Tag: ARTICLE

Telecom operators sat back as the new over-the-top (OTT) service providers, internet and tech companies slowly ate away at their business, particularly in the B2C space. A combination of institutional laziness and poor execution on promising initiatives gave these new entrants the time to jump in and snatch away customers. At the moment, the future doesn’t look too bright either with a worldwide CAGR put at 0.7 percent through to 2020. For the time being, wooing back B2C customers is a losing battle. While OTTs use telecom operators to deliver their services, these companies can’t muscle out the competition since...

The open seas have long attracted those who yearned for adventure. The risk of pitting oneself against a vast and unforgiving sea has tested sailors’ mettle for millennia. It’s not surprising that the maritime industry is one that thrives on facing – and overcoming – risks. But, as technology increasingly dominates it, growing risks exist that the industry dare not ignore. Its growing effort to increase efficiencies through digitization and automation has made it an inviting target for 21st century pirates whose weapons are not cutlasses, but computers. Vulnerabilities in maritime systems and security practices threaten to inflict huge losses...

A growing number of today’s entertainment options show protagonists battling cyber-attacks that target the systems at the heart of our critical infrastructure whose failure would cripple modern society. It’s easy to watch such shows and pass off their plots as something that could never happen. The chilling reality is that those plots are often based on real cyber-kinetic threats that either have already happened, are already possible, or are dangerously close to becoming reality. Cyberattacks occur daily around the world. Only when one achieves sufficient scope to grab the attention of the news media – such as the WannaCry ransomware...

How important privacy is for building smart cities and embracing the IoT In the 60s cartoon The Jetsons, the family lived in a futuristic city with flying cars, a robotic housekeeper, and even a watch that let you do video calling. The Jetsons city of the future is with us in the here and now as we have the technology to build smart cities, and in doing so, we can create amazing places to live and work. This idea of making our cities smart is engaging clever minds all over the world and we are witnessing the emergence of smart places...

The global financial services sector is accelerating its transformation in response to changing values and shifting consumer preferences. Hong Kong is responding in its own unique way. Global events over the last decade have brought home the reality that we are living in a fast-changing world. The economic crisis and rapid technological development are changing consumer behaviour. Millennials – with a particular distrust of traditional financial institutions and an affinity with the digital world – have adopted an entirely different set of attitudes towards financial services. The Millennial Disruption Index found that 71% of millennials would rather go to the...

The fact that cyber-kinetic attacks rarely appear on mainstream news doesn’t mean they don’t happen. They happen more frequently than you would think. Many, for various reasons, aren’t even reported to agencies charged with combatting them. This hinders security experts in understanding the full scope and recognizing the trends in this growing problem. We’ll highlight examples of cyber-kinetic incidents and attacks in this chapter. Some were malfunctions that, nonetheless, demonstrated cyber-physical system vulnerabilities. Some were collateral damage from hacking or computer viruses. The vulnerabilities these exposed inspired a growing number of targeted cyber-kinetic attacks in recent years. The Beginning of Cyber-Kinetic...

Below is a timeline of key historic cyber-kinetic attacks, system malfunctions and key researcher demos targeting cyber-physical systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) resulting in kinetic impacts in the physical world. I tried to select only those that were first-of-the-kind or that significantly increased general awareness about a particular type of an attack or incident I know that the list is incomplete. That’s where you come in. If you are aware of an incident or a research that demonstrated something new regarding cyber-kinetic threats or helped significantly raise the awareness, please contact me. For a more...

The topic of diversity is not one that most people find in their comfort zone. As I wrote in a previous article on diversity, increasing diversity often engenders frustration in those tasked with accomplishing it, and inspires eye rolls among diversity-fatigued employees who have heard countless reports on management’s diversity goals, but remain unconvinced of diversity’s value. Can anything be done to make diversity less of an uncomfortable topic? The answer is no. Nothing about diversity will ever make it into the general business population’s comfort zone. I say that not out of cynicism, but out of practicality. At its root, diversity...

In the summer of 1956, a small gathering of researchers and scientists at Dartmouth College, a small yet prestigious Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire, ignited a spark that would forever change the course of human history. This historic event, known as the Dartmouth Workshop, is widely regarded as the birthplace of artificial intelligence (AI) and marked the inception of a new field of study that has since revolutionized countless aspects of our lives. Origins of the Dartmouth Workshop The idea for the Dartmouth Workshop was conceived by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. These visionary individuals...

Recent advances in Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) / Blockchain have significant implications for the global economy and financial services FinTech and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) solutions. Blockchain is a set of technologies that through distributed computing and mathematics can now deliver Trust to an enterprise, consumer or financial institution remotely and without human intervention. Blockchain continues to improve at a torrid pace, driven first by Moore’s law and second by extraordinary advances in software and connectivity. As technology advances, the rapidly increasing number of use cases being developed on top of blockchain are illustrating the transformative potential of the technology to...

You may have heard, over the last year or two, about the new technological miracle that is the blockchain. It seems that every banker, insurer, manufacturer, artist, lawyer and cybersecurity professional is shouting about blockchain from the highest peak and telling us how it will be used to secure everything against anything for all time, additionally removing those embarrassing blemishes from our skin and freshening our breath at the same time. Clearly some large portion of the blockchain-related content we see in the media is hyperbolic, at best, but it is an important technology nonetheless. Let’s take a look...

Western publications often picture the People’s Democratic Republic of China (hereafter China) as the world’s chief propagator of cyberattacks. But the picture is much more complex than such broad-brush claims suggest. Few Westerners realize that China and its neighbours in the Greater China region (Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong) have, over last few years, became the most technologically advanced region in the world – ahead of the West in the adoption, and in many cases even in the development of advanced technologies. Countries in the region were always close to the top of the list of victims of cyberattacks. Factors, such...

The worlds of financial crime and cybercrime are colliding, converging into one. The biggest threat to businesses globally is the new cyber-enabled financial crime. Yet businesses and even financial institutions tasked with protecting our money continue to fight this combined threat with multiple separate defense systems and multiple separate defense teams. The situation is like a military leader trying to fight different enemies on different fronts. While those enemies remain in different fronts, it makes sense to send separate defense forces against them, each focused on fighting only the enemy assigned to it. But what if those enemies merge and...

How would you picture those who work to prevent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from falling into the wrong hands? Would you picture them heavily armed and with a military bearing? Then you might be surprised. Although such individuals sometimes fight the spread of WMD, the front lines feature a different type. The bulk of front-line defenders are less likely to have military backgrounds than financial ones. That’s because the most vulnerable place to identify and block those who spread WMD is through their financial dealings. So, we look at the world of sanctions violations and proliferation financing to see how...

Terrorist funding detection has been practiced the same way as money laundering detection ever since Counter Terrorism Funding (CTF) initiatives were added to Anti–Money Laundering (AML) efforts after 9/11. Although the two have similarities on the surface, a deeper look reveals more differences than similarities. In fact, some have rightly called terrorist funding “money laundering in reverse” because of marked differences in its sources and goals. Do the two warrant similar treatment in detection methods? Or do their dissimilarities call for different detection approaches? How are they similar? Money laundering and terrorist financing share three similarities: 1.    They involve a source of money or...