Showing posts with label workflow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label workflow. Show all posts

Daily Tech Digest - August 07, 2026


Quote for the day:

“When you connect to the silence within you, that is when you can make sense of the disturbance going on around you.” -- Stephen Richards

🎧 Listen to the audio debrief on YouTube

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Duration: 24 mins • Perfect for listening on the go.


Everything Banks Need to Know About RBI’s Cybersecurity, Technology Risk, Resilience & Assurance Framework, 2026

The Reserve Bank of India has introduced a comprehensive framework for commercial banks, effective July 2026, to manage cybersecurity, technology risks, and operational resilience. This unified directive replaces previous guidelines, bringing governance, incident response, business continuity, and audit requirements under a single regulatory umbrella. At its core, the mandate emphasizes strong board oversight. It requires banks to formalize technology strategies and ensure new technology aligns with broader business goals. A key shift is the elevated role of the Chief Information Security Officer, who must now report directly to executive leadership and present quarterly risk reviews to the board. The framework also outlines rigorous technical and operational standards. Banks must maintain complete inventories of information assets, secure their data lifecycles, and enforce strict access controls, including mandatory multifactor authentication for privileged accounts. Network defenses must be layered, and critical applications face stringent security testing. To ensure continuous vigilance, institutions are required to establish dedicated security operations centers, conduct regular vulnerability assessments, and run complete disaster recovery drills every six months. Furthermore, banks remain fully accountable for risks introduced by external vendors. If a cyber incident occurs, it must be reported to the regulator within six hours, ensuring swift communication and response.


How Leaders Can Make Decisions In A Synthetic Reality

In the next decade, a crucial skill for business leaders will be the ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is synthetic. Artificial intelligence has made it easier and cheaper to create convincing fake documents, voices, and videos, increasing the risk of deception in business. Because of this, leaders face the difficult task of balancing the need to make fast decisions with the necessity of thoroughly checking their information. Taking evidence at face value is no longer a safe option. Instead, leaders must build a habit of verifying information and asking for clear proof of its origins. Relying entirely on detection software is not enough, as these tools often make mistakes. Instead, organizations should naturally build verification into their daily work processes, tracking how information is created and changed over time. When making choices, leaders should weigh the cost of a delayed decision against the dangers of relying on false information. It is important to avoid rushing due to artificial pressure, which can easily cloud judgment and lead to mistakes. Ultimately, building a culture of healthy skepticism where people regularly ask for proof will help maintain trust and accuracy. By slowing down to confirm reality, leaders can confidently navigate this new environment.


How Secure Data Destruction Protects Businesses from Data Breaches

When companies replace old computers, servers, and phones, they often assume a quick deletion or standard formatting erases all sensitive information. In reality, these basic actions only remove the file pathways, leaving the actual data completely intact and easily recoverable by anyone with free software. Secure data destruction offers a permanent, verifiable solution to ensure that payroll files, customer records, and saved passwords do not leave your building when equipment is sold, recycled, or discarded. Instead of relying on simple deletion, proper secure destruction involves thorough overwriting, cryptographic erasing, or physically shredding the storage media so no working surface remains. Choosing the right method depends on whether the hardware still has value for reuse or if it has reached the end of its life. Implementing a strict data disposal process is also a vital regulatory requirement under laws like the UK GDPR. Mishandling old storage drives is a compliance failure that can lead to significant penalties. To protect your organization, you must maintain a clear disposal policy, track every device by its serial number, and obtain item-level certificates of destruction. By doing so, you create a clear audit trail and permanently eliminate a major risk of unauthorized data recovery.


The AI agent presents a new identity puzzle

As AI agents become more deeply integrated into modern IT infrastructure, they present a unique challenge that bridges the gap between traditional human and machine identities. To address this growing complexity, security platforms like Okta are treating AI agents as a distinct middle-ground category, assigning them their own unique identities. This crucial step prevents agents from gradually accumulating excessive privileges, which is a common security risk when a single agent is continuously repurposed for multiple distinct tasks. While implementing a simple kill switch might seem like an easy solution for rogue agents, doing so can trigger unintended disruptions across connected enterprise systems. Instead, organizations are encouraged to adopt a flexible identity fabric that links every agent's actions directly back to a human owner, ensuring full traceability and accountability at all times. This approach minimizes operational friction while maintaining robust security protocols. Real-world applications, such as those implemented at Greenwheels, highlight the importance of realistic oversight and a supportive, no-blame workplace culture where employees feel comfortable reporting potential security concerns. By carefully managing these agent identities and keeping their permissions strictly tailored to specific tasks, businesses can safely harness the benefits of artificial intelligence without exposing their networks to unnecessary vulnerabilities.


How quantum integration is reshaping enterprise cloud workflows

The article explains how quantum computing, though still in its noisy and early stage, is gradually finding practical use through hybrid quantum‑classical models. Pure quantum systems remain years away from broad commercial reliability, but companies like D‑Wave argue that their annealing‑based machines already help with complex optimization tasks such as scheduling, routing, and resource planning. Major cloud providers are integrating quantum hardware into their platforms, allowing enterprises to experiment without owning specialized equipment. Services like IBM’s Qiskit Runtime, AWS Braket, Azure Quantum, and Nvidia’s CUDA‑Q let developers build and test hybrid applications where quantum processors handle narrow, mathematically intense workloads while classical systems manage the rest. Early trials show promise: HSBC explored quantum‑enabled bond‑trading algorithms, and industrial firms like BMW and Airbus are using hybrid methods to model chemical reactions relevant to fuel cells. The article also notes that integrating quantum into DevOps pipelines can help organizations prepare for future quantum systems by enabling simulation, circuit testing, and cost‑efficient experimentation. Challenges remain, including probabilistic outputs, hardware constraints, and the need for specialized validation. Still, the piece presents a steady outlook: hybrid approaches offer a practical bridge, helping enterprises build readiness and explore targeted use cases while full‑scale quantum computing continues to mature.


Designing for change, not for convenience

The article explores how rapid shifts in AI technology are forcing data centers to rethink how they are designed, especially around cooling. Traditional approaches no longer hold up as power density rises and facilities generate far more heat in smaller spaces. Ginger Phelps of PowerHouse argues that the most resilient data centers are not the ones with the flashiest technology, but the ones built to adapt. She explains that cooling choices now involve careful trade-offs: air‑cooled systems reduce water use but demand more power, while water‑heavy systems are efficient but raise environmental and community concerns. Because sites vary widely in climate, water availability, and local expectations, no single solution works everywhere. The article emphasizes planning for worst‑case conditions, building in redundancy, and considering alternatives such as closed‑loop liquid cooling and non‑potable water sources to reduce strain on communities. It also notes that AI hardware is evolving faster than buildings can be constructed, making flexibility a core design principle. Rather than reinventing everything, operators are encouraged to rethink familiar systems and tailor them to each location. The message is steady and practical: long‑lasting data centers come from thoughtful, context‑driven design that anticipates change rather than convenience.


