Opinions

I declare, I have seen the light although I was mired in doubt to start with.

What held me back from accepting the cloud into my life was fear - the terror of losing control.

It started when I joined an IT department on the bottom rung, as the support guy who installed a PC on your desk. From there, my role evolved into server applications, then networks and firewalls. In those days, experience was a brutal teacher, so you always needed a backup. We backed up everything before an upgrade because there was always a precedent for things going wrong.

In October this year, Australian technology entrepreneur Simon Hackett had an in-depth conversation about how the new energy grid and the new Internet grid are starting to evolve – and about the interesting similarities and overlaps that are evolving between the two.

A key thrust of the conversation related to the way that scalable energy storage is the transformative physical component driving changes in how the energy grids of the world will work in the future.

That conversation was undertaken between Simon, who is also executive chairman of ASX-listed battery company Redflow, and astrophysicist turned computer scientist Larry Smarr.

Simon said Larry was the perfect partner for this conversation. “He is someone I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for some years now, and, as you’ll see in the video, we share some similar views on the topics concerned,” he said

“I had a great time riffing with him on these topics.”

The video of this conversation is available for your viewing pleasure here.

Footnote: This is a 15 minute video that was excerpted from a half hour session at the Future In Review conference held in Park City, Utah in October 2015.

Simon said the Future In Review conference was a pretty amazing event. “I’ve been a part of it for many years,” he said. “This year I was wearing my Redflow hat loudly and proudly at the event.”

Centrify CEO Tom Kemp reveals his own 'CEO Fraud' experience of social engineering aiming to scam his company's cash.

money hook phishing

 

I have been seeing increasing number of articles on sites like Krebs on Security on a growing scam called “CEO fraud,” whereby crooks are using social engineering to get executives to wire funds to the crooks. One recent example was tech company Ubiquiti Networks, that was swindled out of $47 millionAnother example is an Atlanta company that was scammed out $1.8 million. Also known as the “business email compromise” (BEC) scam, the FBI reports that over 7,000 victims have lost $750 million in the last 2 years and this form of swindling is growing over 270% since the first of this year.

As CEO of Centrify, I find it very interesting to read about this crime, as my company and I now regularly experience various forms of sophisticated attempts to get us to transfer money to crooks. Hopefully by using myself and this blog post as a case study for what the bad guys are doing, I can help others to not fall victim to this crime.