Things to leave behind in 2024: bad habits, self-doubt, limiting beliefs...and phishing simulations?

For many security defenders, sending a phishing simulation test to the employees within their organization is a key part of their weekly routine. IT Brew previously reported that more than one-third (34%) of IT and security decision-makers send the faux tests at least every two weeks.

Bone to pick. However, several security experts who spoke with IT Brew said that they have gripes with the popular cybersecurity exercise. Mike Britton, CIO of San Francisco-headquartered cybersecurity company Abnormal Security, for instance, told us that phishing simulations often feel “very arbitrary” and like they are done solely for compliance purposes.

“Part of my problem is I can always make people click, or click more or click less,” Britton said. “If I want people to click more, I’ll make it super difficult. If I [want to] make people click less, I make it easier.”

Britton added that this makes it difficult to accurately gauge if phishing simulations reduce risk within an organization or have an impact on employee awareness of threats.

Read the rest here.—BM

It pays to be a certified Google Cloud architect, according to Skillsoft’s annual survey of high-paying IT credentials. Just Bing it, it’s true!

Finishing just behind the top-earning AWS Certified Security certification, Google’s “Google Cloud – Professional Cloud Architect” badge gave its holders on average a salary of $190,204. The median pay is a slight decrease from last year’s average salary of $200,960.

Google gains. Google Cloud has been gaining momentum, according to Greg Fuller, VP of Codeacademy Enterprise at Skillsoft, especially as companies seek to diversify cloud infrastructures to avoid a single point of failure.

“Everyone’s looking for that multi-cloud approach, multi-cloud mindset. And Google Cloud is sitting there, but as that alternative that a lot of organizations are moving to, just for redundancy,” Fuller told IT Brew.

While Google still lags behind Microsoft and Amazon in cloud infrastructure market share, according to a Q1 report from Synergy Research Group, a summer earnings call from Alphabet revealed that Google Cloud’s Q2 revenue reached $10.3 billion—an increase from $8.03 billion one year ago.

Read more here.—BH

Craigslist founder and former CEO Craig Newmark has laid out an additional $200 million in donations to cybersecurity, putting the total amount he has pledged to donate since September 2024 at $300 million.

During a recent edition of the Opening Bid podcast, Newmark told Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi the US is “under attack now” and isn’t prepared for the breadth of cyber threats facing it, the site reported. A large share of the funding will go to volunteer efforts to shore up defenses for critical infrastructure, he said.

“It’s not like I’m in the recruiting line after Pearl Harbor, because my dad volunteered in the ’40s, but I guess that’s what I should be doing,” Newmark quipped.

“I’ve started to fund networks of smart volunteers who can help people protect infrastructure, particularly the small companies and utilities across the country who are responsible for most of our electrical and power supplies, transportation infrastructure, food distribution,” he explained. He added that many such systems “have no protection” and if knocked out, could add “weeks and weeks” to any recovery effort after a major cyberattack.

Federal agencies reported over 32,000 attacks to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in fiscal year 2023, up 9.9% from the year before (the majority of the incidents were minor). Jen Easterly, CISA’s outbound administrator, has warned market forces “aren’t working” on cybersecurity.

Keep reading here.—TM