So said Prof. Yitzhak Ben Israel, head of the Blavatnik Multidisciplinary Center for Cyber Research at Tel Aviv University. * Dr. Avitar Matanya, head of the National Cyber Headquarters, said that cyber can be Israel's export lever. The two spoke at an event attended by ambassadors of countries from all over the world at the Cyber Center at Tel Aviv University ahead of the Cyber Week that will be held in June
Avi Blizovsky
Cyber can be an important component of Israel's exports. Already today, the export of cyber services from Israel stands at 3 billion dollars, which is 5% of the global market - Israel is second only to the USA.
This is what Dr. Avitar Matanya, head of the National Cyber Headquarters, said at an event attended by ambassadors of countries from all over the world at the Blavatnik Multidisciplinary Center for Cyber Research, Tel Aviv University. in June, and they were invited to bring guests from their countries to Cyber Week events.
"For the last three years I have been involved in the establishment of the National Cyber Headquarters and all its activities. The role of the headquarters is to build Israeli cyber capability, work with other bodies to design our national strategy, and to coordinate R&D efforts with the goal of building strategies and policies to be better protected. We believe that one of the most important things to do in the cyber field is cooperation in the cyber field, Israel has a certain role in the strategic distribution of information and can serve as a cyber incubator for the whole world."
Later, Matanya described how the connection of all the networks, including the industrial systems, is a good phenomenon that will make our lives easier and allow us to reach remote places and provide better medicine and education, but this connectivity also contains threats from criminals, terrorist organizations and others who want to take advantage of this to steal money, commit terrorist acts (example , disabling electricity supply in an entire city) or do other damage. "We see that the threats are increasing and becoming more sophisticated. If we can't lower the threat, we won't be able to promote the industries to use cyber for good things."
Elements of success are technology that will make it possible to compare the balance of power that today is leaning on the side of the attackers, the construction of the strategic systems and structures that will be able to better protect the computer systems, because technology alone is not enough. The third element is international cooperation, as was done in the war on terror."
"The prime minister decided to invest in cyber not only on the part of the government but also in academia and industry. We allocated a budget of 75 million dollars to establish 5 research centers, each specializing in a certain aspect of cyber. In Tel Aviv it is an interdisciplinary center that combines the disciplines of computer science, exact sciences and social media."
We are a world leader in cyber, and this is important not only to protect Israel. Because the threat is international. We propose to cooperate with every country and with international organizations and of course with the industry. Companies invite you to be a part of this if we do not prepare with strategies and infrastructures - it will be a great threat to our culture.
"Cyber is not just technology"
Says Prof. Yitzhak Ben Israel, head of the Blavatnik Multidisciplinary Center for Cyber Research, at Tel Aviv University, who explained to foreign ambassadors in Israel why he decided to establish a center that, in addition to technologists, would also include researchers from the social sciences - such as law, business administration, and more.
Ido Moed, Cyber Security Coordinator, Ministry of Foreign Affairs added: "Cyber is changing our lives in many ways. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs understands that something needs to be done to increase international coordination. I asked my coordinating colleagues what needs to be done to protect and we are promoting this through UN and OECD bodies and also through bilateral initiatives between Israel and other countries.
We need to identify the aspects that can be worked on in cooperation. For this purpose, he asked the ambassadors to organize delegations and invite the experts from all over the world to participate in the cyber week, during which it will be possible to connect all the players - in business, governments and academia.
The host of the meeting, Prof. Yitzhak Ben Israel, head of the Blavatnik Multidisciplinary Center for Cyber Research, Tel Aviv University, explains: "In the last decade, several seminal events have occurred that have proven that cyber attacks do not only harm computers, but the economy and can disrupt the activities of entire countries, starting with attacks The denial of service in Estonia and Georgia, through the Stuxnet virus affair that damaged Iran's centrifuges. Today there are chips and computers in every machine. Today we are talking about cyber security and not information security, it is a much bigger concept."
Later Prof. Ben Israel described the development of computers - from vacuum tubes to quantum computers. Today there are many computers in the car that communicate with each other, on the one hand they increase efficiency and make our lives easier. On the other hand, if someone wants to intervene and take advantage of this to cause harm, we will have a problem.
"Everything is going to be smart - smart cities, a smart network. When we mean that something is smart, we mean that every device will have a computer chip. The Internet of Things technology will make it possible to connect all the devices in the network with each other without a person in the loop."
"If we fail to secure this infrastructure, hackers will be able to shut down the electricity supply using a signal transmitted from their washing machine. If we don't know how to secure, we won't have the Internet of Things and smart cities. As soon as someone takes advantage of these capabilities, they are forced to stop developing them. Therefore, cyber security prevents not only security problems but is an important component of technological progress."
"For Israel this is also an opportunity. Israel has been involved in cyber for 25-30 years and has developed a strong infrastructure. And we have an advantage that can be used to make Israel one of the largest centers of cyber technology in the world. For every dollar the government invests in R&D, the industry invests 5 dollars. 10 billion dollars every year come from abroad for research and development activities in Israel. We want to upgrade the cyber ecological environment like we did in high-tech."
"The government decided to add a national security authority to the cyber headquarters - both will be managed by Matanya. The new authority will establish a CERT - an emergency center for dealing with cyber attacks on companies that will assist the civilian sector in the event of an attack and will also deal with regulation."
Prof. Ben Israel added: "Unfortunately, just as it is impossible to completely eliminate the crime, it will not be possible to completely eliminate the cyber attack, but it can be brought to a reasonable level that we can live with."
"The multidisciplinary center at Tel Aviv University has 50 faculty members. If each of them has 4-5 PhD students and more PhD students, we reach over 200 researchers. 70% of them deal with the technological aspect and the rest in more "soft" fields such as law, business administration, social sciences, political science, psychology and more. In fact, you can study in any faculty at the university and leave with a specialization in cyber security. The solution is technological, the Baya is not. It includes subjects such as psychology, human behavior, law, etc. Also to choose the right technological solution you have to take into account all these aspects. Because it is a general university and we have these people. This gives us an advantage and we are building the entire center around the idea of encouraging multidisciplinary research as much as possible." Prof. Ben Israel summarizes.
Later, Prof. Lior Wolff described the artificial vision project that enables authentication, a "deep learning" algorithm to enable the identification of the image content and its description in the text, with the aim of facilitating the image search (Automatic Image Annotation). "Deep learning is a field of artificial intelligence, a new name for what was called 'neural networks'. However, the networks we use today are much deeper than what was possible until now."
"The big companies, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo invest huge sums in the field and hire the best experts, in the past we worked with Facebook's artificial intelligence group on a facial recognition system DEEP FACE. We also have projects in areas such as voice recognition, image recognition, text analysis and robotics."
"Authentication (user identity verification) is an important element in cyber security but will also be used for civilian applications. There are billions of unique entities in the world. Facebook for example asks the surfers to tag the photos so that they can be found in a future search. In the system we developed, the input is the image, the output is text. The project can be divided into three stages: in the first stage we have a picture and a collection of ready sentences and I want to choose the right sentence. The second step is to search for the images according to the text attached to them plus the selected sentence. In the third step, the computer formulates sentences by itself that describe the image. Over time, the computer composes original sentences - 94% of the sentences describing the images in the experiment were original compared to 20% in Google's parallel development."
Prof. Wolff invited those present to enter the website, upload a photo and let him identify it.
