So today I want to talk about security and cognitive radio networks. Now, there are a lot of companies right now that are spending a lot of money on a prediction. And the prediction is that over the next ten years, the number of connected devices and the amount of data that they're going to use is going to increase very, very fast. And so new protocols and new specifications and new hardware even is being developed to deal with this engineering problem of how do we add billions more devices to networks that are already really congested, especially wireless networks. And a lot of the times when these new protocols are designed, it's really important obviously to think about how we make sure data integrity is maintained. And in the kind of networks I'm going to talk about today, not a whole lot of thought has really gone into it yet. And I think the way that security research kind of normally works is we start out with a system that's deployed over a really large area and then someone discovers a problem with it, right? And then we talk about it and everyone freaks out. And then it's up to the vendor or whoever is responsible to try to repair it. And then everyone sort of relaxes a little bit until it happens all over again. And so we sort of had this cyclical band-aiding of almost everything that we interact with. And I think we're at a really unique point in cognitive radio networks because it's far long enough now to where there are actual deployments in the field, but it's not so far along now where if we discover problems with it and we can actually make suggestions to how things should be changed, it's not going to affect millions of people yet. But to understand how we can make these improvements, first we have to understand the system that we're talking about. So initially we had radio, right? In radio you've got a transmitter and a receiver. And if you want to change how the radio operates, then you have to turn a knob. And you've got to be standing there physically to turn the knob. And the knob only turns so far one way or another. Okay, so then technology advanced a little bit further and we came up with software to find radio. Now we can turn those knobs in software and we can do it remotely and we can even control how far the knob turns one way or another. So sort of the next logical step from this is cognitive radio, which is adding a feedback loop into the radio itself. So now the radio is capable of observing its surroundings and then changing itself, changing its own parameters to optimize whatever it's trying to do. And we have a whole bunch of these together and we have, of course, a cognitive radio network. So now not only are individual radios talking amongst themselves trying to understand how they can better increase their performance, but they can talk to each other and they can talk back to a central base station somewhere and inform each other about what's going on. So another word for this might be adoptive network, where they're actually teaching each other. Now to actually send information in the physical layer, it's important that we understand this, otherwise it will be a little difficult to follow. But to actually send information over a wave, we can fully define a wave by three parameters. Its frequency, which is how often a certain point reappears, its amplitude, and its phase. And so by fiddling with one or more of these parameters than we do is called modulation. So that's how we actually represent information in a wave. Now there are lots of different ways you can do modulation, of course. If we start with the simple cosine wave like this, the top is the time domain and the bottom is the frequency domain. If we frequency modulate this, then in the time domain, we see the frequency is actually changing with time. And in the frequency domain, you can see all those frequencies. There are more complicated ways to do this too. For instance, this is quadrature amplitude modulation. It's more difficult just by eye to see what's going on here. But the point is, there are lots of different ways you can do this, and each different form of modulation has different tradeoffs. So by changing individual parameters in each different form of modulation, we can trade off things like how fast it will go versus the bandwidth that will take up and stuff like that. So cognitive invention is sort of the hyped up word for what you might describe as the thing that actually controls and commands individual cognitive nodes. So there are lots of different parameters that the cognitive invention controls. And these are examples of some of them. Now, you'll notice that these are all on different layers of abstraction. So some of them are all the way down in the physical layer, and some of them are higher. And some of them even depend on each other. So the cognitive invention is trying to accomplish some task. Like let's say it's trying to minimize interference, and it's trying to maximize data rate. So we would call that its objective function. So it's got a bunch of inputs to its objective function. These are examples of inputs that it would have. And by changing those inputs, it's going to achieve some output of this function, and it's going to either try to minimize or maximize this function. So if we were to plot that, this is a simple three-dimensional example. Normally, you would have way more than three dimensions, so it would be impossible to visualize like this. But a simple technique that a cognitive invention might use to try to optimize whatever it's trying to do is something like gradient descent or gradient descent or other simple machine learning techniques. And this works relatively well, but obviously there are dangers of hitting local maximum in a set of global. And so there are several other techniques that it can use. Another one is game theory. And this actually works really well, because Spectrum is a resource that is being fought over by lots of different people. And so we can model this in game theory really easily. And one of the ways that we can do this is to try to achieve what's called Pareto optimality, which means that if you've got a single cognitive radio network in a room by itself and there's no one else there, then there's nothing it can do. No change it can make when it's at its Pareto optimality that will increase its performance without also decreasing the performance of another node. So this is sort of like the idealized case where you win every time. Now in real life, of course, this is never true. You're always competing with other people, and there's other things going on in the network. And maybe there's malicious users in the network. So in that case, you can try to attempt for a Nash equilibrium, which means that now instead of trying to win everything all the time, you're basically trying to not lose all the time. In other words, as long as everyone is using the same strategy, there is no change that any one player can make on their strategy that will also not decrease the strategy of another player. Now again, this gets difficult to actually achieve in real life, and so you can try to approximate it. But the point is there's a lot of really interesting ways that a cognitive engine could try to optimize this objective function. Back in the 1800s when wireless telegraph was first showing up, it was really, really spectrally inefficient. And that was because it used spark-gapped transmitters, which just trashed the spectrum. So when operators were trying to talk to each other, they would have to listen to see if anyone was there. And if there wasn't, then they could go ahead and start talking. And so as you can imagine, this did not end up working very well at all. And in fact, one of the more common messages that people sent was GTOOMQRT, which stood for go to hell, old man, I'm trying to transmit. And so they would just yell at each other until someone like gave way and they could actually transmit. And this really became a big problem when the Titanic sank, believe it or not, because after they investigated the sinking, they realized that some of the shore transmitters were actually interfering with some of the ship rescue efforts. And so in 1912, the Radio Act of 1912 was passed, which created the FCC and created licensing. So now people realized to make sure that no one is interfering with each other, we need to have licenses. Everyone is responsible for their own chunk of spectrum and you're definitely not allowed to transmit where anyone else is. And this worked well for a while. But eventually, as more and more wireless devices came online, and especially in the 80s and 90s when cell phone companies started becoming big and they started aggressively lobbying Congress to buy more and more spectrum, the spectrum was divided up into smaller and smaller pieces and some rudimentary spectrum sharing began because as long as you're not obviously in the same physical location or you're not operating at the same time, then you're not going to interfere with each other. Now, more recently, something really interesting has happened. Back in the 90s, when people started seeing this problem of, okay, maybe we should figure out how to ration spectrum a little better, people began setting up spectrum observatories, which are basically just a spectrum analyzer on a building somewhere within antenna, and they would watch this really wide band and see what was actually going on. How are people really using their licenses? And they found out that surprisingly it's actually full of holes, and a lot of the spectrum that people are buying isn't actually used, or at least it's not used very efficiently. So recently, several years ago, the FCC, after being petitioned by Google, decided to make unlicensed the old analog TV channels. So this is called TV White Space. And Google was kind of the primary push of that. So the problem is, because the licenses are not the same everywhere, the availability of stuff like White Space isn't available everywhere. So this is a plot, for example, of one channel of TV White Space across the United States. And all the blue is where it's available, and the green is where it's not available. So as you change channels, the availability of different frequencies changes as well. So this is the entire United States. It's a little deceiving on this plot, because it's not plotting density, it's plotting different channels and different colors. But you can see it's mostly around a couple big cities where there's not a lot of spectrum available, but everywhere else in the United States, in the middle of the desert, there's no TV channels out there, so why not use it? And there are several companies now that have begun really taking advantage of this. The FCC has set up specific databases with Microsoft and a company called Spectrum Bridge and Google, and the way it works is you query these databases, and you tell them where you are, and they'll return to you a list of the frequencies that you're allowed to use without paying for. These companies have also, Microsoft and Google have begun using this in what some people are calling super Wi-Fi, which is basically just taking 802.11 and shifting it down to these frequencies, which is around, it's in UHF, so it's around 500 to 600 megahertz. And they're doing lots of trials right now. There's around 40 experimental installations in the United States. They've also got trials going all over Africa and Kenya and South Africa, Tanzania, Singapore, Senegal, everywhere. So this is really interesting. But there's other uses for this as well. There's a company in France called Sigfox that rather than use this as just another way to do Wi-Fi is trying to use this for long range wireless sensors that are specifically, that are really low power. And so rather than connect people in a traditional network, they're connecting, for instance, farmers who need to measure the moisture of their field, and you've got a really large area. This is the kind of stuff that they're working on. So especially for these low power devices, we need new protocols, we need new ways to deal with these interesting physical and political properties. So there's another company in England called Newell that is developing a protocol called Weightless. And the Weightless is kind of interesting because it's set up as a special interest group, but it's set up as a private special interest group. Now, Bluetooth did the same thing.  