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Exclusive Networks has joined forces with security leaders in calling on the industry to take global action in a bid to end the recruitment crisis in cybersecurity, which is currently faced with an estimated shortfall of 2.7 million professionals. The Paris-headquartered global cybersecurity specialist is one of the founding partners supporting an initiative launched today by investment and advisory firm NightDragon and Next Gen Cyber Talent, a non-profit cyber education provider, to raise $1 million to fund cybersecurity courses for students in the US from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds. Exclusive will be lending its experience and expertise to the campaign having recently established a partnership with California Polytechnic State University, opening an office on campus and currently sponsoring 12 students, 9 of which are already progressing through their security certification training assignments, delivered by Exclusive and its partners. All are expected to go on to full-time roles in the industry after completing their education. On the international front, Exclusive has partnered with Guardia in Europe to launch the first private cybersecurity academy in France where it will help in the development of course content as well as providing mentoring and internship opportunities for students. Exclusive has also recently become and advisory member of the Cyber Security Coalition in Belgium, a partnership between academia, public authorities and the private sector to share specialist expertise, knowledge and information in the fight against cybercrime. We speak with Jesper Trolle, CEO and Denis Ferrand-Ajchenbaum, Executive Board Member & SVP of Exclusive Networks to discuss the cybersecurity talent challenge and the company's involvement. Jesper is a vastly accomplished entrepreneurial channel business leader who joined Exclusive Networks as CEO in September 2020. Since starting out in his native Denmark building successful reseller and distribution businesses, Jesper has amassed almost three decades of executive experience and worked around the world at the head of multi-billion-dollar VAD organisations. He was President of the Americas for ECS Arrow prior to joining Exclusive and holds an MBA from the Henley Business School. Denis joined Exclusive with over 30 years of experience in enterprise IT including stints at value-added distributors, resellers, and vendors. As an Executive Board Member and SVP Global Business Development & Ecosystems, he is responsible for maximising the value and global penetration of existing vendor relationships while scouting and acquiring the next generation of Exclusive Networks’ trusted digital infrastructure portfolio. Denis is also tasked with driving the strategy for our transactional partners – global system integrators (GSIs) and worldwide reseller network – and non-transactional partners – VCs, educational institutions and international and national bodies. In addition, Denis spearheads the strategy and growth of our innovative subscription platform, X-OD. #cybersecurity #exclusivenetworks #skills #cyberawareness

Interview with Sam Liew, President, Singapore Computer Society; Managing Partner, Government Strategic Business Group, NCS Group.   Sam is Managing Partner, Government Strategic Business Group at NCS. He leads NCS' government portfolio, which includes Public Service, Defence and Homeland Security. In addition, Sam is also driving expansion efforts to propel NCS as the go-to digital catalyst for governments and smart cities across Asia Pacific.   Prior to NCS, Sam was the Managing Director of GIC. He was Director, Technology Group and also heads GIC's Business Partner and Solutions Division. Sam was responsible for delivering GIC’s Technology, Data Analytics, and Data Science projects and initiatives.   Before GIC, Sam was Managing Director at Accenture ASEAN Technology. He also led Accenture's Asia Pacific Communications Centre of Excellence, delivering business solutions across Asia. He was also a member of Accenture's Global Technology Leadership Council and ASEAN Geographical Leadership Council.   Sam currently serves as Board Director on the Gardens by the Bay Board. Sam also sits on the Board of Singapore Management University's (SMU) School of Computing and Information Systems and Singapore Polytechnic's School of Computing. In additional, he serves as Council Member on Enterprise Singapore's IT Standards Committee. He has been conferred a Fellow by SCS.   In this podcast, Sam gives an overview of the Singapore Computer Society, and the Tech Leader Awards 2022 (presented on 6th May 2022), the nation’s tech awards which celebrates the stalwarts of excellence and innovation within Singapore’s pulsating tech industry. He also shares some highlights of the Singapore 100 Women in Tech List, another major recognition program by the SCS.   With Singapore’s emergence from the pandemic, Sam gives his take on what it means for the digital transformation trends, and a glimpse into what we may expect for Tech Leader Awards 2023.   Recorded 12th May 2022 Singapore 7am.

