Daily Tech Digest - March 08, 2025


Quote for the day:

“In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.” -- Jane Smiley


Synthetic identity blends real and fake data to enable fraud, demanding new protections

Manufactured synthetic identities merge and blend real identity details from different stolen identities. A real ID number might be paired with a fake name or address and linked to a deepfaked image that lines up with the hacked identity data. Manipulated synthetic identities are real identities that alter an existing identity document. The widespread shift toward digital identity verification and authentication processes, as illustrated by the EUDI Wallet scheme, brings new risks: “the transition to digital identity opens up new areas of attack – precisely because AI-supported fraud scams are likely to become increasingly sophisticated in the future.” ... “The rate of development of generative AI presents a problem to not just ensuring a person is who they say they are, but also to content platforms who need to be sure that the content added by a user is genuine,” says the paper. “Given the potential risks and challenges in detecting generative AI, Yoti’s strategy emphasises early detection at the source, addressing both direct and indirect attack vectors.” While presentation attacks (PAD) are a “relatively mature and well understood issue across the verification space,” well defended by effective liveness detection, more recently popularized injection attacks attempt to bypass liveness detection by hacking directly into a hardware device or virtual camera.


When to choose a bare-metal cloud

Bare-metal cloud services, by contrast, provide users with exclusive access to the underlying physical server hardware: no hypervisor, no virtual machines, no additional abstraction. This purity means full access to raw compute power, such as CPU, GPU, and memory resources, without virtualization’s added latency or restrictions. In essence, bare-metal clouds bridge the gap between the flexibility of cloud computing and the robust performance of dedicated on-premises servers. ... Certain applications can benefit from hardware architectures beyond the standard x86 processors, such as Arm’s or IBM’s Z mainframe architecture. Bare-metal clouds allow users to access these nonstandard architectures for testing or running workloads designed explicitly for them—another area where traditional virtual environments fall short. ... Government, finance, healthcare, and other regulated industries may need dedicated servers to meet regulatory or compliance mandates. Bare-metal clouds provide the necessary isolation while maintaining the flexibility of cloud deployment. ... Using bare-metal hardware often offers little room for provisioning beyond what’s physically available; no additional memory or hardware expansions can be made dynamically. 


Is Gen Z to Blame? Why Cybersecurity Feels Harder for IT Pros

Gen Z’s trust in social media is another cultural difference to be aware of. They’re not only listening to and watching a cohort of self-made influencers, but they’re also following their advice — some of which isn’t sound. Young adults glean a lot of information from social media sites and this raises a few concerns for employers. Young workers have a propensity to believe in what they learn from social media, making them susceptible to scams such as online fraud and get-rich-quick schemes. ... A younger workforce brings fresh pairs of eyes and new ideas to the table. They’re also looking for employers who reflect their preferences, including ones with familiar technologies. Chief information security officers (CISOs) are often dealing with legacy infrastructure and outdated solutions as a primary barrier preventing them from addressing cybersecurity obstacles — and hindering them from meeting Gen Z’s needs. Another challenge is that Gen Z newcomers have shorter work histories and may lack critical in-office and work-from-home experience to recognize phishing, job recruitment, social engineering and deepfake scams. Gen Z is disclosing higher rates of phishing victimization than any other generation, according to National Cyber Security Alliance.


APM Tools and High-Availability Clusters: A Powerful Combination for Network Resiliency

APM tools are well-positioned as a means of feeding better data into the platforms enterprises use to monitor and manage IT infrastructure. Data provided by APM provides a more precise understanding of system health, enabling IT management to establish more precise parameters for making decisions with the confidence of good, timely data. High availability clusters are either hardware (SAN-based clusters) or software (SANless clusters) that support seamless failover of services to backup resources in the event of an incident. ... The combination of APM and HA makes it easier for enterprises to improve network resiliency by supporting and injecting better decision making and the use of automation to enable seamless failover, predictive analytics, self-healing, and other capabilities consistent with maximizing network performance, uptime, and operational resilience. When used in a multi-cloud environment, services can failover to the organization's secondary cloud provider, which is a major advantage when an outage affects a cloud services provider. ... As some enterprises evolve toward autonomous IT, data provided by APM provides a more precise understanding of system health, enabling IT management to establish more precise parameters for making decisions with confidence. 


Why Enterprise Architecture Is Having A Moment

One can think of enterprise architecture as the description and design of the complex web of technologies that supports a particular set of business capabilities. I say “description” because most companies don’t initially have an enterprise architect. Instead, they let their technology landscape grow organically. ... Think about everything an organization would need to do to move from its current state to one that reflected “modern standards.” Describing and inventorying the current state would naturally be part of that. But more important would be defining those standards. In today’s world, such standards would include prioritizing cloud technology, adopting a service-oriented architecture for software built in-house, working with open APIs, and so forth. Enterprise architects are in the business of both defining the technology standards for the business as well as governing the adoption of new and emerging technology in conformity with those standards. ... But the definition of standards does not take place in a vacuum. Instead, this work is guided by the strategic aims of the organization. These aims, in turn, can be viewed through the lens of business capabilities. Specifically, the business must determine what capabilities it will need to realize its strategy in the future. 


