DEV Community: Tom Ofek Rytt

Benefits of an AI-based Automated Transcription

Tom Ofek Rytt — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 19:52:30 +0000

Image source: Pixabay

Transcription has been with us for a long time, but the industry has changed dramatically in the last decade. This is due to advancements in technology, which have subsequently led to the emergence of AI-driven transcription apps such as Trint, Otter, and Wreally.

Since automated transcripts are machine-generated, they are quick to accommodate and can deliver in an hour or maybe even less for short files. This puts automated video subtitles and transcription services at a huge advantage against human transcription – where it could take a couple of days to convert a video recording into a transcribed document.

What Is Transcription?

Transcription is the process of translating speech into readable text. Transcriptions may be created from online videos, as well as podcasts, films, webinars, interviews, news footage, and speeches. It can take a large amount of time to transcribe something especially if you are doing it manually.

Why You Should Transcribe Your Videos

Improved Accessibility

Transcription is one of the best ways to enable hearing-impaired people to access and understand your video content. Video transcription also makes it easier to translate videos into other languages. Users who speak another language can read a transcript in their preferred language, instead of watching the video.

Improved User Experience and Understanding

Transcription allows consuming video content without the use of audio in a sound-sensitive environment. Transcription also lets users skim the content before watching the video. It can also help website visitors find the right video by searching for a keyword used within the video.

Improved Product Value

Video transcripts can help increase the revenue of a paid product, such as a paid-access webinar. The transcription can be included as part of the main product, or present it as an add-on option for an additional fee.

Multiple Use Cases

A high-quality video transcript can be shared on other mediums or used to create other types of content such as blog posts, eBooks, emails and more. A transcript may also help you create additional videos that elaborate or answer questions about the first video.

What are the Different Kinds of Transcription?

Manual transcription

The most traditional form of transcription is manual transcription. Manual transcription involves listening to audio or video files and then typing the words into a document. Many people choose this option because there is no associated cost. The cost equates to much an individual values their time.

Transcriptionist or Video Transcription Services

Creating your own online video transcript or using software may cost less, but it takes time, and accuracy isn’t guaranteed. Hiring a transcriptionist or online video transcription service may provide the most value and convenience. Transcription services use technology to convert speech to text. This kind of service is secure, offers high accuracy, and provides a quick turnaround.

Automated Transcription

This process is significantly faster than transcribing manually. Automated transcription involves the conversion of video content as a whole and automatically produces electronic text at a lesser cost and with quick turn-around time.

Automated Transcription Benefits

Automated transcription has come a long way in the last few years. Let’s look at some key benefits of automated transcription.

Manual transcription can take hours or even days, automated transcription can be completed in minutes.
Automated transcription is secure. Transcription is done entirely by machines and no human can ever see the audio or video file, nor the transcript

Automated transcription is relatively inexpensive. Traditional transcription services can cost anywhere from $60 to $100 per hour of audio or video, automated transcription costs much less.
With really clear, crisp audio, the accuracy of the transcript can be upwards of 95-98%.

What Makes Automated Transcription Possible?

Automated transcription is possible because of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Each file and every sound is analyzed and interpreted using artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Automated technology is then used to match sounds to words to derive accurate transcripts. Some technologies support different languages and varying English accents.

The market for AI-based transcription is split between large startups, who are each approaching the market differently. Larger players tend to offer speech-to-text as an API, as part of a larger product, or as an enterprise-level offering. Startups, on the other hand, are exploring business models to sell transcription software as a service directly to consumers and small businesses.

Some companies, acknowledge the limited abilities of computers today, offer hybrid human and AI transcription services, or tools that let the user manually “polish” the transcription if it’s taken from a recording.

While a few companies focus specifically on one subset of users like medical transcription, most are casting a wide net and either offering general-purpose software or several different products for different market segments.

Conclusion

We are several years away from error-free automated transcription, but the technology continues to improve day after day. As more and more people turn to automated transcription, more voice data is collected and analyzed. The result is improved speech-to-text algorithms and more accurate transcripts.

In the meantime, there are many ways to get the most out of automated transcription in its current state. Most of that requires users to capture high-quality audio and video. Reducing background noise, multiple speakers talking over each other, and swallowed words can greatly increase the accuracy of the automated transcription.

6 Best Practices for Successful SIEM Implementation

Tom Ofek Rytt — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 08:54:26 +0000

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a powerful cybersecurity tool that protects organizations against threats and incidents. After reading this post, you will understand what is SIEM, how it can benefit the security of your organization and what are the best steps and practices to successfully implement SIEM.

What Is SIEM?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a cyber security solution that uses a set of rules and statistical correlations to turn even and log entries from security systems into actionable intel. Security teams can use the information provided by SIEM to detect threats in real-time, manage incident response efforts, investigate past events and form audits for compliance purposes.

Why You Should Use SIEM?

Security Operations Center (SOC) staff can use the data provided by SIEM on real-time and historical events to identify irregularities, vulnerabilities and incidents and establish better security protocols and focus mitigation efforts.

