Search Results for “software”

Software As a Service – Perspectives

By Dudu Mimran | April 17, 2005September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

My perspectives on the important subject of software as a service presented on Venture Chronicles by Jeff Nolan: Software as a Service – Part 1. Evolving Relationships – Technology is nowadays an integral part of businesses in all sectors and the general trend of evolving and de-coupling the dependencies enterprise customers has on technology vendors shows its signs also on the evolution of the way technology is delivered. In the customer’s perspective, the financial alignment…

cybersecurity

WHAT IS PROACTIVE CYBER DEFENSE?

By Dudu Mimran | November 1, 2020September 18, 2022 by Dudu Mimran

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…

What is Cloud Workload Protection?

By Dudu Mimran | September 13, 2020September 15, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

innovation

Digital Transformation Is Hard and Existential

By Dudu Mimran | December 23, 2019September 5, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity iot

My Ten Cyber Security Predictions for 2019

By Dudu Mimran | December 21, 2018September 28, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

How to Disclose a Security Vulnerability and Stay Alive

By Dudu Mimran | December 18, 2018September 28, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

AI blockchain cybersecurity

Risks of Artificial Intelligence on Society

By Dudu Mimran | October 27, 2017September 28, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

AI cloud

The Not So Peculiar Case of A Diamond in The Rough

By Dudu Mimran | May 24, 2017September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

AI patents

Artificial Intelligence Is Going to Kill Patents

By Dudu Mimran | May 23, 2017September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

The patents system never got along quite well with software inventions. Software is?too fluid for the patenting system, built a long time ago for creations with?physical aspects. The material point view perceives software as a big pile?of electronically powered bits organized in some manner. In recent years the patenting system was bent to cope with software by adding into patent applications artificial additions containing linkage into?physical computing components such as storage or CPU so the…

cybersecurity

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

By Dudu Mimran | May 21, 2017September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

Searching Under The Flashlight of Recent WannaCry Attack

By Dudu Mimran | May 19, 2017September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

AI cybersecurity

Right and Wrong in AI

By Dudu Mimran | August 8, 2016September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

Cyber-Evil Getting Ever More Personal

By Dudu Mimran | April 25, 2016September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

Smartphones will soon become the target of choice for cyber attackers?making cyber warfare a personal matter. The emergence of mobile threats is nothing new, though until now, it has mainly been a phase of testing the waters and building an arms arsenal. Evil-doers are always on the lookout for weaknesses?the easiest to exploit and the most profitable. Now, it is mobile’s turn. We are witnessing a historic shift in focus from personal computers, the long-time…

cybersecurity

Is It GAME OVER?

By Dudu Mimran | May 6, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

Exploit in the Wild, Caught Red-Handed

By Dudu Mimran | April 29, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

Time to Re-think Vulnerabilities Disclosure

By Dudu Mimran | April 14, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

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

By Dudu Mimran | April 6, 2015December 28, 2019 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity startups

Cyber Tech 2015 – It’s a Wrap

By Dudu Mimran | March 26, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

Taming The Security Weakest Link(s)

By Dudu Mimran | February 26, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

The Emergence of Polymorphic Cyber Defense

By Dudu Mimran | February 10, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

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

By Dudu Mimran | January 12, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

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

By Dudu Mimran | January 4, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

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

By Dudu Mimran | December 24, 2014September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

startups

What does cross platform mean?

By Dudu Mimran | April 12, 2014September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

startups

Will the number of apps ever stop growing?

By Dudu Mimran | January 6, 2012September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

I am a big fan of apps! Both as an apps developer and as a smartphone user started way before the days it was even called a smartphone. I own several phones with all possible operating systems and never miss a chance to install any new app I encounter. I may be a major factor in the total 2011 downloads number in app stores:) Following this self-proclaiming manifest and after I achieved credibility as someone…