Week 11: Intro to Dark Web and Intro to Cloud

A recent Kaspersky survey has discovered that two-thirds (67 per cent) of industrial organizations do not report cybersecurity incidents to regulators. They perhaps to avoid regulatory punishments and public disclosure that can harm their reputation.

However, it is not compliant with the regulations and ethically illegal for sure. This behavior does not help the company has more quality of cyber security that defense the cyber-attack. The investments on cybersecurity have not been taken seriously for some small business, which make small companies easier to become the target of hackers.

https://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/311019/67-per-cent-of-industrial-organizations-do-not-report-cybersecurity-in.html

Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana will no longer be supported on mobile platforms such as iOS and Android effective January 31st of 2020. This essentially means that Microsoft will be pulling out of the very competitive personal assistant industry, which is primarily dominated by Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. This information came to light during Microsoft’s most recent Ignite conference, where they expressed their intent to shift the primary functionality of Cortana to better assist commercial users.

Source: https://slashdot.org/story/19/11/18/1611220/microsoft-winds-down-its-bigger-plans-for-cortana-with-mobile-app-shutdown

Intro-to-Ethical-Hacking-Week-11

https://capture.fox.temple.edu/Mediasite/Play/08985ba7c9594d48896c4fddecc46b8d1d

New York, Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to predict life expectancy in heart failure patients.

The machine learning algorithm based on de-identified electronic health, records data of 5,822 hospitalised or ambulatory patients with heart failure at UC San Diego Health in the US.

“We wanted to develop a tool that predicted life expectancy in heart failure patients, there are apps where algorithms are finding out all kinds of things, like products you want to purchase,” said Avi Yagil, Professor at University of California.

“We needed a similar tool to make medical decisions. Predicting mortality is important in patients with heart failure. Current strategies for predicting risk, however, are only modestly successful and can be subjective,” Yagil added.

From this model, a risk score was derived that determined low and high risk of death by identifying eight readily available variables collected for the majority of patients with heart failure:Diastolic blood pressure, Creatinine, Blood urea nitrogen, White blood cell count, Platelets, Albumin and Red blood cell distribution.

https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/enterprise-services-and-applications/ai-tool-to-predict-life-expectancy-in-heart-failure-patients/72056335

It has been revealed that with the new release of iOS 13 there comes a small but not so small problem for people who like multi-tasking – i.e. switching between apps frequently. Let’s say you have two apps open – you switch from the first app to second app and then go back to the first one – that apps reloads and then likely stops losing whatever you were doing. Unlike Android and Microsoft, iOS was never good with the multitasking feature.

“The issue appears to be down to memory management issues, with iOS not retaining the app’s information in memory long enough when it is sent to the background. This could be a bug, or it could be a feature and Apple being overly aggressive in maximizing the amount of RAM available for apps in the foreground so as to improve performance.”

Source Link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ios-13-has-a-huge-bug-that-makes-me-want-to-dump-my-iphone-and-ipad/

https://techbeacon.com/security/5-best-practices-identity-governance-administration-success

I thought this was a nice list of concepts to keep in mind, when dealing with identity management systems and access control systems.

• Make identify your foundation
• Create a strategic plan
• Build an agile system
• Help stakeholders make decisions
  • Analytics are your friend
• Don’t forget unstructured data
  • Collaboration is key

Cybersecurity researcher Takeshi Sugawara found that it’s possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound. By pointing a laser at the microphone and changing the intensity, the light somehow influences the microphone’s membrane at the same frequency as the laser. The researchers then changed the intensity of the laser to match the frequency of a human’s voices to “speak” to the voice-activated devices. They found that all almost all the smart devices tested registered commands from up to 164 feet away. This has the potential to allow threat actors to purchase items and unlock doors silently through your window. The researchers even tried using infrared lasers, which are invisible to the naked eye, and found that it worked to activate certain smart devices. There are technical controls to prevent this, such as voice authentication and PIN numbers, but the best thing to do is keep the device out of the line of sight of any potential threats.

https://www.wired.com/story/lasers-hack-amazon-echo-google-home/

Chronicle Is Dead and Google Killed It

Alphabet announced, in early 2018, their new start-up that helps business to realize their data security. The moonshot project involved machine learning technology and security telemetry data about known malware and internet infrastructure. Not long, one and half year, after the breaking announcement, however, Chronicle has been thrown back to Google’s cloud department and reports of management flaws and staff leaving started appearing.

Vice.com