Milica Djekic – Australian Science

Weekly Science Picks

Milica Djekic — Sun, 14 Dec 2014 00:15:02 +0000

It’s Sunday! It’s a perfect day for your holiday, relaxation and joy. The good thing about every Sunday is nothing will force you to get up that early in the morning as you do during the working week. Well, that’s why this day is our opportunity to summarise what have happened over the last 7 days. So, let us review with you the best moments of this week!

Sprouting feathers and lost teeth: scientists map the evolution of birds

A remarkable international effort to map out the avian tree of life has revealed how birds evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs into more than 10,000 species alive today. More than 200 scientists in 20 countries joined forces to create the evolutionary tree, which reveals how birds gained their colourful feathers, lost their teeth, and learned to sing songs.

A different kind of show and tell

Imagine you’re back at school, and one day the teacher has something for show and tell. Someone, actually. A real live scientist, or mathematician, or ICT specialist. And not just the once.

Water vapor on Rosetta’s target comet significantly different from that found on Earth

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has found the water vapor from its target comet to be significantly different to that found on Earth. The discovery fuels the debate on the origin of our planet’s oceans. One of the leading hypotheses on Earth’s formation is that it was so hot when it formed 4.6 billion years ago that any original water content should have boiled off. But, today, two thirds of the surface is covered in water, so where did it come from? In this scenario, it should have been delivered after our planet had cooled down, most likely from collisions with comets and asteroids.

Could a diet supplement supercharge your eyesight?

Eyesight is an easy thing to take for granted, but our ability to see is one of the human body’s most incredible senses. And there’s a lot more to it than simply discerning objects in the distance. Our eyes are capable of dealing with huge variations in contrast, for example.

Hope you have enjoyed this week’s selection. Please stay curious and scientifically passionate. New stories are coming soon!

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Weekly Science Picks

Milica Djekic — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 00:15:45 +0000

It’s the end of one more amazing week, so it’s our time to recapitulate what have happened during the last 7 days. This Sunday, we bring you the best stories from space industry, psychology, medicine and physics, environmental science and much more. So, let’s begin our tour!

Astronomers solve mystery of the universe’s missing stars

Using the Hubble space telescope, they have discovered a distant galaxy in which star formation is itself driving the raw materials for more stars out into space at two million miles per hour – and in the process slowing future star production.

Psychology: A simple trick to improve your memory

If I asked you to sit down and remember a list of phone numbers or a series of facts, how would you go about it? There’s a fair chance that you’d be doing it wrong.

Human eye can see ‘invisible’ infrared light

Science textbooks say we can’t see infrared light. Like X-rays and radio waves, infrared light waves are longer than the light waves in the visual spectrum. But an international team of researchers has found that under certain conditions, the retina can sense infrared light after all.

Australia should export more ideas and fewer greenhouse emissions

As a global energy superpower, Australia can and should play a significant role in ensuring that its exports contribute as few greenhouse emissions as possible. Exporting ideas, technologies and solutions can play an important part in achieving this outcome.

Quite exciting journey, you would agree with us, ha? Well, if you keep following us, you will find out much more.

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Why Should We Trust to Cyber?

Milica Djekic — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:15:26 +0000

These days many people are speculating about ongoing mass e-surveillance systems, which got applied by a lot of countries, but the best known is still an NSA project. As the most usual reason against those projects, some people see privacy breach concerns. But, what is a privacy? Why would our governments “spy

Cite this article:
Djekic M (2014-12-05 00:15:26). Why Should We Trust to Cyber?. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 03, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/technology/trust-cyber/
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Weekly Science Picks

Milica Djekic — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 00:15:41 +0000

It’s Sunday… Hurray! It’s our time to review what have happened during the last 7 days. This time we bring you the most exciting stories from biology, nature and wildlife. So, let’s start our tour!

Grey seals identified as killers behind mystery harbour porpoise deaths

Using DNA analysis of the the bite wounds, a Dutch team examined 721 porpoises that were stranded between 2003 and 20013 along the Dutch coastline and found that nearly one in five had been killed by seals. That makes the seals the major cause of harbour porpoise deaths in the Netherlands, alongside being killed as fishing bycatch.

