Daily Tech Digest - July 17, 2021

Preparing The Office For The AI Revolution

Continuous learning should already be a key part of your culture. Training and developing awareness of AI capabilities and benefits is simply another string to the bow. It helps your business stay competitive, but it also feeds into employee engagement, retention and attracting new talent. It may be that you organize on-site workshops or for those who want it or subsidize an advanced degree program. Every employee is different, so it’ll take some mixing and matching to tailor your efforts to their preferred learning environments, but harnessing this learning and applying these new skills within your business not only nurtures talent, but it also fosters forward-thinking, equipping your people with the skills and the mentality — resilience even — to evolve with the ever-changing world of work. Your people are your most important asset — we all know this. Finding the right people for your business can be the difference between success and failure. However, finding the right combination of people and technology can give you an even greater competitive advantage one that you never even considered.


5 years until enterprise quantum, but your prep begins now

Taking a longer view of the enterprise quantum computing journey will yield greater benefit and business value. That means defining the link between your organization’s quantum program and broader business strategies. Ideally, set up a feedback loop where business strategies help to prioritize quantum program outcomes and the quantum program informs new strategies. ... Navigating the rapidly evolving quantum ecosystem is difficult, with an increasing variety of vendors, academic institutions, startups, and cloud-based service providers. Selecting the right company requires identifying which ones can understand your specific business use case(s) and provide the type of quantum technology you need for your specific strategy. One challenge can be around making long-term commitments to quantum partners. Hardware and software providers have until recently been focused on finding a few high-value strategic collaborators, as reflected in their access contracts or licensing terms, lengthy subscription models, or research programs. 


Ransomware attacks show we're getting clobbered on cybersecurity

The Colonial Pipeline and JBS attacks disrupt the traditional construct that makes IT attacks the playground of criminals and OT attacks the purview of hostile intelligence services. Criminals now have a taste of how lucrative an OT attack might be. Will we start to see criminals target OT infrastructure more often? That is certainly the concern of law enforcement and the intelligence community. Attacks on infrastructure by criminals who aren’t deterred by diplomatic niceties changes the game. This concern was reflected in announcements on Friday by the Department of Justice that ransomware extortions will immediately move up the priority stack to equal terrorism. FBI Director Christopher Wray followed up by likening the surge in ransomware hacks to 9/11. These are startling statements that wouldn’t have been issued without the Colonial Pipeline attack. Interesting what some gas station waiting lines will trigger. Lurking behind all this is a scenario that has our protectors reaching for antacids. Are enemy intelligence services making moves to leverage criminal organizations to attack OT infrastructure, with all its debilitating effects, in a kind of proxy cyber war?


Linux Variant of HelloKitty Ransomware Targets VMware ESXi Servers

The days when Linux, Unix and other Unix-like computer operating systems weren’t typically targeted by malware authors are long gone. It might well have been the case that attackers used to prefer bedeviling Windows systems, given that Windows instances are far more widespare than Linux instances. As well, Linux instances are generally well-protected against vulnerabilities, thanks to a tight-knit user base that delivers fast security updates. Andrew Barratt, managing principal of solutions and investigations at cybersecurity advisory firm Coalfire, told Theatpost on Friday that we said goodbye to the days when malware didn’t target Linux “a long time ago,” but that change was typically server-side and hence not particularly visible to the public. “With the rise of Mac OS on the desktop and its underlying infrastructure being based on BSD – everyone’s favourite ‘hard nix’ – there has been a correlation in *nix based malware as attackers target the Apple end user,” Barratt said in an email, *nix being shorthand for any Unix, Linux or other Unix-like systems. 


Assessing the Feasibility of Research and Data Science Projects

Estimating the probability of technical success — designated as P(T) from now on — is an exercise in identifying the salient risk factors, then scoring each individually on a consistent scale before plugging the values into a mathematical function. Easy. But what exactly is “technical success”? The definition of P(T) is as follows: a likelihood that, given existing data, available technologies, required research, and development, the prototype will be completed and will perform the defined function in a curated laboratory or constrained production environment. P(T) is given as a percentage. The definition is important as it sets expectations for the deliverables. We limit the scope of P(T) to the prototype designed to test the technologies and convince a moderate sceptic that the approach works. The tests should run in a limited but representative case and use a vetted data set. Why the limitations? They decrease the time needed to develop the prototype without compromising the evaluation. They reduce the chance of misalignment with final goals by facilitating minor, continual adjustments.


Top 10 Low-Code App Development Best Practices to Follow

It’s a better idea to put an imperfect application in production than it is to release a fully-baked one. Succeeding with low-code means dividing your application into meaningful chunks and publishing them as often as you can. The idea is to constantly get immediate field feedback from users and make consistent small improvements. Conduct regular feedback sessions with your team members and see how the app operates and what it lacks. ... Low-code platforms provide prepared UI libraries with consistent components. They’re easy to use, and it’s a good practice to create a simple platform that borrows the best features from market leaders. It will take less time and money than creating a unique UI/UX and will allow you to release your app faster. In our experience, UX specialists bring value at the beginning of the project, but later their role decreases significantly, and on the off chance that UX and Visual Design support is needed later on, experts can contribute on an as-needed basis. ... To continue developing a good product, you should always communicate with the low-code community and your users. 


The ICE Blockchain

The purpose of this new blockchain is the much-needed addition of EVM compatibility to our ecosystem. We believe EVM compatibility is paramount for the growth of the ICON Network (see Polygon’s recent success as a good indicator of its importance). It enables developers to iterate and innovate much faster using existing tooling and code from the Ethereum ecosystem and allows for increased growth prospects of ICON given easier portability of applications. Additionally, with this new chain, we are also adding eWASM support that puts us ahead of the game, preparing us for ETH 2.0 compatibility. ... The ICE blockchain will start as a Proof of Authority network, with trusted validators operating the chain. After the network is stabilized, it will migrate to NPoS, the consensus mechanism commonly used by other Substrate SDK networks. NPoS is a variation of DPoS (ICON Network’s current consensus mechanism), where token holders vote for validators to produce blocks and govern the network. Smart contracts on the ICE Network will be written in Solidity, Rust, and C++. Fees for smart contract interactions, smart contract deployments, and token transfers will be paid in ICE tokens.


Physical threats increase as employees return to the office

“As corporations advance the digital transformation of their physical security operations, it has never been more important to seize the opportunity to align their cybersecurity operations and infrastructure,” said Lukas Quanstrom, CEO of Ontic. “Bringing together all threat data and intelligence in an always-on, technology-driven approach to security is the most effective way to advance business continuity in today’s increasingly hyper-connected, hyper-violent environment.” ... Of the physical threats that resulted in harm or death at companies in 2021, 49% of respondents think most or almost all could have been avoided if cybersecurity and physical security intelligence were unified so threats could be shared and actioned by cross-functional teams. 55% of physical security and IT leaders say their CEO believes training employees so they are better prepared for potential workplace violence will create a culture of fear. 26% of those surveyed say their company has never addressed the potential for workplace violence and employees would not know what to do if an active shooter entered their facilities.

First, repeated coding vulnerabilities caught by the security team create frustration for both groups, causing dissension that can impede innovation. Further, the cycle of coding, testing, fixing and then retesting for vulnerabilities delays application releases and extends time to value. And when vulnerabilities lead to successful cyberattacks, everyone is frustrated. The legal and compliance teams face regulatory repercussions. Customers and partners lose trust in the organization. And the C-suite and board see the full scope of the ramifications: time and money wasted, privacy violations and fines, loss of intellectual property, customer and partner attrition, and lawsuits and brand damage. As a result, ensuring secure code from the very beginning of the software development life cycle cannot be ignored as an essential part of a comprehensive cybersecurity defense strategy. So how can you close this security gap, eliminate application vulnerabilities at the source and make everyone happy? First, recognize there are no bad guys on your defense team. This is a problem of process — that is, ensuring the right people have the right skills and access to the right information.


Decentralized Finance: The Next Big Threat for the Finance Sector

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a fast-growing segment of the financial markets. Based on a blockchain platform, DeFi provides software services that can cut out intermediaries in financial transactions, thereby allowing for financial services, such as mortgages and investment, to be delivered at lower costs. The question is: Will it take off, or will the financial sector push back? ... First of all, there are a host of technical risks and concerns about attacks and hacks that have been very significant in DeFi. There have been hundreds of millions of dollars lost because these systems are not sufficiently mature, robust and resilient. ... There are legal risks as well, where regulators appropriately have concerns about things like money laundering and fraud that are going on in the larger blockchain and cryptocurrency world and as well as in DeFi specifically. The value of these DeFi services is that they are decentralized, so there’s not one actor that is responsible for all of the transactional activity.



Quote for the day:

"It's not about how smart you are--it's about capturing minds." -- Richie Norton

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