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Friday 31 January 2020

EC-Council Launches CEH Master Hacker Certification

EC-Council, the leading global information security certification body, has recently launched Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Master credential to address the rising demand for performance-based training and certification for ethical hackers. 

We are committed to using innovative and new approaches to train cyber experts to prevent cybercrime and to promote a safer and secure cyber environment. CEH Master uses a new methodology to prepare the students for real-world jobs. It will go a long way in sharpening the skills of the students who will be better prepared to address the challenge of preventing cybercrime,” says Mr Jay Bavisi, Founder and CEO of EC-Council Group.

CEH Certification Path
CEH certification path
This new initiative is in keeping with EC Council’s commitment to align the curriculum with the demand of the industry. It is for this reason that CEH has emerged as a certification of choice in over 145 countries since 2003. With the launch of the CEH Master, EC Council continue to set standards in the ethical hacking certification and training sector. 

CEH Master credential is awarded to hackers that have both the CEH and the CEH (Practical) certification. It prepares the candidate for actual challenges by evaluating their capability against problems from the real-world. This unique approach is a departure from the regular both the multiple choice exams and simulation-based exams and allows the candidates to hone his/her skills and abilities by working on actual real world challenges. 

With the next exam, security professionals are required to demonstrate the understanding of attack vectors by performing network scanning to identify live and vulnerable machines in a network, performing operating system banner grabbing, system hacking, steganography, steganalysis attacks, enumeration and even cover tracks. They must also conduct a variety of web server and web application attacks including directory traversal, parameter tampering, XSS, perform SQL injection attacks and different types of cryptography attacks as part of a rigorous 6 hour online and proctored exam. This is truly revolutionary.

CEH Master is a badge of honour for any ethical hacker who wants to make a mark in this challenging field. To become a CEH Master, a candidate must successfully pass the  CEH  exam and demonstrate competency in managing real world hacking challenges via the CEH (Practical) Exam. This demands the prospective ethical hacker to discover and exploit real-time vulnerabilities while auditing the systems set up by EC-Council in the cloud, thus enhancing the challenge and better preparing him/her for the job.

Thursday 31 October 2019

Microsoft Research AI Project helps Dehradun RTO in automating driver's license testing

Do you know a whopping 59% of respondents to survey conducted by SaveLIFE Foundation admitted that they did not give any test to obtain a driving license. The numbers seems to be correct, given I have personally seen people around me claiming the same.The challenges with this system range from the subjectivity of each evaluator to the burden of evaluation falling solely on human shoulders. A Microsoft Research team under HAMS (Harnessing AutoMobiles for Safety) project is currently enabling the Regional Transport Office (RTO), Dehradun, Uttarakhand to automate the same process.

“The main challenge in the traditional driver’s license test is the burden placed on the human evaluators and the resulting subjectivity that a candidate faces. Automation using HAMS technology can not only help relieve evaluators of the burden but also make the process objective and transparent for candidates,” says Venkat Padmanabhan, Deputy Managing Director, Microsoft Research India, who started the HAMS project in 2016. Padmanabhan developed HAMS along with Akshay Nambi, who joined the project as an intern and is now a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research India, and Satish Sangameswaran, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Research India, who helped the team bring HAMS out of the research lab and into the real world through external partnerships.



Microsoft Research’s HAMS project enables the driver’s license testing to be an objective and transparent process that helps grant licenses to well-tested drivers. The system doesn't require an invigilator to be present with the candidate in the car. The system is competent enough to get the final results on the basis of the driver's actions and conditions of the environment just in time. While it may sound like a very IoT kind of project where lot of sensors needs to be at work, the team at Microsoft has utilized a simple smartphone to achieve the goal.

HAMS in essence uses a mounted smartphone on car's windshield which uses rear camera to monitor real time road condition  as well as the driver's gaze using front camera of the phone. On top of it, the team has developed AI models for efficient and robust operation.


For driving tests, HAMS has been customized to include capabilities such as precise tracking of the vehicle’s trajectory during designated test manoeuvres, for instance, parallel parking or negotiating a roundabout. This tracking enables HAMS to determine precisely, for instance, whether the driver stopped in the middle of a manoeuvre for longer than is permitted or tried to course correct by rolling forward and backward alternately more times than allowed. Today, if you take the driver’s license test at the Dehradun RTO, you will be doing so in just the company of a smartphone affixed to your car’s windshield. HAMS, running on the smartphone and on an edge server onsite at the testing track, will do the rest and produce a detailed report shortly after you finish navigating through the test manoeuvres.

