Shows
Lex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E20- Encryption RightsThe two active shooter terrorist attack in San Bernardino became into a high-tech case when the phone of one of the shooters was obtained by police, which couldn’t open it because of encryption. This turned into a legal battle between the state and Apple, the creator of the phone, who were asked - and refused - to give access to the phone and to the information on it. This has inspired a lot of research and discussion of what rights we have as users for encryption for password protection, and should it be circumvented in the case of cr...
2020-09-2133 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E19-Online Hate SpeechFreedom of speech is almost a sacred thing in the US and revered in many democratic countries. But in recent years, there is talk of its abuse to propagate hate speech online, and the need to limit it as a result.
What is hate speech (or dangerous speech), what’s unique about it online, what are its real dangers, how should it be dealt with, and at what cost?
All this in this episode of the Lex Cybernetica, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Federmann Cyber Security Research Center’s podcas...
2020-09-0628 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E18- AccountabillityLegal accountability means that an unlawful act does not go with impunity. When a state carries out a cyber operation against another state, it’s accountable under international law towards the international community. However, international law doesn’t always have teeth to hold the rogue actor accountable. Additional challenges include attributing the act to a state, which might be using proxy groups and technology to conceal its identity and the actions themselves; and even the mere definition of a rogue act in cyberspace, using tools from the kinetic world.
We discuss all that in this episode of Lex C...
2020-07-2433 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E17-Human Decision MakerCan we trust decisions made by algorithms? Those are utilized by managers to choose employees, judges to give verdicts, and much more.
While algorithms are often considered unbiased, or at least less biased than humans, they are in truth as biased as the data-sets that they were trained on, and as they were programmed to be - by oversight or design.
The problems with AI decision making, and the right to have a human decision maker in the loop, are the subject of this episode of Lex Cybernetica, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Federmann Cyber...
2020-07-0230 min2020-05-1032 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E15 - Cyber InsuranceWhile cyber threats have been around for decades, cyber insurance is still a fledgling, mainly American, $4-6 bn industry, that's estimated to grow to $20 bn by 2025.
In Israel, only 13% of local companies have cyber insurance, according to a June 2019 survey of executives, decision makers and insurance companies by the Israel National Cyber Directorate (Hebrew press release). The main reasons for not having such insurance are lack of awareness to cyber threats and a lack of financial viability. Many executives in the industry, agriculture, construction and retail said they didn’t know cyber insurance even existed.
Wha...
2020-04-0532 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E14 – Vulnerability of Smart MedicineWho would you prefer tell you when your loved one is going to die? Annalisia Wilharm had a telerobodoctor on wheels deliver the sad news of her grandfather Ernest Quintana’s terminality. Two days later he died of lung failure, at 79. “This secure video technology is a live conversation with a physician using tele-video technology, and always with a nurse or other physician in the room to explain the purpose and function of the technology,” Michelle Gaskill-Hames, SVP and area manager for Kaiser Permanente Greater Southern Alameda County, told the Mercury News. “It does not, and did not, replace ongoing in-perso...
2020-02-0232 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E13 – Smart and Autonomous CarsOn average, 3,287 people are killed every day in car accidents, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Elaine Herzberg was one of them, when, on the evening of March 18, 2018, as she was pushing her bicycle across the road outside the crosswalk in Tempe, Arizona, a car fatally hit her. Herzberg had the dubious honor of being the first pedestrian ever to be killed by an autonomous car.
Autonomous cars are supposed to be safer than human drivers, but we still worry about them more. That’s not merely a tech or security issue, but a psychological one. We need to kn...
2019-11-0628 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E12 – The Human Factor in Cyber Crime and Cyber Security Mitigation Clone this book pageHacker Kevin Mitnick’s infamous social engineering escapades, where he’d call up companies and convince employees to surrender information he would later use to hack their systems, took advantage of people’s, rather than computer systems’, weaknesses. Cybersecurity is not a purely technical issue, but also, and arguably, mostly, a social one. One of the missions cyber criminologists have is to understand why some people become hacking victims while others don’t, and why hackers hack.
Take, for example, the rudimentary system of password protection. If a service provides an initial default password and doesn’t require changing it, many people...
