Tag Archive for: power

How the Startup Nation Became a Global Cyber Power

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Professor Chuck Freilich will discuss the in-depth study he co-authored with Dr. Matthew S. Cohen and Professor Gabi Siboni, which details how Israel, the “startup nation,” geared up to address the unprecedented cyber threat it faced—and still faces—and in the process became one of the world’s top cyber powers.

Thursday, February 16, 2023
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (Pacific Time)
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The RSVP link for this virtual book talk will be available soon. 



After registering, you will be emailed a meeting link and ID information to join us virtually via Zoom on your computer, tablet or smartphone, or to call into the event on your phone. If you do not receive your email confirmation, check your spam or junk mail folders.


Note: This live event will be recorded and posted online afterward for later viewing on the Y&S Nazarian Center’s multimedia page.

This event is organized by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

About the Book & Talk

Israel is subject to a nearly constant daily barrage of cyber attacks from Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and beyond, at times even from close allies. Virtually every possible computer system in Israel, civil and military, has been targeted. A successful attack on Israel’s electric grid, or communications and transportation systems, could not only shut down the country, but expose it to severe military peril.

The book presents the cyber threat Israel faces, the governmental institutions it has established to cope with it, the remarkable cyber security industry it has developed, second only to the United States, and the educational system it has established, from elementary school through university, to train the highly skilled technological manpower needed. The book further addresses the threat on the military level and the role of cyber in Israel’s military strategy, including the famous “Stuxnet” cyber attack, conducted together with the US, which destroyed thousands of Iranian nuclear centrifuges without firing a shot. Israel and the Cyber Threat can be pre-ordered by clicking here.

 

 About the Author

 

Professor Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel and long-time senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center,…

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New Computer Makes Quantum Leap in Processing Power

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Algorithmic Warfare: New Computer Makes Quantum Leap in Processing Power

433-qubit IBM Osprey chip

IBM photo

NEW YORK, New York — As the world grapples with how to take advantage of emerging quantum computing technologies, IBM recently debuted its most advanced computer ever — and broke its own world record in the process.

Unveiled at the annual IBM Quantum Summit in New York, the Osprey computer has more than three times the computing power of the previous model. While the advancements in quantum are expected to impact all industries, the technology could have unique implications for how nations defend themselves, researchers said at the recent summit.

Quantum computers utilize basic units known as qubits as opposed to the 1s and 0s used by traditional computers. The computing power stems from the potential for each qubit to be both 1 and 0 simultaneously, rather than being restricted to one or the other.

At 433 qubits, IBM’s Osprey is the world’s largest quantum computer, surpassing the former largest system in the world, IBM’s 127-qubit computer Eagle.

“We’re living in a moment where computing with a capital C, as I like to call it, is going through one of the most exciting moments since the advent of digital computers in the 1940s,” said Dario Gil, senior vice president and director of IBM research.

“It is an undeniable amount of technical progress that is occurring, and the rate of pace is only accelerating,” he said during the summit.

Creating larger quantum computers increases the ability for the computer to solve complex problems. But stringing together more qubits creates more “noise,” a term meaning interference with the state of the bits in the computer that affects the outcome of the calculations run on it.

As the number of bits without error increases, the closer the quantum computer gets to reaching its full potential. In addition to error issues, current quantum computers are prohibitively large and researchers are continuing to work on…

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These 2 High-Growth Stocks Could Power the Bull Market’s Next Record Run

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When bear markets strike, it feels like they will never end, but investors that focus on buying stocks of companies that continue to post strong revenue growth will be poised to realize sizable gains in the next bull market.

One area to hunt for promising winners is cloud computing. Spending on cloud infrastructure has remained very resilient in 2022, up 30% year over year in the third quarter. Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky mentioned that cloud computing is still in the early innings of adoption. 

While the big cloud service providers like Amazon have a bright future, there are even faster-growing companies addressing specific cloud needs that could lead the market higher over the next decade. Here are two of my favorites.

Snowflake

Snowflake (SNOW -2.52%) is seeing tremendous growth by offering companies a single platform for uploading and analyzing massive amounts of data using artificial intelligence. Over the last five years, annual revenue has increased fourfold to nearly $2 billion, and management believes the business can sustain an average annual growth rate of 30% for several more years. 

Snowflake has emerged as the leading data management solution. It integrates with all the major cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Other cloud companies also offer data analysis tools, but one metric indicates Snowflake is doing it better. For several quarters, Snowflake has maintained a very high net dollar retention rate of over 170%. This means customers spend significantly more with Snowflake after their first year on the platform — a key indicator of its value proposition.

There is a risk that large cloud service providers with greater financial resources than Snowflake could acquire or partner with other data management services to grab a bigger piece of the market, but that’s unlikely for a few reasons. Snowflake already has relationships with many Fortune 500 companies. Most importantly, Snowflake is expanding its competitive lead the more it grows. A key advantage is its data marketplace that allows customers to share and exchange data. This creates a strong incentive for clients to stick with…

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Microsoft Identifies Chinese Hack of Indian Power Grid That Could Go Viral

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Hackers are utilizing a discontinued web server to launch attacks on energy grid infrastructure, Microsoft has warned, with the initial attack discovered on the Indian grid, carried out by Chinese hackers.

According to the software giant, the Boa server was used in routers, security cameras and popular software development kits. While Boa was technically retired in the early 2000s, it is still widely used in various devices, TechCrunch reported.

Microsoft announced this week that it had identified one million internet-exposed Boa server components around the world in a single week. The company warned that the components represent a “supply chain risk that may affect millions of organizations and devices.”

“Without developers managing the Boa web server, its known vulnerabilities could allow attackers to silently gain access to networks by collecting information from files,” Microsoft said.

“Moreover, those affected may be unaware that their devices run services using the discontinued Boa web server, and that firmware updates and downstream patches do not address its known vulnerabilities.”

Power grids, as critical infrastructure, are high-value targets for hackers.

Earlier this year, the Department of Energy began work on shoring up the defenses of the U.S. grid along with supply chain suspecting state-sponsored actors from Russia and China might target the infrastructure.

We really need to do a lot more,” Puesh Kumar, director of the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, told Bloomberg in March. “The energy sector is a very complex machine composed of a lot of different components, a lot of different players—and we really need to raise the security of all of them.”By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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