Turtles and dinosaurs: Scientists solve reptile mysteries with landmark study on the evolution of turtles

A team of scientists has reconstructed a detailed ‘tree of life’ for turtles. Next generation sequencing technologies have generated unprecedented amounts of genetic information for a thrilling new look at turtles’ evolutionary history. Scientists place turtles in the newly named group ‘Archelosauria’ with their closest relatives: birds, crocodiles, and dinosaurs.

Exploring the ocean’s hidden depths

We know so little about the depths of our oceans that they might as well exist on another planet. The majority of the sea floor has never been visited by humans. As to what lives and feeds and breeds down there in the icy depths, it remains best left to our imagination.

The thorny issue threatening the coral reefs of Pilbara

The Great Barrier Reef is a global icon and something of a heavyweight in the natural world. If it was a movie it would be a Spielberg-directed Hollywood blockbuster starring Hugh Jackman and Angelina Jolie. Its cousin, Ningaloo Reef, off Australia’s western coast, is something of a poor relation in a branding sense, but still holds a relative degree of fame. It would be more your ‘straight-to-video’ sort of flick.

That would be all for this week’s choice. Please stay curious and scientifically passionate. We promise you a great stuff in the coming period.

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The Best of Australian Science: November 2014

Milica Djekic — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:15:16 +0000

It’s the end of November, 2014 and it is our time to summarise our contribution for this month.

Please enjoy our this month’s selection.

A Cyber Disaster Somehow Occurred… What to Do the Next? by Milica Djekic

A modern business environment is frequently connected with many risks and uncertainties. The fact is the majority of modern businesses rely on IT infrastructure, but is a cyber threat the only thing that concerns us? Certainly, it’s not. There are a lot of different risks such as natural disasters, fires, threats to physical security and so on they can affect a business continuity and people’s safety.

Life – Evolved by Lia Paola Zambetti

What is a life form? Most of us, if asked, will think of an animal or a human being-in other words, a multicellular organism. However, life itself evolved in cells, single cells of various types that existed and propagated independently. What are, then, the factors that led cells to collaborate together and give rise to complex organisms? Collaboration is possible only if there are no cheaters -cells that exploit the collaboration of others- and cheaters always arise. How is possible, then, for a multicellular organism to develop? Do the cheaters need to be eliminated –an evolutionary impossibility- for complex organisms to occur?

Worldwide action needed to address hidden crisis of violence against women and girls

Yet, despite increased global attention to violence perpetrated against women and girls, and recent advances in knowledge about how to tackle these abuses, levels of violence against women – including intimate partner violence, rape, female genital mutilation, trafficking, and forced marriages – remain unacceptably high, with serious consequences for victims’ physical and mental health. Conflict and other humanitarian crises may exacerbate ongoing violence.

How to Get Skills in Cyber Security? by Milica Djekic

It is also well-known that people are not born with such a skill; they need to master their fields of interest through their lives. That’s exactly the case with cyber! Requirements are high, every single day something new appears and what you need to have for such a career is an excellent learning curve which will allow you to cope with the change and successfully adopt and apply new things.

Well, that would be all for this monthly review. New stories are coming soon!

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A Cyber Disaster Has Somehow Occurred… What to Do Next?

Milica Djekic — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:15:37 +0000

More often than not, people and businesses keep their sensitive and confidential information in their data storage within their cyber system. Their main concern is how not to lose that valuable content. Some studies suggest that more than 40% of businesses never re-open after losing their confidential data, while around 90% of them close their businesses 5 years after such an incident. So, losing this type of information can be seen as a serious and sometimes fatal harm to many organisations. The thing everyone should think about is how to protect their critical data from harm or how to recover them after a disaster happens. In this article, we deal with well-known scenarios in terms of data recovery and provide a better insight into current issues and trends in the field.

What Are the Current Cyber Threats for a Business?

There are numerous risks and uncertainties connected to a modern business environment. The fact is the majority of modern businesses rely on IT infrastructure, but is a cyber threat the only thing that concerns us? Certainly, it’s not. There are a lot of different dangers, such as natural disasters, fires, threats to physical security, etc. that can affect business continuity and people’s safety.

When talking about current business and its functioning, let’s compare it to a surface of the water. If there is no wind or no one throws the stone in, the surface will remain calm. The similar situation is with the business. If an incident happens, it will seriously affect an operation of the entire business.

So, what would be the goal of any business existing in a highly aggressive and risky environment? Many believe that a contemporary business has no future without a good business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. This plan should ensure a continual and safe operation of the business, even in case of an emergency situation.

