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#MillenniumLive with John Felker on Life & Leadership

Alex Sobol, Millennium’s Co-founder, is joined for a lively discussion with this week’s Transformational CISO keynote speaker, John Felker. In this episode, John discusses his mentors while growing up in a small town outside of Rochester, New York, his thirty years in the U.S. Coast Guard, and the country’s top domestic & foreign threats. In one of their conversations, Alex and John talk about the serious threat of disinformation that is present today. With the rise of social media, disinformation has been able to spread more widely and rapidly than ever before. Both John & Alex discuss the nuanced challenges that disinformation poses, and why mitigating this risk should be a priority for today’s leaders.

Listen to the podcast episode on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, or SoundCloud.

About John Felker

John Felker is the Former Assistant Director for Integrated Operations, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for the Department of Homeland Security which monitors cyber threat data and works with corporations to improve the strengths of the existing digital infrastructure. He brought focus to integrated operations across the Agency that extended to Regional CISA elements, intelligence, operational planning, and mission execution with emphasis on risk mitigation and response efforts.

Before his work at the DHS, Felker was the Director of Cyber and Intelligence Strategy at HP Enterprise Services. During his career of 30 years at the U.S Coast Guard, he served as Deputy Commander of Coast Guard Cyber Command and commanded the US Coast Guard Cryptologic Group, which provides a “maritime cryptologic perspective within the Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) community, helping to achieve national intelligence requirements and enhances Maritime Domain Awareness for operational commanders as they plan and execute Coast Guard missions” according to the USCG. Additionally, he commanded USCGC CAPE UPRIGHT and USCGC RED CEDAR. His military awards include the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, and the Meritorious Service Medal.

Felker graduated from Ithaca College in 1978 with a bachelor of science and later on completed his Master of Arts in Public Administration at Syracuse University in 1994. He also serves as a Senior Fellow at the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security at Auburn University. He is currently on the Board of Governors of the Army-Navy Country Club, the board of directors of the Operation Renewed Hope Foundation, and the board of advisors for the Military Cyber Professionals Association and the Cyber Security Forum Initiative.

Back to School Spending Will Reach Record Highs in 2021

Back to School spending will reach record highs in 2021

As kids head back into the classroom for the 2021 school year, back-to-school eCommerce sales are expected to grow with many parents increasing their average anticipated spend.

According to the National Retail Federation, total expected spending for back-to-school will reach $37.1B, up $3.2B from 2020, setting a new record. Similarly, back-to-college spending will increase from $67.7B (2020) to $71B this year, also reaching a record high.

Slickdeals teamed up with OnePoll to survey 2,000 Americans on their back-to-school spending habits. Find out what categories back-to-school shoppers are spending the most on this year and when they plan on shopping.

About Slickdeals

Where savvy shoppers discover and share great deals.

Slickdeals helps you put your brand in front of the right people and activate shoppers at every step in the shopping journey with their solutions. They use first-party data to strategically target native and display advertising to your preferred audience. They help bussinesses expand their reach through advertising solutions such as paid media, content creation, extension & loyalty program, targeting & data insights. With over 12 million monthly shoppers, Slickdeals can make a big impact on your business, go here for more information.

Digital Transformation Leader, James Rinaldi, Keynotes Our September Assembly!

On September 22nd, The Millennium Alliance Digital Enterprise CIO & Data Transformation Assembly kicks off with a keynote address from James Rinaldi, Chief Information Technology Advisor, and former CIO at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After 14 years serving as JPL’s CIO, he currently advises the organization on the future strategy for IT vision. He is a strong believer that IT is imperative for true business alignment across all departments, and is a recognized leader in data & technology. Rinaldi is an 8-time winner of the CIO100 Awards, and his team at JPL has been recognized as a “Best Place to Work in IT” 7 years in a row.

In his keynote address, Rinaldi will discuss the future of IT, provide an introduction to JPL, and answer questions from our audience of C-Suite executives. Interested in learning from one of the most influential voices in technology? Go here to request an invitation to the virtual assembly!

About James Rinaldi

James Rinaldi is JPL’s Chief Information Technology Advisor to the Office of the Director. He was the JPL CIO until October 2019, where he stepped out after 14 years. His current role is to create a future IT vision and strategy for the Lab looking out to 2025 and beyond.

