Grafana Labs launches observability stack for enterprise customers

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Grafana Labs has created an open-source observability trifecta that includes Prometheus for monitoring, Loki for logging and Tempo for tracing. Today, the company announced it was releasing enterprise versions of these open-source projects in a unified stack designed specifically for the needs of large companies.

Company CEO Raj Dutt says that this product is really aimed at the largest companies in the world, who crave control over their software. “We’re really going after at-scale users who want a cutting-edge observability platform based on these leading open-source projects. And we are adding a lot of feature differentiation in the enterprise version along with 24/7 support from the experts, from the people who have actually created software,” he said.

Among those features is a set of plug-ins that lets these large customers pull data into the platform from leading enterprise software companies, including Splunk, New Relic, MongoDB and Snowflake. The Enterprise Stack also provides enhanced authentication and security.

Dutt calls this product self-managed to contrast it with the managed cloud versions of the product the company already has been offering for some time. “We have two main products, Grafana Cloud and now Grafana Enterprise Stack. Grafana Cloud is our hosted deployment model, and the Grafana Enterprise Stack is essentially licensed software that customers are free to run however they want, whether that’s on prem, in a colocation company like Equinix or on the cloud vendor of their choice,” Dutt explained.

Grafana Labs adds a free tier to its managed observability platform

They can also mix and match their deployments across the cloud or on-prem in a hybrid style, and the large enterprise customers that the company is going after with this product should like that flexibility. “It also allows them to hybridize their deployments, so they may decide to use the cloud for metrics, but their logs contain a lot of sensitive information [and they want to deploy that on prem]. And since it’s a composable stack, they may have a hybrid deployment that’s partly in the cloud and partly on prem,” he said.

When you combine this new enterprise version with the managed cloud version that already exists, it gives Grafana another potentially large revenue source. The open-source products act as a driver, giving Grafana a way into these companies, and Dutt says they know of more than 700,000 instances of the open-source products in use across the world.

While the open-source business model usually only turns a fraction of these users into paying customers, having numbers like this gives the company a huge head start and it’s gotten the attention of investors. The company has already raised over $75 million, including a $24 million Series A 2019 and a $50 million Series B in 2020.

Grafana Labs nabs $24M Series A for open source-based data analytics stack

With software markets getting bigger, will more VCs bet on competing startups?

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This morning I covered three funding rounds. One dealt with the no-code/low-code space, another focused on the OKR software market and the last dealt with a company in the consumer investing space. Worth a combined $420 million, the investments made for a contentedly busy morning.

But they also got me thinking about startup niches and competition. Back in the days when inside rounds were bad, SPACs were jokes and crypto a fever dream, there was lots of noise about investors who declined to place competing bets in any particular startup market.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

This rule of thumb still holds up today, but we need to update it. The general sentiment that investors shouldn’t back competing companies is still on display, as we saw Sequoia walk away from a check it put into Finix after it became clear that the smaller company was too competitive with Stripe, another portfolio company.

But as startups get more broad and stay private longer, the space into which VCs can invest may narrow — especially if they have a big winner that stays private while building both horizontally and vertically (like Stripe, for example).

Does that mean Sequoia can’t invest elsewhere in fintech? No, but it does limit their investing playing field.

Which is dumb as hell. Nothing that Sequoia could invest in today is really going to slow Stripe’s IPO, unless the company decides to not go public for a half-decade. Which would be lunacy, even for today’s live-at-home-with-the-parents startup culture that leans toward staying private over going public.

Microsoft’s Dapr open-source project to help developers build cloud-native apps hits 1.0

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Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open-source project that aims to make it easier for developers to build event-driven, distributed cloud-native applications, hit its 1.0 milestone today, signifying the project’s readiness for production use cases. Microsoft launched the Distributed Application Runtime (that’s what “Dapr” stand for) back in October 2019. Since then, the project released 14 updates and the community launched integrations with virtually all major cloud providers, including Azure, AWS, Alibaba and Google Cloud.

The goal for Dapr, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told me, was to democratize cloud-native development for enterprise developers.

“When we go look at what enterprise developers are being asked to do — they’ve traditionally been doing client, server, web plus database-type applications,” he noted. “But now, we’re asking them to containerize and to create microservices that scale out and have no-downtime updates — and they’ve got to integrate with all these cloud services. And many enterprises are, on top of that, asking them to make apps that are portable across on-premises environments as well as cloud environments or even be able to move between clouds. So just tons of complexity has been thrown at them that’s not specific to or not relevant to the business problems they’re trying to solve.”

