Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah: Data Loss Prevention

Showing posts with label Data Loss Prevention. Show all posts

Daily Tech Digest - November 20, 2025

Quote for the day:

"Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better." -- Warren Buffet

A developer’s guide to avoiding the brambles

Protect against the impossible, because it just might happen. Code has a way of surprising you, and it definitely changes. Right now you might think there is no way that a given integer variable would be less than zero, but you have no idea what some crazed future developer might do. Go ahead and guard against the impossible, and you’ll never have to worry about it becoming possible. ... If you’re ever tempted to reuse a variable within a routine for something completely different, don’t do it. Just declare another variable. If you’re ever tempted to have a function do two things depending on a “flag” that you passed in as a parameter, write two different functions. If you have a switch statement that is going to pick from five different queries for a class to execute, write a class for each query and use a factory to produce the right class for the job. ... Ruthlessly root out the smallest of mistakes. I follow this rule religiously when I code. I don’t allow typos in comments. I don’t allow myself even the smallest of formatting inconsistencies. I remove any unused variables. I don’t allow commented code to remain in the code base. If your language of choice is case-insensitive, refuse to allow inconsistent casing in your code. ... Implicitness increases cognitive load. When code does things implicitly, the developer has to stop and guess what the compiler is going to do. Default variables, hidden conversions, and hidden side effects all make code hard to reason about.

SaaS Rolls Forward, Not Backward: Strategies to Prevent Data Loss and Downtime

The SaaS provider owns infrastructure-level redundancy and backups to maintain operational continuity during regional outages or major disruptions. and SaaS teams are no longer responsible for infrastructure resilience. Instead, they are responsible for backing up and recovering data and files stored in their SaaS instances. This is significant for two primary reasons. First, the for become dependent on the vendor's capabilities, which are not within the control of the customer. ... A common misconception, even among mature InfoSec teams, is the assumption that SaaS data protection is fully managed by the vendor. This “set it and forget it” mindset, while understandable given the cloud promise, overlooks the need for organizations to backup their SaaS data. Common causes of data loss and corruption are human errors within the customer’s SaaS instance, including accidental deletion, integration issues, and migration mishaps which fall under the customer’s responsibility. ... InfoSec and SaaS teams must combine their knowledge and experience to ensure that backups contain all necessary data, as well as metadata, which provides the necessary context, and can be restored reliably. SaaS administrators can prevent users from logging in, disable automations, block upstream data from being sent, or restrict data from being sent to downstream systems as needed.

EU publishes Digital Omnibus leaving AI Act future uncertain

The unveiled amendments on Wednesday designed to simplify its digital regulatory framework, including the AI Act and data privacy rules, in a bid to boost innovation. The Digital Omnibus package introduces several measures, including delaying the stricter regulation of ‘high-risk’ AI applications until late 2027 and allowing companies to use sensitive data, such as biometrics, for AI training under certain conditions. ... The Digital Omnibus also attempts to adapt rules within privacy regulation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the and the . The Commission plans to clarify when data stops being “personal.” This could open the doors for tech companies to include anonymous information from EU citizens into large datasets for training AI, even when they contain sensitive information such as biometric data, as long as they make reasonable efforts to remove it. ... EU member states have also called for postponing the rollout of the AI Act altogether, citing difficulties in defining related technical standards and the need for Europe to stay competitive in the global technological race. “Europe has not so far reaped the full benefits of the digital revolution,” says European economy commissioner . “And we cannot afford to pay the price for failing to keep up with demands of the changing world.”

Building Distributed Event-Driven Architectures Across Multi-Cloud Boundaries

The elegant simplicity of "fire an event and forget" becomes a complex orchestration of optimization, failure recovery, and data consistency across provider boundaries. Yet, when done right, multi-cloud event-driven architectures offer unprecedented resilience, performance, and business agility. ... Multi-cloud latency isn't just about network speed, it's about the compound effect of architectural decisions across cloud boundaries. Consider a transaction that needs to traverse from on-premise to for risk assessment, then to for analytics processing, and back to on-premise for core banking updates. Each hop introduces latency, but the cumulative effect can transform a sub-100 ms transaction into a multi-second operation. ... Here is an uncomfortable truth: Most resilience strategies focus on the wrong problem. As engineers, we typically put our efforts into handling failures that occur during an outage or when a service component is down. Equally important is how you recover from those failures after the outage is over. This approach to recovery creates systems that "fail fast" but "recover never". ... The combination of event stores, resilient policies, and systematic event replay capabilities creates a distributed system that not only survives failures, but also recovers automatically, which is a critical requirement for multi-cloud architectures. ... While duplicate risk processing merely wastes resources, duplicate financial transactions create regulatory nightmares and audit failures.

For AI to succeed in the SOC, CISOs need to remove legacy walls now

"The legacy SOC, as we know it, can't compete. It's turned into a modern-day firefighter," warned during his keynote at Fal.Con 2025. "The world is entering an arms race for AI superiority as adversaries weaponize AI to accelerate attacks. In the AI era, security comes down to three things: the quality of your data, the speed of your response, and the precision of your enforcement." Enterprise SOCs average 83 security tools across 29 different vendors, each generating isolated data streams that defy easy integration to the latest generation of AI systems. System fragmentation and lack of integration represent AI's greatest vulnerability, and organizations' most fixable problem. The mathematics of tool sprawl proves devastating. Organizations deploying AI across fragmented toolsets report significantly elevated false-positive rates. ... Getting governance right is one of a CISO's most formidable challenges and often includes removing longstanding roadblocks to make sure their organization can connect and make contributions across the business. ... A CISO's transformation from security gatekeeper to business enabler and strategist is the single best step any security professional can take in their career. CISOS often remark in interviews that the transition from being an app and data disciplinarian to an enabler of new growth with the ultimate goal of showing how their teams help drive revenue was the catalyst their careers needed.

