SEC disclosure rules now require publicly traded companies to disclose impactful—or as the agency puts it, “material”—cybersecurity events, leaving many organizations running to both dictionaries and legal teams to learn the definition.

Understanding the term will be an important aspect of pre-incident planning, according to legal experts and industry pros who spoke with IT Brew, but what’s “material” for one company may be “immaterial” for another. IT pros are huddling up on frameworks and agreed-upon principles to determine which events require reporting to the SEC and which do not.

SEC ya soon. The SEC rules require registrants to disclose “any cybersecurity incident they determine to be material and to describe the material aspects of the incident’s nature, scope, and timing, as well as its material impact or reasonably likely material impact on the registrant.”

According to the SEC, a cybersecurity incident material-izes if “there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable shareholder would consider it important in making an investment decision.”

Read more here.—BH

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

In today’s digital-first world, your content is the customer experience. It’s how you engage, differentiate, and win.

Good news: Composable content platforms like Contentful can guide you from inspiration to launch without skipping a beat, so your teams can focus on building more impactful experiences.

What makes composable content different from a traditional, siloed CMS? Thanks for asking! A CMS manages content for one specific channel at a time. But with Contentful, digital teams can:

• compose customizable experiences at any scale
• collaborate on content experiences quickly and efficiently
• tap into creativity with dynamic features like AI Content Type Generator and Workflows

Discover the momentum your content can drive with Contentful’s composable content platform.

ChatGPT who? Baidu’s chatbot—known as Ernie Bot (文心一言)—has just surpassed 100 million users, according to CTO Haifeng Wang.

Wang made the announcement in late December in Beijing at the company’s Wave Summit—a convention highlighting deep learning and development updates.

Ernie (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration)—whose public launch received China’s stamp of approval last August—responds to voice prompts, photos, and text-based inputs. What’s unique about the chatbot, though, is the subcategories within the app that offer a more visual and niche experience. With a few taps, users can ask the bot to write a script for Chinese streaming video platform Bilibili, or create an outline for a PowerPoint presentation. There’s even a category for users to create mouthwatering food service reviews—because writing reviews yourself is so last year.

Read more here.—AF

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

At CES 2024, IT Brew talked with SailPoint CISO Rex Booth about phishing, deepfakes, and general security. We’ll share our full conversation later, but here’s a preview.

IT Brew: We’ve been hearing a lot about AI capabilities for deepfakes and phishing. How concerned should IT teams be? How about consumers?

Rex Booth: So, I think one of the problems with our industry is that we tend to look at the world through our own lens—we look at the world through a relatively knowledgeable and aware and sophisticated lens. And we think that, of course, everyone will be able to detect a good face filter that’s being generated live; they will know that it’s a fake…whereas the broader population in general doesn’t live in our world and isn’t aware of emerging threats and technologies, and doesn’t know the risk associated with them. Today, you can generate a low-quality video, fake voicemail, whatever, and send it to 100,000 random people, and a decent percentage of those people are gonna get some hits. So, the risk is real now. The broader question is, at what point does the risk become such that it fools a material portion of the population?

—EH

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $70 million. That’s the amount of funding the US Department of Energy is spending on research and development to protect energy infrastructure from cyberattacks, among other threats. (FedScoop)

Quote: “Something like that, where you can take over the SEC account and potentially affect the value of bitcoin in the market—there’s massive opportunity for disinformation.”—Austin Berglas, senior executive at the security firm BlueVoyant, on the temporary takeover of the SEC’s social media account (Reuters)

Read: The dream of the flying car is alive and well at CES, unfortunately. (CNET)

Elevate composable experiences: From hundreds of prebuilt apps and integrations to AI that automates repetitive tasks for your team, innovation is always possible with Contentful’s composable platform.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}