And in the case of Bluetooth, the way it worked was you paid a bunch of money to contribute and then afterwards, once they released the spec, you can download the entire spec for free. Weightless for some reason is working a little differently and if you wanna just read the spec, which they've now released version 1.0, it costs almost $1,000. And they claim that it's an open spec, so I'm not really sure how that works, but I hope that they perhaps take a turn because I'm sure there'd be a lot of people interested in how this actually works and poking around at it. So now briefly I wanna talk about some of the kinds of attacks that specifically apply to cognitive radio networks. Now, a lot of traditional network attacks will also work on cognitive radio networks, but a lot of times they'll work in different ways. And so obviously I'm not gonna enumerate every single kind of attack here, but I wanna give you an idea of the kinds of things you have to think about when dealing with networks like this because it takes a little bit of different thinking. So I'm sure one attack everyone in here is familiar with is a replay attack, right?  So in a regular network, if you don't handle that correctly, that can be bad, but on a cognitive radio network, it can mean different things because your cognitive engine is trying to, is constantly monitoring the network and trying to decide how it can better optimize it, what improvements it can make and how it can make sure it's not interfering with everyone else. So if it sees traffic returning to it that it has already seen, then it may assume one of two things. It may assume that there's a routing problem, especially if it's an ad hoc kind of network, or it may assume that there's some weird RF thing happening, perhaps if it's seeing a large reflection off of a surface or something, and it may try to adjust for it. So taking advantage of the assumptions that the cognitive engine makes is I think a large attack surface. One of the more maybe obvious methods that you might have think of when attacking these kind of networks is changing the observations that individual nodes can see. So if a legitimate node can observe an incumbent on some channel, and the way it would observe an incumbent, there's several different ways. It can use something as simple as energy thresholding. So if there's some power above some threshold that decides that there's a person there, or it can use more complicated ways. For instance, cycle of stationary analysis or wavelet analysis, and it can actually try to characterize the signal more. I'm not gonna go into exactly how those work because the math is really hairy, but in any case, it discovers that there's a person there. And we'll forward this message along the network until it hits perhaps a compromised node, which case the message can be changed. And once this is forwarded along to the base station, this can cause different decisions to be made. And this can do one of two things. First of all, it means that the real incumbent is now gonna be ignored, and you can effectively turn the entire network into your own jammer. And the other advantage of this particular attack is that you don't have to transmit anything to make it work. So rather than having to set up your own radio and potentially be triangulated or something, you can simply change traffic to change what appeared to be observations. A simpler version of this would be a routing disruption. Again, another attack that is well-documented in traditional networks. But if a node either starts dropping packets or completely drops off the network, then this can be really bad for the cognitive engine because if that particular area physically where the node is located is collecting really valuable data, then it's now blind in that part of the network. And so that can drastically change how the entire network will behave. By the way, you don't need some kind of complicated exploit to make a small node, especially the kinds that are typically used in sensor networks to act like a black hole, right? A baseball bat will also work to take the node off the network. The civil attack, another originally designed for peer-to-peer networks, the idea being that if you've got a trust relationship between individual nodes or the base station, then you can take advantage of that by either taking over additional nodes or adding more to the network. So especially in these cases, it's really important to know who you can trust information from and when you can trust that it's real. And so keeping track of individual nodes and whether or not they're being suspicious is really important. So if you get enough of your own nodes on the network, then you now have basically voting majority and you can vouch for compromised nodes on behalf of each other. And in this way, you can indirectly control the decisions that the network is gonna make because you can just feed it whatever you want it to hear and then you can get a pretty good idea of what it's gonna have to do in response. A priority attack is another interesting attack that, another interesting attack that is perhaps unique to this kind of network. The idea is that you've got sensors in different places like let's say you've got a sensor in a laboratory that's measuring the moisture of a fern or something. And then you've got another sensor in the same network that is measuring toxic fume levels in the lab. Okay, well clearly the one that's measuring fume levels should be much higher priority than the one measuring moisture in the plant. And so by exploiting, by telling the cognitive engine that you're higher priority than you really are, then you can derive resources away from places that really need it. Because especially in these cases where you're sharing spectrum, there's a finite amount of resources to go around. And so it's more easy to sort of clamp those off. Whenever people are designing hardware, especially these kind of networks, it's really, really easy, especially when you're designing small nodes to rationalize weak crypto. And the reason this is because if you're, if you're working on a microcontroller and you're writing an assembly and you're trying to squeeze every cycle out, it can be really easy to say, you know, it doesn't like, who's really gonna try to break into this or it doesn't really matter if someone is able to read this traffic. And a lot of it also comes down to speed versus security, right, because in a network like this, you've got a lot more network overhead. And so understanding what trade off to be made is really hard, but it's really, really important and it's easy to screw up. Data privacy on a normal network is obviously important, but in these kind of networks, it gives you more information about the nodes themselves than perhaps on a regular network. For instance, location can be much easier to discover for an individual node because the spectrum that it's observing is really, really specific to where it physically is. And individual trees and buildings and stuff around specific nodes can drastically affect the spectrum that they're observing and you can characterize that. And so you can figure out physically where they are. And this can be really bad if you're trying to keep that secure. So this, I think, primary user emulation is the most challenging attack that we're gonna have to deal with in these kinds of networks. Primary user emulation, well first I guess explain what a primary user is in the context of the FCC. What they talk about there is a, for instance, a TV transmitter who actually owns the license. They would be the primary user and then everyone who's sharing the spectrum with them is the secondary user. So normally the way this works is you look up the database and that tells you all the primary users and you know, okay, well, if they're not on this list then they must not be a primary user. So this is kind of an exploit of both technology and policy because the problem is as the law stands right now, there's no way to authenticate a primary user. So if you set up a radio somewhere and you start rebroadcasting episodes of happy days in the middle of a network, then you can potentially dost the entire network off the air. And even though the network may very, very well suspect that you're doing something bad, there's nothing legally they can do about it because they have to get out of your way. And so figuring out exactly how to deal with this has been really tricky and there's several papers that have been written on special cases for this, but no one has really figured out how to deal with it. And I think it's gonna require a combination of some really clever algorithms for characterizing real primary users versus fake ones and also some policy change on how we're able to detect them and what you're able to do once you discover that they're there. Because at this point, once they doster off the entire network, then essentially becomes a jamming problem and you can try to use something like spread spectrum to get around that, but it's not ideal. So those were obviously not every possible attack. Those are just general ideas. And similarly, these are just general ideas on countermeasures for how to deal with some of these things. And not all of this has been enumerated yet, but I think there are some several key important ideas that we're gonna have to think of when we're trying to solve these issues. The first is using cooperative intrusion detection. Traditionally, we see maybe a single intrusion detection system, but in the case where you've got a bunch of nodes that are all talking to each other, because they can inform each other, they should be able to inform each other about each other. So not only are they observing the spectrum in general, but they should be observing each other's behavior and keeping each other accountable. If they observe strange traffic, then they need to alert each other and adjust their trust functions accordingly. Device reputation is another really important thing. By keeping track of the quality of the spectrum that each individual node is receiving, again, as well as their traffic, then you can build this trust function and you can sort of weight your decisions based on that. And this is not only something malicious, right? If there's something physically wrong with a node and it starts reading weird spectrum, then that's another legitimate reason why you need to know, okay, we should factor these observations less into our decisions. And device location, again, is another important aspect for this because physical security on nodes like this is a big deal. And having physical access to them, even a single node, can significantly affect the network and change the decisions that are being made. So why does this matter? Why should we try to work on some of these problems? Well, this plot right here has probably been seen by, I would guess, every major networking executive in the entire world. And this is showing, of course, the mobile data predictions over the next couple of years. And Cisco is predicting insane numbers. They're saying that by 2020, there'll be 50 billion devices connected together on the network. Right now there's about 10. So there are a lot of these companies that are both predicting and kind of freaking out in preparing for what they think is gonna be this really big deal. So it almost doesn't matter whether or not this actually happens because they're sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. They're predicting that it's gaping and preparing for it. So I think that this will be relevant either way. But this is the spectrum app in the United States right now and you can see how fragmented it is. This goes from three kilohertz to 300 gigahertz. So this is the current solution, is chopping it up into smaller pieces. And obviously we can't keep doing this. And eventually we're gonna have to figure out how to deal with that. So this is another application I think of cognitive radio specifically, is cell phone towers. As the density of cell phone towers increases and as we see the proliferation of femto cells, I mean the number of transmitters is getting closer and closer together and so they have to make sure they're not interfering with each other. And if you've got a femto cell in every house, then you're gonna have problems. And some of these are already beginning to do some very, very simple cognitive aspects to them where they'll try to avoid each other. And I'm only seeing that as gonna continue to increase because it's gonna let them be even more efficient. So to sort of do experiments with this and to play around with this, we need tools.  