Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Colonial Pipeline Attack &
Why You Should Not Hoard Gas in Plastic Tubs
A ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline by hacking group DarkSide crippled gas and jet fuel supplies to nearly half the east coast. The pipeline is 5,500 miles long and can carry 3M barrels of fuel each day. The pipeline is owned by the Koch Industries (28%), South Korea’s National Pension Service and Keats Pipeline Investors LP (23.44%), CDPQ Colonial Partners, LP (16.55%), Shell Pipeline Company, LP (16.55%), and IFM Colonial Pipeline (15.8%).
Thursday, May 27, 2021
RSA Conference 2021
COVID & the Expanded Attack Surface
RSAC Virtual 2021 kicked off on Monday May 17th with a keynote titled “A Resilient Journey” from Rohit Ghai, RSA’s CEO. Unsurprisingly, one of the big themes of the keynote was how COVID-19 forced IT and IT security to rethink how we approach remote workers, trust, resiliency, and hacks when most of the workforce of a variety of companies were forced to work remotely.
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Fusion Centers:
Social Media, Blue Leaks, & Suspicious Activity Reporting
2 Views – ACLU versus NSA
Where there is collection of data, there is always the prospect of great use and/or bad abuse.
And, much of the data culled has been packaged and delivered directly from the individual user, via social posts about getting vaccinated, vacation plans, new purchases, 10 year challenge photos (assisting in AI facial recognition), attendance at protests, and check-ins at every restaurant, workout, and airport - complete with selfies, food photos, and Fitbit results.
Thursday, March 25, 2021
Building Storage Solutions for HPC
High-Performance Computing (HPC) originally started out in defense and research domains, such as universities and government agencies. The workloads that the initial HPC solutions were used for included particle physics, fluid dynamics, nuclear weapons modeling, and research and aerospace projects – and, obviously, the space program. What we have seen in the last several years is HPC being applied to new problems in commercial enterprises.
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Security Hack of F-35 Results in J-31. DOD Says NO MORE in Cybersecurity Enforcement Push
China’s J-31’s is “modeled after” the F-35. That is a nice way of referring to the Chinese hack of F-35 data in 2007 through contractor Lockheed Martin, to build their jet fighter, J-31. Contractors are required to meet standards regarding security protocols but those requirements have not been verified in the past.
Friday, February 19, 2021
Flash or Cache?
Deep Dive on SSD versus HDD (plus cache) for Arrays
In storage systems (and in particular storage arrays), the conventional wisdom has been that flash storage in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs) are necessary for high performance, and NVMe® SSDs provide the highest performance of all storage media. However, a recent interview in Blocks and Files by Infinidat (started by a number of ex-EMC alumni) would like to be the start of a rewrite to this narrative.
Monday, February 1, 2021
Balancing Servers and SSDs
How can datacenter systems and application architects rebalance the relationship between server needs and storage capacity for typical enterprise workloads? Balancing the relationship between servers and SSDs is critical to datacenter cost, operational efficiency, and performance.
Monday, February 8, 2021
AI & Stock Trading
High frequency and algorithm trading has moved from 60-70% of trading in 2010 to 90% in 2017.
While AI is being largely utilized, the proof seems far into the future Don’t we need a recession or major market correction to test the stock trading models?
Saturday, January 9, 2021
U.S. Capitol Security Issues - January 6, 2021
Our AI & Cybersecurity Newsletter typically covers topics such as ransomware attacks, exploits, security issues facing major companies such as Zoom, & security breaches such as the Solarwinds attacks on Nuclear Labs, the U.S. Treasury, & Pentagon. However...
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
Will 2020's Hot Topics Still be Hot in 2021?
Here is a look at three topics for 2021 - storage-class memory, computational storage, and composable infrastructure - what they promised to deliver, to what extent they have lived up to their promise, and what to expect in the coming decade.