Risks at the OECD Event – AI: Intelligent Machines, Smart Policies It is the end of the first day of a fascinating event in artificial intelligence, its impact on societies, and how policymakers should act upon what seems like a once in lifetime technological revolution. As someone rooted deeply in the world of cybersecurity, I wanted to share my point of view on what the future…

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cybersecurity

Thoughts on The Russians Intervention in the US Elections. Allegedly.

I got a call last night on whether I want to come to the morning show on TV and talk about Google?s recent findings of alleged Russian sponsored political advertising. Advertising that could have impacted the last US election results, joining other similar discoveries on Facebook and Twitter and now Microsoft is also looking for clues. At first instant, I wanted to say, what is there to say about it but still, I agreed as…

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innovation

Random Thoughts About Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2017 Presentation

Random thoughts regarding Mary Meeker’s?Internet Trends 2017 report: Slide #5 The main question that popped into my mind was, where are the rest of the people? Today there are 3.4B internet users where the world has a population of 7.5B. It could be interesting to see who are the other non-digital 4 billion humans. Interesting for reasons such as understanding the growth potential of the internet user base (by the level of difficulty of penetrating…

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AI cloud

The Not So Peculiar Case of A Diamond in The Rough

IBM stock was hit severely?in recent month, mostly due to the disappointment from the latest earnings report. It wasn’t a real disappointment, but IBM had a buildup of expectations from their ongoing turnaround, and the recent earnings announcement has poured cold water on the growing enthusiasm. This post is about IBM’s story but carries a moral which applies to many other companies going through disruption in their industry. IBM is an enormous business with many…

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blockchain cybersecurity

United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

If I had to single out an individual development that elevated the sophistication of cybercrime by order of magnitude, it would be sharing. Codesharing, vulnerabilities sharing, knowledge sharing, stolen passwords, and anything else one can think of. Attackers that once worked in silos, in essence competing, have discovered and fully embraced the power of cooperation and collaboration. I was honored to present a high-level overview on the topic of cyber collaboration a couple of weeks…

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AI cybersecurity

Right and Wrong in AI

Background The DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) 2016 competition has captured the imagination of many with its AI challenge. In a nutshell, it is a contest where seven highly capable computers compete, and a team owns each computer. Each group creates a piece of software that can autonomously identify flaws in their computer and fix them and identify flaws in the other six computers and hack them. A game inspired by the Catch The Flag…

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cybersecurity

Is It GAME OVER?

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…

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cybersecurity

Time to Re-think Vulnerabilities Disclosure

Public disclosure of vulnerabilities has always bothered me and I wasn’t able to put a finger on the reason until now. As a person who has been involved personally in vulnerabilities disclosure, I am highly appreciative of the contribution security researchers on awareness and it is very hard to imagine what would the world be like without disclosures. Still, the way attacks are being crafted today and their links to such disclosures got me into…

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cybersecurity privacy

No One is Liable for My Stolen Personal Information

The main victims of any data breach are actually the people, the customers, whom their personal information has been stolen and oddly?they don?t get the deserved attention. Questions like what was the impact of the theft on me as a customer, what can I do about it?and whether I deserve some compensation are rarely dealt with publicly. Customers face several key problems when their data was?stolen, questions such as: Was their data stolen at all?…

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cybersecurity startups

Cyber Tech 2015 – It’s a Wrap

It has been a crazy two days at Israel?s Cyber Tech 2015?in a good way! The exhibition hall was split into three sections: the booths of the established companies, the startups pavilion and the Cyber Spark arena. It was like examining an x-ray of the emerging cyber industry in Israel, where on one hand you have the grown-ups whom are the established players, the startups/sprouts seeking opportunities for growth, and an engine which generates such…

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cybersecurity

A Brief History on the Emerging Cyber Capital of the World: Beer-Sheva, Israel

The beginning of the cyber park There are very few occasions in life where you personally experience a convergence of unrelated events that lead to something?something BIG! I am talking about Beer-Sheva, Israel?s desert capital. When I started to work with Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University 9 years ago it was a cool place to be, though still quite small. Back then, security?which was not yet referred to as cybersecurity?was one of the…

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cybersecurity

The Emergence of Polymorphic Cyber Defense

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…

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cybersecurity

Google Releases Windows 8.1 Exploit Code – After 90 Days Warning to Microsoft

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…

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cybersecurity

Counter Attacks – Random Thoughts

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…

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cybersecurity

A Tectonic Shift in Superpowers or What Sony Hack Uncovered to Everyone Else

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…

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startups

What does cross platform mean?

Cross-platform is tricky. It seems like a small “technical” buzzword but actually, it is one of the biggest challenges for many technology companies and has different aspects for different people in the organization and outside of it. Developer Point of View It all starts with the fact that applications can potentially be targeted towards different computing devices. To get more people to use your applications you would like it to run on more and more…

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