Jeffrey J. Bloom

Jeffrey J. Bloom

There's no such thing as perfect security or an environment that cannot be compromised, but the architectural approach can be highly effective in preventing & detecting these attacks," said Temske. In this interview, he surveys the challenges in secure application development & gives advice on prioritizing modern security strategies, creating an enterprise software security architecture, using security frameworks like CIS & choosing security tools.
http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/feature/Embrace-software-security-architecture-to-beat-WannaCry-era-hackers

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Paul Allen’s monstrous Stratolaunch airplane finally rolled out of its hangar in Mojave, Calif., Wednesday, showing off its complete twin-hulled majesty for the first time. Intended to carry a rocket slung between the two fuselages, & release it at 35,000 feet. The concept is that the rocket will then launch into space & deliver satellites into orbit.
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/allens-colossal-stratolaunch-plane-emerges-from-its-lair/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"[There are] a whole lot of applications of quantum computers which our customers are going to want to use & I can assure you they're not going to walk in on day one & know how to use these things so we want to be able to offer it as a service to them whereby they can use it to run their applications." "The potential that quantum computing will be available via cloud networks & other forms of broadband infrastructure invites the possibility that clusters of programmers & users in all parts of Australia will be able to access this technology."
https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/620063/telstra-offer-quantum-computing-as-a-service/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

The Dex-Net 2.0 bot can pick up awkward & unusually shaped objects, learning how to grasp objects by studying a virtual library of 10,000 3D objects. Its deep-learning system figures out what grasp it should use for each object, leading to bots that can be useful in settings such as hospitals & homes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4560514/Nimble-robot-uses-deep-learning-grasp-different-objects.html

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"We're doing it completely legal, we have very, very short deliveries from the drone where we have a safe takeoff location and the landing area is a Drone Dispatch team member who's receiving the box of doughnuts," said Chris Bonnet, CEO of Drone Dispatch.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DENVER_DRONE_DOUGHNUTS

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Researchers surveyed 352 machine learning experts (forecasting AI progress found there’s a 50% chance AI will outperform humans in all tasks in 45 years & a 50% chance machines will take ALL jobs in 120 years. AI will outperform humans at translation, truck driving & essay writing in 10 yrs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/~/article-4560824/index.html

Jeffrey J. Bloom

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FBI for records "about the extent to which it directs and trains Best Buy employees to conduct warrantless searches of people's devices." The lawsuit stems around an incident in 2011 where a gynecology doctor took his computer for repairs at Best Buy's Geek Squad. The repair technician was a paid FBI informant that found child pornography on the doctor's computer, ultimately resulting in the doctor being charged with possessing child pornography.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/FBI-tries-to-bypass-Fourth-Amendment-Safeguards-by-using-Geek-Squad

Jeffrey J. Bloom

A persistent & devastating attack could trigger Article 5 (NATO’s collective defense measure), theoretically causing allys to go to war in defense of a member state. The attack would have to be much more dangerous than propaganda or social media activities, but invoking Article 5 is still a "real possibility."
http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/31/nato-could-go-to-war-over-a-cyber-attack/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Make sure your wifi is password protected and choose something complex with capital letters, numbers and symbols. This will help to make sure hackers can't guess what it is.

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"Sometimes you just do what you have to do," "A website is only as good as how current it is." Fortunately, they had backed up the night before. "There is nothing that is linked through our files, our server or website that would ever link to a woman's information," "Safety & privacy are our top priorities."
http://www.calgarysun.com/2017/05/30/high-river-charity-outwits-hackers-who-held-website-hostage-for-ransom

Jeffrey J. Bloom

AI systems are artificial neural networks, bearing the roughest resemblance to biological networks of neurons. A $100M program from IARPA is funding mapping of the rodent visual cortex, or 1 cubic millimeter of brain, to understand how neural circuits are activated to process information.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/ai-designers-find-inspiration-in-rat-brains

"Sounds promising but do we really need an AI that takes in garbage, hides in the darkest cramped spaces, efficiently distributes viruses, and is a plague to humankind?" 😂
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/05/30/2118223/ai-could-get-smarter-by-copying-the-neural-structure-of-a-rat-brain#comments

C Elegans is am extensively studied nematode with exactly 302 neurons, whose contetome (wiring) is consistent & known. It's brain function remains a mystery. Neurons are complex, as is their input & output..

