Know Thy Hacker
December 10, 2015
Writer Alastair Paterson at SecurityWeek suggests that corporations and organizations prepare their defenses by turning a hacking technique against the hackers in, “Using an Attacker’s ‘Shadow’ to Your Advantage.” The article explains:
“A ‘digital shadow’ is a subset of a digital footprint and consists of exposed personal, technical or organizational information that is often highly confidential, sensitive or proprietary. Adversaries can exploit these digital shadows to reveal weak points in an organization and launch targeted attacks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though. Some digital shadows can prove advantageous to your organization; the digital shadows of your attackers. The adversary also casts a shadow similar to that of private and public corporations. These ‘shadows’ can be used to better understand the threat you face. This includes attacker patterns, motives, attempted threat vectors, and activities. Armed with this enhanced understanding, organizations are better able to assess and align their security postures.”
Paterson observes that one need not delve into the Dark Web to discern these patterns, particularly when the potential attacker is a “hactivist” (though one can find information there, too, if one is so bold). Rather, hactivists often use social media to chronicle their goals and activities. Monitoring these sources can give a company clues about upcoming attacks through records like target lists, responsibility claims, and discussions on new hacking techniques. Keeping an eye on such activity can help companies build appropriate defenses.
Cynthia Murrell, December 10, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Metanautix: Big Data Search
December 9, 2015
I read “Ex-Google, Facebook Duo Aim to Simplify Big Data Search.” The idea is that people with Big Data cannot find what is needed to answer a question. The fix may be developed by Matanautix.
Sound familiar?
I have heard this user requirement for what is it now? 25, 30 years, or more?
According to the write up:
When a company wants to analyze data, typically it first has to input all of that information all into some type of database. Then an engine can be built to bring about answers to any inquires. What Metanautix does, however, is build-in search capabilities for an existing database.
I thought that a number of other firms have developed solutions for Big Data search; for example, Lucidworks. If the article is correct, the fine folks at Lucidworks will have to content with a competitor that does more than put out marketing assertions.
Stephen E Arnold, December 9, 2015
Verizon: Interest in Yahoo?
December 9, 2015
I read “Verizon Willing to Kick Yahoo’s tires, Consider a Buy.” Verizon already has AOL and a Xoogler. Will Verizon, one of the Baby Bell progeny, buy the Yahooligans and one more Xoogler?
The article stated:
Verizon might consider purchasing struggling Web portal Yahoo, a top Verizon executive said during a media conference in New York on Monday.
Here’s the passage I highlighted in Yahoo purple:
“We look at everything across this spectrum,” Shammo [a Verizon top dog] said at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference, according to Bloomberg. “If we see there is a strategic fit, and it makes sense for our shareholders and we can return value, I mean we’ll look at it. But at this point, it’s way too premature to talk about that one.”
Ah, ha. A clue about Verizon’s online strategy!
After reading this gem of a semi-fluid statement, the goslings and I made a list of the top 10 things Verizon can do with Yahoo:
- Use the Yahoo yodel in Verizon audio and video ads
- Introduce a matched set of Xooglers at the next shareholder meeting
- Resurrect Geocities and sell Web pages as part of a small business bundle
- Create and executive office for Internet business strategy headed by Xooglers Armstrong and Mayer
- Add Yahoo purple to the Verizon red signage compete with T Mobiles pink
- Create a single list of Yahoo products and services after buying Yahoo to find out what Yahoo actually owns
- Recreate the Yahoo directory as a next generation Yellow Pages
- Use the Yahoo search system to locate a replacement for the Yahoo search system
- Alphabetize the list of services listed on the Yahoo splash page
- Add “You’ve got mail” to Yahoo mail, when it works, that is.
Veri-hoooo.
Stephen E Arnold, December 9, 2015
Data Center Costs
December 9, 2015
I find cost estimates useful and sometimes entertaining. Most companies do not reveal their costs for specific line items. When costs are released, they are “shaped” like clay to present a good looking pot, ash tray, or dish.
I read “Average US Data Center Costs $270 Million over 10 Years.” That works out to $20 million or so every year. Here are some details from the write up, which may make interesting reading to a company with $5 million in revenue:
with the right site-selection strategy, organizations can more than halve their data center costs. The right blend of tax incentives along with careful consideration of land, construction, energy and staffing costs can slash up to 52.1 percent, or $140.9 million, off the 10-year price tag of running a data center.
Another item:
Power costs can also significantly affect data center budgeting. “Power costs average 13.2 percent of the total project cost over the life of the project, but vary from 6.5 percent in Quincy, Washington, to 21.3 percent in Boston,” stated CBRE. Southern California and Silicon Valley also command high electricity rates, while Des Moines, Tulsa and Quincy, Wash. offer cheap power.
And:
Regionally, there’s not much difference in a data center costs. In the western, central and eastern parts of the U.S., enterprises can expect to pay $271.5 million, $270.2 million and $268.7 million on average over 10 years, respectively.