The only downside is that it's a little expensive. I've actually written some experimental cognitive engine code, some base station code in GNU radio that will run on the USRP and I'll link to it at the end if you wanna play with it. So this is good for acting like sort of the base station that will make decisions and command smaller nodes. However, if you're trying to do experiments with the network, then you typically need multiple nodes and maybe you can afford one USRP but you probably can't afford like five of them. So the other end of this is the really, really cheap XB type thing, which is just a little wireless module. Kind of you put data in one side and it magically comes out the other side. And the good thing is that it's really, really cheap so you could buy a bunch of them. But the problem is they're not frequency agile at all and they're not very customizable. You can't control them very well. So I kind of wanted something in between. And so there wasn't really anything at the time so I built something. So I built this board that I called level and it goes from 30 megahertz to 4.4 gigahertz. Outputs about 60 milliwatts. It uses a chip by TI that's based on the MSP430 which I'll talk about in a second. And so it's compatible with TI's really cool off the shelf mesh networking stack called Simplicity. And it fits onto our Arduino shields. It isn't an Arduino shield, which I'll clarify what that means in a second. And they cost about a hundred bucks. So this is what it looks like. And I'll briefly go over some of the topology here. This is the CC430 which is microcontroller, like I said, by Texas Instruments. It's got a MSP430 core in it as well as a CC1101 transceiver core in it. It's low power and it's relatively low bandwidth as well. So it's good for doing low power sensor kind of stuff. The local oscillator is this part by analog devices. This is an ADF4351 wideband VCO. Those are mixed together in this ADEX10L. This is a passive mixer. And because it uses a single antenna, it's got two RF switches that are controlled by GPIO on the MSP430 so you can switch from transmit to receive mode. And then it runs through a bunch of filters and some amplifiers. And I also added these two things which are optionally populated. These are directional couplers. And these basically let you tap into the RF signal that's coming out of the MSP430 directly and these ADF4351 directly without going through the mixer and filters and amplifiers and everything. So it helps with debugging. This is what I meant by it fits onto Arduino Shields. As I was building this, I thought it'd be pretty cool if you could actually interact with other devices. For instance, your laptop obviously can do Wi-Fi but it can't do stuff in 500 megahertz. So I was working with TV White Space and I wanted to play around with that. So I realized that Arduino Shields typically have similar SPI pinouts for a lot of these breakout boards for pretty much everything. And so it fits right on there. And once you've de-packetized whatever you're receiving on the top board, then you can just send it over serial to an Arduino Shield which will typically do all the hard parts for you and turn it into 802.11 or whatever you want. So this actually is on a Wi-Fi Shield and this is on an Ethernet Shield. So this board by the way is still, I would still consider it kind of a prototype. And I don't really have a way to mass manufacture them right now. However, code and firmware and everything and schematics are all on GitHub and I'll link that at the end. And if there's enough interest then we can see what we can do. There are other tools out there too that are really good for this stuff. The HackRF by Michael Lassman which just launched on Kickstarter a couple days ago. Pretty neat tool. The BladeRF which also was on Kickstarter earlier this year. And then there's another board that I found out about very recently called the MyriadRF which is this pretty neat little board that it's not quite as frequency agile as the other two boards but it's really neat. And so all three of these are really good tools for playing with this. And all three of them didn't exist when I was originally designing my board which is why I didn't use any of them. So what's next? Well, the whole spectrum crunch thing depending on who you talk to some people would say that it's imminent and we're all doomed. And some people will say, well maybe we have a little more time than we thought. There's new techniques people are using that might buy us some more time. But here's what we know. We know that a lot of these companies that have a whole lot of money are investing a lot of money in cognitive radio networks. They've been doing experiments in turning entire cell phone towers into cognitive nodes. And I think that we're at a really unique time because like I said, these are deployed to the point where there's actually real networks in the field right now. I mean in France with SIGFOX, they've got at this point apparently thousands of devices connected to paying customers. And there's dozens and dozens of installations in the United States right now. Actually West Virginia University just a couple of weeks ago started serving wifi to some of their dorms over TV white space. And so we're at this really cool time where the networks actually exist but they're not used by so many millions of people that it's too late to really change fundamentally how they work. And so I think by attacking these kinds of problems and by trying to solve these, I mean really non-trivial issues be it either technological or political. We can really get, we can really be on our way towards making sort of the next generation network and making sure that we're able to deal with whatever the results of these predictions end up being. Thank you.


The CH-53 Super Stallion can quickly and accurately transfer that in. That's probably a good thing. Oh jeez. Ben, get off of the airplane. You're going to ride in it, not on it. Oh jeez. For those of you who can't see this, he just collided with the aileron. He's going to get a ride over in Buford in the low country and enjoy himself today. Oh jeez. Nice. Here's the problem. He's got pedals at his feet. He's got a right pedal and a left pedal. Those are the rudder pedals. He must think it's an accelerator and a brake. I don't know what he's going to do with that stick that's coming up through the floorboards between no is, you push forward on the stick, the houses get bigger. You pull back on the stick, the houses get smaller. But in this airplane, if you pull back on the stick long enough, the houses get bigger again. I'm not sure what we're going to do about this Wayne Box.  No, I think we're going to call out the Hawk missile battery. Oh, an oscillation, right? Except this is a WIO, a Wagnowski induced oscillation. Yeah, something like that. So he's, I don't know what we're going to do with this guy.  This is what happened to the FC, the nose just falls forward. He picks up from flying speed and this year. He wants to thank, maybe he can scream at you again, who knows. Man, he was yelling loud. The sky has this blue one as the pits point. Experimental aircraft association's air defense office. That course is still climbs up over 500 feet above the ground. He didn't know until he was 18 years old instructor. Instructor.


Have you ever looked up at the stars and wondered are we alone? It's one of those fundamental questions that humans have thought about for thousands of years and the search for that answer is what drives the field of astrobiology. Astrobiology is the study of life in our universe and it brings together lots of different types of science such as biology, chemistry, physics, geology and astronomy. Astrobiologists want to find out how life began, how it evolved and where in the universe we might find it. The best example we have of life is the life we have here on Earth. On Earth we find life everywhere that there is liquid water so when we look for where life is on other planets we look for evidence of liquid water. Mars used to be much wetter and warmer than it is today with similar conditions to that of Earth when life evolved here. We can see evidence of dried up river channels and lakes on Mars so maybe Mars could have supported life. How would we tell that there was life there? We could look for footprints from little green aliens but that would be unlikely. Astrobiologists think that life elsewhere in the universe is probably microscopic. So how would you detect these microscopic life forms? You could look for things that the microbes have left behind. Astrobiologists call these biosignatures. There is a complication though. Life exists pretty much everywhere on Earth including in some of the harshest environments. We find microscopic life at the bottom of the oceans, inside glaciers, in the deserts, even high up in the atmosphere. The organisms that can survive these extreme conditions are called extremophiles. Different extremophiles can tolerate extremes of pressure, temperature, radiation, salinity, acidity or can live without sunlight or oxygen. There are places with these conditions on Earth similar to those we might find elsewhere in the universe. So astrobiologists use these analog sites to understand if and how organisms live in these environments. But that just covers life as we know it. What about extraterrestrial life? No, I'm not talking about those little green things again. What if life could exist on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter? Europa is about the same size as our own moon but it's covered by a shell of ice. Underneath the ice is an ocean. What if there was life there? What would it look like? To find out more, we need to send instruments into space to explore these distant worlds. So it seems like astrobiologists have lots of work to do and lots of questions to answer. But we can probably sum up all of those questions into one big question. Are we alone?


