Category: News

Microsoft overtakes Apple as the most valuable company. Broadcom stirs up a hornets nest when it dumps VMWare partners. The U.S. government demands that hospitals improve cybersecurity if they want government funding and Google is not only axing people, it’s dropping services as well. 

These and more top tech stories on this edition of Hashtag Trending

I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and Tech News Day in the US.

Microsoft has dethroned Apple to become the world’s most valuable public company. 

This shift in market value comes as Apple’s share price dipped by a mere one percent. 

The news marks a notable moment in the ongoing rivalry between these tech giants. 

Microsoft has always been a highly valued company and some of us remember when Microsoft had to lend Apple money so it wouldn’t go out of business and leave Microsoft as a monopoly. 

But the resurgence of Apple under Steve Jobs brought it to the status of the world’s most valuable company.  Now, the fact that Microsoft can catch up and even surpass it is a tribute to Microsoft’s leadership team. 

Sources include: MacRumors 

Hawaii has taken a big step in its clean energy journey by replacing its last coal plant with a massive battery system.  

The Kapolei Energy Storage project marks a significant shift from fossil-fueled power to renewable energy. This project, developed by Plus Power, features 158 Tesla Megapacks and boasts an impressive 185 megawatts of discharge capacity, matching the power output of the old coal plant. 

The battery’s rapid response time and ability to store and release energy make it a crucial component in stabilizing the grid. It’s not just about replacing the coal plant’s energy production; this battery system enables more renewable energy to be added to the grid, reducing the curtailment of renewables by an estimated 69 per cent for the first five years. 

The story of how this works is fascinating from a tech standpoint and you may want to check out the full article to geek out on this one. There’s a link on the show notes.

The Kapolei project isn’t the biggest battery of its kind, but it does mark one of the most sophisticated systems and maintains Hawaii’s leadership example of how to maintain a reliable grid while transitioning to clean energy sources, a model that could be replicated nationwide.

Sources include: Canary Media 

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has led to a significant shake-up in the virtualization giant’s partner programs, leaving many in the dark. The $61 billion deal, followed by plans to reorganize VMware into several Broadcom divisions, has particularly impacted Cloud Services Providers (CSPs). 

Broadcom announced the termination of the VMware Cloud Services Provider program by April 30, 2024. This move affects smaller cloud operators who sell VMware-based cloud services. The abrupt change has sparked industry chatter that Broadcom is focusing on larger, more profitable customers, potentially leaving smaller users and providers out in the cold. The decision has left many smaller providers and their customers facing uncertainty, with fears of needing to migrate to new providers on short notice.

My colleague Paul Barker is covering this in Channel Daily News if you want some more perspective on this. 

Sources include: Channel Daily News  and The Register

The U.S. government is set to introduce new cybersecurity standards for hospitals, linking federal funding to compliance with these standards. This move, expected to be proposed by the White House in the coming weeks, aims to address the increasing threat of ransomware attacks on healthcare facilities. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are reportedly drafting rules that will require hospitals to implement basic network defenses to qualify for federal funding. These rules are a response to the growing number of ransomware attacks on hospitals, which not only compromise sensitive patient data but also employ aggressive extortion tactics. In 2023 alone, at least 46 U.S. hospital corporations were hit by ransomware, with patient data often being stolen. While the intention is to improve hospital security, some experts, like Emsisoft Threat Analyst Brett Callow, caution that cutting off funding might not be the most effective approach and could potentially worsen the situation.

Given the recent hits that Canadian hospitals and health care services have taken, it might behoove the Canadian governments to take a look at what’s happening here as well. 

Sources include: The Register 

Google has announced significant layoffs across multiple teams, including its Voice Assistant unit, hardware team, and central engineering team. The hardware team, responsible for products like Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit, is notably affected, with the augmented reality (AR) team facing the majority of layoffs. 

Google’s spokesperson gave the usual blah blah about enhanced efficiency and better aligning resources but these changes raise some questions. 

We assume that some of this realignment is towards artificial intelligence (AI) technology, with Google planning to integrate generative AI into its virtual assistant. But Google has also slashed the team and some of the services for the Google smart speaker. 

I saw the list of services they cut, supposedly because no one is using them. I had no idea that the smart speaker had features like waking up to music and others. Which might explain why nobody is using them. 

And the severe layoffs in Augmented Reality is a bit of a surprise.  Many had thought that Google and others would be gearing up to compete with Apple’s new A/R offering.

