Accidental News: There Is a Google of the Dark Web.
August 2, 2022
Yesterday one of the research team was playing the YouTube version of TWIT which is Silicon Valley acronym speak for “This Week in Tech.” The program is hosted by a former TV personality and features “experts”. The experts discuss major news events. The August 1, 2022 (captured on July 31, 2022) has the title “The Barn Has Left the Horse — CHIPS Act, Earnings Week, FTC Sues Meta, Twitter Blue Price Hike.” The “experts” fielding questions and allegedly insightful observations by Mr. LaPorte can be viewed at this link. The “experts” on the “great panel” for this program included:
- Jason Snell
- Shoshana Weissmann
- Dan Patterson.
In the midst of recycled information and summaries of assorted viewpoints, there was what I thought was information warranting a bit more attention. You can watch and hear what Dan Patterson says at 2:22:30. A bit of context: Mr. Patterson announced that he is the Editorial Director at Cybersixgill, [supplemental links appear below my name at the foot of this blog post] a firm named after a shark and with, until now, a very low profile. I think the outfit is based in Tel Aviv and it, as I recall, provides what I call specialized software and services to government entities. A few other firms in this particular market space are NSO Group and Voyager Labs, among other. Rightly or wrongly, I think of Herliya as the nerve center for certain types of sophisticated intercept, surveillance, analytic, and stealth systems. Thus, “low profile” is necessary. Once the functionality of an NSO Group-type system becomes known, then the knock on effect is to put Candiru-type firms in the spotlight too. (Other fish swimming unseen in the digital ocean have inspired names like “FinFisher,” “Candiru,” and “Sixgill.”)
So what’s the big news? A CBS technology reported quitting is no big deal. A technology reporter who joins a commercial software and services firm is not a headline maker either.
This is, in my opinion, a pretty remarkable assertion, and I think it should be noted. Mr. Patterson was asked by Mr. LaPorte, “So CyberSixgill is a threat intelligence…” Mr. Patterson added some verbal filler with a thank you and some body movement. Then this…
CyberSixgill is like a Google for the Dark Web.
That’s an interesting comparison because outfits like Kagi and Neva emphasize how different they are from Google. Like Facebook, Google appears to on the path to becoming an icon for generating cash, wild and crazy decisions, and an emblem of distrust.
Mr. Patterson then said:
I don’t want to log roll…. I joined the threat detection company because their technology is really interesting. It really mines the Dark Web and provides a portal into it in ways that are really fascinating.
Several observations:
- Mr. Patterson’s simile caught my attention. (I suppose it is better than saying, “My employer is like an old school AT&T surveillance operation in 1941.”
- Mr. Patterson’s obvious discomfort when talking about CyberSixgill indicates that he has not yet crafted the “editorial message” for CyberSixgill.
- With the heightened scrutiny of firm’s with specialized software causing outfits like Citizens Lab in Toronto to vibrate with excitement and the Brennan Center somewhat gleefully making available Voyager Labs’s information, marketing a company like CyberSixgill may be a challenge. These specialized software companies have to be visible to government procurement officers but not too visible to other sectors.
Net net: For specialized software and services firms in Israel, Zurich, Tyson’s Corner, and elsewhere, NSO Group’s visibility puts specialized software and services company on the horns of a dilemma: Visible but not too visible. These companies cannot make PR and marketing missteps. Using the tag line from a “real” journalist’s lips like “a Google for the Dark Web” is to me news which Mr. LaPorte and the other members of the panel should have noticed. They did not. There you go: “Like a Google for the Dark Web”. That’s something of interest to me and perhaps a few other people.
Stephen E Arnold, August 2, 2022
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Notes:
1 “Sixgill” is the blunt nose “six gill” shark, hexnchoid (Hexanchus griseus). It is big and also called the cow shark by fish aficionados. The shark itself can be eaten.
