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Enjoy this week's issue,
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker
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This week’s victims of ransomware attacks included an energy provider, a chemical company, a convenience store chain, hospitals, a university, a city and more, underscoring the shocking spread of this type of cyber crime across the globe.
Ransomware gang LockBit attacked Argentinian power company Grupo Albanesi, Indian chemical business SRF and more than 200 CEFCO convenience stores in the southern United States. All have been issued with a deadline to pay a ransom or see their data published online. The same group has taken credit for encrypting the data of Royal Mail, the UK’s main provider of postal services, seeking a £65.7 million ransom from the company, a demand that the postal group's board appears to have rebuffed, setting the stage for a potential large-scale leak of company data.
Meanwhile, Community Health Systems (CHS), one of the largest healthcare providers in the United States with close to 80 hospitals in 16 states, confirmed this week that criminal hackers accessed the personal and protected health information of up to one million patients. The Tennessee-based healthcare giant said the data breach stems from its use of a popular file-transfer software called GoAnywhere MFT, developed by Fortra, which is deployed by large businesses to share and send large sets of data securely. The Russia-linked ransomware gang Clop claims to have already breached over a hundred organizations that use Fortra’s file-transfer technology — including CHS.
That’s not all. The Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa, Israel was the victim of a cyberattack carried out by a group called DarkBit, which demanded the equivalent to $1,747,971 in ransom to decrypt its data. And, the city of Oakland, California issued a local state of emergency on Twitter on February 14 in order to cope with a ransomware attack.
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business. |
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| Since quantum computing is a step-change technology with substantial barriers to adoption experts say early movers will seize a large share of the total value, while laggards will struggle with integration and talent. They are advising corporates to start exploring the technology now. Some of Japan’s largest companies are doing just that and more.
“Japanese companies are not just trying to understand but to create the future of quantum computing,” says Kohei Itoh, President of Japan’s Keio University and the founder of the university’s IBM Quantum Network Hub.
Itoh, who has been working in the field since 1998 and is also Chair of the Advisory Board on Quantum Technology and Innovation to the Government of Japan's Cabinet Secretariat, is the founder of one of the first IBM quantum networks. The Keio University IBM Quantum Computing hub, which was launched in 2018, has been among the most successful in attracting corporates, he says. Participants include Sony Group Corporation, Hitachi, Toyota Motor Corporation, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, JSR Corporation and Mitsubishi Chemical Group Corporation.
The value of the hub for corporates is a co-development approach to both programming and hardware, says Itoh. “We program the real quantum computers, examine the output, determine the limitations and what needs to be solved and then feed that back to IBM’s hardware developers,” he says. “They take our suggestions and use them to improve the next generation of quantum computers."
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Who: Winston Ma, CFA & Esq., is a trained software programmer, investor, attorney, adjunct professor specialized in the global digital economy and author. He is the Chief Investment Officer and Vice Chairman of the International Data Center Authority (IDCA). He is also currently the board Chairman of Nasdaq-listed MCAA, a European tech SPAC, a member of Capgemini’s advisory board, and an adjunct professor at NYU Law School. He is the author of eight books including “Blockchain and Web3 – Building the Cryptocurrency, Privacy, and Security Foundations of the Metaverse,” which was released by Wiley in September 2022. He is scheduled to do a fireside chat with The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief on Feb. 28 at the 4YFN conference in Barcelona.
Topic: The metaverse
Quote: "Timing will also depend on looking beyond the competition between Big Tech and Web 3.0 to see how sovereign states might change the playing field... In some markets, it may be that rather than a completely decentralized metaverse governments will provide the tech infrastructure and the digital currency whereas Web 3.0 enthusiasts provide the tech innovation."
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France’s EcoTree enables companies and individuals to offset their carbon footprint by planting trees locally. The French startup has 1,5000 companies ranging from SMEs to large corporates as clients as well as some 60,000 individuals. Société Générale is both a customer and an investor.
Forests are the second largest carbon sink on the planet and home to 80% of the world’s land biodiversity. The pitch is that by buying trees in sustainably managed forests companies can help sequester carbon and help slow the erosion of biodiversity, aiding the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and contributing to the fight against climate change.
“We try to close the gap between good intentions and concrete action by offering simple, tangible ways to have a positive impact on ecosystems in local forests that you can actually visit and benefit from,” says Thomas Norman Canguilhem, a co-founder and the company’s international CEO.
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Amount of money raised this week by Sandbox AQ, a startup spun out from Alphabet last year that is building post-quantum cryptography software, a new approach to data encryption that’s designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. There is a real risk that such machines could render today’s encryption methods useless. The fear is that hackers are already harvesting data today, in preparation for the day when quantum computers are ready. Sandbox AQ’s software works by scanning enterprise’s information technology systems to identify any data that’s still using older cryptography standards. It identifies which parts of the system need to be updated urgently,and also sets out to fortify the encryption of the entire company. (For more on Sandbox AQ see The Innovator's interview with CEO Jack Hidary.) |
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