Selling to the CISO: An open letter to the cybersecurity industry

Vendors think they’re selling technology. They’re not. They’re trying to sell confidence to people whose jobs depend on managing the impossible. As a CISO, I buy because I’m trying to reduce the odds that something catastrophic happens on my watch. Every decision is a gamble. There is no “safe” option in this field. I buy to reduce personal and organizational risk, knowing there’s no such thing as perfect protection. Cybersecurity is not a puzzle you solve. It’s a game you play — and it never ends. You make the best moves you can, knowing you’ll never win. Even if I somehow patched every system and closed every gap, the cost of perfection would cripple the company. ... The truth is that most organizations don’t need more tools. They need to get the fundamentals right. If you can patch consistently, maintain good access controls, and segment your networks so you aren’t running flat, you’re ahead of most of the market — no shiny tools required. Strong patching alone will eliminate most of the attack surface that vendors keep promising to “detect.” ... We can’t blame vendors alone. We created the market they’re serving. We bought into the illusion that innovation equals progress. We ignored the fundamentals because they’re hard and unglamorous. We filled our environments with products we couldn’t fully use and called it maturity. We built complexity and called it strategy. Then we act shocked when the same root causes keep taking us down. Good security still starts with good IT. Always has. Always will. If you don’t know what you own, you can’t protect it.

When IT fails, OT pays the price

Criminal groups are now demonstrating a better understanding of industrial dependencies. The Qilin group carried out 63 confirmed attacks against industrial entities since mid 2024 and has focused on energy distribution and water utilities. Their use of gives them wider reach inside mixed environments. Several incidents involved encryption of shared engineering resources and historian systems, which caused operational delays even when controllers remained untouched. ... Across intrusions, attackers favored techniques that exploit weak segmentation. activity made up the largest share of detections, followed by . The findings show that adversaries rarely need ICS specific exploits at the start of an attack. They rely on stolen accounts, remote access tools, and administrative shares to move toward engineering assets. ... The vulnerability data reinforces the emphasis on the boundary between enterprise systems and industrial systems. Ongoing exploitation of , including attacks that modified device firmware. Several critical flaws in and other manufacturing operations software were also exploited, which created direct pivot points into factory workflows. Recent disclosures affecting Rockwell ControlLogix and GuardLogix platforms allow remote code execution or force the controller into a failed state. Attacks on these devices pose immediate availability and safety risks.

India has the building blocks to influence global standards in AI infrastructure

The convergence of cloud, edge, and connectivity represents the foundation of India’s next AI leap. In a country as geographically and economically diverse as India, AI workloads can’t depend solely on centralized cloud resources. Edge computing allows us to bring compute closer to the source of data be it in a factory, retail store, or farm which reduces latency, lowers costs, and enhances privacy. Cloud provides elasticity and scalability, while secure connectivity ensures that both environments communicate seamlessly. This triad enables an AI model to be trained in the cloud, refined at the edge, and deployed securely across networks unlocking innovation in every geography. We have been building this connected fabric to ensure that access to compute and intelligence isn’t limited by location or scale. ... We see this evolution already unfolding. will thrive when infrastructure, connectivity, and platforms converge under a single, interoperable framework. Each stakeholder; telecoms, data centres, and hyperscalers brings a unique value: scale, proximity, and reach. ... India is already shaping global conversations around and secure connectivity, and the same potential exists in AI infrastructure. In next 5 years, India could stand out not for the size of its compute capacity but for how effectively it builds an inclusive digital foundation, one that blends cloud, edge, data governance, and innovation seamlessly.

How to Overcome Latency in Your Cyber Career

The presence of latency is not an indictment of your ability. It's a signal that something in your system needs attention. Identifying what creates latency in your professional life and learning how to address it are essential components of long-term growth. With a diagnostic mindset and a willingness to optimize, you can restore throughput and move forward with purpose. ... Career latency often appears when your knowledge no longer reflects current industry expectations. Even highly capable professionals experience slowdown when their technical foundation lags behind evolving practices. ... Unclear goals create misalignment between where you invest your time and where you want to progress. Without a defined direction, you may be working hard but not moving in a way that supports advancement. ... Professionals often operate under heavy workloads that dilute productivity. Too many competing responsibilities, constant context switching or tasks disconnected from your goals can limit your effectiveness and delay growth. ... Career progress can slow when your professional network lacks the signal strength needed to route opportunities in your direction. Without mentorship, community or visibility, growth becomes harder to sustain. ... Missed opportunities often stem from limited readiness. Preparation, bandwidth or timing may be misaligned, and promising chances can disappear before you can act.

Why IT-SecOps Convergence is Non-Negotiable

The message is clear: siloed operations are no longer just inefficient—they’re a security liability. ... The first, and often the most difficult step toward achieving true IT-SecOps convergence, is cultural. For years, IT and security teams have operated in silos, essentially functioning as two different businesses. ... On paper, these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) appear aligned—both measure speed and efficiency. But in practice, they reflect different views: one is laser-focused on minimizing risk, the other on maximizing uptime. ... The real opportunity lies in establishing a shared mandate. Both teams need to understand that their goals are two sides of the same coin: you can’t have productive systems that aren’t secure, and security that breaks the system isn’t sustainable; therefore, convergence begins not with tools, but with alignment of intent. Once this clicks, both teams begin working from a common set of goals, shared KPIs, and joint decision frameworks. ... The strongest security posture doesn’t come from piling on more tools. It comes from creating continuous alignment between management, security, and user experience. When those three functions operate in sync, IT doesn’t deploy technology that security can’t enforce, security doesn’t introduce controls that slow down work, and users don’t feel the need to bypass policies with or risky shortcuts. ... When a unified structure is implemented, policies can be deployed instantly, validated automatically, and adjusted based on real user impact—all without waiting for separate teams to sync.

