Interpol says ransomware may become a pandemic, expert advice on fighting ransomware and security updates for ForgeRock and Etherpad. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday July 14th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing writer on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. Ransomware attacks continue to spread. They’ve gotten so common that the Secretary General of Interpol, the international police co-operative, said this week police and cybersecurity companies must work closer to avoid a ransomware pandemic. Attackers are operating with near impunity, he said at a ransomware conference. Its estimated that crooks around the world pulled in $350 million last year in ransomware payments. Conference attendees, who included national computer response teams and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, agreed to raise public awareness, to increase partnerships and do more information sharing. Separately, Andy Bennett, the former deputy chief information and security officer of the state of Texas who is now with a California cybersecurity firm, issued advice on how to fight the attacks. In 2019 Texas faced co-ordinated ransomware attacks on 22 municipalities in the state. Yes, Bennett wrote, some groups will use new tactics that might not be caught by traditional cybersecurity. But, he added, if IT departments have to choose one strategy to improve the odds of beating ransomware it’s using multifactor authentication as an extra requirement for employees and customers to log into accounts. There are other important strategies, such as segmenting data systems so an attacker can’t leap from one network to another. For example, if an attacker gets access to the low-priority heating and air conditioning system they shouldn’t be able to jump to the high-priority...
The Cyber Security Academy is the first of its kind national cyber security training programme in Ireland for young people and is now recruiting 4th, 5th and 6th year students who want to learn the essential skills to identify, prevent and predict cyber-attacks. Cyber Academy is funded under the Science Foundation Ireland Discover Programme, which was launched on the 22nd March by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris, TD and supports 49 public engagement and education initiatives that aim to improve public understanding of science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) and engage a wide audience of people with STEM topics. We have all become increasingly dependent on our smartphones and the internet, especially due to COVID-19. There is a significant lack of awareness and skills around cybersecurity in society in general, and amongst young people in particular. Furthermore, Ireland has a dire shortage of cybersecurity professionals, which is placing our digital economy at risk. Ireland needs to develop young people that have the aptitude and skills to become the next generation of cyber security specialists to protect our digital world. Not only is it one of the most well-paid, in-demand sectors around, but it also offers young people the chance to forge a career doing something that really matters. The Cyber Security Academy is a series of fun and engaging activities for young people (11-18 year old’s) to help them explore their interest in tech by introducing them to the world of cyber security: The Cyber Security Academy is preparing the next generation to contribute to Ireland’s economic growth and as a safe and secure place to live and work by promoting science and technology among school students, reducing gender imbalance in this field and improving proficiency in computer science among its trainees. Do you...
A mathematical thermodynamic model for gene regulation (top, left) is formulated as an artificial neural network (ANN) (bottom, left). Large DNA datasets are fed through the new ANN (right). The pattern of connections is presented in a way that is easy for biologists to interpret. Credit: Kinney lab/CSHL, 2019 In this age of “big data,” artificial intelligence (AI) has become a valuable ally for scientists. Machine learning algorithms, for instance, are helping biologists make sense of the dizzying number of molecular signals that control how genes function. But as new algorithms are developed to analyze even more data, they also become more complex and more difficult to interpret. Quantitative biologists Justin B. Kinney and Ammar Tareen have a strategy to design advanced machine learning algorithms that are easier for biologists to understand. The algorithms are a type of artificial neural network (ANN). Inspired by the way neurons connect and branch in the brain, ANNs are the computational foundations for advanced machine learning. And despite their name, ANNs are not exclusively used to study brains. Biologists, like Tareen and Kinney, use ANNs to analyze data from an experimental method called a “massively parallel reporter assay” (MPRA) which investigates DNA. Using this data, quantitative biologists can make ANNs that predict which molecules control specific genes in a process called gene regulation. Cells don’t need all proteins all the time. Instead, they rely on complex molecular mechanisms to turn the genes that produce proteins on or off, as needed. When those regulations fail, disorder and disease usually follow. “That mechanistic knowledge—understanding how something like gene regulation works—is very often the difference between...
