IT pros spin up accounts. Threat actors look to take them for a spin.

Test accounts help an IT pro who needs to quickly onboard new employees, or configure a new application, or check a database connection. The setups are valuable ways of testing a proof of concept—as long as administrators remember to get rid of the proof.

Former system admins who spoke with IT Brew shared their experiences working fast and creating test accounts. The problem with test accounts spun up quickly? They run the risk of being misconfigured or exposed to the internet, the former system admins said.

“Oftentimes these test environments don’t have the same level of technical cybersecurity controls,” Andy Thompson, a former senior admin for multiple organizations and current offensive cybersecurity research evangelist at identity management company CyberArk, told IT Brew.

Read more here.—BH

Does your org embrace employees using their personal computers and phones for company work? Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies can be vague and hard to enforce, and most folks just tell you to “treat ‘em like company-owned devices.”

Need some advice that's a little more helpful than that?

You’re in luck. Kolide put together a top-notch blog post addressing all your q’s about BYOD. Packed with info and insights on everything from different device scenarios to tips on mitigating personal device risk, this bad boy is a game changer.

You’ll get all the deets on managing:

• mobile devices
• third-party contractor devices
• personal computers

Clear your BYOD confusion.

Many cloud transitions are falling back down to earth, according to a recent survey commissioned by cloud computing firm Citrix.

Citrix commissioned a poll of 350 business and IT leaders in the US, and found 94% had moved some of their workloads back from the cloud to on-premises facilities. The top reasons for such “cloud repatriations,” according to respondents, include unexpected security issues (41%), high project expectations (29%), and failure to meet or set expectations (23%).

Calvin Hsu, VP of product management at Citrix, told IT Brew the results likely reflect expiration of pandemic-era cloud contracts. With 70% of respondents expressing optimism about future cloud projects, Hsu said executives aren’t backing away from the cloud, but are reconsidering which workloads would be better handled locally.

“Now we’re hitting that point where people are looking at their renewal bills and their go-forward strategy after making some of the commitments that they [made] during the pandemic,” Hsu said.

Read more here.—TM

Are optical discs obsolete? Don’t be so quick to say obvs.

Researchers from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, and other Chinese institutions announced in February that they’ve demonstrated a way to pack more than a petabit of data (125 terabytes) into one optical disk. That’s larger than the world’s biggest hard drive, a $40,000 goliath which can hold 100 terabytes.

Previous optical storage methods, like CD-ROMs, DVDs, and Blu-rays, store data in one, two, or even four layers. The researchers claim new advances in optical technology, most centrally an ultra-transparent film called “aggregation-induced emission dye-doped photoresist” (AIE-DDPR), allow them to encode data on as many as 100 layers and achieve 1.6 petabits (200 terabytes) of storage on a single disc of typical size.

Using AIE-DDPR in combination with dual lasers, the scientists reported they were able to blow past the optical diffraction limit—as ZME Science explained, that’s the smallest point an optical imaging system can resolve. Historically, that’s been limited to around the size of the wavelengths of light produced by an optical device.

Keep reading here.—TM

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