Service Overview & History #
On Monday, we had an intro to the ExecCorp company with a tour of the office and meeting the team. We were given a rundown of the company services as well as the history of how the company started and the events leading up to now.
The sales team told us that they have had a recent surge in sales inquiries as their major competitor has recently suffered a cyber breach. This demonstrated one of the differences between company trust in Australia vs Japan. In Australia, it seems that people are more likely to stay with a company after a breach, but in Japan, after a breach people are looking for an alternative who will take their security considerations seriously.
It was interesting to learn that ExecCorp was adopting AI tech since back in 2020, when the current idea of what artificial intelligence is was still very fresh. If I had to guess, I’d say that that they implemented a modern version of convolutional neural networks, which have been implemented since the 1980’s and has grown in effectiveness with the increase in compute power & algorithm design. That’s just a punt. These days there’s multiple ways to do image (and facial) recognition. (we later learned that they use an AWS API)
We closed out the day by comparing professional photographing cultures between Australia & Japan. Our view was that photography is so accessible in Australia, and professionals are too expensive to be justifiable for most family events, so people save it for major occasions & professional settings (corporate portfolios, conferences, etc). In Japan, there are photography services that exist to capture certain life events, making the pricing more reasonable and more accessible (in contrast to what we have back in Oz).
Technical Details #
On Tuesday, the team ran us through more technical details of their system. It was interesting to learn that there are a lot of similarities between ExecCorp’s company security and what we’d see in Australia, such as:
- SSL & TLS website encryption
- Leave No Cache to prevent cache grabbing
- PrintScreen & SaveAs blocking to prevent theft
- Japan Institute for Promotion of Digital Economy and Community (JIPDEC) security certifications (this is something super interesting that I didn’t know existed, a good read if you’re interested in cyber policy)
- Assessments and monitoring from a 3rd party security company (SOC & SIEM)
A lot of the things that have been implemented here are what the Australian government recommends (you can read about Australian standards here)
Learning about these security mechanisms subverted my expectations of security in Japan. ExecCorp seemed to be a very progressive company in terms of their company culture, and I think that that has flowed down into the technologies they use & security mechanisms they apply. Mr Suzuki, the companies director, has expressed his desire to take the company to the international market and he understands the need for adapting to evolving technologies, which might be a reason that the companies security has evolved the way that it has.