And a lot of the development involves re-inventing the wheel to make their applications reliably talk to various other services. The idea behind Dapr is to give developers a single runtime that, out of the box, provides the tools that developers need to build event-driven microservices. Among other things, Dapr provides various building blocks for things like service-to-service communications, state management, pub/sub and secrets management.

Image Credits: Dapr

“The goal with Dapr was: let’s take care of all of the mundane work of writing one of these cloud-native distributed, highly available, scalable, secure cloud services, away from the developers so they can focus on their code. And actually, we took lessons from serverless, from Functions-as-a-Service where with, for example Azure Functions, it’s event-driven, they focus on their business logic and then things like the bindings that come with Azure Functions take care of connecting with other services,” Russinovich said.

He also noted that another goal here was to do away with language-specific models and to create a programming model that can be leveraged from any language. Enterprises, after all, tend to use multiple languages in their existing code, and a lot of them are now looking at how to best modernize their existing applications — without throwing out all of their current code.

As Russinovich noted, the project now has more than 700 contributors outside of Microsoft (though the core commuters are largely from Microsoft) and a number of businesses started using it in production before the 1.0 release. One of the larger cloud providers that is already using it is Alibaba. “Alibaba Cloud has really fallen in love with Dapr and is leveraging it heavily,” he said. Other organizations that have contributed to Dapr include HashiCorp and early users like ZEISS, Ignition Group and New Relic.

And while it may seem a bit odd for a cloud provider to be happy that its competitors are using its innovations already, Russinovich noted that this was exactly the plan and that the team hopes to bring Dapr into a foundation soon.

“We’ve been on a path to open governance for several months and the goal is to get this into a foundation. […] The goal is opening this up. It’s not a Microsoft thing. It’s an industry thing,” he said — but he wasn’t quite ready to say to which foundation the team is talking.

Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

 

U.S. Indicts North Korean Hackers in Theft of $200 Million

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The U.S. Justice Department today unsealed indictments against three men accused of working with the North Korean regime to carry out some of the most damaging cybercrime attacks over the past decade, including the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures, the global WannaCry ransomware contagion of 2017, and the theft of roughly $200 million and attempted theft of more than $1.2 billion from banks and other victims worldwide.

Investigators with the DOJ, U.S. Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security told reporters on Wednesday the trio’s activities involved extortion, phishing, direct attacks on financial institutions and ATM networks, as well as malicious applications that masqueraded as software tools to help people manage their cryptocurrency holdings.

Prosecutors say the hackers were part of an effort to circumvent ongoing international financial sanctions against the North Korean regime. The group is thought to be responsible for the attempted theft of approximately $1.2 billion, although it’s unclear how much of that was actually stolen.

Confirmed thefts attributed to the group include the 2016 hacking of the SWIFT payment system for Bangladesh Bank, which netted thieves $81 million; $6.1 million in a 2018 ATM cash out scheme targeting a Pakistani bank; and a total of $112 million in virtual currencies stolen between 2017 and 2020 from cryptocurrency companies in Slovenia, Indonesia and New York.

“The scope of the criminal conduct by the North Korean hackers was extensive and longrunning, and the range of crimes they have committed is staggering,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Tracy L. Wilkison for the Central District of California. “The conduct detailed in the indictment are the acts of a criminal nation-state that has stopped at nothing to extract revenge and obtain money to prop up its regime.”

The indictments name Jon Chang Hyok (a.k.a “Alex/Quan Jiang”), Kim Il (a.k.a. “Julien Kim”/”Tony Walker”), and Park Jin Hyok (a.k.a. Pak Jin Hek/Pak Kwang Jin). U.S. prosecutors say the men were members of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), an intelligence division of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) that manages the state’s clandestine operations.

The Justice Department says those indicted were members of a DPRK-sponsored cybercrime group variously identified by the security community as the Lazarus Group and Advanced Persistent Threat 38 (APT 38). The government alleges the men reside in North Korea but were frequently stationed by the DPRK in other countries, including China and Russia.

Park was previously charged in 2018 in connection with the WannaCry and Sony Pictures attacks. But today’s indictments expanded the range of crimes attributed to Park and his alleged co-conspirators, including cryptocurrency thefts, phony cryptocurrency investment schemes and apps, and efforts to launder the proceeds of their crimes.

