Miscellaneous

Image from Pixabay

A few weeks ago I was at a conference. I took a lot of notes and I can watch the recorded sessions. What is the best thing to do with all that? After some browsing I made a decision: I am going to treat you to some quotes and let my own thoughts loose on them.

As a warm-up, here’s an obvious one: “If you have only met someone online, then that person is always a stranger.” This comes from a presentation on resilience against scams. You’ll have to agree with this statement, but do you also act accordingly? Or do you still want to believe that this nice person is also honest? That is very difficult. In the last century, when the internet was not yet mean, I met someone in an online forum (does anyone still remember CompuServe?). We had nice conversations about the state of the world and about observations in daily life. Later we started emailing directly, and at my wedding I met him in real life for the first time. If I had taken the above quote to heart, I would have missed out on this friendship. Back then, cybercrime did not exist and online life was a lot easier.

A handy tip to avoid becoming a victim of scammers: never pay to get paid. In other words: if someone promises you the moon but needs your money up front to make that happen, then something is wrong. It started with that Nigerian prince who wanted to share a fortune with you but needed some money to release that fortune, and nowadays you may be offered a job where a little effort will be richly rewarded – but certain costs have to be made first. Don't fall for it.

Then there’s this nice tip that you can immediately benefit from: change the name of your guest network to “faster wifi”. All your guests – and especially your children’s guests – will want to be on that network. And that is exactly where you want them. Because your guest network is separate from the network that provides access to your private data. At odds with this is the idea of connecting all your Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the guest network. The idea behind this is that IoT devices can be hacked relatively easily and that you would rather not have a hacker have access to your data. But do you want all your guests to have access to your dishwasher, dryer and solar panels? Difficult choices.

Sometimes a statement from one speaker ties in with that of another. Like these two: “8% of the users in your organization cause 80% of the risk” and “New employees are the biggest threat: they easily click on links because they do not understand the risks.” I would mainly link the first quote to employees who are in the “cannot & do’nt want to” quadrant: they don’t know how to behave safely and they are also not willing to adjust their behavior, which makes them difficult to reach. But according to the second speaker, the danger lies mainly in new employees. You can do something about that. That is why we have been involved in the onboarding program for new employees for years now. We treat the new colleagues to a presentation in which we playfully guide them through the most important aspects of information security, business continuity and privacy. And we advertise the Security (b)log, so that they will come back to our important message.

If there was one subject that ran through all those hundreds of presentations, it was artificial intelligence. One speaker thought that 90% of so-called AI experts have no idea what they are talking about, and that the other 10% know very little. And that is normal, he argued, because AI consists of many sub-disciplines and it is important that experts know a lot about their own sub-discipline. Just as you wouldn’t go to see a brain surgeon with heart problems, you should also seek out the right specialist in the field of AI.

Finally, a quote that stuck with me because it hits home so well: “ Generative AI is autocorrect/type ahead on steroids.” Let me break it down for you. Generative AI is the form of artificial intelligence known to the general public, which generates something on its own; you know it from ChatGPT, for example. You know autocorrect mainly from your phone; on the one hand, it protects you from typing errors, but sometimes it causes embarrassing situations because the “correction” turns out to be annoying (in my case, “Hi Nick” was once replaced by “Hi pig”). Type ahead is its cousin, and you also know it from your email program that, while you’re still typing an address: I know who you mean! Well, and all this on steroids, that is generative AI. With all the conveniences that come with it, but also with an amplification of all the inconveniences. I stopped the message to Nick in time, but if genAI is happily hallucinating and telling us a story that makes no sense, that’s a lot harder to discover.

There will be no Security (b)log next week.

 

And in the big bad world…

• Meta can now use European data to train its AI.
• Signal opposes Microsoft Recall.
• Comedian Arjen Lubach wonders whether Trump can digitally shut down the Netherlands. [DUTCH]
• this example shows how this shutting down works. [DUTCH]
• Telegram shares data with authorities and defends freedom of expression.
• Windows becomes quantum-proof.
• Eindhoven University of Technology has published the report on the January cyber attack. [DUTCH]
• You can recognize deepfakes by looking for blood flowing through the veins in the face. [DUTCH]