Dudu Mimran Blog - Page 2 - Past Writings on Tech

United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

By Dudu Mimran | December 12, 2016September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

Rent my Brain and Just Leave me Alone

By Dudu Mimran | August 20, 2016September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

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…

Is Chatbots a Passing Episode or Here to Stay?

By Dudu Mimran | July 9, 2016September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

Chatbots 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. Chatbots 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…

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 privacy

No One is Liable for My Stolen Personal Information

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

The main victims of any data breach are actually the people, the customers, whom their personal information has been stolen and oddly?they don?t get the deserved attention. Questions like what was the impact of the theft on me as a customer, what can I do about it?and whether I deserve some compensation are rarely dealt with publicly. Customers face several key problems when their data was?stolen, questions such as: Was their data stolen at all?…

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

A Brief History on the Emerging Cyber Capital of the World: Beer-Sheva, Israel

By Dudu Mimran | March 11, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

cybersecurity

Distributed Cyber Warfare

By Dudu Mimran | March 8, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

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

Counter Attacks – Random Thoughts

By Dudu Mimran | January 2, 2015September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

The surging amount of cyber attacks against companies and their dear consequences pushes companies to the edge. Defensive measures can go only so far in terms of effectiveness, assuming they are fully deployed which is also far from being the common case. Companies are too slow to react to this new threat which is caused by a fast-paced acceleration in the level of sophistication of attackers. Today companies are at a weak point. From a…

cybersecurity

Cutting Down North Korea’s Internet

By Dudu Mimran | December 28, 2014December 28, 2019 by Dudu Mimran

Could be interesting to understand whether cutting down North Korea from the internet was a defensive measure due to a huge amount of ongoing attacks or was it just a preventive measure. Definitely cutting down the internet has become another weapon in the war chest of the US. The question is now: do other countries have such power of cutting down areas? The net infrastructure should be evaluated for such attack vector.

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

Consumers to Enterprise – The Investment Rationale Cycle

By Dudu Mimran | June 9, 2013September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

startups

Every App Needs a Director

By Dudu Mimran | May 13, 2013January 5, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

Excellent piece from TheNextWeb which meets my belief that apps production is very similar to movies or songs production where the main difference is the fact you can change it after distribution http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/05/11/the-rise-of-the-app-director/

startups

The dark side of Android fragmentation

By Dudu Mimran | February 2, 2012September 29, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

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…

innovation iot

Will voice replace the touch interfaces on mobiles?

By Dudu Mimran | January 10, 2012January 5, 2020 by Dudu Mimran

Siri apparently has started a revolution, at least public relations wise since voice activation has been around for quite a while but never seemed to be perfect. It seems people like to talk to her and she responds back. Few in the industry have written on the impact the new voice interaction paradigm might create -?Gigaom discusses the potential loss of mobile ad revenues?and Bloomberg reports on?Siri doubling data volumes. Voice indeed seems as a…