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 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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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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blockchain privacy

Why Privacy Will Remain an Open Issue Unless

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…

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cybersecurity

The Emerging Attention Attack Surface

A well-known truth among security experts that humans are the weakest link and social engineering is the least resistant path for cyber attackers. The classic definition of social engineering is deception aimed to make people do what you want them to do. In the world of cybersecurity, it can be mistakenly opening an email attachment plagued with malicious code. The definition of social engineering is broad and does not cover deception methods. The classic ones…

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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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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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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

Rent my Brain and Just Leave me Alone

Until AI is intelligent enough to replace humans in complex tasks there will be an interim stage, and that is the era of human brain rental. People have diverse intelligence capabilities, and many times these are not optimally exploited due to living circumstances. Other people and corporations which know how to make money many times lack the brainpower required to scale their business. Hiring more people into a company is complicated, and the efficiency level…

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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 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

Distributed Cyber Warfare

One of the core problems with cybercriminals and attackers is the lack of a clear target. Cyber attacks are digital in nature and as such, they are not tied to specific geography, organization, and or person – finding the traces to the source is non-deterministic and ambiguous. In a way, it reminds me of real-life terrorism as an effective distributed warfare model which is also difficult to mitigate. The known military doctrines always assumed a…

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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

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

Consumers to Enterprise – The Investment Rationale Cycle

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…

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innovation

What does Google Browser means to me?

Google having their own browser is a move I did not anticipate and is actually a brilliant idea in terms of os replacement for other proprietary operating systems, hence Microsoft. I think it will actually be very successful for two reasons: – being open source – is powered by a web state of mind (and no one is such as google is) The fact it is open source I think means a killer for IE…

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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

Google?s Aspired Hegemony

After writing yesterday about the launch of Google Pages Beta at Should Google Lead the Web Development Tools Market? I realized that Google has changed profoundly from what they were at first. At the beginning, Google was an enabling technology by really making the world wide web “matter” accessible to everyone. They have contributed immensely in making the web a useful and enjoyable place to be. Ever since Google raised their head towards direct competition…

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blogging startups

A Product Roadmap in a Feed

Strategic Board was initially an idea about a new competitive intelligence/market intelligence tool for enterprises in the IT sector. Since then many things have changed including our concept and vision and probably the only permanent thing here is me and Strategic Board the name itself:) One of the building blocks a competitive intelligence tool is required to have in order to be effective is comparisons and more specifically product comparisons. Product comparisons, whether it is…

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innovation

Can Microsoft afford to ignore Linux?

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…

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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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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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