News 11/06/2018 Cyber Threat Intelligence for understanding threats [kc_row use_container="yes" force="no" column_align="middle" video_mute="no" _id="143334"][kc_column width="12/12" video_mute="no" _id="298733"][kc_column_text _id="390091"] THE SCENERY The data presented in the latest Clusit Report show that the first half of 2017 was the worst ever for cyber security, confirming an inexorable upward trend from 2011 to today: any organization, regardless of size or sector of activity, is concrete risk of suffering a significant cyber attack within the next 12 months. This in the face of ICT security investments still quite insufficient compared to the market value of ICT goods and services. Cybercrime, today, is characterized by attacks aimed at extorting data and money. The media hype that has been created on the subject of security helps companies to become more aware of the risks to which they are subject. Very often, however, attacks are perceived as actions by international criminal organizations, forgetting that sometimes a company's security flaws arise from design errors and security management that can not be resolved by simply identifying the appropriate technology. We need governance, skills and strategy, even more so today that digitalization extends the attack and risk surface. Almost everyone has thought about the protection of PCs and laptops, but only a few companies have installed advanced security systems on their employees' smartphones that represent a very large attack surface. It is therefore necessary to develop a new model of investments in cyber security, adapted to real threats. The answer can be found in the Security by Design approach, that is to think about security already in the design phases of an application or a digital service. Therefore, we must not abandon Digital Transformation or, on the contrary, renounce security in order to have more advanced or innovative features: the real challenge is to integrate security into systems, applications and digital services without precluding usability and experience from users. To be safe and protected, a company must follow a series of rules and processes that are not limited to the implementation of technological solutions but enter into the personal sphere of the behaviors and habits of employees and collaborators. Therefore, we need to think in terms of prevention that declining methods and technologies tailored to the different needs of each company that depend on its nature, the business model, the organizational structure, the awareness of people. [/kc_column_text][kc_column_text _id="379397"] THE LUTECH APPROACH The heart of Lutech's value proposition is based on some pillars: "solid" Security Engineering based on knowledge and the ability to integrate the best technologies in the field of Cyber Intelligence, Breach Monitoring, Incident Response. Lutech's Cyber Threat Intelligence offering provides customers with the support needed to understand consolidated and emerging cyber threats, offering cyber threat detection, analysis and monitoring services. The activities of Intelligence, performed outside the Customer's infrastructure, on the information channels in the visible, deep and dark web, are aimed at collecting the data necessary for the development of information, in some cases even preventive, relating to Cyber Crime. and Fraud Activity, able to support our clients in strategic decision-making and management processes. Also the service of Breach Detection & Incident Response of Lutech (L-BDIR) realizes the monitoring of infrastructure security through the detection and analysis of anomalies in network traffic and execution of application processes, in order to identify, evaluate and responding to external and internal threats to servers, endpoints, mobile devices, applications. Through the use of cloud-based and on-premise technological and service components, L-BDIR collects data and information from the various technologies present in the Customer context and / or offered by Lutech. The detection and response to threats are structured on the model of the "Cyber Kill Chain", with a view to modeling and keeping under control risk scenarios; and to mitigate or remedy the compromise of systems, applications and data, thus reducing the impact on the customer's business. Furthermore, the integration with the Cyber Threat Intelligence services makes the most up-to-date information to the controls and the platforms that can actively use them immediately be activated. Lutech CSIRT Team [/kc_column_text][/kc_column][/kc_row]
News 11/06/2018 Social Analytics: The importance of opinions We are in the age of data, we hear it repeated continuously; the mantra that resounds everywhere, from the press to the generalist sector, is always the same: BIG DATA. Where does this large amount of data come from? And why do we talk about it so much today? The answer is quite simple: we talk about it so much because the data have enormous economic value, especially if they concern people and their behavior. "Data is the new oil", Clive Humby, Mathematician We are talking about "dynamic" data, that is, of those data that change over time, precisely because they are the digital fingerprint of our life in the world, such as passing through a place, our tastes and our opinions, our behavior and relationships with friends and brands. And here is the answer to the first question, most of the data comes from people and devices used by them, such as smartphones, computers, wearable devices, but also from the "things" used by humans such as home automation, smart devices (washing machines) , air conditioners, automobiles, etc.) up to industrial tools, ie from the famous IoT devices (Internet of Things) Summing up then, the huge increase in data is due to the following factors: Today it is no longer just computers and mobile devices that are connected, but everything, even the signals of our body Data transport networks have reached high speeds even on the mobile Users have switched from one-use-to-use-based consumption model (As A Service On Demand) Let's go back to the initial statement: we are in the data age. This statement is so true, that for the first time in modern history, it is technology that is chasing data, not data searching for a technology that supports and generates them. This has, in fact, traced the path of technological macro-trends in the coming years Big Data: understood as the ability to attract, collect, analyze and above all represent a large amount of unstructured data Artificial intelligence: the ability to process data with