Daily Tech Digest - January 26, 2024

Why a Chief Cyber Resilience Officer is Essential in 2024

“We'll see the role popping up more and more as an operational outcome within security programs and more of a focus in business. In the wake of the pandemic and macroeconomic conditions and everything, what business leader isn’t thinking about business resilience? So, cyber resilience tucks nicely into that.” On the surface, the standalone CISO role isn’t much different because it serves as the linchpin for securing the enterprise. There are many different flavors of CISO, with some being business-focused, says Hopkins, whose teams take on more compliance tasks as opposed to more technical security operations. Other CISOs are more technical, meaning they’ll monitor threats in the environment and respond accordingly, while compliance is a separate function. However, the stark differences between the two roles lie in the mindset, approach, and target outcome for the scenario. The CCRO’s mindset is “it’s not a matter of if, but when.” So, the CCRO’s approach is to anticipate cyber incidents and make incident response preparations that will mitigate material damage to a business. They act as a lifeline. This approach is arguably the role’s most quintessential attribute. 


How To Sell Enterprise Architecture To The Business

The best way to win buy-in for your enterprise architecture (EA) practice is to know who your stakeholders are and which of them will be the most receptive to your ideas. EA has a broad scope that impacts your entire business strategy beyond just your application portfolio, so you need to adapt your presentations to your audience. Defining the specific parts of your EA practice that matter to each stakeholder will keep your discussion relevant and impactful. Put your processes in the context of the stakeholder's business area and show the immediate value you will create and the structure that you have in place to do so. You can even offer to help install EA processes into other teams' workflows to help improve synergy with their toolsets. Just ensure that you highlight the benefits for them. Explaining to your marketing team how you plan to optimize your organization's finance software is not going to engage them. However, showcasing the information you have on your content management systems and MQL trackers will catch their interest. Once a group of key stakeholders are on-board with your EA practice, you will have a group of EA evangelists and a selection of case studies that you can use to win over more and more stakeholders. 


Quantum Breakthrough: Unveiling the Mysteries of Electron Tunneling

Tunneling is a fundamental process in quantum mechanics, involving the ability of a wave packet to cross an energy barrier that would be impossible to overcome by classical means. At the atomic level, this tunneling phenomenon significantly influences molecular biology. It aids in speeding up enzyme reactions, causes spontaneous DNA mutations, and initiates the sequences of events that lead to the sense of smell. Photoelectron tunneling is a key process in light-induced chemical reactions, charge and energy transfer, and radiation emission. The size of optoelectronic chips and other devices has been close to the sub-nanometer atomic scale, and the quantum tunneling effects between different channels would be significantly enhanced. ... This work successfully reveals the critical role of neighboring atoms in electron tunneling in sub-nanometer complex systems. This discovery provides a new way to deeply understand the key role of the Coulomb effect under the potential barrier in the electron tunneling dynamics, solid high harmonics generation, and lays a solid research foundation for probing and controlling the tunneling dynamics of complex biomolecules.


UK Intelligence Fears AI Will Fuel Ransomware, Exacerbate Cybercrime

“AI will primarily offer threat actors capability uplift in social engineering,” the NCSC said. “Generative AI (GenAI) can already be used to enable convincing interaction with victims, including the creation of lure documents, without the translation, spelling and grammatical mistakes that often reveal phishing. This will highly likely increase over the next two years as models evolve and uptake increases.” The other worry deals with hackers using today’s AI models to quickly sift through the gigabytes or even terabytes of data they loot from a target. For a human it could take weeks to analyze the information, but an Al model could be programmed to quickly pluck out important details within minutes to help hackers launch new attacks or schemes against victims. ... Despite the potential risks, the NCSC's report did find one positive: “The impact of AI on the cyber threat will be offset by the use of AI to enhance cyber security resilience through detection and improved security by design.” So it’s possible the cybersecurity industry could develop AI smart enough to counter next-generation attacks. But time will tell. Meanwhile, other cybersecurity firms including Kaspersky say they've also spotted cybercriminals "exploring" using AI programs. 


Machine learning for Java developers: Algorithms for machine learning

In supervised learning, a machine learning algorithm is trained to correctly respond to questions related to feature vectors. To train an algorithm, the machine is fed a set of feature vectors and an associated label. Labels are typically provided by a human annotator and represent the right answer to a given question. The learning algorithm analyzes feature vectors and their correct labels to find internal structures and relationships between them. Thus, the machine learns to correctly respond to queries. ... In unsupervised learning, the algorithm is programmed to predict answers without human labeling, or even questions. Rather than predetermine labels or what the results should be, unsupervised learning harnesses massive data sets and processing power to discover previously unknown correlations. In consumer product marketing, for instance, unsupervised learning could be used to identify hidden relationships or consumer grouping, eventually leading to new or improved marketing strategies. ... The challenge of machine learning is to define a target function that will work as accurately as possible for unknown, unseen data instances. 