Google is the other G word that works in mysterious ways. 

Sources include: Reuters 

Hashtag Trending goes to air 5 days a week with a special weekend interview show we call “the Weekend Edition.”

You can get us anywhere you get audio podcasts and there is a copy of the show notes at itworldcanada.com/podcasts 

I’m your host, Jim Love. Have a Fantastic Friday!

The post Hashtag Trending; Microsoft surpasses Apple as most valuable company; Broadcom dumps VMWare partners; Google layoffs first appeared on IT World Canada.

The Canadian government’s cyber authority has started using a U.S. company’s security ratings platform to rank cyber threats to the country’s critical infrastructure.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security said Thursday it has contracted to use SecurityScorecard’s security ratings platform. Under an arrangement with the company, the scoring will help the Cyber Centre educate critical infrastructure owner-operators on the risks facing their organizations, assisting them in remediating and measuring cybersecurity risks.

It gives the Cyber Centre a simple way to instantly measure and quantify the cyber risk of any critical infrastructure entity with an “A” through “F”  rating system, SecurityScorecard said in a news release, using continuously monitored threat intelligence data. This scoring is only for critical infrastructure operators and won’t be made public.

Nayeli Sosa, a Cyber Centre spokesperson, said though it can already pinpoint vulnerabilities and help protect critical infrastructure systems before the threats happen — for example through advisories, alerts, cyber flashes, and pre-ransomware notification — “this kind of tool bolsters our existing services and our toolset.”

Terms of the arrangement weren’t announced.

“We have comprehensive data on government systems, but our visibility into emerging threats to critical infrastructure has been limited historically – and that’s precisely where the greatest risks lie,” Cyber Centre head Sami Khoury said in a statement.

“According to the World Economic Forum, critical infrastructure remains the prime target for threat actors. Our partnership with SecurityScorecard provides us with authoritative and trusted data on critical infrastructure and insight to manage such risks at scale. We are committed to increasing the confidence of Canadians in the critical systems they rely on daily, offering support to critical infrastructure networks and other systems of importance to Canada. This will help the Cyber Centre ensure we can provide tailored support to critical infrastructure owner-operators vital to the security of Canada.”

The partnership “serves as a model for other governments to collaborate with the private sector to achieve real-time visibility into the cyber threats facing critical infrastructure,” said Sachin Bansal, SecurityScorecard’s chief business officer.

The Cyber Centre is the government’s authority for advising federal departments as well as critical infrastructure providers on cybersecurity issues.

Based in New York, Security Scorecard has modules that can check public datasets for evidence of high-risk or insecure ports in an organization’s IT network, analyze how quickly an organization installs security updates, and more.

The post Canadian Cyber Centre now ranks threats with SecurityScorecard solution first appeared on IT World Canada.

IT administrators with Ivanti’s  Connect Secure/Pulse Secure VPNs and Policy Secure gateways are urged to install mitigations immediately.

The mitigations are to temporarily deal with two vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-46805, an authentication bypass and CVE-2024-21887, a command injection) that impact all supported versions of these products.

If they are chained together, “exploitation does not require authentication and enables a threat actor to craft malicious requests and execute arbitrary commands on the system,” the company said.

“It is critical that you immediately take action to ensure you are fully protected,” the company said in an advisory.

Patches will be released in a staggered schedule, with the first version targeted to be available to customers the week of Jan. 22, with the final version targeted to be available the week of Feb. 19. Until then, the mitigations will have to do.

The vulnerabilities were discovered by researchers at Volexity, who in December detected suspicious lateral movement on the network of one of its network security monitoring service customers. An attacker was placing webshells on the customer’s internal and external-facing web servers. Investigating further, Veloxity found that logs on the customer’s Ivanti Connect Secure VPN had been wiped and logging had been disabled. It then discovered two different zero-day exploits which were being chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution.

“When combined, these two vulnerabilities make it trivial for attackers to run commands on the system,” Volexity says in its report. “In this particular incident, the attacker leveraged these exploits to steal configuration data, modify existing files, download remote files, and reverse tunnel from the … VPN appliance.”

Among other things, the attacker modified legitimate Connect Secure components and made changes to the system to evade the the VPN’s Integrity Checker Tool.