Highlights from BlackHat Asia 2022 keynote   Interview with George Do, Chief Information Security Officer, Gojek and GoTo Financial.   George has been working in the cybersecurity field for over 25+ years concentrating on the building and operating cybersecurity programs. He specializes in the transformation of cybersecurity, winning customer trust, and ensuring a strong cybersecurity posture for organization.   George has extensive experience in maturing global cybersecurity programs and teams, including securing applications (products and services), securing core IT infrastructure and cloud workloads, and maintaining a robust incident response capability. George leads global teams in cybersecurity, data privacy, governance, risk, compliance (GRC), and implementation of security frameworks. Working closely stakeholders across functions, the global programs he developed has ensured security is baked into products and services at birth.   Before joining Gojek and GoTo Financial, George served as the global Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Equinix where he built the global cybersecurity program from inception. Previous to that he worked at Exodus (Savvis / Century Link), and Tivo in senior security leadership roles. He began his career at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) where he collaborated with senior federal officials to secure government information assets.   George serves on customer advisory boards for several cybersecurity firms and is an advisor for venture capital. He is a frequent speaker and panelist at cybersecurity industry events.   In this podcast, George shares highlights of his keynote at BlackHat Asia 2022, “Quantify Security Effectively – Moving the Security Needle From the Security Trenches to the Boardroom.”   Drawing on more than two decades of experience in the cybersecurity industry, he speaks on the value of risk quantification to gain board and senior management level buy-in to invest in cybersecurity areas that matter.   Explaining that organisation stakeholders may hold varying perceptions of what these areas, he introduces the concept of a Risk Register to prioritise the different cyber threats the organisation may face.    He also advises on applying a RACI (responsible, accountable, consultative, informed) model to address these cyber threats. Using ransomware as an illustration, he explains the importance to appoint a risk owner accountable for addressing the risk. Additionally, he stresses the importance for the board and senior management to empower the risk owner with the necessary resources.   George also notes that while there are successes at Gojek and GoTo Financial to ensure customer and partner trust and safety, online and cyber threats landscape is an on-going arms race where new threats are constantly emerging.   He wraps up the podcast by reminding the audience to avoid traps such as designing “solutions in search of problems” and adding to the technical debt by “compounding the security industrial complex”.   Recorded 13th May 2022 (BlackHat Asia 2022) Singapore 3pm.    

Oliver Tavakoli is Chief Technology Officer at Vectra. Oliver is a technologist who has alternated between working for large and small companies throughout his 25-year career. Oliver will be visiting Australia at the end of May and discussing how Ransomware will be coming to a cloud near you. Oliver points to this concept as a thought experiment on what to expect next. Ransomware and software supply chain attacks have dominated the cybersecurity news feeds and have certainly also captured the attention of mainstream media. While supply chain attacks have already shown a clear appreciation for target organisations’ cloud footprints and have leveraged that understanding to pull off some of the more impressive attacks, almost all ransomware attacks have continued to focus primarily on traditional on-premise IT estates. This is because tools to attack these environments (Metasploit, Cobalt Strike, Bloodhound, etc.) have been available for more than a decade and that many hackers have great familiarity with these tools and that there continue to be many organisations whose environments are insufficiently hardened to withstand an attack by a moderately skilled adversary. Two trends will drive ransomware to the cloud: 1. the inexorable movement of most data of value to the cloud (in this context, “cloud” is intended to cover both SaaS-delivered applications like Office 365 and public clouds like AWS and Azure) and 2. the gradual availability of tools (for example Rhino Security Labs Pacu) to attack clouds and hackers’ increased familiarity with them. This presentation will discuss what this combination of Ransomware and cloud is likely to look like. Prior to joining Vectra, Oliver spent more than seven years at Juniper as chief technical officer for the security business. Oliver joined Juniper as a result of its acquisition of Funk Software, where he was CTO and better known as developer #1 for Steel-Belted Radius. Prior to joining Funk Software, Oliver co-founded Trilogy Inc. and prior to that, he did stints at Novell, Fluent Machines and IBM. He is a technologist with experience managing larger (100+ member) teams, but with a bias towards leading small teams of smart technical individuals who want to change organisations through articulations of compelling visions, implementation of elegant architectures and building of highly collaborative technical communities. His specialties include networking architectures, systems software design, computer security principles, organisational design. Oliver received an MS in mathematics and a BA in mathematics and computer science from the University of Tennessee. Recorded via Singapore, Friday 20 May, 2022.