Bridging Europe's Cybersecurity Divide Through Political Will

The debate over cybersecurity regulation has been contentious in recent years, with strong positions on all sides. Europe has introduced multiple pieces of regulation, which has led to growing complaints about overlapping requirements and duplications. Which regulations apply to my company, among all existing ones? Which frameworks should I use to improve security and then demonstrate compliance? Which authorities should I report incidents to? Is there a standardized approach to managing and monitoring third parties? ... There is a broad consensus that cybersecurity regulatory requirements should be improved in Europe and beyond. We need to build an effective and efficient legislative framework for both functional and political reasons. On one hand, resources are limited and have to be allocated efficiently to meaningful security measures. On the other hand, frustration with redundant or unclear requirements risks undermining the achievements achieved so far, empowering those who oppose regulation entirely. ... While these operations require time and resources, the main obstacle is not technology. The real challenge lies in negotiating and agreeing on what an efficient system looks like in terms of governance and minimum standards to follow. 


What is risk management? Quantifying and mitigating uncertainty

Risk management is the process of identifying, analyzing, and mitigating uncertainties and threats that can harm your company or organization. No business venture or organizational action can completely avoid risk, of course, and working too hard to do so would mean foregoing potentially lucrative opportunities and strategies. ... IT leaders in particular must be able to integrate risk management philosophies and techniques into their planning, as IT infrastructure and spending can represent within the company an intense combination of risk (of cyberattacks, downtime, or botched rollouts, for instance) and benefits realized as increased capabilities or efficiencies. Some companies, particularly those in heavily regulated industries, such as banks and hospitals, centralize risk in a single department under a top-level chief risk officer (CRO) or similar executive role. A CRO might find themselves with responsibilities that overlap or conflict with CSOs, CISOs, and CIOs, and in some orgs without a clearly defined risk leader, ambitious infosec or infosecurity execs might try to take on that role for themselves. In any case, IT leaders need to understand and apply risk management in the areas under their purview.


Why Using Multiple AIs Is Trending Now

“Companies are building sophisticated AI stacks that treat general-purpose LLMs as foundational utilities while deploying specialized AI copilots and agents for coding, design, analytics, and industry-specific tasks. This fragmentation exposes the hubris of incumbent AI companies marketing themselves as complete solutions,” Moy adds. ... “Multimodality may sound like a remedy for generative AI’s shortcomings in multifaceted processes, but this, too, is more effective in the context of purpose-specific models,” says Maxime Vermeir. “Multimodality doesn’t imply an AI multitool that can excel in any area, but rather an AI model that can draw insights from various forms of ‘rich’ data beyond just text, such as images or audio. Still, this can be narrowed for businesses’ benefit, such as accurately recognizing images included in specific document types to further increase the autonomy of a purpose-built AI tool. While having multiple generative AI tools may sound more cumbersome than a single catch-all solution, the difference in ROI is undeniable,” Vermeir adds. ... “Using the different language models in the same tool has multiple reasons, the main ones being that every model has its strengths and weaknesses and therefore different types of queries to ChatGPT may be handled better or worse depending on the model. ... ” Feinberg adds.


8 obstacles women still face when seeking a leadership role in IT

When women are subjected to undermining stereotypes, have few female role models, are spoken over, or treated as if their contribution isn’t welcome, imposter syndrome is difficult to avoid. “When a woman looks at a job, she’s only going to apply if she meets 90% of the criteria,” agrees Debby Briggs, CISO at NetScout. ... Being seen as an outsider also costs women opportunities, since leaders tend to promote people they know. All the women I spoke to told me they survive this by building their own network. ... “A mentor can provide guidance, and a sponsor is someone who actively opens doors for you.” “This is a must-have,” says Briggs, who adds that she collects mentors. Anytime she finds someone she admires or who has a skill she lacks, she reaches out. “Your mentors don’t have to be women,” she says. ... Women say they feel invisible. “If I am at a tech event standing next to a man and another man walks up to us, more than 50% of the time he will address the man,” says Briggs. This invisibility happens in small interactions and large ones. The website for tech companies is often filled with the faces of white men. The speakers at tech events are all male. How do you scale this obstacle? “If someone invites me to an event, I look at who is on the panel. If it’s all white men, I tell them they don’t have a diverse enough perspective and choose not to go,” says Briggs.


How To Handle "Urgent Request" in Scrum

The first step the Product Owner needs to take is to assess whether the request aligns with the current Sprint Goal. However, based on my experience, most 'urgent requests' are unrelated to the Sprint Goal. They often come from individuals who are detached from the Scrum team's way of working. In many cases, those people are not even aware of what a 'Sprint Goal' is. If the request does not align with the Sprint Goal, I use a tool called the Financial Impact vs. Reputation Impact Matrix. As a Product Owner, I want the impact or potential damage to the company to be visualized in two dimensions so that I do not make decisions based on a single factor. The main purpose of this tool is to quantify the urgency of those "urgent requests." As a Product Owner, we do not want our team to work based on opinions or, even worse, political power; we want them to work based on facts or data. Many Scrum teams order their Product Backlog based on value, and they use potential revenue as the value attribute. Unlike potential revenue, which is expressed in positive terms, financial impact and reputation impact are negative. If the impact is not negative, as a Product Owner, I would not consider the request as urgent. Instead, it can wait and be stored in the Product Backlog for further discussion. 

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