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Israeli Cybersecurity Industry Grows as Global Threats Multiply

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Israel, a country for the Jews is surrounded by countries harboring Islamic fundamentalists..It requires brain and wit to mitigate the threat...Strengthening Cybersecurity is part and parcel of this strategy

[h=1]Israeli Cybersecurity Industry Grows as Global Threats Multiply[/h] by Gwen Ackerman
January 26, 2017, 10:30 AM GMT+5:30



  • Start-ups skipping seed rounds as A-round funding surges
  • Investor says new national thinking needed to grow industry
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A replica of the Trojan horse made up of thousands of computer and mobile phone components in Tel Aviv.
Photographer: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Investments in Israel’s cybersecurity industry jumped 9 percent in 2016, a year when the world suffered a successful cyberattack on a national power grid, a massive e-mail leak that may have altered U.S. elections, and an $81 million central bank heist, according to a new report from Start-Up Nation Central.

Exclusive insights on technology around the world.
According to figures based on the non-profit’s data platform and tech industry database PitchBook, 365 Israeli cybersecurity companies raised a total of $581 million in 2016, about 15 percent of all capital raised by the industry globally. About a quarter of the 65 Israeli cyber start-ups founded last year have already succeeded in raising funds, the report said. The report was released ahead of next week’s Cybertech Tel Aviv 2017 conference.





Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often touts cyber tech as a growth engine for the Israeli economy. The new research suggests the country’s cyber industry is maintaining its status as a global leader, drawing on expertise and experience gleaned from the country’s elite military intelligence forces.
“Israel is at the forefront of innovation in cybersecurity” as entrepreneurs who completed their mandatory military service “uniquely bring their cyberwarfare and cyberintelligence expertise to the commercial sector,” said Avivah Litan, a vice president and analyst at Gartner Research.
[h=3]Joint Research[/h]Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., a pioneer of network firewalls, is a leader in its field, as is CyberArk Software Ltd., which focuses on privileged-account security within corporate networks. Both companies are Israeli.
Last month, the U.S. approved legislation that will expand joint cyber research with Israel. The stakes are high: The global cyber security market will grow to more than $200 billion by 2021 from $122 billion last year, according to the MarketsandMarkets research firm.
Multinationals also are expanding their presence in Israel, as Huawei Technologies Co. acquired HexaTier Ltd. and Volkswagen AG started Cymotive, a security solution for connected cars, in a joint venture with a former head of Israel’s General Security Service.
More than one-third of funding for Israeli cyber companies came from corporations last year, up from one quarter in 2015, according to the report. Investors included Deutsche Telecom Capital Partners and Singtel Innov8 Pte., as well as the venture arm of Israeli military security company Raphael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.
[h=3]Global Player[/h] Israel needs to capitalize on that advantage to make the local industry into a significant global player, said Yoav Tzurya, a partner at Jerusalem Venture Partners.
“There’s no doubt that Israel’s competitive advantage in cyber stems from the military, but the question is if this advantage is being exploited to its fullest,” Tzurya said in a phone interview. “The answer is no.”
He said the country should develop and pursue some sort of framework that would allow soldiers to build their own companies while contributing to national security.
“To build an industry that will draw more money and grow, we need to create a wide pipeline,” said Tzurya, who runs Jerusalem Venture Partners’s Cyber Labs in the southern city of Beersheba.
[h=3]Fewer Exits[/h]Even as investment grew last year, exits fell by one quarter in number and about 50 percent in value terms. The report says that shows companies are choosing to take more time to grow rather than allowing themselves to be acquired for relatively small amounts.
As more start-ups exit innovation hubs, their products are seen as safer investments and they’re able to skip seed rounds. As a result, the industry saw an unprecedented 32 A rounds last year, and average funding at that stage grew 44 percent to $9 million, from $6.3 million in 2015, the report said.
“If you look at the number of later rounds, it shows companies are going for another cycle of maturity and not running off to be bought,” said Guy Hilton, chief marketing officer at Start-Up Nation Central.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...edium=social&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-tech
 
Checkpoint security has had major hiccups with RSA security ID products. Recently they have had issues and vulnerabilities supporting what are called Software Defined Networks.

Having said this, from my personal experience dealing with few Israeli companies in the Cyber Security area, they have one of the best teams in the world. But they are tough people.

Many years ago, I was involved in determining if a cyber-security company based in Israel was worth acquiring or investing. Their laws are so stringent that even if the acquisition happens all software and hardware implementation will stay within Israel only and even to evaluate engineers have to be physically present in a closed room in Israel. There were issues about joint patents and intellectual property going forward. But I was impressed at the kind of talent they have nurtured over the years in this area.

Let me share a more public news which showcased the brilliance of Israeli and US engineers in the area of cyber-offense :)

I do not know how many people remember how Iranian Nuclear research was set back by few years. Iran had their centrifuges in a deep underground facility unconnected to any network in the outside world. The challenge for US engineers working in collaboration with Israeli engineers was to somehow render those centrifuges useless by weaponizing a form of computer virus. These have a term called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), that hide and do their destructive work. The challenge for these virus is how to reach those centrifuge machines and break them since their centrifuge machines are unconnected to any network.