If you're looking for expert legal answers to all your property-related questions, then stay tuned. It's nice to have you listening. A warm welcome to your Property Rights Podcast, brought to you proudly by Private Property. I'm Paul Rotherham and joining me in studio is the MD of SSLR Incorporated Attorneys, Silna Stain. Hello again, Silna. Hey, Paul. Always nice to share studio with you. And it's always lovely to have you here as our expert on property law, a specific focus on rentals and evictions. And do remember, SSLR Incorporated Attorneys has a national footprint. So wherever you are in the country, wherever you're clicking onto this Facebook post and listening to this podcast, SSLR Incorporated Attorneys will be able to assist you. Today, a deep breath here because this is a little bit long, but I think it's very important, Silna, that I give you all the details here. This person writes as follows. My tenant is refusing to pay any increase in the deposit, although in the contract I have with him, it states that the deposit will increase when the rental increases. He's been living in my townhouse for about four years. In the beginning, he paid the rent on time. Hmm, we've heard this story before. But then he started paying later in the month, sometimes skipping months completely. He recently got a plumber out and deducted the amount from the monthly rental. I've seen no invoice even after asking for it. In our contract, it states that no repairs are to be undertaken without my consent. I do have insurance for that, writes this person. In January and February, he short paid the rental. He's been paying at the end of the month instead of the beginning. In August, there was no payment. September, no payment again. I've been sending letters to him every month about the outstanding amounts from January and I've now sent him a seven-day letter of demand stating that he will be asked to vacate and that he would be blacklisted should he refuse. He keeps saying he will pay, making promises, but is now ignoring WhatsApp messages and emails.  This is something that is not uncommon. This is a situation that presents itself very often between a landlord and a tenant. And so we do have a few questions specifically from this listener. His first question is, and I can sense the exasperation here. How much more notice do I need to give him? Well, this is exactly the kind of questions that I make a living from. So when you rental an eviction expert attorney, this is what I deal with every day. So I'm quite comfortable. And in my comfort zone with this question, what I do want to mention is I think the start of the question dealing with the deposit is the least of this listener's problems. I think the deposit is almost that after the factor, if you can just leave that part of the question for me until the very end, we can deal with the deposit, which is anyway not going to be topped up or used in any way. The question right now is, how much more notice must I give the person? Now, what I find interesting here is very often I see landlords doing so many things. But the one thing that they're not doing is the right thing. They're doing a lot of letters, a lot of WhatsApp messages. And none of those things will actually get you to the point where you want to be. And to be honest, the point where you want to be is to cancel this lease agreement. Get the tenant to change from a tenant into an illegal occupant. Hopefully he will move out. But if he doesn't, at least then we can commence eviction proceedings because we can't go to court with an eviction unless we've cancelled the lease agreement. And what I'm hearing from this question is this hasn't happened. This is a month to month agreement. So this notice is potentially not even necessary if the landlord is willing to just write off all the areas. The easiest way of getting this person to no longer have a right to occupy the property is to give one month's written notice in terms of the rental housing act when it comes to a month to month agreement. Give him a calendar month's written notice of termination of the month to month agreement. Yet it's important that you do not use the word cancellation but termination. We can basically do a full episode just on the difference between termination and cancellation, but just in short as to frame my answer, termination is a natural end to your contract. So a month to month agreement ends when one of the parties give the other one a month's notice of termination. Cancellation is an act to breach. And this is also an option this landlord had. And to be quite honest, the first month your tenant doesn't pay or the first month your tenant pays late. You need to get a letter of demand out. Now, a letter of demand is very specific. In this case, it's a month to month agreement. So section 14 of the consumer protection cannot apply. So seven days is perfect. However, if it is a fixed term agreement and there is a natural person, so a person in their name, not two juristic entities, then section 14 will apply. And then unfortunately, we need to give 20 business days notice to remedy your breach. But that is not your letter of demand. Isn't a notice of cancellation. It is time for the tenant to remedy his breach. Payee's rear rents start complying with the conduct rules. Whatever his form of breach is, he has seven days to fix that. Only if he doesn't, can you cancel the agreement? Then we can start the eviction process if the person does not vacate. So that was a very long answer to a relatively short question. But I think it's quite important to realise that this listener feels like I've been doing everything I've been doing so much. And the sad part is none of that, except now potentially for the letter of demand that was done recently, is the correct thing the easiest way and just a tip out there for the listeners. The TPN tenant profile network does have a system where you can generate a letter of demand. I'm actually the drafting attorney of that letter, so I know the content pretty well. And it's very cost effective. You don't have to go to an attorney, but it's very important that the content of that letter is perfect. Especially if you have to give 20 business days notice. If you then get to an attorney and they say the content was wrong, you didn't clearly state what the breach was and what the effect would be if you do not remedy in time. Unfortunately, that letter means absolutely nothing. And unfortunately, I can say this, none of your WhatsApp messages or anything else that's not done in terms of the lease agreement is any way worth anything. So those literally carry no weight at all. Assuming that this now does go to court and notwithstanding what you've said about what is valid and not valid and legal and not legal, let's assume this were to go to court now. The question that is coming here is, would this person be liable for the costs? And my assumption would be go to court for either the real rental collection or foreign eviction or both. And the answer is every single time in our courts in South Africa, your court order, your cost order in terms of your court order will always follow the unsuccessful party. Unless there's something funny, but most of the times your cost will follow the unsuccessful party, meaning the tenant, illegal occupant now, will have to pay the cost of that. But in fairness, practically, I think by now you've seen that I'm a practical person. Very much so. The fact that you have a court order, demanding and ordering that this person must pay the legal cost doesn't mean you can send him your attorney's bill. Now you have to appoint the taxing master, which is somebody sitting at the high courts and the magistrate court. You need to submit your bill of costs. And once you have submitted your bill to the taxing master, the taxing master then compares your fees, a bill by your attorney, to the cost scale that your court order allowed. So if your court order said the tenant, illegal occupant must pay costs on a party and party scale, it's much lower. It's a much lower scale than what your attorney charged. This is 100% legal. It's very similar to medical age rates versus private practice in their rates. Yes, I'm with you. So the same thing. But now you have this taxed bill.  You had to tax your bill of cost. Even though you can issue a warrant of execution on the back of that, what are the chances of actually getting money out of this person? I was just going to say, and I don't want to cut you short because you've always got so many good things to say. But there are a couple more questions I want to get to. And I was just going to say, here your tenant is, they haven't been paying rent. If you honestly think that you're now going to be able to get the money out of them for covering legal fees and costs, you're going to go nuts because that could take you years. Exactly. And I know that there's so much we can get our teeth into here. But just to speed it up a little bit, if you don't mind, Silna, moving on to the next question, would this person, the landlord in this case, be able to claim interest on the outstanding rentals that haven't been paid from the tenant? How does that work in a nutshell? Very good question. That is also only at the time when you issue your letter of demand. Will your Mura interest start running? Your what interest? Mura interest. Is this tomorrow or is this another Latin word? It's another Latin word and Mura means default. So your default interest rate is usually around 10 percent, but it changes like the interest rate does. But the Mura interest rate about the you can charge that from the date of sending your letter of demand or in terms of your lease agreement, you're allowed to charge 2 percent per month to a maximum of 24 percent per annum. If your lease agreement does allow for this, if not, you're only entitled to your Mura interest if you demanded from your letter of demand. Otherwise, only from the time where your attorney issues the summons. OK. And a quick question here. We've ascertained that this is not a contract, but it is a month to month agreement. What are your thoughts as a legal expert specific to rental and things that are in keeping with that? What are your thoughts on having a month to month agreement? Is that something that we should actually be steering away from? Is a long term rental better? Any thoughts on that? Just to some advice? Yes, all the thoughts you can imagine. A month to month agreement does not necessarily mean that it's a verbal agreement. A verbal agreement will always be a month to month agreement, but they could you could have a written month to month agreement. And there's quite a few benefits in that. Actually, we've mentioned that TPN lease back lease before. One of the leases as part of that lease back, which which I'm obviously one of the drafting attorneys of is a month to month agreement. The reason why some investors prefer a month to month agreement is then your lease agreements not governed by a section 14 of the CPA. That's one of the biggest benefits. So if somebody doesn't pay rent, you can give him seven days to remedy instead of 20 business days. On the other hand, you don't have you don't know for a fact how long somebody is going to be there. So if you buy a property and you're planning to, say, for instance, make a few renovations and then resell it, definitely, then I would use a month to month agreement and then 100 percent encourage that that would be in writing. Longer term agreements, it depends on the kind of landlord that you are and your requirements. Same for the tenant. As long as your lease agreement is in writing, which is not a requirement in law. But trust me, if your lease agreement is not in writing, it makes it quite difficult to act in terms of that agreement. When it's a verbal agreement. So whether it's month to month or longer term lease, always have it in writing. I think the one thing we've learned from your property rights podcast, or at least this edition, is if there are any problems, if anything starts going haywire, sort it out straight away. Act now. Don't wait. As we heard from this listener, this person, the landlord, Biggie, pardon the tenant, has been short paying for close on a year now. And as you say, sending a WhatsApp or a smoke signal or a slip of paper under the door simply isn't the right way of sorting the problem out. Exactly. And it won't help you in court at all. Silne Stain, thank you very much for joining us for another episode. It's only a pleasure. Brought to you by Private Property, it is your property rights podcast. I'm Paul Rotheram, and please do join us again for another episode coming soon to this platform. And remember, if you have any comments on this topic, if you'd like to raise a topic, if you'd like to ask a question or give your thoughts, join in the conversation with us. That's what it's all about with this Private Property Podcast. We'd love to include you and involve you and we look forward to seeing your comments.  Leave a comment or ask a question to join the conversation.