Interview with Charles Li, Chief Technology Officer, and the Chief Analyst at Team T5   Charles is the Chief Technology Officer, and the Chief Analyst at Team T5. He leads Team T5 analyst team in threat intelligence research. He has been studying cyber attacks and campaign tracking for more than 10 years. His research interests include vulnerability research, reverse engineering and APT attacks. He often publishes research and gives training courses at security conferences.   In this podcast, he shares some highlights of his team’s presentation at Black Hat Asia 2022. Focusing on the notorious Chinese threat actor groups (APT 10, APT 27, APT 41) he discussed key characteristics, such as how their motivations extend beyond espionage to monetisation, tools overlap, targets, and growing OpSec sophistication.   He also touches on the Chinese Cyber Threat landscape from the Taiwanese perspective, such as the information warfare campaigns. With shifting geopolitical landscapes increasing the frequency of cyberattacks on Taiwanese targets, he notes the Taiwanese responses in increasing cybersecurity regulations and investments.   He also shares how the Chinese government’s five-year plans and international relations shape its cyber operations – such as technical skills and tools exchange with other nation state actors, and exploitation of zero-days.   He advises cyber defenders to invest in tailored threat intelligence, to complement tools such as EDR or firewalls.   Recorded 11th May 2022 8am (Singapore Time/ Taiwanese Time).  

New Macquarie University research into phone scams has identified the scripts and emotions that drive most calls. A team of researchers from Macquarie University’s Cyber Security Hub has analysed the content of more than 100 hours of scam phone calls to identify clear call ‘stages’ and pinpoint the social engineering techniques scammers use on their victims. The team, headed by Professor Dali Kaafar, used machine-learning techniques and natural language processing to uncover scam ‘scripts’ that use various topics and emotions. These findings will help develop better ways to detect and prevent scams which account for the human element which is critical to scammers’ success. The team found that scripts used by scammers contain multiple paths, which can be simplified into four different stages: Stage 1 – Introduction The scammer establishes themselves as credible and in a position of authority, then talks about a serious threat to the recipient in a matter-of-fact way – with the threat supposedly from a higher authority (eg the legal system or tax office). Stage 2 – Assistance The scammer poses as a helpful instructor, using rapport-building conversations, ostensibly helping the recipient to resolve the supposed problem, giving step-by-step guidance to navigate to a website, install software or fill out online forms. Stage 3 – Threat Emotions can ramp up at this stage, as the scammer reinforces threats for non-compliance, citing police, court orders, arrest warrants, jail and other negative consequences, using legal sounding terms, talking over the victim to defer questions and introducing time pressure to prevent the victim thinking it through. Stage 4 – Payment / Close Once the scammer gets what they want – like a credit card payment or enticing the victim to download malicious software – the conversation becomes less organised, and scammers finish the call, sometimes promising to call back with confirmation. We spoke with Professor Dali Kaafar is Executive Director of the Cyber Security Hub in the School of Computing. Further reading: https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/may-2022/Tricks-used-by-phone-scammers-exposed-in-new-study

Dr. Khatuna Mshvidobadze is a Professorial Lecturer of Cybersecurity at the George Washington University and Adjunct Professor of Cyber Security at Champlain College. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Rondeli Foundation in Tbilisi, Georgia. Earlier, she developed and taught cyber security courses for M.S. and M.P.S. programs at Utica College.   She has been Deputy Director of the Information Center on NATO in Georgia and Adviser to the Office of the Minister of Defense of Georgia. Her articles have appeared in Georgian and in English, including in Defense News, Jane's Defense Weekly, US News & World Report, Jane's Foreign Report, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and more.    She has presented topics on cyber threats at different venues inside and outside of the country: The Office of the Secretary of Defense, US Department of Defense, FBI Headquarters and field offices, Department of Justice, Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Healthcare Sector Coordinating Council, Mitre Corporation, Raytheon BBN Technologies, NATO and EU events. She has also been a speaker at TEDx, DefCon and RSA conferences and more.   In this podcast, Dr. Khatuna Mshvidobadze traces the history of Russian information warfare doctrine, and its subset of cyber warfare, operating under an umbrella of “an integrated system of systems”.   Through examples such as the Russia-Georgia conflict of 2008 and Ukraine critical infrastructure disruptions of 2015/2016 – she elaborates how the doctrine evolved, from its foundation days in the 1970s, rooted in the military writings of Nikolai Ogarkov, then Chief of the Soviet General Staff, to today.   Laying out how the cyber troops units are structured under Russia’s military and intelligence organizations, the GRU (Military Intelligence Directorate), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Federal Security Service (FSB), she points out how they carried out the cyber intrusions, using such tactics as phishing and remote desktop protocols exploitations.   Besides state sponsored cyber-attacks, she also notes the wave of ransomware attacks launched by Russian criminal groups such as REvil and Ryuk during the Covid-19 pandemic.   Dr. Mshvidobadze highlighted how outsourcing is a key element in carrying out the attacks, where criminal groups work with Russian threat actor groups, and sometimes across national borders. One example is the information warfare campaigns prevalent during the current Russia-Ukraine conflict carried out by “GhostWriter”, which has alleged ties to Belarus, a Russian ally.   Referencing the recent supply chain attacks such as the SolarWinds and Kaseya incidents by Russian groups, she advises cyber defenders to step up defensive measures on critical infrastructure, re-assess supply chains, and build threat intelligence into cybersecurity frameworks.   Recorded with Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent, Wednesday 27th April 2022 1pm (Italy)/ 7pm (Singapore)

