Brand-New Watson Health Unit Has Boston Buzzing
September 17, 2015
The article titled IBM Watson Health Unit Begins to Take Shape on TechCrunch investigates the work being done to initiate the new healthcare unit in Boston and surrounding community that IBM hopes to use to address major issues in healthcare. Already this year IBM has purchased and partnered with numerous companies in the field. Recently, Boston Children’s Hospital joined the list as well as Apple and Johnson & Johnson. The article states,
“As part of today’s broad announcement, IBM indicated that it would be working with Sage Bionetworks’ Open Biomedical Research Platform around the first Apple projects. Sage will be collecting information from Apple Devices using ResearchKit developer tools, initially with breast cancer and Parkinson’s patients. It will be aggregating storing, curating and analyzing the information coming in from the Apple Devices. IBM will be providing the underlying technology with its IBM Watson Health Cloud platform.”
Additionally, IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Science Compliance was also announced, as the cherry built on top of IBM Softlayer. It is designed to aid companies in the life science industry with a fully compliant cloud solution capable of meeting the demands of the heavily regulated field. Not mentioned in the article is any mention of what the revenues are for this Health Unit initiative, as if they are entirely irrelevant.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Europol and FireEye Are Fighting Digital Crime
September 15, 2015
The Internet is a hotbed for crime and its perpetrators and Europol is one of the main organizations that fights it head on. One the problems that Europol faces is the lack of communication between law enforcement agencies and private industry. In a landmark agreement that will most likely be followed by others, The Inquirer reports “Europol and FireEye Have Aligned To Fight The International Cyber Menace.”
FireEye and Eurpol have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) where they will exchange information, so law enforcement agencies and private industry will be able to share information in an effort to fight the growing prevalence of cyber crime. Europol is usually the only organization that disseminates information across law enforcement agencies. FireEye is eager to help open the communication channels.
” ‘The threat landscape is changing every day and organizations need to stay one step ahead of the attackers,’ said Richard Turner, president for EMEA at FireEye. ‘Working with Europol means that, as well as granting early access to FireEye’s threat intelligence, FireEye will be able to respond to requests for assistance around threats or technical indicators of compromise in order to assist Europol in combating the ever increasing threat from cyber criminals.’ ”
The MoU will allow for exchange of information about cyber crime to aid each other in prevention and analyze attach methods. The Inquirer, however, suspects that information will only be shared one way. It does not explain which direction, though. The MoU is going to be a standard between Big Data companies and law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement agencies are notorious for being outdated and understaffed; relying on information and software from private industry will increase cyber crime prevention.
Whitney Grace, September 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Content Matching Helps Police Bust Dark Web Sex Trafficking Ring
September 4, 2015
The Dark Web is not only used to buy and sell illegal drugs, but it is also used to perpetuate sex trafficking, especially of children. The work of law enforcement agencies working to prevent the abuse of sex trafficking victims is detailed in a report by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation called “Secret ‘Dark Net’ Operation Saves Scores Of Children From Abuse; Ringleader Shannon McCoole Behind Bars After Police Take Over Child Porn Site.” For ten months, Argos, the Queensland, police anti-pedophile taskforce tracked usage on an Internet bulletin board with 45,000 members that viewed and uploaded child pornography.
The Dark Web is notorious for encrypting user information and that is one of the main draws, because users can conduct business or other illegal activities, such as view child pornography, without fear of retribution. Even the Dark Web, however, leaves a digital trail and Argos was able to track down the Web site’s administrator. It turned out the administrator was an Australian childcare worker who had been sentenced to 35 years in jail for sexually abusing seven children in his care and sharing child pornography.
Argos was able to catch the perpetrator by noticing patterns in his language usage in posts he made to the bulletin board (he used the greeting “hiya”). Using advanced search techniques, the police sifted through results and narrowed them down to a Facebook page and a photograph. From the Facebook page, they got the administrator’s name and made an arrest.
After arresting the ringleader, Argos took over the community and started to track down the rest of the users.
” ‘Phase two was to take over the network, assume control of the network, try to identify as many of the key administrators as we could and remove them,’ Detective Inspector Jon Rouse said. ‘Ultimately, you had a child sex offender network that was being administered by police.’ ”
When they took over the network, the police were required to work in real-time to interact with the users and gather information to make arrests.
Even though the Queensland police were able to end one Dark Web child pornography ring and save many children from abuse, there are still many Dark Web sites centered on child sex trafficking.
