cybersecurity

Searching Under The Flashlight of Recent WannaCry Attack

Random thoughts about WannaCry Propagation The propagation of the WannaCry attack was massive and mostly due to the fact it infected computers via SMB1, an old Windows file-sharing network protocol. Some security experts complained that Ransomware has been massive for two years already and this event is only a one big hype wave though I think there is a difference here and it is the magnitude of propagation. There is a big difference when attack…

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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 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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AI cybersecurity

What Will Happen When Machines Start Lying to Us

The mere thought of a computer lying to you about something has boggled my brain ever since I heard it from a friend professor on a flight as an anecdote on what could happen next in AI. That one sentence took me on a long trip in a rabbit hole of a wide range of implications. I did not want to write on it first, not to be the one which saws that idea in…

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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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cybersecurity

Some Of These Rules Can Be Bent, Others Can Be Broken

Cryptography is a serious topic ? a technology based on a mathematical foundation posing an ever-growing challenge for attackers. On November 11th, 2016, Motherboard wrote a piece about the FBI?s ability to break into suspects? locked phones. Contrary to the FBI?s constant complaints about going dark with strong encryption, the actual number of phones they were able to break into was relatively high. The high success ratio of penetrating locked phones in some way doesn?t…

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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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AI

Is Chatbots a Passing Episode or Here to Stay?

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…

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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 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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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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startups

2010 The Decade of Content Discovery

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…

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patents

Wikipedia for Patents?

Recently I have been dealing a lot with patents and I have to say this is not easy! Patents although claimed to be written in English are most of the time just cryptic. It is almost impossible to an effective patent search and even when you get results, just decrypting what is written here is an impossible task. In the field of information retrieval patents I guess are considered something very difficult to crack and…

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innovation

Machine Operated Web Applications

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.…

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blogging

RSS based ranking or maybe a new protocol is needed?

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…

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innovation

Google is the 21st Century Mainframe!

All the big guys are rushing these days to launch as many web applications as possible to “captivate” web surfers in their “club”. Google in a dramatic and maybe a little bit panicked response to Microsoft‘s threats and Yahoo‘s renovated website started launching an application a day. It doesn’t matter anymore what it is, as long it is new and it does something at all then it should be launched – that seems to be…

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innovation

Suggested Innovation in Structured Feed Publishing and Aggregation

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…

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