Daily Tech Digest - March 24, 2020

What is Kotlin? The Java alternative explained

Kotlin is a general purpose, free, open source, statically typed “pragmatic” programming language initially designed for the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and Android that combines object-oriented and functional programming features. It is focused on interoperability, safety, clarity, and tooling support. Versions of Kotlin targeting JavaScript ES5.1 and native code (using LLVM) for a number of processors are in production as well. Kotlin originated at JetBrains, the company behind IntelliJ IDEA, in 2010, and has been open source since 2012. The Kotlin team currently has more than 90 full-time members from JetBrains, and the Kotlin project on GitHub has more than 300 contributors. JetBrains uses Kotlin in many of its products including its flagship IntelliJ IDEA. ... In Kotlin, functions may be declared at top level in a file, locally inside other functions, as a member function inside a class or object, and as an extension function. Extension functions provide the C#-like ability to extend a class with new functionality without having to inherit from the class or use any type of design pattern such as Decorator.

Coronavirus: Can the networks take the strain?

Operators’ measurements found that, in general terms up to 12 March, traffic through IP networks had seen increases of nearly 40% while mobile use has increased by about 50% in voice and 25% in data. Traffic from instant messaging tools such as WhatsApp had increased fivefold in recent days. In a tell-tale sign of the increased use of teleworking, network traffic related to remote work tools such as Skype and Webex has increased fourfold. There is nothing to suggest that the same scenario will be played out in all the European countries that enter lockdown, if they do. And therein lies an issue: who knows what is actually going on and when and what are networking firms doing to ensure that the lights stay lit? The UK’s second-largest broadband provider, Virgin Media, said it realises how important its network is to everyone right now. The company said it wants to reassure users that it is working as hard as it can to keep it in “great shape”. In particular, Virgin stressed that as more people work from home, it is important for users to know that its network can withstand any increased usage, including peaks throughout the day, in the evenings and at weekends.

Report: Most IoT transactions are not secure

“What this tells us is that employees inside the office might be checking their nanny cam over the corporate network. Or using their Apple Watch to look at email. Or working from home, connected to the enterprise network, and periodically checking the home security system or accessing media devices,” the company said in its report. Which is typical, to be honest, and let (s)he who is without sin cast the first stone in that regard. What’s troubling is that roughly 83% of IoT-based transactions are happening over plaintext channels, while only 17% are using SSL. The use of plaintext is risky, opening traffic to packet sniffing, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks and other exploits. And there are a lot of exploits. Zscaler said it detects about 14,000 IoT-based malware exploits per month, a seven-fold increase over the previous year. “Folks can keep their smart watches, smart closets, and whatever else they think is making them smart. Banning devices is not going to be the answer here. The answer is changing up the narrative on how we think about IoT devices from a security and risk standpoint, and what expectations we put on manufacturers to increase the security posture of these devices,” wrote Deepen Desai, Zscaler’s vice president of security research in a blog post.

Creating SQL containers on Azure Data Studio Notebooks with Python

The SQL Server tools team at Microsoft introduced Notebooks to Azure Data Studio (ADS) around March 2019. Since then, data professionals from the SQL Server community have been posting and sharing knowledge on how to make the most of this awesome new feature. It was probably May of 2019 when I decided to give ADS Notebooks a try. I started simply just creating some simplified versions of T-SQL notebooks. Then, I decided to move a step forward experimenting with the code cells that support markdown. I felt this step very natural for me, because of my familiarity with the markup language. However, I was looking for something else. Then, I discovered that ADS notebooks also support Python as one of the built-in kernels. That's when notebooks got my attention! I'm a big fan of Python, therefore I started to experiment around immediately. Python is a very modular language with many libraries and SDK's at our disposal, being the Docker SDK one of the most popular and personal favorites.

New York asks domain registrars to crack down on sites used for coronavirus scams

In an email, Kirkendall said his company has already been working with authorities to "proactively prevent, and take down any fraudulent or abusive domains or websites related to COVID19 or the Coronavirus." "These actions also include banning such terms from our available domain name search tool to prevent them from being registered going forward," Kirkendall told us. But only Namecheap appears to have taken proactive steps to block customers from registering coronavirus scammy-looking domains. On the other hand, GoDaddy and Endurance said they'd continue to rely on their abuse reporting mechanisms that are currently in place. "We have processes and procedures currently in place to investigate and respond promptly to notices of illicit customer activity, including alleged illegal activity or other violations of our terms of service," a spokesperson for the Endurance International Group told ZDNet in an email. GoDaddy provided a similar reply via email, but also in a tweet addressed to Attorney General James.

TrickBot and Emotet strains make process injection most prevalent attack technique

According to Red Canary detection engineer Jason Killam, process injection is a technique used by cyberattackers to mix malicious activity with operating system processes that are fairly routine. "Its most useful function may be that arbitrary code, once injected into a legitimate process, can inherit the privileges of that process or, similarly, access parts of the operating system that shouldn't be otherwise available," Killam wrote. Scheduled tasks are similarly designed to take advantage of normal functions by allowing cybercriminals to take certain actions at prespecified times, enabling execution, persistence, and privilege escalation. Red Canary director of advanced threat detection and research Michael Haag said that Scheduled Tasks are a functionally necessary component of the Windows operating system, adding that they execute routinely, and malicious tasks readily blend in with benign ones. "Scheduled Tasks represent a versatile tool for adversaries. With the requisite privileges, an attacker can schedule tasks remotely. The technique is also useful for execution and persistence in conjunction with a variety of widely used scripting languages, such as PowerShell," Haag said.