Whitney Grace, September 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Dark Web Drug Trade Unfazed by Law Enforcement Crackdowns
September 3, 2015
When Silk Road was taken down in 2013, the Dark Web took a big hit, but it was only a few months before black marketers found alternate means to sell their wares, including illegal drugs. The Dark Web provides an anonymous and often secure means to purchase everything from heroin to prescription narcotics with, apparently, few worries about the threat of prosecution. Wired explains that “Crackdowns Haven’t Stopped The Dark Web’s $100M Yearly Drug Sale,” proving that if there is a demand, the Internet will provide a means for illegal sales.
In an effort to determine if the Dark Web have grown to declined, Carnegie Mellon researchers Nicolas Cristin and Kyle Soska studied thirty-five Dark Web markets from 2013 to January 2015. They discovered that the Dark Web markets are no longer explosively growing, but the market has remained stable fluctuating from $100 million to $180 million a year.
The researchers concluded that the Dark Web market is able to survive any “economic” shifts, including law enforcement crackdowns:
“More surprising, perhaps, is that the Dark Web economy roughly maintains that sales volume even after major disasters like thefts, scams, takedowns, and arrests. According to the Carnegie Mellon data, the market quickly recovered after the Silk Road 2 market lost millions of dollars of users’ bitcoins in an apparent hack or theft. Even law enforcement operations that remove entire marketplaces, as in last year’s purge of half a dozen sites in the Europol/FBI investigation known as Operation Onymous, haven’t dropped the market under $100 million in sales per year.”
Cristin and Soska’s study is the most comprehensive to measure the size and trajectory of the Dark Web’s drug market. Their study ended prematurely, because two Web sites grew so big that the researchers’ software wasn’t able to track the content. Their study showed that most Dark Web vendors are using more encryption tools, they make profits less $1000, and they are mostly selling MDMA and marijuana.
Soska and Cristin also argue that the Dark Web drug trade decreases violence in the retail drug trade, i.e. it keeps the transactions digital than having there be more violence on the streets. They urge law enforcement officials to rethink shutting down the Dark Web markets, because it does not seem to have any effect.
Whitney Grace, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Does This Autonomous Nerf Gun Herald the Age of Killer Robots?
September 3, 2015
Well here’s something interesting that has arisen from HP’s “disastrous” $11 billion acquisition of Autonomy: check out this three-minute YouTube video: “See What You Can Create with HP IDOL OnDemand.” The fascinating footage reveals the product of developer Martin Zerbib’s “little project,” made possible with IDOL OnDemand and a Nerf gun. Watch as the system targets a specific individual, a greedy pizza grabber, a napping worker, and a thief. It seems like harmless fun, until you realize how gruesome this footage would be if this were a real gun.
It is my opinion that it is the wielders of weapons who should be held directly responsible for their misuse, not the inventors. Still, commenter “Dazed Confused” has a point when he rhetorically asks “What could possibly go wrong?” and links to an article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Stopping Killer Robots and Other Future Threats.” That piece describes an agreement being hammered out that proposes to ban the development of fully autonomous weapons. Writer Seth Baum explains there is precedent for such an agreement: The Saint Petersburg Declaration of 1868 banned exploding bullets, and 105 countries have now ratified the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. (Such laser weapons could inflict permanent blindness on soldiers, it is reasoned.) After conceding that auto-weaponry would have certain advantages, the article points out:
“But the potential downsides are significant. Militaries might kill more if no individual has to bear the emotional burden of strike decisions. Governments might wage more wars if the cost to their soldiers were lower. Oppressive tyrants could turn fully autonomous weapons on their own people when human soldiers refused to obey. And the machines could malfunction—as all machines sometimes do—killing friend and foe alike.
“Robots, moreover, could struggle to recognize unacceptable targets such as civilians and wounded combatants. The sort of advanced pattern recognition required to distinguish one person from another is relatively easy for humans, but difficult to program in a machine. Computers have outperformed humans in things like multiplication for a very long time, but despite great effort, their capacity for face and voice recognition remains crude. Technology would have to overcome this problem in order for robots to avoid killing the wrong people.”
Baum goes on to note that organizers base their call for a ban on existing international humanitarian law, which prohibits weapons that would strike civilians. Such reasoning has already been employed to achieve bans against landmines and cluster munitions, and is being leveraged in an attempt to ban nuclear weapons.
Will killer robots be banned before they’re a reality? It seems the agreement would have to move much faster than bureaucracy usually does; given the public example of Zerbib’s “little project,” I suspect it is already way too late for that.
