Podcast

Dale Hoak, RegScale CISO

Zero Trust: easy concept, hard to implement

Lou Covey

Last week, Dr. Zero Trust, AKA Dr. Chase Cunningham, posted in Linkedin that he was fed up with people who say they don’t understand Zero Trust. To a certain extent, I feel his frustration.
Journalists understand the concept. We have a decades-old saying, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” It doesn’t get more zero trust than that.
The problem is that while it’s easy to understand as a concept, it isn’t easy to build a zero trust infrastructure, especially with the misleading gobbledygook most cybersecurity companies put out. Cunningham says there are hundred of books and articles on the subject. He’s right, of course. The question is, which one do you choose?
At the RSAC Conference, We sat down and briefly talked with Dale Hoak, CISO for RegScale, about how easy it is to understand Zero Trust

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Bruce Schneier

Schneier predicts “public” LLMs

Lou Covey

ibuted and democratic, according to renowned security technologist, Bruce Schneier, not controlled by corporations. Developments in the past few weeks indicate he may be right.

Speaking at the RSAC Conference in San Francisco last week, Schneier talked of trust and how we give it to people, strangers, organizations, and technology. His description of that process predicted the development of artificial intelligence controlled almost exclusively by the user, rather than the dystopian corporate AI replacing humanity.

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Engineer calibrating laser on Atom computer

An encryption primer: Don’t wait

Lou Covey

Encryption became a hot topic in the news in the past month. The United Kingdom, Sweden, France and the EU are considering requiring “back doors” to encryption protections. The “Signalgate” scandal in Washington, DC started most people asking, “What is this encryption stuff?” So we decided to provide a primer on the state of encryption today.

While the technology behind encryption is complex, it is not new. The basic algorithms have been with us for decades, silently running on devices and servers, invisible to the user. The purpose is basic: to keep data safe from prying eyes, like criminals and nation states.

Encryption is also a good way of saving money and not just in avoiding ransoms. Insurance companies often offer up to 15% premium discounts to businesses demonstrating strong security practices, including proper data encryption. Encryption significantly reduces the risk of data breaches and their associated costs.

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Engineer blowing a popping bubble labeled AI industry

AI bubble about to pop for cybersecurity?

Lou Covey

As quickly as the artificial intelligence (AI) industry appeared, it may disappear just as quickly. That may have significant ramifications for cybersecurity, according to industry watchers, as the technology falls into the trough of disillusionment.

When OpenAI burst on the scene more than two years ago, Microsoft was a significant instigator in its growth and adoption. Microsoft invested billions in the not-for-profit enterprise for early access to cutting-edge AI technologies and helping accelerate OpenAI's research. It transformed its Azure cloud platform into a leading infrastructure provider for AI development, offering specialized hardware (like GPUs and TPUs) and services tailored for machine learning workloads. AI capabilities were embedded across its product suite, and Microsoft Research contributed significantly to AI advancement in computer vision, natural language processing, and deep learning.

All of that came with extreme demands on computing resources. Microsoft began a buying spree in data centers, both to secure resources and build new centers. They even entered into a deal to reopen the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

Spree ends

That has all come to an end. As reported in Bloomberg last week, the company decided to scale back data center projects in the UK, Australia, and Indonesia. Data center development in Illinois, North Dakota, and Wisconsin is also canceled. All tolled, Microsoft has walked away from more than 2GW. That’s on top of the news that Microsoft had walked away from two data center projects in the US and Europe, piling on to a February announcement that it was canceling data center leases.

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Digital Operational Resilience Act

EU’s DORA: Who will stand up for protection?

Lou Covey

The EU's Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA) went live in January. This legislation's goals seem to conflict with the US administration’s willingness to ignore technology security standards. The question is: Who will stand up to protect corporate and consumer data?

DORA is highly targeted at the stability and resilience of the financial services sector. It ensures financial institutions can respond to, withstand, and recover from ICT-related threats and disruptions. It also requires robust strategies and policies to manage ICT risks in financial institutions.
Arnaud Treps, chief information security officer at Odaseva, said, “DORA is very different from previous regulation where you have to change where you operate. DORA is about having proper backups, the capability to restore quickly, and building redundancy.”

Europe takes the lead

But does the US rejecting data privacy regulation mean walling America off from the rest of the world? Meta has threatened to potentially limit

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English riots cause unprecedent damage

How social media moderation works

Lou Covey

There has been a lot of debate regarding the imposition of moderation on social media and whether that constitutes censorship and violations of the right to free speech. That argument is specious at best. Offending content on commercial social media is removed only when it negates profitability.

Most humans moderate their speech. Sometimes we think about impulsively speaking in reaction to something that incites strong emotions. People who do not react have what is called, “self-control”. Some people don’t have that filter (I’m looking at you, Elon) and blurt out offensive, nonfactual, or dishonest responses. Sometimes they aren’t atypical, they are just selfish people without manners (still looking at you Elon). Moderation of your speech is just a civilized attitude.

Profit motive

When it comes to social media, however, especially for-profit social media, the primary factor is profit. That has been the guiding principle of all social media moderation.

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James Bore talks about cybersecurity marketing

Security industry addicted to bland marketing

Lou Covey

There is no question that the cybersecurity industry performs a vital role in keeping the digital world safe.  It’s too bad the industry is so dedicated to bland, repetitive and un-informational marketing and research.

The problem doesn’t exist with cybersecurity alone.  Every tech industry under finances and plagiarizes marketing communications both within and without their niches, but the problem in security is that there is so little actual data to refer to, it is easy to make it up and still be believed.  The introduction of AI into marketing efforts definitely cuts down the price and effort of communications, but it makes the bland and repetitive content even more bland, repetitive while making it less informative than when humans are actually involved.

Anyone involved in the process of evaluating this content and mining nuggets of relevant truth knows the problem and some are trying to do something about it.  James Bore is one of them.

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Editorial: Jog on, Meta

Lou Covey

Mark Zuckerberg made two announcements about major changes in Meta in the past two weeks. The first was the revelation that they would be creating hundreds of AI-driven bots to interact with users. The second was the announcement that they would stop moderation of content, “except for dangerous stuff,” according to a video posted by Zuckerberg. With a certain amount of schadenfreude, we note that Meta had to pull the accounts they had already made as users started engaging with them, finding their inherent flaws and raking them over the coals for how piss-poor their execution was.

Both of these announcements validated a decision I had made earlier this year to start divesting myself of Meta platform accounts. I made the request to deactivate all the accounts (Facebook, Instagram and Messenger) a week before both announcements. I would have done it sooner if I had known it would take Meta 30 days from my request to deactivate everything. This morning, however, I received a text from my partners in Cyber Protection Magazine asking if I thought we should deactivate our Facebook account.

Frankly, I had forgotten we had one, basically because we received zero engagement from the platform, despite the amount of content we put up there. That,.too, is a result of Meta de-emphasizing legacy media. Of course, I concurred with the team. Sometime in February, we will disappear from Facebook.

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