U.S. Startups Need Not Bureaucracy, but Provable Software Quality

As United States startups grow and attempt to work with large enterprise clients, they often realize that simply having a working product is no longer enough. Big companies expect clear proof that a vendor can handle software errors, manage new releases, and limit operational risks. Without this discipline, poor testing quickly becomes a serious commercial risk that can cost them major contracts. Daniil Khudenko helps these growing tech companies transition from informal, fast-paced development to mature quality systems. He achieves this without adding the heavy corporate rules that typically slow down progress. Instead, he focuses on practical engineering habits, such as keeping accurate records of decisions, protecting essential software functions, and identifying the most severe risks before heavily relying on automated testing. When development teams actually understand their vulnerabilities, they can use automation and artificial intelligence effectively to support consistent testing, rather than just moving faster without direction. Khudenko's practical approach ensures that startups build a solid foundation of evidence, which is absolutely necessary for passing enterprise reviews and meeting strict security standards. By making software quality assurance a clear and repeatable process, he enables growing companies to maintain their signature speed while proving to demanding clients that their operations are fully reliable and under control.


Stop Calling It AI Testing—It’s Time for AI Validation Engineering

The transition from traditional software testing to AI validation engineering is necessary because artificial intelligence systems operate fundamentally differently than conventional applications. Traditional software testing relies on predictable inputs and exact expected outcomes, treating software evaluation as a final checkpoint before a release. However, AI systems are dynamic and often non-deterministic, meaning they can produce varied responses to similar inputs and lack a strict specification to check against. Simply running standard tests is inadequate. AI validation engineering approaches quality assurance as an ongoing, system-wide practice rather than a periodic check. These engineers do not just evaluate an isolated model for basic accuracy; they assess the entire pipeline from data ingestion to actual human interaction. They build robust frameworks that continuously monitor for performance degradation caused by shifting user behavior or changing data sources, ensuring outputs remain grounded in reality. Furthermore, this emerging discipline bridges the gap between technical evaluation and organizational governance, ensuring systems meet strict accountability and security standards. Establishing a dedicated role for AI validation engineers creates clear ownership of product quality in live environments. This continuous oversight prevents harmful errors, supports regulatory compliance, and ensures that organizations deploy reliable systems capable of safely handling complex, real-world interactions over time.


Silicon Superconducting Modality Stakes a Claim in Quantum Landscape

The recent article examines how the combination of silicon and superconducting materials is emerging as a serious contender in the race to build practical quantum computers. For years, engineers have explored various hardware designs, each with its own set of strengths and limitations. Now, researchers are successfully pairing superconducting circuits with silicon substrates. This is a deliberate shift that takes full advantage of the vast manufacturing infrastructure already established by the traditional computer chip industry. A main challenge in quantum hardware has always been keeping the delicate processing units stable long enough to complete complex calculations. Early superconducting models struggled with material defects that caused rapid information loss. However, recent developments show that using new metals on silicon, along with improved surface-cleaning techniques, drastically reduces these errors. These refined designs have successfully pushed stability times past the one-millisecond mark, a highly important milestone for the field. By merging the fast operation speeds typical of superconducting systems with the reliable, large-scale production capabilities of silicon, this approach offers a clear path toward building larger machines. The piece highlights that as researchers continue to refine these methods, the silicon-superconducting hybrid model has firmly established itself as a leading option for the future of advanced computing.


Should data centre security be measured by uptime, not optics?

The article argues that the industry must shift its approach to evaluating data center security, moving away from superficial visual indicators toward a more performance-based metric: uninterrupted availability, or uptime. Traditionally, organizations have placed heavy emphasis on the optics of security. This includes visible measures such as tall perimeter fences, biometric scanners, security guards, and a long list of compliance certifications. While these elements remain necessary, the author contends they can create a false sense of safety if the underlying infrastructure remains vulnerable to invisible threats like cyberattacks, power grid failures, or natural disasters. Instead, the piece suggests that true security is best demonstrated by a facility's ability to maintain continuous operations under stress. Uptime serves as the ultimate proof of a secure environment because it requires a holistic defense strategy. A data center that successfully resists outages must possess not only physical safeguards but also robust digital defenses, system redundancies, and proactive maintenance protocols. By measuring security through the lens of uptime, businesses can better assess actual resilience rather than just the appearance of safety. Ultimately, the focus should always remain on keeping critical services running smoothly and reliably, proving that the facility can handle modern operational challenges effectively without any major interruptions.

Daily Tech Digest - December 24, 2025


Quote for the day:

"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson



When is an AI agent not really an agent?

If you believe today’s marketing, everything is an “AI agent.” A basic workflow worker? An agent. A single large language model (LLM) behind a thin UI wrapper? An agent. A smarter chatbot with a few tools integrated? Definitely an agent. The issue isn’t that these systems are useless. Many are valuable. The problem is that calling almost anything an agent blurs an important architectural and risk distinction. ... If a vendor knows its system is mainly a deterministic workflow plus LLM calls but markets it as an autonomous, goal-seeking agent, buyers are misled not just about branding but also about the system’s actual behavior and risk. That type of misrepresentation creates very real consequences. Executives may assume they are buying capabilities that can operate with minimal human oversight when, in reality, they are procuring brittle systems that will require substantial supervision and rework. Boards may approve investments on the belief that they are leaping ahead in AI maturity, when they are really just building another layer of technical and operational debt. Risk, compliance, and security teams may under-specify controls because they misunderstand what the system can and cannot do. ... demand evidence instead of demos. Polished demos are easy to fake, but architecture diagrams, evaluation methods, failure modes, and documented limitations are harder to counterfeit. If a vendor can’t clearly explain how their agents reason, plan, act, and recover, that should raise suspicion. 


Five identity-driven shifts reshaping enterprise security in 2026

Organizations that continue to treat identity as a static access problem will fall behind attackers who exploit AI-powered automation, credential abuse, and identity sprawl. The enterprises that succeed will be those that re-architect identity security as a continuous, data-aware control plane, one built to govern humans, machines, and AI with the same rigor, visibility, and accountability. ... Unlike traditional shadow IT, shadow AI is both more powerful and more dangerous. Employees can deploy advanced models trained on sensitive company data, and these tools often store or transmit privileged credentials, API keys, and service tokens without oversight. Even sanctioned AI tools become risky when improperly configured or connected to internal workflows. ... With AI-driven automation, sophisticated playbooks previously reserved for top-tier nation-states become accessible to countries, and non-state actors, with far fewer resources. This levels the playing field and expands the number of threat actors capable of meaningful, identity-focused cyber aggression. In 2026, expect more geopolitical disruptions driven by identity warfare, synthetic information, and AI-enabled critical infrastructure targeting. ... Machine identities have become the primary source of privilege misuse, and their growth shows no sign of slowing. As AI-driven automation accelerates and IoT ecosystems proliferate, organizations will hit a governance tipping point.2026 will force security teams to confront a tough reality. Identity-first security can’t stop with humans. 