“As organizations continue to improve and harden their defense, attackers are continually looking for ways to bypass them,” the Volexity report says. “Internet-accessible systems, especially critical devices like VPN appliances and firewalls, have once again become a favorite target of attackers. These systems often sit on critical parts of the network, cannot run traditional security software, and typically sit at the perfect place for an attacker to operate.

“Organizations need to make sure they have a strategy in place to be able to monitor activity from these devices and quickly respond if something unexpected occurs.”

The post Warning issued to admins of Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure gateways first appeared on IT World Canada.

Mandiant says the loss of control of its X/Twitter account last week was likely caused by a brute force password attack on one employee’s account by a cryptocurrency scammer.

Normally, two-factor authentication (2FA)would have mitigated the attack, the Google-owned division said in a tweet on Wednesday, “but due to some team transitions and a change in X’s 2FA policy, we were not adequately protected. We’ve made changes to our process to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

The tweet doesn’t explain the change in X’s 2FA policy, or how it contributed to the hack.

There is no evidence the attacker used malware or compromised any Mandiant or Google Cloud systems in the moves that led to account takeover, Mandiant also said in a separate blog.

In a brute force attack, a threat actor submits stolen usernames and passwords, passphrases or a list of suspected passwords to a login page until the correct one is found.

The threat actor who got access used it to post links to a cryptocurrency drainer phishing page. Drainers are malicious scripts and smart contracts that actors can leverage to siphon funds and/or digital assets, such as non-fungible tokens, from victims’ cryptocurrency wallets after they are tricked into approving transactions.

Along with the explanatory tweet, Mandiant published a detailed blog on a drainer it calls Clinksink which was temporarily leveraged by the attacker. “Numerous actors have conducted campaigns since December 2023 that leverage the Clinksink drainer to steal funds and tokens from Solana (SOL) cryptocurrency users,” it says.

The identified campaigns included at least 35 affiliate IDs that are associated with a common drainer-as-a-service (DaaS) which uses Clinksink. “The operator(s) of this DaaS provide the drainer scripts to affiliates in exchange for a percentage of the stolen funds, typically around 20 per cent. We estimate the total value of assets stolen by affiliates in these recent campaigns to be at least US$900,000.”

It’s not uncommon for attackers to use social media and chat applications, including X and Discord, to distribute cryptocurrency-themed phishing pages that entice victims to interact with the Clinksink drainer, the report says.

The incident is another example of why organizations have to ensure their social media accounts are locked down to prevent crooks from taking them over and leveraging their access for profit or mischief.

This week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission briefly lost control of its X account. In a tweet, X said the SEC didn’t have two-factor authentication protection enabled on the account. It said the cause was “an unidentified individual obtaining control over a phone number associated with the [SEC] account through a third party.”

The post Mandiant admits hacked X account didn’t have 2FA first appeared on IT World Canada.

It’s here – OpenAI has launched the GPT store and I have more questions than answers at this point. AI and disinformation make it to the top of the World Economic Forum’s list of global risks, ahead of climate change and researchers publish a paper on how they have linked brain cells to a computer chip. 

These and more top tech stories on the “gosh Toto we’re not in Kansas anymore” edition of Hashtag Trending

I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and Tech News Day in the US.

OpenAI has unveiled the GPT Store, a new platform for discovering and sharing custom versions of ChatGPT. Since the announcement of GPTs two months ago, over three million custom ChatGPTs have been created. 

The GPT Store is accessible to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users, and features a variety of GPTs developed by both partners and the community. 

Users can browse through categories like DALL·E, writing, research, programming, education, and lifestyle. 

The store will regularly highlight what it says are new and impactful GPTs, with initial offerings including things like a personalized trail recommender from AllTrails, a research tool from Consensus, and a coding tutor from Khan Academy and something called Books for finding – books. 

It appears that anyone can save and submit a GPT but with three million already out there, it’s going to be interesting to see how they keep this organized. 

They have topics and a top 5 in each topic area, which make you curious as to how these were prioritized.

There is a mention of usage policies and GPT brand guidelines as well as a review system for safety measures. The review system includes both human and automated review. As well, users are able to report GPTs.

There is a comment about not using your conversations with GPTs to improve their models but it’s put there in a way that makes you wonder if only Team and Enterprise customers get this treatment or if Plus members need to pay the extra five bucks a month to get that protection. 

And once again, it’s going to be quite interesting to see how they manage the sheer volume.

OpenAI also plans to launch a revenue program for GPT builders based on user engagement. 

