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Meet Us, Hear Us, Play with Us at ShmooCon 2019

Category: Advanced Analytics / Cyber Security / Life At Novetta / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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An annual east coast hacker convention, ShmooCon creates a rather interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussions on critical infosec issues. We look forward to exchanging brilliant, brain-melting ideas with other security professionals and adding to Shmoo Group’s razor-sharp sense of sarcasm, cybersecurity, and threat hunting. At this year’s ShmooCon there may be less moose than ever, but there is definitely MORE Novetta! Hear from our experts in our two speaking sessions, swing by our booth to see a Novetta Cyber Analytics demo, play CTF, and check out open positions because we are...

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Surviving Advent of Code

Category: Advanced Analytics / Life At Novetta / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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Once again, my night’s sleep was interrupted by an insistent alarm. I sat up in a brief moment of panicked confusion and tried to make sense of what was going on. Had the Metadata Registry’s web server crashed again, requiring a midnight trip to the office? Was there an infant in the house in need of a night feed? It took a few more seconds before I reached clarity — I was up at this ungodly hour on a weekday intentionally, for Day 17 of Advent of Code. Created by Eric Wastl, Advent of Code is a series of programming...

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Deploying Machine Learning at the Edge

Category: Advanced Analytics / Big Data and Entity Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /

by Kevin Heald, Matt Teschke

From the team that presented AWS re:Invent 2018 session WPS304 “Rapid Prototyping for Today’s Mission”.   Problem It’s imperative for warfighters to have actionable, up-to-date knowledge about their adversaries. This requires having the ability to quickly process and analyze new data when and where it is discovered. The current procedure for gathering, processing, and analyzing data can take weeks or months due to logistics, transport, and data handling complications. Using the AWS Snowball Edge, this entire process can be automated, delivering insights from data collected in the field within minutes or hours.   AWS Snowball Edge The Snowball Edge is...

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Novetta has BIG PLANS for AWS re:Invent 2018

Category: Advanced Analytics / Big Data and Entity Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /

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Novetta is excited to return to one of the world’s largest tech conferences, AWS re:Invent! This year there are even more ways to engage with us in Las Vegas. For the first time, Novetta will have leaders on stage in two speaking sessions, we are returning to our suite at the Venetian to give customized demos, and we are sponsoring two Worldwide Public Sector (WWPS) events. As in all great partnerships, Novetta and AWS are better together.  Novetta’s advanced analytics technology is enhanced by AWS services and we are proud to offer our support, and contribute our expertise and innovation,...

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NLP Transfer Learning on SageMaker

Category: Advanced Analytics / Big Data and Entity Analytics / Data Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /

by Matt Teschke, Bernard Yuan

Novetta Machine Learning Center of Excellence effort to develop a deep learning model that predicts customer-relevant metadata tags for unstructured text.   BACKGROUND: ENRICHMENT OF UNSTRUCTURED TEXT DATA The rise of the internet has led to a faster flow of information, where news posted to a relatively obscure blog can be shared on social media and then reach national publications within hours. The volume is such that humans alone cannot filter out noise, identify important new information, and determine how messaging trends are changing over time. To address this challenge, Novetta Mission Analytics (NMA) helps customers analyze open source and...

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Cyber Self-Defense: Five Ways to Protect Yourself

Category: Advanced Analytics / Big Data and Entity Analytics / Data Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /

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  1. Be aware that you ARE a target. We hear it in Cyber Security circles pretty often; “I/we/my company doesn’t have anything Hackers want.” According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) for 2018, 76% of breaches were financially motivated. Attackers want your Personally Identifiable Information (PII) so they can assume your identity not only to steal your hard earned money from your bank accounts and Paypal account but also to apply for fraudulent credit cards. Cyber Criminals will even go as far as stealing a very young child’s identity to apply for credit and open up fraudulent accounts....

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Named Entity Recognition and Graph Visualization

Category: Advanced Analytics / Big Data and Entity Analytics / Data Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /

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PHASE I RECAP We are exploring the problem space of Named Entity Recognition (NER): processing unannotated text and extracting people, locations, and organizations. A previous post described our comparative performance evaluation of several open source and commercial NER libraries. Based upon this evaluation we determined that Amazon Comprehend (an AWS solution) performed robustly against test corpora, while the top open source solutions for the NER task were AllenNLP ELMo, Stanford NER Tagger, and NeuroNER. PURPOSE This blog post picks up where the previous post left off, building on evaluation results to explore a practical application of NER. TOOLS To facilitate this...

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Evaluating Solutions for Named Entity Recognition

Category: Advanced Analytics / Big Data and Entity Analytics / Data Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /

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BACKGROUND Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Extraction are interchangeable terms that refer to the task of classifying “named entities” into pre-defined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, etc.1 Let’s look at an example of how this actually works. Given a sample input: John went to the Bank of America in Washington DC An NER algorithm will read in this sentence and look to tag words it recognized as persons, organizations, locations, etc. The following represents the tagged version of the sentence: [John]PERSON went to the [Bank of America]ORGANIZATION in [Washington DC]LOCATION Such tagging is useful because...

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To gain insights into the state of the art of Named Entity Recognition (NER) solutions, Novetta conducted a quick-look study exploring the entity extraction performance of five open source solutions as well as AWS Comprehend.

Data Munging and Exploration

Category: Advanced Analytics Tag(s):  /  /  /  /

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Getting to know your data and forming sound hypotheses This second post in the Predictive Analytics series will cover data munging and exploration. For the steps that come before the data, see the first post – Predictive Analytics for Intelligence. Here I’ll suggest tools and techniques to consider when acquiring and exploring the data relevant to your analytical questions. For the most part I’ll assume that you have access to the data, and that there are features within it that are “interesting” (and I’ll define what I mean by that along the way). Data Forms One of the main failings...

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Blockheads and Blockchain: A View from Novetta

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The Cyberwire Event Coverage – Novetta Tech Talk: Blockchain and Bitcoin Bitcoin enthusiasts aside (and there are a lot of them out there, including not just the stereotypical individual techno-libertarians and black marketeers, but some significant financial services companies as well) should people see the underlying blockchain technology as one with significance for their lives? Or is the blockchain nothing more than a flashy hashtag soon to be overtaken by other fads? Peder Müller, Novetta’s Deputy Director of Analytics, thinks the blockchain is significant. He made the case Monday at the Jailbreak Brewing Company in Laurel, Maryland, to Jailbreak’s usual...

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