Okay, it's just coming up to 11 p.m. on March 20th So just going into electronic open thought I gather some of the major news in the weekend Just get you up to speed. What can you expect from the week ahead? We're gonna bring up some charts as well from a longer term perspective in the equity and energy market But I thought prudent just to start with the heat map of the S&P 500 But rather than the daily performance this was last week's Performance and as you can see here some really bright Scream green spots across the board. We had the lights at Amazon up nearly 11% Apple up six Microsoft up seven and a quarter Google up nearly five and these are don't forget mega cap tech names So some big outperformance in the lights of the Nasdaq 100 in fact the S&P and Nasdaq posted their biggest weekly gain since November of 2020 and just wanted to bring that up first and have a look at a few things and discuss a little bit the market mood at This present point in time because it's been a as we know an incredibly volatile start to the year For different reasons, but namely that most recently of the geopolitical tensions emanating from Ukraine But here we are. This is the S&P 500 on a weekly Candlestick chart and this was last week's move. You can see here this big fat green candle Biggest weekly rally we have since November 2020 as mentioned we bottom out At around a key level of now What will be closely followed support on the higher time frame at 41 38 and a half in the futures market? You can see that held up a couple times last week and also did Create a period of support as well through April May and June of 2021 I'm just having a look at a couple of different things for one You know, where do we go next from here in regards to? The equity indices we have bounced a lot Question marks over is this a dead cat bounce i.e. meaning that it's just a slight reprieve before we Move back to the downside for the more bearish camp thinking that we're not out of the woods yet We're going to see further escalation from Russia military advancements And that's going to create more nervousness in the market or the opposite and actually have we hit as far as market Positioning is concerned peak Ukraine and do we start to move higher and I've got up here JP Morgan They are the perma ball on the streets So a bit of context needs to be applied But they reiterated their court the end of last week for 4,900 year-end S&P which should be a good kind of 10 percent above where we were trading last week and What they're kind of Russia now is is that we've now cleared the much anticipated anticipated Fed lift off with the policy likely as hawkish as it gets and you know I think that is a very important milestone that we've crossed if you think about prior to the Ukraine situation emerging It really was this Almost anxiety that the markets was really sensitive to since the beginning of the year with a lot of that yield Movement that we saw and subsequently leaking out into other asset classes over the Fed having to initiate Not just the execution of the first rate hike, of course But it's the commencement of that cycle and now that that's out of the way Have we now got a degree of a little bit more visibility over the medium-term horizon rather than the unknown? Which was at the time talk of 50 talk about multiple rate hikes The kind of cat is out the bag in that regard. The other thing that I thought was quite interesting that I read this weekend was talking about Last month's inversion of the VIX futures curve and that has actually reversed in recent days In tandem with what we've seen a little bit of the the uptick in the equity markets of late so that kind of positioning and hedging for Short-term shock in the market is starting to dissipate a little bit does come as well as we we started to get the emergence of some of the kind of more ceasefire type neutrality talks coming through although I'm sure much Debate to go on between those two nations before we get anywhere near a permanent more resolution of which Military was drawn on so forth But the signs of that happening has been met a little bit more positive a good quote that I saw over the weekend was that a fund manager said now I'm More worried about the next three months versus three three weeks ago when I was just worried about Tomorrow and I think that really kind of sums up definitely that VIX position or move Some of the equity rallied we've had at the moment I think the Fed now having come out and that's already passed now I think that's quite a meaningful event as plus as well that the markets now have a Climatized a little bit albeit still a fluid situation to what's been happening and obviously in Ukraine A few other things to be aware of on this kind of discussion point stocks Historically have weathered rate hike cycles fairly well looking at data provided by analysts at UBS the Swiss Bank They said since 1983 the S&P 500 has returned an average of five point three percent in the six months following the first Fed rate rise of a cycle now don't get me wrong I do definitely look at these types of statistics with some interest, but we do need to apply the context of the situation Obviously inflation a particularly sensitive metric right now given the direction of travel sites go much further north at the moment I'm still mindful of mapping supply chain disruptions coming out of lockdowns emerging in China at the moment So things can change and but the historical pattern is fairly telling The other thing for the more to even out the argument for the sake of not sounding too bullish is the fact that fund managers Allocation to cash that is currently standing at its highest levels since April of 2020 as according to Bank of America's Latest global research monthly survey So a lot of people have been sat on the sidelines It's gonna be interested to track that data to see whether or not they start to dip their toes back into the water now Given some of the the things I've just mentioned One of the other things I guess to talk about while we're on the charts at the moment is oil prices Because when we go back to the heat map and we look at last week's price activity You'll see there are two quite bright spots of red down on the right hand side And that isn't the energy components and that's for Exxon mobile and Chevron Exxon was down about seven and a half percent Chevron was down about 5.4 but don't forget that these stocks have really outperformed in the prior weeks And of course that comes after we've seen a rampant oil price And that kind of positioning play of the potential energy disruption effects that we're seeing from the Russian invasion of Ukraine So we initially peaked up not that long ago It was only back 7th of March when we hit that when the futures market up at around the 130 price point But we've come collapsing in price and actually from peak to trough of last week's low printed back on Tuesday We've actually declined about 28% and a little bit of that also being weighed upon by that aforementioned situation in China that we're seeing at the moment with further Covid outbreaks that we're seeing which are resulting in large populist areas being locked down again congestion at key transportation Manufacturing hubs which is going to be particularly key from the supply chain front But from the energy demand point that did weigh a little bit We bottomed out and actually though as we started to see some more albeit Inconclusive headlines a lot of noise last week over Ukraine the price did bounce quite aggressively And we actually finished a week up at around 105 So yeah quite a lot to digest there But certainly last week energy suffered a little bit would be interested to see how we settle out here I'd probably say that barring anything substantially unexpected than perhaps then At this point being that I doubt we'll get any kind of concrete deal as yet between Russian Ukraine That's probably gonna take weeks if not months for that to really emerge. And so The idea of that happening immediately and prices just declining on pricing out of that risk I think is gone and then also the China stuff's kind of already filtered in from last week So perhaps we start to trade a little bit more of an hour range, but still I did imagine very volatile One thing to mention on the energy front while we're on the subject is we did have this over the weekend should definitely be aware of it Yemen's Iran aligned Houthi group fired missiles and drones At Saudi energy and water distillation facilities over the weekend causing a temporary drop in output at a refinery But no casualties have been reported. So according to the Saudi energy ministry and state media today on Sunday I haven't been able to actually find out the degree of the temporary drop But it has been termed as temporary. So I'm assuming that it's gone back up But nonetheless, definitely I'd be interested to see how electronic trade opens in the crude market Not looking for any long-lasting nature in terms of impact on the back of this headline But perhaps a little bit bumpy at the get-go In futures trades as we get underway momentarily Yemen's Iran aligned Houthi trying to disrupt Saudi infrastructure is not uncommon So is this the initiation of something new not really because this sort of stuff goes on quite a lot The point here is it has hit a specific energy facility, which is quite interesting The other things then let's update on Russia. What is the latest here and Ukraine and Russia has given Ukrainian forces a Monday deadline to surrender control of the besieged port city of Maripole down here You can see in the southeastern corner Russia's advance in Maripole came after Kiev said it had been cut off from Statistically important sea of as of a conduit to the Black Sea and capturing Maripole would give the Russians control of the main part of Ukraine's southern coast as you can see here and kind of links up The move north they've made out of Crimea and then moving towards the east to connect with the Russian separatist areas that were originally there from 2014 It also comes after Russia's defense ministry has said that on Saturday had used a Kenzal hypersonic missile to hit a target in Ukraine for the first time so a bit of new weaponry coming to the table Despite that the Ukrainian president Zelensky did call for a comprehensive peace talks with Moscow And with that in mind and in terms of the schedule for this week ahead NATO heads of state including US President Joe Biden are going to be gathering on Thursday for an extraordinary Meeting to discuss next steps in retaliation to the conflict. I think this will be particularly interesting Given the fact that lots as lots have happened to certain different degrees in terms of countries reactions and sanctions and so forth Particularly interested to see how the German US relationship is looking at the moment given the fact that There's certainness of Biden But really it's Germany who takes the brunt of that and certainly we're going to get some German economic data this week Which will be interested to see the impacts of the Ukraine situation In terms of that meeting with NATO heads of state It will also coincide with a pre-planned