Since 2011, OpenWorm seeks to completely simulate nematode worm (Caenorhabditis Elegans) muscles & neuron electrical activity at a cellular-level. Although the worm connectome was mapped in the 1980s, the neural network has never been fully simulated in a biologically realistic way. The philosophy of the project is that only by recreating a living organism can we truly understand it.
http://www.artificialbrains.com/openworm

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Doctors didn't need to authenticate themselves when logging onto the pacemaker programmers. So, anyone could log on & tamper with the programmer without the doctor knowing, which in turn might affect how the programmer might behave when it was next used on a pacemaker.
https://www.neowin.net/news/over-8000-bugs-found-in-pacemaker-codes-leaving-them-vulnerable-to-hackers

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Researchers say latest attack--still evolving--takes advantage of a stolen NSA tool to exploit a flaw in some versions of Windows. Microsoft has suggested that the NSA knew of the flaw for some time, yet didn’t disclose it until the theft.
*A better approach is to improve the current system; secrecy makes it hard to know how well the stated criteria for retaining vulnerabilities are being followed. Reporting the total number found & disclosed each year might offer some reassurance to tech companies & the public, without divulging anything sensitive.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-30/ransomware-and-the-nsa

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Former Assistant AG for DoJ’s Nat'l Security Division described how nation state actors exfiltrated data from American companies, costing hundreds of billions of dollars in losses & over two million jobs. Reminding how important it is to work with the government while taking us down memory lane with the Sony hack. Explaining how destructive an attack can be, by using soft targets, such as email, not requiring sophisticated techniques.
https://blog.varonis.com/john-carlin-economic-espionage-weaponized-information-part-2/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Releasing data of roughly 100 fake consumers, including names, addresses, email, phone & payment info,on two different occasions, "criminals were quick to pounce[...]After the second posting, it took only nine minutes before crooks tried to access the information." Identifying over 1,200 attempts to access fake email & payment accounts. Attempts to use fake credit cards to pay for a range of activities, including clothing, games & online dating memberships.
http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ftc-cybercriminals-find-stolen-personal-data-within-9-minutes-of-hackers-posting-it.html

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Spanning five months--October to March--it aimed to excite students about professions in cybersecurity & related operations. Virginia garnered the highest participation rates nationwide with nearly 7,000 students in 110 schools spending a day in the life of six NSA experts, including a data scientist, an intelligence analyst & a cyber-linguist.
http://edscoop.com/virginia-leads-in-nsa-day-of-cyber-participation-nationwide

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Collected communications CAN be masked to protect identified US persons, but made on a case-by-case basis by NSA & government officials..
*DHS already has access to NSA collections & this bill would grant underling agencies access. Including CBP, ICE & TSA. NSA's collections serve a national security purpose, the FBI uses access for standard criminal investigations. There's no reason to believe these agencies won't do the same.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170527/08075437463/congress-fast-tracks-bill-that-would-give-dhs-agencies-access-to-nsa-collections.shtml

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"The costs of autocracy is illegitimacy, & though none of us have wished for this, it is increasingly near," Snowden told the Estoril Conferences, "Elevating criminals like this is the laziest kind of rhetoric, terrorists for all their evil, are incapable of destroying our rights, or diminishing our societies. They lack the strength (to destroy rights), only we can do that, through unthinking, reflexive fear," "Rights are lost by cowardly laws that are passed in moments of panic, rights are lost to the cringing complicity of leaders who fear the loss of their office more than the loss of our liberty."
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-05-30/snowden-says-democracy-under-threat-by-attacks-on-fake-news