SIEM has a number of benefits for the SOC:

**Data clustering—clusters data from various sources such as from databases, applications, network, security, servers and other systems like Anti-Virus (AV) and firewalls.
**Correlation—creates meaningful bundles of event-related data to represent security threats, incidents, vulnerabilities and forensic results.
**Automated alerts—analyses events to alert SOC staff on urgent problems via different kinds of messaging options, emails or security dashboards.
**Compliance—gathers compliance data automatically to produce meaningful reports according to security governance and auditing procedures for industry standards.
**Threat hunting—allows SOC staff to use SIEM data and uncover vulnerabilities and threats by running various queries.
**Automation and integration—allows SOC staff to determine and execute automated workflow and playbooks in response to certain incidents and integrate with other security tools via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
**Threat intelligence —incorporates intelligence feeds that contain actionable data on vulnerabilities, threat actors and attack patterns with internal information.
**Improve Incident Response (IR)—delivers case management and allows SOC teams to collaborate and share security incident knowledge to quickly synchronize critical information and respond to threats efficiently.

For a comprehensive guide on how SIEM works and how it benefits the SOC, read this SIEM guide.

How to Successfully Deploy SIEM In Four Steps

Four phases of successful SIEM deployment plan:

Phase #1: Discovering and planning
Start by reviewing the status of your organizational security to evaluate the most critical fronts your SIEM should be implemented. You should also determine what is crucial and necessary in terms of mandatory compliance, policies and best practices to ensure environmental security while taking into account the organizational policy.

Since SIEM often discovers new security vulnerabilities, you should prioritize smaller subsets of the current policies and devices where the SIEM can be integrated and gather data to determine how to modify the system and apply the solution on a larger scale.

Phase #2: Piloting and implementation
To determine the goals of your SIEM project and the implementation course, you need to consider two goals:

Demonstrating the security capabilities of SIEM that will yield the best Return Of Investment (ROI).
Preparing an operational model that will be used as a baseline and a runbook.

Test what you have discovered in the discovery and planning phase in real-time to expand the list of tools and incorporate them into other technologies. When you reach satisfactory results, use the information to further develop the system in the next phases.

Phase #3: Controlled deployment
The focus of this phase is to allow the organization to orchestrate full deployment by deploying a workflow with detailed approaches. This phase is also a useful test run of the initial production and the completed operational runbooks required for full deployment management.

Phase #4: Continuous Growth
A never-ending phase to ensure that the system keeps on improving over-time. You should always roll out new updates and expand deployment of your SIEM system to gather more actionable intel and incorporate new practices to improve your security and meet current policies.

Six Best Practices for Successful SIEM Implementation

The efficiency of your SIEM solution depends on how you implement it. Incorporate these practices for a more secure organizational environment:

#1. Planning implementation
First of all, you need to determine what services and security features you are looking for in a SIEM solution. Based on these requirements, you need to use policy-based rules to define which logs and activities your SIEM should monitor and use compare this policy against external compliance requirements to determine your needs.

#2. Conducting test runs
Test running various scenarios, such as simulating an attack on the network, can help you assess the reaction and value of your SIEM. For example, you can check how quickly the software detected the threat and how long it took to send alerts to relevant team members. repeating this process multiple times and simulating various scenarios can help you tweak and fine-tune your SIEM.

#3. Tuning correlation rules
SIEM relies on information to be efficient. By applying correlation rules, it can detect events and threats that would be more difficult to identify in isolation. While most SIEM software already comes with pre-defined correlation rules, tweaking the correlation rules to best suit your needs is ensures it fits your needs.

#4. Identify compliance requirements
SIEM software can help organizations meet compliance requirements and regulations. However, these requirements can often overlap. To avoid this scenario, you can draft documents that specify the compliance requirements you need to meet and check that list against potential SIEM solutions to ensure they cover your needs.

#5. Monitor access to network fronts and critical Resources
Some resources are more valuable than others. Ensure that your SIEM tool is monitoring the most valuable resources for your organization including suspicious user activity, systems, and unauthorized access. Additionally, make sure that your SIEM monitors and covers networks fronts that could be vulnerable to attacks such as routers, ports, wireless access and firewalls.

#6. Prepare an Incident Response Plan (IRP)
SIEM solutions can detect and alert on threats, but it is up to your teams to respond and mitigate these threats. The moments after a threat has been detected are the most critical and can prevent incidents from escalating. Planning an efficient incident response plan can help your security teams reduce stress and confusion in these crucial moments and provide a more focused and efficient mitigation effort.

Wrap Up

With the vast quantity and variety of security data that needs to be collected, it has become practically impossible for security teams to manage alerts and threat intelligence manually. While SIEM is an important tool for processing all this information, you need to implement a number of practices and take advantage of additional tools in order to make the most of it.The steps detailed in this guide should help you ensure a successful SIEM implementation in your organization.

