Stopping the Cybersecurity ‘Spiral of Death’

Jeff Yastine

Editor, Total Wealth Insider

Contributor's Links: Banyan Hill Publishing

Jeff “JL” Yastine is the editor of Total Wealth Insider. He first joined Banyan Hill Publishing as editorial director in 2015, bringing with him more than two decades of experience as a stock market investor and financial journalist at the center of financial world events. Jeff is also a weekly contributor to Banyan Hill’s Sovereign Investor Daily and Winning Investor Daily, helping investors understand business, economic and monetary trends, and highlighting the profit-making opportunities brought to light by our financial editors. An Emmy-nominated anchor and correspondent at PBS Nightly Business Report from 1994 to 2010, Jeff has interviewed and learned the investing secrets of some of the most successful financiers and entrepreneurs of the era, such as Warren Buffett, Michael Dell, Sir Richard Branson and many others. Jeff’s reporting also helped identify successful investment opportunities in small-cap growth stocks and large company turnarounds, as well as across a wide variety of sectors, from “big box” retail to agriculture and developments in the biopharmaceutical sector. Jeff’s reporting helped warn investors about the real estate crisis of the mid-2000s and the unsustainable rise of the 2000 dot-com bubble. He also reported on major national events such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the financial impacts of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the influence of foreign automakers as they built new manufacturing plants in the southeastern United States and the historic handover of the Panama Canal in 1999. Jeff also visited Cuba twice, in 1994 and 2003, to report on the role of foreign investors on that nation’s economy. Jeff was nominated for a 2007 Business Emmy Award for his reporting on America’s underfunded system of roads, bridges and other forms of public infrastructure. He was also part of a 2002 team of NBR journalists who won the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants’ Excellence in Financial Journalism Award for a half-hour special report on the nation’s bond market.less

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Stopping the Cybersecurity ‘Spiral of Death’

Date: Wednesday, November 1, 2017 2:17 PM EDT

We can learn plenty about where the cybersecurity world is headed by following a lesson from history…

A century ago, the fledgling industry of aviation had a problem — and it was getting people killed.

According to an edition of Popular Mechanics from that era…

Four fliers died in 1909.
Thirty-two pilot deaths in 1910.
Seventy-seven fatalities in 1911.
One hundred forty pilot deaths in 1912.
Nearly 200 by 1913.

The problem?

In many cases, pilot fatigue and disorientation. Their arms grew tired steering the underpowered, fabric-and-wood, open-cockpit biplanes through buffeting winds. Or they’d fly into a fogbank, lose their bearings and unknowingly descend lower and lower until hitting the ground. Pilots called it the “spiral of death.”

The solution?

Automation and cockpit instruments. In 1914, a father-son inventor team, Elmer and Lawrence Sperry, developed the first autopilot device, and later, the “artificial horizon.” The first altimeters were introduced in the early 1920s.

By 1929, Army Lt. Jimmy Doolittle — during World War II, Lieutenant General Doolittle, leader of the famous 1942 raid on the Japanese homeland — made the first “instrument flight” in which he flew and landed a plane while inside a blacked-out cockpit.

The world of online security appears to be following a similar path…

More automation. Fewer people. Fewer problems.

The Advent of Automated Cybersecurity

In August, the Pentagon — worried about leaks of military and intelligence secrets — purchased a revolutionary cybersecurity technology dubbed “Mayhem,” developed by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University.

What’s so revolutionary about it?

They programmed a supercomputer to automate the entire process of finding unpatched security flaws and bugs.

So instead of waiting for a human hacker to find and exploit an unnoticed vulnerability in a vast corporate computer system, the Mayhem software constantly roams about the system on its own to identify — and fix — those weak points first.

The Mayhem team first gained fame last year, when it won a $2 million competition sponsored by DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — to develop an “all-machine cyber hacking system” to defend computer networks from hackers.

It’s also the reason a publication like MIT Technology Review named the Carnegie Mellon team — now spun out of the university as a private firm called ForAllSecure — one of its “50 Smartest Companies.”

ForAllSecure is the first enterprise to develop such a technology, but you can bet it won’t be the last. Companies with advanced artificial intelligence capabilities will be at the forefront of such groundbreaking endeavors — Total Wealth Insider has one such company in its portfolio already.

The advent of artificial intelligence and automated software analysis will go a long way toward solving cybersecurity’s most intractable problem.

Kind regards,

Jeff L. Yastine
Editor, Total Wealth Insider

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