WHO, coronavirus testing lab hit by hackers as opportunistic attacks ramp up

According to Reuters, WHO has seen a marked increase in attempted cyberattacks – with one of the most recent reportedly perpetrated by a hacker group called DarkHotel. The unsuccessful attack spoofed a webpage to look like a login portal for agency employees in an attempt to steal passwords. As healthcare organizations battle the COVID-19 pandemic, they’re also facing heightened cybersecurity threats from malicious actors looking to take advantage of the crisis caused by the outbreak. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also fended off an attack recently as it was simultaneously focused on coronavirus response. Now, a UK-based medical facility that has plans to test coronavirus vaccines, Hammersmith Medicines Research, has been hit by an attack from one of the ransomware groups that recently pledged not to target medical organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The criminals behind the Maze ransomware attacks apparently managed to exfiltrate a slew of patient records, and have subsequently published some of the files on the dark web, demanding ransom payment.

CV19: Meet The Volunteer COVID-19 Cyber Heroes Helping Healthcare Fight The Hackers

Radoslaw Gnat, a veteran information security professional, has a very personal motivation for being involved: two of his children were recently diagnosed with virus unrelated pneumonia, and healthcare practitioners are helping them. Radoslaw sees this as an opportunity to contribute back. "We are just a group of people that is using our skills and contacts to help people that are the first line of defense against COVID-19," Gnat says. Those skills cover incident response, research, risk management and training services, among other things. Daniel Card, a self-proclaimed "Cyber Ninja Warrior" and founder of the PwnDefend capture the flag games, has issued a call for more people to help CV19 with its work. Alongside the enormous amount of work that is going into enabling technology solution providers and infosec professional volunteers, Card says that CV19 "must ensure that the work we do is conducted in line with our mission to help, not hinder." To facilitate this, CV19 has published a code of conduct that provides a shared understanding of how everyone should work together during this time of crisis.

IT’s Sudden Challenge: Connecting a Distributed Workforce

For IT departments this shift is creating an entirely new set of challenges. The primary challenge is connecting a distributed, remote workforce to business-enabling applications and services residing in the data center and the cloud. Some users require access to VoIP systems, virtual desktops, and video conferencing that require fast and highly reliable network connections. A company that had 50 branch offices yesterday must now grapple with the idea that every user, and their home network, is a new branch they have to support, representing an exponential increase in the number of sites overnight. Over the past few weeks, as this shift has moved from possibility to reality, we’ve had a series of discussions with customers about how to best meet these changing organizational goals. We’ve taken these requirements into account and have compiled a reference architecture that allows for non-SD-WAN and SD-WAN users alike to connect to applications and services remotely. In this blog we’ll dig into this architecture in more depth.

Fintech Firm Finastra Recovering From Ransomware Attack

CEO Tom Kilroy, who has posted a series of notices on the company's website, on Monday noted that Finastra was still working to "restore full IT operations. As mentioned previously, our solutions each have their own nuanced processes to move from being available to operationally live, and we are working closely with impacted customers to move through these essential steps securely." The ransomware attack. which started on Friday, forced Finastra to take its servers offline to prevent the malware from spreading further within its network, according to the online update. Kilroy did not offer details about the type of ransomware used in the attack on the company's infrastructure, but he noted that no customer or employee data apparently was inappropriately accessed or exfiltrated. Kilroy also noted that any clients running their own software on Finastra's network were not affected. The company is working with U.K. law enforcement officials as well as security firms to investigate the incident.

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Quote for the day:

"Leaders begin with a different question than others. Replacing who can I blame with how am I responsible?" -- Orrin Woodward

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Daily Tech Digest - March 23, 2020

You Need to Know SQL Temporary Table

We have been warned to NOT write any business logic in databases using triggers, stored procedures, and so on. It doesn’t mean we don’t need to know database systems. Being competent in database systems could save us a lot of work. For example, managers or customers often send us an email or a short notice asking for some one-off reports. Then we need to quickly log into the database servers and generate reports with either a list of parameters or a CSV file from requesters. ... There are two types of temporary tables: local and global temporary tables. Both of them share similar behaviors, except that the global temporary tables are visible across sessions. Moreover, the two types of temporary tables have different naming rules: local temporary tables should have names that start with a hash symbol (#); while the names of global temporary tables should start with two hash symbols (##). All temporary tables are stored in System Databases -> tempdb -> Temporary Tables.

Remote work tests corporate pandemic plans

IT leaders across the country are shifting gears from accommodating short-term remote work strategies for snowstorms, hurricanes and other natural disasters to how to help workers plan for and remain productive in a longer-term remote work environment. Due to the duration of the pandemic, Miami-based ChenMed, an operator of 60 senior health centers in the eastern U.S., intends to offer the small number of 2,500 users who don't have a laptop, such as front desk staff, the opportunity to take home their desktops so they can continue to answer patient calls and conduct other business. "Yes, it creates a lot more complexity in helping users set that up, but we want them to have a great experience versus trying to use an old computer at home," CIO Hernando Celada said. This strategy gives him confidence that the machines will be secure when the time comes for workers to be sent home, which will be at the first sign of community spread of the virus because ChenMed's patient population is the most vulnerable.