With the number and impact of cyber attacks continuing to increase rapidly, BT has announced a multi-million pound investment in Safe Security, a cyber risk management firm. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the firm’s SAFE (Security Assessment Framework for Enterprises) platform allows organisations to take a health check of their existing defences and understand their likelihood of suffering a major cyber attack. Industry analysis estimates that the cost of global cyber crime reached over $1 trillion in 2020, as criminals exploited seismic changes in everyday life to target both individuals and organisations of all sizes. With high-profile recent incidents impacting critical areas such as energy infrastructure and medical care, businesses and governments are under huge pressure to objectively assess how protected they are against the latest forms of cyber attack. The investment will allow BT to combine the SAFE platform with its managed security services to provide customers with a real time view of how safe they are against an incredibly fast-moving cyber threat landscape. SAFE is unique in calculating a financial cost to customers’ risks and giving actionable insight on the steps that can be taken to address them. The platform ultimately enables organisations to surgically target gaps in their defences, and already protects multiple Fortune 500 companies and governments around the world. Philip Jansen, the CE of BT, said: “Cyber security is now at the top of the agenda for businesses and governments, who need to be able to trust that they’re protected against increasing levels of attack. Adding SAFE to BT’s proactive, predictive security services will give customers an enhanced view of their threat level, and rapidly...
The “red team” hacking exercise conducted by the NSW Auditor-General revealed “significant weaknesses” in the agencies’ cyber security schemes, the watchdog wrote in the report released on Tuesday. “Transport for NSW and Sydney Trains are not effectively managing their cyber security risks,” Auditor-General Margaret Crawford wrote in the report. “Significant weaknesses exist in their cyber security controls, and both agencies have assessed that their cyber risks are unacceptably high.” The report also notes that few staff members at the agencies have received basic cyber security training and that executives do not receive regular detailed cyber risk briefings. “As a result, neither agency is fostering a culture where cyber security risk management is an important and valued aspect of executive decision-making,” Ms Crawford wrote. Anti-hacking defences put up by Sydney Trains and Transport for NSW were no match for a simulated cyber attack. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Dylan CokerSource:News Corp Australia The test was conducted by allowing “authorised attackers” to try to penetrate the computer systems. The “red team” also tested the security of some of the train systems’ physical sites that were relevant to cyber security, the report said. Transport for NSW and Sydney Trains were made aware in advance that the test would occur. The exercise revealed security holes that the agencies weren’t previously aware of, it was revealed. The agencies fought to suppress exactly what those weaknesses were because they feared revealing the vulnerabilities could expose them to further attacks. “TfNSW and Sydney Trains have advised that in the six months from December 2020 and at the time of tabling this audit report, they have not yet remediated all...
Google just made it a lot easier to build your very own custom AI system. The technology is limited for now, but it could be the start of something big. Building and optimizing a deep neural network algorithm normally requires a detailed understanding of the underlying math and code, as well as extensive practice tweaking the parameters of algorithms to get things just right. The difficulty of developing AI systems has created a race to recruit talent, and it means that only big companies with deep pockets can usually afford to build their own bespoke AI algorithms. “We need to scale AI out to more people,” Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist at Google Cloud, said ahead of the launch today. Li estimates there are at most a few thousand people worldwide with the expertise needed to build the very best deep-learning models. “But there are an estimated 21 million developers worldwide today,” she says. “We want to reach out to them all, and make AI accessible to these developers.” Cloud computing is one of the keys to making AI more accessible. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other companies are rushing to add machine-learning capabilities to their cloud platforms. Google Cloud already offers many such tools, but they use pretrained models. That limits what they can do—for example, programmers will only be able to use the tools to recognize a limited range of objects or scenes that they have already been trained to recognize. A new generation of cloud-based machine-learning tools that can train themselves would make the technology far more versatile and easier to use. Several companies have been testing Google...
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