Planning an online intensive, Big Data operation, a Lake Superior sized data lake, and a private cloud? You have some rough numbers.
Stephen E Arnold, December 9, 2015
Understanding Trolls, Spam, and Nasty Content
December 9, 2015
The Internet is full of junk. It is a cold hard fact and one that will never die as long as the Internet exists. The amount of trash content was only intensified with the introduction of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterst, and other social media platforms and it keeps pouring onto RSS feeds. The academic community is always up for new studies and capturing new data, so a researcher from the University of Arkansas decided to study mean content. “How ‘Deviant’ Messages Flood Social Media” from Science Daily is an interesting new idea that carries the following abstract:
“From terrorist propaganda distributed by organizations such as ISIS, to political activism, diverse voices now use social media as their major public platform. Organizations deploy bots — virtual, automated posters — as well as enormous paid “armies” of human posters or trolls, and hacking schemes to overwhelmingly infiltrate the public platform with their message. A professor of information science has been awarded a grant to continue his research that will provide an in-depth understanding of the major propagators of viral, insidious content and the methods that make them successful.”
Dr. Nitin Agarwal and will study what behavioral, social, and computational factors cause Internet content to go viral, especially if they have deviant theme. Deviant means along the lines something a troll would post. Agarwal’s research is part of a bigger investigation funded by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research, National Science Foundation, and Army Research Office. Agarwal will have a particular focus on how terrorist groups and extremist governments use social media platforms to spread their propaganda. He will also be studying bots that post online content as well.
Many top brass organizations do not have the faintest idea of even what some of the top social media platforms are, much less what their purpose is. A study like this will raise the blinders about them and teach researchers how social media actually works. I wonder if they will venture into 4chan.
Whitney Grace, December 9, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Computers Pose Barriers to Scientific Reproducibility
December 9, 2015
These days, it is hard to imagine performing scientific research without the help of computers. Phys.org details the problem that poses in its thorough article, “How Computers Broke Science—And What We Can Do to Fix It.” Many of us learned in school that reliable scientific conclusions rest on a foundation of reproducibility. That is, if an experiment’s results can be reproduced by other scientists following the same steps, the results can be trusted. However, now many of those steps are hidden within researchers’ hard drives, making the test of reproducibility difficult or impossible to apply. Writer, Ben Marwick points out:
“Stanford statisticians Jonathan Buckheit and David Donoho [PDF] described this issue as early as 1995, when the personal computer was still a fairly new idea.
‘An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions which generated the figures.’
“They make a radical claim. It means all those private files on our personal computers, and the private analysis tasks we do as we work toward preparing for publication should be made public along with the journal article.
This would be a huge change in the way scientists work. We’d need to prepare from the start for everything we do on the computer to eventually be made available for others to see. For many researchers, that’s an overwhelming thought. Victoria Stodden has found the biggest objection to sharing files is the time it takes to prepare them by writing documentation and cleaning them up. The second biggest concern is the risk of not receiving credit for the files if someone else uses them.”
So, do we give up on the test of reproducibility, or do we find a way to address those concerns? Well, this is the scientific community we’re talking about. There are already many researchers in several fields devising solutions. Poetically, those solutions tend to be software-based. For example, some are turning to executable scripts instead of the harder-to-record series of mouse clicks. There are also suggestions for standardized file formats and organizational structures. See the article for more details on these efforts.
A final caveat: Marwick notes that computers are not the only problem with reproducibility today. He also cites “poor experimental design, inappropriate statistical methods, a highly competitive research environment and the high value placed on novelty and publication in high-profile journals” as contributing factors. Now we know at least one issue is being addressed.
Cynthia Murrell, December 9, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Business Intelligence Free Trials. Do Not Forget Great Free Trials
December 8, 2015
Want to dive into next generation business intelligence without spending several hundred thousand dollars? If I were younger, I would think about diving. I might even think about business intelligence.
Navigate to “7 Great Business Intelligence Software With Free Trials.” You will learn about software, which the write up describes as “great”, like these:
- BIME, a data warehouse
- Cyfe, an all in one business analytics dashboard
- Decibel Insight, a Web analytics software
- SalesforceIQ, a system to analyze customer relationships
- Sisense, an “insightful Big Data analysis tool”
- Wave Analytics Cloud, visualization to help you understand your customer base
- Zoho Reports, a “simple business intelligence app”
I knew about Cyfe and Zoho, and these are useful tools. I did not know about the other products.
The use of the word “great” might be a bit of an overstatement, but when it comes to business intelligence hyperbole seems to be part of the standard marketing tool kit. Great. The write up may do some annoying. The links to the companies mentioned point to the article itself. Content marketing done with the care of a fast food cook listening to an iPod, watching other workers actually work, and dreaming about the weekend.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2015
Yahoo: A Partial Catalog of Errors
December 8, 2015
I read “7 of Yahoo’s Biggest **** Ups.” Just seven? With the smell of blood in the air on Wall Street, the jibes on talking head TV, and the endless write ups about the Yahoo Board’s dithering, a catalog of Yahoo’s seven biggest failures seems timely.