Private cloud reimagined as equal partner in multi-cloud world

Forrester's Gardner argues that repatriation is not a broad trend. "It's simply not true," he says. There may be some companies moving a specific application back to the private cloud for performance, regulatory or data gravity reasons, but repatriation is a relatively isolated phenomenon. The latest Gartner thinking on repatriation is in agreement with Gardner. "Contrary to market chatter that customers are abandoning the public cloud, consumption continues to grow as organizations leverage new capabilities to drive transformation. Certain workloads with low affinities to public cloud may be repatriated, largely because the migrations were not sufficiently thought through. But few organizations are wholly abandoning the public cloud at any technology layer," reads a 2019 Gartner report from analysts Brandon Medford, Sid Nag and Mike Dorosh. Warrilow says flatly, "Repatriation in net terms is not happening." He adds that there will always be a small number of workloads that go back to the private cloud as part of an organization's ongoing evaluation of the best landing spot for specific workloads.

What’s New in SQL Monitor 10?

SQL Monitor does the best job it can, out of the box, of setting up a useful core set of metrics and alerts, with sensible thresholds. However, the right alerts and the right thresholds are 100% dependent on your systems. A group or class of servers may all need the same alert types with the same thresholds, but these may well be different from those for other classes of server. Also, your group of VMWare-based servers, for example, may need different thresholds than your bare-metal servers for the same set of memory-related alerts. Configuring all this in the GUI, server-by-server, can be time consuming and it’s easy to introduce discrepancies. This alert configuration task, just like any other SQL Server management or maintenance task should be automated. With the PowerShell API, you now write PowerShell scripts to set up the alerts on a machine in a way that is exactly in accordance with your requirements. You then use that as a model to copy all the settings to other machines, or just groups of machines.

Can APIs be copyrighted?

The law is very clear about copyright. If a programmer writes down some code, the programmer owns the copyright on the work. The programmer may choose to trade that copyright for a paycheck or donate it to an open source project, but the decision is entirely the programmer’s. An API may not be standalone code, but it’s still the hard work of a person. The programmers will make many creative decisions along the way about the best or most graceful way to share their computational bounty. ... APIs are purely functional and the copyright law doesn’t protect the merely functional expressions. If you say “yes” to a flight attendant offering you coffee, you’re not plagiarizing or violating the copyright of the ancient human who coined the word “yes.” You’re just replying in the only way you can. Imagine if some clever car manufacturer copyrighted the steering wheel and the location of the pedals. The car manufacturers have plenty of ways to get creative about fins and paint colors. Do they need to make it impossible to rent or borrow a car without a lesson on how to steer it? The law recognizes that there are good reasons not to allow copyright to control functional expressions.

From Zero to Hero: CISO Edition

With new attacks forming faster than the technologies to fight them, holding CISOs to an entirely unrealistic standard doesn’t actually serve anyone. The truth is that no matter how many technologies are deployed or how good the security posture is, 100% protection from cyberattacks is simply not possible. Perhaps senior leadership and boards of directors are finally starting to acknowledge this fact, or perhaps they're starting to realize that a successful response to an attack, along with actions by other parts of the organization, contribute to the ultimate scale and scope of the event. CISOs are uniquely capable of gauging cyber-risk and how to reduce it. Experienced CISOs understand the threats their companies face and know how to deploy the optimal mix of people, processes, and technologies, weighed against threats, to provide the best possible level of protection. Organizations that understand this are leading the charge in shifting the perception of the CISO from technical manager to strategic risk leader.

Most common cyberattacks we'll see in 2020

By convincingly impersonating legitimate brands, phishing emails can trick unsuspecting users into revealing account credentials, financial information, and other sensitive data. Spear phishing messages are especially crafty, as they target executives, IT staff, and other individuals who may have administrative or high-end privileges. Defending against phishing attacks requires both technology and awareness training. Businesses should adopt email filtering tools such as Proofpoint and the filtering functionality built into Office 365, said Thor Edens, director of Information Security at data analytics firm Babel Street. Business-focused mobile phishing attacks are likely to spread in 2020, according to Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst for market intelligence firm Enterprise Strategy Group. As such, IT executives should analyze their mobile security as part of their overall strategy. "Spam filters with sandboxing and DNS filtering are also essential security layers because they keep malicious emails from entering the network, and protect the user if they fall for the phishing attempt and end up clicking on a malicious hyperlink," said Greg Miller, owner of IT service provider CMIT Solutions of Orange County.

Las Vegas shores up SecOps with multi-factor authentication

Las Vegas initially rolled out Okta in 2018 to improve the efficiency of its IT help desk. Sherwood estimated the access management system cut down on help desk calls relating to forgotten passwords and password resets by 25%. The help desk also no longer had to manually install new applications for users because of an internal web portal connected to Okta that automatically manages authorization and permissions for self-service downloads. That freed up help desk employees for more strategic SecOps work, which now includes the multi-factor authentication rollout. Another SecOps update slated for this year will add city employees' mobile devices to the Okta identity management system, and an Okta single sign-on service for Las Vegas citizens that use the city's web portal. Residents will get one login for all services under this plan, Sherwood said. "If they get a parking citation and they're used to paying their sewer bill, it's the same login, and they can pay them both through a shopping cart."