Sources include: OpenAI Blog

The platform formerly known as Twitter, now referred to as “X,” recently suspended several prominent journalists and leftist figures without explanation. Among those affected were Ken Klippenstein of The Intercept, Steven Monacelli of Texas Observer, podcaster Rob Rousseau, and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News. These suspensions also extended to left-leaning accounts like the TrueAnon podcast and @zei_squirrel, a media-criticizing cartoon squirrel. 

The affected users received no communication from X regarding the reason for their suspension, leading to speculation about political motivations behind these actions. 

Notably, the suspensions were briefly lifted hours after initial reporting, following public outcry from figures like former British MP George Galloway. 

X owner Elon Musk later attributed the bans to a routine spam filter sweep, but this explanation has not been universally accepted. This incident follows previous instances where X has banned reporters critical of Musk.

And curiously, this happened the day after Musk was featured on Canadian national news criticizing the Canadian Prime Minister for his treatment of a right wing journalist. 

Sources include: Vice News

Fidelity National Financial, a major player in real estate services, has confirmed a significant data breach. In November, hackers accessed FNF systems, deploying malware and exfiltrating data on 1.3 million customers. The breach caused a week-long outage, severely disrupting the company’s operations and its subsidiaries, leaving customers unable to pay their mortgages. The specific nature of the stolen customer data hasn’t been disclosed, but FNF is offering credit monitoring and identity theft services to the affected individuals, indicating the sensitive nature of the breach.

The ransomware gang ALPHV, also known as BlackCat, claimed responsibility for the attack. They are known for using dark web leak sites to extort victims. The group removed FNF from its site, which sometimes indicates that a ransom has been paid. This incident is part of a recent wave of cyberattacks targeting the mortgage and loan industry. FNF’s response included notifying state attorneys general and regulators, and they have contained the cyberattack since November 26.

Sources include: TechCrunch

The World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2024” has identified artificial intelligence’s role in election disruption as the top global risk for the year. This concern surpasses climate change, war, and economic instability. The report, a collaboration between the WEF, Marsh McLennan, and Zurich Insurance Group, highlights AI-driven misinformation and disinformation as key factors contributing to societal polarization. Over 1,400 global risk experts, policymakers, and industry leaders contributed to this assessment.

Carolina Klint from Marsh McLennan emphasized the unprecedented influence AI models could have on voter behaviour. 

But the report also forecasts a shift in risk focus over the next decade, with extreme weather conditions and significant changes in the political world order becoming more prominent. The WEF calls for global cooperation and the establishment of guardrails against emerging disruptive risks. The report’s release coincides with a critical election year globally, including major polls in the U.S., India, Russia, South Africa, and Mexico. The Eurasia Group’s separate 2024 global risks report also underscores the significance of the U.S. election and the challenges posed by “ungoverned AI.”

Sources include: CNBC

Researchers from Indiana University of Bloomington, the University of Florida, and the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine have made a groundbreaking advancement in AI hardware with the development of “Brainoware,” a human brain on a chip. This innovation, detailed in their paper “Brain Organoid Computing for Artificial Intelligence,” represents a significant leap in biocomputing.

I’ll note that the paper has not been peer reviewed yet, but I went with the story because there have been some experiments establishing the workability of the idea. 

The team cultivated specialized stem cells into neuron clusters, or organoids, each less than a nanometer wide. These organoids, connected to a circuit board via electrodes, allow machine-learning algorithms to interpret their responses. 

In a practical test, Brainoware reports achieving a 78 per cent accuracy in a speech recognition task, identifying speakers based on the organoid’s neural activity in response to electrical stimulation. While less accurate than traditional AI systems and requiring different resources like a CO2 incubator, Brainoware’s energy efficiency is part of the holy grail. One estimate is that the human brain uses about 20 watts. When we compare that to the reported 8 million watts used by current AI hardware, you can see why researchers say that “organoid intelligence” (OI) is the future of computing, powered by living human brain cells. 

And once you get past the creepy factor, the other reason to pursue this may also be to study neurological conditions and cognitive aspects, and offer a new dimension to AI computations and learning.

The author of one article on this says, “while Elon Musk is installing chips inside human brains…researchers are planning to plant brains inside of chips.”  And there we are, back to the creepy factor again.

Sources include: Analytics India Magazine

Hashtag Trending goes to air 5 days a week with a special weekend interview show we call “the Weekend Edition.”