As far as computer-based attacks to our business infrastructure are concerned, it must be said that not only big companies are under risk, but very often, small and midsize businesses as well. Many hackers and cybercriminals target this sort of businesses, because they believe they are an easy catch due to their low security measures.

Indeed, there is a large spectre of scenarios and techniques that data thieves can apply. These normally include cyber espionage in order to obtain confidential details about the business. Afterwards, these would be sold on the black market and consequently the thieves could make a financial gain. The other scenario includes hackers’ and intruders’ activities that can lead to diverse sorts of cyber sabotage and different types of IT harm to their victims.

OK! The Incident Happened… Now What?

Many studies suggest that the majority of small and midsize businesses worldwide are simply unprepared to handle an occurrence of a cyber incident within their IT infrastructure. Many of them are not even capable of surviving an ordinary data breach, which is a regular incident in a cyberspace of today.Why is it so?

First of all, small businesses are too small to invest a serious amount of money and time into their cyber defence. That opens numerous opportunities for cybercrime groups.

In addition, such businesses are still profitable and usually possess highly confidential and valuable data, such as credit card details, employees’ documentation and even some intellectual property or patent information. All those things must be so appealing to bad guys!

So, what we have is such valuable data that can be sold on the black market on one hand, and on the other, easy access to all of those.

In such a case, what we are supposed to do is to try to save what we can. The best advice here is to follow security procedures and try to recover the data using tools available on the market. System and data recovery, as well as a good backup, can be a vital link in the chain that could protect your business from a permanent data loss.

In general, when such an incident happens, the best thing to do is to take some steps that will help you to recover from a disaster. Organisations with a high level of cyber maturity do not improvise or resolve problems ad hoc; they follow very-well defined standards and procedures which enable them to minimize an impact of the incident on their staff, customers and overall reputation.

Things that Can Protect your Organization from Harm

As mentioned before, the best things here are proper cyber defence procedures and processes. After all, cyber security is not only about risk management; it is also about people, processes and technologies involved into that management.

Finally, if a business is not capable of functioning in case of an emergency, it will not survive in a dynamic environment such as our today’s market. In other words, to get ready for such an extreme situation, it is vitally important to have a very-well developed business continuity plan, as well as a disaster recovery strategy.

These two plans will prove themselves more than useful in the situation of uncertainty and high risk to your organisation and employees. Only with them, you will be able to protect your strategically important resources and eventually save your business.

Thinking Ahead is the Best Protection at the Moment

So, what seems as crucial here is a well-planned scenario in case of a disaster. In order to make a good strategy, you need to think in advance and protect yourself and your business from all the potential difficulties that can occur in a real life situation. In other words, thinking ahead can offer the best protection at this moment.

Cite this article:
Djekic M (2014-11-25 00:15:37). A Cyber Disaster Has Somehow Occurred… What to Do Next?. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 03, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/technology/cyber-disaster-somehow-occurred-next/
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Weekly Science Picks

Milica Djekic — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:15:49 +0000

Here we are at the end of one more exciting and fascinating week. It’s our time to summarise what have happened during the previous 7 days. The focus of today’s editor’s selection would be on psychology, neuropsychological and medical research. So, let’s start our journey!

Psychology: How many senses do we have?

We often talk of having five senses as a universal truth. In reality, there may be more – or fewer – depending on the way you look at the question. Christian Jarrett explains the controversy.

Smokers learn to cut down while they sleep

Any smoker can tell you how hard it is to kick the habit. Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs that we know of, and smoking is one of the deadliest of habits, killing more than 5 million annually. Smokers are well aware of the risks, and every year more than one third of them make at least one attempt to stop, but only 2-3% manage to do so.

Training can lead to synesthetic experiences: Does learning the ‘color of’ specific letters boost IQ?

A new study has shown for the first time how people can be trained to ‘see’ letters of the alphabet as colors in a way that simulates how those with synesthesia experience their world.

Less Talk, More Therapy

Settled on her table that first day, I explained to her that I’d had many intractable physical problems in the last several years, the most recent being a pain in my knee that no medical professional could make heads or tails of. I couldn’t sit cross-legged on the floor or rise up out of a full squat, and I’d feel a sharp stab whenever I slipped that leg into my jeans. Some yoga practitioners that my husband knew had recommended I see her about this.

Thank you so much for your attention. We are coming with new stories soon!