Coronavirus challenges capacity, but core networks are holding up

Increased use of conferencing apps may affect their availability for reasons other than network capacity. For example, according to ThousandEyes, users around the globe were unable to connect to their Zoom meetings for approximately 20 minutes on Friday due to failed DNS resolution. Others too are monitoring data traffic looking for warning signs of slowdowns. “Traffic towards video conferencing, streaming services and news, e-commerce websites has surged. We've seen growth in traffic from residential broadband networks, and a slowing of traffic from businesses and universities," wrote Louis Poinsignon a network engineer with CloudFlare in a blog about Internet traffic patterns. He noted that on March 13 when the US announced a state of emergency, CloudFlare’s US data centers served 20% more traffic than usual. Poinsignon noted that Internet Exchange Points, where Internet service providers and content providers can exchange data directly (rather than via a third party) have also seen spikes in traffic. For example, Amsterdam (AMS-IX), London (LINX) and Frankfurt (DE-CIX), a 10-20% increase was seen around March 9.

7 ways the tech and services industry could be transformed

With a large segment of the population confined to their homes having to consume bandwidth, the internet free-for-all we have enjoyed to date is all but done. Emergency legislation or an executive order needs to be enacted to limit video content streaming to 720p across all content services, such as from Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, Disney+, YouTube, and other providers. Traffic prioritization and shaping need to be put in place for core business applications during prime hours, which includes video conferencing for business and personal use. This would effectively be the opposite of net neutrality, as an emergency measure. Internet video streaming traffic should be prioritized for essential news providers, and the government should provide incentives for them to broadcast their content (and for home-bound citizens to consume it) over-the-air (OTA) so that additional bandwidth can be freed up. Remember the antenna and devices with built-in tuners? It may be an appropriate time to shift some programming back to the airwaves, and even bring back the DVR, so that programming can be transferred to devices during off-hours when networks aren't saturated.

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Quote for the day:

"Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." -- Vince Lombardi

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Daily Tech Digest - March 22, 2020

How Is AI Helping To Commercialize Space?

The power of deep learning and AI-enabled recognition provides significant power in analyzing images and providing ability to review the millions of images produced by spacecraft. Artificial intelligence on the other end can analyze the images as they are being taken and determine if there are any issues with the images. Unlike humans, AI does not need to sleep or take breaks so it can rapidly process a lot of data. Using AI to capture images of Earth also prevents the need for large amounts of communication to and from Earth to analyze photos and determine whether a new photo needs to be taken. By cutting back on communication, the AI is saving processing power, reducing battery usage, and speeding up the image gathering process. Satellites are also being used to analyze natural disasters from space. Detailed imagery from a satellite can help those on the ground to see victims, determine the course of the disaster, and more. Artificial intelligence is being used to help speed up the response of satellites to natural disasters. With the help of the onboard AI, satellites are able to determine where a natural disaster is located and navigate to that location.

COVID-19: How to Adjust Business Continuity Plans

The COVID-19 pandemic present new challenges to healthcare IT and security teams, including the need to reassess and adjust business continuity plans, says Christopher Frenz, who leads information security at New York's Interfaith Medical Center. He's chair of an industry committee that has developed new guidance for dealing with those challenges. ... "Business continuity is something organizations should constantly test, particularly in healthcare," he says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. "Testing your backup and disaster recovery plans is something we should always be doing. But at a time like this where we're seeing an upswing in malware attacks against hospitals related to coronavirus, and you're going to have influxes of patients ... that puts additional stresses on systems. So it's definitely a good idea to test and verify that all this stuff works ahead of time," he says.

Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked

Susceptibility to 51% attacks is inherent to most cryptocurrencies. That’s because most are based on blockchains that use proof of work as their protocol for verifying transactions. In this process, also known as mining, nodes spend vast amounts of computing power to prove themselves trustworthy enough to add information about new transactions to the database. A miner who somehow gains control of a majority of the network's mining power can defraud other users by sending them payments and then creating an alternative version of the blockchain in which the payments never happened. This new version is called a fork. The attacker, who controls most of the mining power, can make the fork the authoritative version of the chain and proceed to spend the same cryptocurrency again. For popular blockchains, attempting this sort of heist is likely to be extremely expensive. According to the website Crypto51, renting enough mining power to attack Bitcoin would currently cost more than $260,000 per hour. But it gets much cheaper quickly as you move down the list of the more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies out there.

Cyber crooks continue to exploit COVID-19 for their malicious schemes

“BEC attacks are often delivered in stages. The first email sent is typically innocuous, meaning that they do not contain the attacker’s end goal. The attackers craft plausible scenarios in hopes the recipient will reply. Once they’re on the hook, the attacker will send their true ask. (I need you to buy gift cards, wire transfer funds, etc.),” the researchers explained. “These coronavirus-themed BEC attacks often come with spoofed display names, which are likely real people known to the recipient. In the body of this message, the actor attempts to eliminate the possibility of voice-verification, in hopes of ensuring a higher success rate, by saying their phone is ‘faulty at the moment.'” They’ve also spotted an assortment of fake notices impersonating doctors and local health agencies and institutions (aimed at the general population), as well as more targeted emails aimed at enterprises (employees), such as fake internal emails for credential phishing attacks impersonating the organization’s president, IT staff, risk manager, and so on.

CIOs say personal disruption comes before digital disruption

CIOs suggest personal disruption should be part and parcel to the overall disruptions that their organizations are making. At the same time, they say transformation needs to happen at many levels these days including the personal level. With this said, if an organization has been comfortable with the status quo for too time, CIOs say they need to start by driving the organizational change needed to be receptive to change and to perceive changes the organization needs. A key part of this, CIOs say is that IT leaders should resolve to be open to new ideas and ways of thinking this year and in the coming decade. Part of this involves getting out of the natural comfort zone and being open to thinking differently about how to impact the organization. CIOs suggest in 2020 IT leaders need to have increased awareness of the social and cultural impacts occurring from technology. CIOs say, for this reason, it makes sense to encourage the entire team to self-disrupt itself. To fix businesses, CIOs should get the business out of its comfort zone too.

