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When it comes to security, organizations are embracing AI’s ability to expand their capabilities—but the human element is still important.

Ganesh Pai, founder and CEO of security visibility company Uptycs, told IT Brew at this year’s RSA Conference that for all the integration of AI into security systems, the technology still needs the human touch.

“Traditionally, if you train a machine with a picture of 1,000 cats and the next picture I show you, [you ask it] is this a cat or not? That’s more straightforward,” Pai said. “But in security, there isn’t such a thing to say, ‘Here [are] 1,000 things and I’ll show you the next one—is it similar?’”

Caution ahead. There’s an inherent risk when you operationalize security controls, Pai added. Models can leak data, or be trained incorrectly—there are many areas where it’s unclear how to responsibly leverage AI.

Read more here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Imagine you just left a great meeting with tons of action items and next steps. But when you look back at your meeting notes, it feels like trying to decipher messy hieroglyphics.

That’s where Notion AI steps in. Simply prompt it to “summarize my meeting notes with a list of action items,” and voilà. A line item that would’ve taken 30 minutes becomes a minute-long task.

Notion’s latest guide lays out the unexpected ways its AI function has helped millions of users tackle tedious tasks. Here’s a peek at what you’ll learn:

• the most common and useful ways to use Notion AI every day
• which AI prompts to use for writing, summarizing, and translating
• how AI fits into workflows now and what its role could look like in the future

Download the guide.

If you were a victim of LockBit ransomware, please stand up. The FBI has acquired over 7,000 ransomware decryption keys, which can help victims “reclaim their data and get back online,” according to FBI Cyber Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran.

A LockBit of backstory. Based in Russia, LockBit is one of the most prolific ransomware groups in the world, according to the US Department of Treasury. The US and UK previously disrupted the ransomware group’s operations in February of this year, “seizing numerous public-facing websites used by LockBit to connect to the organization’s infrastructure and seizing control of servers used by LockBit administrators,” the US Department of Justice said in a press release that month.

After the FBI announced the obtained decryption keys at the 2024 Boston Conference on Cyber Security on June 5—in which the agency also spoke on the criminal ecosystem and cyber ops in a keynote address—IT Brew discovered that LockBit had posted contact information for former FBI employees, including the former CIO and former director, in what we believe is one of its group chats on Telegram—sharing addresses and phone numbers the group had collected on 30 people.

Read more here.—AF

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Deployment of traffic-encrypting virtual private networks (VPNs) surged in March 2020, as companies sought ways to get employees working from home.

Now, malicious hackers are checking in on the devices and hoping they’ve been left unmanaged.

“These devices have to get configured properly on an ongoing basis,” Adam Tyra, general manager of security services at cyber insurance provider At-Bay, told IT Brew. “They have to get patched. They have to get maintained. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.”

A VPN is a remote-access software or hardware tool that offers companies:

• Two-way encryption of network communication (confidentiality!)
• Access to corporate resources

A May 2024 At-Bay study found that remote-access vulnerabilities led to 58% of direct ransomware events in 2023, and self-managed VPNs, or technology “implemented on-premises and maintained by in-house IT teams,” have considerably higher risk of security incidents compared to cloud-hosted VPNs; self-managed VPNs accounted for 63% of 2023’s remote-access ransomware events.

Keep reading here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Keep cybersecurity risk in check: Implementing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, along with Veeam Data Platform, will give you an edge in establishing standards, guidelines, and best practices to stay ahead of cyberattacks. Read their white paper to learn how lower risk can be a reality for your IT and security teams. Download it here.