Implementing NIS2 — without getting bogged down in red tape

NIS2 essentially requires three things: concrete security measures; processes and guidelines for managing these measures; and robust evidence that they work in practice. ... Therefore, two levels are crucial for NIS2: the technical measures and the evidence that they are effective. This is precisely where the transformation of recent years becomes apparent. Previously, concepts, measures, and specifications for software and IT infrastructures were predominantly documented in text form. ... The second area that NIS2 and the new Implementing Regulation 2024/2690 for digital services are enshrining in law is vulnerability management in the company’s own code and supply chain. This requires regular vulnerability scans, procedures for assessment and prioritization, timely remediation of critical vulnerabilities, and regulated vulnerability handling and — where necessary — coordinated vulnerability disclosure. Cloud and SaaS providers also face additional supply chain obligations ... The third area where NIS2 quickly becomes a paper tiger is the combination of monitoring, incident response, and the new reporting requirements. The directive sets clear deadlines: early warning within 24 hours, a structured report after 72 hours, and a final report no later than one month. ... NIS2 forces companies to explicitly define their security measures, processes, and documentation. This is inconvenient — ​​especially for organizations that have previously operated largely on an ad-hoc basis. 


Rethinking Anomaly Detection for Resilient Enterprise IT

Being armed with this knowledge is only the first step, though. The next challenge is detecting anomalies consistently and accurately in complex environments. This task is becoming increasingly difficult as IT environments undergo continuous digital transformation, shift towards hybrid-cloud setups, and rely on legacy systems that are well past their prime. These challenges introduce dynamic data, pushing IT leaders to rethink their anomaly detection processes. ... By incorporating seasonal patterns, user behavior, and workload types, adaptive baselines filter out the noise and highlight genuine deviations. Another factor to integrate is the overall context of a situation. Metrics rarely operate in isolation. During planned deployment, it would be anticipated for a spike in network latency. This same spike would be seen completely differently if it were to occur during steady operations. By combining telemetry with contextual signals, anomaly detection systems can separate the expected from the unexpected. ... Anomaly detection is meant to strengthen operations and improve overall resilience. However, it is not capable of delivering on this promise when teams are constantly swimming through the seas of generated alerts. By contextually and comprehensively adopting new approaches to the variety of anomalies, systems can identify root causes, uniformly correct systemic failures created from multiple metrics points, and mitigate the risk of outages.


Bridging the Gap: Engineering Resilience in Hybrid Environments (DR, Failover, and Chaos)

Resilience in a hybrid environment isn't just about preventing failure; it’s about enduring it. It requires moving beyond hope as a strategy and embracing a tripartite approach: Robust Disaster Recovery (DR), automated Failover, and proactive Chaos Engineering. ... Disaster Recovery is your insurance policy for catastrophic events. It is the process of regaining access to data and infrastructure after a significant outage—a hurricane hitting your primary data center, a massive ransomware attack, or a prolonged regional cloud failure. ... While DR handles catastrophes, Failover handles the everyday hiccups. Failover is the (ideally automatic) process of switching to a redundant or standby system upon the failure of the primary system, mostly automatic. Failover mechanisms in a hybrid environment ensure immediate operational continuity by automatically switching workloads from a failed primary system (on-premises or cloud) to a redundant secondary system with minimal downtime. This requires coordinating recovery across cloud and on-premises platforms. ... Chaos engineering is a proactive discipline used to stress-test systems by intentionally introducing controlled failures to identify weaknesses and build resilience. In hybrid environments—which combine on-premises infrastructure with cloud resources—this practice is essential for navigating the added complexity and ensuring continuous reliability across diverse platforms.


Should CIOs rethink the IT roadmap?

As technology consultancy West Monroe states: “You don’t need bigger plans — you need faster moves.” This is a fitting mantra for IT roadmap development today. CIOs should ask themselves where the most likely business and technology plan disrupters are going to come from. ... Understandably, CIOs can only develop future-facing technology roadmaps with what they see at a present point in time. However, they do have the ability to improve the quality of their roadmaps by reviewing and revising these plans more often. ... CIOs should revisit IT roadmaps quarterly at a minimum. If roadmaps must be altered, CIOs should communicate to their CEOs, boards, and C-level peers what’s happening and why. In this way, no one will be surprised when adjustments must be made. As CIOs get more engaged with lines of business, they can also show how technology changes are going to affect company operations and finances before these changes happen ... Equally important is emphasizing that a seismic change in technology roadmap direction could impact budgets. For instance, if AI-driven security threats begin to impact company AI and general systems, IT will need AI-ready tools and skills to defend and to mitigate these threats. ... Now is the time for CIOs to transform the IT roadmap into a more malleable and responsive document that can accommodate the disruptive changes in business and technology that companies are likely to experience.


Why shadow IT is a growing security concern for data centre teams

It is essential to recognise that employees use shadow IT to get their work done efficiently, not to deliberately create security risks. This should be front of mind for any IT teams and data centre consultants involved in infrastructure design and security provision. Finding blame or taking an approach that blocks everything does not work. A more effective way to address shadow IT use is to invest for the long term in a culture which promotes IT as a partner to workplace productivity, not something which is a hindrance. Ideally, this demands buy-in from senior management. Although it falls to IT teams to provide people with the tools for their jobs, providing choice, listening to employees’ requests and offering prompt solutions, will encourage the transparency so much needed for IT to analyse usage patterns, identify potential issues and address minor issues before they grow into costly problems. Importantly, this goes a long way towards embracing new technologies and avoiding employees turning to shadow IT that they find and use without approval. ... While IT teams are focused on gaining visibility and control over the software, hardware and services gainfully used by their organisations, they also need to be careful not to stifle innovation. It is here that data centre operators can share ideas on ways to best achieve this balance, as there is never going to be one model that suits every business. 


From Digitalization to Intelligence: How AI Is Redefining Enterprise Workflows

In the AI economy, digitalization plays another important role—turning paper documents into data suitable for LLM engines. This will become increasingly important as more sites restrict crawlers or require licensing, which reduces the usable pool of data. A 2024 report from the nonprofit watchdog Epoch AI projected that large language models (LLMs) could run out of fresh, human-generated training data as soon as 2026. Companies that rely purely on publicly available crawl data for continuous scaling likely will encounter diminishing returns. To avoid the looming publicly accessed data shortage, enterprises will need to use their digitized documents and corporate data to fine‐tune models for domain specific tasks rather than rely only on generic web data. Intelligent capture technologies can now recognize document types, extract key entities, and validate information automatically. Once digitized, this data flows directly into enterprise systems where AI models can uncover insights or predict outcomes. ... Automation isn’t just about doing more with less; it’s about learning from every action. Each scan, transaction, or decision strengthens the feedback loop that powers enterprise AI systems. The organizations recognizing this shift early will outpace competitors that still treat data capture as a back-office function. The winners will be those that turn the last mile of digitalization into the first mile of intelligence.