Prosecutors in California also today unsealed an indictment against Ghaleb Alaumary, a 37-year-old from Mississauga, Ontario who pleaded guilty in November 2020 to charges of laundering tens of millions of dollars stolen by the DPRK hackers.

The accused allegedly developed and marketed a series of cryptocurrency applications that were advertised as tools to help people manage their crypto holdings. In reality, prosecutors say, the programs were malware or downloaded malware after the applications were installed.

A joint cyber advisory from the FBI, the Treasury and DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) delves deeper into these backdoored cryptocurrency apps, a family of malware activity referred to as “AppleJeus. “Hidden Cobra” is the collective handle assigned to the hackers behind the AppleJeus malware.

“In most instances, the malicious application—seen on both Windows and Mac operating systems—appears to be from a legitimate cryptocurrency trading company, thus fooling individuals into downloading it as a third-party application from a website that seems legitimate,” the advisory reads. “In addition to infecting victims through legitimate-looking websites, HIDDEN COBRA actors also use phishing, social networking, and social engineering techniques to lure users into downloading the malware.”

The alert notes that these apps have been posing as cryptocurrency trading platforms since 2018, and have been tied to cryptocurrency thefts in more than 30 countries.

Image: CISA.

For example, the DOJ indictments say these apps were involved in stealing $11.8 million in August 2020 from a financial services company based in New York. Warrants obtained by the government allowed the FBI to seize roughly $1.9 million from two different cryptocurrency exchanges used by the hackers, money that investigators say will be returned to the New York financial services firm.

Other moneymaking and laundering schemes attributed to the North Korean hackers include the development and marketing of an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017 called Marine Chain Token.

That blockchain-based cryptocurrency offering promised early investors the ability to purchase “fractional ownership in marine shipping vessels,” which the government says was just another way for the North Korean government to “secretly obtain funds from investors, control interests in marine shipping vessels, and evade U.S. sanctions.”

A copy of the indictments is available here (PDF).

Bluetooth Overlay Skimmer That Blocks Chip

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As a total sucker for anything skimming-related, I was interested to hear from a reader working security for a retail chain in the United States who recently found Bluetooth-enabled skimming devices placed over top of payment card terminals at several stores. Interestingly, these skimmers interfered with the terminal’s ability to read chip-based cards, forcing customers to swipe the stripe instead.

The payment card skimmer overlay transmitted stolen data via Bluetooth, physically blocked chip-based transactions, and included a PIN pad overlay.

Here’s a closer look at the electronic gear jammed into these overlay skimmers. It includes a hidden PIN pad overlay that captures, stores and transmits via Bluetooth data from cards swiped through the machine, as well as PINs entered on the device:

The hidden magnetic stripe reader is in the bottom left, just below the Bluetooth circuit board. A PIN pad overlay (center) intercepts any PINs entered by customers; the cell phone battery (right) powers all of the components.

My reader source shared these images on condition that the retailer in question not be named. But it’s worth pointing out these devices can be installed on virtually any customer-facing payment terminal in the blink of eye.

Newer, chip-based payment cards are more costly and difficult for thieves to clone, but virtually all cards still store card data on a magnetic stripe on the back of the cards — mainly for reasons of backwards compatibility. This overlay skimmer included a physical component designed to block the payment terminal from reading the chip, forcing the customer to swipe the stripe instead of dip the chip.

The magnetic stripe reader (top right) worked with a component designed to block the use of chip-based payment cards.

What’s remarkable is that these badboys went undetected for several weeks, particularly given that customers would have been forced to swipe.

“In this COVID19 world, with counter and terminal wipedowns frequent it was surprising that nobody noticed the overlay placements for a number of weeks,” the source said.

I realize a great many people use debit cards for everyday purchases, but I’ve never been interested in assuming the added risk and pay for everything with cash or a credit card. Armed with your PIN and debit card data, thieves can clone the card and pull money out of your account at an ATM. Having your checking account emptied of cash while your bank sorts out the situation can be a huge hassle and create secondary problems (bounced checks, for instance).

Want to learn more about overlay skimmers? Check out these other posts:

How to Spot Ingenico Self-Checkout Skimmers

Self-Checkout Skimmers Go Bluetooth

More on Bluetooth Ingenico Overlay Skimmers

Safeway Self-Checkout Skimmers Up Close

Skimmers Found at Wal-Mart: A Closer Look

The Series A deal that launched a near unicorn: Meet Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig

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The only people who truly understand a relationship are the ones who are in it. Luckily for us, we’re going to have a candid conversation with both parties in the relationship between Ironclad CEO and cofounder Jason Boehmig and his investor and board member Accel partner Steve Loughlin.

