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 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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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

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

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 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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AI

Will Artificial Intelligence Lead to a Metaphorical Reconstruction of The Tower of Babel?

The story of the Tower of Babel (or Babylon) has always fascinated me as God got seriously threatened by humans if and only they would all speak the same language. To prevent that God confused all the words spoken by the people on the tower and scattered them across the earth. Regardless of the different personal religious beliefs of whether it happened or not the underlying theory of growing power when humans interconnect is intriguing…

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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 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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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 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

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

The dark side of Android fragmentation

One of the main problems with Android for app developers contemplating on Android vs. iOs is the fact it is highly fragmented. On iOS you, unconsciously, know that you need only to build one version (Let’s keep the example simple) and it will work on all devices, you know that Apple is doing everything to make sure everyone has the latest version and that there is a decent level of backward compatibility. ?For Android developers…

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startups

The Web Crawls Silently into the Desktop

Recently I got deeply interested in rich Internet technologies such as Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight and it is hard to not see the trend of returning to good old desktop applications with one big twist – the web included. These rich desktop applications are naturally integrated into the web with its rich services, content while enjoying UI breakthroughs achieved by browsers and site designers. It is great to see unique and smooth UI concepts…

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