The year 2024 saw a marked increase in the competence, aggression and unpredictability of ransomware attackers. Nearly all the key numbers are up — more ransomware gangs, bigger targets and higher payouts. Malicious ransomware groups also focus on critical infrastructure and supply chains, raising the stakes for victims and increasing the motivation to cooperate.
Read my roundup of the biggest ransomware stories of 2024 at SecurityIntelligence.com.
The work-from-home movement is under threat despite measurable benefits. Here's what's coming (in my opinion column at Computerworld.com)
Until now, software was used by a user. With AI agents, the software is the user. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.
When AI can "prove it's human" — and CAPTCHAs exist mainly to distribute malware and steal users' time — Google should step up and get rid of CAPTCHAs. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.
The restaurant industry has been hit with a rising number of cyberattacks in the last two years, with major fast-food chains as the primary targets. Here’s a summary of the kinds of attacks to strike this industry and what happened afterward. Read my article at SecurityIntelligence.
At least, that's what it looks like on the surface — I'd better explain this. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.
Hundreds or thousands of North Koreans have illegally gotten jobs at US companies through a perfect storm of hiring failures. Here's what that means for your company. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.
I got to be on TWiT — This Week in Tech — with host Iain Thomson and fellow guest Emily Dreibelbis!
We had a great conversation about the The US Navy's and Starlink, Starlink in Brazil, Elon Musk and the rise of supranational oligarchs, Telegram, The Internet Archive, AI music scams, back to office policies, Apple's AI chatbot, electric cars, Intel troubles, Boeing problems, and more!!
"My fear is that if robots are basically people, then robot makers may feel like gods in creating them." Read my column at Computerworld.com.
We’ve been on the brink of a thriving market for AR glasses for years. What’s taking so long for them to arrive? Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.
The collision happened off the coast of Naples on July 22. Both yachts were anchored, and Salinas' yacht arrived after Jobs' yacht, and had an anchor line that was too long, allowing the boats to come into contact. (Jobs designed and commissioned the yacht, but never got to enjoy it. It's now owned by his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.) The superyacht collision wasn't super bad: just a scratch that will be expensive to fix.
Cyberattacks grow every year in sophistication and frequency, and the cost of data breaches continues to rise with them. These rising costs affect the healthcare industry more than others. Read all about my analysis of a new report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute called "2024 Cost of Data Breach Study" at SecurityIntelligence.
This is quite a story at Business Insider: Are AI and drones (and satellite photography) really being used by insurance companies to surveille homes for the purpose of changing rates and cancelling insurance?
A new report from the watchdog group Check My Ads explores the disturbing trend of scammers are exploiting obituary sections to run deceptive ads. These fake obituaries are used as a cover to promote various scams, including fraudulent financial schemes and malware distribution. Usually, they take real obituaries, enshittify them through AI, then publish them to lure people into seeing ads, downloading files and other shady stuff.
New research finds that, in general, people trust journalists who agree with false claims, and distrust journalists who show that false claims are false.
From the abstract:
The research also solves the mystery of why so many people distrust fact-checking sites: It's because they debunk false claims. Read all about it."Do people trust journalists who provide fact-checks? Building upon research on negativity bias, two studies support the hypothesis that people generally trust journalists when they confirm claims as true, but are relatively distrusting of journalists when they correct false claims."
We’re going to see lots of headlines over the next few years about AI lie detection — and more of what we’ve seen this month: lawsuits, research and huge plans for implementation in security settings.
I’m not going to lie — the whole trend is both fascinating and horrible. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.com.
I use a lot of AirTags. One of them, located (I believed) at my son's house in Silicon Valley, only checked in to the network every once in a while. When I would go to find the physical tag, it couldn't be found on the network. But then, when I would be in Europe or somewhere, it would randomly check in to tell me the battery was low. A few months ago, I tried to find it using the "Directions" feature of Find My, only to have it lead me down the street. I thought it was hallucinating.
But today, I saw that it recently popped up on the network, so I used the directions app to track it. Again, the app led me down the street, then across the street. I used the "Play Sound" feature to make the AirTag beep. And I found it! It was half buried in leaves where it had been exposed to the elements for a year.
How did it get there? Well, the best guess is that neighborhood kids were playing with it — kids whose family moved out of the neighborhood nine months ago.
The 2024 summer Olympics will showcase a new world of AI-generated fakes, advanced cyberthreats and the rise of AI-powered defense. Read my column at Computerworld.com.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and now OpenAI are all known to be working on AI that can "think," make decisions and change course in pursuit of goals. Read all about it in my MACHINE SOCIETY newsletter.
Now that Amazon is making moves to lead in artificial intelligence with next-generation technology, we can no longer ignore it. Read my column at Computerworld.
I got to be a guest on This Week in Tech with host Leo Laporte and fellow guests Denise Howell and Harry McCracken.
We talked about the Samsung event, the FTC's NGL ban, the AT&T breach and much, much more!
The cyberattack landscape has seen monumental shifts and enormous growth in the past decade or so. Here's my attempt at a global, 10-year reckoning. Read my article at SecurityIntelligence.
The two biggest pain points for remote workers trying to get their jobs done in faraway places have been erased by innovative new products that should make it even easier to work from anywhere. Read my column at Computerworld.com.