2 The company’s product is explained at https://www.cybersixgill.com/products/portal/. One “product” is a cloud service which delivers “exclusive access to closed underground sources with the most comprehensive, automated collection from the deep and dark Web. The investigative portal delivers the threat intel security teams need: Real time context and actionable alerts along with the ability to conduct cover investigations.” Mr. Patterson may want to include in his list of work tasks some rewriting of this passage. “Covert investigations,” “closed underground sources,” and “automated collection” attract some attention.
3 The company’s blog provides some interesting information to those interested in specific investigative procedures; for example, “Use Case Blog: Threat Monitoring & Hunting.” I noted the word “hunting.”
4 The company received a fresh injection of funding from CrowdStrike, Elron Ventures, OurCrowd, and Sonae. According to CyberGestion, the firm’s total funding as of May 2022 is about $55 million US.
5 The Dark Web, according to my research team, is getting smaller. Thus, what does “deep web”? The term is undefined on the cited CyberSixgill page. “Like Google” suggests more than 35 billion Web pages in its public index. Is this what CyberSixgill offers?
Facebook Sunset: A Rush to Judgment? Nope. Bus Left Already
July 27, 2022
I read a variation on the Chicken Little story with an infusion of Humpty Dumpty. Sound interesting? Just navigate to “Sunset of the Social Network.” Pretty interesting because this is a Silicon Valley type cheerleading outfit realizing that their outfits don’t match those from the ESPN Cheerleading Championships for 2022. How does one quickly fix a fashion faux pas? Easy. Just claim that social networks are even less trendy than the white pants and red sweaters with Mountain View and Palo Alto logos stitched on the polyester.
So what’s the future? If you haven’t figured it out, the answer is TikTok and recommendations to drive memes, advance fun activities like jumping off roofs, and making wlw videos for middle schoolers. Yep, the future. Why not toss end a couple of references to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?
The write up says:
Under the social network model, which piggybacked on the rise of smartphones to mold billions of users’ digital experiences, keeping up with your friends’ posts served as the hub for everything you might aim to do online. Now Facebook wants to shape your online life around the algorithmically-sorted preferences of millions of strangers around the globe.
On the surface, this seems to be what Zuckbook is trying to achieve. Irritating the Kardashians was a knock on effect.
The write up points out that digital dinobabies are a bit clumsy when snow falls:
Rivals tried and failed to beat Facebook at the social network game — most notably Google, with multiple forgotten efforts from Orkut to Google+.
I haven’t forgotten Orkut. That misstep illustrated a genetic flaw in Google’s DNA. Not only could Google not solve death, it couldn’t solve Facebook nor, more recently, Amazon’s gobbling a very large chunk of product search. (Presumably an able Verity alum will redress that issue with information gene splicing. Well, that’s the theory.
Here’s the passage I quite liked:
But the era in which social networking served as most users’ primary experience of the internet is moving behind us. That holds for Twitter, Facebook’s chief surviving Western rival, as well. Twitter never found a reliable business model, which opened it up to an acquisition bid by Elon Musk. Whatever the outcome of the legal fight now underway, Twitter’s future is cloudy at best. … The leadership of Meta and Facebook now views the entire machine of Facebook’s social network as a legacy operation.
Yowza. The very thing that helped make Silicon Valley punditry the next big thing has moved on. Apparently the email has not yet reached Medium and Substack yet. It has, in my opinion, reached Buzzfeed’s senior team and is probably in the in box of a number of other information outlets. That’s just a guess on my part, however.
And what’s the future? The answer is revealed:
All this leaves a vacuum in the middle — the space of forums, ad-hoc group formation and small communities that first drove excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era. Facebook’s sunsetting of its own social network could open a new space for innovation on this turf, where relative newcomers like Discord are already beginning to thrive.
News flash!
That era has already arrived, and it is morphing, innovating, and invigorating interesting new mechanisms of informationization. Want an example? Okay, CSAM on Telegram. I address this disturbing activity in my luncheon talk at the upcoming Federal Law Enforcement Training Center talk. The downturn in Dark Web activity illustrates a trend building over the last six years.
