Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Carbanak raises the information security stakes

    Carbanak raises the information security stakes

    “The most sophisticated attack the world has seen to date” is how Kaspersky Lab’s North American managing director Chris Doggett describes the massive Carbanak electronic bank fraud that could have cost victims up to a billion dollars.

    Using a range of techniques, the Carbanak gang cracked their targets’ networks, right down to monitoring financial firm officers through their computers, and stole money through through the banks’ own ATM networks.

     

    “That’s where the money is.” Was 1930s bank robber Willie Sutton’s response to being asked why he robbed banks and that is what’s driving the Carbanak gang.

    For every Willie Sutton or Carbanak gang there’s a million opportunistic street muggers and script kiddies looking for stealing a few dollars from weak targets though and this is what the average small business or individual needs to be careful about.

    Last week Kaspersky reported that nearly a quarter of all phishing attacks targeted financial data. The amounts being stolen are minuscule compared to Carbank’s ill gotten gains but far less work is required to crack a home or small business account.

    For any large organisation that hasn’t learned from the Sony or Target hacks, the Carbank heist should be warning that information security is now a responsibility of executives and boards. All of us though have to take care with our data and systems.

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  • The Internet’s Pax Americana

    The Internet’s Pax Americana

    Tech journalist Kara Swisher has a twenty-five minute interview with President Obama on his relationship with the technology industry and Silicon Valley, it’s an interesting snapshot on how the United States sees its role as custodian of the internet.

    In talking about European agencies’ efforts to reign in the power of companies like Google the President is dismissive; “we have owned the Internet. Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it, in ways they can’t compete. And oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is designed to carve out their commercial interests.”

    Obama is absolutely correct to say the Internet currently belongs to the United States, it was the US that developed the technologies and built the initial infrastructure for the global network in a similar way it did for the GPS system.

    The internet probably won’t remain the US’s sole domain as China, Indian, Russia and other powers find control of the global communication network resting with the US isn’t in their interests and develop work arounds or rival technologies.

    Just as Spain and then the English once dominated the world’s shipping and communications, it may well be the US’s dominance of the Internet is not permanent.

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  • Reading the golden records – can we avoid a digital dark age?

    Reading the golden records – can we avoid a digital dark age?

    In 1977 NASA’s Voyager mission launched from Cape Canaveral to explore the outer solar system, included on the vessel in case it encountered other civilisations were a plaque and a golden record describing life on Earth.

    The record was, is, “a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” It containing images,  a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and spoken greetings in fifty-five languages.

    Most American households in 1977 could have listened to the sounds on Voyager’s golden disk but were the spaceship to return today it would be difficult to find the technology to read the record.

    This is the concern of Google Fellow and internet pioneer Vint Cerf who told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose this week we are “facing a forgotten century” as today’s technologies are superseded rendering documents unreadable.

    A good example of ‘bit rot’ is the floppy disk – the icon used by most programs to illustrate saving files is long redundant and few organisations, let alone households, have the ability to read a floppy disk.

    For corporations the problem of dealing with data stored on tape is an even greater problem as proprietary hardware and software from long vanished corporations becomes harder to find or engineer.

    As the Internet of Things rolls out and data becomes more critical to business operations, the need for compatible and readable formats will become even more important for companies and historical information may well become a valuable asset.

    With libraries, museums and government archives having digitised historic information, this issue of accessing data in superseded formats becomes even more pressing.

    It may be that important documents need to be kept on paper – although there’s still the problem of paper deteriorating  – to make sure the 21st Century doesn’t become the digital dark ages and our golden records remain unread.

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  • Building the next Internet of Things network

    Building the next Internet of Things network

    Earlier this week we looked at Cisco’s claim that Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks will handle much of the world’s mobile data traffic by the end of the decade.

    French company SIGFOX showed how investors are looking at the opportunity in these systems with a $115 million funding round two days ago.

    What’s particularly notable about SIGFOX’s investors is how many of them are telcos themselves with Spain’s Telefonica, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and South Korean SK Telecom being key shareholders.

    Along with the telcos, who SIGFOX hopes will help them expand their footprint outside Spain, France, the UK and the Netherlands, there’s also a collection of industrial companies including Air Liquide and infrastructure giant SDF Suez.

    That a diverse range of companies are moving into the LPWA market shows how important the stakes are for providers in securing a position in the the technologies that will define the Internet of Things as industries brace themselves for the massive rollout of connected devices.

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  • Connecting motor bikes to the IoT

    Connecting motor bikes to the IoT

    One of the obvious applications for smart devices is in motorbike helmets; an article in Intel’s Free Press website describes how they may work in a prototype setup on a BMW BMW R1200GS bike.

    The smart helmet, which uses an Intel Edison system, is different from current add on systems in that it directly communicates with the bike’s internal electronics giving a rider a deeper level of control.

    “If you need directions, say ‘take me home’ and it’ll queue up directions and give them over audio. But if there isn’t enough gas, then it will redirect you to a gas station first because it can read the bike’s remaining fuel range,” explains Moyerman. “It will also do smart navigation, so if a blind turn is approaching, it’ll give you warning to slow down.”

    Creating the prototype isn’t simple as each manufacturer has its own control language, a common problem in retrofitting Internet of Things functions onto devices not designed to connect to a network.

    “Putting together a system like that is much more complicated than plug and play. Every vehicle maker has its own data language, which means that there’s no universal standard to interpret the data. The team at Intel worked with BMW’s Bay Area group to translate a R1200GS adventure motorcycle’s own language from the CAN bus (controller area network) to Edison, which then sends it to the smartphone via Bluetooth.”

    The same challenge faces car manufacturers as well which increases the risks of vehicle owners being locked into a certain manufacturer’s ecosystem – for instance, buy a BMW and be locked into the Apple HomeKit system.

    Regardless of the compatibility problems, we’re increasingly going to see these technologies included with common household items. That many of them are voice activated should give those concerned about the privacy of Samsung smart TVs some pause for thought.

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