Daily Tech Digest - July 07, 2022

Metaverse Standards Forum Makes Data Interoperable But Only For Big Tech

Interoperability is the driving force for the growth and adoption of the open metaverse. Hence, the Metaverse Standards Forum aims to analyze the interoperability necessary for running the metaverse. More than 30 companies took up their respective posts as founding members of the forum. Game developers, architects, and engineers are mere clicks away from building the next cutting-edge metaverse project with artificial intelligence and advanced hardware. Setting interoperability standards with consideration to available technology is crucial to the mass adoption of the metaverse. Similar to the Metaverse Standards Forum, some key players are missing from the Oasis Consortium, like Meta. And in the past, groups like this have become smaller and smaller once internal conflict inevitably arises. The Metaverse Standards Forum is led by the Khronos Group, a nonprofit consortium working on AR/VR, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. Khronos has already tried to set a standard for VR APIs with its similarly named VR Standards Initiative in 2016, which included companies like Google, Nvidia. Epic Games and Oculus, which is now part of Meta.

Identity Access Management Is Set for Exploding Growth, Big Changes — Report

As SaaS and cloud subscription services have proliferated in the space, smaller firms increasingly have found IAM within their reach, and this study says to expect this trend to snowball. Whereas the subscription model makes up 60% of the market now, in five years the researchers forecast it will make up 94% of all IAM spending. Meanwhile, other, broader IT trends such as the explosion in cloud computing, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, mobile computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and more geographically dispersed workers are all spurring greater IAM services spending to solve an acute need for saner access control. "There are more devices and services to be managed than ever before, with different requirements for associated access privileges," according to Juniper's analysts. "With so much more to keep track of, as employees migrate through different roles in an organization, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage identity and access." According to Naresh Persaud, managing director in cyber-identity services for Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory, the market has been especially jumpstarted in the last 12 to 18 months as organizations work to accommodate a broader range and larger scale of remote-work situations.

Working with Microsoft’s .NET Rules Engine

Getting started with the .NET Rule Engine is relatively simple. You will need to first consider how to separate rules from your application and then how to describe them in lambda expressions. There are options for building your own custom rules using public classes that can be referred to from a lambda expression, an approach that gets around the limitations associated with lambda expressions only being able to use methods from .NET’s system namespace. You can find a JSON schema for the rules in the project’s GitHub repository. It’s a comprehensive schema, but in practice, you’re likely to only need a relatively basic structure for your rules. Start by giving your rules workflow a name and then following it up with a nested list of rules. Each rule needs a name, an event that’s raised if it’s successful, an error message and type, and a rule expression that’s defined as a lambda expression. Your rule expression needs to be defined in terms of the inputs to the rules engine. Each input is an object, and the lambda function evaluates the various values associated with the input.

10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting Your Entrepreneurial Journey

Entrepreneurship is over-glorified and misrepresented on social media. In reality, it is about building a business that solves a problem for a consumer. It's not about driving nice cars or posting nice pictures on social media. In fact, real entrepreneurship looks quite contrary to what we see on social media. Do we require a certain level of luck, genetics and an environment around us to be an entrepreneur? Yes — somewhat, for sure. But also, anyone can solve problems anywhere in the world. That is true for both small problems and big problems. The choice comes in the decision to find people who have needs, wants and issues that you can offer a solution for. It is also a choice that each of us gets to make on how well we wish to solve that issue — how obsessed we are willing to become with that solution and how above and beyond we are willing to go with servicing the customers well. Beyond the business solution also comes the personal and emotional responsibility — shaping and growing ourselves to be able to handle and maneuver through constant stress and difficulties.

Don’t let automation break change management

Where automation is essential and unavoidable, network teams need to make sure all the good they can do with automation is not done at the expense of or in conflict with one of the other pillars of enterprise IT: change management. They need to make sure automation is controlled by change management, and that they are keeping change management processes in step with their increasing reliance on automation. One aspect is to implement change management on the automation, including the scripts, config files, and playbooks, used to manage the network. The use of code management tools helps with this: check-out and check-in events help staff remember to follow other parts of proper process. Applying change management at this level means describing the intended modifications to the automation, testing them, planning deployment, having a fallback plan to the previous known-good code where that is applicable, and determining specific criteria by which to judge whether the change succeeded or needs to be rolled back.

Imagination is key to effective data loss prevention

SecOps teams are charged with protecting data on a network or endpoint in each of its forms: at rest, in use, and in motion. To be in the driver’s seat and create the appropriate rules or policies to protect data across these three classifications requires teams to understand their environment fully. This is why organizations should consider implementing a flexible, scalable XDR (extended detection and response) architecture that can seamlessly integrate with their current security tools and connect all the dots to eliminate security gaps. With native integrations and connections for security policy orchestration across data and users, endpoints and collaboration, clouds and infrastructure, an XDR architecture provides SecOps teams with maximum visibility and control. ... Knowing what to protect, even before establishing protection, is key. So much so that comprehensive data visibility is a critical tenet for any SecOps team. Achieving this enables security teams to have the flexibility to create data protection parameters tailored to their own specific needs, creating an environment where the only limit on what they can achieve is their imagination.