According to ISACA’s new survey report, State of Cybersecurity 2022: Global Update on Workforce Efforts, Resources and Cyberoperations, organisations are struggling more than ever with hiring and retaining qualified cybersecurity professionals and managing skills gaps. The eight annual survey features insights from more than 2,000 cybersecurity professionals around the globe, and examines cybersecurity staffing and skills, resources, cyberthreats and cybersecurity maturity. We speak with Jonathan Brandt and Jenai Marinkovic on behalf of ISACA for a report deep-dive discussion. A copy of the report is available here https://mysecuritymarketplace.com/rep... Jonathan Brandt, CISM, CDPSE, CCISO, CISSP, CySA+, CPI, PMP A senior information security practice manager in ISACA’s Knowledge and Research department. In this role, he contributes thought leadership by generating ideas and deliverables relevant to ISACA’s constituents. He serves ISACA® departments as a subject matter expert on information security projects and leads author management teams whenever external resources are necessary. Brandt is a highly accomplished US Navy veteran with more than 25 years of experience spanning multidisciplinary security, cyberoperations and technical workforce development. Prior to joining ISACA, Brandt was a project manager for classified critical infrastructure projects across the globe. Jenai Marinkovic, vCTO/CISO, Tiro Security; Technology & Information Security Consultant, Beyond; member, ISACA Emerging Trends Working Group Jenai Marinkovic is a multidisciplinary technologist and strategist with 20 years of experience in architecting, building and securing systems at scale. She has designed and operated in real-time over the top streaming ecosystems that power live sports, gaming, and entertainment. She’s also worked in biomedical manufacturing and laboratory diagnostics, healthcare tech and robotics in agriculture. Jenai’s worked with artificial intelligence, its impact on diversity and inclusion as well as improving human empathy towards machines. She has expertise in designing the next generation security experiences necessary to support digital transformation She has built and run design, architecture, innovation, engineering, security and operations teams. Her security expertise spans security architecture, engineering, defense, and forensics and invented a cyber defense framework for large scale breaches based on American football. Jenai has worked for large enterprise brands including DIRECTV, Electronic Arts, Beckman Coulter and international investigations firms such as Kroll. About ISACA For more than 50 years, ISACA® (www.isaca.org) has advanced the best talent, expertise and learning in technology. ISACA equips individuals with knowledge, credentials, education and community to progress their careers and transform their organisations, and enables enterprises to train and build quality teams. ISACA is a global professional association and learning organisation that leverages the expertise of its more than 150,000 members who work in information security, governance, assurance, risk and privacy to drive innovation through technology. It has a presence in 188 countries, including more than 220 chapters worldwide. In 2020, ISACA launched One In Tech, a philanthropic foundation that supports IT education and career pathways for under-resourced, under-represented populations. Twitter: www.twitter.com/ISACANews LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/isaca Facebook: www.facebook.com/ISACAGlobal Instagram: www.instagram.com/isacanews

Noname Security’s surge in adoption can be attributed to its proactive approach to API security throughout the full software development lifecycle. Unlike most solutions in the market today that rely solely on traffic analysis to pinpoint active attacks, Noname Security analyzes configuration, traffic and code to identify the broadest set of API vulnerabilities — including misconfigurations and design flaws. We speak with NoName's CISO, Karl Mattson, a cybersecurity leader and innovator with over 25 years’ experience leading innovative and diverse teams of technology and security professionals in financial services, retail and federal government. Previously, Karl served as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for PennyMac Financial Services and City National Bank. He has a track record of providing CEOs, CTO and investors in cybersecurity on strategies for product, market and customer success.  Recorded 13 April 2022 #APIsecurity #noname #cybersecurity #AppSec

