Ronin Analytics and Google Ideas Team Up to Help Companies Understand Their Digital Health and Evaluate Cyber Security

New York, NY (PRWEB) November 01, 2013

Ronin Analytics, LLC Chief Executive Officer and President recently participated in the yearly summit hosted by Google Ideas, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Gen Next Foundation. Held in New York City, the summit focused on how conflict is being transformed by connected technologies. Robert Stasio and Mark D. Young were invited to lead a Digital Health Clinic to demonstrate basic digital device vulnerabilities and recommend techniques to improve the digital health of summit participants.

Through a series of panels, presentations, and working groups the Conflict in a Connected World summit exposed current online threats, described future trends, and focused attention on the tools and approaches designed to empower people in the face of conflict or repression. Speakers included Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, Google Ideas Director, Jared Cohen, and Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventative Action Director, Paul B. Stares. Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Dean, Admiral James Stavridis, Crowdstrike Chief Technology Officer Dmitri Alperovitch, and the Chief Executive officer of Mandiant were a few of the panel participants.

The Ronin Analytics Digital Health Clinic was the one of eight custom-designed "sandbox" experiences for summit participants. Other sandbox experiences included a history of digital conflict, a description of subtle censorship practiced by repressive governments, and data visualizations that have come out of the Syrian conflict. The Digital Health Clinic was extremely popular and most summit participants were surprised by their level of vulnerability. "I had no idea how risky it is to not update my operating system," said one participant from an international media organization. "I learned more from talking to Ronin professionals for 15 minutes, than I learned as a government cyber security employee for ten years," said another attendee from Canada. Ronin Analytics leadership met with almost all summit participants and provided more detailed individual assessments for more than 50 summit attendees.

Some attendees visited the Ronin Analytics Digital Health Clinic to learn how to increase their cyber security when using publicly wireless hotspots. The Ronin team discussed personal practices and low-cost commercially available technical solutions.

Mark D. Young, Ronin Analytics President and General Counsel, and Tom Anderson, Computer Science and Engineering professor at the University of Washington led discussions in a working group focused on security, privacy, and access on the Internet. Various privacy technologies were described, but most of the working group focused on the use of uProxy -- a browser extension that allows trusted friends to create a proxy for one another, enabling a safer, more secure connection to the Internet.

"Ronin Analytics was very pleased to partner with Google Ideas on the Conflict in a Connected World summit," said Ronin President and General Counsel, Mark D. Young. "Technology is an inextricable element of all human interaction, including conflict. This summit showed all of us the importance of access to information, the need to protect those who are vulnerable in cyberspace, and the opportunities that exist to express our humanity in the information age."

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