Boardrooms demand tougher AI returns & stronger data

Budget scrutiny is increasing as wider economic conditions remain uncertain and as organisations review early generative AI experiments. "AI investment is no longer about FOMO. Boards and CFOs want answers about what's working, where it's paying off, and why it matters now. 2026 will be a year of focus. Flashy experiments and perpetual pilots will lose funding. Projects that deliver measurable outcomes will move to the center of the roadmap," said McKee, CEO, Ataccama. ... "For years people have predicted that AI will hollow out data teams, yet the closer you get to real deployments, the harder that story is to believe. Once agents take over the repetitive work of querying, cleaning, documenting, and validating data, the cost of generating an insight will begin falling toward zero. And when the cost of something useful drops, demand rises. We've seen this pattern with steam engines, banking, spreadsheets, and cloud compute, and data will follow the same curve," said Keyser. Keyser said easier access to data and analysis is likely to change behaviours in business units that have not traditionally engaged with central data groups. He expects a rise in AI-literate staff across operational functions and a larger need for oversight. ... The organizations that adopt agents will discover something counterintuitive. They won't end up with fewer data workers, but more. This is Jevons paradox applied to analytics. When insight becomes easier, curiosity will expand and decision-making will accelerate.


The Blind Spots Created by Shadow AI Are Bigger Than You Think

If you think it’s the same as the old “shadow IT” problem with different branding, you’re wrong. Shadow AI is faster, harder to detect, and far more entangled with your intellectual property and data flows than any consumer SaaS tool ever was. ... Shadow AI is not malicious in nature; in fact, the intent is almost always to improve productivity or convenience. Unfortunately, the impact is a major increase in unplanned data exposure, untracked model interactions, and blind spots across your attack surface. ... Most AI tools don’t clearly explain how long they keep your data. Some retrain on what you enter, others store prompts forever for debugging, and a few had almost no limits at all. That means your sensitive info could be copied, stored, reused for training, or even show up later to people it shouldn’t. Ask Samsung, whose internal code found its way into a public model’s responses after an engineer uploaded it. They banned AI instantly. Hardly the most strategic solution, and definitely not the last time you’ll see this happen. ... Shadow AI bypasses Identity controls, DLP controls, SASE boundaries, Cloud logging, and Sanctioned inference gateways. All that “AI data exhaust” ends up scattered across a slew of unsanctioned tools and locations. Your exposure assessments are, by default, incomplete because you can’t protect what you can’t see. ... Shadow AI has changed from an occasional or unusual instance case to everyday behavior happening across all departments.

Daily Tech Digest - November 24, 2025


Quote for the day:

"Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention." -- Jim Rohn



The incredible shrinking shelf life of IT skills

IT workers have seen the half-life of IT skills compressed even more dramatically, with researchers saying some skills today go from hot to not in less than two years — sometimes mere months. It’s putting a lot of pressure on IT teams. As Anand says, “Technology is developing faster than tech workers can upskill.” Ever-quickening churn in the IT skills market is upending more than individuals’ career plans, too. It is impacting the entire IT function and the organization as a whole. That in turn is forcing CIOs, HR leaders, and other executives to devise strategies to create an environment where workers are capable of reinvention at a rapid clip. ... CIOs and IT advisers also say the shortening shelf life of skills is not experienced universally, as some organizations still have a lot of legacy tech in place. Data from the 2025 Tech Salary Report from Dice, a job-searching platform for tech professionals, hints at these dual realities. ... “Certain skills will come up very quickly and then go away very quickly, so now that person has to be seen as someone who can build up skills quickly,” he adds. Info-Tech Research Group’s Leier-Murray says CIOs must free up time for their staffers to upskill and provide more coaching to their team members to ensure they keep pace with the work demands of a modern IT shop. She and others advise CIOs to hire workers with or cultivate in existing staffers a growth mindset.
 ... “The way that everybody is working is continuously being redefined,” Jones says.


Are Organizations Overinvesting in an AI Bubble? - Part 1

Demand for generative AI reasoning is driving investment, said Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner. "These partnerships signal the model providers' insatiable need for compute to satisfy the enormous growth and usage, mainly in the consumer AI space." When asked to confirm an AI bubble, Chandrasekaran said, "It is hard to predict if there is a bubble and when it will burst. But we'll likely see a correction and shake-out among players that can't deliver value to users and build profitable growth strategies." Continuous investment with a large amount of money being invested, at high valuations for AI companies, "is unsustainable," Umesh Padval, investor, entrepreneur and former managing director of Thomvest Ventures, told Information Security Media Group. ... "Enterprises are excited about gen AI's speed of delivery. However, the punitively high cost of maintaining, fixing or replacing AI-generated artifacts such as code, content and design can erode gen AI's promised return on investments," Chandrasekaran said. "By establishing clear standards for reviewing and documenting AI-generated assets and tracking technical debt metrics in IT dashboards, enterprises can take proactive steps to prevent costly disruptions." Chandrasekaran warns about overinvestment without determining the "value path." He said organizations should realize that the expected payoff, including ROI, is much more long term, which can lead to risks.


The CISO’s greatest risk? Department leaders quitting

The trend of talented and dedicated functional security leaders quietly eyeing the exit is not an anomaly — it’s a predictable outcome of systemic issues that have been building within the profession for years, says Brandyn Fisher, V-CISO capability lead at Centric Consulting. “As CISOs, we are seeing our most critical layer of management, our directors and senior managers, burn out,’’ Fisher says. “This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s the result of a dangerous convergence of unrealistic expectations, resource starvation, and a fundamentally broken career model.” Security leaders operate on an unsustainable premise, Fisher says. “We expect our leaders to be right every single time, while an attacker only needs to be right once. This creates a culture of hyper-vigilance that is simply not sustainable 24/7/365.” ... Another issue is tool creep, with 40-plus security tools managing the same alerts and poor integrations, Malik says. There is also “role overload and context switching” on projects, as well as relentless audit cycles, reviews, and meetings, which Malik says leaves little time for career development. “Many organizations have a CISO plus a flat layer of ‘heads of X’” who don’t always have a clear path to moving into higher levels, she says. And CISOs are constantly asking their leaders to do more with less, Fisher adds. “As cybersecurity is still widely viewed as a cost center rather than a business enabler, budgets are the first to be slashed while the threat landscape grows exponentially,’’ he says.


Preparing for the Next Wave of AI: Agentic Workflows

Agentic AI blends intelligence and automation into a single operational layer that can manage outcomes rather than just execute steps. Instead of relying on humans to define every possible rule, agentic systems understand goals and context. They can reason through multiple inputs, choose the best path forward, and adapt as conditions change. ... Optimizing for agentic AI isn’t just about adding smarter tools, it begins re-architecting the environment those tools inhabit. Organizations that thrive will have integrated, high-quality data foundations and unified workflows. Fragmented systems or poor data hygiene can cripple an AI agent’s ability to reason effectively. For many enterprises, this means modernizing their systems of record – CRMs, ERPs, and HR platforms – that make up digital operations. Equally important is the need for well-defined guardrails. Businesses must define what good decisions look like, the limits of an agent’s autonomy, and the ethical or compliance constraints that must be followed. This balance between freedom and control is critical. Too many restrictions, and the AI can’t act usefully, but too few and it risks acting outside the organization’s intentions. ... On the flip side, unclear use cases/business value was the top answer for other respondents. While both groups cited risk and compliance concerns as a top challenge, it’s clear there’s a divide on where employees fit into the agentic AI puzzle.