We attended the opening of the Dragos office in Melbourne, Australia and met with CEO and Founder, Robert Lee. Robert Lee is a recognized pioneer in the industrial security incident response and threat intelligence community. He gained his start in security as a U.S. Air Force Cyber Warfare Operations Officer tasked to the National Security Agency where he built a first-of-its-kind mission identifying and analyzing national threats to industrial infrastructure. He went on to build the industrial community’s first dedicated monitoring and incident response class at the SANS Institute (ICS515) and the industry recognized cyber threat intelligence course (FOR578). Forbes named Robert to its 30 under 30 (2016) list as one of the “brightest entrepreneurs, breakout talents, and change agents” in Enterprise Technology. He is a business leader but also technical practitioner. Robert helped lead the investigation into the 2015 cyber attack on Ukraine’s power grid, he and his team at Dragos helped identify and analyze the CRASHOVERRIDE malware that attacked Ukraine’s grid in 2016 and the TRISIS malware deployed against an industrial safety system in the Middle East in 2017. Robert is routinely sought after for his advice and input into industrial threat detection and response. He has presented at major security conferences such as SANS, BlackHat, DefCon, and RSA and has testified to the Senate’s Energy and National Resources Committee. As a non-resident national security fellow at New America, Robert works to inform policy related to critical infrastructure cyber security and is regularly asked by various governments to brief to national level leaders. Recorded April 7, 2022 Video version available at https://youtu.be/i2H3YndP8gs For more information visit www.dragos.com #otcybersecurity #cybersecurity #dragos #ukraine #cyberattack #crashoverride

Organisations in A/NZ, and around the world, are grappling with the complexity of delivering highly distributed modern digital services, while managing the increased sophistication and volume of cyberattacks. F5’s new Distributed Cloud platform provides a set of easily deployed and managed application security and delivery services that allow organisations to apply consistent protection and policy across every application, regardless of architecture and location. Some research estimates 39 per cent of Australian enterprises have adopted multi-cloud technologies, while across the APAC region its estimated a whopping 93 per cent of companies are embracing a multi-cloud strategy – so the trajectory of multi-cloud adoption is, quite clearly, on the up. We speak with Jason Baden, Regional Vice President, Australia and New Zealand of F5. Based in Sydney, Jason has held this position for over four years, where he is responsible for driving F5’s local market and business growth, and positioning F5 as a strategic partner for both customers and channel partners. For more information on the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform visit https://www.f5.com/cloud/products/platform-overview #F5 #cloudcomputing #multicloud #hybridcloud #cybersecurity #botnets #paymentsystems #fraudprevention

Dr. Sarah Pearce is Director of the SKA-Low Telescope, soon to be built in Western Australia as part of the $2bn international SKA Observatory. Sarah worked at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, for 10 years in the fields of space and astronomy, and spent six months in early 2021 as CSIRO’s Acting Chief Scientist.   Her previous roles included senior science advisor in the UK Parliament and project manager of GridPP, the UK’s program delivering computing for particle physics. In 2020, Dr. Pearce was named Telstra NSW Business Woman of the Year and Executive of the Year at the Australian Space Awards. She is a strong advocate for diversity in science and technology.   Sarah holds a PhD in X-ray astronomy from the University of Leicester and an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Oxford (Worcester College).   In this podcast, Dr Pearce shares the latest development of the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) Observatory - an international ‘mega science’ radio-astronomy project. The SKAO Is an intergovernmental organisation – the second-ever in astronomy – that was officially launched in July 2021.   She highlights that SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope facility of its kind, underpinned by the latest technologies that can help address the exciting cutting-edge challenges in astronomy, including our understanding of the cosmic dawn – the time when the first stars and galaxies in the Universe were formed.   She elaborates on the international partnerships and collaborative efforts in the project. It involves 16 countries as well as engineering consortiums across the world, who are coming together to build the two SKA telescopes, being built in remote regions of South Africa and Australia.   She explains how the existing precursor radio telescopes in Australia – the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) with 36 antennas, and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia with more than 4,000 antennas – have contributed to planning for the SKA-Low telescope, the “low” frequency antenna array operating in the 50-350 Mhz band.    Comprising up to 130,000 antennas spreading across 65km of desert, Dr Pearce explains the telescope will be more sensitive, and able to capture images at higher resolution and faster than ever before.   Dr Pearce discusses the significance of the selection of the sites in Australia and South Africa – that the Southern hemisphere offers the best views of the Milky Way Galaxy and the remote locations of the telescopes locations ensure minimal radio interference (or “radio quiet”) at these sites. In fact, due to the amount of radio signals generated by human activities, sites visitations are very restricted.   With the data captured by the hundreds of thousands of SKA antennas expected to reach 8 terabytes per second, equivalent to more than 100,000 the average speed of home broadband, Dr Pearce points out how the “big data” aspect is also a challenge, in addition to the challenges involve in building the telescopes.   Dr Pearce rounds off the podcast by paying respects to the Wajarri Yamaji people, the traditional owners of the land on which the SKA-Low telescope will be built.         Recorded 16th March 2022 1.30pm Australia Western Time Zone/ Singapore Time   Recorded 16th March 2022 1.30pm Australia Western Time Zone/ Singapore Time

Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent speaks with Dr. Jiasun Li, Assistant Professor of Finance, George Mason University.  Jiasun received his Ph.D. in finance from UCLA Anderson School of Management and B.S. in mathematics from Fudan University (Shanghai, China) prior to joining George Mason.   His research interest covers FinTech (including blockchain and crowdfunding), as well as the theory of the firm, governance, and market microstructure.   Dr. Li is a winner of the Yihong Xia Best paper award and the Chicago Quantitative Alliance academic paper competition, along with many other paper prizes. He has also been voted by students as "Faculty of the Year" (one recipient per year from the entire faculty).   In this podcast, Dr. Li shares with the audience, how blockchains such as bitcoin interact with the field of game theory.   Dr. Li describes the challenges to achieving the basic premise of bitcoin and blockchain as distributed systems – that is, the ability to arrive at a general agreement (consensus) without a central authority when some participants may be rogue.   By referring to the Byzantine General’s Problem – a metaphor of this challenge – he highlights how communication between participants distributed across sites is a key feature.   He unpacks how this challenge is resolved in the bitcoin blockchain within the mining process. He also points out that the incentives to motivate participation in the process naturally involve game theory, which models situations where users strategize to optimize their own payoffs.   He also shares his research on mining pools, where like in lottery pools, miners pool their resources to optimize their risk-return tradeoffs. He explains how the strategic interactions between mining pools prevent over-concentration.    On how permissioned and permissionless blockchains compare regarding the applicability of game theory models, he relates to the concept of “repeated games”, and illustrates how repeated interactions may yield a different outcome to a single-shot game.   Drawing on the distinction between “honest” (blindly following protocols) and “rational” (optimizing one's self-interest), he shares on-going work (https://business.gmu.edu/news/2626-mapping-blockchain-s-frontiers/) on aligning incentives to obtain outcomes as prescribed by desired protocols. Another emerging piece of work studies the incentives involved in “slashing” dishonest participants' crypto assets.   Referring to other famous disruptive cyber incidents in the blockchain world – such as the DAO or the 2010 bitcoin overflow – he suggests that all events could be modeled by game theory models, with trade-offs between releasing codes quickly vs spending time and resources in robust audits.    However, he cautions while game theory is a useful modeling tool, the reality is complicated and it is often difficult to capture the entire spectrum of possible actions.   Recorded 11th May 2022 6pm U.S Eastern Time / 12th May 2022 SGT

Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent speaks with Al Geist, Corporate Research Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (“ ORNL” ). He is the chief technical officer of the Exascale Computing Project, as well as the CTO of the Leadership Computing Facility and chief scientist for the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at ORNL. He is helping lead the acquisition of the Frontier Exascale computer at ORNL. His recent research is on Exascale computing and resilience needs of the hardware and software. At ORNL, Geist has published two books and over 200 papers in areas ranging from heterogeneous distributed computing, numerical linear algebra, parallel computing, collaboration technologies, solar energy, materials science, biology, and solid state physics. Geist is one of the original developers of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), which became a worldwide de facto standard for heterogeneous distributed computing. He was also actively involved in the design of the Message Passing Interface (MPI-1 and MPI-2) standard. He was involved in the development of FT-MPI, a research prototype to explore how to make MPI applications fault tolerant. In this podcast, Al goes behind the scenes to give the audience a glimpse into Frontier, the first Exascale supercomputer in the USA. By referencing the highlights he presented at the Supercomputing Asia (28th Feb 2022 – 3rd March 2022, Singapore), he shares with the audience the challenges the team overcame to build Frontier. With the capabilities to perform billions of billions of floating point operations per second (“Exsacale”), Frontier joins Fugaku - the Japanese supercomputer currently ranked as the world’s fastest – in the list of high performance computers that have reached the Exascale milestone. Besides speed, Al also explains how reliability – ability to mitigate computation failures and errors - is crucial to supercomputers in delivering results that decision makers can rely on with confidence. Al also discusses the innovations in the cooling infrastructure to address the challenge of rising energy consumption that comes with increasing computation power. He also points to the impressive work in refitting the buildings that house Frontier – including rein-enforcing the 20,000 square feet of floor areas to withstand the weight of 8,000 pounds of supercomputer cabinets. With applications running on Frontier that are of high sensitivity including national security implications, he also touches on security considerations – such as controls over remote access as well as physical access, and data segregation. Looking ahead, Al shares how, by programming and coding smarter, supercomputers will continue to deliver the gains in computational speeds for a couple more generations to come, despite the slowdown in semiconductor advancements. Recorded 7th March 2022 6pm (US Eastern Time) / 8th March 2022 7am (Singapore).