Facebook and the Silicon Valley real news folks now realize something has changed. Too late? For some, yes.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2022
How Secure Is Cyber Security?
July 27, 2022
I have noted that cyber security companies invite me to webinars, briefings, conferences, and telephone calls. The subject of these calls is usually advanced, next-generation, proactive, smart, and intelligent cyber security solutions. The idea is that I will mention these firms in my lectures to law enforcement, crime analysts, and intelligence professionals. I sit through some. One outfit offers weekly seven to 10 minute reports about some new, absolutely horrible cyber threat. Others want me to join a Zoom to watch a series of PowerPoint slides showing how the latest Zero Day will make life miserable for companies without their cloud-based security system.
I then read item after item about a new variant of a RAT, an exploit taking advantage of the Swiss cheese of enterprise software, or some new dump of personal financial data on a Dark Web site selling fulz. It seems to me as if the cyber security sector is better at marketing than delivering cyber security. That’s just my opinion, and I usually don’t make a big deal of the veggie burgers being sold as 100 percent prime sirloin.
I read “Digital Security Giant Entrust Breached by Ransomware Gang.” The article does little to make me feel warm and fuzzy about cyber security systems and their vendors. I learned:
Digital security giant Entrust has confirmed that it suffered a cyber attack where threat actors breached their network and stole data from internal systems.
Who are the customers of this “digital security giant”? The write up reported:
This includes US government agencies, such as the Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Health & Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, and many more.
Great. How effective are those whiz bang cyber security systems?
Yeah. I think I know the answer. Marketing is easier than delivering cyber security that works.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2022
Microsoft: Excellence in Action
July 25, 2022
I wanted to print one page of text. I thought a copy of the cute story about the antics of Elon and Sergey might be nice to keep. My hunch is that some of the content might be disappeared or be tough to see through the cloud of legal eagles responding to the interesting story. Sorry.
Nope.
Why?
Microsoft seems to be unable to update Windows without rendering a simple function. Was I alone in experiencing this demonstration of excellence? Nope. “Microsoft Warns That New Windows Updates May Break Printing.” The article states:
Microsoft said that the temporary fix has now been disabled by this week’s optional preview updates on Windows Server 2019 systems. This change will lead to printing and scanning failures in Windows environments with non-compliant devices.
There you go. Non compliant.
But wait, there’s more.
But wait there’s more!
“New Windows 11 Update Breaks the Start Menu Because Microsoft Hates Us All” explains:
It looks like Microsoft has once again shipped dodgy Windows 11 updates, with reports suggesting that the two latest cumulative updates have been causing serious issues with the Start menu. The updates in question are KB5015882 and KB5015814, and it looks like they’ve introduced a bug which causes to Start menu to disappear when you click to open it.
What do these examples suggest to me?
- A breakdown in basic quality control. Perhaps the company is involved in addressing layoffs, knock on effects from SolarWinds, and giving speeches about employee issues
- Alleged monopolies lack the management tools to deliver products and services which function like the marketing collateral asserts
- Employees follow misguided rules; for example, the Wall Street Journal’s assertion that employees should “ditch office chores that don’t help you get ahead.” See Page A 11, July 25, 2022. (If an employee is not as informed as a project lead or manager, how can the uninformed make a judgment about what is and what is not significant? This line of wacko reasoning allows companies with IBM type thinking to provide quantum safe algorithms BEFORE there are quantum computers which can break known encryption keys. Yep, the US government buys into this type of “logic” as well. Hello, NIST? Are you there.