4 Reasons Central Banks Should Launch Retail Digital Currencies

While domestic retail payments in many OECD countries are now free, cross border payments remain a minefield of pain, cost and delays for consumers. If I send money to my mum in India, she has no digital identity in the UK and I have no digital identity in India. So my bank in the UK verifies that I sent the money, my mum’s bank verifies that she’s the person the money is for and both the banks verify (or at least hope) that neither I nor my mum is a nefarious character. Then the banks wait until they have compared their respective spreadsheets and make me wait for this reconciliation. Only after that, both the banks take a nice cut on the FX and send the rest to my mum. If the bank was in rural Ghana instead of Delhi, there’d probably be two more banks in this bank-chain, which’d quadruple the delay and the pain. This whole process of cross border payments is not only a pain for consumers, it also makes the global AML regime ineffective and unenforceable. Instead, if the Bank of England and the Reserve Bank of India both were to rely on a shared set of data standards for their respective digital currencies and for the corresponding digital identity infrastructure

Exploring the risky behavior of IT security professionals

Almost 65% of the nearly 300 international cybersecurity professionals canvased by Gurucul at RSA Conference 2020 said they access documents that have nothing to do with their jobs. Meanwhile, nearly 40% of respondents who experienced bad performance reviews also admitted to abusing their privileged access, which is double the overall rate (19%). “We knew insider privilege abuse was rampant in most enterprises, but these survey results demonstrate that the infosecurity department is not immune to this practice,” said Saryu Nayyar, CEO of Gurucul. “Detecting impermissible access to resources by authorized users, whether it is malicious or not, is virtually impossible with traditional monitoring tools. That’s why many organizations are turning to security and risk analytics that look at both employee and entity behaviors to identify anomalies indicative of insider threats.” ... This showcases the problems organizations have with employees behaving outside of the bounds of practical and published security policies.

Covid-19: NHS tackles coronavirus crisis with the help of tech

NHS Digital’s website states: “Patients should be enabled to get advice and care without attending the practice unless in-person care is clinically required.” But although phone appointments are great, they won’t cover everything. This is where video appointments are invaluable – not just for patients who may be displaying coronavirus symptoms, but for anyone who needs to be seen by a GP. Some GPs already have online systems and video consultations in place, but many of those who have the service available have not yet begun to use it. EMIS is one of the biggest GP IT system providers in England, with nearly 4,000 GP practices using its EMIS Web service. In 2017, it launched its Video Consult service, but uptake has been limited. This echoes throughout GP practices in the UK – suppliers often offer the service, but few GP practices use it. EMIS, which normally charges GPs for the use of video consultations, has now decided to offer it free for the next few months.

To succeed in DevOps these days, go hybrid

DevOps is not just a technical undertaking, it's a business proposition. This calls for hybrid skills that enable a more holistic view of the entire software development and deployment process. With a majority of enterprises (52%) intending to ramp up their recruiting of DevOps skills. close to two-thirds, 65%, reported having difficulties with finding these combinations of skills. DevOps is not just a technical undertaking, it's a business proposition. This calls for hybrid skills that enable a more holistic view of the entire software development and deployment process. With a majority of enterprises (52%) intending to ramp up their recruiting of DevOps skills. close to two-thirds, 65%, reported having difficulties with finding these combinations of skills. The DevOps journey is still very difficult for more than 50% of respondents. "DevOps is a fundamental change in the traditional structure of IT. It not only represents the adoption of new technology, but also an organizational transformation challenge with all that it implies with the 'evangelization of the existing responsibility silos.

The Anatomy of a Microservice, One Service, Multiple Servers

In addition to supporting multiple transport mechanisms that can improve performance and efficiency, when providing more than one API Server, there’s an architectural benefit. That is helping to enforce separation of concerns. While the high-level architecture diagram presented in Microservice Definition and Architecture depicts a clear separation of concerns, like any other development effort, implementing this pattern does require diligence. In a previous article in this series, I stated that I believe developers have the best intentions in mind. Of course, there are exceptions, but individuals do want to do a good job. The problem comes in when deadlines loom. Things start to get thrown off the back of the truck. Shortcuts are taken. Non-functional requirements such as metrics gathering and reporting are missed. The more an architecture helps guide a team, the less likely these things will happen. Specifically, in the case of having two API Servers, business logic remains where it’s supposed to remain: in the business service.

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Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone." -- Ferdinand Marcos

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Daily Tech Digest - March 21, 2020

Cisco moves WiFi roaming technology to wireless broadband consortium

With OpenRoaming, device users can employ methods such as Samsung ID, their mobile SIM card, or their cloud provider to sign into OpenRoaming once, granting them seamless access to participating wireless networks around the world, according to Cisco. In addition, OpenRoaming brings together a federation of trusted identity providers, to automatically allow users to join any network managed by an OpenRoaming federation member. The membership include service providers, device manufacturers, cloud ID, or even loyalty memberships. Boingo Wireless, GlobalReach Technology, Intel, Korea Telekom, and others have pledged support for OpenRoaming. “There is considerable pull from the industry and our customers, both enterprise and service provider, to automate secure onboarding across multiple verticals,” wrote Matt MacPherson, Cisco’s Wireless CTO in a blog about the transfer. WBA’s global ecosystem can integrate OpenRoaming into its technologies, regardless of equipment provider. He says that OpenRoaming supports seamless, secure roaming that can iprove Wi-Fi service in general.