The importance of digital skills bootcamps to UK tech industry success

The success of digital skills bootcamps in helping to secure the UK tech industry’s future is heavily contingent on the level of involvement from businesses. At present, however, not enough organisations are devoting the time needed to upskill or reskill staff, with research conducted by MPA Group finding that over a third of companies – 35 per cent – only allow workers to devote less than two hours per week to training, research, and development. Although there may be a number of reasons for this, MPA Group’s research indicated that ‘a lack of budget’ was considered by businesses to be the largest barrier for workplaces allowing staff to spend time on development. Digital skills bootcamps are helping to solve this problem by enabling companies to take advantage of the considerable state investment in the initiative, meaning organisations are given more affordable access to industry-led training. What’s more, with bootcamps having already been trialled to great success in places like the West Midlands – where approximately 2,000 adults have been trained with essential tech skills over the past few years – firms have the opportunity to hire recent programme graduates who can help impart what they have learned onto their workers.

The Parity Problem: Ensuring Mobile Apps Are Secure Across Platforms

So to build a robust defense, mobile developers need to implement a multi-layered defense that is both ‘broad’ and ‘deep’. By broad, I'm talking about multiple security features from different protection categories, which complement each other, such as encryption + obfuscation. By ‘deep’, I mean that each security feature should have multiple methods of detection or protection. For example, a jailbreak-detection SDK that only performs its checks when the app launches won’t be very effective because attackers can easily bypass the protection. Or consider anti-debugging, which is an important runtime defense to prevent attackers from using debuggers to perform dynamic analysis – where they run the app in a controlled environment for purposes of understanding or modifying the app’s behavior. There are many different types of debuggers – some based on LLDB – for native code like C++ or objective C, others that inspect at the Java or Kotlin layer, and a lot more. Every debugger works a little bit differently in terms of how it attaches to and analyzes the app.

4 ways CIOs can create resilient organizations

As CIO, you need to make sure your technology investments enable change. After all, you might need to support an entirely remote employee population. You might need to offer new capabilities that attract top talent or quickly shut down business in a region wracked by geopolitical conflict. Organizations invest large sums in migrating to the cloud. One reason is the ability to grow with needs. But technology scale is no longer the primary benefit of the cloud. And scale is no longer a guarantee of resilience. Rather, focus your cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) investments on supporting rapid change. Multi-cloud strategy, containerization, agile DevSecOps development methodologies: All should be designed around elasticity that equips you to make quick wins or pivot to new business models. ... Data analytics can provide holistic views and predictive models that help CIOs and others understand emerging trends. Those insights support data-driven decision-making and ultimately, resilience. That’s because you no longer have to rely on gut feel to prepare for an otherwise unpredictable future.

What happens when there’s not enough cloud?

Most companies struggle to find enough customers to buy their products. According to Selipsky in a Mad Money interview, cloud companies like AWS might have the opposite problem. “IT is going to move to the cloud. And it’s going to take a while. You’ve seen maybe only, call it 10% of IT today move. So it’s still day 1. It’s still early. … Most of it’s still yet to come.” Years ago I noted that the cloud will take time. Not because there’s limited demand, but precisely because even with enterprises on a full sprint to the cloud, there are trillions of dollars’ worth of IT to modernize. As MongoDB CMO Peder Ulander responded to McLaughlin, “If anything, the growing shortage of capacity is a watershed moment for AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.” (Disclosure: I work for MongoDB.) In a hot market, it’s standard for demand to outstrip supply. Ulander cites products as diverse as Teslas or Tickle Me Elmo toys. What’s interesting here is that we’re having the enterprise equivalent of a 1996 Tickle Me Elmo shortage.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth." -- Warren G. Bennis

Daily Tech Digest - February 06, 2021

Artificial intelligence must not be allowed to replace the imperfection of human empathy

In the perfectly productive world, humans would be accounted as worthless, certainly in terms of productivity but also in terms of our feeble humanity. Unless we jettison this perfectionist attitude towards life that positions productivity and “material growth” above sustainability and individual happiness, AI research could be another chain in the history of self-defeating human inventions. Already we are witnessing discrimination in algorithmic calculations. Recently, a popular South Korean chatbot named Lee Luda was taken offline. “She” was modelled after the persona of a 20-year-old female university student and was removed from Facebook messenger after using hate speech towards LGBT people. Meanwhile, automated weapons programmed to kill are carrying maxims such as “productivity” and “efficiency” into battle. As a result, war has become more sustainable. The proliferation of drone warfare is a very vivid example of these new forms of conflict. They create a virtual reality that is almost absent from our grasp. But it would be comical to depict AI as an inevitable Orwellian nightmare of an army of super-intelligent “Terminators” whose mission is to erase the human race.

The robots are ready – how can business leaders take the leap?

Robots and intelligent technology can now optimise something we’ve never been able to before: the bandwidth of employees. This has become increasingly more critical as staff adjust to remote working. By onboarding these new tools and incorporating them into the workforce, businesses can empower their staff to do more. They can automate mundane and repetitive tasks extremely quickly, giving their human colleagues more time to take on problem-solving and time-consuming tasks. In fact, 4 in 5 employees that use robots and digital workers say they have been beneficial with efficiency and collaboration, and are useful in easing the burden of administrative tasks. Employees have found that a ‘robotic helping hand’ has been most appreciated for sorting data and documents, providing prompts for pending tasks, and digitising paperwork. What’s also clear is that some businesses do have the right tools in place to help. In fact, half of UK employees said processes helped them do their job faster and collaborate better, both critical during the pandemic. However, for business leaders, the pressure to get automation right is huge. It’s a major investment of time, money, and energy for everyone involved.

Why process mining is seeing triple-digit growth

Many enterprises are finding it difficult to scale beyond a few software robots or bots because they are automating a bad process that cannot scale. “Most businesses are automating processes through RPA and hyperautomation without first fully understanding their data and processes,” explained Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio, a SAP spinoff focused on business transformation. As enterprises pursue increased efficiencies, there is debate about whether it makes more sense to automate what exists or to fix it first. Automating a bad process may make it faster, but it may also suffer from chokepoints caused by integration with legacy systems or approval processes. Process mining can help a company fix a bad process first. Chris Nicholson, CEO of Pathmind, a company applying AI to industrial operations, argues, “The main challenge to overcome before applying process automation is to standardize the current processes performed by people. If they are not standardized, there can be no automation.” With process mining, companies can see whether their current processes are standardized so they know which problem they have to solve first: standardization or automation.