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How to Get Skills in Cyber Security?

Milica Djekic — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:15:38 +0000

We were talking before, though our cyber security sessions, that a career in cyber defence is the quite challenging one and it requires a lot of hard work and time to put your skills and expertise at a competitive level. So, the question here would get addressed to problems related to education and work experience in cyber security. Today it’s not sufficient to have a degree in some field; very often it’s more important to gain a proven track record as an evidence you are capable of doing some job. In this brief talk, we plan to discuss all the possibilities that a cyber defence career can offer to us and also review some common requirements you need to satisfy in order to get successful in such a business.

Why is Cyber Career so Challenging?

As mentioned before, cyber security or simply cyber is related to computers, web and mobile technologies. It is well-known that the entire IT sector relies on very skilled and highly competitive people. But, what is the case with cyber?

In cyber, you need someone who is familiar with computers, web and mobile devices, but not only that. Such a person must know how to protect all of these from threats, risks and attacks. So, you need extremely bright individuals to contribute here.

It is also well-known that people are not born with such a skill; they need to master their fields of interest through their lives. That’s exactly the case with cyber! Requirements are high, every single day something new appears and what you need to have for such a career is an excellent learning curve which will allow you to cope with the change and successfully adopt and apply new things.

So, cyber is a quite challenging area and it needs a lot of effort and time in order to expertise everything, but for someone who has an affinity for such a job, it can become a life-long passion.

What is also good to get mentioned here is the fact that there is a big cyber skill shortage in the world. We live in a cyber era; everything is getting so cyber; the need for cyber experts is great and very often people are hesitating to choose that career, because they are aware it requires a lot of hard work and serious involvement.

On the other hand, this could be encouraging to young people who are talented for computers to try to find their place in cyber, because such a career can offer them a very competitive environment, a good position on the Lobar Market and a suitable financial compensation to their efforts.

How Important is an Educational Background in Cyber?

The educational background is pretty significant everywhere, but as you know it is not necessary of crucial importance when it comes to your career. Sometimes skills are more important than your degree.

Good schools and good high education providers can affect your future work experience and help you develop some skills and work habits. Here we would like to highlight a significance of education in everyone’s life as well as in cyber profession.

For instance, the majority of skills in cyber career can be gained through hard work, but what would make you outstanding in your job is a constant capacity to learn which can be easily adopted through education in your childhood.

Later, in your life and career, you can get recognized through your practical experience and efforts, but even then you need to be capable to study and use your mind for problem-solving tasks.

So, your education can be seen as a good preparation to your career, but if you stop working hard after finishing your school, then your education will mean nothing though your life.

Could Your Hard Work get Recognized?

Cyber field is amazing because it offers you an opportunity to develop a lot of skills through your work experience and to get approved for that. There are many cyber certificates that can make an internationally recognized expert out of you and they can make you competitive at global Lobar Market.

The best known certificate in cyber area is so called “Certified Information Systems Security Professional

Cite this article:
Djekic M (2014-11-20 00:15:38). How to Get Skills in Cyber Security?. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 03, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/education/get-skills-cyber-security/
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Weekly Science Picks

Milica Djekic — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:15:58 +0000

Welcome at the end of one more exciting and this time, we could say, historically amazing week. Namely, these days we are witnessing a highly interesting ESA’s mission called Rosetta. For such a reason, this week’s review will be dedicated to that mission and some space science and industry stories. So, let’s go through the top news of this week.

Are we sending aliens the right messages?

By broadcasting formulae of aromatic chemicals, she says, aliens could reconstruct all sorts of whiffs that help to define life on Earth: animal blood and faeces, sweet floral and citrus scents or benzene to show our global dependence on the car. This way intelligent life forms on distant planets who may not see or hear as we do, says Paterson, could explore us through smell, one of the most primitive and ubiquitous senses of all.

Philae lander sends back first ever image from comet

The picture shows the cracked, bumpy surface in monochrome, with one of Philae’s three legs in the bottom left of the frame. It is not yet clear whether the leg in the image is actually touching the surface. What is certain is that Philae is not level, and may be wedged into a pit.

