350-201 test prep - Performing CyberOps Using Core Security Technologies (CBRCOR) Updated: 2023

Technology for Impact was a 5-year partnership between Mercy Corps and Cisco, centered around the shared goal of using technology to deliver aid and development assistance faster, better and to more people. Cisco generously supported seven specific technology initiatives with $8.5 million in funding, nearly $3.4 million in product and technical expertise, and an additional $3 million for tech-based COVID response. Cisco employees have also supported Mercy Corps with nearly $875,000 in employee giving.

This partnership has helped extend the Technology for Development (T4D) team’s influence across Mercy Corps teams, integrating tech solutions into all of our program priority areas, and centering technology and innovation as an organizational commitment.

Building a reputation for digital peacebuilding

One of the exciting developments we’ve seen over the course of our partnership is the cross-pollination between programs and focus areas. For example, as Mercy Corps learned more about how to plan for, develop, and implement digital and informational tools for community engagement, natural linkages have emerged with our governance and peacebuilding sectors. The digital ecosystem analysis that has been core to our Digital Communities initiative can also be used to understand how social media is being weaponized in ways that lead to physical conflict and violence, and what can be done to address that.

We’re now applying a digital lens to programming across our peacebuilding work both at the strategic and tactical levels. This shines through in our partnership with AIfluence, a Kenya-based company offering Africa’s first AI-powered influencer marketing program. By engaging micro-influencers– real people with established audiences who trust their messages and information– Mercy Corps harnessed the power of social media to spread messages of peace and trust in democracy during the August 2022 elections in Kenya. This locally-led, community-based approach results in greater impact than messages coming from the government itself, helping to depolarize online discourse and set the stage for more peaceful elections.

In Iraq, our peacebuilding program team began to account for an understanding of online mis- and disinformation. Social media in Iraq, like everywhere else, can amplify and deepen intergroup tensions, enable the spread of hate speech (which further marginalizes communities), and breed echo chambers. Mercy Corps worked with a group of 81 young people on a project called Iraqi Youth Against Disinformation (IYAD), in which they chose syllabus to analyze based on Mercy Corps’ Digital Peacebuilding framework and developed responses designed to reject extremism and increase tolerance. The entire project was designed, developed and implemented by young people, and 67% of program participants (70% male, 64% female) reported that the initiatives were effective at addressing mis- and disinformation in their communities.

Transforming operations with upgraded equipment

Prior to the partnership, an IT audit revealed that one-third of Mercy Corps’ offices had “unacceptable” connectivity, impeding on our team members’ ability to carry out operations in a timely manner. Ad hoc networking systems, often sourced in-country and without centralized administration, meant reduced functionality with team members struggling to obtain files, send emails, or participate in calls. Cisco generously provided $3.4 million in Meraki hardware equipment and licenses, which have been installed in 188 offices in 34 countries. Now, just 6% of Mercy Corps offices have unacceptable connectivity levels, largely due to the lack of network infrastructure and internet provision in more remote locations and IT members at Mercy Corps headquarters can now block malware from a central location.

Then in July 2021, Mercy Corps and Cisco worked together to establish networking equipment in Indonesia — a country that has faced numerous natural disasters — so that it would be accessible in a time of crisis. When Mt. Semeru erupted in December of that year, our response teams were able to establish an emergency response center and provide hygiene, cooking, and COVID protection supplies. A year later when the earthquake hit, the prepositioned equipment was easily transportable to support the response teams in Cianjur. Office equipment upgrades and prepositioned equipment have improved bandwidth for our global teams, freeing our time and resources to focus on delivering aid quickly and more efficiently.

Testing, learning and building a new era of humanitarian aid

Testing, prototyping and piloting are standard steps to take in developing and implementing any kind of technology. Failure and lessons learned are normal parts of the process. The humanitarian context presents unique challenges given the remote and complex environments   
and the ethical dilemmas of applying unproven ideas with vulnerable communities– innovations are not a panacea for the challenges facing our sector. Instead, we believe that technology’s transformative impact is unlocked when program teams layer it with existing programs, taking into account the specific contextual needs and opportunities.

Together with PESITHO, T4D piloted a tech-driven solution to reimagine how families cook in Uganda’s Bidi Bidi refugee camp. For vulnerable communities without electricity, an act as simple as cooking dinner can be hazardous. Fumes from burning wood, coal or kerosene in traditional stoves or open fires can lead to stroke, lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, while also polluting the environment.

The solar stoves we financed through a pay-as-you-cook model also has two USB ports and two rechargeable lamps, enabling families to meet cooking needs and also charge phones and study or work after dark. Some participants started generating additional income by offering phone charging capabilities to others. The innovative model addresses issues of poverty by financing the cookstoves through a cell-phone based, pay-per-use approach, lowering the barriers to entry. Mercy Corps and PESITHO are now working to Improve and scale the program to make solar cooking accessible to more people in Uganda.

