After the acceleration and excitement of last month we are now firmly in gear and keeping the pedal own, with the occasional personal distraction.

  • A wedding!!

  • We met #theArmy

  • Mitre ATT&CK news

  • Syra Marshall (CTO) Diversity & Inclusion blog post

  • Things we’ve enjoyed reading

Our most important* news this month is of course that I was married to the wonderful Louise! It was a fabulous sunny Saturday and a wonderful day all round. Pictures attached. Who doesn’t love a wedding!? (* I choose the news)

Since June into July Elemendar has:

Won into the Digital Catapult Machine Intelligence Garage Program which gives us access to expertise, serious computing power and £100,000 worth of GCP credits. That’s a hefty chunk of bits and bytes which we will be using to the full.

Exhibited with the NCSC Accelerator at the Three Counties Defence and Security Expo near Malvern.

This was an interesting expo. Men wearing red trousers, drones, surveillance, combat gear and lots of talk of defensive envelopes and such (thick cardboard?). Among other interesting introductions we met with a senior Airbus and NATO person who explained that NATO’s remit now specifies that they need to have command of Air, Sea, Land and Cyber and as such they want to talk with us.

Working on up to Mitre ATT&CK. It’s no longer original to say that Tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) are the new Indicators of compromise (IOCs), with frameworks like Mitre ATT&CK creating a standardised language. But even then, any analyst who has tried to use it knows that techniques take a huge amount of work to model compared to observables. Now that Elemendar’s AI analyst is steadily getting better at reading IOCs, we are moving on to experimenting with automatic extraction and classification to ATT&CK from text. We  look forward to sharing this base functionality with the community later in the summer.

Beyond ML models and MITRE ATT&CK, our CTO and Co-founder Syra Marshall cares about diversity in tech (it’s good for everyone!). She has been working with Codebar to make things better on that front and wrote about it.

Things we have enjoyed reading this month:

1. We love this story about the French Military looking to hire Sci fi writers to predict future threats. We seem to be way ahead of “Minority Report” now.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/19/france_turns_to_scifi_to_feel_out_future_threats/

2. Don’t look away but the fines for GDPR are getting bigger and more frequent. This is a sobering read on who gets the cash and how much and might make you think about how using our AI to analyse your CTI might save your bacon.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/10/gdpr-fines-ba-british-airways-marriott-data-watchdog

3. Lastly for the deep thinkers out there please enjoy this article from the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group on “Deep Learning Without Wasteful Labelling”. This actually hurts my brain.
https://oatml.cs.ox.ac.uk/blog/2019/06/24/batchbald.html

Thanks for reading! Please get in touch if you’d like to learn more about our work.

Until next month

-Tristan