What are the mistakes? Here you go:
- Not buying Google
- Not buying Facebook
- Not selling itself to Microsoft
- The Flickr flop
- Not thinking as a technology outfit
- The Tumblr tumble
- Disorganization in the reorganizations.
I have prepared several analyses of the Yahooligans over the years. I once had an illustration for a PowerPoint presentation which showed the Titanic and Terry Semel as the captain. I wish I could find that deck.
There are a couple of points in my list of purple vulnerabilities; for example, the settlement with the Google for the alleged, possible missteps regarding the GoTo, Overture, Yahoo advertising systems was an important milestone. I think that error in judgment was the action that turned on the flashing yellow lights for Yahoo. Yahoo settled a legal matter and took some money. Google then pranced toward its $60 plus billion in revenue dervived mostly from online advertising.
I also noted in my analyses the technical hubris at Yahoo. The company talked a good game and some of the Yahooligans published articles explaining whizzy technology type things. But the company fumbled not one or two technical opportunities. The company has been for a long time essentially a marketing yodler. Yodels are interesting, but yodels do not turn half baked ideas into revenue. The technology matters, not the wild notions.
Poor Yahoo. Its trajectory presages what will happen to a number of other outfits who take their eye off the technology-that-matters ball as it whizzes towards the batter’s head.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2015
Enterprise Software Survey: ZDNet Content Marketing
December 8, 2015
“Research: Enterprise Software Rising with 69 Percent Usage” caught my attention. I like numbers which suggest two thirds adoption of software which seems ubiquitous to me. So the write looks like news. It sounds like news. Sort of news I think.
The write up is a marketing pitch for a new study by ZDNet and its for fee research arm Tech Pro Research. “Enterprise Software: Advantages, Opportunities, Challenges” studies enterprise software. I am not exactly sure what “enterprise” means in the ZDNet world. My hunch is that the term embraces commercial enterprises which buy products from the ZDNet advertisers. I could be wrong, of course, because enterprise may mean, the local dry launderette entrepreneur.
The article discloses some interesting factoids, which I assume ZDNet and a host of enterprise software sales people believe are solid gold. None of the gold foam stuff.
I noted these points:
Enterprise software has a definition I found surprising. I learned:
Enterprise software encompasses a variety of functions, including asset management, business intelligence, CRM utilities, data processing, databases, financial applications, identity management, retail software, process management and resource planning. It can run on either individual machines or on centralized servers, whether in-house, located in the cloud or a hybrid combination.
No, enterprise search, no analytics, no Big Data, and no enterprise cyber security. Yikes. The mid tier consultants are probably perspiring in their home offices due to these omissions.
I found this factoid interesting: nine percent of the sample do not currently use an enterprise software solution but are considering one in the next year and 22 percent do not use enterprise software and are not planning on changing their stripes next year. That works out to 31 percent of the sample not doing the enterprise software thing even though, I assume, the companies in the sample were enterprises. I said, “Huh. Imagine that.”
Even more puzzling was the list of enterprise software deployed in the last 12 months by the sample.
- Human resources
- Storage
- Databases, note the plural
- Big Data
- Mobile
Now the paragraph I quote about the functions of enterprise software did not include Big Data. What’s the scoop, ZDNet. Is Big Data an enterprise application or not? My view is that Big Data is for the folks who understand analytic-type stuff. Most enterprises have precious few of these types of people. Another fascinating point.
The preferred vendors identified in the write up came at me from left field. I admit I am not in the know like the real journalists at ZDNet. Here’s that listing:
- Adobe Systems
- Dropbox
- LinkedIn (my goodness)
- Microsoft
But the un-preferred vendors is more intriguing. This group includes:
- CA Technologies
- Oracle
- Red Hat
- SAP
I assume that each of these companies will be really thrilled to meet with the ZDNet ad sales professionals.
If you want more, you will be able to explore the opportunities by diving into the for fee version of the study.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2015
Google Responds with AI Paper Deluge: Is IBM Watson the Trigger?
December 8, 2015
I read an unusual Google blog post called “NIPS 2015 and Machine Learning Research at Google.” For some research areas at Google, figuring out who is on first is very difficult. For example, what Alon Halevy working on now?
This blog post identifies papers on smart software, variously called artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing, et al.
If you scan the posting, the Alphabet Google thing identifies more than 90 Alphabet Googlers: some famous like Jeff Dean and Ramanathan Guha and some not so famous except to their math instructors in junior high.
I think the listing of papers and people is fascinating, Recruiters will probably thank their favorite moonstone for the holiday shopping list of must haves. For outfits like IBM, it is your turn to divulge who and what writes about smart software.
Game on. Now try to find the presentations.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2015
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