Plus, Microsoft Teams, which is not exactly the most stable software on my Mac Mini, is going to get more exciting features. “Microsoft Is Launching a Facebook Rip-Off Inside Teams.” This article reports:
Microsoft is now launching Viva Engage today, a new Facebook-like app inside Teams that encourages social networking at work. Viva Engage builds on some of the strengths of Yammer, promoting digital communities, conversations, and self-expression in the workplace. While Yammer often feels like an extension of SharePoint and Office, Viva Engage looks like a Facebook replica. It includes a storylines section, which is effectively your Facebook news feed, featuring conversational posts, videos, images, and more. It looks and feels just like Facebook, and it’s clearly designed to feel similar so employees will use it to share news or even personal interests.
That’s exactly what I don’t want when “working.” The idea for me is to get a project, finish it, and move on to another project. Sound like kindergarten? Well, I listened to Mrs. Fenton. Perhaps some did not heed basic tips about generating useful outputs. Yeah, Teams with features added when the service does not do the job on some Macs. Great work from the Windows Phone and Surface units’ employer.
Net net: Problems? Yes. Fixable? I have yet to see proof that Microsoft can remediate its numerous technical potholes. Remember that Microsoft asserted that Russia organized 1,000 programmers to make Microsoft’s security issues more severe. In my view, Russia has demonstrated its inability to organize tanks, let alone complex coordinated software exploits. Come on, Microsoft.
Printers!
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2022
Jargon Changes More Rapidly Than Search And Retrieval
July 22, 2022
Oh boy! There is a new term in the search and retrieval lexicon: neural search. While the term sounds like a search engine for telepaths or something a cyborg and/or android would use, Martech Series explained that it is something completely different: “Sinequa Adds Industry-Leading Neural Search Capabilities To Its Search Cloud Platform.”
Sinequa is an enterprise search leader and it recently announced the addition of advanced neural search capabilities to its Search Cloud Platform. The upgrade promises to provide unprecedented relevance, accuracy, etc. Sinequa is the first company to offer neural search in four deep learning language models commercially. The models are pre-trained with a combination of Sinequa’s trademark NLP and semantic search.
Search engines used neural search models for years, but they were not cost-effective for enterprise systems:
“Neural search models have been used in internet searches by Google and Bing since 2019, but computing requirements rendered them too costly and slow for most enterprises, especially at production scale. Sinequa optimized the models and collaborated with the Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA AI/ML teams to deliver a high performance, cost-efficient infrastructure to support intensive Neural Search workloads without a huge carbon footprint. Neural Search is optimized for Microsoft Azure and the latest NVIDIA A10 or A100 Tensor Core GPUs to efficiently process large amounts of unstructured data as well as user queries.”
Wonderful for Sinequa! Search and retrieval, especially in foreign languages are some of the biggest time wasters in productivity. Hopefully, Sinequa actually delivers an industry changing product, otherwise, they simply added more jargon to the tech glossary.
Whitney Grace, July 22, 2022
Ka-Ching: The Old Sound of New Revenue for the European Union
July 21, 2022
New billing cycle begins. Two benefits. The first is more revenue from fines on US big tech money spinners and the second is a good old school slide tackle with the cleats up. Ouch.
“DMA: Council Gives Final Approval to New Rules for Fair Competition Online” states:
The [Digital Marketing Act] DMA ensures a digital level playing field that establishes clear rights and rules for large online platforms (‘gatekeepers’) and makes sure that none of them abuses their position. Regulating the digital market at EU level will create a fair and competitive digital environment, allowing companies and consumers to benefit from digital opportunities.
And the bold face? That was part of the cited announcement. Ka-ching, slide, oh, broken shin, too bad, mon ami.
The write up elaborated that the Silicon Valley type of logical and efficiency centric companies will no longer be allowed to:
- rank their own products or services higher than those of others (self-preferencing)
- pre-install certain apps or software, or prevent users from easily un-installing these apps or software
- require the most important software (e.g. web browsers) to be installed by default when installing an operating system
- prevent developers from using third-party payment platforms for app sales
- reuse private data collected during a service for the purposes of another service.
Now the ka-ching part. Fines can be up to 20 percent of worldwide revenues. That means that the fines levied by Russia’s estimable agencies are small, brown, shriveled potatoes.