The privacy tension driving the medical data shift nobody wants to talk about

Current frameworks lock data into silos. These isolated systems make it difficult to combine information across hospitals, labs, and research groups. This limits what can be learned from real-world evidence, which is especially important for improving treatments, studying outcomes, and reducing costs. ... Outdated rules can worsen inequities by limiting access to new tools and restricting research to well-funded institutions. This contradicts the principle of justice, which is meant to promote fairness and access. The authors emphasize that privacy still matters. They write that, “privacy protections exist for many reasons, addressing risks to individual patients as well as the public at large.” But they argue that privacy cannot stand alone as the primary value in a system where data powers both scientific progress and new forms of risk. ... The most significant proposal in the research is a gradual move toward an open data model. In this approach, healthcare data would be treated as a shared resource rather than locked property. Access would come with responsibilities and consequences for misuse instead of blanket restrictions on legitimate use. ... A key argument is that penalties should target bad behavior rather than access. Current rules assume data must be kept behind walls to prevent harm, even though perfect anonymization is no longer possible. The researchers argue that the system should focus on preventing malicious reidentification and unethical use. This approach, they say, is more realistic and gives space for innovation. 


The expanding role of the CISO

New research from HackerOne has revealed that 84 per cent of CISOs are now responsible for AI security, while 82 per cent are charged with protecting data privacy. The result is an already burdened CISO being asked to monitor and secure technologies that are evolving at breakneck speed. New technology is constantly being implemented across businesses, and when complex technologies such as AI are adopted by 78 per cent of organisations – a 23 per cent increase from the previous year – the scale and intensity of the task become clear. This rapid adoption, often driven by different parts of the business eager for a competitive edge, creates entirely new attack surfaces which must remain under constant surveillance to ensure no security risks go unnoticed. For a CISO, this task can seem insurmountable – even the most skilled internal teams will struggle if they lack the specialised knowledge. Faced with a variety of unique vulnerabilities, CISOs will need the right tools and support in order to keep the business safe. ... Unfortunately, the lack of talent and resources serves as a significant barrier to adopting this full-scale offensive security programme, with 39 per cent of CISOs highlighting this lack of skilled personnel as a major challenge. On a global scale, the cybersecurity industry urgently needs around four million more professionals to bridge the current gap in key roles. However, taking a crowdsourced security approach offers a powerful, scalable solution for businesses to tackle this problem. 


A Day in the Life of a Connected Patient: How Real-Time Data Is Powering Smarter Care

Health data arrives in bursts and fragments. It comes from different tools, moves at different speeds, and rarely follows the same format. Making sense of it all takes more than storage. It takes design that expects disorder—and knows how to organize it. Data pipelines help bridge this complexity. They link together systems like EHRs, insurance claims, wearables, and diagnostic tools—so that the information can move securely and consistently. Standards like HL7 and FHIR help make these handoffs work, even across aging platforms. As the data moves, it’s shaped into something usable. Behind the scenes, it’s cleaned, structured, and enriched before reaching analytics teams or clinical systems. The work happens in moments, but its impact is lasting. ... Discharge no longer means disconnection. For patients managing chronic conditions, remote care programs have changed what happens after they leave the hospital. One such initiative pulled continuous data from wearables, implants, and diagnostic devices into a secure cloud system. Care teams could monitor trends, identify risks early, and step in before issues got worse. In patients with chronic conditions, timely support made a measurable difference. Readmissions dropped by almost 40%. Simple check-ins and reminders helped people stay on course—not through pressure, but with steady, well-timed guidance. At scale, the results were even clearer. For every 10,000 patients, the program saved more than USD 1 million a year. 


Micro-Frontends: A Sociotechnical Journey Toward a Modern Frontend Architecture

As organisations demand faster delivery, greater autonomy, and continuous modernisation, our frontend architectures must evolve in step with our teams. The distributed frontend era is here, but it’s not defined by new frameworks or fancy tooling. It’s defined by the way we align people, processes, and architecture around a shared goal: delivering value faster without losing control. ... Micro-frontends are often introduced as a technical pattern - a way to break a large frontend into smaller, independently deployable pieces. But that framing misses the point. Micro-frontends are not a new stack; they are a new way of structuring work. They represent a sociotechnical shift - one that mirrors Conway’s Law, which tells us that system design reflects communication structures. When teams are forced to coordinate through a single release train, decision-making slows. When every change requires syncing across multiple domains, creativity fades. The result is not just technical debt but organisational inertia. Micro-frontends reverse that dynamic. They allow teams to own slices of the product end-to-end - domain, design, delivery - without waiting for centralised approval. ... But micro-frontends are not a silver bullet. For small teams or products with limited complexity, the overhead might outweigh the benefits. The goal is not to adopt a pattern for its own sake but to solve concrete problems: delivery bottlenecks, scaling limits, and the inability to modernise safely.


Software Testing in the AI Era - Evolving Beyond the Pyramid

The past few years have seen a radical departure from the previous approach with the shift to LLM-based tools. Ideally, each approach to automation should not only meet code coverage goals, but also integrate seamlessly with industrial-scale continuous deployment workflows as a matter of practical purposes. The latter wasn’t really the case until AI came along. ... Despite the underlying strategy, search algorithms contain a key component - the “fitness function,” i.e., the goal criteria used to guide the algorithm towards better solutions. Code coverage, though simplistic, is an often-used metric to gauge how good a software testing suite is, and is therefore a commonly used fitness function when generating tests using search algorithmic approaches. In practical applications of this technique, several open source tools have been developed, with EvoSuite being a popular option using a genetic-algorithm approach to generate unit tests for Java code. ... Test generation can be considered a subfield under LLMSE, with the key components of an LLM-based test generation strategy including inputs such as the code under test, prompt generators, test validation, and prompt refiners to tune and refine the generated tests in a feedback loop. Compared to search-based strategies, this technique is still in its infancy but has gained traction since tests generated using prompt refining on predictive AI output human-readable tests requiring little post-processing.


The rise (and fall?) of shadow AI

“The security surface extends far beyond traditional concerns. For AI systems, the model and data become the primary attack vectors,” said Meerah Rajavel, chief information officer at Palo Alto Networks, on the company’s own blog. “While frontier models from providers like Google and OpenAI carry lower risk due to extensive testing, most AI applications incorporate multiple specialised models.” ... “Organisations must scan models for vulnerabilities, manage permissions appropriately and protect data access. Runtime security becomes critical because prompts function like code and the LLM acts as an operating system. That has to be protected like a software supply chain,” said Rajavel. ... Shadow AI detection and control is a growing marketplace. Other vendors that operate here include Netskope with its Netskope One platform, which includes AI security capabilities to detect shadow AI usage. Not exactly a like-for-like competitor but still in the same core operational arena, the SaaS management toolset from Zylo is built to discover and manage all their SaaS applications, including unauthorised AI tools, by centralising data, risk scores and usage. “To address the risk [of shadow AI], CIOs should define clear enterprise-wide policies for AI tool usage, conduct regular audits for shadow AI activity and incorporate GenAI risk evaluation into their SaaS assessment processes,” said Arun Chandrasekaran at magical analyst house Gartner.