So I am from South Korea just for those who are not so familiar with my company as K telecom we are The leading operator to one operator in Korea both fixed and mobile combined occupying approximately 50% market share and we also one of the three IPTV service providers And now we are pursuing and moving forward to the next era, which is 5G so even if the 5G first global Specification is still under development and expected to be done by the end of hopefully this year and then The major rollout worldwide rollout probably will start to begin like year 2020 or later on but You know this year 2017 it seems to be a very important milestone as far as a 5G Community operator community concerns because you will see you will see the rear Trial services sometime this year and here and there here in America and in Korea You know, so this is a major Milestone and we are very much excited But knowing that the ecosystem is not fully ready yet. We have to fully understand what risk is what risk is We are dealing with so So today I'm gonna use my presentation to explain you about our thoughts about What part I'm shift we try to institute during the course of a 5G network rollout so Starting from this slice. I presume that these are the key initiative we are pursuing Most of you are already familiar with all these that you know keywords so unbundling open source Softwareization and cloudification. Those are the four major initiatives that we try to You know implement embrace Because this is a perfect opportunity for us to change our track network architectures and Do things right this time, right? So Open source, you know, you know what that means softwareization cloudification very straightforward Unbundling is very tricky things, you know, and a lot of unbundling or democratization is already done On the data center side they an open source community has an excellent job including hardware and software democratizing the you know conventional data center and transform it to a very You know flexible and agile programmer and operation-efficient cloud systems and Open source community You really must be very proud of it. You are the one who actually make that happens But can you expect the same unbundling democratization on the opposite side, which is a Radio access network side, which actually the major portion of operator TCO total cost of ownership Because you know when you speak when you talk about ready access unit you have to deal with the many many operation problems including sales side equation and Installing the equipments antennas and do the Calibrations and also you have to regularly dispatch your engineers making sure everything is operating well so that make things are very difficult for operators to You know to aggressively Go for the you know access network unbundling, but it's time to To make it happen. So we ask a telecom together with the other operator friends we started the unbundling many unbundling project here and there and Open source Technologies also is gonna be a very crucial ingredient doing so But what makes a unbundling difficult then other area other? Domain is because the specification is not being developed here It's being developed by other community, which is a 3gpp and very into semi-open community But anyway, it's and also the specification is very heavy and you have to make sure you have support And all backwater compatibility for the compatibility and also the existing network equipment Vendors They are trying very hard change try to change themselves and try to be become more IT centric vendors, but then still there's a lot of not just the technical challenges, but also culture challenges and operation challenges, so I'm gonna address that later on and So We came up as a telco. We came up with the two important architectures namely this S scale and cost cosmos So on the right-hand side bottom you see, you know, S scale and cosmos so S scale.  I'll talk about that So here's the whole borrower picture of what I've this right what I mentioned a scale and cosmos So as you know, if you're a key Operating exactly to what concern you have, you know, when it comes to You know May making a decision on the big investments like a 5g one is you want to Achieve Agile new service introductions new service introductions So that's one important agenda second is a Significant TCO Efficiency and savings like I said access network comprise most part of a whole TCO. So you have to You have to you have to you know be very cautious on that and And last but not least is the consumer experience quality or satisfaction So those are the three priorities in top of mine, you know in in their mind the executive mind So how our SKT's architectures, you know, S scale and cosmos combined can can deliver that that Achieve that targets so S scale like I said is a overlay architectures It's comprised next generation OSS which is big big data analytics based and And networking slicing and software defined rent as to rent and software defined their core software defined core is relatively straightforward because Thanks to the SDN and NPP technology. Whereas software defined the rent is very I'd like to say tricky because it's a it's not especially the front whole side back whole side still a lot of You know close the architectures. It's supposed to be open architecture, but in reality It's not that often yet so we need to democratize all these Interfaces between the different building blocks horizontally and vertically and you know control plane user plane I You know personally, I'd like to introduce a new plane called the radio plane Which is a less addressed during the whole summit here this week so And the cosmos is our software defined interest infrastructure is not just the open source hardware But also it's just software defined infrastructures based on open hardware and softwares So this is a more detailed Diagram so And let me skip this but I'd like to emphasize the importance of in 5g how we we we How we should Do the function splitting between the access net line in the centralized the access unit and the remote unit So remote unit up until 4g or its evolution So we only have just a RF component there and use the very expensive fiber-based front all To transmit receive the and digitize the RPS signals to the sent data processing unit and There is a high performance constraint on the foot on the front hole today So So it's gonna be important In 5g we have to loosen up all those performance constraints so that we can replace it or with the the commodity Front hole such as a carrier ethernet so And then to achieve that you have to be very what I know You have to be very smart splitting the functionalities for the basement processing So you have to move some portion of L1 processing to the radio Remote unit side and then leave some functionalities on that's data processing side But you want to centralize data set the same data You know these three units today you you want to centralize it to the extent possible, right? So that part is a very tricky so and What else so I mean You know in the conventional cloud architectures There are three resources you are dealing with right the compute and Storage and network, but you forgot to incorporate the radio as a No resources one of the resources you have managed Because of that your cloud architectures cannot penetrate into the access network today, so You have to introduce this radio resource as a part of your You know resource pulling mechanisms, so otherwise You know you can not properly address the 10 access access radio access domain So Yeah, yeah, I'd like to emphasize that the significance of all those things so to Because the radio is the most precious Asset and resources from mobile operator perspective first. It's very expensive to acquire second is may get even more expensive and third is the more spectrum you have the more Front-haul backworld networks you need but that's requires a huge TCO increase month So overall, you know more spectrum means more TCOs. So how you can? deal with you know this kind of a Undesirable TCO increase so if you do things right and if you properly embrace the radio resource as part of your You know cloud resource management framework then you can do much better job and There won't be any customizations today's you know to embrace the cloud You know all the innovations done in data center can be applied To the ready access unit But it requires a lot of customizations because there is no research radio resource management scheme there So and escape, you know this line is very busy. It's pretty much self-explanatory But this week, you know, I recognize that This radio side is less Addressed than any other topics. So Once again, I'd like to you know underline the importance of addressing this space because that this is the where you can Find the huge business opportunities and also technology innovations and also more healthful healthy ecosystem cultivations So our ready access network software defined ready access network Initiative comprise the fiber projects Open front home like I said and modular radio remote access unit and control plane user plane separation through a standard interface X-RAN there is activity called the X-RAN they've done a good job To make it this this this happened and they introduced this kind of a notion of a rent server which is a very good and The third is open hardware software I mean the white box bare matter OCP compliant hardware is a it's a very appropriate But still they are lack of a certain requirements that mobile operator need, you know, so like a you know 69 reliability or something like that So still there is some areas that needs to be further Improved, you know, the you know of mobile operator to truth You know more aggressively adopted the open hardware software a lot and the mobile edge computing, you know Someone also introduced the mobile edge computing So it's not a mobile edge computing. It's a multiple access edge computing meaning that you can multiple Access edge computing can embrace not just the mobile but also fixed line any media broadcasting line, you know Broadcasting network, so it's a the concept is being or broaden today and But last last but not least is a analytics space the self-organizing network. This is the Area, this is the domain that your machine learning technology can be fully exploited and life cycle management and to end the slicing it's to come to be this life. So let me skip it and Cosmos is on the lay Architectures that I mean just mentioned so it looks like a conventional cloud architectures, but we we have done some customizations to to Use this to cloud the conventional architectures for the mobile network. So and Open source we we Have been taking advantage of all this in a variety of open source solutions and I'm gonna spend few minutes, you know SK telecoms activities and In the space of open source community. So we are participating into many many Different open source community including on us court OCP, TIP, which happened, you know that currently sharing the boat And the open stack and the opnf will be an X-Ran Maybe on app too, I Haven't decided yet, but it looks quite promising to me. So I'm not so this is mCourt. We together with our operator and very, you know, and Vendor or innovators support we are able to successfully showcase this at the mobile world of Congress March this year and we I strongly believe that we gain a lot of attractions and It proves that this kind of a you know new architecture open source space You know ready acts, you know Mobile network Works well not just a functionally, but also operation wise And we are very proud of being part of this pioneering companies and There are some real business cases and use cases This is very important to When you talk to your your supervisors Because 5g really will require a huge investment capex and OPEC so It's it's it's very important you have to come up with some compelling stories and also you have to you know with this kind of a Understanding about what business opportunities you can achieve out of 5g you can feel more comfortable as an engineer So you can do your job better right once you feel more confident and We are also actively participating in some other open source project as well kubernetes and sep especially the kuban this kubernetes side we decided to use it for our you know cloud systems and Also sep is our flash storage Softly find the storage solutions previously. It's custom. It's optimized for the hard disk but now we are trying to donate our code so that it can much more optimized for the now more new storage systems, which is a Flash-based and tip like I said, I'm currently are sharing these activities and very proud of it and you know, we have a very good partner of Colleague operators like a dice telecom and And also, you know a lot of operators other operators