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…
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…
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…
For a long time, I was contemplating on the best strategy for client application development, mobile clients, or desktop client applications. The problem with native client application development is usually the difficulty of building the UI and applying changes to it over time. Since I did both web development and client development I am accustomed in the web area for the ease of UI creation as well as applying changes to it. In web development…
The end of year is full of posts about how all startups and CEOs (now after the market meltdown) are going to be focused in 2009 on revenues, efficiency, listening to customers, making better products, and more… Just the other day I read Some startup CEOs? New Years’ resolutions where most resolutions sound like boiler plated stuff. It is not that I don’t appreciate efficiency and revenues, don’t get me wrong, but still one has…
Amanda Watlington relates to USAToday article on Blogging and CEO on a post Blogs and Feeds: CEO Blogs — Where Angels(?) Fear to Tread. I am a CEO of a new venture company and a blogger for the last four months and I wanted to write down what do I get from it: 1) Feedback on my thoughts – As a CEO and a person in general I have different opinions on various subjects related…
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…
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…
The way online services are setup today implies that the only technical means to provide a more personalized experience to customers is to collect as much as possible personal data into a server and then to put it into some machine that offers recommendations. Personalization is convenient, and we all want convenience, even at the price of compromise of our personal lives. This line of thought started with Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and today it…
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…
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…
LifeLabs, a Canadian company, suffered a significant data breach. According to this statement, the damage was “customer information that could include name, address, email, login, passwords, date of birth, health card number and lab test results” in the magnitude of “approximately 15 million customers on the computer systems that were potentially accessed in this breach”. It is an unfortunate event for the company, but eventually, the ones hurt the most are the customers who entrusted…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Softbank acquired BostonDynamics, the four legs robots maker, alongside secretive Schaft, two-legged?robots maker. Softbank, the perpetual acquirer of emerging leaders, has entered a foray into artificial life by diluting their stakes in media and communications and setting a stronghold into the full supply chain of artificial life. It starts with chipsets (ARM), but then they divested a quarter of the holdings since Google (TPU) and others have shown that specialized processors for artificial life are…
Random thoughts regarding Mary Meeker’s?Internet Trends 2017 report: Slide #5 The main question that popped into my mind was, where are the rest of the people? Today there are 3.4B internet users where the world has a population of 7.5B. It could be interesting to see who are the other non-digital 4 billion humans. Interesting for reasons such as understanding the growth potential of the internet user base (by the level of difficulty of penetrating…
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…