How to protect your data privacy: A digital media expert provides steps you can take and explains why you can’t go it alone

The dangers you face online take very different forms, and they require different kinds of responses. The kind of threat you hear about most in the news is the straightforwardly criminal sort of hackers and scammers. The perpetrators typically want to steal victims’ identities or money, or both. These attacks take advantage of varying legal and cultural norms around the world. Businesses and governments often offer to defend people from these kinds of threats, without mentioning that they can pose threats of their own. A second kind of threat comes from businesses that lurk in the cracks of the online economy. Lax protections allow them to scoop up vast quantities of data about people and sell it to abusive advertisers, police forces and others willing to pay. Private data brokers most people have never heard of gather data from apps, transactions and more, and they sell what they learn about you without needing your approval. A third kind of threat comes from established institutions themselves, such as the large tech companies and government agencies. These institutions promise a kind of safety if people trust them – protection from everyone but themselves, as they liberally collect your data.


Pwn2Own 2024: Tesla Hacks, Dozens of Zero-Days in Electrical Vehicles

"The attack surface of the car it's growing, and it's getting more and more interesting, because manufacturers are adding wireless connectivities, and applications that allow you to access the car remotely over the Internet," Feil says. Ken Tindell, chief technology officer of Canis Automotive Labs, seconds the point. "What is really interesting is how so much reuse of mainstream computing in cars brings along all the security problems of mainstream computing into cars." "Cars have had this two worlds thing for at least 20 years," he explains. First, "you've got mainstream computing (done not very well) in the infotainment system. We've had this in cars for a while, and it's been the source of a huge number of vulnerabilities — in Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and so on. And then you've got the control electronics, and the two are very separate domains. Of course, you get problems when that infotainment then starts to touch the CAN bus that's talking to the brakes, headlights, and stuff like that." It's a conundrum that should be familiar to OT practitioners: managing IT equipment alongside safety-critical machinery, in such a way that the two can work together without spreading the former's nuisances to the latter. 


Does AI give InfiniBand a moment to shine? Or will Ethernet hold the line?

Ethernet’s strengths include its openness and its ability to do a more than decent job for most workloads, a factor appreciated by cloud providers and hyperscalers who either don't want to manage a dual-stack network or become dependent on the small pool of InfiniBand vendors. Nvidia's SpectrumX portfolio uses a combination of Nvidia's 51.2 Tb/s Spectrum-4 Ethernet switches and BlueField-3 SuperNICs to provide InfiniBand-like network performance, reliability, and latencies using 400 Gb/s RDMA over converged Ethernet (ROCE). Broadcom has made similar claims across its Tomahawk and Jericho switch line, which use either data processing units to manage congestion or handling this in the top of rack switch with its Jericho3-AI platform, announced last year. To Broadcom's point, hyperscalers and cloud providers such like AWS have done just that, Boujelbene said. The analyst noted that what Nvidia has done with SpectrumX is compress this work into a platform that makes it easier to achieve low-loss Ethernet. And while Microsoft has favored InfiniBand for its AI cloud infrastructure, AWS is taking advantage of improving congestion management techniques in its own Elastic Fabric Adapter 2 (EFA2) network


The Evolution & Outlook of the Chief Information Security Officer

Beyond mere implementation, the CISO also carries the mantle of education, nurturing a cybersecurity-conscious environment by making every employee cognizant of potential cyber threats and effective preventive measures. As the digital landscape shifts beneath our feet, the roles and responsibilities of the CISO have significantly evolved, casting a larger shadow over the organization’s operations and extending far beyond the traditional confines of IT risk management. No longer confined to the realms of technology alone, the CISO has become an integral component of the broader business matrix. They stand at the intersection of business and technology, needing to balance the demands of both spheres in order to effectively steer the organization towards a secure digital future. ... The increasingly digitalized and interconnected world of today has thrust the role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) into the limelight. Their duties have become crucial as organizations navigate a complex and ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape. Customer data protection, adherence to intricate regulations, and ensuring seamless business operations in the face of potential cyber threats are prime priorities that necessitate the presence of a CISO. 


To Address Security Data Challenges, Decouple Your Data

Why is this a good thing? It can ultimately help you gain a holistic perspective of all the security tools you have in your organization to ensure you’re leveraging the intrinsic value of each one. Most organizations have dozens of security tools, if not more, but most lack a solid understanding or mapping of what data should go into the SIEM solution, what should come out, and what data is used for security analytics, compliance, or reporting. As data becomes more complex, extracting value and aggregating insights become more difficult. When you decide to decouple the data from the SIEM system, you have an opportunity to evaluate your data. As you move towards an integrated data layer where disparate data is consolidated, you can clean, deduplicate, and enrich it. Then you have the chance to merge that data not only with other security data but with enterprise IT and business data, too. Decoupling the data into a layer where disparate data is woven together and normalized for multidomain data use cases allows your organization to easily take HR data, organizational data, and business logic and transform it all into ready-to-use business data where security is a use case. 



Quote for the day:

“If my mind can conceive it, my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it!” -- Jesse Jackson

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