Steve Duplessie: Let's start the week off on the wrong foot. A
CyberArk engineer in Tel Aviv done with a laptop, a $50 Wi Fi
extender and some open source tools, wandered the streets and
was able to pick up 1000s of hash network passwords. The
company estimated that they could grab up to 70% of all the
passwords they attempted. Now, to be fair, they did point out
that not all routers support roaming features, which is how
they broke in, but unfortunately, all of the major
players do. Good Lord, we're making it just too easy for the
bad guys, people. It's like flipping your keys to the safe
to a stranger and asking them to keep an eye out while you go to
lunch. To make things worse, Russian hackers Nobelium who are
responsible for the SolarWinds hack are still at it looking to
further damage the global supply chain. Turns out Microsoft found
out they're actively targeting cloud and managed service
providers in the US and Europe with relationships with
governments think tanks and private entities to see if they
can cause further damage. According to Microsoft, about
10% of the targeted companies were compromised giving this
week's gold medal to the Russian government with the Chinese and
Iranian government's fighting it out for silver and bronze. on a
happier note, in August, Microsoft participated in
President Biden's cybersecurity summit where they committed $20
billion over the next five years to kickstart integration of
advanced security solutions into product design, and they
unveiled $150 million pot to help federal, state and local
governments with technical services, including partnerships
with community colleges and nonprofits for cybersecurity
training. According to research from ESG and the Information
Systems Security Association or ISSA 57% of organizations have
been impacted by cybersecurity skills shortages and 44% believe
the skills shortage has gotten worse over the past two years.
With these two things in mind, Microsoft has announced a plan
to cut that workforce shortage in half by 2025. As part of that
plan, Microsoft will partner with community colleges across
the US and provide free resources to help end that
shortage. They announced they'll provide a free curriculum to
community colleges across the country provide training for
faculty at 150 Community Colleges and give scholarships
and resources to 25,000 students as part of the effort. Now
according to cybersecurity guru and ESG Fellow John Oltisk,
Microsoft is following through on its commitment, the company
is giving back and addressing a critical problem with its semi
altruistic gesture. Other vendors like Apple and Google
have made similar commitments at the President's summit, but
Microsoft's leadership here will force others to act. This will
not only increase the pool of potential hires, but also seed
the market with young Microsoft savvy entry level talent. This
puts Microsoft in a great position to hire some of the top
candidates, while others will find employment at large
customers and prospects and promote Microsoft Security.
Either way, Microsoft wins and will see a huge ROI. So in other
words, while it's a great gesture, it's not just to save
the world, Microsoft is following its Cisco's wildly
successful footsteps. About 100 years ago, Cisco created the
CCNA or the Cisco Certified network engineer and got
companies to pay Cisco to teach their networking IT staff how to
deploy and operate advanced Cisco technologies. Those who
are certified wore those certifications like a badge of
honor. In reality, what Cisco did was teach their customers
how to more effectively buy more Cisco stuff. Microsoft is
playing the exact same game. Sure the world's better if we
have more security trained experts. But what do you think
those kids coming out of college you're gonna buy when they hit
the workforce, Microsoft courses, that's what they know.
It's a pretty brilliant move all around. And not that they need
it. But Microsoft ended the week posting absolutely ludicrous
numbers once again, with $45 billion in quarterly revenue of
which 20 billion was cloud based. It pushed their market
cap way past Apple to a crazy $2.5 trillion. To put that into
perspective, there are only seven countries on the planet
where the GDP or gross domestic product higher than that
Microsoft has the world's eighth largest economy essentially. Now
think about that while you're eating your cornflakes. More
good news this week, a cyber code threat detection startup
Snyk is just on fire. In less than 24 months, the company's
valuation has increased 800% to over $8.5 billion.
To me, Veracode was a pioneer who figured out that it's stupid
to secure code after it's in production, that making sure
it's secure before it's in production is a much better
idea. Find the problem before you ship it into the wild
because shutting down production after the fact is shutting off
the cash spigot. sneek has taken that philosophy and mastered the
market building a massive community of developers who put
security first right into the development process. The company
is led by a genuinely nice and supremely smart guy named Peter
Mackay, whose company is about to become as high profile as
VMware was 10 years ago, when even your grandmother was
talking about virtualization to her knitting group. Now skeevy
Uncle Billy will be talking about SecDevOps at your next
high school graduation. In better news, the Royal Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of the RSPCA, which was
set up 200 years ago to ensure that all animals from household
pets to wildlife are treated with the care and attention they
deserve. Well, that RSPCA went cloud first 10 years ago. They
chose Googles business apps and collaboration tools. And when
the pandemic hit 18 months ago and the world essentially
stopped. The RSPCA still managed to handle over 1.2 million
calls, investigated 140,000 suspected incidents of animal
cruelty, and was able to secure 1400 animal abuse convictions.
Better yet, by mastering the use of Google meat they were able to
place 29,000 animals in permanent homes, all during the
pandemic. This is the kind of cloud first story that makes way
better news than it saved me money. And in the best news of
the week at the Climate Pledge Arena. Yes, that is the actual
name of Amazon sponsorship arena where the new National Hockey
League franchise Seattle Kraken play, Amazon is installed
cashierless technology in several retail outlets that is
proven to provide deep, legitimate societal value. A
patron was able to acquire a beer in under eight seconds, no
line no sloppy unskilled labor spilling half of it away, but
just pure economic technical wizardry. The world may be a
better place after 40 years of playing with new rocket ships,
but this is technology that can alter the mood of nations today.
Bravo, Amazon. Well that's it for this week. On our next
episode, I'll be spending some time looking at the overwhelming
stupidity that is Theranos thanks for watching and keep
those suggestions and comments coming. Send us email at
comments at the bigger truth.com Bye bye