Ransomware attacks are on the rise and evolving into the prevalent threat of 2021. Organisations are running to stay ahead of the tools and techniques, but its often more difficult to identify where any exfiltrated data may be stored and disclosed further.Expect to see more funding and innovation flow to cyber startups that close this gap and have a robust R&D roadmap to evolve their platforms and tooling.Recent Y combinator cyber startup - cyble.io is the latest with seed funding (backed by Innov8 and Angel investors as well). https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210405005474/en/https://cyble.io/about-us.html

In Australia, we're still largely trying to make PPPs work (hint: it takes more than 1 year funding and partnership to build & execute value). However it has been proven successful elsewhere in leading to substantial economic development, significant operational capability uplift and more.Project IKE was a prototyping exercise funded by DARPA (US) back in 2013. The Contractor (Two Six Labs) has since scaled, commercialising the product in collaboration with US Defence Agencies (Navy etc). The product is now transitioning to US Cyber Command as a key cyber readiness and analysis platform.Commercialising R&D is not impossible.https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2021/04/20/a-cyber-tool-that-started-at-darpa-moves-to-cyber-command/

We are racing to learn about ourselves, our heritage and predict our likelihood/ predisposition to disease/ allergies or food choices (yes, Australian do love vegemite!). Who should we trust with our data? How will our data be used to identify and target us?There's lots of genomic testing services/ platforms, DNA registries and testing kits. Which privacy innovators are working with them?An emerging example - DNAsafe.io - run the computations required over encrypted data so its not fully visible. Next: we keep the data of ourselves and share/ run encrypted data with partners/ providers (Digi.me/ IDXchange)photo credit: dnasafe

Nvidia releases - Morpheus - an AI-powered app framework for cybersecurity devs..Morpheus aims to enable compute nodes in networks to serve as cyberdefence sensors so organisations can analyse packets without information replication, leveraging real-time telemetry and policy enforcement, as well as data processing at the edge. Using AI, Morpheus can analyse more security data than conventional app frameworks without sacrificing cost or performance.https://developer.nvidia.com/morpheus-cybersecurity

What if we could have a conversation with Einstein? AI platform Digital Humans is using technology to give us a chance to interact with human-like animations. What's next?https://einstein.digitalhumans.com/index.htmlImage credit: digital humans

1,200+ citizens from the US, Canada, Germany, UK and Australia were surveyed in a recent KPMG & UoQ study. Focusing on AI systems with applications in Healthcare and Human Resources - what are the views on citizen trust and expectations for AI?Not surprisingly, while Trust is key to the success of AI-driven applications; citizens were found to have 'low trust' but generally 'accepting' of AI solutions generally - the level of confidence and willingness to share data with a third party and AI system is also interesting.Implications for business, government/ policymakers and morehttps://home.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/au/pdf/2021/trust-in-ai-multiple-countries.pdfimage credit: KPMG