Like an onion, cybersecurity contains multiple layers. When it’s done well, at least.

That’s what a trio of researchers concluded after setting out to discover what “responsible cybersecurity” looks like for organizations in today’s world.

Responsible cybersecurity? IT Brew caught up with Niki Panteli, a professor of digital business at Lancaster University in the UK and lead researcher on the project, to decode her team’s findings on the proposed framework, which sounds like it could be a character award from a grade school teacher.

“Responsible cybersecurity presents a collective commitment where multiple stakeholders act as stewards and [are] looking after cybersecurity,” Panteli said.

Panteli and the research team—which includes Konstantinos Mersinas, an associate professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Boineelo Nthubu, a graduate teaching assistant and researcher also at Lancaster University—arrived at that definition after conducting 20 interviews with cybersecurity professionals across several industries, including the utility and manufacturing services sector.

Read the rest here.—BM

Drop it like it’s hot—and by “it,” we mean tech jobs, which fell in February.

Tech unemployment rose in February, even as the market appeared to improve year over year. A CompTIA analysis of the numbers found that unemployment ticked up from January’s 2.9% to 3.3% in February. That was under the national rate of 4.1%; CompTIA has consistently found tech unemployment outperforming the economy as a whole.

“The report paints a mixed picture as labor market data catches up to market developments,” Tim Herbert, CompTIA chief research officer, said in a statement accompanying the numbers.

Cement shoes. In the tech sector, the bleeding was near universal. IT and custom software services and system design saw the biggest drop with 9,800 positions lost. PC, semiconductor, and components manufacturing saw a decline of 2,700 positions; telecommunications and cloud infrastructure were the outlier, adding 1,000 and 700 positions, respectively.

It’s a complicated time for the industry as it faces headwinds from the broader economy. Job cuts in the sector were the third-highest of all professions for the first two months of 2025, according to an analysis from career transitioning advisory firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas. Even so, the year-to-date number was 22% less than over the same period in 2024.

Read more here.—EH

Autonomy is a funny thing. On a good day, an assistant’s autonomous decisions can save time. On a bad day, a toddler’s autonomy can lead to 500 purchases of Elmo merch.

For Richard Bownes, chief data scientist for Europe at consultancy Valtech, deploying generative AI for clients requires “handbrakes”—processes that slow down the speedy process to ensure an agent’s decisions don’t lead to catastrophe.

Bownes recently helped a public services org—one dealing with people’s finances, he said—to use GenAI to “speed up their case management.”

“It would be inconceivably irresponsible to create a system in which decisions could be made by a public services organization, in the name of the public good, that would make up an answer, that was actually an artifact of hallucination or bias, or just a model not really understanding the question,” Bownes said.

What’s an agent? Bownes’s definition of an agent sounds more like a thermostat, at least on the surface. It is, according to Bownes, “a model which can take an action within its environment, with some level of autonomy.”

Keep reading here.—BH

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