Harnessing the digital revolution
Advances in technology have always been a double-edged sword.
Automobiles allowed us to travel great distances at great speeds, bringing markets and families closer (or taking them farther, as the case may be). They also spew pollution and are involved in about 40,000 deaths a year in the U.S.
The internet closed even greater gaps, enabling commerce by allowing instantaneous communication between people separated by oceans and continents. And as it has evolved it has also become a haven for hate and crooks.
On the whole, the benefits of these and other technological advances outweigh the negatives associated with them. Just consider the billions and billions of dollars in value created with the rise of the digital economy.
One of those early 21st century entrepreneurs leveraging technical know-how is Rakesh Agrawal, the founder of Houston’s SnapStream.
Agrawal spoke with our Dwight Silverman about the business, which allows everyone from late-night comedy show producers to police to private individuals to isolate clips from broadcast television shows.
The Harris County Sheriff ’s Office was among one of its first customers, and got the company to rethink how it serve its customers. “We found out that they had downloaded our consumer product and had spent like 60 or 70 hours troubleshooting the hardware to record lots and lots of TV,” Agrawal says. “They showed us how they did it. They would fast forward through the video and be like, ‘Oh hey, wait, go back to that thing, we saw a guy wearing a uniform.’ I left the meeting and I thought, ‘If we could somehow make it so they could search instead of having to visually scan the video files, that would be tremendous.’… So we built the prototype of that product. I think it took two or three months.”
And just as the good guys have learned to adapt new technologies to their needs, so too have the scammers, which has in itself helped create a sub-industry protecting businesses and governments.
Contributor Ilene Bassler looks at how that shapes up, learning from Lisa Sotto, managing partner of Hunton Andrews Kurth’s New York office, why cyber crime is becoming increasingly popular.
“It’s such a great scheme because you don’t have to sell anything,” Sotto says of ransomware schemes. “You just shut down a network, you get money, and then you give back the encryption key…. You don’t have to sell anything. It’s a lot easier than stealing data and selling it.”
Protecting against these sorts of attacks, especially in the oil and gas industry, is particularly fraught, observes columnist Chris Tomlinson.
He speaks with Leo Simonovich, global head of industrial cyber and digital security for Siemens, who tells him that “the energy vertical really faces what I would call the perfect storm” when it comes to protecting its infrastructure from cyberattack.
“Sometimes the cure to a cyber vulnerability is worse than the risk of an attack,” Simonovich says. “If you do a basic vulnerability scan, you can bring down a plant. If you deploy a patch, you can bring down an asset or even a fleet.”
Doubled-edged sword. Still, no technological advance has come without a cost, and we still call them advances, so we appear to be headed in the right direction.
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