The Abby Kelley Foster (AKF) Charter Middle School has an IT team that sits in classrooms weekly, replacing screens, keyboards, and other odd parts that have been pulled out, dropped down, and yanked off during the course of a young student’s day. The IT fixers here lack the certifications and degrees often common for tech pros found in an educational setting.

That’s because they’re 12 years old.

In late 2023, as the Worcester, Massachusetts, middle school faced a growing number of broken Chromebooks, the school’s IT director and principal came up with an afterschool activity: IT Club. The effort has a two-fold impact: the school gets fixed-up laptops and a new class of young peers who know how to treat technology and lead by example.

Another Chromebook, please! The school this year has 488 fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh graders. According to the school’s “1:1” policy, that means 488 Chromebooks—one for each student. Or more, once they start breaking.

“We went through so many Chromebooks last year. And it got to the point where it was just like, ‘How do we continue to replace these?’” Shelly-Anne Hinds, middle school principal at AKF, told IT Brew.

Read more here.—BH

Tech leaders are feeling the pinch. They’re dealing with uncertainty around generative AI, cybersecurity threats, automation—the kind of challenges that weigh on ya.

That’s where Splunk can help. Their newsletter shares insights that keep you informed on how security, IT, and engineering decision-makers are thinking about the industry’s top topics.

Wondering how chief information security officers (CISOs) are (and aren’t) using generative AI? Or what lessons technical leaders can learn from Formula 1 pit crews? Splunk has you covered.

As experts in unified security and observability, Splunk connects with tech leaders all the time, and their content is specifically curated for C-suite technical execs (think: CISOs, CTOs, and CIOs).

Stay informed with Splunk.

Google Cloud accidentally deleted the account of one of its customers. In a joint statement on May 8, Google Cloud and UniSuper—the Australian pension fund that experienced the disruption—said that Google Cloud has been “conducting a root cause analysis” of the “one-of-a-kind occurrence.”

“Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” the statement said.

UniSuper—which manages $135 billion Australian (approx. $90 billion US) in pension funds—thankfully had another backup in place with a different provider, and that helped minimize “data loss” and “significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration,” the joint statement also read.

“It’s almost unprecedented to think an organization of that size could just have their entire cloud account completely deleted,” Scott Leach, the vice president of the Asia-Pacific region at Varonis—a NYC-based company that specializes in software for data security, governance, threat analytics, and more—told IT Brew.

Read more here.—AF

The internet may be vast beyond conception—but attackers looking for juicy targets within that unending sea of data may find them concentrated in a relative handful of companies.

According to a recent report by supply-chain security firm SecurityScorecard, scans of internet-accessible devices show 90% of the global external attack surface is concentrated in products and services from just 150 firms. Just 15 companies accounted for a full 62%.

What’s more, around 41% of those firms had evidence of at least one compromised device within the last year.

“What we see is some of the company mergers and consolidation of cloud technologies are obviously providing an opportunity for threat actors,” Ryan Sherstobitoff, SecurityScorecard’s SVP of threat research and intelligence, told IT Brew.

Keep reading here.—TM