War – The Intelligent Insider

It is still debatable what should be the name of new ‘death sentence’, covid19, Coronavirus, or Wuhan virus but any name you give it as a data and technology professionals, it is sign of a missed opportunity.

The word ‘death’ does not really match with the word ‘opportunity’, unless you are in the business of war or weapons. However, this is the time data could save millions of lives globally, if we truly use it to make ‘the world a better place.’ Surprised, how?

How big is the problem:

Currently, we all are hiding in our houses globally and it is the 21^st day of lockdown in India and globally, it varies between 1-3 months of lockdown with an uncertain future extension. If you just look at the economics only United States have so far declared a US$ 2.2 trillion stimulus package for the US economy, another 750 billion euros package from Europe. Excluding this all other countries are giving 2-10% of their GDPs as stimulus package.

Why is the virus so dangerous and even more dangerous in comparison with world war 1 & 2? Is it because there is no medicine, there is no vaccine, it is highly contagious, and you cannot see your enemy? No, the more dangerous because it spreads through human to human!

So, it spreads as you touch someone, kiss someone, give a tight hug, or shake your hands. So, to stop the virus, you need to stop being a human, stop spreading love, stop hugging people.

These are all general facts we know by now thanks to melodramatic media, social or traditional. Then how come data management missed an opportunity?

Yes, it is but may be late but not too late. Unless, we find a cure, we need to ‘contain’ the virus in ‘hotspots’ and break the human chain. How can you see a human chain? It is not just a social media network analysis! You get ‘in touch’ a lot of people, that you do not even know.

Last week, Google and Apple started collaborating (one of the rare events!) to create an app, to alert the users if they exposed themselves to someone who was suffering from COVID19 or later developed the symptoms of COVID19.So far, they preferred to use ‘Bluetooth’ over ‘Wi-Fi’ ‘GPS’, or ‘cellular signals’ because it needs a short range to find out if they crossed path with someone who should have been in quarantine. Will this work? Not over 50%, why?

What if the ATM machine, a healthy person is using to withdraw cash and a few hours back a COVID19 patient withdrew money from the same ATM? It is true for POS machines at grocery stores, unless you used a contact less card or mobile payment system?

Managing the Data Management Puzzle!

So, this is how a complete cross-referencing data management solution can help to contain the virus.

Data Input:

All corona positive cases will register with an app or mobile website

Everyone should also input their mobile number to the same app if they are coming back or going out using any port of entry (irrespective of the person has COVID19 or not)

The app or the site would take permission for accessing the contact list, Bluetooth, GPS, call logs, and sending notifications

Along with the mobile number it should also click a picture (selfie of the person, mentioned in #1 and #2)

Data Storage:

When the government healthcare system gets this information, they will pass the mobile/cell phone number and the picture to

Final Destination: Data Cross Referencing

Immigration office (to check for the travel history)

Banking systems/Payment Gateway providers (Master Card, VISA, Alipay, RuPay etc., to see where are those POS systems are located)

To cellular service providers (to cross reference the call lists and check if called numbers, were in proximity using the cellular towers) – Add the locations in a map API.

Match it with recent criminal database to see if police officers intercepted them, while he/she was infected

Use Bluetooth, like they any way plan to use for proximity and send alerts to all users nearby

Send the number of Airlines and Railway authorities to see if there were any bookings made with the name and number combination to check the travel path for contamination. They can also locate the other cell phones that were moving with the tracked cell phone

Match the picture against Facebook, Instagram, YouTube for a facial recognition. This would give a fair idea about people around them with the time stamp

You can also match the photograph with traffic and CCTV cameras. This too would give a fair idea about people around them with the time stamp
- Also, you can run the picture and phone number to track the driving license and run it with motor vehicle department to track the vehicle movement and stop points

Sound like a lot of work and Déjà vu, right? But in actual it is not difficult from the technology capability side, we have enough computing power from IBM, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and many more. So, what is stopping?

Collaboration: Breaking the silos use alternate data!

All this is not my brilliant idea and no one else is thing about it. The primary problem is all these data sits in their silos. Is not this a perfect example of alternate data?

It does not need super techie to design this solution even if we need, we have enough talent, it needs a collaborator and negotiator to break the silos.

The global CEOs keeps talking about breaking the silos in their respective companies but when it comes to multiple companies, will they go into silos themselves? The future, will answer the questions but it is still not too late yet! Make the world a better place with data!

Abhijit Ghosh the CEO of StanShare.

Winter is coming – Are you prepared to save yourself!

We have either heard or read about War that includes World War-1, World War-2, or even United States invasion to Vietnam, Iraq, Or Afghanistan. If you missed the real war like these, you may have seen War in TV in Game of Thrones.

Fortunately, we don’t have a World War-3 yet. However, if I ask you what’s the probability of a World War-3, what do you think? I say no way. Let’s take a deep dive into war to justify the why there is no World War-3 in traditional way.

In recent history, the only successful invasion (let’s not call it a war) was Russia’s conquest of Crimea in twenty first century. However, the Russian elite itself, probably well aware of the real-cost and benefits of military adventures; which is why they have been careful about not escalating it further. Be it Russia or United States, have been using the school bully principle. Pick up on the weakest kid, and don’t beat him up too much, and lest the teacher intervenes.

Why is it so difficult for the major powers to wage successful war in 21^st century? Yuval Noah Harari explained it really well in his books “One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. In past, economic assets were mostly material, so it was relatively straight forward to enrich yourself by conquest. If you defeated your enemies in the battle field, you can get cash by looting their cities, selling their civilians in the slave markets, and occupying valuable Wheatfield and gold mines.” Today, only puny profits can be made that way. Today the main economic assets consist technical, institutional knowledge or data, rather than the wheat fields or gold mines.