Sophisticated cybersecurity threats demand collaborative, global response

The cybersecurity industry has long been aware that sophisticated and well-funded actors were theoretically capable of advanced techniques, patience, and operating below the radar, but this incident has proven that it isn’t just theoretical. We believe the Solorigate incident has proven the benefit of the industry working together to share information, strengthen defenses, and respond to attacks. Additionally, the attacks have reinforced two key points that the industry has been advocating for a while now—defense-in-depth protections and embracing a zero trust mindset. Defense-in-depth protections and best practices are really important because each layer of defense provides an extra opportunity to detect an attack and take action before they get closer to valuable assets. We saw this ourselves in our internal investigation, where we found evidence of attempted activities that were thwarted by defense-in-depth protections. So, we again want to reiterate the value of industry best practices such as outlined here, and implementing Privileged Access Workstations (PAW) as part of a strategy to protect privileged accounts.

AI Transformation in 2021: In-Depth guide for executives

AI transformation touches all aspects of the modern enterprise including both commercial and operational activities. Tech giants are integrating AI into their processes and products. For example, Google is calling itself an “AI-first” organization. Besides tech giants, IDC estimates that at least 90% of new organizations will insert AI technology into their processes and products by 2025. ... First few projects should create measurable business value while being attainable. This is important for the transformation to gain trust across the organization with achieved projects and it creates momentum that will lead to AI projects with greater success. These projects can rely on AI/ML powered tools in the marketplace or for more custom solutions, your company can run a data science competition and rely on the wisdom of hundreds of data scientists. These competitions use encrypted data and provide a low cost way to find high performing data science solutions. bitgrit is a company that helps companies identify AI use cases and run data science competitions. Implementing process mining tools is one of those easy-to-achieve and impactful projects. For example, QPR’s Process Analyzer tool has an extensive set of ready-to-use process mining analyses, including ready-to-use clustering analysis and process predictions, as well as a platform for machine learning based analyses.

Microsoft Says It's Time to Attack Your Machine-Learning Models

Machine-learning researchers are focused on attacks that pollute machine learning data, epitomized by presenting two seemingly-identical image of, say, a tabby cat, and having the AI algorithm identify it as two completely different things, he said. More than 2,000 papers have been written in the last few years, citing these sorts of examples and proposing defenses, he said. "Meanwhile, security professionals are dealing with things like SolarWinds, software updates and SSL patches, phishing and education, ransomware, and cloud credentials that you just checked into Github," Anderson said. "And they are left to wonder what the recognition of a tabby cat has to do with the problems they are dealing with today." ... Anderson shared a red team exercise conducted by Microsoft where the team aimed to abuse a Web portal used for software resource requests and the internal machine-learning algorithm that determines automatically to which physical hardware it assigns a requested container or virtual machine. The red team started with credentials for the service, under the assumption that attackers will be able to gather valid credentials - either by phishing or because an employee reuses their user name and password.

Microsoft: Office 365 Was Not SolarWinds Initial Attack Vector

In its Thursday blog, the Microsoft team says the compromise techniques leveraged by the SolarWinds hackers included "password spraying, spear-phishing and use of webshell through a web server and delegated credentials." Earlier this week, acting CISA Director Brandon Wales told The Wall Street Journal that the SolarWinds cyberespionage operation gained access to targets using a multitude of methods, including password spraying and through exploits of vulnerabilities in cloud software (see: SolarWinds Hackers Cast a Wide Net). "As part of the investigative team working with FireEye, we were able to analyze the attacker’s behavior with a forensic investigation and identify unusual technical indicators that would not be associated with normal user interactions. We then used our telemetry to search for those indicators and identify organizations where credentials had likely been compromised by the [SolarWinds hackers]," Microsoft's security team says. But Microsoft says it's found no evidence that the SolarWinds hackers used Office 365 as an attack vector. "We have investigated thoroughly and have found no evidence they [SolarWinds] were attacked via Office 365," the Microsoft researchers say. "The wording of the SolarWinds 8K filing was unfortunately ambiguous, leading to erroneous interpretation and speculation, which is not supported by the results of our investigation."

Data loss prevention strategies for long-term remote teams

For many, a distributed hybrid workforce is the new normal, vastly expanding their threat landscape and making it more challenging to secure data and IT infrastructure. In this environment, companies need to pivot their defensive capacity, ensuring that they are prepared to meet the moment (i.e., the threats). When considering cybersecurity threats, we often think of shady cybercriminals or nation-states hacking company networks. After all, when these incidents occur, they make worldwide news headlines. For most companies, however, external bad actors aren’t the most critical risk. A company’s employees often pose a more prominent and – luckily – a more manageable cybersecurity threat. IBM estimates that human error causes nearly a quarter of all data breaches. Additionally, employees commonly and inadvertently compromise company data through poor password hygiene, accidental data sharing, improper technology use, phishing scams, and more. Some employees will also act maliciously, intentionally stealing company data for profit, retribution, or fun. The market for sensitive data is so prolific that some cybersecurity experts predict the emergence of insiders-as-a-service as bad actors capitalize on remote work trends to infiltrate companies.