meeting of European Council members of EU member leaders Discussing the energy crisis and COVID as well as the Ukrainian war as well Okay, other things in the news before I talk about the kind of week ahead one was from some ECB comments The ECB the bank will take action if it sees second round inflation effects and a De-anchoring of medium-term inflation expectations as according to the vice president Louis de Gwendoz over the weekend As terms of the calendar What have we got on the outlook? Well actually Monday and Tuesday are pretty quiet overall So as you can see here from this calendar from the Dutch Bank ING it really kicks off from Wednesday But a few things to talk over from a top level First off from the UK we've got UK CPI coming out on Wednesday And that is expected to tick up year on year to 5.9 percent from 5.5 But I would definitely not expect that to really create any shock in the market And that's because we already know The UK inflation is gonna head substantially higher than than what's expected in this particular reading the Bank of England said at their most Recent meeting of course last week then inflation is now expected to climb to 8% in Q2 with a risk of further advances thereafter So got a long way to go in that story and so an upside price shock unless it's Substantially higher and we still got things like the changes in electricity and prices things like that to drop in April could create a Reaction in markets, but I think a lot of people are kind of primed for that to be the case going forward Also on Wednesday on the same day chance of the Rishi Sinek delivers his spring statement Which will create a lot of media interest. I'm sure and you'll read about it a lot in just the The general news because households are really feeling the pain at the moment with wages Well below that of the the level of inflation that we're anticipating to see going forward That's putting a lot of pressure on those household incomes Confidence and so on and so forth It's worth noting though that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected separate from the spring statement to outline a plan For the broader energy strategy at this this week I don't have a day at this point or a time, but that might give Sonak a little bit of breathing room I guess in that regard to kind of talk about that as a separate point Bank of England dissenter If you remember there was one John Cunliffe the deputy governor He is actually speaking on Tuesday could be quite interested to see what he's got to say He voted against the pack and actually went for a hold decision despite the bank executing their third consecutive rate hike last week And Governor Bailey is up on Wednesday and you've got UK retail sales coming out as well on Friday Which again with UK data, it's probably going to materially worse Particularly when it comes to something like consumer spending at this point because of the household Incomes being squeezed Confidence is likely to degrade over time and that is going to have a consequent impact. So Again, the low side numbers are probably not going to be that surprising Both this figure and particularly going forward and then otherwise on Thursday You can see quite a busy day and that's because we get the European flash PMIs UK US as well And that's expected to show a sharp drop in business activity Largely, of course due to the Ukrainian situation the recent ZDW survey You remember beginning of last week saw expectations metric fall to a pandemic low And that kind of sets the scene then ifo likely to follow suit again If you're not familiar with these data points ZDW is the survey of current economic conditions and six months outlook from Economists and analysts German ifo is from thousands of businesses on the ground in Germany So it's a really good insight to see how pessimistic basically they're becoming given the Risks associated with the connection of that with disruption from Russia and the situation in Ukraine the impact Definitely like to be most acute in in Germany compared to the more service-based industries like that in France, for example And German ifo that comes out on Friday is expected to drop by about five points down to around 94 spot one For the US perspective aside from PMI you got new home sales. Did you on Wednesday? Durable goods, which analysts at ING note that it's like to be dragged down by a drop in Boeing Aircraft orders that alongside weekly jobless claims all due on Thursday And then you do have Fed chair Jerome Powell speaking on Monday and Wednesday In fact, I haven't listed all of them in my notes, which you can obtain by my Twitter handle, but There are a lot of Fed speakers this week And so looking out for perhaps a little bit of clarity We've already had the meeting and so we've got some degree of visibility Perhaps looking for any information further on the balance sheet side of things could be something to to just keep on the on the radar But that is it from me. So hopefully that was useful Don't forget. I'm going to drop a link Some useful links within the video Descriptions so if you haven't done one of our finance accelerator simulations and you're a student you definitely should absolutely free Gonna get you some practical experience tell a little bit from your performance metrics of what roles in finance You could be good out so check that out and also our daily newsletter, which is open for everyone, of course The market maker I'll drop the link to that if you're not already on it Do check it out. I'd really appreciate to have you in the community. All right Have a great week ahead and catch you next time. Thanks You


These two doctors raised the false alarms that were largely responsible for creating all the public hysteria about vaccines. Andrew Wakefield scared us about MMR and Neil Halsey scared us about mercury. In 1998 Wakefield published a study in the Lancet, a small study only 12 children. Children had developmental disorders and GI symptoms. Ten of them were autistic and eight of the autistic children were thought to have developed autism after the MMR shot, which turned out not to be true. He found a pattern of abnormalities on colon biopsies. Now he didn't use any controls in order to show that these abnormalities were related to autism. He would have had to compare the rate in autistics to the rate in the general population. He didn't use any controls. He didn't verify that the autism developed after the MMR. The paper's conclusion was honest. It said in so many words we did not prove an association between MMR vaccine and the syndrome described. Nevertheless, Wakefield immediately called a press conference and told the world that MMR should be stopped because it probably caused autism. He suggested giving the vaccine singly, which didn't make any sense and he didn't have any evidence to support it. It was just his rationale. And interestingly he just filed a patent for a single measles vaccine. Now, since single vaccines weren't available in the UK, stopping the MMR meant no measles vaccine at all. Vaccination rates plummeted. You can see the numbers on the screen. Measles rates soared, children died and in 2008 measles was declared endemic again in the UK. Wakefield's study is now entirely discredited. All attempts to replicate it failed. The Lancet and 10 of his 12 co-authors retracted the study. Wakefield himself has been exposed as unethical and unprofessional. He was asked to resign from his job. He was investigated with devastating results and the licensing body in the UK has charged him with several counts of misconduct. It turns out Wakefield was hired by a lawyer to find evidence to justify suing vaccine manufacturers. The children he studied were his lawyer's clients. He covered up the fact that he was paid over half a million pounds by the lawyer. The study was never approved by the Hospital Ethics Committee and in endangered children. He didn't disclose any of his conflicts of interest, which were several and he lied repeatedly. Wakefield thought measles RNA in the bowel caused autism. He covered up the fact that his lab had already looked for measles in the bowel and had failed to find it. Then he claimed the unigenetics lab did find it. But the unigenetics lab has since been discredited. Among other things, they supposedly found measles RNA with a test that can only detect DNA. They had contamination in the lab. They were also paid by the same lawyer and an independent investigator went in and looked at all their procedures and he said, I do not believe that there is any measles virus in any of the cases unigenetics looked at and the lab is no longer in business. The latest allegations, the investigator Brian Deere was able to get a hold of the original medical records of the patients that Wakefield studied. It turns out most of them had signs of autism documented in their medical records before they ever got the MMR shot. What's more, the original biopsy reports were reported as normal and then they were reviewed and declared abnormal for the published study. So it was all a big mistake. It was junk science. It didn't show any connection between MMR and autism, but it was used to deny children MMR. The second false alarm was about thimerosal. It's a vaccine preservative that contains mercury and the FDA was concerned about the total amount of mercury children might be getting. We knew methylmercury could cause mercury poisoning, such as the Minamata disaster they had in Japan. But thimerosal doesn't contain methylmercury. It contains ethylmercury, which is excreted faster and it's much safer. There was a study in 1929 where adults were given the equivalent of 20,000 times the amount of thimerosal children could possibly get from all their vaccines and none of them developed any symptoms of mercury poisoning. Thimerosal is still recommended as a preservative by the World Health Organization and it's still used in other countries. But pediatrician Neil Halsey was almost single-handedly responsible for getting thimerosal banned in the US. He wasn't even thinking about autism. He was worried about subtle neurologic effects in children which had been seen in children exposed to methylmercury, but no damage had ever been shown from ethylmercury. There was no evidence against ethylmercury at the time. Halsey thought we should bend over backwards to avoid any possibility of harm and he railroaded the committee by tactics like threatening to hold his own press conference if they didn't vote the way he wanted. The committee's announcement was guaranteed to confuse the public. Current levels of thimerosal will not hurt children, but reducing those levels will make vaccines even safer. Thimerosal was not removed from vaccines for any concern about autism. That concern was raised by two mothers of autistic children who looked up the symptoms of mercury poisoning and somehow got the idea that the symptoms of mercury poisoning and autism matched. They don't. They absolutely don't. And as Steve said, there's been no change in the rate of autism, no decrease in autism since the thimerosal was removed. So the damage had been done. A third of the population still believes vaccines cause autism.


