Newly Launched Terbium Software to Monitor Dark Web for Enterprise
April 11, 2016
Impacting groups like Target to JP Morgan Chase, data breaches are increasingly common and security firms are popping up to address the issue. The article Dark Web data hunter Terbium Labs secures $6.4m in fresh funding from ZDNet reports Terbium Labs received $6.4 million in Series A funding. Terbium Labs released software called Matchlight which provides real-time surveillance of the Dark Web and alerts enterprises when their organization’s data surfaces. Consumer data, sensitive company records, and trade secrets are among the types of data for which enterprises are seeking protection. We learned,
“Earlier this month, cloud security firm Bitglass revealed the results of an experiment focused on how quickly stolen data spreads through the Dark Web. The company found that within days, financial credentials leaked to the underground spread to 30 countries across six continents with thousands of users accessing the information.”
While Terbium appears to offer value for stopping a breach once it’s started, what about preventing such breaches in the first place? Perhaps there are opportunities for partnerships with Terbium and players in the prevention arena. Or, then again, maybe companies will buy piecemeal services from individual vendors.
Megan Feil, April 11, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
UK Cybersecurity Director Outlines Agencys Failures in Ongoing Cyberwar
April 8, 2016
The article titled GCHQ: Spy Chief Admits UK Agency Losing Cyberwar Despite £860M Funding Boost on International Business Times examines the surprisingly frank confession made by Alex Dewdney, a director at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). He stated that in spite of the £860M funneled into cybersecurity over the past five years, the UK is unequivocally losing the fight. The article details,
“To fight the growing threat from cybercriminals chancellor George Osborne recently confirmed that, in the next funding round, spending will rocket to more than £3.2bn. To highlight the scale of the problem now faced by GCHQ, Osborne claimed the agency was now actively monitoring “cyber threats from high-end adversaries” against 450 companies across the UK aerospace, defence, energy, water, finance, transport and telecoms sectors.”
The article makes it clear that search and other tools are not getting the job done. But a major part of the problem is resource allocation and petty bureaucratic behavior. The money being poured into cybersecurity is not going towards updating the “legacy” computer systems still in place within GCHQ, although those outdated systems represent major vulnerabilities. Dewdney argues that without basic steps like migrating to an improved, current software, the agency has no hope of successfully mitigating the security risks.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Venture Dollars Point to Growing Demand for Cyber Security
April 4, 2016
A UK cyber security startup has caught our attention — along with that of venture capitalists. The article Digital Shadows Gets $14M To Keep Growing Its Digital Risk Scanning Service from Tech Crunch reports Digital Shadows received $14 million in Series B funding. This Software as a service (SaaS) is geared toward enterprises with more than 1,000 employees with a concern for monitoring risk and vulnerabilities by monitoring online activity related to the enterprise. The article describes Digital Shadows’ SearchLight which was initially launched in May 2014,
“Digital Shadows’ flagship product, SearchLight, is a continuous real-time scan of more than 100 million data sources online and on the deep and dark web — cross-referencing customer specific data with the monitored sources to flag up instances where data might have inadvertently been posted online, for instance, or where a data breach or other unwanted disclosure might be occurring. The service also monitors any threat-related chatter about the company, such as potential hackers discussing specific attack vectors. It calls the service it offers “cyber situational awareness”.”
Think oversight in regards to employees breaching sensitive data on the Dark Web, for example, a bank employee selling client data through Tor. How will this startup fare? Time will tell, but we will be watching them, along with other vendors offering similar services.
Megan Feil, April 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Netflix Algorithm Defaults To “White” Content, Sweeps Diversity Under the Rug
April 1, 2016
The article Marie Claire titled Blackflix; How Netflix’s Algorithm Exposes Technology’s Racial Bias, delves into the racial ramifications of Netflix’s much-lauded content recommendation algorithm. Many users may have had strange realizations about themselves or their preferences due to collisions with the system that the article calls “uncannily spot-on.” To sum it up: Netflix is really good at showing us what we want to watch, but only based on what we have already watched. When it comes to race, sexuality, even feminism (how many movies have I watched in the category “Movies With a Strong Female Lead?”), Netflix stays on course by only showing you similarly diverse films to what you have already selected. The article states,
“Or perhaps I could see the underlying problem, not in what we’re being shown, but in what we’re not being shown. I could see the fact that it’s not until you express specific interest in “black” content that you see how much of it Netflix has to offer. I could see the fact that to the new viewer, whose preferences aren’t yet logged and tracked by Netflix’s algorithm, “black” movies and shows are, for the most part, hidden from view.”
