Booz Allen named NVIDIA Partner Network Consulting Partner of 2018

Press release

SAN JOSE, CA–March 19, 2019–Artificial Intelligence (AI) has wide-ranging applications across government and is increasingly seen as a strategic priority for federal agencies. Booz Allen Hamilton—a leading provider of machine learning services to the U.S. Federal Government—helps organizations design and implement strategic and ethical uses of AI. Today, Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH) was recognized with the Americas 2018 NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) Consulting Partner of the Year Award. For the second year in a row, Booz Allen Hamilton was presented with this award at the NPN Reception and Awards Ceremony held during the 2019 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

The NVIDIA Partner Network honored Booz Allen Hamilton for continuing to grow awareness around graphics processing unit (GPU) in the artificial intelligence (AI) market through their leadership, co-marketing, and key strategic wins.

“We are quickly moving from artificial intelligence breakthroughs to AI implementations that are accelerating the adoption of this critical technology across the private sector, Federal Government, and at the tactical edge,” said Dr. Josh Sullivan, a Booz Allen senior vice president and leader of the firm’s analytics and AI practice. “Our work with NVIDIA empowers clients to tackle data analysis at a scale out of reach for traditional computing solutions. In turn, new insights are driving operational efficiencies and other real results for our clients, delivering the long-promised benefits of AI today.”

“There has been no technology transformation which offers as much value to the Federal Government as AI,” said Anthony Robbins, vice president, North America Public Sector at NVIDIA. “Partners like Booz Allen Hamilton, who have been serving this market for more than 100 years, are critical to both the adoption and implementation of AI.”

The NVIDIA Partner Network hosts an annual awards ceremony during GTC in Silicon Valley honoring its top North American partners that have shown growth in their GPU business through their leadership and investments they have made throughout the year.

To learn more about Booz Allen’s work in artificial intelligence, visit BoozAllen.com/AI.

KnowBe4 Acquires CLTRe; Shines Spotlight on Security Culture Measurement

Press Release

Acquisition further demonstrates importance of managing the human risk and cements KnowBe4’s presence in Europe

KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training (SAT) and simulated phishing platform, today announced the acquisition of CLTRe —pronounced “Culture”— a Norwegian company focused on helping organizations assess, build, maintain and measure a strong security posture. CLTRe will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of KnowBe4, and service customers globally. CLTRe’s Toolkit and Security Culture Framework will be available to all KnowBe4 customers later this year.

According to The 2018 Cybersecurity Culture Report, 95 percent of organizations see a gap between their current and desired organizational cybersecurity culture. With 94 percent of malware being delivered via email (2019 DBIR), it’s clear that working with users to minimize cyber risk and improve security culture is key.

The 2018 Security Culture Report shows the value of being able to measure culture, helping organizations to demonstrate the effectiveness of their organizational security controls, as required by GDPR, CCPA and other regulations. Interestingly, the finance industry demonstrated an overall healthy improvement in culture from 2017 while the real estate industry showed a decline.

CLTRe created the CLTRe Toolkit and the Security Culture Framework, which work in tandem to help organizations gather evidence about their current security culture and how it changes over time. The acquisition of CLTRe is advantageous for both KnowBe4 and CLTRe clients; KnowBe4 users will gain access to a research-driven measurement platform to show how their security culture program matures over time. And CLTRe clients will be introduced to the industry’s most progressive and easiest-to-use SAT and simulated phishing platform to help educate users and change their behavior.

CLTRe measures the seven dimensions of security culture: behavior, responsibilities, cognition, norms, compliance, communication and attitudes.

PwC and CyLon launch Scale | Cyber programme

Press Release

PwC is collaborating with CyLon to launch its first Scale | Cyber programme to support high potential scale-up businesses focused on building a more secure and innovative digital economy.

Eight of the brightest international scale-ups disrupting the cyber security industry have been identified to undertake the 10-week programme, helping them to raise their profiles, identify commercial opportunities and prepare for growth. The programme, taking place in London, will introduce the companies to potential customers, decision makers, and thought leaders in their field who could advise, mentor, or partner with their business.

