At CES 2025, it was hard to find any kind of residential appliance or fixture that wasn’t connected to the web in some way—and as internet of things (IoT) devices spread across the home, it’s more important than ever to ensure the increased attack surface is secure.

One example: doggy doors.

Insecure pet doors are a potential weak spot for home security, as burglars and other threats (coyotes, for example) might be able to squeeze their way through. Most cheaper models offer little more than a flap or sheet of plastic to deny access to an attacker.

Martin Diamond, the founder and CEO of Pawport, showed off the company’s solution during Pepcom’s Digital Experience event at this year’s CES in Las Vegas. Pawports are smart, motorized pet doors designed to replace existing fixtures, offering both enhanced convenience and security by only opening when it senses the proximity of a pet wearing a paired transmitter on their collar. While the original concept stemmed from a 2021 Kickstarter campaign, the company plans to launch the product this year.

“You lock it on, and you’ve transformed it that quickly from an old-fashioned pet door into something sleek and modern,” Diamond told IT Brew. “A lot of different finishes, control the lights, control schedules for your dogs, curfews, lightning detection, all things that you can do.”

“This is like the maximum security, all the bells and whistles,” he added.

Read the rest here.—TM

Binghamton University professor Surinder Kahai believes an effective CIO leads with both hands.

In a study, published in November 2024, Kahai and two researchers made the case for the “ambidextrous CIO,” what they define as a leadership style that’s both transactional and transformational.

While transactional leaders “motivate by exchanging rewards for performance,” the report said, Kahai shared traits of a transformational leader with IT Brew:

• Individualized consideration and focus on one’s personal growth
• Willingness to challenge the status quo
• The ability to articulate in ways that motivate employees “intrinsically”
• The ability to be a role model

“The transactional motivates you extrinsically, gives you a bonus, gives you recognition, gives you rewards. The transformational leader transforms the basis of the motivation,” Kahai told IT Brew.

Kahai and colleagues surveyed CIOs or top executives at 68 organizations, along with their direct reports and a fellow business leader. The researchers asked respondents how frequently their top IT leader engaged in behaviors demonstrating transformational, transactional, and “laissez-faire” leadership.

“Ambidextrous leadership promotes mechanisms to develop shared domain knowledge between IT and business specialists,” the report determined.

Kahai spoke with IT Brew about what those mechanisms are exactly and why they matter.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

If I’m a CIO on day one, what “mechanisms” would you recommend I implement?

We’re not asking a marketing person to continue just doing their marketing stuff; they have to attend vendor presentations. They have to attend IT conferences. They have to learn the basic skills of IT. On the other hand, the IT people should be meeting with customers, meeting with the suppliers of the company. They should be going to the business conferences so that they can pick up the business knowledge. Business people, for instance, could be attending workshops, or IT people could be creating those workshops with their business people.

Read more here.—BH

No more pencils, no more books—your info has been hacked by crooks.

A Dec. 28 attack on software solutions provider PowerSchool, which works with K–12 districts around the US, resulted in the breach of data of a number of students. The attack was due to compromised credentials, PowerSchool wrote in a statement via Director of Communication Melissa Wenzel.

“On December 28, 2024, we became aware of a potential cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to certain PowerSchool SIS information through one of our community-focused customer portals, PowerSource,” according to Wenzel. “PowerSchool is not experiencing, nor expects to experience, any operational disruption and continues to provide services as normal to our customers.”

No class. The potential pool of victims, Saviynt Chief Trust Officer Jim Routh told IT Brew in an email, is 50 million students. Because of the nature of the attack—the compromised credentials—the first lesson for organizations is to “increase cyber resilience against threat actors attempting to gain privileged access using compromised user/consumer credentials,” Routh wrote via PR rep Tila Pacheco.

“A secondary lesson learned from this incident is the need for cloud service providers to reduce the use of passwords that can be compromised,” he added.

Keep reading here.—EH

Discover how data lakes and lakehouses revolutionize analytics with scalable storage and smarter management. Find out which solution fits your needs and keeps your data game strong.