By David
Shamah, The Times of Israel
GE (General Electric) is getting into the
cloud business – and it’s taking Israeli cyber-security firm ThetaRay along
with it.
After
investing along with several partners $10 million in ThetaRay last year, GE
presented the company at its recent Minds and Machines Conference in San
Francisco with its Industrial Innovation Award for offering the “Most
Innovative Industrial Internet Technology.”
The ThetaRay
technology, said GE, will be used in its big data platform for industrial and
business cloud development, called Predix.
According to
Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay, “our relationship with GE will make it possible
for many more industrial companies to benefit from our groundbreaking solution.
We are honored to receive this award, and proud to be part of the Predix
ecosystem.”
GE’s Predix
platform offers companies apps that allow them to process cloud-based data to
analyze information, helping them use big data to save money and time.
Financial news site The Street quoted Bill Ruh, GE’s vice president of global
software, as saying at a June conference that GE intends to be a
“next-generation industrial company that is going to have as a core competency”
the ability to meld the physical and digital worlds.
With its
data analysis apps, Predix will help companies analyze specific cohorts of data
to do things like providing data to allow wind farm operators to adjust
turbines in real time to change the curvature of a blade or make other
alterations, allowing a more efficient operation and producing more power, the
site quoted Ruh as saying.
When big
data meets the cloud, hackers generally aren’t too far behind. It’s much easier
for them to get to data that is transmitted to a public cloud than it is to get
to that data when it is on a local server, behind a firewall – even when there
are substantial defenses in the cloud server. In 2011, for example, hackers
were said to have used an account on an Amazon cloud server to steal data from
Sony, and in 2014, photos, many of them of celebrities in various stages of
undress, were posted on a hacking site after being poached from online accounts
on Apple’s iCloud servers (Apple claimed that it was the accounts that were
hacked, not the servers).
In any
event, ThetaRay’s technology comes in handy for cloud sites seeking to protect
their clients. “Hackers are always looking for backdoors,” said Gazit. “They
penetrate systems using various methods, like spear-phishing schemes,” in which
hackers search for a weak link, matching an email message with a potential
victim who is vulnerable to threats, rewards, fear or other psychological
tactics to get the victim to click on a link or open a document that will
install malware giving them access to data.
“Once they
penetrate a system they can put any kind of malware they want into it, turning
it into their own little ‘playground,’ installing anything they want.
Meanwhile, information continues to flow through the system, and it’s all
exposed to hackers’ whims.”
The best way
to deal with the threat, said Gazit, was to look at the overall picture in a
system, and try to figure out what “doesn’t look right. Our system checks for
anomalies both inside and outside a network, evaluating what would be
considered ‘normal’ in an organization and what would be anomalous.”
Anomalies
could include increased activity inside a network, or greater than usual
requests for communication resources outside a network. Those anomalies, for
example, showed up on systems that were plagued with the Stuxnet virus, which
wreaked havoc with Iranian centrifuges even as it indicated, on screen, that
everything was running smoothly, said Gazit.
To arrive at
its conclusions, ThetaRay examines lots of data – “the more the better.
“We check
for anomalies in the huge amount of data we process, looking for patterns of
activity that should not be there,” said Gazit. Data is taken from all input sources
— email, web connection data, log files, sensors, cameras and microphones, etc
— comparing the activity with expected patterns, with the models, said Gazit,
developed over a period of seven years by top graduates of the IDF’s security
tech Unit 8200 group, and top professors from Tel Aviv University and Yale
University.
ThetaRay was
one of only four companies to be honored with Industrial Innovation Awards,
alongside PepsiCo, Pitney Bowes, and Salt River Project. The “Most Innovative
Industrial Internet Technology” award was designed to highlight a company or
offering that significantly advances the Industrial Internet, GE said.
“The success
of the Industrial Internet depends on a collaborative ecosystem,” said Harel
Kodesh, vice president, Predix, and CTO, GE Digital. “With Predix, GE is
driving digital innovation across the industrial world-working with companies
like ThetaRay helping advance this mission. We consider its technology a
valuable component of the Predix microservice catalog that is helping our
customers achieve better outcomes.”