It turned out that the team succeeded in breaking the centrifuges for more than a year and the poor Iranians had no clue.
These attack vectors (APT) were targeted but sent around the whole world and their mission was to reach the host in Iranian lab underground and then increase the speed of the centrifuges (while allowing the readings to remain at safe levels) so they break.

Iranians never discovered the problem but it was Kaspersky labs in USA that discovered this threat which of course did not cause any offense to anyone other than the Iranian Nuclear reactors. It was doing its destruction without being discovered.

How this threat was sent to those facilities? I am not sure how many people have interest in this topic area. I can describe this more if there is interest in the next post.
 
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How this threat was sent to those facilities? I am not sure how many people have interest in this topic area. I can describe this more if there is interest in the next post.

Shri TKS,

I am interested in this..Look forward to your posts
 
Read this story of an Indian hacker who promised help to Mauritania to spy on its network...Riveting
[h=1]The Post-Snowden Cyber Arms Hustle[/h]
On one of those afternoons, Kumar stood on the wide main street of Ghaffar Market in central New Delhi. The place smelled of roasted lotus seeds, sold by vendors beneath a riotous canopy of power, cable, and phone lines. In the muggy mid-day heat, young men tapped away on laptops, offering to jailbreak older iPhones; a 21-year-old hacker selling this service for 1,000 rupees ($14) was inundated by eager customers. Other technicians pitched passersby on the ability to read the e-mails of a wayward lover or turn a boss’s smartphone camera into a spy device. Kumar spent many of his formative years in Ghaffar, and after 45 minutes of catching up with friends, he remarked that he’d been lucky to get out of Mauritania alive. “One small mistake and everything’s gone—money, life, everything,” he said.
At their most advanced, cyber arms—code that governments use to spy on or sabotage computers—are created by Ph.D.s working for defense contractors such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. But the market for those products is limited to the U.S. and the select few allies who can afford them. The rest is dominated by lone-wolf savants and boutique companies whose interactions are characterized by what economists politely call a trust deficit. It’s hard for buyers and sellers to know whether their counterparts are scammers, thieves, or something more dangerous.
Mauritania, a country of 4 million people on Africa’s western coast, has seen 10 coups and attempted coups since independence in 1960 and is perhaps best known to the West as one of the few countries in the world where slavery still exists. It’s also a hot spot for Islamic fundamentalism, which has made its government both an American ally in the war on terrorism and an avid consumer of spy tech—for use against terrorism suspects, but also, potentially, journalists, activists, and political opponents.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-18/the-post-snowden-cyber-arms-hustle
 
Shri TKS,

I am interested in this..Look forward to your posts

Sri Vgane,

Thank you.

In post #3, Sri mskmoorthy has given excellent references for an in depth view of this virus (called a worm actually).
The Showtime documentary which is 90 minutes long paints an end to end story while the other references go into technical details.

What I planned to share is more of a limo-view of the attack and share its implications to countries like India.

Though the Iranian's Nuclear facility was situated deep underground and was not connected to the outside world through internet, the engineers who masterminded this worm, realized that human beings that work on the facilities need to be interacting with the outside world. Incidentally, this worm is called Stuxnet by those that discovered the worm in USA and seemingly called by the code name Operations Olympic Games by the secret agencies that was involved in its creation. USA and Israel has not denied the reports that they were behind its creation.

So the means of passing the initial version of the worm was by infecting the operating system of the software in the USB flash drive. After all, the control systems all have software that needs to be periodically updated. The most likely way to carry the update software might be USB key or CD drive etc. So by infecting all USB drives (through its operating system) it is possible to get to the machine.

People must be using printers and hence printer interface is another way to infect. Now I am oversimplifying a bit for clarity.
Also engineers need various equipment to test and if those equipment interfaces are infected it is possible to reach the desired target. The software of the worm itself was a piece of fine software engineering. It can spread easily without detection. It can know how to identify the specific target system in a specific country and becomes dormant after a given date (before the next US President would take over for example)

There were several revisions to the infection. Initially, it was spread in a very targeted manner in Iran. Later it is believed that the Israelis were to anxious to cause widespread damage sooner and enabled the spread of the worm worldwide. The risk is of course discovery when one is too aggressive. That was a mistake and the worm got discovered.

However, there is every reason to believe that there are many more such worms already in many control systems. And they are not just created by one nation state.

Iran, since this infection, has put together a cyber army of its own and is very active in infecting US sites. I have first hand knowledge of some of these attacks.

It is believed that many of the control systems that are found in power generation units could have been infected by worms similar to stuxnet and by the very nature of such infection are undetected. It is hard to control their action once they are released.

I will not be surprised if many of the India's energy control systems are infected by worms that are undetected yet.

Every country needs to have cyber offensive and defensive teams in my view. Few years ago, I tried to convince this need for such teams with few heads of certain organizations in India. I got a lot of bureaucratic responses. I know that the current Modi Government is serious but I have little confidence anything will get done because of the middle and top level bureaucracies making stupid decisions. There are very talented engineers in India that are under utilized in my view.

Today we have enormous number of cyber warriors that are state sponsored. China has a huge army, so does USA, Israel, Iran to name a few.

It is time that India is much more active and build up its expertise.
 
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