An interesting visualisation – history of a growing United States – mapping built using R.
The animated map above shows population density by decade, going back to 1790 and up to recent estimates for 2015. The time in between each time period represents a smoothed transition. This is approximate, but it gives a better idea of how the distribution of population changed.
The Data used for this mapping is from the Census Bureau amd made better accessible by NHGIS.
An interesting take using R. Do check this out.
A very interesting move by Uber indeed. Very much inline with Modi’s push for creating local jobs and opportunities.
Top sources in know of Uber’s plans told The Economic Times, “Uber has around 200,000 active driver partners on their platform currently and they want to increase this to a million by 2018. They are beginning with this pilot with Maruti Suzuki and will extend this going ahead”, said an executive in know of developments.
Ola – what are you up to?
Picture Courtesy: financialexpress.com
It’s time for the biggest Tech event of the year – Apple’s product (hardware) launch event tomorrow.
WWDC in June is when we find out about the greatest and the latest software Apple has built, but when it comes to how the software blends seamlessly with hardware, resulting in one of the best designed, engineered and built tech products on the planet, it’s the event in Fall, where they launch them.
Key expectations are the next iPhone – iPhone 7, and the next big leap in wearables Apple Watch 2.
If there is one preview that you would want to read, about the event tomorrow, make it Jason Snell’s
The devil’s in the details, though. This event is Apple’s big chance to put all of its fall product offerings in context, to tell stories that explain why these products do what they do (or in some cases, don’t do what they don’t). This is product marketing at its highest level, and the way Apple introduces a product can be enlightening.
Apple getting rid of the headphone jack, what’s their take on wireless audio, the best camera on a smartphone getting even better (two lens camera), positioning of the Apple Watch – Jason has it all in his post.
The Head of Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple, Ivan Krstić, announced to Black Hat attendees last week, that Apple will begin offering cash bounties of up to $200,000 to researchers who discover vulnerabilities in its products.
Krstić’s talk at Black Hat was definitely interesting and covered a good breadth of the technical measures that Apple has been taking in making iOS secure, from grounds up. The presentation also included a level of technical detail and disclosure of security—here, related to AutoUnlock, HomeKit, and iCloud Keychain—that has been mostly absent in the past at conferences, according to those present.
Apple being so open and forthcoming, about their security architecture, is somewhat unusual, but definitely welcoming.
Now, about the the bounty program itself, it will initially be limited to about two dozen researchers who Apple will invite to help discover difficult-to-uncover security bugs in five specific categories:
Each of these aspects represent key threat vectors for attacks by governments and criminals alike. While iOS has never had exploits spread significantly in the wild, jailbreaking the software has made use of various methods of running arbitrary code in iOS. In another Black Hat presentation, the makers of the Pangu jailbreak for iOS 9 (fixed in 9.2), described how they achieved that kind of code execution.
Until now, there’s been no known extraction of data from Secure Enclave, the dedicated hardware in iOS devices with an A7 or newer processor that acts as a one-way valve to store fingerprint characteristics and certain data associated with Apple Pay. It is also used to prevent downgrading iOS to exploit a bug in a previous release. iCloud, which has been in the media sometimes for the wrong reasons, have had some accounts compromised in the past through certain weak password entry endpoints and social engineering of celebrity accounts, there has been no reported breach of iCloud servers itself.
Going by these clearly laid out vulnerability categories and qualification parameters, I see that Apple’s program sets clear objectives – find exploitable bugs in key areas. It makes complete sense, because proving exploitability with a repeatable proof of concept, takes lot more effort than merely finding a vulnerability. If the bug is found to have significant impact on security, then Apple will pay the researchers a fair value for their work. By doing this, Apple aims to learn how to improve a bug bounty program, over a period of time, and derive maximum value out of it.
The end result is – high-quality vulnerabilities (and their respective exploits) discovered, by researchers and developers who Apple believes have the skills and the right intentions to help advance product security. Bounty fees at other companies range from a starting point from $100 to $500, and are capped at from $20,000 at Google to $100,000 at Microsoft, clearly indicating the focus being quantity, unlike Apple’s focus on quality and difficult to discover, exploit and reproducible vulnerabilities.
