We Will be Surrounded by 500 Billion Connected Devices by 2030, Says Anter Virk of SubCom

Upcoming era is of technological advancements. From Machine learning to Artificial Intelligence, from Augmented Reality to Virtual Reality and many more such two words combination exists and can be seen growing at a very fast speed. Startup culture is also not left behind in this technology revolution. Penetration of technology has happened so far that, from 106 Unicorns in India, it is close to impossible to find a start-up which isn’t using technology in a direct or indirect way.

Businesses use technology for almost all types of work. Whether they are looking to generate leads, or to get new employees onboard, there is some type of technology involved. Still, it became a boon and curse at the same time due to its nature of being hard to use and vulnerability. This article is a small piece of conversation with Anter Virk, Co-founder of Subconscious Compute, or Subcom in short, about how small businesses may ensures cyber security.

How did you get the idea for the Subcom?  

The Idea of creating Subcom is older than the company itself. When I met Dilawer, he was working on new sort architecture of Artificial Intelligence (AI). To understand what the new concept was, you must understand the older one.  Artificial Intelligence is that we have built a lot of cognition into the models so that they can work for us. As they are trained on very bulky data, you need a ton of resources to run these models. For Example, if you have to look for a needle in haystack you have to scan every strand of haystack. That's how our AI is built.

Our core focus was to make a system that can scan the data to a larger extent, by putting in low level resources. The architecture we were working was for doing intelligence from the device system or edge. When we are working around edge, cyber security came into our consideration. Another reason for working in the cyber security was to save Internet of Things Devices (IOT devices) from attack. They are almost everywhere in different forms, shapes and sizes. IoT devices are vulnerable to hack because when we talk about laptops and mobile phones they have built in security systems while other devices lack that.

On an average, a normal person takes 200 days to identify your data breach. Can you compromise with someone's pacemaker for 200 days? No not at all. We are in a place where people are struggling to protect their laptops from hackers; imagine the situation when somebody hacks into a pulmonary support devices even for five minutes?  Therefore, we are trying to build SubCom for the security of endpoints.

How good is cyber security as a career option?

Regardless of what is going on, in the industry, like mass layoffs, cyber security is an exceptional career option. Cyber security is an industry in which we are still about 300 to 500 million people short. Therefore, even if the country makes 5 to 10 million cyber security experts, there will be enough vacancies. So, this is, I think the best things about security. The challenge is, there are no good platforms that have the ability, to educate people about cyber security. 

From AI’s point, we are looking at some 500 billion more devices by 2030. Talking about the current time, there are about a hundred billion devices. Thing to note here is that devices are responsible for creating data. When these billions of devices will work, they will create enormous amount of data. As the technology is expanding we are creating a lot of data. In fact, we have created ninety percent of the data in last three years. If we follow the same speed of creating data any amount of manual labour will be less to process and secure it. Therefore, not only cyber security but AI and Machine Learning are very good career options.

From a cyber security expert’s point of view, what measures do you think small businesses should take?

Cyber security is very simple. For small businesses, I would like to say that you don't really have to be luxury to and build a very elaborate defence. All you should do, till the time you have proper resources to spend, you have to rely on the ability of your service provider to secure your data. As far as cloud is concerned, it is responsible for cloud’s security. The good and the bad thing at the same time about cyber secure is that lot of it depends on the person themselves. Since bulk of the errors in the cyber security are human errors, like using frail passwords or the same password across twenty different services you must take care of them. Additional steps you can take as a small business owner is enabling a multi-factor authentication and take care of not leaving the device un- attended. If you don't do the basic things right, big security measure will not be able to help.

Apart from that, you have to be a bit specific about the type data you are storing on any place. Also, businesses should get over the mentality of thinking “I may not be get attacked because I am small”. Even small businesses are getting attacked day by day now. In fact, 60 percent of businesses go bankrupt when they are attacked. So you have to make sure that you follow good practices in terms of cyber security.

Is using cracked software bad for cyber security? If yes, Why?

It is always better to invest a few dollars in the right software rather than going to some sites and download that for free. If you are downloading a cracked version, it means someone has played around with its code. Also, there is no guarantee that the person who has did so, has not add some extra unnecessary line, to tamper the system resulting as data breach.  This is one of the best ways to get your own system hacked.

Again I am coming to a similar point where small business have this mindset of “I am too small and this will not happen to me; or if I am not been hacked so far I can never be”. We need to realize that security is not an additional expense but an investment. We would be, by 2025, having some seven connected devices per person on the planet. If so many devices are going to touch your life, you must be aware about securing yourself.

From the industry point of view, what would be the next change that we are going to see in the next 5-10 years?

I can see parameters are surely going to change. For example, Instead of building better passwords, I think password less systems will be more often and will make more sense too. Another such thing is Multi Factor Authentication. These systems will become real time and prevalent. Cryptography in its true sense will change or stop.  There are a number of reasons to change the system of passwords like they are very tricky pieces to manage and are easy to breach.  

Due to above reasons, either you will be going to get systems which are completely dependent on the two factor authentication, or it would move to another different authentication. Overall the hustle of remembering passwords will be reduces as the time flows. One more reason for it is supercomputers being so much easy to operate, which leads to easy breaking of passwords

There are numerous alternatives which will be used for letting you use the devices. Biometrics is one, Behavioural insight is another. Tomorrow I would know whether it is you or not you simple by following the pattern of your keystrokes.