Out with the Fortune 500s, government agencies, and multinational conglomerates, in with the startups.

Over the course of Michael Levin’s more than 20-year stint in the IT and cybersecurity industry, he has held leadership positions at all types of large companies, from the US Department of Health and Human Services to health insurance company UnitedHealth Group. However, earlier this year, Levin switched gears and started a new chapter in his professional career: serving as the CISO of Arizona-based healthtech startup Solera Health.

Levin, who has been CISO at Solera since September, told IT Brew that he has been enjoying the change of pace and helping the startup “drive and identify risks.” His advice to security professionals contemplating a startup organization as their next career move? Start it up.

“You can always go back to a larger organization, but these opportunities rarely present themselves for the smaller ones,” Levin said.

IT Brew caught up with Levin to discuss what life as a CISO outside of Fortune 500s looks like.

The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the difference between being a CISO at a startup as opposed to an enterprise business?

Speed. That is the biggest change. The second biggest change is resources. When you’re a large class organization, you get large, colossal budgets and a different caliber of salesperson and tools coming to you. In a startup, everything has to be strategic and it’s a zero-sum game, so if you do A, you can’t do B. There’s also very little margin for error. There’s no safety net. At large corporations, there’s always a safety net because there’s always more resources if necessary.

The other benefit is it’s a lot more nimble. There’s no secret vetoes. There’s no person in some department that you never heard of that will come up and raise an issue and suddenly throw a wrench into your work and basically cause a three-month delay. None of that happens here.

Read the rest here.—BM

Pretending to be on the Zoom could get a little trickier, as enterprise browser company Surf Security has a deepfake detector that it says is the real deal.

The vendor’s model makes determinations by analyzing patterns in the voice spectrum, the Surf team told IT Brew, and works with browser-based SaaS audio services like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.

“You don’t even know that I’m checking whether you’re fake or not,” CTO Ziv Yankowitz said on a demo on Google Meet—one that confirmed in a few seconds that this IT Brew reporter was human. (Phew!)

The company released a beta version of the push-button feature on November 20.

Fake news! The US Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) released an advisory in November to warn financial institutions of an increase in fraud schemes using deepfake media, including the creation of false documents, photos, and videos to defeat customer identification processes.

Identity verification company Entrust recently reported an “all-time high” in deepfake threats over the past year: One every five minutes, according to the firm.

Read more here.—BH

To me, the action is the juice—if by “action,” you mean “data center needs,” and by “juice,” you mean “energy.”

With organizations and companies around the world facing higher AI and data center usage, the question of how to power those parts of the industry that are driving the new e-economy is a pressing one. Where and how to generate that energy is a pressing question, Energy Exemplar CEO David Wilson told IT Brew.

“The dominant investments today are solar and wind...batteries, and then also gas, as picking all those assets that fill the gaps when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing,” Wilson said.

High pressure. As IT Brew has reported, speculative inquiries from companies looking to build data centers make it hard to predict how to generate that power and what the cost will be. Some experts recommend turning to some out-there ideas like orbital centers as an off-planet solution that would, hypothetically, make energy demands less burdensome.

Different regions in the US, however, are looking into more grounded options. Entergy Louisiana is looking into natural gas to meet the state’s data center demand. West Virginia coal plants are powering centers in nearby northern Virginia. In Texas, an already stretched power grid is facing even more stress from demanding data centers across the state.

Keep reading here.—EH