James is currently the Executive Director of Innovate@UCLA and an Avasant Senior Fellow and member of Avasant’s Fellows Executive Committee.

As CIO, James had direct management responsibility over JPL’s Information Technology Directorate. Works closely with JPL management, supporting end-users of the engineering, interplanetary network, and finance/business operations. James sat on the JPL Executive Council and various management councils. He developed the IT strategy, budgets and executed major IT contracts. He actively participated in NASA IT governance councils.

James has more than 30 years of experience with information systems in government and industry. Prior to joining JPL as CIO, James was Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration where he had overall responsibility for the planning, development, and delivery of information systems across the FDA. At FDA, James modernizes many areas of need, including systems to manage food imports for safety and security reasons. Prior to FDA, he was the Chief of Information Technology Services at the IRS and Chief of Business Systems Integration. While at the IRS, James helped develop the Free Tax Alliance e-Gov initiative as well as provide guidance and expertise on the IRS Modernization efforts. James spent nearly 16 years at the Marriott Corporation in Bethesda, MD, where his last position was senior vice president for information resources, operations, and services. James has a bachelor of arts in computer science from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. He has successfully completed executive and leadership development programs. James is an award recipient of the several CIO 100 and Federal 100 awards, as well as numerous industry awards. James has sat on several non-profit boards and industry advisory councils.

David Sable Asks, Is the Magic of Inspiration Making a Comeback?

As originally published by David Sable on Linkedin. Subscribe to the newsletter!

Are ideas digital or analog? What about inspiration?

I ask because I recently heard yet another “Digital First” presentation, and I was challenged to find any original idea at all in the very smart and fashionable deck shared with myself and the rest of the audience.

As I have written before, investors should run from marketing companies that speak in DIGIBABBLE (that is, Digital First), because until we humans become digital entities, our choices transcend technology.

And of course, there is the practical side to my argument. One of my frequent mantras is, “digital is everything, but not everything is digital,” meaning that digital technology is at the core of just about everything today, no matter if the final product presents itself as digital or otherwise.

Bottom line, most everything that likes to present itself as “tech” today is simply an application of tech, but in and of itself, has broken no new tech ground.

All of which leads me back to the notion of ideas and inspiration.

A recent article I read about Gen Z freeing the world from e-mail made me wonder who was going to save the world from Zoom and iMessage and more importantly, what did one have to do with the other? Isn’t it the use case that’s important? How you use the product or service? How you leverage it to build ideas and inspire people, as opposed to merely freeing the world from its use?

It reminds me of an assignment I had, years ago, from one of the top global consulting firms. The project entailed interviewing their most important partners, with the goal of helping them better understand their brand and how to leverage it for new business. I’ll never forget when one partner told me, “I am nothing without my computer—we are nothing without our tech.”

I was shocked—seriously. A firm known for its IP, bold thinking, game changing strategies and transformational ideas was reduced to a PC. That notion, needless to say, comprised a large portion of my report and presentation.

Let’s be clear and quiet the Knee Jerkers. Tech is an enabler. It always has been and always will be. A PC can help to accomplish a lot, but it isn’t going to make the difference in a company’s pursuit of clients or solutions—only people and ideas can, relationships and value-added thinking.

I’ve been particularly inspired over the past few weeks because both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos made it into space on their private spacecrafts. In fact, I watched Richard Branson’s flight, while I flew (earthbound) to a business meeting.

As I quietly cheered him on from my Delta seat, I felt transported back to my younger self…standing on my grade school rooftop playground in Manhattan, with friends crowded around me to listen to John Glenn’s liftoff on my little transistor radio (the height of technology back then).

I was already bit by the space bug, it never left me. Over the years, though, it’s been hard to sustain the awe and wonder of it all—the inspiration to look up and out, not just down and in.

Branson always looked up. His vision for Virgin was always huge and inspiring. My view is that people like him and Bezos and Musk don’t want to be remembered for a fashionable airline, a big store with quick delivery or for creating yet another fast car (electric or autonomous notwithstanding), which is why they’ve all jumped on the space bandwagon.

I know it’s easy to be cynical about it all. Billionaires competing over whose toy will get them to space first, quickest, furthest. But perhaps a more positive way of viewing it, as I choose to do, is that this renewed interest in space travel represents a potential renewal of our human desire to break the bounds of what limits us.

We are in trouble if all we have to inspire the next generation is TikTok, Instagram and the Kardashians. We need more. We need to look up and out.

