SiliconANGLE: Databases then and now: the rise of the digital twin

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When I first started in IT, back in the Mainframe Dark Ages, we had hulking big databases that ran on IBM’s Customer Information Control System, written in COBOL. These mainframes ran on a complex collection of hardware and operating systems that was owned lock, stock, and bus and tag barrel by IBM. The average age of the code was measured in decades, and code changes were measured in months. They contained millions of transactions, and the data was always out of date since it was a batch system, meaning every night new data would be uploaded.

Contrast that to today’s typical database setup. Data is current to the second, code is changed hourly, and the nature of what constitutes a transaction has changed significantly to something that is now called a “digital twin,” which I explain in my latest post for SiliconANGLE here.

Code is written in dozens of higher-level languages that have odd names that you may never have heard of, and this code runs on a combination of cloud and on-premises equipment that uses loads of microprocessors and open source products that can be purchased from hundreds of suppliers.

It really is remarkable, and that these changes have happened all within the span of a little more than 35 years. You can read more in my post.

 

 

The nasty world of malware keeps getting worse

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A couple of posts this week have crossed my virtual desk that shows the state of internet hacking continues to reach new depths. The first one is from Microsoft Research, the second is from a little-known security outfit called VulnCheck.

The Microsoft report found what it calls a multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle. Back in the day, we had man-in-the-middle and browser-in-the-middle exploits that involved ways to phish a target and then trick someone into giving up their account credentials. As we got better credentials, such as using multi-factor authentication (MFA), the crooks got more sophisticated at prying the additional factors out of us by putting up fake websites.

The new attacks take things to a more complicated level, and indeed, you need a diagram to show the various logic flows as a compromised email account is used to launch a new email campaign, which launches several new campaigns that target new organizations. All of them use what is called indirect proxies so the attackers can control the phishing pages you see, steal web session cookies, make changes to MFA methods, and other trickery. One thing that makes this attack harder to figure out is that unlike typical phishing attacks, no web traffic actually occurs between the target and the actual website that is being faked. The complete details are at the above link.

Russia cyber aggression fuels tensions with west | Financial TimesThe other post from VulnCheck describes research they uncovered recently. This attack impersonated security researchers by copying pictures of actual analysts and attaching them to fake names and social media accounts and GitHub projects, with each project claiming to have a zero-day attack as a lure. Try as they may, the VulnCheck folks would find and neutralize one fake GitHub account only to have it popup a few hours later. All of the claims are phony, and instead contained malware that the attackers try to download to their targets and further compromise things. All of the phonies had one thing in common — they all worked for the High Sierra Cyber Security company, which as you might guess, doesn’t exist. But give them props for all the effort involved in setting this up. If this sounds familiar, the same scenario was used during the Russia attempts on our 2016 election.

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.