Loughlin led Ironclad’s Series A deal back in 2017, making it one of his first Series A deals after returning to Accel.

This episode of Extra Crunch Live goes down on Wednesday at 3pm ET/12pm PT, just like usual.

We’ll talk to the duo about how they met, what made them ‘choose’ each other, and how they’ve operated as a duo since. How they built trust, maintain honesty, and talk strategy are also on the table as part of the discussion.

Loughlin was an entrepreneur before he was an investor, founding RelateIQ (an Accel-backed company) in 2011. The company was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 for $390 million and later became Salesforce IQ. Loughlin then “came back home” to Accel in 2016, and has led investments in companies like Airkit, Ascend.io, Clockwise, Ironclad, Monte Carlo, Nines, Productiv, Split.io, and Vivun.

Not entirely unsurprising for a man who has dominated the legal tech sphere, Jason Boehmig is a California barred attorney who practiced law at Fenwick & West and was also an adjunct professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. Ironclad launched in 2014 and today the company has raised more than $180 million and, according to reports, is valued just under $1 billion.

Not only will we peel back the curtain on how this investor/founder relationship works, but we’ll also hear from these two tech leaders on their thoughts around bigger enterprise trends in the ecosystem.

Then, it’s time for the Pitch Deck Teardown. On each episode of Extra Crunch Live, we take a look at pitch decks submitted by the audience and our experienced guests give their live feedback. If you want to throw your hat pitch deck in the ring, you can hit this link to submit your deck for a future episode.

Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque on the value of simple pitch decks

As with just about everything we do here at TechCrunch, audience members can also ask their own questions to our guests.

Extra Crunch Live has left room for you to network (you gotta network to get work, amirite?). Networking is open starting at 2:30pm ET/11:30am PT and stays open a half hour after the episode ends. Make a friend!

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that aims to give founders and tech operators actionable advice and insights from leaders across the tech industry. If you’re not an Extra Crunch member yet, what are you waiting for?

Loughlin and Boehmig join a stellar cast of speakers on Extra Crunch Live, including Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt, as well as Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque. Extra Crunch members can catch every episode of Extra Crunch Live on demand right here.

You can find details for this episode (and upcoming episodes) after the jump below.

See you on Wednesday!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Cybersecurity – Week 7

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The Good

Eight members of a SIM-swapping gang that targeted thousands of U.S. individuals during 2020, including hundreds of social media celebs, musicians and sport stars, have been arrested in the U.K. The gang is thought to have stolen over $100 million by using social engineering lures or malicious insiders to hijack American cell phone accounts.

Having successfully persuaded a carrier to swap the victim’s real SIM number for one controlled by the attackers, the criminals were then able to access a victim’s incoming calls, text and voice messages, personal information, contacts and one-time passwords (OTPs) for sensitive software such as banking apps. The gang also stole Bitcoin from victims as well as hijacking social media accounts to commit further fraud.

The U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were all involved in assisting Britain’s National Crime Agency in the operation. The eight arrested are males aged 18-26 and will face charges under the Computer Misuse Act. They are also expected to be prosecuted for fraud and money laundering, and U.S. prosecutors will be seeking extradition of the accused to the USA.

The Bad

It’s been a week for patching zero days, with both Windows Defender and Google Chrome hitting the headlines for serious vulnerabilities affecting millions of users, both at the Enterprise and Home user levels.

CVE-2021-21148 is a high-severity flaw in Chrome’s JavaScript engine, V8. Although few details have emerged, Google have said that it “is aware of reports that an exploit…exists in the wild”.

Browser zero-days are among the most highly prized by attackers given that for the majority of people browsers are their gateway to the internet, in constant use, and, if a vulnerability includes or can be chained with a sandbox escape, provide a powerful opportunity to take over the entire device. Some reports have speculated that CVE-2021-21148 may be the same vulnerability that Microsoft suggested was being used by the ZINC actors targeting security researchers. Google, however, have not confirmed that at the time of writing.