Many major tech companies, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, have been running Bounty programs for years. But there is a reason for Apple not getting into the Bounty business until now, even if security has always been a priority for them and iOS is way more secure, grounds up, than other competing mobile OS platforms today. That reason is primarily to ward off governments and underground hackers who merely want to make money, by not being in a position to negotiate with them. The disclosure by the United States government on last week that an unknown third party had approached it — and not Apple — to help open a controversial iPhone only highlights how the giant company approaches bug-hunting efforts and security differently from the rest of the tech industry.
Asked by the audience at Black Hat why Apple waited so long to launch a bounty program, Krstić said the company has heard from researchers that finding critical vulnerabilities is increasingly difficult, and it wanted to reward those who take the time to do it.
I have been following Apple closely since 2009, when I bought my first Apple product – an iPhone 4 (the last phone Steve Jobs personally launched). Being a Security Consultant myself, I have always wondered to how Apple builds their software to be far more secure than other operating system platforms. And this has been true from the very beginning of Mac (built on a strong Unix base), And so I have always tried to understand iOS and Mac security a bit deeper, but Apple has always been secretive about sharing information, just the way they are about their product strategy and roadmap. So this new development with the Bounty program and the overall incharge for Product security at Apple making a presentation at Blackhat, is very exciting to me.
I am looking forward to understanding how Operating System security is best handled, from a company that makes the best software and hardware in the world today.
Notes:
Feature Image courtesy: blackhat.com
Gartner has just released their annual Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, for 2016.
16 new technologies added to the Hype Cycle this year, including blockchain, machine learning, general purpose machine intelligence, smart workspace for the first time.
Interestingly, 14 technologies were taken off the Hype Cycle this year including Hybrid Cloud Computing, Consumer 3D Printing, and Enterprise 3D Printing.
Do checkout the report here. Definitely worth a read.
Image source: Gartner
As security (cyber) becomes more and more important, to businesses, governments, and also to our personal lives, the need for good security engineers and researchers is increasing at a rapid pace.
This is true whether one is working in an entry-level position or is already a senior researcher.
It is often said in the security industry that “It is easier to teach a developer about security than it is to teach a security researcher about development (coding).”
Information security professionals are used to seeing, experiencing and talking about failures in the industry. This usually leads them to assume that badly written (vulnerable) code is always the product of unskilled developers. If these professionals have never been exposed to software development, even at a small scale, then they do not have a fair understanding of the complex challenges that developers face in secure code development. And I think that a security professional cannot be effective in designing detective and preventive security controls (tools, architectures, processes) if he or she doesn’t appreciate these challenges.
Let me illustrate that with an example- ‘code injection” attacks against NoSQL databases versus SQL databases. Simply put, SQL and NoSQL databases both collect, organize and accept queries for information, and so both are exposed to malicious code injections. So, when NoSQL databases became popular, people were quick to predict that NoSQL injection would become as common as SQL injection. Though that is theoretically true, developers know that it’s not that simple.
If you take sometime out understanding NoSQL databases, you will quickly realize that there are a wide variety of query formats, from SQL like queries (Cassandra), to JSON based queries (MongoDB, DynamoDB), and to assembly like queries (Redis). And so security recommendations and tools for a NoSQL environment have to be targeted to the individual server that is underneath. Also, your security testing tools must have the injection attacks that are in the format of that specific database. And so one cannot blindly recommend controls or preventive measures, without understanding that the vulnerabilities are not available on all platforms. Encoding recommendations for data will be specific to the database type as well. This OWASP article explains how one can test for noSQL injection vulnerabilities.
This is all the knowledge that one can learn by digging deep into a subject and experimenting with technologies at a developer level. And so people with development backgrounds can also, often times, give better technical advice.
If one looks at the people leading security programs or initiatives at companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and other large successful tech companies, many of them are respected because they are also keeping their hands on the keyboards and are speaking from direct knowledge. They not only provide advice and research but also tools and techniques to empower others in the same industry.
So to summarise, I would like to say that whether one is a newly graduated engineer or a senior security professional or a security researcher, one should never lose sight of the code, as that is where it all begins!
Picture courtesy: http://www.icd10forpt.com
IEEE has published its annual Top Computer programming languages rankings report. It starts with the line “C is No. 1, but big data is still the big winner”, indicating the rise of R, the defacto programming language used in Big Data analytics, including Cyber Security domain.
I think this is an extraordinary result for a language which is domain-specific (big data and data science). If you compare R to the other four languages, which are general purpose languages (C, Java, Python amd C++) in Top 5, it’s a great feat, and is a clear indication of the adoption and heavy use and relevance of R in today’s Information Age where every device, system, or a “thing” (IoT) generates some form of data (logs). This also reflects the critical important of Data Science (where R is the defacto programming language used by Data Scientists), as a descipline today.