Participants in the programme will undertake a business development curriculum and receive advice from entrepreneurs and experts on topics such as leadership, operational growth, investor readiness, sales and marketing, as well as how boards view and strategise around cyber security.

The programme will culminate in an Executive Evening, the programme’s corporate pitching event, where the cohort will present to PwC and CyLon’s network of senior executives, industry thought leaders and decision makers.

Since launching in 2017, PwC’s Scale programmes have supported over 240 scale-ups to grow through various sector/regional focused groups. These programmes presented opportunities for scale-ups to connect with over 2000 corporate executives to enable over 3000 introductions.

Richard Horne, cyber security partner at PwC, said:

“Cyber security risk continues to rank highly amongst CEOs’ top threats to their organisation. We need innovative new businesses like our cohort to help tackle the latest cyber threats and build a more secure digital society.

“This programme will support these high growth scale-ups on their journey and help generate mutually beneficial commercial opportunities and relationships with established organisations.”

Grace Cassy, co-founder of CyLon, added:

“CyLon's experience supporting the growth of over 80 international cyber security companies gives us unique insights into what makes a successful cyber business. We will draw on this experience and our unique combination of security, investment and business expertise to provide support and guidance to the Scale | Cyber companies, alongside some outstanding CyLon mentors. We are excited to collaborate with PwC as we continue to support cyber talent and innovation driving the global digital economy."

The first Scale | Cyber cohort of businesses are:

• Applied Blockchain builds blockchain applications that work cross-chain to manage supply chains and product life cycles of high value goods;
• Censornet consolidates critical security services within a single cloud platform;
• Cloud Conformity provides a consolidated view of all AWS infrastructure and associated compliance level, making it easier to identify issues/risks as they occur via a threat monitoring dashboard;
• Dispel gives teams simple, rapid, secure remote access to industrial control systems, sensitive datasets, or vulnerable legacy assets;
• EverCompliant is a cyber intelligence tool that stops transaction laundering by mining numerous data sources and cross referencing them across millions of data points to allow organisations to understand the legitimacy of companies they are engaging with;
• Hazy is a data synthesisation tool to help companies unlock data innovation and improve fraud detection and risk models;
• Oneclick is a cloud platform with all the necessary components for application provisioning, including extensive security measures. Applications and data can be delivered to any device, at any time, to the right location and in the right format via encrypted streaming;
• Semperis delivers identity-driven cyber resilience for the keys to the kingdom - Active Directory. Organisations leverage Semperis to improve visibility into their hybrid identity environment, instantly roll back unwanted changes, and fully automate the forest recovery process.

https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/scale-cyber-first-cohort.html

Robert Herjavec Named Trailblazing Cybersecurity Executive of the Year at the 2019 Cyber Defense InfoSec Awards

Press release

March 4, 2019

Robert Herjavec, Founder & CEO of Herjavec Group, has been named the “Trailblazing Cybersecurity Executive of the Year” at the 2019 Cyber Defense InfoSec Awards.

This is a new award category for which the recipient must have demonstrated their excellence as a visionary and trailblazer over a sustained period of time. The criteria includes the following:

• A record of outstanding effectiveness at stopping breaches and choosing the right tools and technologies to continue to defeat threats. 
• The ability to inspire others - to share, promote and drive the vision of one or more market sectors of cybersecurity. 
• The ability to predict and therefore defend against new types of cyber threats.

“As one of the trailblazing cybersecurity executives, Robert Herjavec is the first market leader to drive MSSPs in the direction of Identity and Access Management (IAM) before all others. He had the vision and foresight to realize that most breaches are shifting to the cloud because of too many unmanaged cloud-based services, poor and understaffed IT management and shadow IT. For this and other leadership activities Mr. Herjavec has undertaken in the field of cybersecurity, we believe he deserves this award as the Trailblazing Cybersecurity Executive of the Year for 2019,” says Gary S. Miliefsky, Publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine.