Welcome to this webinar on the next evolution of WebAssembly, the component model. My name is Sohan Maheshwar and I'm a lead developer advocate at Fermion. So, I'm going to start off with maybe some, with a statement that could be a little controversial, which is, it's really time to reboot software development. And the way we have been building and architecting software all this while has been based on certain assumptions. And now with the next evolution of WebAssembly, these assumptions will change. So, really it is time for us to reboot software development. Let me give you an example. And this example is called the 2400 hour problem. Now, basically parsing a URL or a URI is, while it is a non-trivial task, it is fairly simple. You have a URL like this that looks like HTTPS colon slash slash www.farmion.com slash blog. And this has a protocol. It has a host and it has a path name. And sometimes it could have some queries after it as well. Parsing this is straightforward, right? And every single programming language out there has its own or multiple URL parsers that are standards as libraries that are used. Now, here's the thing. C++ has one, Java has one, JavaScript has one, Rust has one, if not many. And it estimates, rather we have estimated that it's taken at least 2400 person hours to actually construct all of these parsers from scratch. Each language needs its own, each framework needs its own. Why couldn't we just use a single parser that was created as a specification? Well, the problem is there are so many different languages out there and each of them need their own parsers. Apply the same thing for other specifications, cryptographic keys, all of these computing things that really have specifications but need to be implemented from time to time in every language and framework there is. Well, all of this is going to change with something called the component model. So really in the future if you're building a JavaScript app, you can say something like I need a YAML parser and you can actually grab a YAML parser that is written in Rust because Rust is good at doing things like parsing since it is a low-level language. Similarly, you can say like I need a date format and you can use a Python library because Python is good with numbers to really do that and all of this in your JavaScript app. How this is going to work? Well, that's what I'm here to tell you. To understand how the component model works in WebAssembly, you need to know a bit about WebAssembly and the boring answer about what WebAssembly is is it is another portable bytecode format which means that it can run anywhere as long as there is a runtime for it. Now, this was originally developed for the web in the mid-2010s and it was meant to be lightweight, portable, security sandboxed by default. And here's the thing, all of these things are good for a browser but they're really great for the server side and to be serverless. Now, for anything to run on a server, you need access to things like files, clocks, system interfaces, random number generators and so on. And this didn't exist up until 2018-19 when something called WASI was introduced. This stands for WebAssembly Systems Interface and this essentially allows you to run WebAssembly outside a browser. So you don't need a browser anymore to do all of the cool things WebAssembly is capable for. It gives you access to files, file systems, clocks and random numbers, completely independent of a browser or a runtime that is on the browser and it extends WASM security sandbox to include input-output. So for a WASM file to work with another file, you have to explicitly give it permissions to get access to that file because it is security sandboxed by default. How essentially WASM works very simplified is you write code in any language, right, Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust, whatever. That is compiled using an SDK such as Spin to a WASM file. Now this WASM file can run in any platform, any architecture, any operating system as long as it runs a WebAssembly runtime. So in this case maybe WASM time, think of it as sort of a virtual machine, right, but just that it's independent of platforms, architectures and so on. And that's how WebAssembly becomes portable. You can write code in all of these languages and run it anywhere. So for something like this to work, you have to think of the contract between operations and a developer as it is right now, especially in the case of writing serverless apps. What it looks like is you have a proprietary software like Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, Google Functions and so on.  And typically your Azure function will not work with your AWS Lambda serverless function, right. You are locked into something like an Azure or at a slightly low level you have a container and you have container registries such as OCI or maybe you're in the Kubernetes ecosystem or you have an app running on a virtual machine. Really we're seeing a future where there's something called a component model where essentially everyone is writing certain components that do very specific tasks which all can work with each other regardless of the language that they're actually written in. So going back to that example you can write code in whatever language you want. You can actually use libraries from all over without knowing what the other language really is because of how WebAssembly works and essentially WebAssembly takes care of the rest. Again just this blows my mind so I hope it's blowing your mind as well. Imagine writing a JavaScript app but using a YAML parser that's written in Rust and using a date formatter that's written in Python without really knowing how to write Rust or Python or honestly without even caring that it is written in Rust or Python. As long as your YAML is parsed and your date is formatted the way it's supposed to be your JS app will run. That's what the component model unlocks. Essentially any Wasm server side app or any Wasm app is made up of WebAssembly modules. Now these can be written in things like Rust, Go, C++ and many more and they're compiled to a core Wasm module. Each of these modules are portable because we said it can run anywhere. The binary size is very small so you're saving on money and you're saving on carbon footprint as well and time. It's isolated by default. It has very fast startup times and no call starts. These are completely open standards so you know you can run it anywhere. With this recent launch of the component model one of these modules can work with another almost seamlessly in a way that you can compose applications. So you see component a.wasm which is a core Wasm module on your left and you see component b.wasm, a core Wasm module on the right. Now one can export the thing it does and the other can import the thing it wants and this way you can write it again in Rust and Go and really have them work against or rather work with each other to create a new component in this case which is component c. And you can see that stack like thing invite next to the Wasm WebAssembly logo. That is actually your memory. As you can see your export and your import is not really interacting with the thing that your business logic is working on because this is the security sandboxed by default. We're actually creating interfaces for each component so that they can talk to other components in the WebAssembly ecosystem. That's what the component model really is. Here is an example of how this would look like in production. On your right you can actually see on the top there is something that says business logic component and there is an export and this business logic is the logic you as a developer. Now maybe you want to have authentication and authorization for this business logic but you don't want to write it from scratch again. So you can actually use a component that does auth for you. So here is in the middle an auth middleware component and you can actually see that it exports and it imports basically there is an interface for it to talk to your business logic. And then at the very bottom you have your WebAssembly or your Wasi HTTP implementation which could be either on spin, on Wasm time, on engine X unit, Wasm cloud and so on. Essentially you can see how these different components are independent components of each other but they are working with one another. So if you are writing business logic and you want an auth middleware component you can go ahead and do so. All you need to know is that it exports and imports and that's how it interfaces with another component. In fact here is a demo that I am going to show you and I am going to show it to you very quickly but you can check the entire code base out on our GitHub right there. So this is a middleware component that the engineers at Fermion wrote which essentially does authentication and authorization via GitHub. So imagine business logic is already written. I have built this program and I am running it locally and then I open it in my browser and it is not yet authorized so I am going to click on login. Now when I click on login it authorizes using GitHub and it authenticates rather using GitHub and then authorizes me to then access the business logic because I am now an authorized user. And if you look at the code you can see different components for authenticate, authorize and a callback which I have originally added to my GitHub app that I did earlier. Again we don't have time necessarily to go through the code base entirely but check it out for yourself and see if it works. It is a very cool example of how the component model can work in practice. So what are some of the advantages of this component model? Well like I said you can write programs in multiple languages and get different functionalities and not really suffer from that 2400 hour problem that we spoke about. But I am going to give you a couple of scenarios related to security where this component model can shine. Now imagine there is a vulnerability in an upstream