You can get us anywhere you get audio podcasts and there is a copy of the show notes at itworldcanada.com/podcasts 

I’m your host, Jim Love. Have a Thrilling Thursday!

The post Hashtag Trending Jan.11- OpenAI’s GPT store; AI and disinformation top WEF’s list of global risks; Research links brain cells to computer chip first appeared on IT World Canada.

The AI PC democratizes access to artificial intelligence in ways that are unprecedented and kind of exciting. Intel’s chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger asserted last night during a talk at CES 2024.

The company said last month during the launch of its “AI Everywhere” strategy that “The AI PC represents the largest transformation of the PC experience in 20 years, since Intel Centrino untethered laptops to connect to Wi-Fi from anywhere.”

The AI PC is pretty much what it sounds like: A personal computer with the processing power to run high-end AI workloads locally instead of in the cloud.

To further sell the idea, Gelsinger pointed to what he calls the three laws of edge computing: economics, physics and land.

The law of economics explains how it is cheaper to run AI workloads on your personal device, instead of having to rent cloud servers.

The law of physics enables your workload to be more responsive, since you will not have to roundtrip the data to the cloud and then back.

And finally, the law of land allows you to have more control over where your data is. You can store your data locally if you are not comfortable with storing it in the cloud and do not want to deal with the complications of using a hyperscaler.

These three laws would drive more of these AI use cases to the devices that we use across the edge, Gelsinger said.

The company said last month that its latest Intel Core Ultra mobile processor family, featuring its first client on-chip AI accelerator — the neural processing unit, or NPU — would usher in the age of the AI PC and bring AI to more than 230 designs from laptop and PC makers worldwide. 

According to the Boston Consulting Group, AI PCs will comprise 80 per cent of the PC market in 2024. That raises questions about the viability of hybrid cloud options. 

Gelsinger explained that the creation of foundation models requires “big huge cloud environments”, but that most of us are going to be just using those models. That seems to be a trend, where people are using, for instance, open source foundation models like Meta’s Llama 2 to run smaller models on their data for their applications, he added.

Nvidia was also featured at CES 2024 on Monday, touting the AI PC and announcing a number of AI-ready laptops. But Intel claims the AI PC, affirmed Gelsinger, adding “We’re the driving force behind it. But you know, we love it when people copy us.” 

Yesterday, Intel also announced that it is bringing the AI PC experience to the car, as part of its “AI Everywhere” strategy, launching automotive versions of its newest AI-enabled chips as well as with the acquisition, announced yesterday, of Silicon Mobility, a fabless silicon and software company that specializes in SoCs (system on chips) for intelligent electric vehicle (EV) energy management.

China-based Geely’s Zeekr brand will be the first original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to use Intel’s new family of SDV SoCs.

The post CES 2024: Why the AI PC? Intel’s Pat Gelsinger makes a case first appeared on IT World Canada.

Describing it as a “tectonic shift” for the networking industry, industry analyst Mauricio Sanchez has predicted that yesterday’s US$14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks by HPE will clearly extend the latter’s reach into distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack protection offerings, firewalls, cloud workload security, and distributed cloud networking markets.

Sanchez, senior director of enterprise security and networking research at Dell’Oro Group, wrote in an advisory released late last night that “Juniper has long been known as a premier service provider router company, and, more recently, as a darling in the enterprise networking space with the AI-powered MIST WLAN solutions.

“HPE has been in the networking industry even longer, going back to the 1980s, and most recently, a well-regarded enterprise networking player with Aruba campus solutions. However, both firms have a wider portfolio that spans the network security and SASE/SD-WAN technology landscape.”

He said key strengths of the deal are the fact that Juniper brings a number of network security technologies that HPE lacks, and that its reputation in the cloud and comms service provider space will help HPE’s overall credibility.

The major weakness is that “Juniper’s network security market share is small compared to the big three of Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks.”

According to a release issued by the two companies, the acquisition – an all-cash transaction of US$40 per share – is “expected to double HPE’s networking business, creating a new networking leader with a comprehensive portfolio that presents customers and partners with a compelling new choice to drive business value.

“The explosion of AI and hybrid cloud-driven business is accelerating demand for secure, unified technology solutions that connect, protect, and analyze companies’ data from edge to cloud. These trends, and AI specifically, will continue to be the most disruptive workloads for companies, and HPE has been aligning its portfolio to capitalize on these substantial IT trends with networking as a critical connective component.”