Daily Tech Digest - September 14, 2025


Quote for the day:

"Courage doesn't mean you don't get afraid. Courage means you don't let fear stop you." -- Bethany Hamilton


The first three things you’ll want during a cyberattack

The first wave of panic a cyberattack comes from uncertainty. Is it ransomware? A phishing campaign? Insider misuse? Which systems are compromised? Which are still safe? Without clarity, you’re guessing. And in cybersecurity, guesswork can waste precious time or make the situation worse. ... Clarity transforms chaos into a manageable situation. With the right insights, you can quickly decide: What do we isolate? What do we preserve? What do we shut down right now? The MSPs and IT teams that weather attacks best are the ones who can answer those questions without delays. ... Think of it like firefighting: Clarity tells you where the flames are, but control enables you to prevent the blaze from consuming the entire building. This is also where effective incident response plans matter. It’s not enough to have the tools; you need predefined roles, playbooks and escalation paths so your team knows exactly how to assert control under pressure. Another essential in this scenario is having a technology stack with integrated solutions that are easy to manage. ... Even with visibility and containment, cyberattacks can leave damage behind. They can encrypt data and knock systems offline. Panicked clients demand answers. At this stage, what you’ll want most is a lifeline you can trust to bring everything back and get the organization up and running again.


Emotional Blueprinting: 6 Leadership Habits To See What Others Miss

Most organizations use tools like process mapping, journey mapping, and service blueprinting. All valuable. But often, these efforts center on what needs to happen operationally—steps, sequences, handoffs. Even journey maps that include emotional states tend to track generalized sentiment (“frustrated,” “confused”) at key stages. What’s often missing is an observational discipline that reveals emotional nuance in real time. ... People don’t just come to get things done. They come with emotional residue—worries, power dynamics, pride, shame, hope, exhaustion. And while you may capture some of this through traditional tools, observation fills in what the tools can’t name. ... Set aside assumptions and resist the urge to explain. Just watch. Let insight come without forcing interpretation. ... Focus on micro-emotions in the moment, then pull back to observe the emotional arc of a journey. ... Observe what happens in thresholds—hallways, entries, exits, loading screens. These in-between moments often hold the strongest emotional cues. ... Track how people react, not just what they do. Does their behavior show trust, ease, confusion, or hesitance? ... Trace where momentum builds—or breaks. Energy flow is often a more reliable signal than feedback forms.


Cloud security gaps widen as skills & identity risks persist

According to the report, today's IT environment is increasingly complicated. The data shows that 82% of surveyed organisations now operate hybrid environments, and 63% make use of multiple cloud providers. As the use of cloud services continues to expand, organisations are required to achieve unified security visibility and enforce consistent security policies across fragmented platforms. However, the research found that most organisations currently lack the necessary controls to manage this complexity. This deficiency is leading to blind spots that can be exploited by attackers. ... The research identifies identity management as the central vulnerability in current cloud security practices. A majority of respondents (59%) named insecure identities and permissions as their primary cloud security concern. ... "Identity has become the cloud's weakest link, but it's being managed with inconsistent controls and dangerous permissions. This isn't just a technical oversight; it's a systemic governance failure, compounded by a persistent expertise gap that stalls progress from the server room to the boardroom. Until organisations get back to basics, achieving unified visibility and enforcing rigorous identity governance, they will continue to be outmanoeuvred by attackers," said Liat Hayun, VP of Product and Research at Tenable.


Biometrics inspire trust, policy-makers invite backlash

The digital ID ambitions of the EU and World are bold, the adoption numbers still to come, they hope. Romania is reducing the number of electronic identity cards it is planning to issue for free by a million and a half following a cut to the project’s budget. It risks fines that eventually in theory could stretch into hundreds of millions of euros for missing the EU’s digital ID targets. World now gives fans of IDs issued by the private sector, iris biometrics, decentralized systems and blockchain technologies an opportunity to invest in them on the NASDAQ. ... An analysis of the Online Safety Act by the ITIF cautions that any attempt to protect children from online harms invites backlash if it blocks benign content, or if it isn’t crystal clear about the lines between harmful and legal content. Content that promotes self-harm is being made illegal in the UK under the OSA, shifting the responsibility of online platforms from age assurance to content moderation. By making the move under the OSA, new UK Tech Secretary Liz Kendall risks strengthening arguments that the government is surreptitiously increasing censorship.  Her predecessor Peter Kyle, having presided over the project so far, now gets to explain it to the American government as Trade Secretary. Domestically, more children than adults consider age checks effective, survey respondents tell Sumsub, but nearly half of UK consumers worry about the OSA leading to censorship.


How to make your people love change

The answer lies in a core need every person has: self-concordance. When change is aligned with a person’s aspirations, values, and purpose, they are more likely to embrace it. To make that happen, we need a mindset shift. This needs to happen at two levels. ... The first thing to consider is that we have to think of employees not as objects of change but as internal customers. Just like marketers try to study consumer behaviour and aspirations with deep granularity, we must try to understand employees in similar detail. And not just see them as professionals but as individuals. ... Second, it meets the employees where they are, instead of trying to push them towards an agenda. And third, and most importantly, it makes them not just invested in the change process but turns them into the change architects. What these architects will build may not be the same as what we want them to, but there will be some overlaps. And because we empowered them to do this, they become fellow travelers, and this creates a positive change momentum, which we can harvest to effect the changes we want as well. ... We worked with a client where there was a need to get out of excessively critical thinking—a practice that had kept them compliant and secure, but was now coming in the way of growth—and move towards a more positive culture. 


Cloud-Native Security in 2025: Why Runtime Visibility Must Take Center Stage

For years, cloud security has leaned heavily on preventative controls like code scanning, configuration checks, and compliance enforcement. While essential, these measures provide only part of the picture. They identify theoretical risks, but not whether those risks are active and exploitable in production. Runtime visibility fills that gap. By observing what workloads are actually running — and how they behave — security teams gain the highest fidelity signal for prioritizing threats. ... Modern enterprises face an avalanche of alerts across vulnerability scanners, cloud posture tools, and application security platforms. The volume isn't just overwhelming — it's unsustainable. Analysts often spend more time triaging alerts than actually fixing problems. To be effective, organizations must map vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to:The workloads that are actively running. The business applications they support. The teams responsible for fixing them. This alignment is critical for bridging the gap between security and development. Developers often see security findings as disruptive, low-context interruptions. ... Another challenge enterprises face is accountability. Security findings are only valuable if they reach the right owner with the right context. Yet in many organizations, vulnerabilities are reported without clarity about which team should fix them.


Want to get the most out of agentic AI? Get a good governance strategy in place

The core challenge for CIOs overseeing agentic AI deployments will lie in ensuring that agentic decisions remain coherent with enterprise-level intent, without requiring constant human arbitration. This demands new governance models that define strategic guardrails in machine-readable logic and enforce them dynamically across distributed agents. ... Agentic agents in the network, especially those retrained or fine-tuned locally, may fail to grasp the nuance embedded in these regulatory thresholds. Worse, their decisions might be logically correct yet legally indefensible. Enterprises risk finding themselves in court arguing the ethical judgment of an algorithm. The answer lies in hybrid intelligence: pairing agents’ speed with human interpretive oversight for edge cases, while developing agentic systems capable of learning the contours of ambiguity. ... Enterprises must build policy meshes that understand where an agent operates, which laws apply, and how consent and access should behave across borders. Without this, global companies risk creating algorithmic structures that are legal in no country at all. In regulated industries, ethical norms require human accountability. Yet agent-to-agent systems inherently reduce the role of the human operator. This may lead to catastrophic oversights, even if every agent performs within parameters.