component in this case we are imagining a vulnerability in the auth middleware component. The good thing is it doesn't actually affect your entire program your business logic can remain the same the underlying layers of your WebAssembly run times can remain as is. You can mitigate this by simply pulling a patch upstream component of this middleware fixing whatever vulnerability was there and everything goes on as is. In fact to take this a step further the bytecode alliance is working on something called VARG check out VARG.io which is in development right now which is an open source registry protocol for things like wasm packages. So in the future you will on VARG you will see something like an authorization or authentication middleware that will be a standard that you can use in your WebAssembly app and not really care about its implementation as long as you know that it is working. Similarly let's look at a scenario where there is a vulnerability but this time in the business logic. Again the layers below it are not affected because we have successfully written it in a componentized manner. So all you can do is mitigate by rebuilding only your business logic there is really no need to rebuild any other component no need to rebuild the middleware no need to rebuild the underlying wasm layers as well once you patch your business logic everything again works as is. So each of these components sort of work individually and there is a layer of abstraction between them which makes this very powerful in terms of security. And let's look at a scenario 3 where there is some problem in the platform itself. So in this case we are saying that your key value store in your WebAssembly cloud is probably done. So in this case the host component is not embedded in the application but here the platform provider handles this and mitigates this problem. So whoever is giving you the cloud like say it's an Affirmion cloud will fix this and then again your entire program works as is. So again your auth middleware is not affected your business logic is absolutely not affected again because of the componentized nature of how this program is built. So you can see why this excites me and it should be exciting you as well. Also just to give you another angle of why the component model can be amazing is to look at costs and sustainability. Typically these two are related proportionally if you have like binary sizes you are being more energy efficient but that also reduces your compute storage and networking costs so you save money as well. If you take an example like a conventional CI CD on the left you see a simple CI script basically for go it's a popular script you'll find it on GitHub. There are multiple go versions for multiple OS's and essentially when you're packaging this when you're doing a build you do OS architecture language multiple versions. For tests you do your operating system in architecture to package. This is a lot. Similarly if you look at literally this is from the Docker documentation you can see that there are a bunch of platforms, labels, outputs all of this done in a Docker container but imagine if all of this was built in a componentized or component model fashion this is what it would actually look at where you have a build which is your build so in this case let's call it the WASM 32 WASI Preview 2 your test basically you just need to test one thing which is your run time because this run time we know runs in every platform architecture OS and so on so all you have to do is one version of this run time and you don't really need to package anything because the components are already packages so you don't have to package anything honestly I don't even need to put numbers or you know benchmarks for this because I think you can only tell how much more efficient in terms of costs and binary sizes and packet sizes and networks and storage sizes this will be and just to add to that WebAssembly in itself is already way more lightweight than some of the other technology we have been using in the past so you see why the component model really is the next evolution for WebAssembly so I hope you are excited about this for next steps it's time to build your first WASM app using spin you can just check up github.com it's completely open source so check it out if you want to read more you can read the blog post about it's time to reboot software development which speaks about the 2400 hour problem if you want to dive a little more deeper into the tech check out the post about composing components with spin if you want to get started building in WebAssembly and spin this month in December there's the advent of spin coding challenge which is designed to get people you know interested in building in WebAssembly there are prizes as well so check it out hope you learned something new today feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or email or wherever you'll find me online go check out WebAssembly and server side WebAssembly and the component model have a good rest of the day and see you soon bye


Going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards. We've been three boxes from Mr. Harper B. You got two at 23 at Bowman Draft Baseball Jumbo's 123 prism football hobby. Good luck Harper See what we got buddy. Yeah, no paper will ship out of this. I don't I'm assuming you you know that at this point God I'm a limb and assume that so good luck buddy. See you super Super or Brady. I'll see if Brady ought not seen one of those yet Skybill paper Spencer Nivens the 499 Purple Jackson Wiggins the 250 And Devon's off the bun. There's a yellow Carlos Jorge the 75 regoya and rock of fortnight Like that That's a Kyle and Sam duel right there Dole dual shtick Good lord, man, Jase Barofin, it's the video game brain rot At this point You're saying sad True blue skeins the 150 Cravey and Xander, but it's giving big It's giving big part. That's Lunar Glow first of Jack Wettiger first your fracter Patrick Riley and Jose class of 23 Garrett Forrester auto that is just the base Nice one there. Harbor or in and TJ Walton. That is a Jacob Wilson glass Ariel Castro Matt Shaw first refractor Yellow first cam Fisher to 75 Celestine and Jacob Wilson first refractor Max Anderson Sky blue chrome Brooks Lee and the Zanzana Tullo We're jumbo Diaz was today Nice cam Collier to 99 congrats on that draft picks and prospects Your Shenanigans being forced to that lock Weird being forced to that a lot Now me and you were doing it Sky blue paper is Max Anderson 499. I think me and force you at least once a stream Jovi Toronto green to 99 congrats on that one there Harper true green Jovi Toronto leave my wells and Christian that's it Box number two now that is a Conor O'Halloran to 499 Okay, Denton first refractor Rockrigio first refractor nice Johnny Farmello on the golden nugget to 49 These are not easy to pull dude Grats on that the die cut that's it. That's awesome. Congrats Harper. Nice one there, buddy The caro and Joe Redfield first refractor Lunar Glow first Sean Sullivan Get it forced there true blue Zach Thornton first the 150 Merrow and Farmello first refractor by it Langford glass Elijah Green and Joe Patrona No, we're the last ones here to Yeah, usually everybody Shots coming in just walk around the shop CJ K this Corrects me walls.  Yeah, and both though usually to or whoever's top First base on his grant Taylor just not the white socks. There's a ghost for a while and sky for the word yet I wouldn't consider them there. No, he's definitely he's definitely not there somewhere Made up and Colin help Sick and canceling geez feel better toke. Yeah, hope you feel better man That sucks Rosarito Montes the 499 I was gonna say I don't think I've ever seen you here this late toke That is a Brock Rodding the 125 aqua lunar crater and Jack Hurley first refractor Assuming Steven I'm assuming it is I don't think we saw most of them So I'm off at this time fair Jackson Cheerio and saving some pious first base auto jave shears for the Padres Blake Mitchell Doesn't Crawford and Justin Reimer Good stuff there Harper. All right. Now your box of prism. Let's do a Harper Hear that all the time tomorrow Let's go Hawks, dude I hope the Hawks when you all start Star with no Orlando magic Promo code magic lose and you get nothing after you're gonna get you're gonna get nothing Silver is Fred Warner red wave to 149 is Khalil Mack. Yes, Bob.  You're right You were right. He's not very good He's a G leaguer right now silver is DJ Chirk Calvin Austin second-year auto the Steelis They tune in an O'Connell rookie like yes, he sucks Aha got me so bad Vonte Adams purple ice axe Charbonate at 225 Brian breezy and headed hooker rookie hooker hook Devon Holland that is an orange Sante Samuel to 249 very Porter jr. And Evan Hull Big money big money big money big money See it green scope is John L. Way. That's pretty cool to 75 Darnell Washington and Tankdale some of a Devon Adams Carl Lawson purple to 125 for the Jets Chris Rodriguez jr. And DeWon Johnson Silver Brian Robinson jr. Orange Ricky Williams to 249 Josh Downs rookie and Michael Wilson Green scope. It's X Charbonate rookie to 75. That's when they're Harper AJ Henry and Stetson back Josh Jacobs green scope TJ Watt for the Steelis Michael Meyer and DJ Turner Silver rookie Nolan Smith for the Eagles Red wave Chris Godwin to 149 To the Bucks Tariq Stevenson and Isaiah Foskey blue wave Deron Payne to 199 Jack Campbell and Keanu Benkman see a big auto Portal silver Trevor Lawrence night. There it is Puka Nakua silver rookie auto. There we go Harper Good stuff there buddy. Hell. Yeah, man. That'll play Puka Nakua silver rookie auto for the Rams will Anderson in a manual forms Harper that'll do it for your break Thank you as always buddy do appreciate it very good auto at the end there and Get them right out to you or you'll pick them up somehow they'll get to you appreciate it