The Rise of Responsible AI

In Public Safety arena using biased data to train the AI to identify criminals using cyber forensics can lead to the wrongful conviction of innocent people as the output of the software was influenced by racial and ethnicity data points introduced as either the code used was not tested properly or used wrong data sets for testing resulting in destroying lives. Apart from the bias in the data set we have also seen that during any application or transactional data processing there is no transparency as to find out why this decision was taken, which parameter influenced it and why did the algorithm took additional steps to mitigate it? All these can be easily answered by embedding explainability and transparency in the AI design processes to provide understandability of the context and interpretability of the decision by AI. Thus we need Responsible AI which is the practice of using AI with good intention to empower employees and businesses, and fairly impact customers and society – allowing companies to engender trust and scale AI with confidence along with the purpose of providing a framework to ensure the ethical, transparent and accountable use of AI technologies consistent with user expectations, organizational values and societal laws and norms.

Adaptive Frontline Incident Response: Human-Centered Incident Management

Many companies struggle with defining an incident. To us, an incident is when a service or feature functionality is degraded. But defining "degraded" contains a multitude of possibilities. One could say "degraded" is when something isn’t working as expected. But what if it’s better than expected? What’s the expected behavior? Do you define it based on customer impact? Do you wait until there’s customer impact to declare an issue an incident? This is where having a common and shared understanding of the normal operating behavior of the system and formalizing these in feature/service level objectives and indicators are key. We have to know what we expect, to know when a degradation becomes an incident. But, defining service level objectives for legacy services already in operation takes a significant investment of time and energy that might not be available right now. That’s the reality in which we frequently operate, trading off efficiency with thoroughness, as Hollnagel (2009) points out. We handle this tradeoff with a governing set of generic thresholds to fill in for services without clear indicators. At Twilio we have a lot of products, running the gamut from voice calls, video conferencing, and text messages, to email and two factor authentication.

Quote for the day:

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." -- Satchel Paige

December 13, 2014

Interview: Lucie Glenday, chief digital officer, Surrey County Council
“It’s a hard thing,” she says, calling herself a troublemaker. “That’s what the role is – somebody to come in and ask questions no one else has asked.” But CIO Paul Brocklehurst has taken it all in his stride. Already the council is advanced when it comes to digital thinking and has managed to deliver £250m worth of savings over the past four years. “But we’ve got more to go, and when you’ve got that constant battering of someone saying ‘I think you can do that better’, that’s really tricky,” says Glenday. “Especially when, to all intents and purposes, it’s a new face, someone who’s come down from cabinet officer and doesn’t seem to act in the same way everyone else does.”

The Cost of Data Loss on a Smaller Scale
If these numbers don’t scare you enough, they pull out another familiar figure: the dollar sign. These companies like to estimate the cost of data loss for a company. In 2012, Seagate estimated that $40 million is lost annually on data loss events. According to an Aberdeen research study, the average company loses $163,674 in unused labor and lost revenue for each hour of downtime due to data loss. But most of the time, these daunting percentages and huge numbers seem like empty threats. Data loss can’t possibly be that common, right? And even if it were, it certainly couldn’t cost that much, right?

Seven areas to focus on when complying with PCI DSS v3.0
Merchants and service providers are required to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which represents a set of guidelines for securing card data. If a business is found to be noncompliant, it can suffer considerable repercussions. Despite this, the Verizon 2014 PCI Compliance Report revealed that in 2013 only 11.1% of organisations fully complied with the requirements of the PCI DSS, and only one in five organisations came close to complying and passed 95%+ of controls.

Building a Data Governance Team with a Eye on Information Security
Potter noted that information is essential to supporting good patient care, as well as operational effectiveness, reducing costs; but data in itself also produces a level of risk for the organizations. Historically, she said, there has been a perception that data should be available any time, anywhere. There needs to be recognition that provider organizations must maintain control of data, which is essential to the care of the patient, she said. She noted that provider organizations today have access to vast amounts of data, from personal identifiable information, personal health information, corporate information, intellectual property and research.

For Long-Term Data Archive Solutions, Tape Storage Still on Top
For long-term data archive solutions, why does Google prefer to use tape storage drives and devices to archive and back up every email it stores? Because Google, recognizes that tape is less expensive, has greater longevity and reliability and is more portable and compatible with a variety of data formats than hard disk drives (HDDs). The need for long-term data archive solutions that will endure well into the future is only increasing. Recent advances in the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) and tape libraries from IBM, Oracle, Quantum, Spectra Logic and others are making data access times much faster. In addition, Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standardization, now on its sixth iteration (LTO-6), guarantees data access across devices well into the future.

Hyper-V Replica for Disaster Recovery
Appropriately called Hyper-V Replica, Microsoft introduced it with Windows Server 2012 R2 and upgraded it in the subsequent release. While it provides replication designed to ensure business continuity, Hyper-V Replica is not a substitute for failover clustering. If your organization has the budget to build a clustered Hyper-V deployment, you should definitely do so. Although there are similarities between replication and failover clustering, failover clustering is the preferred method for protecting your virtual machines (VMs).

Managed Failovers To Overtake Traditional Disaster Recovery Testing By 2018
“It has been a target for criticism that while it’s technically an open-source technology, it’s really controlled by the company behind it. Rival products are being launched to ‘rein in’ the problem, producing a slew of open projects that developers can tailor to meet their specific needs. We can expect to see more of this in the next couple of years.” Cloud object storage is another “one to watch” in 2015, says Dymacz: “We have been saying this for years, but object storage is something that’s hugely underused at the moment. Data is continuing to grow faster than most organisations know what to do with, and the costs associated with storing that data are growing year on year.

US technology companies facing growing UK pressure over internet spying
No such criticism of American institutions, much less companies, has ever been made before by a senior British government official. According to John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham and a cryptographer, "this statement from GCHQ is without precedent". "The US has an unfortunate track record of ignoring other countries' laws, in the area of high tech especially. It is good that they have been given a clear message from the UK that this must stop happening in the UK. I welcome GCHQ's openness and clarity on this matter. This is a very welcome development," he said.