“The successful deployment of the HAMS-based driver license testing at the Dehradun RTO is a significant step towards the Transport Department’s goal of providing efficient, world-leading services to the citizens of Uttarakhand. We are proud to be among the pioneers of the application of AI to enhance road safety,” said Shri Shailesh Bagauli, IAS, Secretary, Government of Uttarakhand. “On an average, over 50 candidates take the HAMS-enabled automated license test every day at the Dehradun RTO. Due to the comprehensive nature of testing, just about 50 percent candidates pass the test, ensuring that only qualified drivers are given a driver’s license,” says Nambi.

Sunday 14 April 2019

Stellar Research finds, 7 out of every 10 individuals are vulnerable to data breach & privacy RISK while disposing off their devices

Global data care expert Stellar has conducted & announced findings of world’s largest known study of residual data in used devices.
The study analysed a sample size of total 311 used devices comprising hard drives, memory cards, and mobile phones at Stellar’s central laboratory in India. The analysis revealed that a majority 71% of these devices contained personal data, Personally Identifiable Information (PII)and sensitive business information. In a larger perspective, the report establishes that 7 out of every 10 individuals are vulnerable to data breach & privacy risks while disposing their old storage devices.
The study was performed to ascertain the awareness levels amongst device owners, regarding usage of secure data wiping methods at the time of selling old storage devices. It also aims to create awareness about data privacy risks when file deletion or drive formatting are used with a faulty assumption as permanent data removal action.
The devices analysed in the study were procured from individuals, online portals & resellers across multiple locations. Majority of these devices were analysed using a publicly available DIY software - Stellar Data Recovery that discovered thousands of files containing personal data.
The residual data can easily fall into wrong hands, and can lead to identity thefts, financial frauds, personal security threats & user privacy issues. Businesses can be vulnerable to data theft & misuse of business-critical information like financial reports, trade agreements, intellectual property, business intelligence and trade secrets to name a few.
"This lack of awareness among customers at large can lead to an alarming rise in acts of cybercrime. It also underlines the acute importance of adoption of data sanitization procedures by individuals and organizations as a safeguard at time of disposal of old IT assets”, said Sunil Chandna, CEO, Stellar. “The Personal Data Bill 2018, when approved as a law could trigger development of a secure ecosystem leading to high awareness & risk mitigation actions by consumers & organizations,” said Chandna. 
The latest 2019 study is a second and a part of continued program of Stellar to measure the risk awareness using NAID Second-Hand Device Study Principles.
NAID (National Association for Information Destruction), an international watchdog for the secure data destruction industry with more than 2000 member companies globally, has commended Stellar for being the first organization to conduct this study by using NAID principles.
 “The Stellar Second-Hand Electronic Device Study and similar studies before and after, demonstrate the gravity of the problem to regulators, businesses and consumers,” said Bob Johnson, NAID founder and i-SIGMA CEO. “By employing NAID’s principles to conduct the study, STELLAR has assured the results are accurate and the personal information found in the process was fully protected at all times”, said Bob.
The detailed report is available for download using the link - https://www.stellarinfo.com/ResidualDataStudy.php

Tuesday 9 April 2019

Harness Partners with Google Cloud Platform to Bring Next-Generation Continuous Delivery to Kubernetes and Cloud-Native Applications