processes and performances similar to those of human intelligence Blockchain: the technology created to guarantee decentralization, transparency, security and immutability of data. It is precisely on these themes that TEIA Technologies, a company belonging to the Lutech group, focuses precisely on the data age, with the awareness that the value of the data does not lie in the data itself, but in the knowledge we can derive from it. In TEIA we work on the data and with the data to extract, in fact, knowledge. Knowing your customers and prospects is no longer just a competitive advantage, but a necessity that companies can no longer ignore, and that's what we do for our customers and partners: collect and process data using the technologies we've talked about above: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Analysis. The data on which we work are mainly divided into two macro categories: Open data: all data available on public socio-digital channels, such as Social Networks, Forums and Blogs Custom Data: the data that are present in the company, and that almost always are a mine of information not carried to value. Since its foundation in 2013, TEIA has developed and put various products and services in a portfolio, thanks to continuous technological research and collaboration with major universities and research institutions: AI: proprietary artificial intelligence platform, based on machine learning, neural networks and cognitive computing Topic Catcher: semantic clustering (http://topic.teia.company) Custom Data Analyzer: platform dedicated to the analysis, also in real time, o customer custom data, also based on the technological core of teia.ai Opinion Platform: proprietary opinion analysis platform based on teia.ai. The Opinion Analysis platform is, in fact, the central cornerstone of the company's proposal in the context of Social Analytics. Its main strength is expressed in the ability, enabled by the synergistic use of different AI technologies and semantic analysis, to distinguish between sentiment and opinion, a substantial difference when we want to extract granular and quality information from the analysis of data " Increasingly, Sentiment and Opinion Analysis are used as synonyms to such an extent that even on Wikipedia the definition of Sentiment Analysis reads: "Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) refers to the use [...]". The differences, however, are substantial because identifying the mood of a text is a very different operation than deriving its opinion. Let's try to think of the following sentence: "These cookies are delicious". It is quite simple to attribute the correct mood that, in this case, is "POSITIVE" but if the sentence to be analyzed was the following, what would be its mood? "This brand makes delicious cookies, but they are full of fat and cost too much." Most of the Sentiment Analysis tools would force the attribution of a label through an algorithm based on generic rules of semantic interpretation and, at best, to a text like that of the example would attribute a "NEUTRAL" mood (it could, however, happen that the label assigned is that of "POSITIVE"). It is evident that the result not only does not perfectly reflect reality but provides indications that are potentially the opposite of the real expressed sentiment. The forcing in attributing a mood "at all costs" is one of the main reasons why in the majority of sentiment analysis the percentage of neutrality is very high (above 60-70%), this type of result should be an alarm for those who receive it: on social networks people write to express their opinions or to share information, it is therefore strange to conclude an analysis of this type stating that most of the posts are labeled as "NEUTRAL". The fault of this result is not (only) to be attributed to the tool or the algorithms used in the analysis: try to attribute a sentiment to the offending sentence. I am convinced that most people, at the question "What mood would you attribute to the above sentence?" Would answer “It depends". Here, this is the problem: an analysis tool can not answer "DEPENDS", and without precise instructions can not help but force an answer, even if clearly wrong. Let's try to analyze the previous sentence by placing a well-defined condition: what we would answer if the question were asked as follows: "What is the opinion about the price of cookies?" or "What is the opinion about the taste of cookies?"; in this case, I am sure, the answer would not be “IT DEPENDS" but a very precise label or category. Well, the accuracy of the answers is one of the substantial differences between Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Analysis, but it is obviously not the only one. When we ask someone's opinion, we expect a reasoned answer or otherwise the precise expression of a personal thought. I try to explain once again with an example, to the question "Why do you like these cookies?" What do you expect to be answered? Something like "positive perception" or a structured comment as it could be: "These cookies I like because they know about butter"? Here is another difference between Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Analysis: in the first case, the maximum we can get is a more or less precise representation of the mood around a single and well-defined topic, while in the second case we can get the answers to our questions. As an example, below we show a possible representation of an opinion analysis. In this case, the analysis refers to the user's perception of the assistance services of a manufacturing company operating in consumer electronics: As you can see, regardless of the specific case, the Opinion Analysis allows us not only to determine the mood but also, and above all, to understand the motivations behind it. One of the greatest difficulties in listening to the network is to be able to separate what is an opinion, from what is instead a simple news, ie a post or article that does not express opinion, but that simply shares information, or from communications of the same brand that you want to derive the perceived. Also in this case the simple Sentiment Analysis is not enough, to understand what opinion the people have of our brand, product or service, but it is necessary to rely on the Analysis. The image below shows the graphic effect of the approach described above applied to a survey conducted during the launch of a consumer product: The first thing that is evident is how the volumes at stake are drastically different and how, above all, the number of posts in which users express a real opinion