Mac McMillan’s Clarifying Moment on Data Security
“The events of this past year ,” McMillan, CEO founder of the consulting firm CynergisTek Inc., told his audience, “have begun to show what’s going on, that the folks who want to do harm to us in healthcare have absolutely found us, and they’re not going away.” McMillan cited and briefly summarized 12 different, very serious, data breaches in 2014 that in a variety of ways are illustrative of all the threats facing patient care organizations in the U.S. What’s more, as he pointed out, the external threats—from hostile foreign governments, foreign-based criminal syndicates, and other entities—are beginning to emerge as potentially devastating for the U.S. healthcare system.

Forecasting to Improve Your Data Center Portfolio
Building and managing data center infrastructure represent large amounts of investments; it can easily reach up to hundreds of millions of dollars. Knowing whether or not you need additional capacity or whether your company can wait a few months to make this additional investment, can translate into a significant financial improvement to your data center portfolio. In retail, there are two forecasting models that allow you to manage your inventory levels between Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), distribution centers, retail stores and end customer: sell in and sell through models.

Quote for the day:

"To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

October 22, 2013

Hack in the Box: Researchers attack ship tracking systems for fun and profit
AIS protocol “was designed with seemingly zero security considerations,” but is a mandatory tracking system “for all passenger ships and commercial (non-fishing) ships over 300 metric tons.” AIS works “by acquiring GPS coordinates and exchanging vessel’s position, course and information with nearby ships, offshore installations, i.e. harbors and traffic control stations, and Internet tracking and visualization providers.” By 2014, it is estimated that AIS will be on one million ships.

Lowering the cost of private cloud software
One of the biggest long-term costs in virtualization and private/hybrid cloud environments isuncontrolled, unmonitored growth in computing demand. Costly growth occurs when users, empowered by self-service provisioning, deploy and scale workloads and then eventually abandon unneeded workloads within the private cloud without scaling down or decommissioning them.

Winning ‘the War to Keep Your Employees’ Requires Re-Recruiting Your Top Talent
Much like married couples can re-energize their marriage by renewing their vows, managers should periodically change and update what the company has to offer during the re-recruiting process. Re-recruiting is necessary because even if your top performers are loyal and have not actively applied for a new job, they are still constantly being identified, assessed, and contacted by corporate recruiters and by employees seeking out potential employee referrals.

AngularJS on top of ASP.NET: Moving the MVC framework out to the browser
Mixing .NET code with HTML in views can soon get very messy. Wouldn’t it be nice if the presentation layer (HTML) could be pure HTML? Also, in the ASP.NET MVC model, some of the business logic invariably resides in the controller. It is tempting to use an antipattern like the one shown above ... In this article we will see how Angular JS, a new JavaScript framework by Google can be used effectively to build web applications where: Views are pure HTML; Controllers (in the server sense) are pure REST based API calls; and The presentation layer is loaded as needed from partial HTML only files.

5 Tips for Managing Clouds at Scale
At a recent panel of cloud users, one thing became clear though: Managing a public cloud deployment at small scale is relatively straightforward. The problem comes when that deployment has to scale up. "It gets very complex," says IDC analyst Mary Turner, who advises companies on cloud management strategies. "In the early stages of cloud we had a lot of test and development, single-purpose, ad-hoc use case. We're getting to the point where people realize the agility cloud can bring, and now they have to scale it."

Rakuten’s CEO on Humanizing E-Commerce
When people talk about “social shopping” or “social commerce,” they’re referring to the fact that people like to connect with others for advice about purchases. Some people think that friends—whether in real life or on social media—have a big influence on what we buy. I don’t believe they’re that powerful. The curators running our shops know quite a bit more about products and are a much better source of recommendations. If you want to buy a tennis racket, do you ask a friend or the pro at the shop? If you want to learn about wine, do you ask a friend or a sommelier?

Passing PCI firewall audits: Top 5 checks for ongoing success
If you are an information security professional whose organization handles credit card information, then unless you have been living under a rock since PCI DSS was first introduced in 2004, PCI compliance is a fact of life. Many love to bash the standard as the "low bar" for security, but when it comes to "Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data," special attention to these five components

Managing virtualization machine security for in-house IaaS deployments
Many virtualization platforms offer specific controls for securing virtual machines; organizations should certainly take advantage of these. For example, VMware Inc.'s virtual machines have configuration settings that specifically prohibit copy and paste between the VM and the underlying hypervisor, which helps prevent sensitive data from being copied to hypervisor memory and clipboards. Platforms from Microsoft and Citrix Systems offer similar copy-and-paste restrictions.

Fighting Shadow IT: 10 Best Practices to Prevent Enterprise Data Leaks
Businesses are struggling to securely share files because employees are turning to consumer services outside the network to get the job done themselves without bothering to communicate to IT. Easy data access will win just about every time if it comes up against corporate policy. Since the single biggest cause of data leaving the network is a company's employees, guidelines need to regulate how corporate information is shared.

PCI SSC 2013 Community Meeting Takeaways
For PCI DSS v3.0, where segmentation is used to reduce scope and limit the network boundaries of the cardholder environment, penetration tests will be required to test the effectiveness of network boundaries. This means that internal penetration tests will need to include the internal network not just on the inside of the cardholder environment but also on the outside of the cardholder environment, from the vantage point of internal network zones that face the cardholder environment.

Quote for the day:

"Winning becomes easier over time as the cornerstones of confidence become habits" -- Rosabeth Moss Kanter

July 10, 2013

In Agile, Simple Is Not...
Unfortunately, in the agile world, the phrase "Do the simplest thing possible" has taken on a life of its own and is used to justify poor designs and implementations. When asked to justify their poor design, developers will push back with "Well, this is the simplest thing possible." While it may be true that it is the most straightforward or obvious thing possible, it almost certainly is not the simplest. Agile says that you aren't done at that point. You still have to refactor to a good, simple design.

