If you’re an IT professional, a lot of the companies supplying your hardware and software had a rough day Thursday.

Following President Trump’s latest tariff declaration on April 2, tech values slid and the “Magnificent 7” stocks—which include companies like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon—not-so-magnificently lost over a trillion dollars in Thursday trading.

In addition to a 10% baseline tariff on US imports from nearly all countries, Trump announced, via a posterboard big enough to hide an NFL coach’s questionable play calls, additional levies on many other trading partners.

Market analysts who spoke with IT Brew are looking ahead to consider how the volatility might impact the prices of IT hardware and software—if at all.

“How much something like hardware could go up, we’re sort of gaming this out and seeing that companies are probably going to eat their margins…when it comes to physical things like chips and other tech parts, but I have a hard time seeing tariffs impacting software pricing,” Lily Taft, partner and portfolio manager at Main Street Research, said.

“I think it’s not going to impact IT buying decisions, unless we see this unfold into a true economic slowdown,” she added, predicting that an economic dropoff is a “low probability.”

Read the rest here.—BH

You have the right to remain silent...except when you are a major tech vendor, like Oracle, at the center of serious breach allegations, according to some cybersecurity professionals.

In late March, Oracle made headlines after a threat actor by the alias of rose87168 claimed on BreachForums that it had six million records obtained from Oracle Cloud’s single sign-on (SSO) and lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) systems for sale.

However, despite mounting evidence supporting the breach allegations and a class-action lawsuit filed against the tech giant in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in relation to the matter last week, Oracle largely declined to elaborate on or even confirm the incident at first. The tech giant previously told several publications, including The Register and Dark Reading, that the published credentials are not for Oracle Cloud and no breach has occurred.

Bloomberg reported on April 2 that the vendor informed some customers that an attacker had gained access to a “legacy environment” that hadn’t been used in eight years, and that the FBI and CrowdStrike were investigating the incident. Oracle did not immediately respond to IT Brew’s requests for comment on the alleged breach.

Read more here.—BM

In like a lion, out like a lamb—the C-suite was moving in March. Here’s who went where.

Phillip Miller heads to H&R Block

Turns out, you can hack your way to the top. That’s what Phillip Miller, author of Hacking Success: How Owners and Officers Should Cultivate Policy for Cybersecurity and Use of Artificial Intelligence, has found. He’s H&R Block’s new CISO.

Miller comes to the tax preservation services company after a 30-year career, including high-level IT positions at AWS and in the retail space at Brooks Brothers, Payless ShoeSource, and more. He also founded the security advisory and consulting company Qurple in 2011.

New Homeland Security CIO Antoine McCord has sparse record

DHS has a new CIO, but there’s precious little about him to be found online.

According to DHS, Antoine McCord is a former Marine with “over 18 years of experience in cyber operations and national security.” His time in the Marines included work in cyber and intelligence, specializing in threat detection and tech integration—after the corps he joined the intelligence services and advised on national security.

DHS also said that McCord spent time in the private sector in the cybersecurity and defense technology spaces. (IT Brew was not able to independently verify any of McCord’s experience, and DHS did not immediately respond to a request for more information.)

Keep reading here.—EH