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Improving security and privacy with AI

Two talks at last week’s FIRST conference looked at how Artificial Intelligence might be used in incident response. In both cases, the use of AI improves user privacy directly – by reducing or eliminating the need for human responders to look at user data – and also indirectly, by producing faster detection and mitigation of […]

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Threat Intelligence: for machines and humans

Threat Intelligence is something of a perennial topic at FIRST conferences. Three presentations this year discussed how we can generate and consume information about cyber-threats more effectively. First Martin Eian from Mnemonic described using (topological) graphs to represent threat information. Objects, such as domain names, IP addresses and malware samples are vertices in the graph. […]

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Human Factors: Don’t make a CRISIS! out of a Crisis

Some security incidents need more than a technical solution. Two talks at this week’s FIRST conference looked at the importance of human factors, in crisis management and vulnerability handling. Jaco Cloete looked at situations where a cyber-incident can become a business incident, causing reputational damage, social media fallout, loss of market share, regulatory fines, even […]

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Vulnerability Disclosure: Why are we still talking about it?

Ben Hawkes, from Google’s Project Zero, gave a fascinating keynote presentation on vulnerability disclosure policies at this week’s FIRST Conference. There is little disagreement about the aim of such policies: to ensure that discovering a vulnerability in software or hardware reduces/minimises the harm the vulnerability subsequently causes. And, to achieve that, there are only really […]