The fourteenth issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines the rising tensions over the future of Taiwan, as China’s pursuit of “unification” pits it against the United States and US allies such as Australia. The Taiwan Choice looks at the growing risk of a catastrophic war and the outlook for Australia as it faces a strategic choice that could reshape its future in Asia. Published on 21 February, Issue 14 examines the rising tensions over the future of Taiwan and Hugh White discusses why war over Taiwan is the gravest danger Australia has faced. Hugh White AO is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University. His work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, and global strategic affairs especially as they influence Australia and the Asia-Pacific. Hugh has served as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, as a senior adviser on the staffs of Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and as a senior official in the Department of Defence, where from 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence, and as the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper. His major publications include Power Shift: Australia’s future between Washington and Beijing, [2010], The China Choice: Why America should share power, [2012], Without America: Australia’s future in the New Asia [2017], and How to defend Australia [2019] For a copy visit https://www.australianforeignaffairs.com/essay/2022/02/the-taiwan-choice Discount Code for your copy of the Australian Foreign Affairs - 14th Ed - AFA3OFF  #taiwan #china #uschina #indopacific #asia #quad #anu #hughwhite

Western governments have issued warnings for organisations to protect their systems against possible Russian cyber attacks. The threat potentially impacts all tiers of governments, all organisations and individuals. So what form will the Russian Cyber attacks take, there are a number of options: - Denial of Service attacks - is a cyber-attack in which the attacker seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable by flooding the site with data; - Web-site Defacement – hacking web pages and replacing with an alternative web page usually with a political message; - Ransomware – infecting organisations with malware that spreads across the system and locks down the system until a ransom (usually in bitcoin is paid); - Hacking – stealing information that is either publicly disclosed or sold via the darknet. The attacks may be undertaken either by parts of the Russian Government, APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) hacking groups acting on behalf of the Russian government or by patriotic hacking groups / militia (as in the 2007 cyber attacks on Estonia). The Australian - Lithuanian Cyber Research Network, a joint initiative of RMIT University and Mykolas Romeris University, was launched in early February 2022, by His Excellency Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs who stated that this trip to the Asia Pacific region, which included Singapore and Australia was about “strengthening old friendships and building new ones. Political dialogue, enhanced economic cooperation, and regional security are main subjects for conversations during upcoming busy days!” The network is the first of its kind globally and provides a platform for Australia and Lithuania to cooperate on common cyber security issues that affect both the Asia Pacific and Europe. We speak with the Director of RMIT’s Centre for Cyber Security Research & Innovation and co-convenor of the Australian-Lithuanian Cyber Research Network, Professor Matthew Warren who said at the launch, “the network provides a platform for the two countries to undertake jointly important cyber security research. Professor Warren went on to say “The first initiative of the network will be the Australian – Lithuanian Hybrid Threat Observatory. Hybrid threats are state and non-state actors that are challenging countries and institutions they see as a threat, opponent or competitor to their interests and goals with a focus on disputing industry and society”.  #cyberwar #russia #ukraine #russiaukrainewar #cyberattack #RMIT #Lithuania #infowar #informationwarfare #cybersecurity

