Up Times • July 2023

Business Continuity Mixtape – Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:

Bryley’s building was a town-of-Clinton fallout shelter — And like Bryley’s building, the internet is a repurposed Cold War relic. In the ’60s US military leaders … were concerned that a preemp­tive nuclear attack by the Soviets on U.S. telecommunications hubs could disrupt the chain of command — and that their own counterstrike orders might never make it from their command bunkers to their in­tended recipients in the missile silos of North Dakota. The idea data scientists invented was the transmission of packets of data on redundant, connected routers, which was both brilliantly stable and a vulnerability for the kinds of attacks we continue to experience … [4 min. read] delanceyplace.com

Why can’t we be friends? — A good argument about the value of human-machine cooperation from a blog post by Volvo Autonomous CTO Luca Delgrossi: experience shows that for tasks that are repetitive and well-defined – like calculating square roots or playing chess — robots are an excellent choice. But can driving be categorized as repetitive or well-defined most of the time? Just imagine approaching a roundabout in a thunderstorm flanked by cyclists. It’s in complex situations like these that human experience and intuition are likely of greater value. Because these situations require contextual awareness, operational judgment, creativity, and foresight to avoid an emergency. Characteristics autonomous machines currently lack when compared to humans … [5 min. read] https://www.volvoautonomoussolutions.com/

Now! A brand-new legacy system! — Security experts want legacy machines and software replaced: these systems your business may depend on can also bring you a multitude of no-longer-patched vulnerabilities. And who wants that? The problem is, our new applications and machines are also likely to have next year’s vulnerabilities, because too often, reports McKinsey, we still fail to adequately document the code we’re creating. Bryley President Garin Livingstone has insisted in Bryley’s own work that we document with a view that the guy who inherits the project can see what’s what … [6 min. read] darkreading.com

Well, what do you know — Billions of phishing emails are sent every day – so you’re likely somewhat familiar with these attempts to trick recipients into responding to criminals’ emails. And the more you know, the better off you are to defend yourself and your organization. So try this 10-question phishing quiz (with answers) from the Wall Street Journal … [7 min. quiz] wsj.com

That all you got, AI? — First Microsoft then Google and a raft of others have jumped on the AI Large Language Model (LLM [ChatGPT and Google Bard are LLMs]) cybersecurity bandwagon. But there is reason to be hesitant about rushing to entrust the security of your data before these things have been vetted, and before we understand a truly useful way to integrate them. Because for one, LLMs have been shown to regularly return false results. And for another, the most popular open source LLM is already hacked … [5 min. read] infosecurity-magazine.com

^{Note: The Mixtape section is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}