start to join it including telephonic a orange a bottle phone And bt and some others so it's a it's a good organically growing and also Functionally, it's also growing as well so there is many new project group today and as you can see on this chart the lab the Right-hand side means the access network and Left-hand side Sorry left-hand side is access network from your side and right-hand side is is a core network and in the middle It's a backhoe so as you see we have a many more Project group on the access side meaning that we are truly focusing on this access network democratization and unbundling and embracing the open source hardware and software So we are very excited about it This you know every year we are holding a almost tip summit. So You it would be a welcome if you know join us and Like I said for the bundling project is one of the focusing areas We are doing and tip. So here Explaining the how we can split the functions between the different Units and also how we can split and make it open interface Horizontally and vertically there are some you know alternative Architecture choices here, you know type one and type two So depending on what your network or our strategy and vendor partners you can adapt to different alternatives different types and We put together So it's not just a paper technology or concept technology. We actually built prototype and POC and and successfully demonstrated and you know we have a very Very important technology companies in this in this pictures such as a radicis I think yeah, this is pretty much about it Like I said, I'd like to re-emphasize the importance of what matters for the mobile operators one is a TCO Innovations so with 5g can you achieve that my answer is yes Because 5g architecture will be much more simplified, right? so LTE and all the way up to the Today's mobile network is pretty complicated You know, it was a streamline when we introduced the LTE, but still the complexity is there So we have to further or significantly streamline the mobile network You know in 5g era and we are working on it collectively and secondly is a new service introductions should be as a as a so we built a transform our service network service infrastructure Become to become a gel programmable and reliable So DevOps environment perfectly fit into this strategies And last but not least is a end user or customer experience how we can satisfy how you can surprise how you can You know impress your customer how so that you can acquire new customer and also keep retain your existing customers So we to achieve all these three goals, you know 5g Network principle has to be designed properly to To embrace all this technology innovations being happening in in this community Thank you. Thank you for your attention Do we have questions or does everybody want to go home? You're not going to be popular though As long as everybody gets more knowledgeable. I'm okay. Good answer. You get a discount next year. Sure Okay, Raghu from Sienna When we listen to the enterprise presentation from Amadeus Some of the drivers included the enormous Number of changes that they have to handle per day per month and the number of transactions that they have to handle as a basis for Going down the software defined networking approach From a telco operator mobile operator perspective What is the scale of changes that you Have at this point in time that you could not achieve and we would like to achieve for example And the second aspect is when you are trying to think of new service introduction What kind of time scales do you anticipate needing as you look into the future of the VR AR kind of services So how responsive should the network be going forward? Yeah, okay, so My answer to your first question scalability matters a lot to the operators For many reasons one The traffic demand is growing exponentially, you know average data consumption per month per you know user last year You know LTE it's like a two two point five or three gigabyte per month per users Now this year one year later. It's already doubled and The growth rate is increasing rapidly. So You you have to make sure that your network capacity and cell capacity Has to be scalable, right? So scale scalability matters a lot and to make your access networks is Scalable as possible we have to embrace the this kind of a you know Softierization and cloudification. I mean you can reproduce your precious radio resources by Densifying your cell site, but like I said, it also associated many You know cost Equation cost and site management cost. So yeah, so that's you know, that's that's what matters things very difficult for the scalability to Guarantee the scalability, but anyway, you know, we have a we feel very confident that so far we managed to accommodate all this rapidly increasing traffic demand mainly in the space of mobile media and From subscriber perspective, you may set You know in a saturated market, there is no subscription increase month, which is not true because IOT Connected the car. There are many things still needs New connectivity. So if you count them Again, the number of subscribers will increase significantly. So these are the our scalability commas and to answer your next second question, how fast should we Expect the new service introduction. I mean if you're radically or ultimately should be a real time on demand and You know just like to compete against the What they are providing the what OTT providing we had to our speed has to be compatible so that's our Target, right very good. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you


From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation on a very important topic, cyber security and cyber resiliency. With me today is Stefan Voss, who's the Senior Director of Product Management for Data Protection Software and Cybersecurity and Compliance at Dell EMC. Stefan, thanks for coming on helping us understand this very important topic ahead of RSA World. Yeah, my pleasure, thanks Dave for having me. You're welcome, so let's talk about the environment today. We have for years seen, you know, back up, we're seeing back up evolve into data protection. Obviously disaster recovery is there, certainly long-term retention, but increasingly cyber resilience is part of the conversation. What are you seeing from customers? Yeah, definitely, we're seeing that evolution as well. It's definitely a changing market and what a perfect fit, right? We have to worry about right of breach, what happens when I get attacked, how can I recover? And the technologies we have, right, that we have for business resiliency, back up, they all apply, they all apply more than ever, but sometimes they have to be architected in a different way. So folks are very sensitive to that and they realize that they have great technologies. I'm glad you mentioned the focus on recovery because we have a lot of conversations in theCUBE about the CIO and how he or she should be communicating to the board or the CISO, how they should be communicating to the board. That conversation has changed quite dramatically over the last 10 years. Cyber is a board level issue when you talk to certainly large companies every quarter they're talking about cyber and not just in terms of what they're doing to keep the bad guys out, but really what the processes are to respond, what the right regime is, cybersecurity is obviously a team sport, it's not just the responsibility of the CISO or the SecOps team or the IT team, everybody has to be involved and be aware of it. Are you seeing that awareness at board levels within your customer base and maybe even at smaller companies? 100%, I think the company's size almost doesn't matter, everybody can lose their business fairly quickly. And there's one thing that not Petia, that very bad sort of attack told us is that it can be very devastating. And so if we don't have a process and if we don't treat it as a team sport, well be uncoordinated. So first of all, we learned that recovery is real and we need to have a recovery strategy. Doesn't mean we don't do detection, so the NISC continuum applies. But the CISOs are much more interested in the actual data recovery than they ever were before, which is very interesting. And then you learn that the process is as important as the technology. So in other words, Bob Bender, fabulous quote from Founders Federal, the notion of sweating before the game, being prepared, having a notion of a cyber recovery runbook, right? Because the nature of the disasters are changing. So therefore we have to think about using the same technologies in a different way. And I said that at the open, things are shifting from just a pure backup and recovery spectrum to much broader. The ROI is changing. People are trying to get more out of their data protection infrastructure than just insurance. And certainly risk management and cyber resiliency and response is part of that. How is the ROI equation changing? Yeah, I mean, it's a very valid question. We do have, people are asking for the ROI. We have to take a risk based approach, right? We are mitigating risk. It's never fun to have any data protection or business resilience topology because it's incremental cost, right? But we do that for a reason. We need to be able to have an operational recovery strategy, a recovery strategy from a geographic disaster and of course now more so than ever a recovery strategy from a cyber attack, right? And so therefore we have to think about, not so much the ROI, but what is my risk reduction, right? By having sort of that process in place but also the confidence that I can get to the data that I need to recover. And we're going to get into that a little bit later when we talk about the business impact analysis but I want to talk about data isolation. Obviously ransomware is a hot topic today and this notion of creating an air gap. What is data isolation from your perspective? What are customers doing there? Yeah, I mean, I think almost every customer has a variant of data isolation. It's clear that it works. We've seen this from the not pet you attack again where we were at large logistics company, right? Found data of the domain controller on a system that went maintenance in Nigeria. So a system that was offline but we don't want to operate that way. So we want to get the principles of isolation because we know it kind of reduces the attack surface, right? From the internal actor, from ransomware variants, you name it, right? All of these are, when you have stuff on the network it's theoretically fair game for the attacker. So that Nigeria example was basically by luck there was a system offline under maintenance that happened to be isolated and so they were able to recover from that system. Absolutely, and another example was, of course critical data, that domain controller because that's what this attack happened to go after was on tape. And so this just shows and proves that isolation works. The challenge we were running into with every customer we worked with was the recovery time especially when you have to do selective recovery more often, we want to be able to get the benefits of online media but also get sort of the benefits of isolation. Yeah, I mean, you don't want to recover from tape. Tape is there as a last resort and hopefully you never have to go to it. How are customers sort of adopting this data isolation strategy and policy? Who's involved? What are some of the prerequisites that they need to think about? Yeah, so the good thing, first things first, right? We have technology we know and love so our data protection appliances where we started architecting this workflow that we can use. So in other words, you don't have to learn a new technology buy something else. There's an incremental investment, yes. And then we have to think about who's involved. So that earlier point, the security folks are almost always involved and they should be involved. Sometimes they fund the project. Sometimes it comes out of IT, right? So this is the collaborative effort and then to the extent it's necessary, of course you want to have GRC so the risk people involved to make sure that we really focus on the most important critical assets, right? Now ahead of RSA, let's talk a little bit about what's going on in that world. There are security frameworks, NIST in particular, is one that's relatively new. I mean, it's kind of 2014, it came out, it's been revised, really focusing on kind of prevent, detect and very importantly respond, something we've talked about a lot. Are people using that framework? Are they doing the kind of self assessments that NIST prescribes? What's your take? Yeah, I think they are, right? So first of all, they are realizing that leaning too much left of breach, in other words, hoping that we can always catch everything, sort of the eggshell perimeter, everybody