In an age where bites hold more power than bullets and clicks can cause more chaos than clashes, the reality of our digital world is both awe-inspiring and terrifying. Consider this, every 39 seconds a cyber attack strikes. That's right, cyber crime has turned into a trillion-dollar industry, eclipsing even that of the drug trade and profitability. These criminals prey on our digital ignorance, with 90% of attacks originating from our own human error or lack of action. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to our virtual global audience. My name is Steve Remi and I will be your moderator for today's webinar entitled, Automated Cyber Risk Management to Achieve Digital Age Resilience. I'm the founder and CEO of Eight Degrees East, a strategic advisory company based in Switzerland. Eight Degrees East is also a UPU consultative committee member and I serve as the co-repertor for the freight and transport thematic chapter alongside Lars Carlson of the Global Shipping Company, MERSC. Today, I'm joined by a diverse panel of experts in this domain. Allow me to please introduce them. Ms. Rasha Al-Abdali. Based in Muscat Oman, Rasha oversees the development of national policies and standards for governing the IT industry in Oman, providing guidance and consultancy services to government agencies, as well as conducting research on new technological trends. Rasha is also a member at the National Task Force for managing national risks of critical infrastructure services. Welcome Rasha, thanks for joining. Hi Steve, hi all. It's a pleasure to be today with you here in this panel and we wish we have a fruitful session of the end discussion. Thanks. Mr. Massimiliano Ascii. Based in Rome, Italy, Massimiliano has been leading research and innovation activities in cybersecurity for post-Italian, the largest infrastructure in Italy, which is active in the areas of post and logistics, as well as financial, telco and insurance services. Massimiliano currently chairs the DotPost Group, DPG, at the Universal Postal Union, which governs, steers and develops the DotPost sponsored top-level domain name. Ciao Massimiliano, great to have you. Thank you very much. Welcome everyone. I'm really happy to be here with you today and the topics we will discuss I think are very interesting and it's our current problems. So I'm very excited and let's start discussing. And Ms. Terry Roberts. Based in Washington DC in the United States, Terry is the former deputy director of Naval Intelligence, Office of the US Chief of Naval Operations and an executive director, Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. He is a global cyber intelligence, risk and national security executive, and the current founder, president and CEO of White Hawk Inc. As well as an expert advisor for eight degrees East. Welcome Terry and thanks for agreeing to such an early start. I love this international panel. This is wonderful. Great to be here. Our goal today is to be solution oriented. We want to deliver to the individuals and the organizations that are tuning in the following insights into establishing a robust cyber risk baseline. Understand action plans aimed at mitigating key vulnerabilities continuously. And thirdly to strengthen overall cybersecurity posture and ensure operational continuity. We will achieve this through an interactive discussion today, based on predefined topics and questions. We have an hour and a fair amount of topics to cover, but if we can, we will answer some select questions from our viewers time permitting. If we do not have time, we still urge you to pose the questions in the chat. And if we have your email coordinates, we will revert to you and writing with responses and do course following the webinar. That said, let's get started with our first question. The first question or topic is, can next generation technologies effectively address the challenge of cyber threats in the postal sector, considering the complexities faced by both large and small operators. Massimiliano, this was was your topic. If you could give us a couple of points of color that'd be great. Thank you very much Steve for the opportunity to talk of this topic because since few years, the postal sector has been affected by many cyber attacks, which has been led by cyber criminals because probably they found this is profitable. So, as there is an economical motivation, basically behind these attacks, we believe this will not stop and will come again and again and again. So this is a real issue as especially when considering that probably the response of our industry is still not at a weight to the to the threat. And for example, when talking about vulnerability management, that could be particularly effective mitigation measure to this phenomena. This is a particularly challenging, particularly challenging issue, both for large operators and for the smaller ones in less developed countries for different reasons, obviously. The larger ones are facing huge complexities, IT architecture, very extended attack surface. Our services are particularly vulnerable also. This is lacking processes in vulnerability management, especially and the smaller operators have instead to face skill gap issues and the budget issues. So both would need the support of something different. We need to really to react to the situation and we are just trying to understand if we could leverage on next generation technologies really leverage reliable technologies that would be able to tackle this challenge. So this is what we asked to the to the market. No, is there a possibility to face these challenges. What do you think about this very, for example, very. So I've had the luxury of, you know, being at the center of next generation capabilities, you know, for decades, and especially since 2009. There's a possibility to dig in to thousands of software based SAS based, you know, a ML based technologies and services. And 20 years ago, we weren't there. Even 10 years ago, we started to have the capabilities, but they weren't proven at scale. And I can tell you that now, the last five years after billions of dollars in R&D in university startups and spin offs in a global pursuit right of resilience in the digital age that we now have a portfolio of technologies that can and and and this is the difference. They can automate obviously manual processes. Okay. But they can also come at the challenges in a totally different way. Using big data using mathematical algorithms right using software based implementations that can be remote and be updated. So even though your sector is as complex as the energy sector or as any other sector right that is global international interactive cooperative right. This is the only way that you're going to become resilient because you can't throw enough manpower at it. Right. You can't. This is moving at the speed of software and you can't throw enough money at it and we don't have limit limited limitless resources. So it is only by piloting and implementing these next generation capabilities and I'll go into some of the more specifics later about what some of the approaches are. But if you're not using them, you're not resilient and you're wasting your valuable resources. This is very fantastic news Terry and it is very interesting to to learn that there's a way to demonstrate on the field the effectiveness of these technologies and this means probably we exciting times are coming. They're here. They're here. Russia. Any comments there? Well, as they mentioned, like the the technologies are developing and evolving, especially nowadays with the AI and the big data. The learnings of the threats and the database is expandable, you know, and that we could address the issues there. We just need to make sure that these technologies are well configured, you know, to to to align with the organization security policies as well. I think we can we can utilize and optimize the offerings of the next generation solutions. Perfect. Talking of AI and machine learning that brings us to the next topic. Topic two, how close are we to achieving 100% reliable, transparent and cyber attack proof AI ML technologies for affordable automation in the postal value chain. Massimiliano again, you want to sort of set the stage here. Thank you, Steve. This topic is really touching me because I really believe these new technology are so promising as they would enable probably the to automate all a set of operations which are particularly heavy for for the operators. And if this kind of automation would be able to be affordable, you know, so that everyone could be able to to to bring this technology in, I would say, and this would surely help to fill the gaps between the most advanced operators from a technical point of view and the less advanced ones and the gap is huge. And this is a very big problem, because we are working in the same value chain, and we are strictly interconnected, one among the others. So, if these technologies would help to address this issue, this would be fantastic. At the same time, we need to be sure that these technologies are reliable enough as researchers showed up that these technologies can be sometime vulnerable, no, itself. So, how could we be sure now that this is safe enough, secure enough when using it for cyber defense. This is very important. And last but not least, we need these systems to take quick decisions, because they can see things that human beings are not able to see. And of course, we need to be quick and take many decisions at the same time, but at the same time, maybe after a while, we need to verify these decisions, no, and to understand why this decision has been taken. So we need transparency, explainability to be particularly developed. Are these technologies mature enough to grant such that such requests are satisfied? What's your thoughts about that, Terry?  