Daily Tech Digest - October 26, 2017

Church that Worships AI God May Be the Way of the Future

You might soon be able — if you're so inclined — to join a bonefide church worshiping an artificially intelligent god.  Former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski, according to a recent Backchannel profile, filed paperwork with the state of California in 2015 to establish Way of the Future, a nonprofit religious corporation dedicated to worshiping AI. The church's mission, according to paperwork obtained by Backchannel, is "to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society." ... Levendowski's pitch for an AI church comes amid apocalyptic warnings from tech and science luminaries like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking to the dangers of artificial intelligence.

India Warily Eyes AI

The IT industry may employ only a few million of India’s 1.3 billion people—but it has been a beacon for young men and women with aspirations. It motivated families to send their children to university, placed graduates in gleaming campuses, conferred independent urban lifestyles upon them, and provided stable incomes and access to the world outside India. Over the last 30 years, moreover, it has been the only industry in India to begin from seed and bloom to such success. India is otherwise struggling to create jobs: 12 million Indians enter the workforce every year, but only 135,000 jobs in the formal economy’s eight biggest sectors—including IT—were created in 2015. A dramatic contraction of the IT industry—a dimming of the beacon—would jolt the country’s economy and polity deeply.

Use of IoT in corporate networks is soaring

Even the omnipresent issue of IoT security seems to be less frightening to companies than before – just 7% of those with bigger (10,000+ devices) deployments said that security was their top concern, although most still acknowledged its importance. Earlier editions of the study cited security as a top concern among up to 29% of companies. Roughly two-thirds of all respondents said that their IoT deployments were “mission-critical” and admitted that a security breach would be catastrophic. Even though the study found growth largely across the board, some verticals saw particularly strong uptake – retail, transportation and energy all grew at better than 17% year-on-year, while other sectors – including those like healthcare and automotive, where IoT has been popular for somewhat longer – continued to grow at a respectable 9% and 12%, respectively.

Agility, comradery drive CA Technologies' strategy turnaround

"There is nothing stronger than pitching something that shows a customer you are in the same boat as they are. It demonstrates you have a deeper appreciation for what they are going through," said Ayman Sayed, ... Moreover, CA Technologies' strategy wraps its portfolio of agile, DevOps and security products around its software development cycle, with a blueprint in hopes to offer a better overall software development environment. CA will also offer technical support through the planning, building, testing and deployment stages to get customers more familiar with some of these newer technologies. One IT professional with a technology services company who worked with CA as part of a digital transformation project said CA's training and technical services helped speed his company's transition to improve its overall operations' performance and agility.

So You Want to Be a Data Scientist? – It’s Complicated

Anyone who is considering a career in data science needs to understand first, the myriad of things such a career involves, the type of education and training required, and exactly what the job market holds. And because the field is growing so fast, students and mid-career professionals both have an opportunity to move into data science careers, if they get the right education and training. There is no single definition of data science, as it varies with industry, specific business, and what the purpose of the data scientist’s role is. And different roles require different skill sets, therefore the educational and training path is not uniform. Data scientists can come from many fields – math, statistics, computer science, and even engineering. But the role the scientist is to play is now generally broken down into two large categories

Edge Analytics – What, Why, Who, When, Where, How

Descriptive analytics focuses on what happened, diagnostic analytics relays why it happened, predictive analytics previews what is likely to happen and prescriptive analytics conveys options on what you should do about it. But you’ll be missing out on an exciting area called Edge Analytics if you relied solely on this type of classification. Let’s look at the scenario of an offshore oil rig which has hundreds of sensors collecting data but miles away from any decent data center to process and analyze this data. What if the sensors had access to decentralized process systems that could perform data analytics and possibly shut off a faulty valve right then and there based on the diagnosis and prediction? Wouldn’t that be more efficient than sending all that sensor data back to central data centers miles away and relaying back the same information much later? Yes, that’s where edge analytics comes in.

How CIOs can Help Improve Enterprise Agility

We can cite the benefits of the ability to react more quickly to change, the delivery of business value on an incremental basis, and the improved satisfaction customers have with our products due to their day-to-day involvement. We have also seen greater morale and increased employee engagement among our development team members. But a company cannot become agile simply by expanding the use of sprints, stand-up meetings, and burndown charts into every department. ... The extent of your company’s agility is determined by the degree to which you can change course, and the speed at which you can achieve this change. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, declared at Davos that “speed is the new currency of business.” But if your momentum prevents you from quickly changing direction, you may find yourself moving swiftly to the wrong destination. The increasing unpredictability of our world demands more and more agility.

Bad Rabbit: Ten things you need to know about

Russian cybersecurity company Group-IB confirmed at least three media organisations in the country have been hit by file-encrypting malware, while at the same time Russian news agency Interfax said its systems have been affected by a "hacker attack" -- and were seemingly knocked offline by the incident. Other organisations in the region including Odessa International Airport and the Kiev Metro also made statements about falling victim to a cyber-attack, while CERT-UA, the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine, also posted that the "possible start of a new wave of cyberattacks to Ukraine's information resources" had occurred, as reports of Bad Rabbit infections started to come in. At the time of writing, it's thought there are almost 200 infected targets and indicating that this isn't an attack like WannaCry or Petya was -- but it's still causing problems for infected organisations.

Doubling Up on AV Fails to Protect 40% of Users from Malware Attacks

Nearly 40% of users who had multiple, traditional antivirus solutions loaded on their endpoints faced a malware attack during the first half of the year, a Malwarebytes report revealed today. The Mapping AV Detection Failures report, which scanned nearly 10 million endpoints, found a number of malware attacks occurred despite having two or more traditional, or signature-based, antivirus solutions installed. "The takeaway for enterprises is [that] the most basic threats have not been caught by the AV they have deployed," says Marcin Kleczynski, Malwarebytes CEO. "Yet, they continue to use these and grow desensitized." He adds CISOs and other IT security leaders may be adopting a common assumption that no one ever gets fired for using antivirus software from the industry leaders, especially when analysts rate them high on the effectiveness scale in comparative reports.

The impact of threat hunting on your security operations

In general, threat hunting can be most efficiently implemented by organizations that already have a solid, mature information security operations center (SOC) and computing incident response team (CIRT). While the latter two are holding the fort (so to speak), threat hunters are free to cast a wider net.Threat hunting starts with the assumption that an incident has happened, but it’s not based on already received alerts. It can be based on findings from previous hunts, or information from outside the organization. Effective hunts depend more on the knowledge, skills and instincts of human analysts than on tools. It is generally acknowledged that, while senior SOC analysts and incident responders can have the right foundation for threat hunting, in order to be good threat hunters they also have to be able to think creatively and see the big picture. Still, there can be no doubt that good tools can help threat hunters channel their capabilities more efficiently.

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Quote for the day:

"More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren't so busy denying them." -- Harold J. Smith

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