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 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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cybersecurity

The First Principle of Security By Design

People create technologies to serve a purpose. It starts with a goal in mind and then the creator is going through the design phase and later on builds a technology-based system that can achieve that goal. For example, someone created Google Docs which allows people to write documents online. A system is a composition of constructs and capabilities which are set to be used in a certain intended way. Designers always aspire for generalization in…

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AI blockchain cybersecurity

Accountability – Where AI and Blockchain Intersect

Recently I?ve been thinking about the intersection of blockchain and AI. Although several exciting directions are rising from the convergence of these technologies, I want to explore a specific one: accountability. One of the hottest discussions on AI is whether to constraint AI with regulation and ethics to prevent an apocalyptic future. Without going into whether it is right or wrong to do so, I think that blockchain can play a crucial role if such…

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cybersecurity

A Cyber Visit to London

CDA I had a super interesting visit to London for two cyber-related events. The first was a meeting of the CDA which is a new collaboration effort among the top European banks headed by Barclays Global CISO and the CDA themselves. The Israel Founders Group assembled top experts from the world of cyber security and gathered them as an advisory board to the CDA. CDA Group of Seven British Government The second part of the…

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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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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

Exploit in the Wild, Caught Red-Handed

Imagine a futuristic security technology that can stop any exploit at the exact moment of exploitation?regardless of the way the exploit was built, its evasion techniques, or any mutation it might have or was possibly imagined to have. This technology is truly agnostic for any form of attack. An attack prevented with its attacker captured and caught red-handed at the exact point in time of the exploit…Sounds dreamy, no? For the guys at the stealth…

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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

Most cyber attacks start with an exploit – I know how to make them go away

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…

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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

Taming The Security Weakest Link(s)

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…

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cybersecurity

To Disclose or Not to Disclose, That is The Security Researcher Question

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…

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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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socialnetworks

My first days on Twitter

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…

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innovation

Single Sign-On for News Sites?

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.…

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innovation

Web-based Apps Offline Capability

It seems that web-based applications can accomplish today the most extensive and complex tasks that were possible before only by locally installed software. One aspect that has not been addressed by either Microsoft IE or Firefox, the leading web browsing software, is working offline. Although Microsoft has mentioned it in the past under the hat of Smart Client architecture still current products do not show any sign of support. Offline capability is something not trivial…

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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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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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