But I took my first course in AI in 1985 in graduate school, you know, AI and machine learning. And at Carnegie Mellon, the first school of machine learning was established in the early 2000s. So, and I saw one of their first major experiments called NEL, Never and Ever Learning. And so we have been working on all of this for a long time. Today's, you know, capabilities are not the result of an overnight, you know, technology advance. But to explain a little bit about where we've been and where we could go. So traditional cybersecurity, right, as Amos said, is based on, you know, the number of controls, the audits, the checklists, the foundations, making sure that the best of breed frameworks. And then it has been very additive. You keep adding technology and you have this complex technology stack. Okay.  But the other 90% often don't have anything but best practices. Okay. And they don't even have in-house talent. So it's by using these proven AI-based, big data-based cyber risk and threat monitoring, both inside the networks, across your operational technologies, and from a hacker perspective, that you can have a 360 view of your risk and threat continuously and then mitigate the highest priority risks. That's where we want to get to and we have the capabilities and they are affordable. Great. Great. Thank you for that. And we have really high hopes and we are also very excited. At the same time, you can understand that we need to have evidences and when collecting some kind of information like the ones you're giving us today, this is very interesting to us. Thank you very much. I just would like to comment about Steve's question, one he mentioned, how close are we to achieving 100% reliable across the cyber attack pool? Well, I would like to say that there is no 100% guarantee in this program. Anything is hackable. It is only about how much delay we can make for it to happen and how fast can or does it take us to respond to it? Even if you have the best technology solutions in the world, people are the weakest point and in AI cases, if no proper data sets and algorithms are configured, anything could accidentally happen. That's why in the GRC domain we always talk about reasonable assurance and that's something to make it very clear to all people in the postal services that if we would want to embed security and cybersecurity controls, we need to have that kind of percentage where we will be hackable but we need to be ready and we need to be resilient about it. Yes, so Rasha, I would like to build on that. The way I look at it is, if you're doing the monitoring, the prioritization and the key risk mitigation, then when you have an event, you're going to be able to operate through it because the crown jewels are protected, right? And you see it almost immediately as opposed to it happening over a period of time and your operations are brought to their knees. Exactly. Great. Moving on, another fun topic. This should spark some dialogue for sure. What measures should the postal service organizations undertake to combat the growing threats of ransomware, phishing, and social engineering, considering the potential implications of data breaches and financial loss? Rasha, this was your topic, so maybe you want to tee this one up a little bit. Sure. Well, organizations need to take proactive steps to be ready for tackling these security threats. They need to have effective incident handling response process and right resources to conduct and prevent those attacks from happening. They need to have clear escalation metrics for reporting attacks that mark as high severity and have it properly communicated to the respective stakeholders. So when attacks occur, they ensure reporting is done through the right channels and decisions are made for handling attacks can be timely made. This is very important and especially as Terry was mentioning, we cannot focus on everything. We need to focus on the high risk threats and because every organization have scarcity of resources and budget. And I think we need to focus more on the on the high impact and high risks. We need to have clear strategies in place for handling such attacks based on an agreed risk appetite set by the top management, especially when it comes to ransomware. They need to understand, you know, before they get into the attacks, you know, they need to plan ahead that if we have a ransomware, how are we going to handle that they need to have data classification in place, so that if ransomware is not in place and the data that is, you know, controlled by the ransomware is, is really very critical to the organization what decisions can be made. Do they need to pay for that ransomware? Do they not need to pay? How they would react to it?  A lot of attacks are expected to happen. So an organization needs to be ready, you know, in advance for such attacks and they need to understand what kind of decisions and who are the people in the organization who can make the decisions for that. They need also to have an effective security awareness program for their employees, for the management for the technical teams and end users as well as security, you know, campaigns for their clients to indicate about the several types of threats and what impact can they bring and how to avoid them and what is dealing with them when the attacks take place. They need to have proper data classification. I mentioned that. So this is all is important to do it proactively so that you can ensure, you know, resilience, and you ensure that you can really properly handle such attacks when they really occur. So I think Russia has shown the complexity of the requirements. And with our risk and threat and solution data partners, today, whole industry of risk and threat monitoring and risk assessment capabilities can do a comprehensive assessment on any legal organization in the world within 48 to 72 hours. But what's most important is within that assessment and right this is this is not on premise. This is not intrusive. These are capabilities that banks use today for business clients and insurance groups use today for cyber liability insurance underwriting. And within the assessments, you can dig into the compliance across 80 different frameworks, the maturity of the organization, the key risks that they have and provide a prioritized action plan. And again, it's automated, it's using big data, it's using AI and ML. So what this does is it arms that organization with this information in a very digestible and understandable and actionable way so that they can get at right. Their top vulnerabilities. Okay, so that gets you kind of to here. Okay. For the specific Steve the specific issues that you brought up here, we have found in the thousands of assessments that we have performed globally that often it gets to basics. Okay, automating patch management is like one of the number one issues, right, and it prevents a merry out of all vulnerabilities. And the other one is cybersecurity awareness training, because I think as you mentioned, the statistics are that about 90% of all cyber events are the results of human actions. Okay. So, and here's a technology again, there are a whole portfolio of great online courses companies programs right of all different price point levels to be able to implement effective annual cybersecurity awareness training. That's focused on your industry that's focused on is on what's been happening to your industry, and that combined with the automated risk assessment can help prevent or mitigate the impact of all of these high risk events. That's fantastic. I totally agree with both of you. And I would just stress that still information and training is needed here and technologies have produced particularly good results encountering these these threats also in the past that we still need to switch from reactive to proactive. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. We're actually making good time here which is great. So, you know, Switzerland would be my adopted country would be proud. Two more questions topics and now we're moving more into the the policy and governance area. So, the next topic is how can postal services ensure consistent security policies and data protection across the supply chain, considering their complexities of integrated and semi integrated systems. Again, Rasha, if you could maybe give a little bit of an intro there. Sure. This is very important because if you're doing a really great job, but you are integrated to, you know, other organizations and, you know, stakeholders across the supply chain and they're not doing a good job. Then it's all compromised. So it is very important that to have third party security policies in place that has to be integrated as part of the outsourcing and middle management process for the for the postal organizations. They need to ensure that the security policies are well reflected in their contracts with the various external stakeholders across the chain to ensure that data is protected and data protection controls are implemented and attacks are well communicated and handled when they occur. It is also very important that they need to set a proper SLAs that guarantees the acceptable levels of availability of their services. They need to conduct regular auditing and security assessments to ensure the vendor compliance to security requirements, especially those set by regulators. Terry mentioned a few minutes ago about the automated risk assessment, you know, and the auditing. It's wonderful. But also when you are integrated with other vendors, suppliers or other clients across the supply chain, you need to ensure that you have the ability to check their compliance as well too. So one of the best practices is that when you sign a contract, you need to make sure that you at least embed as one of the conditions, your ability to audit that vendor or the integrated service at least with a certain external stakeholder. Excellent. So I agree 100%. So one one thing we tell all companies and organizations to do is do an assessment of your crown jewels. Okay. And, and UPU as an organization, right, because you're the same sector, you share a lot of the same crown jewels across yourselves. And what that helps you do is to then prioritize the resilience of the crown jewels so that if someone breaks in, they can't get to those right, you can you can operate through it. And the continuum that we have put in place as a part of our cyber risk program recommendations for every organization is the continuous monitoring the prioritization of the vulnerabilities. You can focus at least once a year pen test to validate those vulnerabilities and again, this now can be done remotely through software based capabilities that are half the price of traditional pen testing. Okay.  