Insights from the International Cyber Week in Israel

Hello Cyber Bugs,

So, the cyber week in Tel Aviv is officially behind us now. It was a great cyber security event, and I had the chance to listen to great experts about the vulnerabilities around us and the way to avoid them and be more secured.

There were some interesting discussions around privacy in general and data privacy in particular. I am always amazed again and again, how fragile is our privacy, even for those of us, who take the seemingly necessary measures. Seems that everyone are gearing up for the GDPR regulations in Europe, but still doing the bear minimum just to meet the lower threshold of the regulator.
One funny (yet troublesome) discussion was around the right to be forgotten. Seems that there are still some senior figures out there, that do not understand what is all the fuss about, and think that privacy should not be protected. The leading thought is - if you have nothing to hide then what seems to be the problem. One Professor from Stanford that was there aligned with that line of thinking. I asked him to imagine, what would have happened if the amount of private data on people and the analytics power of today was available to the Nazis during WWII. He argued that these were different times. I argued that history has a tendency to repeat itself. Our world is becoming more extreme and controlled more by right wing nationalists - and this is one hell of a concern when it comes to privacy protection.
Another great session was around Blockchain. Beautiful things that are being done around cyber security with Blockchain by Intel, IBM, GE and many more. If you are into cyber security and intrigued by the capabilities of Blockchain, i do encourage you to research and contribute to the community. The crossway between cyber sec and Blockchain created some great concepts that still need to be proven.
And speaking of a community and contributing to it - the icing on the cake was definitely BSides TLV - the hackers community getting together sharing knowledge, ideas and thoughts like we always do. No corporate bullshit to distract us. Pure hacking stuff. The 100-slides-in-(less than)-3-minutes welcome presentation by Chris (Nickerson) was brilliant! Rest of the discussions there were also great and you can get a glimpse at what was discussed there on the agenda link.
All in all, it was a great week. An opportunity to see some new enthusiastic startups aimed to save the world, meeting old friends from the community and making new ones.
Keep well. Stay Tuned.