Upon completion of the sale, which is expected to close either the end of this year or early 2025, Juniper chief executive officer (CEO) Rami Rahim will lead the combined HPE networking business and report to HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri.

Neri, in the release, said the acquisition represents “an important inflection point in the industry and will change the dynamics in the networking market and provide customers and partners with a new alternative that meets their toughest demands.

“This transaction will strengthen HPE’s position at the nexus of accelerating macro-AI trends, expand our total addressable market, and drive further innovation for customers as we help bridge the AI-native and cloud-native worlds, while also generating significant value for shareholders.”

During a press briefing this morning, Rahim said, “those who know Juniper know that we were born in the era of the internet, and we build the products that help the internet scale to what it is today. Fast forward to today, the biggest inflection since the dawn of the internet itself is artificial intelligence, it is AI.

“And the thing that I am most excited about with this combination is that we will be able to bring the depth and the breadth of the portfolios necessary to capture the full market opportunity that AI presents in front of us. I think that combination is going to be incredibly powerful to solving our customers most compelling AI needs in the market.”

Neri added that the combination of the two companies, “will not only will make us more relevant, it’s going to disrupt the networking market, and it’s going to deliver significant value to our combined shareholders.”

The post Impact of HPE’s US$14 billion buy of Juniper huge: Dell’Oro Group first appeared on IT World Canada.

Sixty per cent of organizations say a single approach to governance of data and AI assets is “very important”, a new report by MIT Technology Review Insights revealed. This indicates struggles with a siloed data architecture as well as increasing and thornier security and compliance needs.

The report gathered insights from a survey of 600 technology leaders as well as in-depth interviews from industry heavyweights at AT&T, Databricks, Dell Technologies, Walmart and others.

Arsalan Tavakoli, co-founder and senior vice president of field engineering, Databricks, said, “CIOs are realizing that there’s a real cost to maintaining the different monolithic stacks they previously acquired in the cloud. It’s not just the systems but the glue between them and getting them all to work together, which is painful and duplicative. There’s now a strong push to simplify.”

This unified approach is especially critical as organizations kickstart their AI journey to transform their operations, explained John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies.

“A modernized data infrastructure is essential to scale AI across the enterprise. AI is not just a new consumer of our existing data systems. It will need a set of technologies that are optimized to feed data into its models, exchange that data with other models, and curate what the models produce. All of those are new workloads.”

The report notes that many technology leaders who were interviewed see a unified approach as a long-term aim, and that, in the meantime, they are employing federative approaches to ensure maximum commonality of language and rules across different models. However, the need for consistent, secure, and scalable governance remains a unifying strategic thread.

The report also speaks to the importance of creating industry data ecosystems to bolster AI-led growth. 

Sixty-four per cent of survey respondents say the ability to share live data across platforms is “very important,” while an additional 31 per cent say it is “somewhat important.”

Technology teams at insurers and retailers, for example, aim to ingest partner data to support real-time pricing and product offer decisions in online marketplaces, while manufacturers see data sharing as an important capability for continuous supply chain optimization.

“The growing realization of the power of data and the increasing vertical and horizontal integration of the value chain elevate data sharing to a much more strategic level,” said Tavakoli. “After all, sharing is the cornerstone of synergy creation.” CIOs, he added, are asking how they can share data without imposing restrictions on what technology they are going to use.

For example, 63 per cent of respondents across verticals believe that the ability to leverage multiple cloud providers is at least somewhat important. Seventy per cent feel the same about open source standards and technology.

Tavakoli advised, “You don’t know what technologies are going to be created. Don’t put your data in walled gardens; use open formats, open standards, and open specifications to preserve strategic flexibility.” The growing availability and popularity of open-source LLMs, for instance, presents new opportunities.

The report concluded that generative AI adoption, which is booming across enterprises of all sizes and industries, will not be a one-size-fits-all approach, but in every case, “value creation will depend on access to data and AI permeating the enterprise’s ecosystem and AI being embedded into its products and services.” 

The key to AI growth will also be to get data into the hands of every employee, affirmed Tavakoli.

“Every C-level executive we talk to in every industry understands that data and AI must underpin everything the organization does, and reach every individual in the organization. That means getting data into the hands of all employees—from the most technical to the least— so all of them can play an active role in driving insights to improve operations, developing new products, and serving audiences better.” 