Richard Branson said on his return:

“The whole thing it was just magical”

I’d like to think he was channeling the legendary author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the following:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

It’s time to get the magic back. To think about ideas and not just execution. To inspire and not just hype investment. To look up and out and not just down and in.

Because ideas are neither digital or analog—they’re magic.

What do you think?

#MillenniumLive on Healthcare’s Future: Building Back Better

#MillenniumLive is joined by healthcare analyst and content strategist, Jack O’Brien. Jack hosts the monthly HealthLeaders Finance Podcast interviewing C-suite level executives and industry leaders at leading hospitals and health systems across the country. In this episode, we discuss major shifts in the industry, population health, the major effects from the pandemic, and what a hybrid patient care delivery model looks like in the years ahead. He touches on how hospitals post-covid have to work on building morale back in their teams, as well as increasing their recruitment and retention rate as this year was tough on our healthcare heroes.

Listen to the podcast episode on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, or SoundCloud.

About Jack O’Brien

Jack is the Content Team Lead at HealthLeaders Magazine, which is based out of New York City. He’s been published in The Washington Examiner, The Altamont Enterprise and Albany County Post, New Hampshire Journal, The Williston Times, Red Alert Politics, The Legislative Gazette, The New Paltz Oracle, and The Little Rebellion. He is originally from Queensbury, New York, and graduated from the State University of New York at New Paltz.

#MillenniumLive on The Life and Leadership Series with Alex Sobol

This week on #MillenniumLive we’re going back to revisit some great conversations that Millennium’s Co-founder, Alex Sobol has had with our distinguished guests that have been on the Life & Leadership series thus far. More episodes with Alex and featured guests are coming soon, so be sure to subscribe to or follow our podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, or

Listen to the podcast episode on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, or SoundCloud.

About Alex Sobol

Alex Sobol is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner at The Millennium Alliance in New York City. In over a fourteen-year period, he has established a strong and reputable career-building, educational, and multimedia platform involving c-level audiences. He has extensive global business development and sales management experience working with growing technology-based start-ups while also having served cornerstone companies such as IBM, GE, HP, JPMC, Microsoft, Verizon, Itron, and Cisco. He is a leader in the industry with vast knowledge across a wide spectrum of enterprise and public sector technology businesses with a stellar track record for delivering immediate results. Due to his immense background, Alex has traveled and/or worked in more than 15 countries! He attended the University of Delaware and graduated in 2007 with a BA in Interpersonal Communication.

Using an Omnichannel Strategy to Drive Longterm Engagement and Increase Sales

Contributed by Slickdeals

Business Goals

Behind Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Walmart sees the bulk of its annual revenue from one of the biggest shopping events of the year: Back to School. Their goal for the 2020 Back to School event was to maintain profit margin and drive bottom line sales. They partnered with Slickdeals to increase exposure for their best offers and build awareness around the shopping event by highlighting them as the go-to brand for Back to School essentials.

Partner Profile

This retail giant has grown over the last 50 years into the largest retailer in the world. Built on the cornerstone of offering every day low prices, Walmart has been able to attract customers looking for a shopping experience created around the convenience of one-stop shopping. With 11,400 stores spanning across 26 countries, Walmart has excelled in building its brick and mortar presence as well as expanding its place in the world of e-commerce.

Read the full report here

About Slickdeals

Where savvy shoppers discover and share great deals.

Botnet Attacks on the Rise: Companies to Invest Heavily in API Security

Recently, companies are beginning to shift to the use of the cloud and expose functionality via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Cybercriminals have been taking this new exposed entry to their advantage as new technologies often lack the proper security.

With APIs becoming more commonly used in companies, cybercriminals have been using Botnets to carry out malicious attacks on them. CSO Mag describes a botnet as a collection of internet-connected devices that an attacker has compromised, they act as a force multiplier for individual attackers, cyber-criminal groups and nation-states looking to disrupt or break into their targets’ systems. Common in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks and can be used to easily send spam to the masses, steal credentials with ease, or by spying on people and organizations.