By co-designing technology trials with team members who are experts in the unique contexts of the countries where we work, we were able to ensure that pilots led to pragmatic solutions rooted in communities’ particular needs and challenges. In the process, we’ve nurtured a culture of innovation at Mercy Corps, helping tie pilots to larger programs in order to have greater reach. We have learned that innovation goes beyond what type of technology to use and where — it is just as much about the enabling environment. For us, that meant investing the time and effort necessary to build capacity around technology and create a willingness to try new ways of working.  
 

More information about Jabber

Multiple Phone Lines

If you have multiple telephone lines, you can manage them in Jabber for Windows or macOS. Contact the Technology Help Desk for assistance setting up additional telephone lines in Jabber.

Note: the Jabber smartphone apps do not support mulltiple telephone lines. 

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 Jabber Troubleshooting

If you run in to issues using Jabber, try quitting the application and re-launching it. If your issues persist, please contact the Technology Help Desk for assistance.

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Jabber Client Updates

If there is an update to the Jabber client software, you may be see a message when you sign in to Jabber: "There is a new version of Jabber. Please upgrade."  If you see this, please select the option to install the update, and follow the prompts to complete the software update.

If you want to confirm that your client is up to date, you can check the client version:

Windows: Open the Cisco Jabber client. Click on the gear icon, then click Help and Check for updates. You will either see a message that your client software is up-to-date, or that there is an update. Follow the prompts to complete the software update. 

macOS: Open the Cisco Jabber client. Click Jabber, then click Check for Updates... You will either see a message that your client software is up-to-date, or that there is an update. Follow the prompts to complete the software update. 

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Additional information from Cisco

Getting Started with Cisco Jabber

Getting around the Cisco Jabber App -- Click on the top entry to see the documentation for the latest version of the Jabber client.

Note: Google Workspace is SCU's primary collaboration suite, so some of the services listed in the Cisco documentation (such as Chat, Presence, and Calendar Integration) have been turned off in the SCU environment.

Cisco is more tightly integrating its network- and application-intelligence tools in an effort to help customers quickly diagnose and remediate performance problems.

An upgrade to Cisco's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platform melds the vendor’s AppDynamics application observability capabilities and ThousandEyes network intelligence with a bi-directional, OpenTelemetry-based integration package. (Read more about how to shop for network observability tools)

The goal with DEM is to get business, infrastructure, networking, security operations, and DevSecOps teams working together more effectively to find the root cause of a problem and quickly address the issue, said Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group. 

“The networking side of the house only typically sees networking as a packet, and the apps team only sees a TCP flow from an application. But with DEM, ThousandEyes and AppDynamics, we have enabled that information to be shared with both those teams, and customers can now see how the network impacts that application and vice-versa,” Pereira said.

Network and application teams have integrated visibility that they never had before, he said. “Now, for example, the application team can look at their own tools and contextualize application metrics with ThousandEyes network data to map exactly how everything impacts a particular app they may be monitoring in real-time.”

DEM does this by using OpenTelemetry, a standards-based framework of tools, APIs, and SDKs used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data to analyze software performance and behavior. OpenTelemetry is being developed under the Cloud Native Foundation by contributors from AWS, Azure, Cisco, F5, Google Cloud, and VMware among others.  

On Monday, Cisco unveiled an AI-fueled component to its cloud security initiative a year ago. The service is to safeguard against potential security breaches advances in fake video, audio, and text presentations powered by AI when more people are working from home. Company executives caution OpenAI’s ChatGPT will make phishing attempts in particular harder to detect.

“Security is the game of minimizing risk, not reducing it to nothing,” Robbins said in a roundtable interview with several reporters at the company’s San Francisco office Monday afternoon. “Reduce the time it takes to investigate an attack.”

At the same time, Robbins said Cisco is contemplating hiring a vice president to head its responsible AI operation, and beefing up at a time while Microsoft Corp. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Amazon.com Inc. are trimming AI ethics teams.

Cisco’s product announcement kicked off the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, where AI’s promise and threat is a major storyline.

Fears of deceptive content, aided in great part by AI, has corporations and individuals predicting an explosion in AI-related cyber-attacks over the next six months to a year.

Several, including Robbins, point to the firing of the editor-in-chief of Die Aktuelle, a German magazine that published a fake AI interview with former Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher, who has not been seen in public since he suffered a brain injury in a skiing accident in December 2013.

“Imagine the classic Nigerian scam that is targeted to people and not based on one broad misplaced chain letter,” says Steve Wilson, chief product officer of Contrast Security. “ChatGPT has made sophisticated AI available to every script kiddie.”

Indeed, the threat of AI — the industry’s latest craze — mirrors those of other breakthrough technologies that burst upon the scene: They are not only adopted by businesses and consumers but by cybercriminals, according to Raju Chekuri, CEO of NeteRich.

“What to me is most concerning is we rush to the technology with the most buzz, but we don’t understand the basics,” Erkang Zheng, CEO of JupiterOne, said in an interview. “It’s like cutting corners when building a house.”

This is where vendors like Cisco and others come into play. They see an opportunity to analyst data flows and quickly sift through internet traffic data to identify patterns that could lead to security breaches. “Security is a data game,” Jeetu Patel, head of Cisco’s security and collaboration units, said in a briefing Monday.