The post Leaders looking for a unified, built-in governance of data and AI: MIT report first appeared on IT World Canada.

Beware of so-called security researchers emailing firms that have been victimized by ransomware and claiming to be able to recover their stolen data.

That’s the warning from researchers at Arctic Wolf, who have found at least two examples of what are being described as follow-on extortion attacks.

The fake researcher offers to hack into the server infrastructure of the original ransomware group to either recover or delete exfiltrated data. This is a scam whose goal is to get the victim organization to pay bitcoin for supposed assistance.

The report details two cases researchers investigated:

— in early October 2023, an entity describing themselves as “Ethical Side Group (ESG)” contacted a Royal ransomware victim by email and claimed to have obtained access to victim data originally exfiltrated by the crooks. Royal had told the victim firm it had deleted the stolen data.

“ESG” offered to hack into the ransomware gang’s server infrastructure and permanently delete the organization’s stolen data for a fee.

— in early November 2023, an entity describing themselves as “xanonymoux” contacted an Akira ransomware encryption victim and claimed to have obtained access to a server hosting victim data exfiltrated by the crooks. This despite the fact that Akira claimed it didn’t exfiltrate any data and had only encrypted the victim’s IT systems.

“Xanonymoux” claimed to have compromised Akira’s server infrastructure and offered to help either in deleting the victim’s allegedly stolen data or providing the victim firm with access to Akira’s server.

“Based on the common elements identified between the cases documented here, we conclude with moderate confidence that a common threat actor has attempted to extort organizations who were previously victims of Royal and Akira ransomware attacks with follow-on efforts,” say the researchers. “However, it is still unclear whether the follow-on extortion cases were sanctioned by the initial ransomware groups, or whether the threat actor acted alone to garner additional funds from the victim organizations.

“This research highlights the risks of relying on criminal extortion enterprises to delete exfiltrated data, even after payment.”

The post Warning: A fake ‘security researcher’ is trying to trick ransomware victims first appeared on IT World Canada.

Vulnerabilities found in internet-connected factory torque wrenches.

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday January 10th, 2024. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com and TechNewsday.com in the U.S.

Anything that connects to an IT network can have software vulnerabilities. The latest example: WiFi connected pneumatic torque wrenches used by car manufacturers. According to researchers at Nozomi Networks, the vulnerabilities they found in a Bosch Rexroth wrench could let a hacker plant ransomware that would spread across a network. Or the holes could let an attacker alter a wrench’s tightening controls and affect the safety of products. A manufacturer using compromised devices could be extorted by a hacker, and sued by customers. The vulnerabilities are in the device’s Linux-based operating system. The wrench connects to a wireless network so it can be remotely programmed. The lesson: Makers of any internet-connected device have to continuously scrutinize their code for vulnerabilities.

Microsoft SQL database servers in the U.S., Europe and Latin America are being targeted by a threat actor. According to researchers at Securonix, the gang either sells access to compromised servers or plugs them with a strain of ransomware called Mimic. This particular gang has been ramming their way into servers through brute force attacks, which are preventable. Then they leverage a command to create a Windows shell, a command that is supposed to be disabled by default. Among the lessons from this attack: Don’t expose critical servers to the internet — and if you have to, protect them with security like a virtual private network. And IT should always be watching for the creation of new local users on servers and other endpoints.

An American judge has sentenced a Nigerian man to 10 years and one month in prison and ordered him to pay almost US$1.5 million in restitution for conspiring to launder money pulled from internet fraud schemes. The 33-year-old man worked directly with the Nigeria-based leader of an international criminal organization to defraud individuals and businesses across the U.S. He was convicted last August by a federal jury. Three co-accused pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering.

A threat actor is using hacked YouTube accounts to plant videos of cracked software like games. According to Fortinet, victims who fall for the scam are tricked into downloading malware. The tactic isn’t new. The lessons: Listeners should know by now to secure their social media accounts with multifactor authentication. And employees should be warned that promises of free versions of commercial software by unknown providers only leads to misery.

Finally, yesterday was Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday, when the company issued security updates for its products. January’s patches include fixes for Windows Kerberos and the Hyper-V hypervisor, as well as holes in Microsoft Office, SQL Server and SharePoint Server.

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The post Cyber Security Today, Jan. 10, 2024 – Vulnerabilities found in internet-connected factory torque wrenches first appeared on IT World Canada.