2019-10-2223 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E11 – Ecosystem and Cyber ConflictsA healthy innovation ecosystem is crucial for states to handle cybersecurity threats. Traditional methods and procedures simply will not do. “After a couple of years, if you're successful, you'll have a solution, for example the Iron Dome”, explains Dr. Amit Sheniak of the Federmann Cyber Security Center, the Truman Institute, and the Davis Institute. “Until you did that long process, went through all the bureaucracy – the change already evolved, moved on, inflicted harm, and you couldn't mitigate it. Hence, governments understand today that the way to tackle those threats in terms of research and development is to create some kind of outso...
2019-09-0127 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E10 – Artificial IntelligenceWe hear a lot about AI and how it's going to change our lives - or even destroy them. How does the legal system deal with having AI integrated into our lives? Prof. Karen Eltis, a full Professor of Law (professeure titulaire) at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ottawa and research associate at the Federmann Cyber Security Center – Cyber Law Program, says that cyberspace diminished or removed two main pillars of traditional law - territory and intermediaries. She also wants to dispel AI myths, saying “It’s like the Wizard of OZ and the man behind the curtai...
2019-08-0526 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica Interview E06 – Prof. Yuval ShanyState actors abuse the ability to cyberattack anonymously or through proxies, which allows them to evade the consequences and avoid retaliation. Before we determine what we should and should not do in reaction to a cyberattack, we need to make sure we correctly attribute it to its source.
“Currently, one of the predicaments is that states are able to do very bad things and get away with it, scot free”, says Prof. Yuval Shany, the head of The Federmann Cyber Security Center – Cyber Law Program and the chair of the UN Human Rights Committee.
There are currently no international agencies respon...
2019-07-0937 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E09 – Big Data and Information SecurityBig data is used, among other things, in cybersecurity research. Take, for example, Dr. Amit Rechavi‘s research, tracking different hacking activities in order to supply policymakers with state attribution of malicious hackers.
We often put our trust in data-based information and decisions, but even data has inherent bias in it, which stems from what data we decided to collect, the way the data was collected, as well as how it was analyzed. Dr. Guy Katz explains how this happens and what can be done to address this.
Another problem with big data is its potential to harm our privacy, no...
2019-06-0224 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E08 – Military Application of Human Enhancement TechnologiesWhat is human enhancement? One way to define it is to compare it to therapeutic measures, explains Prof. Noam Lubell, a professor of international law at the University of Essex, research associate at the Hebrew University Federmann Cyber Law Program and Swiss chair of humanitarian law at the Geneva Academy. "Your glasses or contact lenses would be therapeutic, because they bring us up to the norm. Enhanced would be if you had an implant which gave you night vision or let you see beyond 2KM into the distance".
Human enhancement has military applications, from giving soldiers exoskeletons to connecting their...
2019-05-0125 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica Interview E05 – Prof. David MaimonProf. David Maimon is the guest of this episode of Lex Cybernetica, Prof. Maimon is an Associate Professor in the department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Georgia State University. His research interests include cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crimes and experimental research methods. His current research focuses on computer hacking and the progression of system trespassing events, online deception and fraud, computer networks vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, and decision-making process in cyberspace.
In his interview, Maimon points the finger at cybersecurity companies and experts who don’t use evidence based proof to their tools’ effectiveness, and says there’s not enough good d...
2019-04-0138 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica Interview E04 – Dr. Tehilla Shwartz AltshulerThe Israeli elections are imminent, and so are the threats to our democracy. The threat comes from hackers, who may try to harm the elections or divert the results, and from digital information manipulators, spreading fake news and propaganda. Election hacking is just one example of the cyberthreats to our way of life. Another is the threat to our privacy from governments and corporations. GDPR and other privacy laws try to strengthen our control over our personal data. But are we also to take responsibility as individuals? One of the main bodies that’s in charge of our cybersecurity is th...
2019-03-0335 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica Interview E03 – Prof. Michael SchapiraThe Internet works, but we’d like it to work better. But fixing it is not as easy as it would have been when it was just a fledgeling academic network. For the last decade, Prof. Michael Schapira has been tackling one really essential part of it - securing Internet routing. Apparently, it’s currently based on trust. What could possibly go wrong?
Another pet peeve of Schapira's is time. Specifically, how to use the web to accurately synchronize one’s computer or cellular clock. His suggested solution: an app called Chronos.
Prof. Michael Schapira, an associate professor at the School...
2019-02-1044 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica Interview E02 – Prof. Noam LubellCyberwar, What is it Cybergood For?