The Adventures of Rosetta and Philae

The giant antenna dishes of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex are supporting the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, relaying data that the refrigerator-sized Philae probe has commenced its descent to the unknown surface of Comet 67-P Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Intergalactic ‘wind’ is stripping galaxies of star-forming gas

Astronomers have provided the first direct evidence that an intergalactic ‘wind’ is stripping galaxies of star-forming gas as they fall into clusters of galaxies. The observations help explain why galaxies found in clusters are known to have relatively little gas and less star formation when compared to non-cluster or ‘field’ galaxies.

These would be all for this week. Thank you so much for your attention. We are coming with new stories soon!

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Somewhere in the Future … How Does Cyber Security Look Like?

Milica Djekic — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:15:49 +0000

Throughout this article, we do not plan to tell you some fictional story, but rather to provide you with very realistic predictions for the future of cyber defence which relies on current research and development trends and a way which cyber industry makes for us. The focus of this review will be on cyber security automatic solutions which will include an intelligent software for monitoring, prevention and incident response. A human’s effort will be replaced with machine’s skills and people will be the ones who will just use benefits of such an intelligent system.

The Path We Have to Walk

The main problem with a modern cyber security is that it is still based on very passive principles. For instance, recent cyber solutions are quite good in monitoring and prevention, while they still suffer a serious lack of a good incident response. Security experts believe that an appropriate cyber defence system should provide a mix of all of three – monitoring, prevention and incident response.

What we should have in mind at this stage is that today’s security solutions are still very human-dependent and, from such a perspective, the greatest challenge for the future would be an automatic operation of cyber systems with a minimum human’s effort invested. Many researchers and software engineers forecast that the future of cyber security will rely on some sort of (security) software that will have its own self-defence capabilities.

The idea which stays behind this software is related to solution that automatically generates the patches. In other words, such a software has an ability to learn what a normal behaviour is and what an error could be and to repair itself if any vulnerability appears.

Some suggests that the path we have to walk would lead us to very sophisticated solutions which will be governed with intelligence. Such a scenario predicts a piece of code that will be capable of learning, adapting and predicting. Further, we will attempt to give a better insight on what exists on the market at the moment and to explain a course of the future discoveries and inventions.

A Self-Defending Software Already Exists

Quite recently the US research team was investigating and testing the capabilities of an intrusion prevention software (IPS). Such a software is able to protect itself from external attacks and intruders.

The testing included the list of questions which researchers carefully prepared and sent to vendors of the IPS expecting them to provide the answers and to share some of their industry experience with them. Once the research team got the response from the industry, they selected the best software for a testing in the laboratory conditions. The results suggest that a recant version of the IPS can be assumed as a good prototype of self-defending software that we will have in the future.

A theoretical background of such a solution is based on ‘automatically patching an error’ system. A current model given in [1] indicates that an automatic patching or a generating of the repair code is feasible only throughout a good learning and repairing algorithm. Some advanced studies invoke adaptive algorithms and predictive analytics as a trend in the coming times.

In general, some types of initial self-defending software already exist and as it is given in [2], they find their applications in military sector. In other words, if some testings have been made for army, we can expect that the first commercial versions of the software will appear on the market soon.

What Would Happen the Next?

In not that distant future, we can expect that a software with a self-defence mechanism governed with intelligence will become a part of our lives. General science defines intelligence as an ability to adapt to new conditions, while security sees intelligence as an information with some analysis applied. The key word here would be ‘an ability to adapt’ or ‘a capacity to track a change’.

Whatever a software of the future would appear, it will include two characteristics – an adaptivity and a self-defence. Intelligent systems are definitely something that will gain their place in the future, but what is also possible is a system with an automatic incident response.

The incident response is a big challenge of cyber security nowadays, so it’s natural that in the future such a security element will be a part of the (security) system which will need a minimum human-machine interaction.

Few Words at the End

As anything else, cyber security must get along with a change, because that’s the only certain thing in the future. In such a case, it is necessary to rely on intelligence, so what we need to do is to think in multidisciplinary manner and to try to connect everything with everything as the ‘Internet of things’ concept suggests. That’s how we can get ready for the coming days.

References:

[1] Ernst M., Self-defending software: Automatically patching errors in deployed software, Lecture notes, University of Washington, 2009
[2] Kerivan, J.E., Brothers, K., Self-defending security software, Military Communications Conference (2005 MILCOM), IEEE, 2005

Cite this article:
Djekic M (2014-11-11 00:15:49). Somewhere in the Future … How Does Cyber Security Look Like?. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 03, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/technology/somewhere-future-cyber-security-look-like/
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