Tag Archive for: teams

V7 raises a $33m Series A to help teams build robust AI, faster –

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  • V7, the data engine for AI, announces a $33m Series A funding round, co-led by Radical Ventures and Temasek, joined by Air Street Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Partech. 
  • V7’s client base of Fortune 500 companies, scaleups, and startups rely on V7’s platform to build sophisticated AI models that learn and improve from unstructured data including medical records, paper documents, and video.
  • This funding round includes the participation of machine learning pioneers including Francois Chollet (Keras creator), Oriol Vinyals (DeepMind), Jose Valim (Elixir creator), Ashish Vaswani (Google Brain / inventor of Transformers) and leadership figures at OpenAI, Twitter, and Amazon.

LONDON, November 28, 2022 – Today V7, the data engine to build and improve AI for computer vision, announced its $33m Series A financing co-led by AI-focused Radical Ventures and Temasek, with participation from existing investors Air Street Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Partech. This represents the largest Series A funding round in its category by more than double, and will allow V7’s further expansion into the US market, growing its team in its biggest market.

Machine learning-powered computer vision models are helping tackle a range of challenges facing society today, from spotting cancers to robotic farming. But when building an ML system, 80% of a team’s time is spent managing training data. This is a slow process that helps refine and augment the “knowledge” that models have learned by having humans perform laborious, manual labeling tasks.

V7 automates the labeling process, allowing companies to solve data labeling tasks ten times more quickly. The company’s unique “programmatic labeling” workflows use AI models and minimal human steering to apply labels to data at scale. The product comes with general-purpose AI models built in, which automatically segments objects in images and video, acting as a co-pilot for human annotators. After about 100 human-guided examples, V7’s platform can start identifying objects at scale on “autopilot”, routing edge-cases it doesn’t yet understand to human reviewers. 

V7’s growth trajectory is unabated despite a macroeconomic…

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Cloud Security Made Simple in New Guidebook For Lean Teams

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Cloud computing was the lifeline that kept many companies running during the pandemic. But it was a classic case of medicine that comes with serious side effects.

Having anywhere, anytime access to data and apps gives companies tremendous flexibility in a fast-changing world, plus the means to scale and customize IT at will. The cloud is an asset or upgrade in almost every way.

With one glaring exception: cybersecurity.

The cloud promised to make companies more secure and security more straightforward. Yet over the same time period that the cloud took over computing, cyber attacks grew steadily worse while security teams felt increasingly overwhelmed.

Why?

We will explain shortly. For lean security teams, the more important question is how to make cloud security work, especially as the cloud footprint grows (a lot) faster than security resources. Will the cloud always cast a shadow on cybersecurity?

Not with the strategy outlined in a free ebook from Cynet called “The Lean IT Guide to Cloud Security“. It explains how security teams with less than 20, 10, or even 5 members can make cloud security work from here forward.

Storms Brewing in the Cloud

The “cloud rush” prompted by the pandemic certainly caught hacker’s attention. Attacks on cloud services rose 630% in 2020 and topped on-premises attacks for the first time. The sudden increase in cloud adoption explains some of that uptick – the cloud was a larger target than before. But this really had nothing to do with the pandemic.

It was only a matter of time before hackers started relentlessly targeting the cloud, now costing businesses $3.8 million on average with each successful breach.

Clouds look to hackers like prime targets, more appealing than almost any other.

On the one hand, clouds house huge stores of valuable data along with mission-critical applications. They are where the valuable targets live, so they’re an obvious, even inevitable attack vector.

On the other hand, clouds either complicate or compromise many of the cyber defenses already in place, while coming with complicated defensive requirements of their own. Many cloud environments end up insecure, making them an easy attack vector as well.

As long…

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Huntsville High students challenge college teams at hacking competition

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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — As technology progresses and more of our information is placed online, digital content faces greater cyber threats. The National Cyber Summit brought thousands of industry professionals and amateurs to pave the future of cyber security.

On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 100 competitors made up of students and computer specialists from around the country displayed a form of ethical hacking in the Cyber Cup Challenge. Ethical hacking and penetration testing are a major part of cyber security.

“You have to have permission,” said Huntsville High cyber student Aislinn Hamill. “Otherwise, it’s not ethical.”

Ethical hackers identify system weaknesses and security risks before someone with less ethical intentions can exploit them.

“It’s basically finding vulnerabilities for the betterment of the company or the website or such,” said Huntsville High cyber student Eva Aubel. “With express permission to do so.”

Over the two-day competition, the participants found their way through a series of online obstacles by playing a virtual game of capturing the flag. For each challenge completed and each ‘flag’ captured, the teams received points.

“They’ll find an open port, be able to work through the network, and find additional vulnerabilities that exist within the network,” said Sixgen Director of Mission Operations Micheal Slayton.

Eva Aubel, Aislinn Hamill, Hailey Holsonback, and Megan Quin are seniors at Huntsville High School. Their team of four is the youngest group to qualify for the final round of the competition where they competed against college teams from across the country.

Eva Aubel, Aislinn Hamill, Hailey Holsonback, and Megan Quin (from left to right) place fourth in the academic category in the Cyber Cup Challenge at the National Cyber Summit.

“For this week of competition, they’ve had five weeks of experience,” said Huntsville High School cyber security instructor Jim Morse.

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Security Teams Overwhelmed With Bugs, Bitten by Patch Prioritization

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The number of vulnerabilities disclosed in the first half of the year topped 11,800, forcing companies to determine the impact of an average of 90 security issues per weekday.

The numbers are from cybersecurity firm Flashpoint’s “The State of Vulnerability Intelligence — 2022 Midyear Edition” report, which notes that the massive number of vulnerabilities reported in the first half of the year highlights the problems facing companies as they try to triage software security issues and determine which software updates to prioritize. 

Without better guidance, organizations attempting to sort through the security issues struggle to separate those that are highly critical from minor vulnerabilities and those that may not affect their environment at all, says Brian Martin, vice president of vulnerability intelligence at Flashpoint.

“There are some issues that will have no bearing on any real organization in the world — it might be a vulnerability in some Chinese blog that has seven installs worldwide,” Martin says. “On the other hand, we do have vulnerabilities in Microsoft products, Google products, Apple products. Stuff that is just as high-profile and concerning as any issue from a Patch Tuesday.”

Daily vulnerability volumes
Daily vulnerability volumes in the first half of 2022. Source: Flashpoint

Clouding the issue is the focus put on zero-day vulnerabilities, those labeled as “discovered in the wild” by researchers before a patch is available. These are difficult to collect information on. Google’s Project Zero documented 20 such vulnerabilities exploited in the wild in the first half of 2022, while Flashpoint found at least 17 more issues.

Yet the most common attacks usually use known vulnerabilities.

“Discovered-in-the-wild vulnerabilities are often used in high-profile breaches or are attributed to Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks,” the report states. “Due to their nature, organizations often lack defensive options for them. However, business leaders need to keep in mind that discovered-in-the-wild vulnerabilities represent a tiny fraction of compromises occurring around the world.”

Organizations also had to deal with a growing number of days with hundreds of reported vulnerabilities because…

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