API bot attacks are, in particular, becoming a major issue for E-Commerce businesses. Since they are used to carry out the stealing of credentials and private information, this puts a big target on the backs of e-commerce businesses. Specifically, they are being hit by tactics such as price scraping, sneaker bots, grinch bots, and gift card stuffing. These tactics can be used to share pricing information with competitors, automate purchases, and find specific products online and purchase them. Research done by Imperva revealed that over 30% of traffic to e-commerce sites are bots, 18% of traffic to e-commerce sites comes from bad bots, with 24% of those bad bots being classified as sophisticated. With these attacks on the rise, it is ever important for companies, especially those in e-commerce to invest in bot and API security.

As of late, the situation is only getting worse. The Council to Secure the Digital Economy (CSDE) shared a report stating that a single botnet can include more than 30 million “zombie” endpoints and allow these cybercriminals to profit roughly six figures per month. This has a serious impact as these DDoS attacks threaten health and research facilities as well as government services around the world, with these attackers using the circumstances of the pandemic for their personal gain. Botnets have been used on social media platforms to spread disinformation about the pandemic to threaten the global dialogue surrounding it and using the demand for information to incorporate phishing scams. They have been also used to specifically target vendors of face masks and hand sanitizer as the pandemic caused an influx of customers making them a big target for botnet attacks.

A report by Radware states that APIs are the next big threat as they are used to process a variety of sensitive information such as payment information, user credentials, social security information, etc. making API security the most critical area for companies to invest in 2021. They also mention that 55% of organizations receive a DDoS attack on their APIs monthly yet only 24% of organizations have a dedicated solution for bot management. For API Security, F5 Labs recommends a few best practices to protect your APIs against hacking.

Do not store information in APIs that are not meant to be shared
Don’t expose more data than necessary
Encrypt traffic using TLS
Inventory and manage your APIs
Use a strong authentication and authorization solution

To protect yourself against botnet attacks in general, Panda Security recommends some tips on how to avoid them.

Keep your operating system up-to-date
Don’t open files from unknown or suspicious sources
Scan all downloads before running the downloaded files, or find different ways of transferring files
Don’t click suspicious links
Install an antivirus program

How Businesses Can Begin to Change the Conversation

Contributed by [24]7.ai

Over the years, we’ve spoken with countless businesses across multiple industries. And every time we strike up a conversation, we ask a lot of questions, because we’re constantly on the lookout for new ways we can use technology to improve the customer experience. During these conversations, however, we began to notice a troubling theme. While businesses were generally quite confident about the customer support they were delivering, they weren’t seeing the results they expected. Satisfaction levels were low, customers weren’t always embracing new services, and in some cases, the businesses were actually losing customers. We knew something was terribly wrong. So, we asked Dimensional Research to see if they could explain this growing trend, because we wanted to see if we could do something about it.

When Dimensional Research completed its study, the findings were telling. One of them, however, stood out like a flashing red light. Customers aren’t nearly as happy with the support they are getting as businesses think they are. And there’s a pretty big gap between the surveyed companies’ own perception of their customer service and what their customers think about it. Even worse, the study indicated that an alarming number of these companies were losing customers as a result of their poor support. We also uncovered another troubling truth. AI and virtual agents still lag far behind humans when it comes to providing a satisfying experience. When asked, almost all customers still preferred working with a live person.

Read the full report here

About [24]7.ai

Proven Results for Key CX Challenges

No matter what industry you’re in, the measure of success is in the numbers. [24]7.ai understands the challenges that are top of mind for customer-centric organizations—and they know how to deliver results. Their solutions and services are purpose-built to make an impact on the metrics that matter most: CSAT scores, revenue, and ROI. See what kind of measurable impact they can make for your business, and go here for more information.

Cybersecurity Leader, John Felker, Keynotes Our August Assembly!

On August 17th, The Millennium Alliance Transformational CISO Virtual Assembly kicks off with a keynote address from John Felker, Former Assistant Director for Integrated Operations, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security. Felker is a proven innovator in the cybersecurity space and is notably recognized for his work leading the Coast Guard strategic Cyber program. Most recently, Felker joined Parsons’ federal strategic advisory board where he provides strategic guidance in the key federal market growth areas of cyber and intelligence, space and geospatial solutions, engineered systems and missile defense, and C5ISR.

In his keynote address, Felker will share how CISOs can bring together information from cyber teams and the boardroom for successful business objectives. He will also provide an inside look into his career background, experiences, and what senior leaders should be thinking about as they enter the post-pandemic era. Interested in learning from one of the most influential voices in cybersecurity? Go here to request an invitation to the virtual assembly!