While most cyberattacks are civil ones, the discussion about them has been militarized very early on. This is a problem, according to Prof. Noam Lubell, because the consequences are that most of the discussion of regulation of cyber security focuses on the branch of law that deals with military operations. Prof. Lubell is co-author of an article about how AI and machine learning can help states decide whether to resort to force and go to war.
Another issue on Prof. Lubell’s mind is human enhancement in the battlefield. Enhancement as in technologies that im...
2019-01-0128 min
Lex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E07 – Digital Rights and ActivismThe departure of both WhatsApp founders from Facebook, who bought their chat app in 2014 for $19.3 billion, had to do with user rights, and in a broader view, digital rights. Jan Koum left earlier this year over disagreements with Facebook, which attempted to use users’ personal data and weaken the app’s encryption, according to the Washington Post.
A few months earlier, in late 2017, Brian Acton announced leaving Whatsapp to form a new foundation. In early 2018 Acton and Moxie Marlinspike, developer of the Signal Protocol and the Signal app, announced the Signal Foundation, which Acton gave $50 milllion to establish and will exec...
2018-12-0253 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E06 – Surveillance“Unplug your Alexa devices right now, you're being hacked” was the warning Danielle (last name withheld) got when she picked up the phone recently. On the other side was one of her husband's employees, who’d received a recording of the couple’s conversation - “You sat there talking about hardwood floors”. This evil machination was carried out - due to “an extremely rare occurrence”, according to Amazon’s comment to KIRO-TV - by the couple’s aptly named Amazon Echo, a constantly-eavesdropping machine people for some reason welcome into their homes.
A basic couple normie-talking about hardwood floors is unfortunately not cr...
2018-10-2840 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica Interview E01 – Prof. Aviv ZoharProf. Aviv Zohar is an associate prof. at The School of Engineering and Computer Science at The Hebrew University and The Chief Scientist at QED-it. His research interests include the economics of computational systems and protocols, cryptocurrencies, multi-agent systems, game theory, mechanism design, and networks.
In his interview, Zohar gives a Cryptocurrency-101, then explains some of the cyberthreats they are susceptible to, including brute force attacks, double spending, exchange raids, stolen cold wallets, and 51% attacks. He also talks about the regulatory problems with cryptocurrencies - for example, if the bank, or exchange, loses all your crypto - whose responsibility is...
2018-09-1535 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E05 – Fake NewsFake news is not a new concept, but it has been amplified by the internet and technology ecosphere. Fake news, such as the infamous Pizzagate story, can travel halfway around the World Wide Web in first-class seats while the truth is putting on its leather journalism shoes. The proliferation – or, to load the terminology, propagation – of the black-and-white-and-read-all-over plague has a clear culprit: Facebook.
To its credit, Facebook, while stubbornly insisting it’s a tech and not a media company, and whose founder Mark Zuckerberg downplayed fake news’s effect on the presidential elections, does attempt to kill fake news on its e...
2018-07-2624 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E04 – Cyber Terrorism: Profiling and Human RightsLate last year, a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli police, who found out that he had posted an image of himself on Facebook next to a tractor, a work vehicle weaponized by Palestinian lone wolf attackers to lethal affect in recent years, and captioned it with an a threat of a slaughter, presumably of Jews. What perfect pre-crime profiling.
Profiling is something we do all the time. As soon as we see a person (or an animal), we immediately, automatically, subconsciously make a profile in our head – are they a friend or a foe, will they try to kill us...
2018-06-1027 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E03 – Privacy and the GDPRIdentified only by his surname, Ao was caught in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, 90 kilometers from his Zhangshu home. He was reportedly shocked when police got hold of him, because he was singled out by facial recognition technology at a Jacky Cheung concert, which he complacently attended with his wife and a 50-thousand strong audience. He said he wouldn’t have gone had he known the police would be able to Where’s Waldo him. Another shocking, tech-driven privacy invading was at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the personal Facebook data of 87 million users’ were compromised, among them the data o...
2018-05-0728 min2018-04-2525 minLex Cybernetica PodcastLex Cybernetica E01 – The Tallinn ManualNo paying of bills online. No appealing of fines. No reporting of hazards. No court sessions. No applying for municipal positions. No free WiFi for tourists at the airport. This is what life was like for Atlantans for over a week after a ransomware cyberattack was waged on the city government of the capital of Georgia, USA, on March 22, 2018. Cybersec experts hired by the city claim the attackers come from the SamSam hacking crew. And what did the initiators of what the New York Times called “one of the most sustained and consequential cyberattacks ever mounted against a major American ci...
2018-03-2828 min