Deception Technology as a Strategy for Cyber Security

Tom Ofek Rytt — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 20:40:53 +0000

Image by Lasse Vestegård from Flickr

Nowadays, preventing security events from occurring is an uphill battle. The industry of cybersecurity to keep up with the commonality and intensity of cyber-attacks and data breaches. Additionally, some reports estimate that the lack of cybersecurity experts will only grow bigger and lead to a global crisis. This situation leads many security experts to come up with unique ways to combat cyber attacks.

One of the cybersecurity methods invented by these efforts is deception technology, which aims to change the balance of power between security teams and cybercriminals. Read this article to learn what is deception technology, what are the benefits of deception, and why your organization should implement it as part of the cybersecurity strategy.

What Is Deception Technology?

Deception technology is a security method designed to lure bad actors that have infiltrated the network into traps and expose themselves before they can inflict significant damage. The concept of deception technology originated with the honey pot technique, which is used by sites to attract people with malicious intent and identify them.

For deception technology to work, it needs to look genuine and mimic legitimate asses across the entire infrastructure. These decoys can also run in a real or virtual Operating System (OS).

Why Use Deception Technology?

Organizations use deception technology by placing a decoy in their network such as masking directories and files to seem like they hold high value to the organizations. When attackers try to access these decoys, they trigger the trap and the system alerts security teams across the organization that the organizational network has been breached and they are called into action.

Deception technology allows security teams to fight cyber attackers in their own game and employ techniques that are different from most traditional cybersecurity efforts and provides an early and accurate detection method.

Reasons to use deception technology include:

Quick breach detection—gives attackers false impression that they have the edge and drops their guard. When they try to cease their advantage, the trap is activated and all their activities are recorded and security teams alerted and can begin mitigating the threat.
Reducing false positives and provides automation—reduces the number of false positives generated by the systems and delivers useful alerts that are triggered under specific activities and events. Additionally, the system automatically generates alerts and replaces a hands-on approach to breach detection. Thus, making security less exhausted from chasing false positives and more focused and useful during true events.
Scaling and automation—placing more decoys on new files and directories is easy, which makes deception technology highly scalable and allows you to fit into organizations of all sizes and grow according to need. Additionally, deception technology can be implemented in all types of organizational environments including on-premise, cloud and hybrid.

Detection Capabilities of Deception Systems

Deception threat technology is capable of detecting a wide variety of threats without relying on known signatures, pattern detection and database lookups:

Geo-fencing—tracks and locates the attacker of the attempted to steal specific deception files.
Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks—protects against events where an attacker intercepts and possibly modify communication between two parties without their knowledge.
Lateral movement—detects when attackers try to move throughout different parts of your networks to gain more access and information.
Credential theft—recognizes when bad actors attempt to steal username and passwords.
Tracking stolen files—plants tracking software in stolen files and detects and send alerts and location information when attackers try to access the files even after they have downloaded them to their systems.

Deception Technology Vendors
Here is a list of several of the top providers of deception technology solutions:

Acalvio—provides Advanced Threat Defense (ATD) solution to detect, engage and respond to malicious activity inside the network. increases the security capabilities of Development, Security and operations (DevSecOps) personnel with ease of deployment, management and monitoring.
Cynet—offers a deception technology solution that supports various types of decoys to detect threats in various stages of the attack’s lifecycle. Cynet cyber deception provides preconfigured decoy files and allows you to craft your own files to best fit your requirements and system.
Illusive Network—a group of ex-Israeli military intelligence, which offers deception technology solution for high-tech that detects attempts to disrupt and tamper with systems and empowers defenders to be more productive.

Deception Technology Strategy

The scale of deception technology must fit the requirements of the enterprise in which it is deployed. Consequently, the architecture of deception systems must be versatile enough to scale up and down with demand. Additionally, it needs to offer various decoy options to accommodate different technologies and environments.

After the system is activated and managed to catch threats, use the next stages to ensure you make the most out of your deception technology:

System profile—analyze the deception system to identify what vulnerabilities were exploited and which tools or malware were used to launch the attack.
Attacker profile—analyze the deception system data to learn how the attackers infiltrated the system.
Attack analysis—study the attack and incorporate the lessons you learned to patch the security holes.
Threat hunting—let your security analysts use playbooks and security alerts to hunt down the threat.

The Benefits of Deception Technology

Deception adds an important defense layer that no other form of security does and offers many benefits for organizations:

Post-breach damage reduction—detects threats after relatively low dwell time to reduce damage potential and quicken remediation efforts.
High-fidelity alerts—simplifies and accelerates incident response and reduces fatigue caused by false positives.
Visibility—grants visibility into device, system, and network modifications to reduce risk of credential theft and other forms of access abuse.
Versatility—not being reliant on knowing signatures, patterns, and attack vectors allow deception to be more adaptable and useful against advanced threats.
Deployment automation—allows you to automatically deploy additional decoys around critical assets or make the areas you suspect to be susceptible to attacks more complex.

Wrap Up

Now that you understand the importance and value of deception technology, you are ready to start forming your own deception strategy and lay traps to protect your network from attacks. You can leverage the capabilities of technologies like honeypots and advanced analytics to not only stop threat actors in their tracks but also discover their location and attack methods. Sometimes, it’s better to fight fire with fire.