Speaking of Microsoft, Patch Tuesday came and went this week with the Redwood outfit patching no less than 56 bugs in its software, nine of which are said to be critical and at least one is believed to be actively exploited in the wild. Among the bug fixes was CVE-2021-24092, an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows Defender – the AntiVirus protection that comes installed by default on Windows devices – that had remained undiscovered since 2009.

1. Create a hard link to notepad.exe. 2. Simulate the load of BTR. 3. Notepad.exe is overwritten.

Eagle-eyed researcher Kasif Dekel discovered the vulnerability after noticing that a little-known internal driver, the Boot Time Removal Tool (BTR.sys), doesn’t normally reside on the system but is briefly dropped, activated, and then purged during Defender’s remediation process. Exploring the driver’s internal logic led Dekel to the bug, which potentially affects up to 1 billion devices. That’s the second Windows Defender zero-day discovered in a month.

The Ugly

While Microsoft and their users can be thankful for the hard work of security researchers, there’s little that can be done to protect those who refuse to protect themselves (and the rest of us) by ignoring basic security procedures, like: keep your OS up to date, don’t expose sensitive services directly to the internet (aka use a firewall!) and don’t use and share a common password. While many of us have tried to knock these simple cyber sins out of our nearest and dearest, it goes beyond the unthinkable when those responsible for our critical infrastructure are commiting such potentially deadly errors.

And so it turned out this week that a malicious hacker attempted to poison the drinking water supply of 15,000 residents in Oldsmar, Florida, by increasing the quantity of lye (sodium hydroxide) from the miniscule 100 ppm to a massively dangerous level of 11,100 ppm. The water treatment plant serving Oldmar was being controlled by a SCADA system still running the now-unsupported Windows 7 OS on multiple devices. To make matters worse, according to a State advisory for public water suppliers, the breached system was connected directly to the internet, leaving it exposed to anyone who happened to know or learn its IP address. To top it all, all the SCADA devices had a single password that had been shared among multiple users to facilitate remote logging in via TeamViewer.

The incident is being investigated by the County Sheriff’s office, the FBI and the Secret Service. At this time, it is not known whether the cyber attack was conducted by a foreign or domestic intruder, but with over 150,000 public water systems in the U.S, most of which are said to be underfunded, the need for each and every one to get up to speed with basic cybersecurity practices cannot be overstated.

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Introducing Hack Chat, An Interview Series Hosted By Marco Figueroa

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Hack Chat is a series of live conversations featuring real-life Red Team and Blue Team community leaders who are transforming the industry.

For the past four months, SentinelLabs has been working on a new interview series called Hack Chat, where we profile industry leaders from Red and Blue teams in cybersecurity and dive deep into what it takes to become great at their craft.

Below, Hack Chat host and Principal Threat Researcher at SentinelLabs Marco Figueroa explains the vision behind this innovative new series and gives a taste of what viewers are in store for.

More Than Just Another Podcast

“We know many technology and cybersecurity podcasts already exist in the market, but we wanted to bring something unique to our audience. Rather than having the traditional guest come on for an interview, we wanted to have technical practitioners from the offensive and defensive sides come on and provide insight into their expertise.”

With Some Extraordinary Guests

And the list of guests is a stellar line up of cybersecurity pros who are all leaders in their fields.

“To kick Season One off, I reached out to people that I’ve gotten to know personally over the years at conferences; people that have taught me a lot through conversations and the projects they’ve worked on or created. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know each guest from Season One very well, and I knew that if they had time during their busy schedules to join me for an in-depth conversation about various topics in their field of expertise, it would be a fantastic season.”

Get Ready for Hack Chat Season One!

It all kicks off today with the launch of Hack Chat Season One. We plan to release each Season with six guests: three red teamers and three blue teamers. According to Marco, Hack Chat was created to help cybersecurity professionals explore what it takes to become a cybersecurity expert.

Together with some of the leading practitioners who have inspired the industry in various ways, Marco and guests dive into their research and many other related topics: starting companies, building threat intelligence programs, APT Hunting, tool development, mindfulness, and transformative collaborations that have shifted the industry. The Hack Chat series explores the ins and outs of Red and Blue teaming and discusses the theory and practice that has propelled each of the guests to where they are today.

SentinelLabs is deeply invested in how to bring about knowledge to the cybersecurity community, and we see the Hack Chat series as a medium to help practitioners grow by hearing from leaders who find ways to make remarkable breakthroughs.

Here’s the guest list for Season 1 along with a taste of what you can expect.

