If I had to single out an individual development that elevated the sophistication of cybercrime by order of magnitude, it would be sharing. Code sharing, 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 ago at the kickoff meeting of a new advisory group to the CDA (the Cyber Defense Alliance), called the “Group of Seven” established by …
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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 brain power required to scale their business. Hiring more people into a company is complicated, and the efficiency level of new hires decelerates with scale. With a good reason – all the personality and human traits combined with others disturb efficiency. So it makes sense that people will aspire to build tools for exploiting just …
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 which 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 (CTF) game which is played by real teams protecting their computer and hacking into others aiming to capture a digital asset which is the flag. …
Chat bots 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. Chat bots 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 game concerning human-machine interaction or is they just another evolutionary step in the long path of human-machine interactions. How Did We Get Here? I’ve noticed chat bots for quite a while, and it piqued my …
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 classic target, to mobile devices. And of course, a lofty rationale lies behind this change. Why Mobile? The dramatic increase in usage of mobile apps …
Morphisec started warming its engines with two findings related to two recent in-the-wild exploitations: IN-THE-WILD, NUCLEAR KIT FOUND THAT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATES FLASH EXPLOIT VARIANTS ON-THE-FLY ENCRYPTED FLASH EXPLOIT THAT BYPASSES MITIGATIONS FOUND IN THE WILD
Israeli startup Morphisec, which develops cyber security prevention and detection tools, has closed a $7 million Series A funding round led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), GE Ventures, Deutsche Telekom, Portage Advisors llc., and OurCrowd. The company has raised $8.5 million to date, including this financing round. http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-cyber-security-startup-morphisec-raises-7m-1001071492
Morphisec sheds some light on their anti zero-day product with their new website – check it out here.
Another excellent research from the Cyber Security Research Center @ Ben-Gurion University where your humble servant is serving as a CTO. The third one in the series of air-gap hacking breakthroughs where this time Mordechai Guri the lead researcher achieved data leakage via GSM radio frequencies to a dumb feature phone. What is so earth-shaking about it? The fact feature phones are allowed in secure places since they are considered harmless as they don’t have networking capabilities. Well…, no more. Here is the excellent coverage on Wired by Kim Zetter and the proof of concept video: