Daily Tech Digest - June 29, 2023

How the new deepfake reality will impact cyber insurance

Deepfakes can ruin a company's reputation, bypass biometric controls, phish unsuspecting users into clicking malicious links, and convince financial agents to transfer money to offshore accounts. Attacks leveraging deepfakes can happen over many channels from social media to fake person-to-person video calls over Zoom. Voicemail, Slack channels, email, mobile messaging, and metaverses are all fair game for distributing deepfake scams to businesses and personal users. Cyber liability insurers are beginning to take notice, and as they do, their security requirements are beginning to adjust to the new 'fake' reality. This includes, but is not limited to, better hygiene across the enterprise, renewed focus on home worker systems, enforced multifactor authentication, out-of-band confirmation to avoid falling for deepfake phishing attempts, user and partner education, and third-party context-based verification services or tools. ... For the most part, organizations will need to focus on requirements that are in their cyber insurance policies. 


Confronting Financial Fraud in Payments with the Help of AI

AI is being considered for fraud protection efforts in different ways by these organizations. Schmiedl said JPMorgan Chase has evolved from algorithms to machine learning and neural nets to look at fraudulent card activity, examining unstructured data, and entity extraction. “There’s an inherent signal in every email,” he said. “Actors that are trying to create fraudulent emails tend to basically use different patterns and you can learn those patterns through AI/ML.” JPMorgan Chase is assessing the use of large language models, Schmiedl said, for fraud, risk, and other possible areas. Such efforts have focused on in-house data and resources, he said, focusing on the firm's own ecosystem rather than looking externally. “If you start using these models and outside data, you start to see things that are presented like facts that aren’t facts,” Schmiedl said. Swift is building a new AI platform, Bhatia said, with tech players such as Google, Microsoft, and others. “We really believe that this is going to help us add on to the rule-based engines that we already have today and really bring a higher success rate in helping with fraud,” she said.


Recovery options: Copy-on write vs redirect-on-write snapshots

Consider a copy-on-write system, which duplicates blocks before overwriting them with new data. In essence, when a block within the protected entity needs to be changed, the system copies that block to a separate snapshot area before it is overwritten. This approach uses three I/O operations for each write: one read and two writes. Prior to overwriting a block, its previous value must be read and written to a different location, followed by the write of the new data. Should a process attempt to access the snapshot at a later time, it does so through the snapshot system, which is aware of which blocks have been changed since the snapshot was created. ... In contrast, a redirect-on-write system utilizes pointers to represent all protected entities. When a block needs to be changed, the storage system simply redirects the pointer associated with that block to another block and writes the data there. The snapshot system maintains a record of all block locations constituting a given snapshot, which is essentially a list of pointers that correspond to the block locations.


Five Ways AI is Likely to Change How Organizations Approach Information Risk and Security

Many security events and incidents are the result of insecure application code, applications that are misconfigured or applications that have been manipulated by adversaries and used as part of their attack activities. The volume of security-related software patches and updates that are produced by application vendors on an ongoing basis has provided clear evidence that current approaches to application security must be enhanced to be effective. AI is likely to accelerate these enhancements by integrating application security-based LMMs into application development and security testing and protective tools such as static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST), software composition analysis (SCA), web application firewalls (WAFs), application programming interface (API) security gateways, and quality assurance and penetration testing. These LMMs can ensure that application source code and running applications are tested against—and are resilient to—variations and permutations of known and expected attacker methods and tactics in a highly efficient and risk-based testing environment.


Svelte vs Angular: Pros and Cons of Modern Web Development

Introduced to the world in 2016, Svelte emerged as the unlikely hero in the tangled saga of JavaScript frameworks. Its mission? To revolutionize the way we think about reactivity in web apps. Svelte has a sort of "wax on, wax off" philosophy: rather than doing all the heavy lifting in the browser, it does its magic in the build step. While other frameworks are trying to build a luxurious skyscraper complete with a rooftop pool and a helipad, Svelte is content with constructing a cozy, energy-efficient home that fulfills all your needs. In the fast-paced, ever-changing universe of web development, sometimes less is more. Think of Svelte as a stealthy web ninja – it's lightweight, fast, and packs a powerful punch. It's reactive - change the state, and the DOM updates automatically. It’s like having a little elf inside your code, waiting patiently to sweep away any unnecessary work. ... Don't just take my word for it - look around! Angular is powering everything from IBM's online support pages to Delta Airlines' booking platform. It's as versatile as it is powerful, and it's up for whatever challenge you're ready to throw its way.


State of the API: Microservices Gone Macro and Zombie APIs

Engineers and developers ranked zombie APIs as a higher concern than executives did, who placed “loss of institutional memory” as slightly more concerning than loss of maintenance, aka zombie APIs. ... “That’s the emergence of zombie APIs, because a lot of institutional knowledge lies with the people who built it,” Sobti told The New Stack. “Once the people transition out, the change management is complex, and that’s where cataloging your API has internal APIs, in particular, becomes very critical.” API catalogs can keep track of internal APIs in one place, he added. There are dedicated teams that are now responsible for not just building the underlying infrastructure that allows the catalogs to exist, but also managing the catalog and creating the practices on building to get those APIs into the catalogs. That is where reuse becomes critical, he added. As further proof of the need for better documentation, the survey found that a lack of documentation was cited as the primary obstacle to consuming an API.


Taking IT outsourcing to the next level

When two parties enter a complex IT outsourcing deal, they need to work collaboratively, communicate effectively, and build trust. This is where relational contracts come in. Unlike transactional contracts focusing on legal obligations and penalties, relational contracts emphasize collaboration, communication, and problem-solving by specifying mutual goals and establishing governance structures to keep the parties’ expectations and interests aligned over the long term. Formally, a relational contract is defined as “A legally enforceable written contract establishing a commercial partnership within a flexible contractual framework based on social norms and jointly defined objectives, prioritizing a relationship with the continuous alignment of interests before the commercial transactions.” Complex relationships in which it is impossible to predict every what-if scenario are tailor-made for relational contracts. Large IT outsourcing projects provide a strong example of this, due to the technical complexity of the work and the number of stakeholders involved. 


AI-led business processes – getting the balance right between business impact and staff satisfaction

While seen in parts today, it is showing signs of potential scale that would create larger impacts on business processes. In addition, businesses across multiple industries are predicted to focus more on the value add that can only be contributed by human employees. According to research from Boston Consulting Group, just 30 per cent of AI investment is spent on algorithms and technologies, while the remaining 70 per cent has gone towards embedding AI into business processes and agile ways of working. ... The expertise within, and alongside that of partner companies of AIM Reply has been vital in helping organisations across retail, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, logistics, financial services and insurance drive value from evolving AI capabilities. Focused on serving as a boutique for AI and hyperautomation platforms and solutions, the company encourages its clients to adopt an end-to-end approach that focuses on business goals, enabling the business make informed decisions based on data, and business benefits, rather than use cases.


AI requirements exceed infrastructure capabilities for many IT teams, study finds

Companies lacking in the proper hardware to do AI training have two options: make a massive investment in hardware or turn to cloud service providers for AI-as-a-service, which most of the top cloud service providers now offer. Rather than make the million-dollar investment in hardware, an enterprise could upload the data to be processed and the cloud service provider can do the heavy lifting. The enterprise could take the trained data models back when the processing is done. Customers often will opt for end-to-end solutions from AI vendors in the cloud, especially initially, “because they make it easy for the customers with a simple button,” Voruganti said. But variable cloud costs – which enterprises incur with each read or write to cloud-based data, or with every data extraction, for example  – may cause IT teams to reconsider that approach.Voruganti said he’s seeing companies choose to place foundation models with different cloud service providers based on their areas of expertise. 


Risk Management of Human and Machine Identity in a Zero Trust Security Context

While humans and their associated accounts are often the primary targets of security measures, they merely represent the activity of the machines they interact with. In a Zero Trust deployment, embracing the concept of "machine as proxy human" becomes crucial. This approach allows organizations to apply security rules and surveillance to all devices, treating them like a malicious human is operating behind them. By considering machines as proxy humans within the context of Zero Trust, organizations can extend security measures to encompass all devices and systems within their environment. This includes user devices, servers, IoT devices, and other interconnected components. Organizations can enforce strict access controls by treating machines as potential threat actors, applying behavioral analytics, and continuously monitoring for suspicious activities or deviations from expected behavior. This shift in mindset enables organizations to proactively detect and respond to potential security threats, regardless of whether they originate from human actors or compromised machines. 



Quote for the day:

"Leadership is absolutely about inspiring action, but it is also about guarding against mis-action." -- Simon Sinek

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