Then the slide tackle: The high tech “way above the clouds in self confidence and entitlement” will have to “inform the European Commission of their acquisitions and mergers.”
Well, so what? That’s an email, right?
Not so fast. A failure to “inform” means the 20 percent fee kicks in. A sluggishness, a bad attitude, and the old let’s apologize tactic will beget additional legislation.
What if the big dude-oids don’t follow the rules?
Just between you and me, okay, renting an apartment in France can be complicated. Now imagine how complicated it will become when the EU creates an environment in which regulatory authorities take a close interest in any touch point with a member. How about flying into Frankfort and being escorted to a return flight to the US? What about a private jet with a happy Silicon Valley-type logo on its tail being refused access to air space? What about some of those interesting employer-employee requirements: Lunch for a French staff in Paris is trivial to employment regulations not codified in a single law.
The write up resonates with that most musical sound: Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. Why? The agreement was adopted.
Stephen E Arnold, July 21, 2022
Commercializing Cyber Crime with Search and Retrieval
July 14, 2022
I read “Ransomware Gangs Offer Ability to Search Stolen Data.” The write up reports:
Bleeping Computer reported today that the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang was the first to offer the feature, announcing that they have created a searchable database with leaks from nonpaying victims. The hackers said that their stolen data had been fully indexed and that the search feature included support for finding information by filename or by content available in documents and images. The BlackCat ransomware gang claims it is offering the search service to make it easier for cybercriminals to find passwords or other confidential information.
Other alleged bad actors are offering a search function as well. These are Lockbit and Karakurt.
Several observations:
- Commercialization of cyber crime has been a characteristic of some of the more forward-leaning bad actors
- The availability of open source search makes it easy to add functionality
- More productization is inevitable; for example, subscriptions to Crime as a Service.
Net net: The focus of crime analysts and investigators may have to embrace enablers like Internet Service Providers, cloud services, and open source code repositories.
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2022
IBM Smart Software and Technology: Will There Be a Double Fault?
July 9, 2022
It has been a few years since Wimbledon started using AI to engage fans and the media. The longstanding partnership between IBM and the venerable All England Lawn Tennis Club captured the Best Fan Engagement by a Brand trophy at the 2022 Sports Technology Awards. The “IBM Power Index with Watson,” “IBM Match Insights with Watson,” and “Personalized Recommendations and Highlights Reels” were their winners. Maybe Watson has finally found its niche. We learn what changes are in store this season in the company’s press release, “IBM Reveals New AI and Cloud Powered Fan Experiences for Wimbledon 2022.” The write-up specifies:
“New features for 2022 include:
* ‘Win Factors’ brings enhanced explainability to ‘Match Insights’: Building on the existing Match Insights feature of the Wimbledon app and Wimbledon.com, IBM is providing an additional level of explainability into what factors are being analyzed by the AI system to determine match insights and predictions. Win Factors will provide fans with an increased understanding of the elements affecting player performance, such as the IBM Power Index, court surface, ATP/WTA rankings, head-to-head, ratio of games won, net of sets won, recent performance, yearly success, and media punditry.
* ‘Have Your Say’ with a new interactive fan predictions feature: For the first time, users can register their own predictions for match outcomes on the Wimbledon app and Wimbledon.com, through the Have Your Say feature. They can then compare their prediction with the aggregated predictions of other fans and the AI-powered Likelihood to Win predictions generated by IBM.”
The “digital fan experiences” use a combination of on-premises and cloud systems. Developers have trained the machine-learning models on data from prior matches using Watson Studio and Watson Discovery. See the press release for more specifics on each feature.