Cynthia Murrell, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bank Exports IT to India
September 1, 2015
Computer World’s article, “As It Sets IT Layoffs, Citizens Bank Shifts Work To India Via Web” sounds like it should have been published five years ago. It was not that long ago when Americans were in an uproar about jobs being outsourced to China and India, but many of those jobs have returned to the US or replaced with an alternative. Despite falling out of interest with the mainstream media, jobs are still being outsourced to Asia. Citizens Bank is having their current IT employees train their replacements in a “knowledge transfer” and they will be terminated come December.
Citizens Bank signed a five-year services contract with IBM for IT services. IBM owns a large scale IT services company in India, which pays its workers a fraction of the current Citizens Bank IT workers.
As one can imagine, the Citizens Bank employees are in an uproar:
“The number of layoffs is in dispute. Employees said as many as 150 Citizen Bank IT workers were being laid off. But this number doesn’t include contractors. IBM will be consolidating the bank’s IT infrastructure services, and, as part of that, the bank is consolidating from four vendors to one vendor, IBM. This change will result in the elimination of some contractor jobs, and when contractors are added, the total layoff estimate by employees ranges from 250 to 350.”
It is reported that some IT workers are being offered comparable positions with IBM, while others are first in line for jobs in other branches of Citizens Bank. However, the IBM jobs appear to be short term and the other bank jobs do not appear to be turning up.
Other companies are shifting their IT work overseas much to the displeasure of IT workers, who thought they would be assured job security for the rest of their lives. IT workers place the blame on companies wanting to increase profits and not caring about their employees. What is going on with Citizens Bank and other companies is not new. It has been going on for decades, but that does not make the harm to Americans any less.
Whitney Grace, September 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
How to Search the Ashley-Madison Data and Discover If You Had an Affair Too
August 26, 2015
If you haven’t heard about the affair-promoting website Ashley Madison’s data breach, you might want to crawl out from under that rock and learn about the millions of email addresses exposed by hackers to be linked to the infidelity site. In spite of claims by parent company Avid Life Media that users’ discretion was secure, and that the servers were “kind of untouchable,” as many as 37 million customers have been exposed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a huge number of government and military personnel have been found on the list. The article on Reuters titled Hacker’s Ashley Madison Data Dump Threatens Marriages, Reputations also mentions that the dump has divorce lawyers clicking their heels with glee at their good luck. As for the motivation of the hackers? The article explains,
“The hackers’ move to identify members of the marital cheating website appeared aimed at maximum damage to the company, which also runs websites such as Cougarlife.com andEstablishedMen.com, causing public embarrassment to its members, rather than financial gain. “Find yourself in here?,” said the group, which calls itself the Impact Team, in a statement alongside the data dump. “It was [Avid Life Media] that failed you and lied to you. Prosecute them and claim damages. Then move on with your life. Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you’ll get over it.”
If you would like to “find yourself” or at least check to see if any of your email addresses are part of the data dump, you are able to do so. The original data was put on the dark web, which is not easily accessible for most people. But the website Trustify lets people search for themselves and their partners to see if they were part of the scandal. The website states,
“Many people will face embarrassment, professional problems, and even divorce when their private details were exposed. Enter your email address (or the email address of your spouse) to see if your sexual preferences and other information was exposed on Ashley Madison or Adult Friend Finder. Please note that an email will be sent to this address.”
It’s also important to keep in mind that many of the email accounts registered to Ashley Madison seem to be stolen. However, the ability to search the data has already yielded some embarrassment for public officials and, of course, “family values” activist Josh Duggar. The article on the Daily Mail titled Names of 37 Million Cheating Spouses Are Leaked Online: Hackers Dump Huge Data File Revealing Clients of Adultery Website Ashley Madison- Including Bankers, UN and Vatican Staff goes into great detail about the company, the owners (married couple Noel and Amanda Biderman) and how hackers took it upon themselves to be the moral police of the internet. But the article also mentions,
“Ashley Madison’s sign-up process does not require verification of an email address to set up an account. This means addresses might have been used by others, and doesn’t prove that person used the site themselves.”
Some people are already claiming that they had never heard of Ashley Madison in spite of their emails being included in the data dump. Meanwhile, the Errata Security Blog entry titled Notes on the Ashley-Madison Dump defends the cybersecurity of Ashley Madison. The article says,
“They tokenized credit card transactions and didn’t store full credit card numbers. They hashed passwords correctly with bcrypt. They stored email addresses and passwords in separate tables, to make grabbing them (slightly) harder. Thus, this hasn’t become a massive breach of passwords and credit-card numbers that other large breaches have lead to. They deserve praise for this.”