This sort of “default” suggests quite a lot about what Netflix has decided to put forward as normal or inoffensive content. To be fair, they do stress the importance of logging preferences from the initial sign up, but there is something annoying about the idea that there are people who can live in a bubble of straight, white, (or black and white) content. There are among those people some who might really enjoy and appreciate a powerful and relevant film like Fruitvale Station. If it wants to stay current, Netflix needs to show more appreciation or even awareness of its technical bias.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
RAVN ACE Can Help Financial Institutions with Regulatory Compliance
March 31, 2016
Increased regulations in the financial field call for tools that can gather certain information faster and more thoroughly. Bobsguide points to a solution in, “RAVN Systems Releases RAVN ACE for Automated Data Extraction of ISDA Documents Using Artificial Intelligence.” For those who are unaware, ISDA stands for International Swaps and Derivatives Association, and a CSA is a Credit Support Annex. The press release informs us:
“RAVN’s ground-breaking technology, RAVN ACE, joins elements of Artificial Intelligence and information processing to deliver a platform that can read, interpret, extract and summarise content held within ISDA CSAs and other legal documents. It converts unstructured data into structured output, in a fraction of the time it takes a human – and with a higher degree of accuracy. RAVN ACE can extract the structure of the agreement, the clauses and sub-clauses, which can be very useful for subsequent re-negotiation purposes. It then further extracts the key definitions from the contract, including collateral data from tabular formats within the credit support annexes. All this data is made available for input to contract or collateral management and margining systems or can simply be provided as an Excel or XML output for analysis. AVN ACE also provides an in-context review and preview of the extracted terms to allow reviewing teams to further validate the data in the context of the original agreement.”
The write-up tells us the platform can identify high-credit-risk relationships and detail the work required to repaper those accounts (that is, to re-draft, re-sign, and re-process paperwork). It also notes that even organizations that have a handle on their contracts can benefit, because the platform can compare terms in actual documents with those in that have been manually abstracted.
Based in London, enterprise search firm RAVN tailors its solutions to the needs of each industry it serves. The company was founded in 2011.
Cynthia Murrell, March 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Slack Hires Noah Weiss
March 29, 2016
One thing you can always count on the tech industry is talent will jump from company to company to pursue the best and most innovating endeavors. The latest tech work to jump ship is Eric Weiss, he leaps from Foursquare to head a new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group at Slack. VentureBeat reports the story in “Slack Forms Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group On ‘Mining The Chat Corpus.’” Slack is a team communication app and their new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group will be located in the app’s new New York office.
Weiss commented on the endeavor:
“ ‘The focus is on building features that make Slack better the bigger a company is and the more it uses Slack,” Weiss wrote today in a Medium post. “The success of the group will be measured in how much more productive, informed, and collaborative Slack users get — whether a company has 10, 100, or 10,000 people.’”
For the new group, Weiss wants to hire experts who are talented in the fields of artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and natural language processing. From this talent search, he might be working on a project that will help users to find specific information in Slack or perhaps they will work on mining the chap corpus.
Other tech companies have done the same. Snapchat built a research team that uses artificial intelligence to analyze user content. Flipboard and Pinterest are working on new image recognition technology. Meanwhile Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft are working on their own artificial intelligence projects.
What will artificial intelligence develop into as more companies work on their secret projects.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Infonomics and the Big Data Market Publishers Need to Consider
March 22, 2016
The article on Beyond the Book titled Data Not Content Is Now Publishers’ Product floats a new buzzword in its discussion of the future of information: infonomics, or the study of creation and consumption of information. The article compares information to petroleum as the resource that will cause quite a stir in this century. Grace Hong, Vice-President of Strategic Markets & Development for Wolters Kluwer’s Tax & Accounting, weighs in,
“When it comes to big data – and especially when we think about organizations like traditional publishing organizations – data in and of itself is not valuable. It’s really about the insights and the problems that you’re able to solve,” Hong tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “From a product standpoint and from a customer standpoint, it’s about asking the right questions and then really deeply understanding how this information can provide value to the customer, not only just mining the data that currently exists.”