You take all of those findings, and then you make sure that your policies and your programs are focused on what are the issues that you have found. Okay. And then you brief your executive team, excuse me, at least quarterly on how you're doing. Okay. In English, meaning in non cyber language, right. Okay, to make it so that then you can say I need the resources to do this. Okay. And, and you need the whole executive team buying into this that being resilient to online crime fraud and disruption is a core part of your business and your organization. Finally, you can then do once a year. What Russia was talking about which is an exercise it exercise who's in charge. What's your communications plan. Do you have someone on speed dial to come in for response. Right. So it's a continuum, and it's continuous. Okay. And then you base your policies on the results of all of that. Oh, supply chain. Sorry. So the risk assessments that I'm talking about both business risk and cyber risk business risk being financial organizational leadership. Okay. Are are all automated commodities that you can buy today. So if you go to my website, because I don't productize, there's under innovative solutions mapped to the Gartner categories you can see exemplars of the type these types of next generation solutions and they're global. Okay. That can address the different areas to include supply chain risk and by the way, you can just do an annual business risk cyber risk if you can't afford a continuous approach. It's a very, very interesting discussion. I also would like to add to the discussion to stress that the upu at upu we develop standards. We develop proper standards for cybersecurity. In order to guarantee consistent methodologies to be adopted across the sector. At the same time, these standards should have been should not be bureaucracy, but smart, smart standards, adaptable standards, which would be to anyone would like to adopt and according to different budget cultures and needs. In time, I believe that technology also here can support a lot as Tracy told, and we need to push on integration among different systems system integration is very critical in my opinion and interoperability is the key for efficiency. This is a very important information exchange. Last but not least, I would say that also the dot post group as a mission delivers security services for the community. And this is one way we're trying to adopt to support this process, the process you are predicting by delivering a possible services services that are available on the market of course. And rely on when delivering your own digital services. So this could be one way or at least one possibility to improve the situation. Excellent. Russia, did you have a follow. Well, I think we would cover the most points and I think it's very important that you don't work in silos with comes to building effective security, you know, a program for organization or services, especially in the, in the postal services because you are working with so many with the network and you need to make sure that you know there's a harmony between what you do and what others are doing. And the collaboration is very important building a working within a framework and collaboration is very important awareness across the chain is very important. I believe, you know, it's a shared responsibility. If we would want to make sure that we achieve the continuous resilience of our services. You know, one recommendation that I've been making past few years, especially to great organizations such as yourselves and through a mechanism like dot post is providing services of common concern. So, even you were talking about suppliers, especially regionally you may share a lot of the same suppliers. So why should each individual organization do a pay for a risk assessment right. Why not do it once, right, and then share it across the members. So therefore with limited resources, you can have an effective supply chain risk program in place. But, you know, and I'm volunteering you ask me, you know, you can have it in one place and then have benefit same thing with some of these next generation technology solution licenses right. The prices go down exponentially with volume. We expected this so yes, we are very happy to explore these opportunities. Yep. And, and I mean like it goes from $1000 a risk assessment to $200 a risk assessment. Do you see what I'm saying. It's, it's dramatic because take advantage of that it's software based. So, so things like that I think, and you can pilot right so you can one one member or a couple of members can pilot a capability together show the impact across up you and then others can decide. Ah, do I do I want to leverage this capability. Is it the right thing for me. Excellent. Yep. Great. Let's move on to the final topic. Which is how can postal services ensure effective business continuity in the face of digital transformation, especially in critical areas like medical and financial services while mitigating risks and ensuring stakeholder communication and testing mitigation plans. Russia. You want to get a little bit on that please. Sure. This is very important topic, especially nowadays when we talk about in the latest up forums and and conferences they we have entered the the the domains of delivering products not just normal packages but we're talking about medical services we're talking about financial services and these are very critical services. We're delivering life, not just packages, and it's very important to take a business continuity seriously and and put the right measures and how how do we how do we ensure we have effective business continuity, you know, in place. First of all, postal services need to conduct. First of all, there is a homework that needs to be done properly which is conducting business impact analysis to identify critical services that need to be taken good care of. That helps in setting the right priorities for building sufficient mitigation plans and required RTOs RTOs and how much amount of time can we, you know, can we afford to to to get our services, you know, recover how amount of data is data loss is acceptable so if we get to to really what are our actual, you know, critical services, and we prioritize them and then we focus on that that helps us really to to to have accurate plans in place with the right measurement of of what are the acceptable you know, RTOs and RTOs. We need to have proper information assets inventory in place to identify all valuable assets for those critical services such as network devices and systems, which will require active backup implementation plans and tests. This is a very important step, and they need to identify the emergency teams who will be involved in activating the business continuity plans, communicate them well and keep them up to date along with their contact details. Having the right plans in place the right people who are competent to to activate and execute these plans is very important to step, but we need to have them always up to date and we need to have all of the, you know, the details of those people.  It is very important that we have the process service to have regular tests, you know, conducted and test results need to be reported. This will ensure any failure is addressed and weak points are rectified. So, the right controls are always there and they're effective. It is very important for ensuring business continuity to have redundancy mechanism in place so that availability doesn't get affected. This includes having disaster recovery center ready and equipped to take over running the critical services. I think these are very important steps and points to be considered if we or any, you know, post service organization needs to build a, you know, an effective continuity continuity process in planning in place. Absolutely. So, I would think, because many of your organizations have been, have existed for decades or longer, that what we forget is our architectures have evolved. Right. They weren't designed yesterday and built just yesterday. Right. They've evolved, you've added things, you've changed things, right, but you still have a lot of legacy hardware and software. So, for Rasha's points, I always recommend an architecture review, but mapped to your business functions. Okay. So that you have visibility of this function is reliant on these databases on these business applications on these communications or relay systems or these operational technologies. So with that visibility, then you can make decisions of how you want to migrate to a next generation architecture over time by design. So for instance, sometimes I tell people don't spend money on cybersecurity. If you, if you have software, especially business applications that are more than 10 years old, just buy updated software, because old software, all the windows and doors are open. And you won't have business continuity because they can take down that business function very easily. Okay. Another cloud provisioning. Many older organizations have their databases on premise, right, on old servers. And it can be a lot less expensive and much more resilient with the right next generation cloud provisioning. Okay. And they are doing better security than you're doing on premise. And then Rasha's point on asset management. Because the architectures have evolved, a lot of times you have shadow it that you don't even know exists, because you've forgotten about it, and you don't have visibility into it. And that's another backdoor for criminals. By