understands that that's not enough so we have to go in depth and we also have to have a recovery strategy. And so the way I always like to break it down pragmatically is one, what do I prioritize on, right? So we can always spend money on everything but doing a business impact analysis and then maybe governing that in a tool like RSA Archer can help me be a little bit more strategic. And then on the other end, if I can do a better job coordinating, the data recovery along with the incident response, that'll go a long way. You know, and of course that doesn't forego any investment sort of in the detection but it is widely adopted. One of the key parts about the NIST framework is understanding exposure in the supply chain where you may not have total control over one of your suppliers policies but yet they're embedded into your workflow. How are people handling that? Is there a high degree of awareness there? What are you saying? It is absolutely, that's why product security is such an important element and it's the number one priority for Dell security even above and beyond the internal sort of security of our data center is crazy to the sound because we can do a lot of damage right in the market. So certainly supply chain, making sure we have robust products all along the way is something that every customer asks about all the time and it's very important. Let's come back to business impact analysis. We've mentioned it a couple of times now. What is a business impact analysis and how do you guys go about helping your customers conduct one? Yeah, I mean, let's maybe keep it to that example. Let's say I go through this analysis and I find that I'm a little bit fuzzy on the recovery and that's an area I want to invest. You know, and then I buy off on the concept that I have an isolated or a cyber recovery vault and an isolated enclave onto which I can then copy data and make sure that I can get to it when I have to recover. The question then becomes, well, what is business critical mean? And then that's where the business impact analysis will help to say, what is your business critical process? Number one, number two, what are the associated applications, assets? Because so when you have that dependency map it makes it a lot easier to start prioritizing what applications do I put in the vault in other words, right, in this specific example. And then how can I put it into financial terms to justify the investment? Well, we were talking about ROI before. I mean, really we've done actually quite a few studies looking at global 2000 and the cost of downtime. I mean, these are real tangible metrics that if you can reduce the amount of downtime or you can reduce the security threat, you're talking about putting money back in your pocket because global 2000 organizations are losing millions and millions of dollars every year. So it is actually hard ROI even though some people might look at it as softer. I want to talk about isolated data vaults, there's notion of air gaps. What are you guys specifically doing there? Do you have solutions in that area? Yeah, we do. So we are using luckily, so the concepts that we know from business resiliency disaster recovery, right? So our data protection storage, which is very robust, it's very secure, it has very secure replication. So we have the mechanisms to get data into the vault. We have the mechanisms to create a read-only copy, so an immutable copy that I can then go back into. So all of this is there, right? But the problem is how do I automate that workflow? So that's a software that we wrote that goes along with the data protection appliance sale. And what it does, it's all about ingesting that business critical data that I talked about into the secure enclave, and then rendering it into an immutable copy that I can get to when I have nowhere else to go. Okay, so you've got that gap, that air gap.  And so how much awareness is there of that exposure? And I know it's maybe, we're hitting the tip of the pyramid here, but it's still important. Can you guys help address that through whether it's processes or product or experience? 100%. So we have, of course, our consulting services that will then work with you on elements of physical security. Or how do I lock down that remaining replication link? It's just about raising the bar for the attacker to make it more likely we'll catch them before they can get to really the prized assets. We're just raising the bar, but yes, those are things we do. So consulting, physical security. How do I do secure reporting out? How do I secure management going in? How do I secure that replication or synchronization link into the vault? All of these are topics that we then discuss if they kind of deviate from the best practices and we have very good answers through our many customer engagements. Stephen, let's talk about some of the specific offerings. RSA is a portfolio company in the Dell Technologies Group. It's a sister company of Dell EMC. What are you guys doing with RSA? Are you integrating with any of their specific products? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I think so. When you think about recovery and incident response being so important, there's an obvious, right? So what RSA has found, I thought this was very interesting, is that there's lack of coordination between typically the security teams and the data professionals, data restoration professionals. So the more we can bridge that gap through technology, reporting, the better it is, right? So there's a logical affinity between an incident response retainer, activity, and the data recovery solutions that we provide. That's one example, right? So because every day counts, that example that I talked about, not Petia, the specific customer was losing 25 euros every day. If I can shave off one day, it's money in the bank or money not out of the bank. The other area is how do I make sure that I'm strategic about what data I protect in this way? That's the BIA Archer. And then there's some integrations we are looking at from an analytics perspective. Archer being the sort of governance, risk and compliance, workflow, that's sort of one of the flagship products of RSA. So you integrate to that framework. And what about analytics? Things like IOC, RSA net witness, are those products that you're sort of integrating to or with or leveraging in any way? Yeah, first off, analytics in general, it's an interesting concept. Now we have data inside our secure enclave, right? So what if we could actually go in and give more confidence to the actual copies that we're storing there? So we have an ecosystem, from an analytics perspective, we work with one specific company. We have a REST API based integration where we then essentially use them to do a vote of confidence on the copy of the raw backup. Is it good? Are there signs that it was corrupted by malware and so forth? So what that helps us do is be more proactive around our recovery because I've knew, I think you're about to say something, but if I knew there's something suspicious, then I can start my analytics activity that much sooner. Well, the light bulb went off in my head. That's what I was, because if I have an air gap, and I was saying before, it's necessary, but insufficient. If I can run analytics on the corpus of the backup data and identify anomalies, I might be able to end run somebody trying to get through that air gap that I just mentioned before. Maybe it's a physical security breach and the analytics might inform me. Is that a reasonable scenario? It is a reasonable scenario, although we do something slightly different. So first of all, detection mechanisms, left of breach stuff is what it is. We love it, we sell it, we use it.  It doesn't typically work. So what we do is in the vault, we have time, we have a workbench, so it's almost like sending a specimen to the lab, and then we take a look at it. Are there any signs that there was data corruption that's indicative of a ransomware attack? And when there is such a scenario, we say you might want to take a look at it and do some further investigation. That's when we then look at net witness or working with the security teams. But we can now be of service and say you might want to look at this copy over here. It's suspicious, there's an indicator of compromise and then take the next steps, other than hoping for the best. You mentioned the ecosystem. You mentioned the ecosystem before, I want to double click on that. So talk about the ecosystem, as we said here, it's a team sport, you can't just do it alone. From a platform perspective, is it open? Is it API based? Maybe you could give some examples of how you're working with the ecosystem and how they're leveraging the platform. Yeah, 100%. So like I said, so we have our data protection appliances and that's sort of our plumbing to get the data to where I want. We have the orchestration software. This is the part we're talking about. The orchestration software has a REST API. Everything's documented in Swagger. And the reason we did that is that we can do these orchestrations with third party analytics vendors. That's one use case, right? So I'm here, I have a copy here. Please scan, tell me what you find and then give me an alert if you find something. The other example would be maybe doing a level of resiliency orchestration where you automate the recovery workflow beyond what we would have to offer. There are many examples, but that is how we are enabling the ecosystem essentially. You mentioned founders federal earlier. Is that a customer, is that a reference customer? What can you tell me about them? Yeah, it's a reference customer and they very much saw the need for sort of this type of protection. And if we've been working with them, there's a Dell world last year session that we did with them. And very much the same sort of like the quote said, focus on the process, not only the product and the set of technologies, right? So that's how we've been partnering with them. The quote being sweat before the game, that came from founders federal, that's a great quote. All right, we've talked a lot about just sort of general terms about cyber recovery. What can you tell us, tell the audience what makes Dell EMC cyber recovery different in the marketplace and relative to your competition? How do you pitch me? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very unique capability because one, you need a large install base and sort of a proven platform to even build it on, right? So when you look at the data domain technology, we have a lot to work with and we have a lot of customers using it. So that's very hard to mimic. We have the orchestration software where we I believe are ahead of the game, right? So the orchestration software that I talked about that gets the data into the vault securely and then our ecosystem, right? So those are really the three things. And then of course we have the consulting services which is also hard to mimic to really design the process around this whole thing. But I think the ecosystem sort of approach is also very powerful. You have a big portfolio, you got the sister company that's sort of well known obviously in this business. Do you also have solutions? I mean, for instance, is there an appliance as part of the portfolio that fits in here? And what is that? Yeah, so you can think of this as if I wanted to really boil it down the two things I would buy is a data domain. It could be the smallest one and a VxRail appliance that runs the software and then I stick that in the vault and then there's sort of that product. So you can think of it as an appliance that happens to go with the software that I talked about that does the orchestration. Okay, so RSA, the premier conference on cyber coming up in a couple of weeks. What do you guys got going there? Give us a little tease. Yeah, absolutely. So it's going to be an awesome show and we will have a booth and so we look forward to a lot of customer conversations and we do have a panel. It's going to be with MasterCard and RSA and myself and we're really going to take it from left of breach all the way to right of breach. Awesome, do you know when that panel is yet? It is, I think on the fifth, I have to check. Which is, which day? It's a day. I want to say it's Wednesday. So it starts on the Monday, right? So there'll be day three. So check the conference schedule. I mean, things change in the last minute, but that's great. MasterCard is an awesome reference customer. We've worked with them in the past and so that's great. Stefan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and sharing some of your perspectives and what's coming up at RSA. It's good to have you. Thanks so much, David. Appreciate it. Okay, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from our East Coast headquarters. You're watching theCUBE.


