Category Archives: Op-Ed

The new organization needed to digitally protect the U.S.

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Americans live in a digital glass house. Unless we do something radically different, that house is set to shatter. How much longer can we continue to tolerate the daily theft of our nation’s secrets, technological innovation and personal privacy from criminals and nation-states? The answer doesn’t lie with our government, nor with commercial firms. There is no magic pill, but there is a better way. Our corporations, universities and research centers are the lifeblood of global innovation, having pioneered society’s technological advancements over the past 75 years. Yet in spite of all the amazing innovation that has made the American economy the envy of the world, we remain the most digitally vulnerable business population on the planet. The U.S. has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into ensuring our offensive and defensive cybercapabilities are ahead of our adversaries. But our society and businesses remain vulnerable because every aspect of our […]

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10 ways to secure sensitive information on AWS

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Some security experts have described the recent exposure of sensitive information of 198 million Americans — nearly all registered voters — as “the mother load of all leaks.” Deep Root Analytics, the data analytics firm that left its AWS database exposed on the public internet for two weeks, is now facing its first class-action lawsuit. The uproar over the leak will likely continue for a long time. More than anything, this security incident highlighted the need for organizations to protect their often-overlooked Infrastructure-as-a-Service systems like AWS. The Deep Root Analytics data repository was in an S3 bucket without protected access, accessible to anyone who would navigate to a six-character Amazon subdomain. Implementing the right security strategy can prevent this kind of leak in the future. It would also help protect data from other threats. Although Amazon Web Services has invested heavily in security, the platform is not impenetrable. For example, […]

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Mexico Hacking and Spying on Its Citizens Is a ‘Human Rights Crisis’

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The illegal use of hacking tools by the Mexican government against activists and reporters has become a systematic policy of intimidation and harassment. Continue reading Mexico Hacking and Spying on Its Citizens Is a ‘Human Rights Crisis’→

Why a global cybersecurity Geneva convention is not going to happen

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Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith has been pounding the pavement all year asking for a “global cyber Geneva Convention” in the face of threats facing his employer’s software and the greater internet at large. It’s a pipe dream and I’ll tell you why. Any global effort works best when there are clear answers. For instance, there is a clean line between “nuclear war” and “not nuclear war.” The cyber domain is different. While there is some consensus within Microsoft that’s driven by business concerns and hyped as social concerns, there isn’t the same consensus within or between global governments. We don’t even know the trade-offs that would be implied by the things Microsoft is asking for: a barrier on the trade of “cyberweapons” resulted in massive outcry when it was codified in the Wassenaar Arms Control Arrangement last year, some of which came from the very same […]

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The Guy Who Saved Your iPhone From Hackers Is Stuck in a UAE Jail

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‘Million dollar dissident’ Ahmed Mansoor’s actions protected millions of iPhone users from sophisticated spyware. If you care about your privacy and security, you should be fighting for his release. Continue reading The Guy Who Saved Your iPhone From Hackers Is Stuck in a UAE Jail→

For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year

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Instead of corporate tax cuts for big companies that can be used to create more robots, we could allow Americans to benefit from the wealth automation creates. Continue reading For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year→

For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year

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Instead of corporate tax cuts for big companies that can be used to create more robots, we could allow Americans to benefit from the wealth automation creates. Continue reading For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year→

Software-defined secure networking is ideal for hybrid cloud security

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We tend to use the nebulous term “the cloud” as a catch-all phrase that implies any type of hosted environment, but it’s important to dig beneath the term when network security is at stake. In reality, “the cloud” can actually take a number of different forms. Compute capabilities can be managed in a cloud service provider environment and server workloads migrated into a managed service offering – the most traditional and popular cloud approach. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions like Salesforce or Office 365 can be used to receive cloud provider services without agencies having to define anything about the applications themselves. There are also cloud-native applications, such as microservices, which can be threaded and delivered in various regions of the cloud environment at any time. Each of these approaches can test an agency’s perimeter security efforts in their own way, which is why it is critical for us to look at […]

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