July 27, 2015

Nonstop Cyber Attacks Drive Israel to Build Hack-Proof Defense

“If I ranked the existential threats, cyber would come right behind nuclear weapons,’ said Carmi Gillon, former head of the Shin Bet domestic security service and chairman of Cytegic, a company that has developed a digital dashboard and tools to help keep companies protected. Israel and the U.S. face some of the most serious cyber assailants in the world, said Daniel Garrie, executive managing partner of cyber-consulting firm Law & Forensics in New York. That forces them to be ‘‘light years ahead’’ in prevention. While attempted hack attacks on Israel reached 2 million a day during last year’s fighting in Gaza, the country has yet to report destructive events such as the theft of data from about 22 million people at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.


The government push to regulate driverless cars has finally begun

The bill, called the SPY Car Act, would require certain commitments from car manufacturers who want to build driverless or connected cars. For example, under the legislation the Federal Trade Commission would force automakers to use "reasonable measures" to protect the increasingly complex software that helps our cars run smoothly. Together with highway authorities, the FTC would also develop a window sticker that rates a new car's vulnerability to digital attack, in the same way consumers use fuel economy stickers to evaluate a car's potential gas mileage. Hackers who figure out how to take control of a car's brakes, engine or other systems not only pose a danger to those inside the affected vehicle but also to others around it.


Worried About a Cyber-Apocalypse? AIG Wants to Sell You a Policy

“We are listening to our customers, who tell us they are looking for larger limits -- some as high as $1 billion in coverage for cyber property damage and business interruption for larger corporate properties and facilities,” said Dan Riordan, chief executive officer of Zurich Global Corporate in North America. He wouldn’t say how much coverage Zurich might provide. Since the first cyberpolicy was written in the late 1990s, insurers have been unwilling to provide coverage for all losses. Most firms are reluctant to offer policies for property damage resulting from hacking because there’s almost no data available to determine costs, according Tracy Dolin, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s.


5 steps to becoming an enterprise architecture ninja

Enterprise architects have often logged years of IT and business experience, and have outstanding abilities to think both structurally and strategically. But when you ask them to rate what they're doing on a maturity scale -- say 1-5 -- plenty of very competent professionals look at their shoes and mumble 1 or even 0. Despite being tasked with making sure company systems have a solid foundation (and don't topple under their own complexity), managing product integration, digital transformation, and IT roadmaps, they don't often take the time to benchmark their own skills and contributions. If you're an enterprise architect, listen up. Charting your own personal roadmap is key to explaining the impact of your role, and winning respect and influence.


6 Smart Jewellery For The Perfect Fusion Of Fashion And Tech

While the Nike+ FuelBand, Fitbit Flex and Jawbone UP demonstrated potential in wearable computing with their tracking capabilities and accompanying mobile apps, the devices themselves looked more at home in the gym than in ones everyday life. Nowadays, a new breed of wearables, more female-targeted line of devices are starting to emerge, offering features that extend beyond health and fitness, as well as the look of “real” jewellery made with metals and stones instead of bulky plastic bands. The “Smart jewellery” range includes a wide range of devices: From those that keep one aware of important calls and texts to those that are meant to serve as protection for women in peril.


Your body, the battery: Powering gadgets from human “biofuel”

When it comes to energy-rich bodily fluids, blood is hard to beat. Plasma, the liquid component of blood, is constantly suffused with dissolved glucose, our cells’ primary source of energy. Most EFCs that have been developed to date target this molecule. The first EFC that could draw power directly from an organism's bloodstream was created in 2010. Its French developers implanted the inch-long device into the abdomen of a live rat, where it operated successfully for 11 days—apparently without much discomfort on the part of the host. During this time, it continually generated around two microwatts of power, which is more than enough to power a pacemaker in theory.


Outsourcing: How Cyber Resilient Are You?

In an effort to improve upon the results of the SEC and DFS reports, issuances from the FFIEC and FINRA provide third-party cyber guidance with a focus on resilience (i.e., the ability to withstand and recover from a cyber attack). Consistent with the regulators’ overall approach to cybersecurity, the guidance suggests an approach that is more advisory than enforcement-oriented and is principles-based rather than prescriptive. A prescriptive approach would make less sense at this stage, as cyber risks are evolving rapidly and financial institutions each have idiosyncratic exposures based on the particularities of the institution.


Interview: When Technology and Design Collide, then Collude

The two are intrinsically interlinked. Both provide inspiration for the other. There is an element of truth that sometimes limitations of technology can prevent designers from thinking big, but technology often comes up with inspiration and new ideas and approaches that design has never thought about. The theory is about incremental innovation versus disruptive innovation. It suggests that incremental innovation is climbing to the top of the existing hill that you're standing on. It's limited by the size of that hill. That's often what a lot of UX designers focus on. They run usability testing, trying to tweak and improve a particular product and service. But they lose sight of the fact that there might be other bigger mountains out there to climb.


How to find agility in the cloud

"We needed to move from where deployment was a post-application function to a Dev Ops culture," Juneja says. "We needed to bring in some talent that could address the leadership gap we had in cloud and in Dev Ops. The benefit of stabilizing and thinking about next-gen concurrently is we were able to do a lot of analysis of our existing stack, our existing team functions — idenfity the things we would do and not do in the new environment. This is where we identified the gaps in our skills and leadership. We brought in a vice president for cloud that had done cloud transformation for a healthcare company. We built a center of excellence for Dev Ops and brought in a leader from a major transactions company."


When DevOps isn't enough, try NoOps

For NoOps to work, it needs an IT platform that developers don’t need to worry about in terms of resource constraints – and that’s where the cloud comes in. Once the hardware is out of the hands of the organisation, the operations side of the equation becomes someone else’s problem. The cloud provider has the job of provisioning, monitoring and maintaining the hardware and – provided a suitable service level agreement (SLA) has been settled – the physical aspects of the platform become relatively immaterial. ... All too often, even in cascade projects, developers fall into the trap of believing their operational environment will perform the same as their development one, forgetting that much of what they do is self-contained in their own workstation or hived away from the vagaries of the main network.



Quote for the day:

"Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means." -- Max McKeown

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