Structure News: Ever wonder how many NSA breaches have we have NOT heard about?

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where We're Following All The Polls August 19th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about how the NSA just made us all less secure, Art Coviello's decades of security wisdom, and Intel's bet on chips for artificial intelligence systems. BIG PICTURE You had one job, National Security Agency. The U.S. government organization charged with keeping our national secrets secure suffered an embarrassing loss this week, when it emerged that several of its offensive hacking tools had been stolen and released on the web. They include exploits that could be used to bypass firewalls and take control of routers made by companies like Cisco and Juniper, according to a good, basic Bloomberg explainer of what appears to have happened. And there's a solid chance there might be more where that came from. We'll probably never know exactly what happened, since there's a near-zero chance the NSA will acknowledge the incident. The usual suspects (Russia, China) were flagged, and given that the tools are a few years old, several of the software flaws have probably been fixed. (Bloomberg reported that Cisco found one new flaw, but had long ago fixed another flaw leaked in the breach.) While this leak probably won't turn into a security disaster (for now, anyway), it's still regrettable. Last week we talked about how Microsoft's Windows key leak made laughable government arguments that tech companies should produce "magic keys" that would only be used for good. This is worse: if it's going to be U.S. policy to exploit software flaws to gather intelligence, that's one thing, but failing to secure the tools used to exploit those flaws -- ostensibly in the name of protecting the nation -- actually puts us all more at risk. Most of us aren't trying to play cyber Game of Thrones. We're trying to operate businesses that grow more dependent on software and connectivity every day. And if we're lucky enough to grow those operations into big businesses, we'll have the pleasure of fending off attacks written by criminals inspired by hacking tools created with our taxpayer dollars. Oren Falkowitz -- Area1 Security CEO, former NSA employee, and future Structure Security speaker -- told ABC News that it's unlikely the NSA was hacked directly; more likely, somebody left a laptop in a car (again),a third-party contractor screwed up, or there's a new Snowden. I think it's safe to say another security review is well underway at the NSA. STRUCTURE NEWS FORMER RSA CHAIRMAN ART COVIELLO: SECURITY IS TOO CONFUSING, AND THAT NEEDS TO CHANGE We've been very lucky to have the services of Art Coviello (pictured)as we've prepared the agenda for Structure Security, and I had a chance to sit down with the former RSA executive this week to discuss the current state of security and preview his opening talk at the conference. More and more people are embracing a risk-analysis-first approach to securing their organizations, but implementing that strategy has proven more difficult than anybody would like. Structure Security will take place September 27th and 28th at the beautiful Golden Gate Club in San Francisco's Presidio district. In addition to Art and Oren, we have some of the best minds in information security and technology scheduled to speak, including Niloofar Howe, now running strategy for Art's former company, Intel's Scott Montgomery, and Arlette Hart of the FBI, who is likely having some interesting conversations this week. More information can be found here, and you can register for tickets here. INDUSTRY NEWS ORACLE BETTING ON MASS DATA MIGRATION TO THE CLOUD It's fashionable (and usually quite correct) to ding Oracle as it scrambles to navigate the transition to the cloud computing era. Buteven though we're getting ready to put on our ninth Structure cloud event this November, there is still a lot of time to carve out a cloud business, as Steve Daheb of Oracle argues in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. GOOGLE STARTED ON SELF-DRIVING CARS BEFORE UBER EXISTED, BUT UBER IS GETTING TO CUSTOMERS FIRST One of the most promising applications of artificial intelligence research is the developmentof self-driving vehicles, and Uber took a big step toward that future this week with plans to operate a fleet of self-driving (but closely supervised) cars in Pittsburgh. Recode analyzes the competitive forces driving Google, Uber and all of us toward autonomousvehicles, which are so close and so far away at the same time. CIA OFFICIAL: 'CLOUD HAS BEEN A GODSEND' In other secretive government agency news, it appears the CIA-Amazon Web Services cloud deal is working out pretty well for everybody. Sherril Nicely, the chief information security officer of the CIA, gave AWS quite the pull quote for its Re:Invent conference by declaring the service a "godsend" when it comes to securing sensitive workloads, as reported by NextGov. INTEL UNVEILS NEXT-GENERATION XEON PHI CHIPS FOR AI It was Intel Developer Forum week in San Francisco, and while the biggest news might have been Intel's deal with ARM to start making ARM-based chips in its factories, the company also showed that it is starting to produce much more flexible chips than in the past. Venturebeat reports that Intel plans to launch new server processors designed specifically for artificial intelligence, and Baidu is already on board as a customer. THE NEXT WAVE OF AI IS ROOTED IN HUMAN CULTURE AND HISTORY Speaking of Intel and artificial intelligence, Engadget has a nice interview with Intel's Genevieve Bell this week on the future of AI. Bell, who has brought a human touch to Intel's chip research for years, has some interesting thoughts on how well manage the rise of artificial intelligence and why humanity isnt exactly about to disappear. THE DIRTIEST LITTLE SECRET ABOUT BIG DATA: JOBS Data is the lifeblood of the modern tech industry, but using the tools required to unlock the power of that data is still harder than it should be. ZDNet returns to something we discussed earlier this year at Structure Data: way too many data-driven analysis tools require a ton of human intervention to make sure the data being put into the system is clean and relevant, and that's a waste of time and money. QUOTE OF THE WEEK This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove US responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server." Edward Snowden, former NSA employee of some renown Click here to unsubscribe from this list. 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