CYBERSECURITY

War games

Logging on to your favorite multiplayer game to pwn your friends gets a little more difficult when you don’t have access. One gamer recently noticed their Electronic Arts (EA) account was compromised by Russian hackers, writing about the incident in an online forum in January. Another said at the end of February that their Epic Games account was hacked, even with 2FA set up, writing on Reddit that the hacker “booted my email ID so I don’t have access now.”

Others have recently taken to Facebook to vent their frustrations, with one user writing on Feb. 20 that their computer was infected with a trojan, which led to a ban on their Fortnite account. Another on Jan. 30 said hackers first compromised their email account, which led to them losing their Epic Games account—one which contained “years upon years” worth of games and models worth thousands of dollars.

“As organizations have done a better job, protecting systems, protecting data protecting devices—[hackers] look for the weakest link, and oftentimes that can be a gamer,” Theresa Payton, the first woman to serve as White House chief information officer—and a mother of three Gen Z gamers—told IT Brew.

Read more here.—AF

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

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IT OPERATIONS

Miss you

Some C-suiters got pink hearts; some were wooed away by more appealing prospects. Here’s who was in and out in February.

Elham Tabassi named CTO for the brand new US AI Safety Institute

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced the creation of the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) on Feb. 7, and named Elham Tabassi as the organization’s CTO and Elizabeth Kelly as its Director. AISI is operated under the umbrella of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Tabassi has been at NIST since June 1999, working as an electronics engineer until Oct. 2017, then as chief of staff through Oct. 2022. Since Oct. 2023, she’s been the agency’s chief AI advisor. In Sep. 2023, Time Magazine named her one of its 100 Most Influential People in AI.

Sonos executive Antoine Leblond joins Bumble as CTO

After 25 years at Microsoft and nearly seven years at Sonos, Antoine Leblond joined Bumble as CTO on Feb. 21, part of an overall leadership shakeup at the dating app. In an announcement for investors, Bumble said Leblond would be “leveraging foundational and emerging technologies, such as AI, to deliver more compelling and positive experiences for all users.”

Leblond served as Sonos’s SVP of software, and left Microsoft as SVP of Windows.

Read more here.—EH

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

IT STRATEGY

Speak into my good device

And you thought the guy in the airport terminal talking on speaker was a problem.

The future might get loud, according to Tobias Dengel, president at digital services provider WillowTree and author of the 2023 book The Sound of the Future, at least if his vision comes true: a reality in which people mostly talk to their devices to get the results they need, from a text message to an on-demand movie to whatever generates from generative AI, like entire code lines from a verbal prompt.

Early voice-tech iterations involved one mode of communication: a speech input (“Hey, Siri!”) and a speech output (Siri reads the weather). For the technology to truly find its voice, its developers must offer many modes of communication, according to Dengel, like verbal prompts leading to lightning-fast results through text, imagery, or other presentations.

“That’s our core thesis: That every app is going to be voice-powered; it’s going to be a multimodal experience,” Dengel said.

Dengel told IT Brew more about how he sees and hears the future.

The responses below have been edited for length and clarity.

What’s an example of a multimodal experience?

Tobias Dengel: The one that we have created as users every single day—without realizing it—is chat or texting. Everyone’s speaking into their mobile device because it’s so much faster. But we don’t listen to the response; we read the response. So, even though text-messaging apps weren’t designed as multimodal, we as users have made them multimodal.

Keep reading here.—BH

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

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