Robert founded Herjavec Group in 2003 and since then, his ability to interpret industry trends and understand enterprise business security demands has helped him achieve the profile of a global cybersecurity expert. Today, Herjavec Group is a global leader in cybersecurity. Robert has served as a Cybersecurity Advisor for the Government of Canada, participated in the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and is a member of the US Chamber of Commerce Task Force for Cybersecurity. His views on the threat landscape, on emerging technologies and on the need for a proactive security framework are regularly profiled across print, digital and television mediums.

Herjavec Group is also thrilled to be awarded three 2019 Cyber Defense InfoSec Awards. To view the full press release, click here.

https://www.herjavecgroup.com/robert-herjavec-trailblazing-cybersecurity-executive-2019/

Malwarebytes Q1 Cybercrime Report: Emotet and Ransomware Attacks Renew Focus on Enterprise; Trojan Detections Grow 200 Percent

Press release

SMBs Face Greatest Risk as Overall Business Detections Grow 235 Percent

Santa Clara, CA – April 25, 2019 – Malwarebytes^TM, the leading advanced endpoint protection and remediation solution, today announced the results of the Q1 2019 Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques report. The report is a culmination of data based on the Company’s unique threat analysis capabilities. Q1 showed a significant uptick in business ransomware detections (195 percent), along with continued momentum for Trojan variations by over 200 percent and a sharp decline in cryptomining.
Trusted as an authority on malware and threat analysis, Malwarebytes’ latest report shows an increasing trend of cybercriminals targeting businesses, and in particular SMBs, whose limited resources make them prime targets. This shift away from consumer targets demonstrates that cybercriminals are focusing on higher value targets with heavier stores of consumer data over individuals. This quarter, a new section on data privacy has been added to the report, detailing the habits and sentiments of consumers on their data amidst the evolving threat landscape, as well as businesses’ lax practices for protecting that data.
“Consumers might breathe a sigh of relief seeing that malware targeting them has dropped by nearly 40 percent, but that would be short-sighted,” said Adam Kujawa, director of Malwarebytes Labs. “Consumer data is more easily available in bulk from business targets, who saw a staggering 235 percent increase in detections year-over-year. Cybercriminals are using increasingly clever means of attack to get even more value from targets through the use of sophisticated Trojans, adware and ransomware.”

Highlights from the report include:

• The US leads in global threat detections at 47 percent, followed by Indonesia with nine percent and Brazil with eight percent.
• Businesses are the prime target. Overall detections of threats to businesses have steadily risen. They increased by about seven percent from the previous quarter, while consumer detections declined by nearly 40 percent. Compared to Q1 2018, business detections have skyrocketed 235 percent.
• Ransomware is back to business. Ransomware has gained rapid momentum among business targets with an increase of 195 percent in detections from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019. Compared to the same time last year, business detections of ransomware have seen an uptick of over 500 percent, due in large part to a massive attack by the Troldesh ransomware against US organizations in early Q1.
• Emotet also continues to target enterprises. Emotet has made a total shift away from consumers, reinforcing the intent of its creators to focus on enterprise targets, except for a few outlier spikes. Detections of Trojans (Emotet’s parent category) on business endpoints increased more than 200 percent since Q4, and almost 650 percent from the same time last year.
• Cryptomining against consumers is essentially extinct. Marked by the popular drive-by mining company CoinHive shutting down operations in March, consumer cryptomining dropped by 79 percent for consumers compared to the same time period last year.
• Mobile Mac devices are increasingly targeted by adware. While Mac malware saw a more than 60 percent increase from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019, adware was particularly pervasive, growing over 200 percent from the previous quarter.
• Exploit authors developed some flashy techniques. A new Flash Player zero-day was discovered in Q1 and quickly implemented into popular exploit kits, including Underminer and Fallout EK, as well as a new exploit kit called Spelevor.

The full Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques Report is available at: https://resources.malwarebytes.com/resource/cybercrime-tactics-techniques-2019-q1-report/

https://press.malwarebytes.com/2019/04/25/malwarebytes-q1-cybercrime-report-emotet-and-ransomware-attacks-renew-focus-on-enterprise-trojan-detections-grow-200-percent/

A cyber security joint analysis lab with BIT established

News

On November 21st 2018, A cyber security joint analysis lab ，named BIT-Antiy Joint Lab ，sponsored by Antiy Labs and BIT was launched at the Information Science Experimental Building of Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT for short), and a technical seminar was run at the same time.