Praise for this, if for nothing else. The impact of this data breach is still only beginning, with millions of marriages and reputations in the most immediate trouble, and the public perception of the cloud and cybersecurity close behind.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
It Is a Recommended Title
August 24, 2015
Centripetal Networks offers a fully integrated security network specializing in threat-based intelligence. Threat intelligence is being informed about potential attacks, who creates the attacks, and how to prevent them. Think of it as the digital version of “stranger danger.” Centripetal Networks offers combative software using threat intelligence to prevent hacking with real-time results and tailoring for individual systems.
While Centripetal Networks peddles its software, they also share information sources that expand on threat intelligence, how it pertains to specific industries, and new developments in digital security. Not to brag or anything, but our very own CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access made the news page! Take a gander at its description:
“The RuleGate technology continues to remain the leader in speed and performance as an appliance, and its visualization and analytics tools are easy-to-use. Because of federal use and interest, its threat intelligence resources will continue to rank at the top. Cyber defense, done in this manner, is the most useful for its real time capacity and sheer speed in computing.”
CyberOSINT was written for law enforcement officials to gain and understanding of threat intelligence as well as tools they can use to arm themselves against cyber theft and track potential attacks. It profiles companies that specialize in threat intelligence and evaluates them. Centripetal Networks is proudly featured in the book.
Whitney Grace, August 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Sensible Advice on Content Marketing
August 21, 2015
Here’s a post on structured-content marketing that is refreshingly free of semantic search baloney. Tatiana Tilearcio at Synthesio shares what she learned from a seminar in, “Four Insights from a Content Marketing Crash Course.” The symposium, scheduled to be repeated in October in Connecticut, was presented by content-strategy outfit Content Boost. Tilearcio’s first takeaway promotes a firm foundation; she writes:
“Get Organized And Understand Your Goals Before You Create Your Content Marketing Plan.
Before you sit down to put together your strategic plan, you have to know the answer to the question ‘what’s the purpose for your content marketing, and what will it do to your brand?’ To do this, you need to first create a dream wish-list of what you would like to see for your brand. Next, you need to address how you want to go about enhancing your brand’s content marketing efforts and what your budget is. When creating a content marketing plan, or any marketing plan, a budget is essential. Without a proper budget of what your plan will cost, your ideas will never come to fruition. If you have identified all of this, then you are already well on your way to understanding what your campaign strategy is.”
The article also discusses blending efforts in blogging, social media, and email; co-sourcing content; ensuring users find value in gated assets; repurposing content; and the importance of strong titles. See the post for more details on each of these points. Based in Norwalk, Connecticut, Content Boost is part of the Technology Marketing Corporation, aka TMCnet.
Cynthia Murrell, August 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Its Hacker Season
August 21, 2015
One of the quintessential cartoon feuds exists between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as they argue whether or not it is duck or rabbit hunting season. Whoever wins gets the lovely prize of having their face blown off, thankfully cartoon violence does not obey the rules of life and death. The ensuing argument ends with hilarious consequences, but everyday another type of big game is always in season: your personal information. Hackers are constantly searching for ways to break into vulnerable systems and steal valuable information.
One a personal level it is frightening to be hacked, but corporations stand risk millions of dollars, customer information, trade secrets, and their reputations if their systems get hacked. There are many companies that specialize in software to prevent potential hackings, but Cybereason offers unique selling points in the article, “Introducing Cybereason: Real-Time Automated Cyber Hunting.”
“This is why Cybereason exists, to bring the fight against hackers off of the frontlines and into the depths of your environment, where they lurk after gaining unnoticed access. Security needs to be about having an ever-watchful eye over your endpoints, servers, and network, and the Cybereason platform will allow you to perform real-time, automated hunting across your entire environment.”
On their Web site they posted a product video that feeds on the US’s culture of fear and they present an Armageddon like situation complete with a female voice over artist with a British accent, a Guy Fawkes mask, and Matrix-like graphics. My favorite bit is when Cybereason is made to resemble a secret intelligence agency of superheroes.
Despite the clichéd video, it does give a thorough visualization of what Cybereason’s software and services can do. The fear factor might be a selling point for some clients, but I’d rather hear hard facts and direct solutions. It takes out the dramatic elements and actually tells me what the product can do for me. You have to love Cybereason’s ending phrase, “Let the hunt begin.” It makes me want to respond with, “May the odds ever be in your favor.”
Whitney Grace, August 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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