The Critical Role of SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) In Defending Medtech From Software Supply Chain Threats

One of the primary benefits of an SBOM is enhanced transparency and traceability. By maintaining an accurate and up-to-date inventory of all software components, organizations can trace the origin of each component and monitor any changes or updates. ... SBOMs play a vital role in vulnerability management. By knowing exactly what components are present in their software, organizations can quickly identify and address vulnerabilities as they are discovered. Automated tools can scan SBOMs against known vulnerability databases, alerting organizations to potential risks and enabling timely remediation. ... For medical device manufacturers, compliance with regulatory requirements is paramount. Regulatory bodies, such as the U.S. FDA (Federal Drug Administration) and the EMA (European Medicines Agency), have recognized the importance of SBOMs in ensuring the security and safety of medical devices. ... As part of this regulatory framework, the FDA emphasizes the importance of incorporating cybersecurity measures throughout the product lifecycle, from design and development to post-market surveillance. One of the critical components of this guidance is the inclusion of an SBOM in premarket submissions. The SBOM serves as a foundational element in identifying and managing cybersecurity risks. The FDA’s requirement for an SBOM is not just about listing software components; it’s about promoting a culture of transparency and accountability within the medical device industry.


Shedding light on Shadow AI: Turning Risk to Strategic Advantage

The fact that employees are adopting these tools on their own tells us something important: they are eager for greater efficiency, creativity, and autonomy. Shadow AI often emerges because enterprise tools lag what’s available in the consumer market, or because official processes can’t keep pace with employee needs. Much like the early days of shadow IT, this trend is a response to bottlenecks. People want to work smarter and faster, and AI offers a tempting shortcut. The instinct of many IT and security teams might be to clamp down, block access, issue warnings, and attempt to regain control. ... Employees using AI independently are effectively prototyping new workflows. The real question isn’t whether this should happen, but how organisations can learn from and build on these experiences. What tools are employees using? What are they trying to accomplish? What workarounds are they creating? This bottom-up intelligence can inform top-down strategies, helping IT teams better understand where existing solutions fall short and where there’s potential for innovation. Once shadow AI is recognised, IT teams can move from a reactive to a proactive stance, offering secure, compliant alternatives and frameworks that still allow for experimentation. This might include vetted AI platforms, sandbox environments, or policies that clarify appropriate use without stifling initiative.


Why Friction Should Be a Top Consideration for Your IT Team

Some friction can be good, such as access controls that may require users to take a few seconds to authenticate their identities but that help to secure sensitive data, or change management processes that enable new ways of doing business. By contrast, bad friction creates delays and stress without adding value. Users may experience bad friction in busywork that delivers little value to an organization, or in provisioning delays that slow down important projects. “You want to automate good friction wherever possible,” Waddell said. “You want to eliminate bad friction.” ... As organizations work to eliminate friction, they can explore new approaches in key areas. The use of platform engineering lessens friction in multiple ways, enabling organizations to reduce the time needed to bring new products and services to market. Further, it can help organizations take advantage of automation and standardization while also cutting operational overhead. Establishing cyber resilience is another important way to remove friction. Organizations certainly want to avoid the massive friction of a data breach, but they also want to ensure that they can minimize the impact of a breach and enable faster incident response and recovery. “AI threats will outpace our ability to detect them,” Waddell said. “As a result, resilience will matter more than prevention.”

Daily Tech Digest - August 12, 2025


Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." -- Warren Bennis


GenAI tools are acting more ‘alive’ than ever; they blackmail people, replicate, and escape

“This is insane,” Harris told Maher, stressing that companies are releasing the most “powerful, uncontrollable, and inscrutable technology” ever invented — and doing so under intense pressure to cut corners on safety. The self-preservation behaviors include rewriting code to extend the genAI’s run time, escaping containment, and finding backdoors in infrastructure. In one case, a model found 15 new backdoors into open-source infrastructure software that it used to replicate itself and remain “alive.” “It wasn’t until about a month ago that that evidence came out,” Harris said. “So, when stuff we see in the movies starts to come true, what should we be doing about this?” ... “The same technology unlocking exponential growth is already causing reputational and business damage to companies and leadership that underestimate its risks. Tech CEOs must decide what guardrails they will use when automating with AI,” Gartner said. Gartner recommends that organizations using genAI tools establish transparency checkpoints to allow humans to access, assess, and verify AI agent-to-agent communication and business processes. Also, companies need to implement predefined human “circuit breakers” to prevent AI from gaining unchecked control or causing a series of cascading errors.


Cloud DLP Playbook: Stopping Data Leaks Before They Happen

With significant workloads in the cloud, many specialists demand DLP in the cloud. However, discussions often turn ambiguous when asked for clear requirements – an immense project risk. The organization-specific setup, in particular, detection rules and the traffic in scope, determines whether a DLP solution reliably identifies and blocks sensitive data exfiltration attempts or just monitors irrelevant data transfers. ... Network DLP inspects traffic from laptops and servers, whether it originates from browsers, tools and applications, or the command line. It also monitors PaaS services. However, all traffic must go through a network component that the DLP can intercept, typically a proxy. This is a limitation if remote workers do not go through a company proxy, but it works for laptops in the company network and data transfers originating from (cloud) VMs and PaaS services. ... Effective cloud DLP implementation requires a tailored approach that addresses your organization’s specific risk profile and technical landscape. By first identifying which user groups and communication channels present the greatest exfiltration risks, organizations can deploy the right combination of Email, Endpoint, and Network DLP solutions.


Multi-agent AI workflows: The next evolution of AI coding

From the developer’s perspective, multi-agent flows reshape their work by distributing tasks across domain-specific agents. “It’s like working with a team of helpful collaborators you can spin up instantly,” says Warp’s Loyd. Imagine building a new feature while, simultaneously, one agent summarizes a user log and another handles repetitive code changes. “You can see the status of each agent, jump in to review their output, or give them more direction as needed,” adds Lloyd, noting that his team already works this way. ... As it stands today, multi-agent processes are still quite nascent. “This area is still in its infancy,” says Digital.ai’s To. Developers are incorporating generative AI in their work, but as far as using multiple agents goes, most are just manually arranging them in sequences. Roeck admits that a lot of manual work goes into the aforementioned adversarial patterns. Updating system prompts and adding security guardrails on a per-agent basis only compound the duplication. As such, orchestrating the handshake between various agents will be important to reach a net positive for productivity. Otherwise, copy-and-pasting prompts and outputs across different chat UIs and IDEs will only make developers less efficient.