Microsoft issues partners Windows XP phase-out marching orders
Microsoft and its partners have a lot of work to do between now and then to try to get more businesses off Windows XP. During the first day of the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, officials reminded resellers and systems integrators of their marching orders around the 11-year-old operating system.

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
If you understand who you are and what your strengths are (self-awareness), and you know how to lead yourself (self-management), then you will be a better leader. You will know how to read others and empathize. A good leader excels at leading himself first. If you can lead yourself first, then you will be better prepared to lead others. Being able to control your own emotions, being aware of your behavior, and being able to manage yourself will allow you to maximize your potential.

Virtual data protection: Seeing is believing
According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group report on Trends in Protecting Highly Virtualized Environments, virtualization rates as one of the top (or top) challenges in data protection. But digging deeper, one finds that five of the top six challenges in protecting virtual environments are related to visibility. Specifically, the top six challenges are:

Microsoft's MDM solution solves SMB and enterprise needs
Microsoft is late to the market for a comprehensive MDM solution, but has fairly quietly and quickly modified the alignment of their client device management applications, System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Windows Intune. Following a recent upgrade wave to the System Center and Intune products, when it comes to managing client devices like PCs, smart phones, and tablets, organizations of all sizes have a good value and solid MDM solution available from Microsoft.

India to overtake U.S. on number of developers by 2017
India's software development growth rate is attributed, in part, to its population size, 1.2 billion, and relative youth, with about half the population under 25 years of age, and economic growth. India's services firms hire, in many cases, thousands of new employees each quarter. Consequently, IT and software work is seen as clear path to the middle class for many of the nation's young.

Try Collabsuite, an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange
Collabsuite’s features include: Email, instant messaging, and calendaring; Rich AJAX webclient; Mail and IM archival; Shared rosters and multi-user conference chat; and Active Directory integration / Single Sign-On (SSO). Even if you aren’t especially knowledgeable about Linux or open source, you can get Collabsuite up and running rather quickly.

An "Acentric" Approach to Customer-centricity
Although most organizations would tend to agree with Drucker, they know that it is not practically possible to align all initiatives and actions to build a 100 percent customer-centric organization with products and services tailor-made for each customer. Over the years, organizations have begun to recognize that the customers' requirements need to be heard.

Lasting Legacy: Nelson Mandela's Evolution as a Strategic Leader
Mandela's remarkable story holds valuable lessons for other leaders involved in deep struggles, foremost among which are the importance of holding firm to a morally just vision and the ability to influence a sequence of key strategic decisions over time (decades, in his case) in order to bring about truly remarkable results. Three decisions especially stand out in Mandela's evolution as a strategic leader.

McAfee Security Architectures for the Public Sector
In general, agility is the capability of a system to change in response to a new condition. For resilience, agility is characterised by integration and interoperability. Integration is the ability of the system to rapidly adopt new technology or new security capability. An agile solution has the ability to easily interoperate with other technology through the adoption of open standards or an extensible management framework.

Quote for the day:

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." – Aristotle

August 19, 2012

Survey: CIOs Bullish on Cloud Benefits, But Worry About SaaS Data Silos
CIOs continue to grow more and more bullish about cloud solutions, with a whopping 92% saying that cloud provides business benefits, according to a recent survey. Nonetheless, IT execs remain concerned over how to avoid SaaS-based data silos. The survey was conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by Host Analytics.

KPMG: Why is the SaaS cloud market expanding rapidly?
It’s a reasonable enough assumption – companies moving to the cloud often do so in the hope of reducing cost, after all – and it appears SaaS is the best model with which to achieve that aim, although there are still some worries for CIOs to consider.

A Study in Leader Humility
Colin’s story reminds me of the vital role humility can play in leading a business organization. It also tells me that if there is one Colin, there have to be many more like him, quietly working away, not for the glory, but for the pleasure of being part of something great, something much bigger and more important than themselves.

Oracle Makes More Moves To Kill Open Source MySQL
It’s pretty clear that Oracle is trying to make it as difficult as possible to use MySQL. The result is a wave of unsettlement in the developer community about what Oracle considers open and what it sees as closed. The move is causing problems for developers in all manner of ways as expressed here and here.

It Takes Guts To Start A Company--So How Do You Get 'Em?
The willingness to take risks is born of a combination of elements. Your personality, your experiences, your “training” to deal with risk, and your support network all factor into your readiness to accept and embrace the risks that entrepreneurship requires.

Data Loss Prevention Is Better -- And Cheaper -- Than The Cure
Do yourself a massive favor and go check the state of your backups. Make sure that your precious digital data is safe. Do it before you’re faced with a massive recovery bill.

Quest Software unveils Foglight for Windows Azure applications Available immediately as a beta, the newest addition to the Foglight APM portfolio enables IT administrators to monitor performance and understand what end users are experiencing with Windows Azure-based applications.

Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM) Unveiled, to Replace C2DM Framework
GCM offers the ability to introduce a broker in between an application server and Android devices, guaranteeing cloud-type scalable communication between the two parties. GCM defines the contract so both a server and Android applications register for the GCM service and Google GCM servers maintain communication between them. The GCM servers handle all aspects of queuing messages and delivery to the target applications running on Android devices.

IG Group Open-Sources RESTdoclet
RESTdoclet is available for download as Open Source on GitHub, or in binary form from Sonatype, both under the terms of the Apache 2 license. Be sure to check out the project wiki for usage instructions, and do feel free to email IG Group at (open.source@iggroup.com) if you have any questions or feedback.

Quotes for the day:

"Management is a position that is granted; leadership is a status that is earned." ~K. Scott Derrick

"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." ~Robert Jarvik