HD Moore: The Journey of a Hacker and Entrepreneur

H.D. is a network security expert, open source programmer, and hacker. He is a developer of the Metasploit Framework, a penetration testing software suite, and the founder of the Metasploit Project. He has been referred to as “the industry’s most famous white hat hacker”, as well as an overall good dude.

In this episode of Hack Chat, we discuss what it takes to become good at hacking, and delve into his newest business venture—Rumble.

H.D. Moore
The Journey of a Hacker and Entrepreneur

Watch Trailer

“You really need to know some programming language, it really doesn’t matter the language: Ruby, Java, Javascript, Python, Go be comfortable writing code because there is so many things to do today if you can’t automate it or script it you really can’t understand it well.” – HD Moore, Hack Chat Season 1, Episode 1

JA Guerrero Saade: JAGS Hunting for APTs

Juan is a Cyber Paleontologist who has published game changing reports like Moonlight Maze which has been featured in the Washington D.C spy museum. He is formerly of GReAT, Google, Chronicle, and is the co-founder of Stairwell. Anyone who has seen Juan give a talk will agree he is a master of storytelling and always provides great value.

In this episode of Hack Chat, we discuss all things APT, reports that Juan has published in the past, and what it takes to hone your craft so you can find threat actors.

JA Guerrero Saade
Hunting for APTs

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“Your response is about competence, you want to understand what they came for, understand what it is they got, what potential disruptive power that has to your organization.” – JAAGS, Hack Chat Season 1, Episode 2

Mubix: Keep Asking Questions as a Red Teamer

Mubix is a Red Teamer who is always looking for challenges and willing to learn anything to overcome it. Mubix continues to push the limits of his skills and is one of the most motivating people on Twitter, discussing everything Red Teaming.

In this episode of Hack Chat, we move into the mindset of learning new tools of the trade and how Mubix continues to elevate his skills.

Mubix
Keep Asking Questions as a Red Teamer

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“I learn by doing myself, I ask everyone questions, any blog posts that I see I test and if it doesn’t work I ask why does the things don’t do what it’s supposed to.” – Mubix, Hack Chat Season 1, Episode 3

Chris Cochran: How to Build Threat Intelligence Platforms

Chris Cochran is a cybersecurity professional, leader, and content creator. Chris has extensive experience building and running strong cybersecurity programs and has a deep history and passion for security operations, engineering, and leadership.

In this episode, we dig deep into Threat Intelligence and what it takes to provide value to your stake holders.

Chris Cochran
How to Build Threat Intelligence Platforms

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“Sit down with every stakeholder that can consume intelligence and figure out what it is they need to get their job done.” – Chris Cochran, Hack Chat Season 1, Episode 4

Chris Nickerson: The Red Team Grind & Hustle

Chris Nickerson is an Information Security industry veteran whose main area of expertise is focused on Red Teaming and Adversarial Modeling. In order to help companies better defend and protect their critical data and key information systems, he has created a blended methodology to assess, implement, and manage information security realistically and effectively.

In this episode of Hack Chat, we go into deep conversations about a Red Teamer’s work ethic and dedication to their craft. We also discuss the Sunburst supply chain attack, and Chris gives his insights on how bad this hack was to Solarwinds and the CyberSecurity industry.

Chris Nickerson
The Red Team Grind & Hustle

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“I had great mentors; I’ve done everything that I could to contribute to the community, through a hard work ethic, speaking engagements, helped elevate people” – Chris Nickerson, Hack Chat Season 1, Episode 5

Ronald Eddings: SOARing

Ronald Eddings is an expert in scaling assets and applications on premises and in the cloud. Today’s network architecture creates a degree of complexity that often leads to misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. As a leader in security architecture, Ronald assists organizations scale security controls while reducing complexities that analysts and engineers face.

In this episode of Hack Chat, we go into the importance of Devops automation and how corporate networks need to begin investing in SOAR.

Ronald Eddings
SOARing

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“Really understanding what is your use case, why are you attempting to secure something, what does that mean to you, will help you build a strategy and select the right tools, the right automation for the right strategy and implementation.” – Ronald Eddings, Hack Chat Season 1, Episode 6

So How Do You Get Hack Chat?

We’re sure you’ll agree that a line up like that is going to make for a fantastic season of Hack Chat that you just won’t want to miss!

You can tune in to all the interviews and get notified when each new Hack Chat is out right here.