As Russia commences military operations in Ukraine, we speak with Associate Professor Alexey Muraviev, National Security & Strategic Studies from Curtin University in Perth. Dr Muraviev discusses why Russia feels “so confident” with its Ukraine deliberations, given its new partnership arrangements with China, and why China “must walk a fine line”: “Perhaps the most powerful draw card in Putin’s back pocket is China. While Russia and China have been growing closer in recent years, a summit between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the start of the Olympics sent alarm bells ringing in Western countries”. Alexey research interests focus on problems of maritime security (modern naval power, maritime terrorism), Russia’s strategic and defence policy and military modernisation, Russia as a Pacific power, alliances in the Asia-Pacific, regional balance of power, Australian national security and defence, contemporary terrorism, future wars, and other. Recorded 4:00pm AEDT, Thursday 24 February 2022. To watch the MySec.TV version visit https://mysecuritymarketplace.com/av-media/chinas-support-for-russia-how-far-does-it-go/ Further reading https://theconversation.com/why-vladimir-putin-is-so-confident-in-his-ukraine-strategy-he-has-a-trump-card-in-china-177534  #mysecuritytv #russiaukraine #war #china #aukus #quad #india

The Australian Department of Home Affairs is in the process of overhauling Australia's electronic surveillance framework.  We speak with Dr William Stoltz following a public submission authored by Dr. Dominique Dalla-Pozza of the ANU College of Law and Dr. William A. Stoltz of the ANU National Security College and informed by an ANU CoL-NSC Joint Dialogue held in December 2021 during which a number of scholars from across the ANU. To read the submission visit https://law.anu.edu.au/sites/all/files/public_submission_-_electronic_surveillance_reform_-_anu_college_of_law_and_national_security_college_11.02.22.pdf This follows our interview with Dr Nick Tate, President of the Australian Computer Society - available here https://youtu.be/t_QDUhWoVYA  

We speak with Dr Nick Tate, President of the Australian Computer Society (ACS). Nick is also President of the South-East Asia Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC) and an Adjunct Professor of IT and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. The ACS has recommended the Australian Government change the way electronic surveillance is performed by the nation’s law enforcement agencies. In a written response to the Department of Home Affairs’ Reform of Australia’s electronic surveillance framework Discussion Paper last week, ACS called on the government to stop ‘deputising’ IT professionals and technology companies. This follows ACS’ objection to the 2018 Assistance and Access Bill requiring Australian IT companies and professionals to secretly assist in cracking electronic protections when called upon to do so by agencies. To read more visit https://australiansecuritymagazine.com.au/call-out-to-stop-deputising-tech-companies/ To view the MySec.TV version visit https://mysecuritymarketplace.com/av-media/call-out-to-stop-deputising-tech-companies/

Interview with Dr Gay Jane P. Perez, Deputy Director General for Space Science and Technology (DDG-SST), Republic of the Philippines - Office of the President - Philippine Space Agency. Dr. Perez serves as the Deputy Director General for Space Science and Technology (DDG-SST) at the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA). She is also a Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Meteorology of the University of the Philippines Diliman. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (2010-2011). She is a graduate of the National Institute of Physics at the University of the Philippines Diliman, from which she received Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics (2003), Master of Science (2005), and Doctor of Philosophy in Physics (2009). Dr. Perez has led various programs on satellite development in the Philippines as well as other projects that utilized satellite and remotely sensed data for environmental applications and climate studies. Dr. Perez is a recipient of The Outstanding Women in the Nation's Service (TOWNS) Award (2019) and is the first Filipino woman to receive the ASEAN-US Science Prize for Women (2018). Her research interests include Earth observation satellite product development, drought monitoring and forecasting, forest change detection, land cover/land use change, other satellite remote sensing applications for the environment, seasonal and climate prediction, climate change and variability, complex systems, and interdisciplinary applications of Physics. In this podcast, Dr Perez shared the latest developments at the Philippine Space Agency, and some of the highlights she presented at GSTC 2022 (Global Science and Technology Conference 2022).  She touched on the efforts to build the downstream Space Technology infrastructure, including the challenges to ingest the immense volume of data gathered from satellites, and turned them into meaningful insights in applications ranging from hazard management to drought management. Dr Perez also gave the listeners a glimpse into the evolution of the Philippine upstream activities, including the launch of the first Philippine satellite Diwata 1 in 2016, to today’s development of CubeSat(s) for research. Wrapping up the podcast, Dr Perez pointed to the importance of capacity building and international partnerships, echoing the words of many in this fast growing sector: “if you want to run fast, do it alone; if you want to run far, we need to do it together.” Recorded 10th February 2022, Singapore/Philippines Standard Time 11am.  Interview as part of the ASITII International Space Bridge Series 2022 - Register interest at www.asitti.space