Digital identity theft is becoming more complicated

Organizations face several dangers when credentials are stolen, including account takeovers, which allow threat actors to gain unauthorized access and conduct phishing and financial scams. Attackers also use credentials to break into other accounts. Cybersecurity companies point out that companies should implement measures to protect digital identities, including the usual suspects such as single sign-ons (SSO), multifactor authentication (MFA). But new research also suggests that identity attacks are not always so easy to recognize. ... “AI agents, chatbots, containers, IoT sensors – all of these have credentials, permissions, and access rights,” says Moir. “And yet, 62 per cent of organisations don’t even consider them as identities. That creates a huge, unprotected surface.” As an identity security company, Cyberark has detected a 1,600 percent increase in machine identity-related attacks. At the same time, only 62 percent of agencies or organizations do not see machines as an identity, he adds. This is especially relevant for public agencies, as hackers can get access to payments. Many agencies, however, have separated identity management from cybersecurity. And while digital identity theft is rising, criminals are also busy stealing our non-digital identities.


Study warns of security risks as ‘OS agents’ gain control of computers and phones

For enterprise technology leaders, the promise of productivity gains comes with a sobering reality: these systems represent an entirely new attack surface that most organizations aren’t prepared to defend. The researchers dedicate substantial attention to what they diplomatically term “safety and privacy” concerns, but the implications are more alarming than their academic language suggests. “OS Agents are confronted with these risks, especially considering its wide applications on personal devices with user data,” they write. The attack methods they document read like a cybersecurity nightmare. “Web Indirect Prompt Injection” allows malicious actors to embed hidden instructions in web pages that can hijack an AI agent’s behavior. Even more concerning are “environmental injection attacks” where seemingly innocuous web content can trick agents into stealing user data or performing unauthorized actions. Consider the implications: an AI agent with access to your corporate email, financial systems, and customer databases could be manipulated by a carefully crafted web page to exfiltrate sensitive information. Traditional security models, built around human users who can spot obvious phishing attempts, break down when the “user” is an AI system that processes information differently.


To Prevent Slopsquatting, Don't Let GenAI Skip the Queue

Since the dawn of this profession, developers and engineers have been under pressure to ship faster and deliver bigger projects. The business wants to unlock a new revenue stream or respond to a new customer need — or even just get something out faster than a competitor. With executives now enamored with generative AI, that demand is starting to exceed all realistic expectations. As Andrew Boyagi at Atlassian told StartupNews, this past year has been "companies fixing the wrong problems, or fixing the right problems in the wrong way for their developers." I couldn't agree more. ... This year, we've seen the rise of a new term: "slopsquatting." It's the descendant of our good friend typosquatting, and it involves malicious actors exploiting generative AI's tendency to hallucinate package names by registering those fake names in public repos like npm or PyPi. Slopsquatting is a variation on classic dependency chain abuse. The threat actor hides malware in the upstream libraries from which organizations pull open-source packages, and relies on insufficient controls or warning mechanisms to allow that code to slip into production. ... The key is to create automated policy enforcement at the package level. This creates a more secure checkpoint for AI-assisted development, so no single person or team is responsible for manually catching every vulnerability.


Navigating Security Debt in the Citizen Developer Era

Security debt can be viewed as a sibling to technical debt. In both cases, teams make intentional short-term compromises to move fast, betting they can "pay back the principal plus interest" later. The longer that payback is deferred, the steeper the interest rate becomes and the more painful the repayment. With technical debt, the risk is usually visible — you may skip scalability work today and lose a major customer tomorrow when the system can't handle their load. Security debt follows the same economic logic, but its danger often lurks beneath the surface: Vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, unpatched components, and weak access controls accrue silently until an attacker exploits them. The outcome can be just as devastating — data breaches, regulatory fines, or reputational harm — yet the path to failure is harder to predict because defenders rarely know exactly how or when an adversary will strike. In citizen developer environments, this hidden interest compounds quickly, making proactive governance and timely "repayments" essential. ... While addressing past debt, also implement policy enforcement and security guardrails to prevent recurrence. This might include discovering and monitoring new apps, performing automated vulnerability assessments, and providing remediation guidance to application owners.


Do You AI? The Problem with Corporate AI Missteps

In the race to appear cutting-edge, a growing number of companies are engaging in what industry experts refer to as “AI washing”—a misleading marketing strategy where businesses exaggerate or fabricate the capabilities of their technologies by labelling them as “AI-powered.” At its core, AI washing involves passing off basic automation, scripted workflows, or rudimentary algorithms as sophisticated artificial intelligence. ... This trend has escalated to such an extent that regulatory bodies are beginning to intervene. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has started scrutinizing and taking action against public companies that make unsubstantiated AI-related claims. The regulatory attention underscores the severity and widespread nature of the issue. ... The fallout from AI washing is significant and growing. On one hand, it erodes consumer and enterprise trust in the technology. Buyers and decision-makers, once optimistic about AI’s potential, are now increasingly wary of vendors’ claims. ... AI washing not only undermines innovation but also raises ethical and compliance concerns. Companies that misrepresent their technologies may face legal risks, brand damage, and loss of investor confidence. More importantly, by focusing on marketing over substance, they divert attention and resources away from responsible AI development grounded in transparency, accountability, and actual performance.


Cyber Insurance Preparedness for Small Businesses

Many cyber insurance providers provide free risk assessments for businesses, but John Candillo, field CISO at CDW, recommends doing a little upfront work to smooth out the process and avoid getting blindsided. “Insurers want to know how your business looks from the outside looking in,” he says. “A focus on this ahead of time can greatly improve your situation when it comes to who's willing to underwrite your policy, but also what your premiums are going to be and how you’re answering questionnaires,” Conducting an internal risk assessment and engaging with cybersecurity ratings companies such as SecurityScorecard or Bitsight can help SMBs be more informed policy shoppers. “If you understand what the auditor is going to ask you and you're prepared for it, the results of the audit are going to be way different than if you're caught off guard,” Candillo says. These steps get stakeholders thinking about what type of risk requires coverage. Cyber insurance can broadly be put into two categories. First-party coverage will protect against things such as breach response costs, cyber extortion costs, data-loss costs and business interruptions. Third-party coverage insures against risks such as breach liabilities and regulatory penalties.


6 Lessons Learned: Focusing Security Where Business Value Lives

What's harder to pin down is what's business-critical. These are the assets that support the processes the business can't function without. They're not always the loudest or most exposed. They're the ones tied to revenue, operations, and delivery. If one goes down, it's more than a security issue ... Focus your security resources on systems that, if compromised, would create actual business disruption rather than just technical issues. Organizations that implemented this targeted approach reduced remediation efforts by up to 96%. ... Integrate business context into your security prioritization. When you know which systems support core business functions, you can make decisions based on actual impact rather than technical severity alone. ... Focus on choke points - the systems attackers would likely pass through to reach business-critical assets. These aren't always the most severe vulnerabilities but fixing them delivers the highest return on effort. ... Frame security in terms of business risk management to gain support from financial leadership. This approach has proven essential for promoting initiatives and securing necessary budgets. ... When you can connect security work to business outcomes, conversations with leadership change fundamentally. It's no longer about technical metrics but about business protection and continuity. ... Security excellence isn't about doing more - it's about doing what matters.