SiliconANGLE: News from Google and Amazon cloud announcements this week

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I posted two stories on SiliconANGLE about lots of news coming from new security services on Google Cloud and similar news from AWS. Both are showing that we are at watershed events — AWS is making architectural changes and adding new depth with programming languages such as Cedar.  Google is finally building some solid tools into its Chronicle platform that has been available for four or so years now. Both are also paying attention to LLMs/Generative AI methods to provide threat intelligence.

Both vendors are trying to consolidate their services with their channel partners large and small.

Solving the last mile of package delivery

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You no doubt have had a package stolen from your front porch or know someone who has experienced this. And thanks to Covid, we are all using delivery services more often, which just increases the market size for porch pirates, as they are called.

The pirates are getting some pushback thanks to tech. First came the video-streaming door cameras (like Ring, now part of Amazon) that could capture them and report them to authorities. That made a small dent in their operations. But a better solution is happening in Singapore.

If you live there, for the last several years you can have your packages delivered to one of now 1,000 public lockers that are all over the island. If you have ever used the lockers that Amazon has at Whole Foods or one of its other storefronts, you get the idea. It is a wall of lockers of various sizes with a computer controlling access. Once you authenticate yourself, a door opens and the package is revealed. The lockers are built and operated by Pick Network and are called the Locker Alliance Network (which sounds vaguely Terminator-ish but let’s move on). You choose the locker installation nearest to your home or office or wherever you happen to be, and the delivery company will get the package there. On the company’s website, you can locate the nearest locker and you can see by the map how dense they are spread around the country.

To give you some sense of scale, Singapore is a very densely settled area about half the size of Rhode Island but with five times its population. I spoke at a conference there back in 1998, and was amazed at its diversity of languages and culture: fortunately for me, almost everyone these days is educated in English. It is very modern and apart from the signs in Chinese characters, you could have been in any major downtown city. Back then their freeways had one of the first open road toll collectors (meaning no booths that were designed for variable congestion pricing and no slowing down), something that took a while to show up elsewhere in the world.

It isn’t completely one humongous city like Hong Kong, but the density it does have makes something like the locker network functional. Pick claims lockers are within walking distance for most people. You can also drop off packages at the lockers, again like what we can do at Whole Foods.

Having a “last mile” solution is significant in that it has other benefits: there are fewer delivery vans tying up the roads, and less carbon consumption too. BTW, don’t you hate that term? How else should we refer to the contact with customers — maybe “first mile!” You get my point. And it is an open network, meaning (unlike Amazon), any delivery company can integrate with their own systems.

According to this article in the local newspaper, usage was initially slow but seems to have caught on, at least given by the increasing size of the locker network. It helps that Pick is federally funded. The delivery companies saw major increases in their own productivity, the story reported, although not clear how this was calculated.

In the meantime, watch out for those porch pirates on your own deliveries.

SiliconANGLE: There’s a lot of enterprise-grade secure browsers out there, but are they ready for prime time?

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The quick answer, in my piece for SiliconANGLE, is no, not quite yet. Certainly IT managers want to secure their entire collection of web browsers across an enterprise. This has been a sleeper product category for many years, but it’s now heating up thanks to better management tools and an increasing awareness of threats such as phishing and email compromises.

 

SiliconANGLE: Cloud conundrum: The changing balance of microservices and monolithic applications

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The cloud computing debate isn’t just about migrating to the cloud, but how the cloud app is constructed. Today’s landscape has gotten a lot more complicated, with virtual machines, cloud computing, microservices and containers. The modern developer has almost too many choices and has to balance the various tradeoffs among those architectures. I examine how to pick the right mix of cloud apps from a variety of tech, what I call the cloud conundrum in my latest analysis for SiliconANGLE.

 

Book review: Breaking Backbones Book 2 by Deb Radcliff

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I have known Deb Radcliff as a B2B journalist colleague and now cyber fiction author for more than a decade. Her latest novel in the “Breaking Backbones” series can be read independent of the first volume, and is a sizzler taken directly from today’s cybersecurity news. We have mostly the same motley cast of characters of hackers, ne’er-do-wells, and tough dudes who are trying to mess up the world now that its central IT authority GlobeCom was taken down at the end of the first book. The various hacker clans are trying desperately to free a bunch of imprisoned programmers somewhere in Russia and stop the evil doers from unleashing their AI-based code on the world. In the meantime, there are plenty of drone attacks to manage, code to review, and personal scores to be settled. There is plenty of dystopia to be served up in its pages, and a great deal of verisimilitude thanks to Radcliff’s familiarity with the subject matter. Will her world be successful at freeing its digital enslavement from a crazy autocrat? Well, I won’t give away the ending, but it sure was fun reading about it.

SiliconANGLE: Fixing 25 years of email insecurity

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I have been writing about email security for nearly 25 years (or more, depending on how you count things). Back in 1998, when Marshall Rose and I wrote our landmark book “Internet Messaging,” we said that the state of secure Internet email standards and products is best described as a sucking chest wound.” We had the publisher print a blank page in the book to signify how bad email security was. Well, perhaps we are still the walking wounded, although at least today we have better tools.

Most recently, I wrote a piece for SilconANGLE entitled, Fixing email security: It’s still a rocky road ahead. It begins:

The foundational protocols for making email more secure and less of a threat have been in place for almost a decade, yet they remain mostly unused, poorly implemented and largely ineffective. A recent report from Sendlayer shows just how much of a problem that is.

Book review: Visual Threat Intelligence by Thomas Roccia

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Thomas Roccia has written an interesting book called Visual Threat Intelligence that is both unusual and informative for security researchers of all experience levels. He is a Senior Security Researcher at Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence group, and the founder and curator of Unprotect.it, a database of malware evasion techniques.

Think of it as both a reference guide as well as a collection of carefully curated tools that can help infosec researchers get smarter about understanding potential threats (such as YARA, Sigma, and log analyzers) and the ways in which criminals use them to penetrate your networks.

For threat intel beginners, he describes the processes involved in breach investigation, how you gather information and vet it, and weigh various competing hypotheses to come up with what actually happened across your computing infrastructure. He then builds on these basics with lots of useful and practical methods, tools, and techniques.

One chapter goes into detail about the more notorious hacks of the past, including Stuxnet, the 2014 Sony hack, and WannaCry. There are timelines of what happened when, graphical representations of how the attack happened (such as the overview of the Shamoon atttack shown here), mapping the attack to the diamond model (focusing on adversaries, infrastructure, capabilities, and victims) and a summary of the MITRE ATT&CK tactics. That is a lot of specific information that is presented in a easily readable manner. I have been writing about cybersecurity for many years and haven’t seen such a cogent collection in one place of these more infamous attacks.

Roccia also does a deeper dive into his own investigation of NotPetya for two weeks during the summer of 2017. “It was the first time in my career that I fully realized the wide-ranging impact of a cyberattack — not only on data but also on people,” he wrote.

The book’s appendix contains a long annotated list of various open source tools useful for threat intel analysts. I highly recommend the book if you are interested in learning more about the subject and are looking for a very practical guide that you can use in your own investigations.