the way, with these cyber risk outside monitoring, we can discover all the shadow it, and then you can bring it down by design and close that all of these things are central to business continuity. And so the last point is, if you're giving it to your IT people, or your engineers, and the business or the organization's leadership are not involved in these conversations, then it's not being done effectively. Because many times the technical side of the organization that it doesn't understand all of the pieces of the business functions and operations. It's a joint conversation. It's something you have to do as a team. Thank you very, very interesting. Also this topic is critical because why do we need a business continuity in the postal sector, especially when considering the many sizes of the companies operating all over the world. First of all, we have to remember we are not just delivering postal and logistics services, but we are a point of reference for citizens. And we are delivering many kinds of services other than the postal ones, which are considered still considered very important in many countries, but you can imagine some of us are delivering the pensions and are delivering universal income services. So people needs our services because we are also still also not thinking about business only, but to deliver services to the citizens too. That's why business continuity is particularly relevant. At the same time, you should consider different budgets and availability. There are countries which struggle to understand how to, how could they implement. So there's a strong demand for both kind of operators and countries to reduce costs of implementing and operating business continuity solutions. This is one request for the market. It's a very strong need and I believe we can do a lot here. There's a lot of things we could do. Cloud services, platforms and infrastructures are probably one of the best options for low budget solutions because these are particularly costly, but at the same time cost structure is particularly flexible. You can turn on and off the services as needed. So this is one way, one possible approach. I think that's a really good point about the, you can turn it on and off, right? Yeah. And this also came back to what was the saying that you said before we went live that cyber is a team sport. Cyber security is a team sport. So this whole point, and I've seen this many times in the corporate world where the IT don't talk to the executives and vice versa. It's a recipe for disaster in the end. I mean, I mean, in many ways, executives and managers have aggregated the responsibility on this because they see it as technical. And we don't do that with finance, but financial risk everybody owns. Well, cyber risk everyone needs to own. Yeah. Very good point. We are at nine minutes left in the in the webinar, which is perfect because I would like to so we can end on time. This has been a great discussion and I think that a lot of fantastic ideas and and areas to explore for for the people that are listening has been shared and is available following this. And I would invite you all just to give a couple of minutes quickly, final thoughts. And then I will conclude this. So, Rasha, if you would like to go with a few closing remarks from your side, please. Well, I will start from where you ended. Again, I stress on that security is a team sport. It's very important that we identify all of the stakeholders who are very important to our business. And what are the critical services that we are handling what are the valuable assets, you know, that are part of the services and then build a complete strategy in line with the business objectives. This is just to ensure the proper governance of where what we really need to protect is really important to the business and to our services. And we need and all of everything else is just around that, to be honest. We need to to direct our investments toward that. We need to direct all of our security projects toward that as all of the efforts all of the trainings and awareness has to be around that so that we don't invest on the wrong place on the wrong direction that the business is on the other side, and we are on a different side This is very important. If we really want to do security properly to keep the business up and running. Excellent. Thank you very much. Massimiliano, a few words. I believe the time is up for the postal sector is not anymore the time to wait for things to happen. We have to be proactive. We have to do something concrete to counter the cyber threats that we are raising every every day. I would say, we are not sharing ideas, experiences, we are not exploring the market. Seriously, my opinion, we are not. This is based on evidence is the evidence is are the cyber incident, which I could read on. And every time I see the same scheme as for example, being applied to the players or the postal sector. This is terrific. We should share information we should operate as one, we should exchange information we should leverage on high tech in order to fill the gaps and to raise level up the overall cybersecurity level of the entire value chain because we are operating as a one. And these must happen also in the field of digital services so it's time to act and we are here to sustain this process, this maturity process that we need to happen really to happen. Thank you, Massimiliana. Excellent. Terry. Yeah, when I when I meet with sectors like yours that are global and complex and have a combination of it and OT. And their sense and their business functions are sent and continuity are central to our world. Okay. I always get the feeling from everybody that you're overwhelmed and rightly so, right, you're drowning in everything that you have to do, and the importance of doing it right. And the reason that I have focused on cost effective scalable automation and technology solutions is because it's the only way to lift that burden and make each organization effectively identify prioritize and address the risk of digital age risks. And I need everyone who watches this program to have a sense of urgency of getting this done, because when you are hit. It can bring an organization to its knees. It can cost millions of dollars. And we're giving it all to the bad guys. You know, that's, that's the other thing I hate. We're making the bad guys rich. Okay. So, with your limited resources, you want to put them as Sasha said, in the right place. Okay. So I have a recommendation. UPU do a risk based a risk assessment on every entity in UPU share that individual risk assessment only with the individual organization. Remember, these are, you can buy them, right. But then there are portfolio analytics across by sector sub sector region size that can be shared with the whole organization right no names, just the regions the size the sub sector. Okay. And then through dot post you can you can learn, what are the key, the top three issues, right, that we're seeing based on real data. And then what are the services of common concern that you might want to put in place to address those issues. I'm telling you, within 90 days, you will see improvements, because you will arm everybody with a different perspective on themselves and something that is understandable and actionable. And then you can decide what else you may want to do over time. Well, we're almost out of time. A few comments from my first from my side. First of all, I want to thank the three of you for taking the time and really creating I believe a very rich and insightful webinar. I think on the back of this, you know, there are follow ups for anybody that's listening and anybody that we talked to after this, because the, the situation is real. It's increasing. And an action needs to be taken. I've seen this in any different guys is throughout my corporate career as well and I've seen that today at an increasingly high rate. So we wanted to we wanted to come up with solutions today and propose solutions and steps for the for the viewers. I think we've done that. But more importantly, it's now the onus is on on the owners locally and internationally to reach out if they have questions, comments, if they if they need support supports there. And this is this is the goal of the consultative committee is really to bring this public private partnership, the best and breed in different areas to to be able to to raise everybody's game. But more importantly, as we're talking about cyber security to to guard the assets that we work every day to bring a better value to to our constituents, which are the people that we deliver to. So thank you again very much, everybody. I hope that this was as as as joyful for you as it was for me. I wish you a great day. Take action and be safe. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Now, the World Health Organization, the WHO and other red groups have appealed to leaders of the world's 20 biggest economies to fund a $23.4 billion plan to bring COVID-19 vaccines, tests and drugs to poorer countries in the next year. The plan outlines the strategy of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator Act A until September 2022, expected to include, yes, of an experimental oral antiviral pill made by American Co for treating mild and moderate cases. If the pill is approved by regulatory authorities, the cost could be as little as $10 per course. Together, these countries have the ability to make the political and financial commitments that are needed to end this pandemic and to prevent future crises. We are at a decisive moment, requiring decisive leadership to make the world safer. And I have three requests for the G20 leaders. First, fully fund the Act Accelerator. Second, support the creation of an overarching framework for global health security through a legally binding treaty on pandemic preparedness and response. And third, support the creation of a health threats financing board supported by a financial intermediary fund hosted by the World Bank.