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Organizations struggle to manage OT security risks

Industrial IoT

A new survey from OTORIO and ServiceNow reveals that 58 percent of organizations identify their operational technology (OT) cybersecurity risk level as high or critical.

However, the survey of 200 IT and OT leaders shows only 47 percent of companies surveyed have an OT cybersecurity solution in place, and 81 percent of respondents still manage their OT risks manually rather than having an automated solution.

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TikTok: What's going on and should you be worried?

Since 2020, several governments and organizations have banned, or considered banning, the immensely popular social media app TikTok from their staff’s devices.

With all these alarming bells ringing, we thought it might be handy to break down what we know and see if we can plot a sensible strategy from there. So, if your hair is on fire, extinguish it and consider this with a cool head.

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The real risks of OpenAI's GPT-4

Artificial-Intelligence-threat

While many were marveling at the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Monitaur was busy analyzing the accompanying papers that examined the risks and technical design of its latest engine. In this commentary, I examine this through the lens of proper governance, responsible use, and ethical AI, while also considering the larger landscape of language models within which OpenAI sits.

The analysis results were not what were hoped for.

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Which sectors could thrive from digital transformation?

Digital Transformation

Historically, some sectors have moved towards a digital transformation quickly, while others have taken longer to progress. Here, we will look at how living in the per-digitalised age can be dangerous, as well as issues surrounding companies falling behind their competitors, and how and why traditional processes can be changed.

Digital transformation happens when companies shift away from traditional methods and introduce technology as a fundamental part of their strategy. This can take place through either digital technology being integrated into an organization or through a cultural shift within the business.

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Guarding against attacks targeting hybrid Active Directory environments [Q&A]

Active Directory (AD) is used by 90 percent of enterprises as the primary source of trust for identity and access. But it can also be a weak link, exploited in many modern cyberattacks.

We spoke to Ran Harel, senior director of product management at Semperis, to explore the challenges in securing a hybrid AD environment and how organizations can best defend this expanded attack surface.

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Opportunities and considerations for small businesses experimenting with ChatGPT

ChatGPT

For the past few months, the tech -- and tech-adjacent -- world has been fascinated by ChatGPT. A generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool that has been open for public use since late 2022, it’s designed to interact with humans to answer questions or develop content based on a prompt written in simple, conversational English rather than a complex data query.

ChatGPT has been used to write Valentine’s Day poems, plan a Thanksgiving menu and write other humorous outputs. It also has quickly become a research hub, programming tutor and source for writing inspiration. Famously, a leading tech news site used ChatGPT to write some of its articles, to varying degrees of success.

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Ransomware-in-a-box: Why containers are a cybersecurity risk

Container development

With the creation, storage, and use of data continuing to accelerate dramatically, security vulnerabilities and risks to data integrity are also escalating across the board. The trends are alarming, with one recent study from IDC -- looking at the requirements for ransomware and disaster recovery preparation -- revealing that in 2022, almost 80 percent of organizations surveyed had activated a disaster response. What’s more, 83 percent had experienced data corruption, and most worrying of all, almost two-thirds said that a ransomware attack had resulted in unrecoverable data.

Indeed, there is currently no application type that can be considered to be completely safe from ransomware. Among the wide range of possibilities this situation creates are the risks posed to organizations that are refactoring their applications for Kubernetes. Refactoring is an increasingly popular approach to application deployment, whereby apps are broken down into a range of services that can subsequently be operated independently. One of the key benefits this offers is that the application’s underlying hardware is used more efficiently, while each service can also be scaled as required without impacting other services and resources.

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Businesses waste $17 million a year on unused SaaS apps

A new report from enterprise SaaS management firm Zylo finds that on average, 44 percent of businesses' SaaS licenses are wasted or underutilized, and the average organization wastes $17M in unused SaaS licenses every year.

Enterprise organizations (those with 10,000 employees or more) spend over $224M annually on SaaS but only utilize 50 percent of their SaaS licenses

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62 percent of organizations suffer unplanned downtime every month

Over half of organizations say they have suffered a data breach in the past two years, an increase from 49 percent in 2022 and 39 percent in 2021.

In addition, a new report from Splunk shows 62 percent of respondents report that their business-critical applications have suffered from unplanned downtime due to a cybersecurity incident on at least a monthly basis, an increase from 54 percent in 2022.

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Understanding the business model of cybercrime

As businesses get bigger they begin to gain extra layers of management and start to behave in different ways. A new report from Trend Micro reveals that the same is true for cybercrime groups.

A typical large cybercrime organization allocates 80 percent of its operating expenses to wages, with the figure similarly high (78 percent) for smaller criminal organizations, according to the report.

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Microsoft is about to make a crazy change to Windows 11 that will draw the ire of users

Attacking monitor with a chainsaw

Change is often good, but not when it comes to changing the way Windows works -- particularly the fundamental features that people have become used to. But this is precisely what Microsoft is looking to do by introducing a controversial new limitation on Alt-Tab in Windows 11.

As anyone who has used Windows for any length of time will know, the Alt-Tab keyboard shortcut provides an easy way to switch between open apps and windows. In recent years, Microsoft has added functionality by making it possible to Alt-Tab through Edge tabs, but now the company is testing a new implementation that reduces its usefulness.

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Microsoft backtracks on new Content Adaptive Brightness Control feature in Windows 11 -- desktop users to miss out

Restricted Access sign

When Microsoft released the latest Dev build of Windows 11, one of the new additions was Content Adaptive Brightness Control (CABC) -- an energy-saving feature that works by dimming areas of the screen depending on the content that is being viewed. Much was made of the fact that CABC was something that would benefit everyone, including desktop users. But it turns out that this is not actually the case.

Microsoft has now backtracked on its announcement, revealing that CABC is rather more underwhelming than we were first led to believe -- and far fewer Windows 11 users will be able to take advantage of it than first suggested.

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Watch ChatGPT generate a string of valid Windows activation keys

ChatGPT running on a laptop

OpenAI's ChatGPT can be used for all sorts of things, from answering questions and translating text, to generating original content like stories, poetry and code.

Given the right prompts, it can even be tricked into producing valid license keys for software. YouTuber Enderman managed to overcome ChatGPT’s initial reluctance to do this and got it to provide him with a selection of working keys for Windows 95.

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Sharing deployment best practices helps all developers

Developers are constantly innovating better and more efficient ways to deploy software, but not all teams are privy to the new strategies. We as a developer community need to eliminate all gatekeeping and share best practices. What benefits one team will help another, allowing us to continuously build on these improvements together.

Deployment velocity drives business value, but only if the software is reliable. Users won't care about receiving frequent updates if they don't work. Sharing deployment best practices can eliminate manual tasks and enable developers to focus on coding, leading to more reliable deployments and apps and more efficient processes.

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Novel social engineering attacks surge by 135 percent driven by generative AI

Social Engineering

New research from cybersecurity AI company Darktrace shows a 135 percent increase in social engineering attacks using sophisticated linguistic techniques, including increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length, and with no links or attachments.

This trend suggests that generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are enabling threat actors to craft sophisticated and targeted attacks at speed and at scale.

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