Completely Free Machine Learning Reading List

There are many free online courses for learning data science and machine learning available. I previously covered a list of my top five in this article. However, books can be a really useful tool for learning the detail and theory behind these subjects. Fortunately, if you look hard enough you will find that there are a wealth of completely free books online that cover the majority of topics and concepts that you need to learn. ... "Think Stats" by Allen B. Downey can be read online or downloaded as a pdf here. It covers many of the core statistical concepts for data science including data analysis, distributions and probability. It also leans heavily towards coded examples written in python rather than mathematical equations, which I think makes it easier to digest for those without advanced maths degrees. ... "Bayesian Methods for Hackers: Probabilistic Programming for Bayesian Inference" by Cameron Davidson-Pilon attempts to bridge the gap between theoretical Bayesian machine learning methods and their practical application in probabilistic programming. It provides a really good introduction to Bayesian inference with a practical first approach.

60% of Security Pros Trust Cyberthreat Detections Verified by Humans over AI

According to research findings, based on the responses of 102 professionals in the cybersecurity industry, 45% of respondents opined that their companies lack a sufficiently staffed cybersecurity team. Over 70% of respondents agreed that AI-based tools made their security teams more efficient by eliminating over 55% of everyday security operations. Incorporating AI tools into security operations decreased employees’ stress levels, according to 40% of respondents. And, 65% claim that AI tools allow them to focus on cyberattack mitigation and preventive measures. Despite the advantages AI-based technologies offer, the majority of respondents stressed that there are skills and benefits the human element provides cybersecurity teams that AI and machine learning cannot match. WhiteHat provides services that are required for organizations to secure the entire software lifecycle (SLC) from the development through deployment and operation. Its Application Security Platform technology solutions include Software Composition Analysis (SCA), Static Application Security Testing (SAST), and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST).

How artificial intelligence is changing the game for banks

“Natural language processing will dramatically change the way we will operate. There is a tremendous amount of hidden knowledge locked away at a bank — we’re sitting on a goldmine. This will give us a way to access it,” he says. “We will be able to make faster, better decisions on everything from mortgages to calculating how much collateral the bank holds.” Legrand’s mention of collateral begs a big question: would AI — with all its better, faster ways of handling data — have been able to sound an early alarm on a big systemic problem like the financial crisis? Liu, for all his ambition, baulks at making quite such a big claim. “I don’t think it would avert a crisis because there are so many different elements that come into it. But it would help with crisis management. [This technology] can help show you things such as if one part of the bank goes bankrupt, how quickly would that crisis spread.” With the world economy rocked by COVID-19, he adds, banks are again coming under pressure to spot problems with liabilities and non-performing loans as quickly as possible.

Architectural Implications of IoT Data

Due to potential implications for enterprise and our transformation programs, we must plan data collection via IoT sensors carefully. Data sources for IoT solutions can be diverse and complex. As a first design activity, we must determine the type of physical signals to measure. Then, we can identify the number of sensors to be used. We need to calculate speed of signals for these sensors and document in our data acquisition plan. Digital transformation architects need to closely work with the IoT Solution Architects and solution designers to create stringent governance and innovative measures around streaming data collection plans. In addition to the architectural, design, and innovation challenges of massive data, application usage patterns are also essential factors for the performance of IoT solutions particularly in the enterprise modernisation and digital transformation initiatives. For example, minute details such as the processors and memory of the servers hosting the IoT applications matter and must be considered carefully using benchmarks. By using benchmarks for application, data, and infrastructure, we can create an exclusive IoT performance model and a set of test strategies to use in our digital transformation solutions.

Singapore introduces contact tracing app to slow coronavirus spread

The mobile app can plug the gaps and more quickly identify potential carriers, who then can monitor their health and take the necessary action sooner. Early detection is crucial in slowing down the spread of the coronavirus, according to the government agency. To safeguard personal privacy, it added that users would have to provide consent during the initial setup of the app to participate in TraceTogether and agree to have their mobile number and captured data used for contact tracing. GovTech said only the user's mobile phone was required during the installation, and no other data such as name, location, contact list, or address book would be collected. Data logs were stored locally on the mobile phone and contained only cryptographically generated temporary IDs. The data logs would be extracted only when needed by the authorities for contact tracing, it said.  TraceTogether is available for download via Google Play and Apple App Store.

Intel trains neuromorphic chip to detect 10 different odors

Nabil Imam, a neuromorphic computing lab senior research scientist at Intel, believes the research will pave the way for neuromorphic systems that can diagnose diseases, detect weapons and explosives, find narcotics, and spot signs of smoke and carbon monoxide “We are developing neural algorithms on Loihi that mimic what happens in your brain when you smell something,” he said in a statement. “This work is a prime example of contemporary research at the crossroads of neuroscience and artificial intelligence and demonstrates Loihi’s potential to provide important sensing capabilities that could benefit various industries.” Neuromorphic engineering, also known as neuromorphic computing, describes the use of circuits that mimic the nervous system’s neuro-biological architectures. Researchers at Intel, IBM, HP, MIT, Purdue, Stanford, and others hope to leverage it to develop a supercomputer a thousand times more powerful than any today. ... According to Intel, Loihi processes information up to 1,000 times faster and 10,000 more efficiently than traditional processors, and it can solve certain types of optimization problems with more than three orders of magnitude gains in speed and energy efficiency.