Hong points out that the data itself is useless unless it has been produced correctly. That means asking the right questions and using the best technology available to find meaning in the massive collections of information possible to collect. Hong suggests that it is time for publishers to seize on the market created by Big Data.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 22, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Sci Hub May Be Relegated to Dark Web Only
March 18, 2016
Academics are not done with innovating when it comes to the dissemination of free knowledge. Science Alert recently published Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge. The article details Sci-Hub, an online service opened up by a researcher in Russia offers free access to more than 48 million journal articles, which is almost every peer-reviewed paper in existence. Additionally, it describes how Elsevier has sued Sci-Hub. The article summarizes how Sci-Hub works,
“The site works in two stages. First of all when you search for a paper, Sci-Hub tries to immediately download it from fellow pirate database LibGen. If that doesn’t work, Sci-Hub is able to bypass journal paywalls thanks to a range of access keys that have been donated by anonymous academics (thank you, science spies). This means that Sci-Hub can instantly access any paper published by the big guys, including JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier, and deliver it to you for free within seconds. The site then automatically sends a copy of that paper to LibGen, to help share the love.”
What is fascinating about this case is that whether Elsevier or Sci-Hub wins, there may still be a means for Sci-Hub to continue offering unlimited journal access. As other articles on this subject have alluded, the founder of Sci-Hub sees its relegation to the Dark Web as its worst-case scenario.
Megan Feil, March 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Decides to Be Nice to
March 18, 2016
Google is a renowned company for its technological endeavors, beautiful office campuses, smart employees, and how it is a company full of self-absorbed and competitive people. While Google might have a lot of perks, it also has its dark side. According to Quartz, Google wanted to build a more productive team so they launched Project Aristotle to analyze how and they found, “After Years Of Intensive Analysis, Google Discovers The Key To Good Teamwork Is being Nice.”
Project Aristotle studied hundreds of employees in different departments and analyzed their data. They wanted to find a “magic formula,” but it all beats down to one of the things taught in kindergarten: be nice.
“Google’s data-driven approach ended up highlighting what leaders in the business world have known for a while; the best teams respect one another’s emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally. It has less to do with who is in a team, and more with how a team’s members interact with one another.”
Team members who understand, respect, and allow each other to contribute to conversation equally. It is a basic human tenant and even one of the better ways to manage a relationship, according to marriage therapists around the world. Another result of the project is dubbed “psychological safety,” where team members create an environment with the established belief they can take risks and share ideas without ridicule.
Will psychological safety be a new buzzword since Google has “discovered” that being nice works so well? The term has been around for a while, at least since 1999.
Google’s research yields a business practice that other companies have adopted: Costco, Trader Joes, Pixar, Sassie, and others to name a few. Yet why is it so hard to be nice?
Whitney Grace, March 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Dead Startup Tally Sheet
March 17, 2016
Startups are the buzzword for companies that are starting up in the tech industry, usually with an innovative idea that garners them several million in investments. Some startups are successful, others plodder along, and many simply fail. CBS Insights makes an interesting (and valid) comparison with tech startups and dot-com bust that fizzled out quicker than a faulty firecracker.
While most starts appear to be run by competent teams that, sometimes they fizzle out or are acquired by a larger company. Many of them are will not make it as a headlining company. As a result, CBS Insights invented, “The Downround Tracker: Which Companies Are Not Living Up To The Expectations?”
CBS Insights named this tech boom, the “unicorn era,” probably from the rare and mythical sightings of some of these companies. The Downround Tracker tracks unicorn era startups that have folded or were purchased. Since 2015, fifty-six total companies have made the Downround Tracker list, including LiveScribe, Fab.com, Yodle, Escrow.com, eMusic, Adesto Technologies, and others.
Browse through the list and some of the names will be familiar and others will make you wonder what some of these companies did in the first place. Companies come and go in a fashion that appears to be quicker than any other generation. At least in shows that human ingenuity is still working, cue Kanas’s “Dust in the Wind.”
Whitney Grace, March 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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