Jeffrey J. Bloom

As to whether the information leaked from the DNC had been doctored, no analysis has been applied to it so far. But this kind of tampering is likely to become more widespread.
"Tainted leaks are the next frontier of disinformation: an attempt to really tamper with the integrity of large sets of information that people will believe to be genuine," John Scott-Railton, researcher at Citizen Lab, told Forbes.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/fancy-bear-us-election-hackers/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Interested buyers must send 100 units of Zcash cryptocurrency, with no guarantee it's 100% safe/reliable. The monthly subscription service probably isn’t for anyone worried about losing "$20k+ Euro."
Only noting the next data dump is something of "value to someone," & the 100 Zcash price will increase in the future.
*"Monthly dump is being for high rollers, hackers, security companies, OEMs & governments[...] Playing ‘the game’ is involving risks. Zcash is having connections to USG (DARPA, DOD, John Hopkins) & Israel.”
http://bgr.com/2017/05/30/shadow-brokers-nsa-exploits-subscription/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Researchers behind the Patreon campaign, Hacker Fantastic & x0rz, hope that by purchasing the data they will be able to analyze it & possibly prevent another attack like the WannaCry ransomware.

Jeffrey J. Bloom

*Symantec & Kaspersky blame WannaCry on North Korea. SecureWorks & TrendMicro blame DNC hacks on Russia.
*Attributing cyber attacks to any country or hacker should conducted with utmost caution. Where's the proof? emails, communications, trusted witnesses to testify under oath & the like? Nothing definitive has emerged to blame anyone for the attacks. Brandon Swafford's Forcepoint role revolves around human elements of data protection, hunting malicious users & understanding human behaviour leading to data breaches.
*The US DOJ indicted 5 people from China's PLA in 2014 & earlier this year, 2 Russian FSB officers along with 2 other hackers.
https://www.itwire.com/security/78345-tech-pro-cautions-on-attribution-of-cyber-attacks.html

And the article disappeared! Try google cache:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OKPScMMfm7EJ:https://www.itwire.com/security/78345-tech-pro-cautions-on-attribution-of-cyber-attacks.html

Jeffrey J. Bloom

A simpler method precisely & perfectly places atomic-scale defects in diamond material to function as qubits. This could allow mass production of quantum computers & upend modern encryption; allow solving "unsolvable" problems; and shatter information storage & transmission limitations!
https://futurism.com/mit-just-unveiled-a-technique-to-mass-produce-quantum-computers/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

“Using HGX, ODM partners can work with NVIDIA to more quickly design and bring to market a wide range of qualified GPU-accelerated systems for hyperscale data centers. Through the program, NVIDIA engineers will work closely with ODMs to help minimize the amount of time from design win to production deployments.’’
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/262235/nvidia-nvda-partners-odms-to-boost-ai-cloud-computing

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"Accelerated computing is evolving rapidly--tripling deep learning performance in our Tesla GPUs in one year---& this is having a significant impact on the way systems are designed," “Through our HGX partner program, device makers can ensure they’re offering the latest AI technologies to the growing community of cloud computing providers."
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-top-manufacturers-hgx-1-partnership,34544.html

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Kieku listening service will provide all-you-can-eat brain food & podcasts.
"Finding meaningful audio is time-consuming & complicated.” There's about 30,000,000 minutes of podcasting every year, that's almost 3,500 every hour!
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/this-finnish-startup-is-using-artificial-intelligence-to-create-a-youtube-for-podcasts-2017-5/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Using cutting-edge machine learning, Danish startup UIzard Tech IVS, is creating a neural net that can generate code automatically using GUI screenshots. The Pix2Code model actually outperforms many human coders because it can create code for 3 platforms--Android, iOS & web-based--with an accuracy of 77%, & improves as the algorithm learns more. https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/05/28/startup-uses-ai-create-gui-source-code-simple-screenshots/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

the Cortex-A75 & A55 designs use DynamIQ technology, allowing them to be clustered with as many as 8 processors. Promising 20% & 15% better performance than earlier models (respectively), faster single instruction multiple data (SIMD) & floating point units, making it suitable for machine learning applications.
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/arm-releases-new-chip-designs-aimed-at-ai-machine-learning-463509

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Harvard researchers deployed an algorithm to detected unusual changes in Wikipedia's global server traffic beginning in May 2015. This data was combined with historical analysis of daily request histories for 1.7 million articles in 286 different languages from 2011 to 2016 to determine possible censorship events. [...] they found that, globally, Wikipedia's switch to HTTPS had a positive effect on the number censorship events by comparing server traffic from before & after the switch in June of 2015.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wikipedias-switch-to-https-has-successfully-fought-government-censorship