Today the hottest thing in new startup investments is “enterprise” startups and for someone old like me, it gives a d?javue kind of feeling. It seems investments behave in a cyclical manner where the first field of growth is always in the area of consumer products. In consumer products innovation is only limited by imagination. After a phase of massive investments in the area of “consumers,” there is a stage where a big portion of…
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…
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…
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…
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…
2018 was a year of awakening to the dear side effects of technological innovation on privacy. The news from Facebook’s mishandling of users’ data has raised concerns everywhere. We saw the misuse of private information for optimizing business goals and abuse of personal data as a platform to serve mind-washing political influencers posing as commercial advertisers. Facebook is in a way the privacy scapegoat of the world but they are not alone. Google, Twitter, and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Overview The security level of a computerized system is as good as the security level of its weakest links. If one part is secure and tightened properly and other parts are compromised, then your whole system is compromised, and the compromised ones become your weakest links. The weakest link fits well with attackers? mindset which always looks for the least resistant path to their goal. Third parties in computers present an intrinsic security risk for…
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…
Software applications have two main perspectives the external perspective where interfaces to the external world are defined and consumed and the internal perspective where an internal structure enables and supports the external interface. Let me elaborate on this: The internal perspective shows the building blocks and layers within the application allowing specific data flow and processing. To further simplify things let’s take an example from the real world and that is a real building block.…
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…
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…