Harness, a Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform, today announced that it has partnered with the Google Cloud Platform and is now available for purchase in the GCP marketplace — giving Google Cloud customers the ability to automate the Continuous Delivery process and deliver artifacts to production quickly, securely, and repeatably.
As a Google Cloud partner, Harness empowers engineering teams to move fast and ship code without the fear of failed deployments. With its Smart Automation technology, Harness provides the first-ever solution to automate the entire continuous delivery process. By applying unsupervised machine learning to Continuous Delivery — a new technology called Continuous Verification — the platform understands a microservices baseline and can initiate automatic rollbacks when irregular activity is detected, avoiding business downtime or widespread failures. To date, Harness has helped customers such as McAfee, Home Depot, Nutanix, Bank  of Santander, and Soulcycle reduce errors in production deployments by up to 99%, while increasing overall engineering velocity by up to 8x.
Key features include:
  • Pipeline Builder. Instead of taking hours to build pipelines, DevOps teams can build and execute complete continuous delivery pipelines in minutes with serial or parallel workflows across their applications, services, and environments.
  • Workflow Wizard. Complex pipelines become simple with out-of-the-box support for canary deployments and blue/green deployments using cloud technologies such as Kubernetes.
  • Continuous Verification. Release teams finally know for sure that deployments succeeded or failed by leveraging unsupervised machine learning to automatically verify application deployments in production. They can detect errors quality and regressions from tools such as AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic and Sumo Logic, as well as use the Harness 24×7 Service Guard feature to monitor the performance of releases indefinitely.
  • Automated Rollback. Instead of painful, manual rollbacks, Harness can automate rollbacks to the last working artifact version and run-time configuration with no required scripting or code.
  • Continuous Security. Harness bakes in security into every step of the deployment process. Harness uses its SecretStore or deep HashiCorp Vault integration to seamlessly reference secrets across all deployment workflows and pipelines. Harness also keeps a full audit trail of every deployment, so teams know the who, what, where and when behind every action.
  • Real-Time Delivery Analytics.DevOps and engineering team leads now have powerful insight into every application, environment, version, and deployment. Teams can debug deployments in seconds, and role-based access is baked into every part of the platform.
"Vuclip gains tremendous advantages from the combination of Harness and Google Cloud," said Jishnu Kinwar, VP of Technical Operations at Vuclip, a leading global technology-driven media company delivering on-demand entertainment to emerging markets. "We use Harness to deploy our artifacts into GCP, relying on Harness machine learning to verify success and help automate rollbacks when required. The two solutions ensure that we're using the very latest Continuous Delivery technology to better serve our customers worldwide."
"We're thrilled to partner with the Google Cloud Platform and help equip DevOps and engineering teams with the safe and seamless ability to deliver applications to the Google Cloud," said Jyoti Bansal, Harness co-founder & CEO. "We see a rapid migration of legacy and monolithic applications to microservices and Kubernetes environments hosted by Google Cloud, and Harness is here to help developers with a platform that accelerates microservices and cloud adoption and reduces the risk of application downtime — while giving engineering teams their weekends back."
The Harness trial is free for two weeks and can be accessed here.

Aptiv/Audi Receives Innovation Partnership Award for Automated Driving Satellite Compute Platform

Dublin, April 9, 2019 - Aptiv PLC (NYSE: APTV), a global technology company enabling the future of mobility, announced it was recognized by Automotive News as a 2019 Innovation Partnership Award winner for its work with Audi on the Aptiv Automated Driving Satellite Compute Platform.

Aptiv is democratizing active safety through the efficient and scalable Automated Driving Satellite Compute Platform. Most systems have the computing power integrated into the sensors, processing the information at the source, which makes each sensor expensive to build and to replace when damaged. Aptiv's Automated Driving Satellite Compute Platform takes processing and electronics out of individual sensors, instead sending the information to the central platform, allowing the sensors to be smaller, more cost efficient, lighter and easier to package in a vehicle. The reduced mass and volume also eliminates sensor heat dissipation concerns. In one application Aptiv's innovative technology reduced the camera footprint from the size of a deck of playing cards to the size of a pack of chewing gum.

"As a global technology company with a rich history of developing safer, greener and more connected solutions, we are honored to be recognized for our collaboration with Audi in development of the Automated Driving Satellite Compute Platform," said David Paja, Aptiv's senior vice president and president of Advanced Safety & User Experience. "This industry-first platform, developed with our strong Audi partnership, enables our customers to apply a simplified sensor footprint to scale features for advanced levels of safety automation. It truly is a game changer in the industry."  

From basic ADAS to Level 4 autonomous vehicles, this compute platform is scalable for increasing automated driving levels and complexity demands. The concept has had a revolutionary impact on Aptiv's customer's vehicle architecture.

The Automotive News PACE panel of judges recognized the Aptiv-Audi team working on the Automated Driving Satellite Compute Platform with an Innovation Partnership Award, for their "special levels" of supplier and OEM collaboration.

The judges found that Aptiv's systems integration capabilities and strong collaboration with Audi led to the development of a platform that  incorporates several different components into a single, affordable ECU controlling the advanced safety features. The judges cited Aptiv's Automated Driving Satellite Compute Platform as a great example of the new level of collaboration needed as the industry moves toward more autonomy.