Auto ML and the future of self-managing networks with Dr. Behnaz Arzani

Things like video analytics, like natural language processing, things like that are always needed, not necessarily something for networking. So my friend and I, Bita Rouhani from Doug Burger’s group, started to look at well, what happens if you just dump networking data into these systems? Like, just let’s see how well they do. And they did it abysmally bad. The state-of-the-art was like terrible. And so we looked at it and said okay, why is that the case? And what we found was that, well, there’s simple domain customizations that we could do, even on the input. Not anything to the machine learning, but just how we present the data that would significantly boost their accuracy. And so the idea was well, actually, operators are really good at that part. Like they really know their data. They really know things about the data that the auto ML frameworks don’t know. So is there a way to bridge this gap? Is there a way to provide that domain knowledge without him knowing anything about ML?

The Two Trends that Will Shape the Future of ITSM

The first trend is what I call the primacy of the customer. Essentially, this trend means that organizations are no longer creating value by delivering a mass product to a mass market as efficiently as possible. Instead, differentiating value is created by delivering a differentiated customer experience. Those that positively transform the experience win. This idea also has a few associated buzzwords like the experience economy, mass customization, and the market of one. These catchphrases all relate to this idea, but the big difference is that it’s now becoming the primary driver of organizational value. The second trend is more personal. I call it the primacy of algorithm. Throughout the industrial age, organizations needed workers who could perform work consistently, reliably, and repeatedly. Essentially, they needed robots, so we trained generations of humans to be the robots that would power the literal and figurative machinery of the industrial age. Today, however, we’re on the cusp of an algorithmic tipping point.

Mass move to work from home in coronavirus crisis creates opening for hackers

“People who have never worked from home before are trying to do it and they are trying to do it at scale,” said Wendy Nather, a senior advisor with Cisco’s Duo Security who has spent the past decade working from home for various jobs. She said the sudden transition would mean more scope for mistakes, more strain on information technology staff, and more opportunity for cyber criminals hoping to trick employees into forking over their passwords. Criminals are dressing up password-stealing messages and malicious software as coronavirus-themed alerts, warnings, or apps. Some researchers have found hackers masquerading as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a bid to break into emails or swindle users out of bitcoin, while others have spotted hackers using a malicious virus-themed app to hijack Android phones. Advanced cyber spies also appear to be exploiting the coronavirus outbreak that has infected tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 more than 210,000 people and killed 8,700 worldwide.

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Quote for the day:

"The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it." -- Lord Thomas Macaulay

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Daily Tech Digest - March 20,2020

How to Spot Disruption Before It Strikes

In this modern age, everything is interconnected, which means that if you’re trying to see the future of one thing — let’s say your field — you really do have to pay attention to developments in adjacent areas to see which connections will catapult change forward into the future. That means you have to pay attention to things like wealth distribution and education. And in both of those cases, we’re talking about who has access to what. Are there groups that are gaining more agency and ability where they live? Are there changes happening to regulations and to permissions? Essentially, this new app was a way to help people make money while they sleep. Gollum got its idea from something that existed in the ’90s and in fact still exists today. In the ’90s, while you were asleep, you could donate the unused compute power of your computer to others — to researchers and academics who needed supercomputing networks but maybe couldn’t afford to get access to one. So instead, there were these distributed networks of computers all around the world where people had donated their unused compute time while they were asleep, for great projects.

Attack Surface, Vulnerabilities Increase as Orgs Respond to COVID-19 Crisis

Predictably, a lot of the activity has involved phishing and social-engineering campaigns where COVID-19 has been used as a thematic lure to get people to click on malicious attachments and links in emails or to download malware on mobile and other devices. There have also been reports about account takeover and business email compromise activity, a growth in domains serving up drive-by malware, and attempts to exploit virtual private networks (VPNs) and other remote access tools. The danger posed by these threats has been exacerbated by new requirements for "social distancing" and the resulting push by many organizations to widen or implement telework capabilities for their workforce. The sudden COVID-19-related surge in the use of videoconferencing, remote access, and VPN services — especially at organizations that have not used them before — is giving attackers more targets to go after and defenders a lot more terrain to protect.

France warns of new ransomware gang targeting local governments

CERT-FR said it is still investigating how the Pysa gang is gaining access to victim's networks. However, forensics clues left behind paint a picture of what could have happened on some of the infected/ransomed networks. For example, CERT-FR said there was evidence suggesting that the Pysa gang launched brute-force attacks against management consoles and Active Directory accounts. These brute-force attacks were followed by the exfiltration of a company's accounts & passwords database. Victim organizations also reported seeing unauthorized RDP connections to their domain controllers, and the deployment of Batch and PowerShell scripts. Furthermore, the Pysa gang also deployed a version of the PowerShell Empire penetration-testing tool, stopped various antivirus products, and even uninstalled Windows Defender in some instances. CERT-FR says that in at least one case they analyzed, they also found a new version of the Pysa ransomware, which used the .newversion file extension instead of the older .pysa.

