The 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 criminal offenses, and how.   We talk about this and mor ..read more

Freedom 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 podcast, with Susan Benesch, Executive Director of The Dangerous Speech Project, Faculty Associat ..read more

Legal 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 ..read more

Can 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 Security Center’s podcast, with Prof. Helmut Aust ..read more

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While 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 c ..read more

Who 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, replac ..read more

On 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 know someone is responsi ..read more

Hacker 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 pass ..read more

A 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 ..read more