Mobile threats increase ahead of holiday shopping season
New research from the Zimperium zLabs team reveals a sharp rise in mobile threats tied to the holiday shopping season.
The report shows that mishing (mobile phishing) remains the most widespread and effective mobile attack vector. Smishing messages and fake delivery alerts impersonating trusted retail and logistics brands surged up to fourfold during the 2024 holiday shopping period, with attackers using urgency-driven messages like ‘Your package is delayed, click here’ to trick users into revealing credentials or downloading malicious apps.
Rise in agentic identities leads to increased risk
The AI wave is translating into an increased number of AI agents in the workplace, which equates to a surge of both non-human identities (NHIs) and agentic identities. This is resulting in an urgent focus for CIOs and CISOs on identity threats and recovery.
New research from Rubrik Zero Labs, based on a survey by Wakefield Research of over 1,600 IT security decision makers, finds 89 percent of respondents have fully or partially incorporated AI agents into their identity infrastructure, and an additional 10 percent have plans to.
How AI is changing the role of IT leaders
Artificial intelligence has redefined what it means to lead in IT, with 63 percent of IT leaders
reporting that their roles have evolved due to advances in AI.
A study, from IT management platform Atera, finds today’s IT leaders are increasingly responsible for driving business value. 49 percent cite business value leadership -- shaping strategy and translating AI into revenue and growth – as the top area of increased importance, and 47 percent point to orchestrating human-AI collaboration as a key change in their roles.
Better cyber hygiene could have prevented 92 percent of incidents
A new report reveals that 92 percent of organizations that experienced a security incident in the past year believe stronger cyber hygiene could have prevented it, underscoring how persistent execution gaps continue to leave organizations exposed to preventable risk.
The study by Sapio Research for Swimlane shows that despite unprecedented spending on cybersecurity tools and services, foundational security practices remain inconsistent and often overlooked.
1 in 7 consumers fall victim to online scams
A new survey from Bitdefender, of more than 7,000 consumers worldwide, finds that 14 percent of respondents (one in seven) report falling victim to scams in the past year, with an additional four percent unsure.
Based on an average scam loss of $545, that equates to over $534,000 lost among survey participants alone. The US led in scam victims at 17 percent, followed by the UK (16 percent) and Australia (16 percent), while France had the lowest at 11 percent.
More than half of IT leaders lack resources despite increasing budgets
Although 74 percent of IT leaders expect budgets to rise in 2026 more than half say they still lack the internal resources to fix issues quickly or drive innovation.
A new report from DataStrike also finds 60 percent of organizations now rely on MSPs to manage data infrastructure, more than double the rate reported last year. This highlights a growing dependence on external expertise as teams tackle modernization and technical debt.
AI use in the workplace soars with testing leading the way
A new report, based on data from 3.9 million skills tests taken by employment candidates globally, reveals a dramatic shift towards AI proficiency and cognitive capability across the global workforce.
The data from TestGorilla shows AI testing recorded the highest growth, up 166 percent in comparison to the previous year. Following closely are coding debugging (+133 percent), computer literacy (+77 percent) and data structures/arrays (+73 percent). Together, these underline the urgent demand for practical coding competence and AI fluency.
Maximizing AI ROI In healthcare by establishing an automation-first mindset [Q&A]
AI use cases in healthcare continue to expand, and organizations are identifying opportunities to leverage automation technologies to improve existing workflows.
However, after years of implementing new tooling and expanding tech stacks for better efficiency and backend processes, most organizations are left with disparate systems and datasets that make AI initiatives difficult to put into practice. IT teams are now forced to work backwards, embarking on time and resource consuming efforts to determine how automation can work within the parameters of these fragmented processes.
One in 44 GenAI prompts risks a data leak
In October, one in every 44 GenAI prompts submitted from enterprise networks posed a high risk of data leakage, impacting 87 percent of organizations that use GenAI regularly.
A study from Check Point Research finds an additional 19 percent of prompts contained potentially sensitive information such as internal communications, customer data, or proprietary code. These risks coincide with an eight percent increase in average daily GenAI usage among corporate users.
Financial sector ups investment in ID verification tech
Banks, fintechs, and crypto platforms are ramping up investment in fraud prevention and identity verification (IDV), positioning it as the next layer of cyber defense, according to a new survey.
The study from Regula shows banks are leading this trend: the share of institutions intending to increase IDV budgets by more than 50 percent is nearly tripling -- from 4.4 percent to 15 percent in just two years.
New hardened images set to improve container security
A typical container image carries over 600 known vulnerabilities, nearly half of them years old and for Java workloads, the risk is particularly acute.
To address this BellSoft is announcing Hardened Images, a tool for enhancing the security and compliance of containerized applications in Kubernetes.
Companies forced to make financial changes after a cyberattack
A new study from Cohesity finds 70 percent of publicly traded companies have reported adjusting earnings or financial guidance after a cyberattack.
Among the impacts 68 percent say they observed an impact on their stock price, while 73 percent of privately held firms redirected budgets from innovation and growth initiatives.
Would you swap personal information for a bargain?
Ahead of Black Friday a new study shows that, while 95 percent of Americans are concerned their data could end up in a breach, 78 percent are still willing to share personal information for discounts, perks, or free shipping.
The report from Incogni, based on a study of over 1,000 US adults, finds that volunteering personal information for discounts or access to content and rewards has become so routine that few likely consider the implications before doing so.
Why it's time to ditch the VPN and embrace RPAM for secure remote work [Q&A]
As much of the workforce takes time out from the office for the holidays, employees, contractors and third-party vendors continue to log in remotely from holiday homes, airports or hotels, far from the traditional corporate environment.
This surge in remote work access inevitably heightens security risks. For IT and security teams already managing a sprawling attack surface, reduced visibility and control create a challenge that legacy tools like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) were never designed to address.
New Gcore platform simplifies enterprise AI deployment
Businesses are keen to deploy AI but doing so across hybrid and regulated environments, and managing the resulting workloads, remains deeply complex.
This is why Gcore is launching Everywhere AI, a deployment platform that allows enterprises to deploy, scale, and optimize AI workloads flexibly across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments while maximizing performance, efficiency, and revenue.
Ian's Bio
Ian spent almost 20 years working with computers before he discovered that writing about them was easier than fixing them. Since then he's written for a number of computer magazines and is a former editor of PC Utilities. Follow him on Mastodon
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