about a particular topic is very less than the number of posts that report generic information but that do not represent the expression of end users, but that is what every brand wants to know when analyzing the opinion of its customers and prospects. The next steps: customers are people, who leave a footprint when they interact with the digital and physical world: they give, sometimes unconsciously, enormous information about their behavior and habits, which can tell us a lot about their personality. It is with this awareness that we are developing a proprietary platform for the analysis of psychometric personality traits. Soon we will be able to tell you that the psychological profile has a person who interacts with certain contents, so as to better calibrate the communication addressed to it. Teia is also very attentive to the security of the data it deals with, so we could not even start working on the blockchain, studying and developing systems for decentralization and information security. Mauro Ferri Co-Founder TEIA, Lutech Group
News 29/05/2018 Collaboration: Collaboration and smartworking technologies for a new way of working Collaboration projects developed by Lutech to support the business management of its Customers, respond effectively to the reasons that push companies to adopt these new technologies: Using videoconferencing and real-time sharing of documents for travel reduction, with consequent economic and time savings and with an eye also for the ecological aspect. Having an "always connected" work force, regardless of the individual's geographical position, with consequent greater speed and efficiency in the information exchange and in the decision-making processes of the Company. Adopt a new way to work in a group, also interconnecting different functions within the company, which also takes its cue from the new methods of communication that come from the consumer and social world and to which everyone has become accustomed to our private life. Undoubtedly, the most delicate aspect for the success of a collaboration project is the knowledge of the world of networking and of the infrastructures on which collaboration projects are based. Poor performance and lack of tuning can heavily influence the success of the project and the adoption of technologies by users. The collaboration, in fact, must be immediate and easy to use and not bring complications to the work of those who use it. Another important aspect for the system integrator is that of consultancy support in the impact that the adoption of collaboration technologies have on the company processes and organizations. In this field, Lutech has been collaborating for years with Cisco, the world leader in these technologies, which continues to reinvent and improve the collaboration experience by focusing on ease of use, solution design and integration with applications and the social network. It is important to underline how Cisco offers collaboration solutions for companies and organizations, combining simplicity with security, scalability and adaptability to all types of business environment, all generations and all functions. AInstead of following the trivialization of the concept that only smartphones enabled by laptops and smartphones, offers an experience suitable to express the real economic potential and model, represented by digitization. A clear example of this is the Cisco Spark team collaboration Cloud platform and the recently launched Cisco Spark Board, which allows co-design and remote whiteboarding work even with tablet users. Lutech has equipped its own auditorium and meeting rooms of the best Cisco technologies to make its customers touch the most advanced solutions in the world of collaboration and smartworking, book a visit to discover together the potential and fields of application.
News 29/05/2018 Artificial Intelligence: the era of Digital Transformation It is common thought of the main market analysts that Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents the main driver of change and innovation that the world of IT and society will experience in the next decade. The transversality of technologies, processes, markets and services impacted by the AI is the indicator that best provides the idea of the pervasiveness and potential of this movement. The trend of investments in AI, tripled in the three-year period 2013-2016 up to 40B $, confirms the moment of growth of the sector led by the Digital Giants (Google, Apple, Baidu) and more generally by those who made the Digital Tansformation the the driving force behind its business (see McKinsey Global Institute - Artificial Intelligence, The Next Digital Frontier). During the last 3 years in Lutech we have dealt with the theme of artificial intelligence aware of the context and in particular of: Variety and dynamism of the available technological resources and the interlocutors with which to collaborate (universities, research teams, SW Open Source, start-ups, incubators, Solutions Providers). Multiplicity of the "classic" IT sectors and Business Processes that can benefit from the introduction of a "cognitive" engine and transversality of the impacted commodity sectors. Peculiarity and uniqueness of the individual project initiatives, even when similar Use Houses are faced. Relative youth of the use of AI solutions at the Enterprise level and consequent need to sensitize the user to the correct contextualization, method of approach and the definition of the expectations of a project in this field We responded to this complexity by creating a practice dedicated to artificial intelligence, guided by the belief that an open and "interdisciplinary" approach was the only one possible to grow and establish itself as a reference player in the market. Development and enhancement of knowledge: our AI practice aims to develop and enhance resources and knowledge through collaboration with research institutes, market analysts, companies, Enterprise solution providers, and through a process monitoring the market and collaborating with the most promising start-ups on the European scene. The continuous growth of the work team - which today has about 20 resources - is achieved through the integration of research profiles, the training of new graduates with a background in Machine Learning / AI on Open Source technologies, participation in thematic university masters, the official training programs of the most successful international Solution Vendors on the AI scene. In the process of constructing offerings in the field of Cognitive and Big Data & Analytics, we completed the