Move over, boys. Here to help women hack the glass ceiling is Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS), a nonprofit that aims to support women from all walks of life as they pursue careers in cybersecurity.

Last year’s conference hosted by WiCyS (pronounced wee-sis) brought together almost 2,000 attendees, with 19 countries represented.

“The energy is just extremely different than what I’ve ever experienced anywhere else because it’s this heightened level of fulfillment, being there,” Lynn Dohm, the executive director of WiCyS told IT Brew.

The org’s efforts—including opportunities to learn new skills, receive training, and network—aim to address an absence in the tech sector.

A 2024 State of the Tech Workforce study from the industry association CompTIA found that women represented approximately 49% of the US workforce, but only 29% of tech occupations. “This gap signals underrepresentation in the tech workforce,” the April report read.

“As executive director, my role is to provide more accessibility and opportunities for women not only to get into cybersecurity, but advance into their careers because of it,” Dohm told IT Brew.

The WiCyS leader spoke with IT Brew about how the group provides those opportunities and a welcoming energy for cybersecurity newcomers.

Read more here.—AF, BH

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

IT pros, your plates are full. And that was before someone added a heaping serving of new requirements and upgrades.

With new reqs for processing power, speed, security, and intelligence always on the horizon, it’s crucial to maintain an IT environment that can stomach all the twists and turns.

That’s why Eaton provides comprehensive IT solutions that dive deep into every facet of power management, helping you stay ahead of the curve.

Wanna see how easy learning can be with Eaton? They’ve unveiled three brand new infographics that cover how to upgrade every element of your IT sphere.

See how Eaton products can address common IT issues, such as managing distributed infrastructure, supporting AI apps, and more.

Cloudflare’s San Francisco headquarters has 100 lava lamps, its Austin office has iridescent mobiles that dangle from the ceiling, London’s got double pendulums, Singapore has a pellet of uranium, and Lisbon will soon have electric-powered wave machines to help the company randomize data.

Inspired by surfers catching waves, the team at Cloudflare Portugal—the US-based IT company behind a free, privacy-first CAPTCHA alternative known as Turnstile—is working to give its new office in Lisbon, slated to open toward the end of 2024, an eccentric, Hokusai-style upgrade—this time, emulating the ocean. The upcoming wave machine installation is yet another way the IT company is using unique methods to randomize data for SSL encryption.

“There’s actually going to be a wall of them with, I think, about 40 of these wave [devices] on it,” John Graham-Cumming, CTO of the company, told IT Brew. “And it’s very similar to the rest of the systems—we just have a camera pointing outwards, and we take pure photographs and then use the photograph to generate the random number seed.”

Read more here.—AF

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

Talk to a tech expert and you’re likely to get an opinion on AI—but not necessarily a positive one.

Hype around the tech’s use cases has sparked somewhat of a backlash from experts. You can count Gurucul ​​VP of Product Marketing and Solutions Sanjay Raja as a skeptic. He told IT Brew he sees the issue with the promise of the tech—which he refers to as ML/AI to include machine learning—as, in part, the reliability of the input data it builds on.

“The data that you look at and are provided is going to be critical to how you train the AI to get better,” Raja said. “But it’s also where the accuracy of that data has to be very precise and very important as well.”

Model citizens. Raja added that, due to the uncertainty about whether AI models are trained or simply rule-based, there’s a conflict developing between vendors and investors. Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not the promise lines up with the actual potential of the technology.

Keep reading here.—EH

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