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Intenseye raises $4M to boost workplace safety through computer vision

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Workplace injuries and illnesses cost the U.S. upwards of $250 billion each year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. ERA-backed startup Intenseye, a machine learning platform, has raised a $4 million seed round to try to bring that number way down in an economic and efficient way.

The round was co-led by Point Nine and Air Street Capital, with participation by angel investors from Twitter, Cortex, Fastly and Even Financial.

Intenseye integrates with existing network-connected cameras within facilities and then uses computer vision to monitor employee health and safety on the job. This means that Intenseye can identify health and safety violations, from not wearing a hard hat to ignoring social distancing protocols and everything in between, in real time.

The service’s dashboard incorporates federal and local workplace safety laws, as well as an individual organization’s rules to monitor worker safety in real time. All told, the Intenseye platform can identify 30 different unsafe behaviors which are common within workplaces. Managers can further customize these rules using a drag-and-drop interface.

When a violation occurs and is spotted, employee health and safety professionals receive an alert immediately, by text or email, to resolve the issue.

Intenseye also takes the aggregate of workplace safety compliance within a facility to generate a compliance score and diagnose problem areas.

The company charges a base deployment fee and then on an annual fee based on the number of cameras the facility wants to use as Intenseye monitoring points.

Co-founder Sercan Esen says that one of the greatest challenges of the business is a technical one: Intenseye monitors workplace safety through computer vision to send EHS (employee health and safety) violation alerts but it also never analyzes faces or identifies individuals, and all video is destroyed on the fly and never stored with Intenseye.

The Intenseye team is made up of 20 people.

“Today, our team at Intenseye is 20% female and 80% male and includes four nationalities,” said Esen. “We have teammates with MSes in computer science and teammates who have graduated from high school.”

Diversity and inclusion among the team is critical at every company, but is particularly important at a company that builds computer vision software.

The company has moved to remote work in the wake of the pandemic and is using VR to build a virtual office and connect workers in a way that’s more immersive than Zoom.

Intenseye is currently deployed across 30 cities and will use the funding to build out the team, particularly in the sales and marketing departments, and deploy go-to-market strategies.

SuperAnnotate, a computer vision platform, partners with OpenCV to spread visual ML

Reduct.Video raises $4M to simplify video editing

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The team at Reduct.Video is hoping to dramatically increase the amount of videos created by businesses.

The startup’s technology is already used by customers including Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman and IDEO. And today, Reduct is announcing that it has raised a $4 million round led by Greylock and South Park Commons, with participation from Figma CEO Dylan Field, Hopin Chief Business Officer Armando Mann and former Twitter exec Elad Gil.

Reduct was founded by CEO Prabhas Pokharel and CTO Robert Ochshorn (both pictured above). Pokharel argued that despite the proliferation of streaming video platforms and social media apps on the consumer side, video remains “underutilized” in a business context, because it simply takes so much time to sort through video footage, much less edit it down into something watchable.

As Pokharel demonstrated for me, Reduct uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing and other technologies to simplify the process by automatically transcribing video footage (users can also pay for professional transcription), then tying that transcript to the video.

“The magic starts there: Once the transcription has been made, every single word is connected to the [corresponding] moment in the video,” he said.

Reduct.Video screenshot

Image Credits: Reduct.Video

That means editing a video is as simple as editing text. (I’ve taken advantage of a similar linkage between text and media in Otter, but Otter is focused on audio and I’ve treated it more as a transcription tool.) It also means you can search through hours of footage for every time a topic is mentioned, then organize, tag and share it.

Pokharel said that AI allows Reduct to simplify parts of the sorting and editing process, like understanding how different search terms might be related. But he doesn’t think the process will ever become fully automated — instead, he compared the product to an “Iron Man suit,” which makes a human editor more powerful.

He also suggested that this approach changes businesses’ perspective on video, and not just by making editing faster and easier.

“Users on Reduct emphasize authenticity over polish, where it’s much more the content of the video that matters,” Pokharel said. He added that Reduct has been “learning from our customers” about what they can do with the product — user research teams can now easily organize and share hundreds of hours of user footage, while marketers can turn customer testimonials and webinars into short, shareable videos.

“Video has been so supply constrained, it’s crazy,” he continued. “There are all these use cases for asynchronous video that [companies] haven’t even bothered with.”

For example, he recalled one customer who said that she used to insist that team members attend a meeting even if there was only two minutes of it that they needed to hear. With Reduct, she can “give them that time back” and just share the parts they need.

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