Some interesting lines from the report:
Another language that has continued to move up the rankings since 2014 is R, now in fifth place. R has been lifted in our rankings by racking up more questions on Stack Overflow—about 46 percent more since 2014. But even more important to R’s rise is that it is increasingly mentioned in scholarly research papers. The Spectrumd efault ranking is heavily weighted toward data from IEEE Xplore, which indexes millions of scholarly articles, standards, and books in the IEEE database. In our 2015 ranking there were a mere 39 papers talking about the language, whereas this year we logged 244 papers.
R’s steady growth in this and numerous other surveys and rankings over time reflects the growing importance of Data Science applied using R. And application of Data Science concepts in Cyber security, especially in detecting cyber attacks, is only becoming more and more relevant.
Using conventional security monitoring tools which use rule based detection engines (yes they are called SIEM!), to detect cyber attacks, is not working anymore. Let’s face it; SIEM has come off age. Using Machine learning approach to detect cyber attacks, has become one of the most important developments in the cyber security domain in the last 10 years. And its relevance in today’s world, where there is surplus amounts of data (also called “Big Data”) being churned out by all forms of computer systems, is at its peak. And R is playing a very important role in helping Security Data Scientists build “algorithmic models” that can detect better cyber attacks
So I am very excited and happy to see R’s popularity and adaption growing year on year.
This is a core area of study I am currently focusing on, and I will be writing more about this here on my blog, in the coming months.
Picture Courtesy: ieee.org
TechCrunch just reported that Verizon has acquired Yahoo for $4.83 billion.
This definitely is a shocker and I am sure many would agree with me. Not many of us were expecting Marrisa Mayer to call it a day by dropping the ball so soon.
One of the most important companies of the first dot-com boom, Yahoo, has reached the end of its life as an independent company. This deal represents a stunnin decline for a company that was valued at more than $100 billion at its its peak in 2000.
Marissa’s roots as an engineer at Google, definitely helped in improving the brand value with software programmers and technology users alike, and she did make an effort to beef up Yahoo’s technical talent. She instituted a regorous recruitment process and it worked hard at hiring computer scientists from some of the best universities. But there is little sign that these moves changed the culture at Yahoo or improved morale among the programmers working there. They always saw and projected themselves as a “media company” and not a “technology company”. I am not sure if it played out well for them, as its attempt to be a tech company and a media company at the same time, resulted in an organisation that was less than the sum of its parts.
I strongly believe that one reason why Verizon was a strong contender was that they have done this before; Verizon acquired another struggling Internet company last year. Like AOL, Yahoo makes a lot of money by creating Internet content and selling ads against it. So from Verizon’s perspective, this definitely looks like a logical step.
With respect to Mayer’s future at Yahoo, I am sure she is pursuing opportunities outside, as the statement that Yahoo released about this deal, “Yahoo will be integrated with AOL under Marni Walden, EVP and President of the Product Innovation and New Businesses organisation at Verizon”, makes it evident that Marissa Mayer’s future lies outside of Yahoo.
I wish her all the best, and am sure she will build something very interesting soon in the tech business.
Picture courtesy: TechCrunch.com
A good essay pointing out the weird similarities between cyber weapons and nuclear weapons.
On the surface, the analogy is compelling. Like nuclear weapons, the most powerful cyberweapons — malware capable of permanently damaging critical infrastructure and other key assets of society — are potentially catastrophically destructive, have short delivery times across vast distances, and are nearly impossible to defend against. Moreover, only the most technically competent of states appear capable of wielding cyberweapons to strategic effect right now, creating the temporary illusion of an exclusive cyber club. To some leaders who matured during the nuclear age, these tempting similarities and the pressing nature of the strategic cyberthreat provide firm justification to use nuclear deterrence strategies in cyberspace. Indeed, Cold War-style cyberdeterrence is one of the foundational cornerstones of the 2015 U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Strategy.
However, dive a little deeper and the analogy becomes decidedly less convincing. At the present time, strategic cyberweapons simply do not share the three main deterrent characteristics of nuclear weapons: the sheer destructiveness of a single weapon, the assuredness of that destruction, and a broad debate over the use of such weapons.
Hari Notes 