Prof. Luo Senlin, the director of the BIT Information System and Security Countermeasure Experiment Center and the co-director of BIT-Antiy Joint Lab, hosted the seminar. Xue Zhenghui, secretary of the party committee of the School of Information and Electronics, and He Gongdao, the deputy director of Antiy Technical Committee, gave speeches at the seminar separately. Zhang Ji, dean of the School of Science and Technology；Chen He, deputy dean of the School of Information and Electronics；Wang Xiaofeng, senior R&D vice president of Antiy；Luo Yunfeng, director of Antiy public affairs department, and members of the joint lab attended the seminar.

Xue Zhenghui, secretary of the party committee of the School of Information and Electronics, said that BIT is among the first institutes to establish information confrontation major in China, and has first-class research and teaching force in network security, data mining, text security and media security. Antiy is a national-level network security emergency service support unit that leads the development of threat detection and analysis capabilities. By building a joint lab with Antiy, he hopes to integrate research and teaching with engineering technology practice, and promote the synergy of the security industry and the academia.

He Gongdao ，Antiy Vice President ，pointed out that in order to cope with the increasingly serious cyberspace security situation, Antiy continues to strengthen its threat detection engines and support platform systems, and is committed to building a tactical situational awareness platform and a series of capability-based security products. Antiy also applied deep learning techniques to automated analysis of back-end samples. BIT is in a leading position in the field of information security and artificial intelligence. By establishing a joint lab, BIT’s research and teaching talents can be emerged with Antiy’s engineering capabilities, promoting the application of artificial intelligence in network security field.

During thetechnical seminar session, researchers from both sides delivered speeches entitled "Artificial Intelligence-Based Malware Analysis" and "Machine Learning in Engineering Technology", and exchanged their views.

Antiy has long been committed to combining manual analysis with automated methods, to improve the efficiency of threat analysis. In 2001, Antiy proposed applying the industrial pipeline concept to malware sample processing, realizing automated feature extraction of binary samples. In 2004, Antiy realized automated full-sample analysis and determination, and then completed the development of the integrated analysis environment, and gradually realized dimension reduction of manual analysis and the iteration of the manual analysis experience to automated analysis. At present, Antiy conducts automated analysis of millions of new file samples every day, and performs dynamic and static analysis on each of them. Each sample is being dissected into different threat vectors, sample ?size processed daily up to more than 10TB.

As threats continue to ?evolve, Antiy recognizes that security vendors should not only accelerate their own threat capture, threat analysis and capability development, but also establish a closed-loop with adversaries in it, so as to improve the customer’s ability to detect threats, shorten the time span of threat discovery, and improve the effectiveness of security posture.

Relying on the joint lab, Antiy and BIT will promote the exploration of artificial intelligence, data mining and other cutting-edge technologies, and cooperate on scientific research, resource sharing, academic exchange, and project application, etc., forming a mode for university-enterprise cooperation, composite talent training, as well as engineering/academic achievement exporting.

Universities and enterprises are limited by their own roles and modes, and in the past, there were certain limitations in their high-level cooperation. Most of the network security research in universities lacks the support of mature engineering capabilities, some research is even repetition of the work done by network security enterprises. Moreover, most of the network security enterprises and engineers are engaged in product and support development, lacking forward looking, follow-ups and theory transforming. In their cooperation, Antiy adheres to the principle of complementary advantages, narrow-band focus, practice-oriented, and the pursuit of leading edge. As for the direction of cooperation, Antiy selects the areas that they have engineering ability and data foundation and BIT has academic accumulation in the same time. In the cooperation, they give spaces to the theoretical advantages of BIT, and the basic engineering capabilities and data advantages of Antiy providing platform resources, engineering resources and big data resources, helping BIT form high-level academic achievements with forward-looking and practical prospects, and promoting the transformation of scientific research results into effective security values.

https://www.antiy.net/p/a-cyber-security-joint-analysis-lab-with-bit-established/