acquisition of a start-up in 2016, Teia Technologies, which contributed to enriching the company's experience and know-how in this sector. On the basis of this positive experience we are continuing to analyze and evaluate the growth opportunities that the market offers us. We act as promoters and disseminators of knowledge within AI through the organization of events aimed at top companies in the Italian market, such as the Cognitech event in collaboration with The Innovation Group, participation in national and international thematic events, such as the Campus Party Italia or the Young Leadership Forum in London, as sponsors, members of the jury or contributor. The opening to the exchange of know-how and collaboration in various forms with all the interlocutors of this sector is the basis on which today is based the creation of value and knowledge of our AI group. Value producers: the AI world requires a new design approach and a re-examination of the role of providing consulting services and System Integration to customers. We have created a "cross-cutting" AI practice not only with respect to the markets but also with respect to the Business Platforms (Customer Engagement, Cyber Security, etc.) on which it operates in order to make its contribution to all the guidelines that bring value to the customer. In the process of analysis and development of a solution we place ourselves towards the client as contributors to the creation of value. Value that is no longer based on a "standard" platform to be customized but arises from the intersection of different skills and the - often unique - design of an application strongly linked and conditioned to the quality and quantity of the data on which it works. The value of the solutions we offer to our customers comes primarily from the internal comparison with our company, with those of the market who are familiar with the dynamics, regulations, processes and constraints. In collaboration with our Industry Leaders, we have developed an offer portfolio dedicated to the various markets, defining for each of them a set of specific Use Houses, supported by a broad ecosystem of technological solutions, and on the basis of which we compare ourselves with the customer in the initial stages of the start of the collaboration. To this portfolio we support our technical skills, our Technological Assets and the skills of System Integrator to simplify and make effective the introduction of new solutions. Areas of intervention, from Big Data to Machine Learning: we have understood the potential of "big data" architectures capable of handling large amounts of unstructured data and in binary formats, architectures that can represent the ideal support for various machine algorithms and techniques. learning, so-called data-cruncher. These algorithms need a huge and varied database to be able to train, work better and provide precise answers that are really useful to the end user. This is the first consequence of the birth and specialization of very strong figures like Big Data Architect and Data Scientist, which through a close and structured collaboration with other professionals, are able to innovate applications and systems in which AI becomes the protagonist, sometimes improving the final use of solutions. In light of these considerations, Lutech has focused investments both on people and on partnerships with the leading suppliers of the market and we have already seen the first results including, first of all, the passion and dedication that the teams turn into concrete works and products of value for customers. The partners and the technologies with which Lutech works are the result of a continuous research and evaluation of how much the dynamic market of AI makes available. Our collaboration ranges from the best known solution providers and vendors (eg Google) to emerging solutions in which we see innovation and potential for growth. This last category includes, for example, the American start-up Loop AI Labs, which through a proprietary deep-learning algorithm has made Unsupervised Learning on unstructured texts, its cutting edge, minimizing human intervention in the configuration activities. To all this are added the stimuli and ideas coming from the open source world which represents an important resource for comparison and a continuous drive towards innovation. Our solutions and success cases: we have faced the opportunities presented on the market by focusing the activities on areas of strategic value identified together with customers and Lutech market and technology experts. Among the most important assets born from this process we can mention solutions based on Natural Language Processing, such as the various versions of virtual assistants. From the development of solutions based on Neural Networks, different assets have originated, focusing on analysis and classification of texts and images for various purposes. Lutech solutions were of interest to various clients in the media, telco, banking / insurance sectors, consumer electronics that have seen valuable results for the improvement of the quality of internal processes management and towards consumers. . Efforts have also gone in the direction of evolving pre-existing business assets (eg proprietary Threat Management System) integrating advanced derivative analysis functionalities into them from artificial intelligence algorithms. The next steps: the evolution of knowledge, research and improvement of Lutech solutions will be at the center of the next activities, with the aim of confirming Lutech as an ideal partner to support customers in the process of adopting the AI. Rocco Corridoni - Head of Customer Engagement and Cognitive Business Platforms Vincenzo Russo
News 29/05/2018 Lutech Best System Integrator @ ICA2017 Commitment, cooperation and passion: these are the distinctive features of Lutech Group and its great team. This mix allowed Lutech to be acknowledged as Best System Integrator at Italian Channel Awards 2017. The #ICA2017 awards ceremony was held this past January 30th, at Spazio Mil in Sesto San Giovanni, during the la Gala event promoted by Channel City. This event hosted and awarded the best operators of the ICT market. Thanks to your support, Lutech was selected in the top 5 short list of the Italian Channel Awards 2017, and it was recognized as Best System Integrator for the second year in a raw. This is an important outcome for Lutech, after a year of renovation and growth. We can start a new year with an even more positive attitude, to face new ambitious and tangible goals. Thank you for your support!