Up Times
A gabion fence used in landscaping. Gabions are made of thin wires that on their own couldn’t hold back stones. But woven together the little wires do the job well. Imagine cybersecurity similarly, individual tools (like Endpoint Detection and Response, Principle of Least Privilege and Firewalls) that taken together make a rock wall or its cybersecurity equivalent.
Yes, and … – One way to look at layered security is how it represents the inventors behind the variety of approaches.
For example the first antivirus program dates from the exploratory origins of networking itself. It was the work of MIT grad Ray Tomlinson. After earning his Master’s, Tomlinson worked at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge. In 1970 the BBN team released the TENEX operating system for Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-10 mainframes.
Shortly after delivering TENEX, one of Tomlinson’s co-workers Bob Thomas wrote the first computer worm to determine the possibility of developing a program that could spread between computers.1 It made the twenty-eight connected PDP-10s unpredictably display the message, “I’m the Creeper, catch me if you can.”
The Creeper worm actually caused more of a problem than expected – it seemed to just move around erratically. So the Creeper had to be stopped. Ray Tomlinson took up the challenge and coded the antivirus program Reaper to quash the Creeper.
In 2014 (two years before his death) Tomlinson wrote about those days at BBN, what I miss most is the uniqueness of that time and being on the frontier – doing things that no one else could do or wanted to do.2
Fifty years later we may be in a different age. But the stories behind the people behind the tech are still as compelling. Or in the words of my teacher David Rattner, there’s as much drama at noon as at twilight – you just have to look for it. And by paying attention to the various ways people build things and problem-solve you can end up with better and more secure tech.
Andrew has become Bryley’s in-house resource on XDR (Extended Detection and Response) – a powerful tech that uses machine learning to watch over network behavior and can alert – and even fix – problems it finds.
Andrew Promoted to Senior Field Engineer
We were able to rely on Andrew – soup-to-nuts – to create a procedure and install XDR for Bryley’s clients
–COO Anna Darlagiannis-Livingstone
Andrew has been named Senior Field Engineer. Andrew has embraced the role – he’s known here for always being hungry to learn something new. And even when the work is remote, being in the field can be equated to always something new: every day is different when supporting the breadth of Bryley clients – with their various networks, software and processes.
Prior to his time at Bryley, Andrew worked an IT help desk at a Westborough medical software developer. And before that he provided IT support at a video game developer. In 2020 he received a BS in Computer Science (3.94 GPA) from UMass Lowell.
Andrew has brought his Computer Science training to bear in his proficiency in scripting the past two-and-a-half years he’s been at Bryley. It makes Bryley more efficient for clients when he scripts an antivirus deployment, for example. Or as Anna said, there are just certain things you can’t readily see on a computer, like if it has an encryption license. We could look up a service ticket to see if a device is running with encryption. Andrew wrote a script that tells us immediately, giving us the information we need to know how to support the machine … [4 min. read] Continue Reading >
Celebratory cupcakes
Glad for this Holiday Tradition
Not sure how it got started, but Bryley’s annual delivery to Celltreat Scientific Products has been a highlight for the Client Services and Tech Teams. It’s a token of appreciation for Bryley’s ongoing partnership with Celltreat. The cupcakes are a small reminder of the importance of our work together … [2 min. read] Continue Reading >
Here’s a protected pup, as an analogy for thinking about the safety of customers. Like, per the FTC, Amazon’s Alexa’s default settings that retained users’ (including children’s) voice recordings indefinitely.
On being a customer
The FTC has produced a blog post showing AI-related events that have caused harm to clients/end-users. Some of these the FTC has addressed with lawsuits – too late for the people harmed by inadequately considered uses of tech.
As firms think about their own approach to developing, deploying, and maintaining AI-based systems, they should be considering the risks to consumers that each of them carry in the here-and-now, and take steps to proactively protect the public before their tools become a future FTC case study … [4 min. read] ftc.gov
Can you do that?
The Biden White House is trying to complete a Cyber Trust label for internet-connected, consumer products, like on doorbells and fitness trackers. They say it’s akin to an Energy Star label on a refrigerator.
And it’s intended to reward manufacturers who follow the National Institute for Standards and Technology’s advised practices for security. Achieving the mark may require strong device passwords and the device’s ongoing vulnerability patching. The standards are still be ironed out.
There is a danger from the consumer perspective to rely on the shorthand of such a symbol. A Cyber Trust tag could give people false confidence. Like, ‘someone else has done the research, this must be good to go’ – while we’re not sure how well these devices will be vetted … [4 min. read] insurancejournal.com
A dachshund on a pet-monitoring camera (an IoT [Internet of Things] device)
You know what would be really helpful for IoT devices?
Sarah noticed her smart thermostat adjusting itself unexpectedly. Initially dismissing it as a glitch, she became concerned when the lights began flickering and the front door mysteriously unlocked …
Sai Sujitha Venkatesan of Bryley partner Dell has some suggestions to keep Internet of Things (IoT) devices (i.e. smart devices) more secure, including:
- Change default passwords to strong, unique passwords
- Use MFA (multifactor authentication) if the device permits
- Create a dedicated network for your smart devices, often called by router manufacturers a “Guest Network”
- Download and use the latest firmware and software updates to keep protected from new threats
- Disable unused services, like voice commands, to minimize entry points a criminal could exploit
[5 min. read] sans.org
We’re going to have to answer these questions
Dr John Kim and Dr Pascal Wallisch addressed a November NYU roundtable about meaning and generative AI. This tool, Dr Wallisch argues, is as world-changing as the Manhattan Project. And this time, it’s not in the hands of the government, but of profit-driven corporations. So where does that leave us?
Dr Kim: What does it mean to be human? And what is reality? … one way or another we’re going to have to answer these questions. We’re going to have to refer to some deeper principles. It can’t just be the free market will decide. It can’t just be those people over there we designate it to, these experts over there. This is affecting all of us, and so we all have to somehow participate in this conversation and infuse these spaces … [for example] it could be a professor that is talking about this stuff … and [a] student becomes a lead engineer at a place like Anthropic [Google-/Amazon-funded AI] or OpenAI … [who will] carry some of that DNA about what it means to be human, what is reality, into that conversation and does so in a way that actually takes into account human flourishing … [1 hour watch] youtube.com
Here’s my family doing its part to train the dataset (not really — these kids are AI-generated). So I uploaded this stock image to the Google program through theyseeyourphotos.com and Google’s engine said among other things: The children’s age and appearance indicates a malleable, vulnerable demographic easily targeted with products through their parents, furthering our market reach.
What are we doing?
Where do you store your photos and who can access them? Google is the target of a competing product’s exposé that’s worth testing out for yourself – to get a sense of how much tech companies have on you. (Apple, if you’re curious, also has access to your photos in iCloud, unless you turn on Advanced Data Protection.)
Ente launched theyseeyourphotos.com, a website and marketing stunt designed to turn Google’s technology against itself. People can upload any photo to the website, which is then sent to a Google Cloud computer vision program that writes a startlingly thorough three-paragraph description of it. (Ente prompts the AI model to document small details in the uploaded images.) [4 min. read] wired.com
Note: The section directly above 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.
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