I'm probably gonna get like 20 or 30 views initially on these videos So if I do lose revenues not gonna be breaking the bank. All right, let's see You can buy it on steam, right I Have a little bit of money in my steam wallet or I could ask my wife to gift it We see Because of this part of the DLC stuff store where's store page Did you enable the new lighting effects? No, I did not what have you done I don't even see where where is it? Oh, there it is Okay Scary hey, Jake. How you doing man? Hey, babe. I Think she's up. Let me see. Can you gift this? I have $15 in my wallet. I don't have enough Um I'm right back chat Thanks for watching. Feel free to follow the stream if you enjoy yourself follow me on Twitter Twitter.com slides and wanna I'm actually gonna use this time to take a Unscheduled break So thanks for watching. I will be back that portal is probably gonna disappear. Thanks for waiting guys. I'm looking up this Trying to find out where you can preview the sounds Says you can select sound packs by using the presets below There we go scroll down and click apply How can you is there a way to preview it now? Click on stuff in the filter over here? Okay? It's kind of loud. All right, so that was Where is Ziggy Ziggy's not on here. Oh Let's see what matho has It's the same thing Dad mess up That's the same thing What the? Yes, I was wrong. I reset filter go to presets. That's like matho apply Maybe anything click apply Guarantee Guarantee, I didn't click apply Guarantee Guarantee Guarantee boy, that's big boy.   Well, he has a vulgar one. What is this thing? Jeez? All right, we're not doing math them. Oh, you got Amy on here Why don't have Ziggy? Okay, okay. Okay me. Okay. All right. Well Okay, let's reset Let's do As is a Zara Okay Yeah, Bex is like sound effects. It looks like I almost I'm interested. I might do this chat. I might do this This sounds fun There's like a path of I mean, it's like a lead danger sound pack, but it's like infinitely easier I'll use Bex for now too. I think I think this one. It has sound effects like Wait, what results? I Guess I heard the defaults before What results is a mind-melting Melaton, I mean I Like I like the path of Exile streamers I got to say I like these guys, but guys these sound packs are pretty awful I Think they threw them together last minute because it didn't announce the sound packs like less than a week ago We'll have some higher quality ones. I'm sure later later But right now. I don't want to use any of these. I think my wife was able to gift it. Let me see Yay Monster Hunter soundtrack. Thank you, mate Add to my library. It should download it.  It's not in the download queue is it? Scheduled for today Okay, I might have to play. All right, let's my portal already disappeared anyway, so we're gonna exit Path of Exile Launch Monster Hunter to get the soundtrack and we're gonna play Monster Hunter music While playing Path of Exile Let's do it. It's launching by the way I'm hoping that it's gonna download it because otherwise It says a schedule for the day.  I'd use something like that You tell you're addicted to a game when the when the sounds make you happy That's why we're doing this Bye Piggy I'm just going to get my soundtrack so I can play path I mean add-ons and bonuses. I didn't work. I didn't work chat I didn't trigger the download How can I force this download? Anybody know how to do this? It says schedule for the day the 11 o 4 p.m Oh download now there it is I I didn't oh gosh I didn't know that I didn't even know that's what that arrow did All right, cool. It's downloading now All right, we'll launch a path again. I've never had to do that. It's just I don't know Weird Specter, how you doing man? Welcome Oh, thank you all for coming by Appreciate it for hanging out with us. Um So I just finished mr. Crab. So we're gonna go to uh We gotta go to the ledge now.    All right, so we're going towards uh Okay, million damage And around to this uh spiritual command. Are you done downloading boy? Yes All right, so let's go to my folder Steam folder should be in the directory of the game Steam steam apps common make sure I move this out because I have a habit of playing Soundtracks from the steam folder and then I when I have to make room for more games I I delete the game and I lose the soundtrack So we're gonna copy that off of that folder. Here we go Monster Hunter world original soundtrack Uh, let's see. I have a vg soundtracks folder Plop it right here 91 items Thank you, babe.  There's three. It's 3000. Well, there's two zips 1.2 gig flak. Oh, I got to go to flak chat. Can I extract here? I've done my seven zip uh My seven zip uh contextual stuff, man We gotta go with flak, man. I just I'm spoiled every time I have a chance or an option to use flak I use it flak is really really high audio quality Arguably the best you can get instead of like some super high Waves what up hk with the seven bees That champion emote that came out so well, didn't it? All right, so we're gonna add this as a Let's go over to foobar Just currently like sitting like this Add new playlist. We'll call it uh monster hunter Flak Whoa three discs Drag these all in here. Hmm Oh, that's beautiful. All right, so we're gonna play this and then um, let's see. Let's do a random, I guess Well, not There we go.  It's so good I see you There sells to the uh ledge Open the ledges up here now Melee summoner was awful before you know, I'd never even That's kind of loud.  All right, that's mr. Krabs. That's gotta be Yeah, I already did that. All right, so let's hope it's not by the entrance. I needed an ammy My every you're not you're like the third person that thought the day was a subathon I'm kind of glad you guys are looking forward to it. That makes me feel happy inside and outside killed this abomination First I remember nothing killed me in a hardcore league I'll never forget that It was like on merciless.  I was like, why some orthopedics all fight I think it's time to go back in the in the dungeon chat This'll do nicely exile. Actually, I think that meter tells you How close you are to the next thing maybe I'm not sure what that meter does Let's move this off of here. Oh, it's a cap. Okay So I should go down there before it caps Yes All right, so we're going this way, right? Yeah in spiritual command Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense chronic kills. You just you get it get it high up and then You just keep going for multiple levels instead of just going one level And then having to leave make sense. Oh, that's gonna make some point building chat. Um We update the title Let me close all these links I'm loving it It's a fun build so far Very strong. I mean the fact that I get the the relic And you know zombies and all this stuff and smite It's like this is like the bases of my build and I'm still in act one I'm probably going to be carrying this through all the way the maps. So At this point, it's just going to mean me getting skills to I mean getting like gems and and gear to support this and getting a bigger army And getting what's what's the name of that skill again the new one. Uh, it's called Uh dominating blow once I get dominating blow going The army growth The new dominating blow Not the old one Some people probably want the old one back ye Ye first essence Got a great I am no beast. I'm bored. Oh spiritual man Minions deal 15 percent increased damage have increased attack speed cast speed Increases and reductions to means attack speed also affect you Go It's Oh, it's a beautiful thing chat Uh-huh brother cap No, thank you Um, this belt might be good


So season 7 is the latest season within Apex Legends and today guys we go over all the reasons you need to be playing this game and what is in my opinion the best battle royale game out there. How's it going guys my name's DPJ and if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more be sure to subscribe. So where to start with season 7 as it's brought so many new amazing things but let's start with the map Olympus and well in my opinion I truly think it's the best map we have seen within Apex Legends yet. A crazy improvement over Kings Canyon and World's Edge in my opinion is truly polished in its design it's vertical with stunning designed high buildings which are extremely modern too it's truly a sight to be seen and this is one of those maps we just want to keep going back and playing. So this floating artificial map from the future does behold some seriously interesting spots for combat from extremely close quarters to massively open areas. For instance the Reverie lounge is a popular spot where the high tier loot can be located the lounge at the top of this building with limited ways of actually getting up there so expect a fight on your way to get in that amazing loot. And yes for those wondering this is that very building rather than killed Loba's parents and this is just one instance of this map where a lot of lore comes into play. Another seriously interesting area is the rift. So the rift is a massive area that was used for research before the city was abandoned. The rift area consists of three smaller areas on the ground and one fourth up high. The main landmark of this rift area is an unstable rift which if you go near it will pull you into it and it will send you along the spine of the FaZe Runner which is a portal that connects three areas of the map. Something else new to this map is the Trident vehicle. Now this vehicle does really change the dynamics of play possible compared to previous maps and it makes to a great great addition. Now not many people would be thinking it's OP but it truly isn't. Respawn have done an amazing job in balancing this Trident vehicle out for sure. So the map is cool and cool with some amazing new additions to the game but let's move on and talk about the latest legend added into the game. Her name is Horizon and she comes with some great great lore. So nearly a century ago the Outland suffered from a terrible energy crisis. Charmingly eccentric astrophysicist Dr Mary Somers theorized the solution was Bramphium, an element only found on the accretion disk of a black hole. She left her husband and son behind on Olympus to prove it. Horizon was right but it cost her everything.  Using her brains she modified her robot companion Newt to escape, only 87 years too late. Now Horizon is entering the games to earn enough money to find a way to travel back in time and be with her son. Fortunately she's developed some powerful gravity-altering tech to help her along the way. Horizon's custom spacesuit allows her to fall from great heights and control her movements in the air. She can deploy gravity reefs to give her team a vertical boost and she can deploy Newt to drop a micro black hole to sock opponents in and blast them with gravity. And trust me guys Horizon is by far in my opinion the best addition to this game and I'm pretty certain you'll have fun using her. Another new feature to Apex Legends Season 7 is clubs. Now clubs is a place where you can build or find a group of up to 29 other people to play this game with. If you create a club you can name it, create your own emblem and much more. So if you want to create your own clan to play with, do challenges with and so much more guys. Clubs will 100% help you out in doing that. But yeah guys this is Apex Legends Season 7 which in my opinion is the best season yet by Akali and Myle. Remember Apex Legends is 100% free to play so if you haven't tried it yet, get it via the link within the video description and give it a chance.  And on that note guys the end of the video has arrived. If you enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out. If you're new around here and want to see more on a daily basis be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button. But guys thanks as always for stopping by, hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one.