How organizations can maintain a third-party risk management program from day one

Third parties certainly are having a lot to do with data breaches these days. You read any study, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, any of the unbiased studies out there, a number of the data breaches are actually coming from third parties and vendors, so that we recognize that you might have your four walls or your firewalls under control, but what you’re doing with other vendors and other folks in your supply chain, certainly puts your data at risk. We think that’s certainly important. A lot of these heavily regulated industries are actually getting audited and examined to understand how they understand the ecosystem of third parties. But we’re also seeing it go down-market. Not just the heavily regulated industries, but other areas and other verticals are starting to really think about how they interact with third parties, what data they’re sharing, and also what kind of value they could get from those third parties. Are they understanding the metrics, the measurements that they measure those vendors on? Are they getting what they paid for? Are they getting the level of performance they expect? And because of that, I think we can optimize a lot of those relationships and help them better understand that ecosystem in which they behave.

7 Spring Cleaning Tasks to Improve Data Security

Begin this year’s spring by reviewing your data assets. Move any sensitive information offline if it doesn’t need to be network-accessible. Keep in mind that any data not in your possession cannot be stolen from you. If you are storing information about other people or organizations and you can’t foresee any possible future use for that data, get rid of it. If you need it, move it to a secure offline facility. For instance, if you are storing credit card CVC codes — which you should not need to — get rid of them. There is no better method of ensuring data security than not having irrelevant data in the first place. Make sure you’re backing up properly and frequently. You should back up often enough that if something were to go severely wrong, you wouldn’t be panicking about lost personal or enterprise data. If you are responsible for ensuring that others back up, make sure that they understand the importance of doing so, and deploy technology that simplifies and automates the backup process. If you aren’t sure whether you’re backing up often enough, you probably are not.

Managing Service-to-Service Communications in the Era of Microservices

Broadly speaking, the data plane "does the work" and is responsible for "conditionally translating, forwarding, and observing every network packet that flows to and from a [network endpoint]." In modern systems, the data plane is typically implemented as a proxy, that is run out-of-process alongside each service as a "sidecar." Klein states that within a service mesh, the data plane "touches every packet/request in the system, and is responsible for service discovery, health checking, routing, load balancing, authentication/authorization, and observability." There is work underway within the CNCF to create a Universal Data Plane API, based on concepts from Klein's earlier blog post The Universal Data Plane API. This proposal extends the xDS API that has been defined and implemented by Envoy and is supported in other proxies such as MOSN. A control plane "supervises the work," and takes all the individual instances of the data plane — a set of isolated stateless sidecar proxies—and turns them into a distributed system.

Everything you need to connect with your teammates and be more productive

In the face of COVID-19, there are countless stories from customers who are using Teams to connect and thrive in inspiring ways. A professor at University of Bologna in Italy shared on Twitter how the school moved 90 percent of courses online to Teams within four days, which is definitely a first in the university’s 900-plus year history. Doctors at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Pennsylvania will use Teams for videoconferencing with patients, especially those who are most vulnerable to coronavirus, as a way to protect both patients and healthcare providers. And the City of Osaka in Japan is using Teams to conduct orientations and trainings for hundreds of new incoming employees in April. Stories like these are playing out in countries the world over. We believe that this sudden, globe-spanning move to remote work will be a turning point in how we work and learn. Already, we are seeing how solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration have become central to the way we work.

3 Technologies That Can Ease the M&A Process

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process optimization that automates tasks using software robots, or digital workers. RPA can play a major role in automating repetitive and manual data-related tasks, freeing up employees for higher-value work. During mergers and acquisitions, employees have new systems and processes to adjust to, within a limited time frame and staff may not have learned the skills required to complete these tasks efficiently. RPA can help to ease this process by using artificial intelligence workers to help with data entry, data mapping, data extraction and moving data into multiple systems, which is critical for systems consolidation after a merger or acquisition. ... While custom point-to-point integration can help companies reach a short-term goal, it drastically complicates matters in the long run when integrating multiple companies’ subsystems and data centers. Fortunately, there are a variety of off-the-shelf alternatives that can create connectivity across a company’s entire business ecosystem, without needing complex custom code.

Security Ratings Are a Dangerous Fantasy

Why are security ratings so bad? For starters, the data is terrible. The quality of security ratings is contingent on the quality of the underlying data and the science with which this data is interpreted. Unfortunately, the cybersecurity ratings industry has nowhere close to the depth and breadth of data of other ratings sectors. Security ratings companies do not have accurate network maps, and ratings are regularly deflated due to misattribution or improper understanding of network configurations. Security ratings companies typically use incomplete third-party data and do not communicate caveats or error estimates to their customers. By the time you read them, security ratings are already out of date, because the data is not quickly refreshed and refresh timestamps aren't clearly communicated. Another challenge is that ratings aren't scientific or statistically relevant. Given those problems, vendors committed to a ratings product have no choice but to hack their way to a partial solution.

Beware Of AI Assisted Ransomware

The AI component of Ransomware does some clever stuff like conceal the conditions needed to unlock the files as well as deploy untraceable malicious applications, but it doesn’t stop here. Just like businesses use AI for language learning, so too can the malware be trained to recognise types of content and be on the lookout for specific words as well as listen to voice prompts. Face recognition log in is popular now too so of course, the smart malware can be trained to recognise images. Cybercriminals are also using advanced image APIs for face recognition on webcams, and security cameras. Hackers get a lot of personal information or data from the dark corners of the Internet, aka ‘dark web’. For example, where you shop online or do your personal banking data can be stolen, and it often ends up on the dark web where it is traded to hackers who can use it in their malware. Open source tools are also the target of hackers where they can be used to compromise website, servers and cloud infrastructure. So with the influx of smart hacking, what can we do to protect data and devices, so we’re not a victim of a malicious cyber attack?

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Quote for the day:

"If You only have a hammer everything looks like a nail." -- Abraham Maslow

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