Cynthia Murrell, July 9, 2022
Dr. Google, Dr. Google, Emergency, Emergency
July 8, 2022
The United States’s healthcare system is a giant mess controlled by drug makers, pharmacies, insurance companies, hospitals, and others who benefit from the system. The country spends 17% of its GDP on healthcare. There is a lot of money to be made in American healthcare and big tech companies know it. The Economist explains how, “Alphabet Is Spending Billions To Become A Force In Health Care.” The five big tech companies have invested over $3 billion and probably more. These investments range from Amazon’s telemedicine and online pharmacy, the health features on Apple’s smartwatch, Microsoft has health-related cloud computing offerings, and Meta’s reality-reproducing releasing fitness-related features.
Google’s parent company Alphabet is making the most ambitious moves in healthcare. Between 2019 and 2021 Alphabet more than one hundred deals in life sciences and healthcare with venture capital funds. In 2022, Alphabet has so far spent $1.7 billion in advancing health technology and science. Alphabet is using the same business tactics as in the past: throwing lots of money at projects and seeing what develops.
Alphabet has plans for wearables, health records, health-related AI, and extending human life. Google purchased Fitbit in 2019 for $2.1 billion and the company designed a feature that monitors the heart for irregularities. The FDA approved it. With this approval, Google hopes it will also see the same for its Pixel Watch, Pixel phone, and Google Nest.
Alphabet also wants to increase transparency in electronic health records:
“Google is also giving health records another whirl. The new initiative, called Care Studio, is aimed at doctors rather than patients. Google’s earlier efforts in this area were derailed in part by hospitals’ sluggishness in digitizing their patient records. ‘That problem has mostly gone away but another has emerged,’ says Karen DeSalvo, Google’s health chief—‘the inability of different providers’ records to talk to each other.’ Dr DeSalvo has been vocal about the need for greater interoperability since her days in the
Obama administration, where she was in charge of coordinating American health information technology. Until that happens, Care Studio is meant to act as both translator and repository (which is, naturally, searchable).”
The company has already made headway with AI, such as AlphaFold-software that predicts protein structures and Isomorphic Labs that will accelerate and cheapen drug discovery. As for stopping the aging process, subsidiary Verily partnered with L’Oréal to study skin biology. Its other subsidiary Calico received 42.5 billion from AbbVie to study age-related diseases.
Alphabet faces many roadblocks, such as governments, government data that is difficult for AI to read, market competition, and general difficulties. Alphabet probably will not solve the mystery of death.
Whitney Grace, July 8, 2022
Can Kyndryl Drill IBM and Strike Gold? But Who Drilled Whom?
June 6, 2022
I found it amusing that Big Blue found itself on the wrong side of what I call a deal poaching allegation. The details of the BMC and IBM services for AT&T is interesting. However, a knock on effect of that $1.6 billion dollar settlement has put the estimable IBM spin out Kyndryl in the spotlight. I thought the name “Kyndryl” was one of those pharma products tailored to old people who watched cable news talking heads. Was I wrong? Absolutely. Kyndryl is IBM’s managed services business. The idea for that was that big companies did not want to deal with full time equivalents who kept an organization’s servers chugging along. Let IBM do it was a good business until the sharpies at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, among others, figured out how to package the cloud to chew into Big Blue’s revenues.
Gulp down a Wal-DRYL and check out “Kyndryl Shares Swoon on Fear It Faces Huge Liability in Lawsuit Against IBM.” The article explains:
Spun out of IBM (ticker: IBM) last year, Kyndryl (KD) is basically IBM’s old managed IT services business. It is a gigantic company with around $18 billion in sales and a workforce of about 90,000 people. But Kyndryl is shrinking at the top line, pays no dividend, and is having trouble finding a constituency among investors. The stock is down more than 50% since the spinoff was completed in November. And now the two companies find themselves on the opposite sides of a legal mess that poses considerable risks for Kyndryl.
What I find interesting is that the incident strikes me as one part of IBM is fighting another part of IBM. Where does the customer fit into this crashing of brilliantly managed entities? I know. Let’s ask Watson. No, let’s check out M-Dryl. Seems less financially risky.
Stephen E Arnold, June 6, 2022
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