We keep calling data is gold and technologies are blood, if you think now, the concept of war has to change and it did. You are seeing cyber criminals, cyber-attacks, cyber theft more over war and invasion. Unfortunately, a common man has very little knowledge about this, even big fortune 500 companies are resting after sending few emails on phishing attacks! People read it and it leaves in their memory for a day or two and then vanishes. Some people also ask, why do I care, my job is to do what I get paid for!

This reminds me a small story, we watched, when we were kids. It’s small cartoon in our one and only television channel in ‘Door Darshan’, I still remember cartoon. There were a bunch of birds flying free on the air and their captain taught them a song it says “Bird catchers will come, use the bird catching net, give you grains, but don’t be greedy and get stuck”. The group had been singing this for year after years, even without knowing the meaning, and some day they got caught by the bird catchers, while singing the song and eating the grains spread over the net.

This is so true for our world today, we all know, it will come, sing the song without understand the meaning and then give the bank account number for expecting some free money from Nigeria! I still don’t blame these people, why? Because they have no idea on how hacking is done or how valuable their data is. When I used to receive of these emails, while working for a big company, what I knew, don’t keep a simple password, don’t open an email that looks suspicious and that’s the end of it.

Once, I was badly looted of 50 dollars by cybercrime not fooled by Nigerian email though, but still my act was foolish! It’s not much of a loss in terms of money for most people but if you are in a financial crunch, you know the value of 50 dollars!

I realized, if we want to be safe, I need to know “how to hack”. Now, I look back at the event (when I was fooled) as “I paid 50 dollars for learning”.

Initially, I thought, cybercrimes or hacking happens at the big companies or governments and not to common people like us but it’s myth!
The second myth, I learned, when I was studying hacking, I always thought, you need to be a computer nerd, with tremendous tech knowledge to hack someone.

You can learn hacking computers, WIFI networks, break into a secured network in just a month of studying, readings, and analytical mind. It’s like playing chess, many people hack, just to have an adrenalin rush. I had the similar experience, when I hacked my own computer!

We are going to start with you and not the organization as we all look at things, what does this mean for me?

Let’s start with your home WIFI password, a hacker just a need a little misconfiguration to hack your WIFI under 15 minutes, if you leave WPS with PIN on (you made the job much simpler), if don’t, have this misconfiguration, never mind, and a would-be hacker can still hack your network in less than 30 minutes, even if you are using WEP, WPA, or WPA2, or enterprise grade setup unless your passwords has random text, numbers, upper case and lower-case characters. They can still hack it but it will be expensive as they would need to run all the combinations with a GPU. If you don’t have these in your WIFI passwords, they just need a computer with something Kali Linux installed and a separate network card worth 20 USD. If you are thinking, I am oversimplifying, but I am not.

Now, if someone hacks into your WIFI, don’t think they want to just use your internet, they are looking for your data, passwords, credit card number, browser data, anything that you have stored. Even if you don’t have them stored for yourselves, they can use your computer and exploit your friends! In hacking terms, called ‘social engineering method”.

The next question come is that you have an Antivirus software to save you, isn’t it. Not, really, it takes a couple of hours to fool your antivirus, if I am using port 80 or port 8080 and my ‘signature’ not matching with what they have in the Antivirus database. Since, these ports are used for communications FTP, the hacker program that can injected with a fake authorization. For the hacker, it’s not one program, the hacker would have choice of tools to exploit these starting from Wireshark, using Honeypot or simple ARP poisoning.

What is these hacker’s main goal? To be the ‘man in the middle’! When you connect to internet, your computer, sends a request to the router, your router send the signals, to the server reads the request and send back a signal to your router, your router receives it, and send it back to the device, the one originally requested the server. The hacker, will try to secure a place between you and the router, posing as a genuine device/server and now all your signals will go through the hacker computer to the router and the server and back as relay. This way they can modify anything that goes through the hacker’s terminal including pushing a fake software update. I can go on step by step but don’t want to kill you with the jargons.

In a nutshell, hackers can move the direction of the missile, on the fly, get defense data, make banking transactions for you, or even hack into crypto currency exchanges. How do sanctions countries like North Korea survive?

Another, psychology is it’s my office computer, so why should I care? But, the hackers just need that one computer to enter your home network (when you connect from home) or enter the organizational network through you and they don’t leave your personal data out of generosity

Yes, the art of war has changed in 21^st century! In some countries, kids get mandatory military training at early age, it’s probably the time to train them on cyberwarfare to be safe.

With second machine age, and 5G knocking the door, you need more cyber-solders protecting people over the military. More signal goes through the air, more the chances of someone intercepting it.

Are you ready for the new age World War -3?

Abhijit Ghosh is the CEO of StanShare, in addition to an enthusiastic learner with deep understanding of both data, technology, and concurrent people management policies and practices. An exceptional achiever, well-rounded, multilingual, culturally aware professional with a strong background in building and leading multi-discipline, geographically dispersed teams to manage complex operations and automation. Specializes in highly cross functional collaborations with Operations, Finance, HR, Data Management in financial services industry. He has over 17 years of hands-on management experience in planning, creating, data products and solutions through design thinking. Extremely skilled strategist for robotics and cognitive automation solutions.

Tag: War

COVID19 – A missed collaboration opportunity for CEOs, CDOs, and CTOs!

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