CYBERSECURITY

Major pain

In a report published March 20, the Cyber Safety Review Board said that a summer 2023 intrusion, in which Chinese threat actors compromised Microsoft’s cloud environment and inboxes belonging to 22 organizations and over 500 people globally, could have been prevented and “should never have happened.”

In the CSRB’s review, the board said it had identified “operational and strategic decisions” indicative of “a corporate culture that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.”

Gold rush. In May and June 2023, Storm-0558—threat actors linked to China and known to have “espionage objectives,” according to Microsoft—compromised multiple Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes, with the CSRB noting that the threat actors struck “the espionage equivalent of gold” in its compromise.

The State Department was the first to uncover and notify Microsoft of the intrusion last year on June 16, with the report noting that the agency’s security operations center “detected anomalies in access to its mail systems” the day before.

Read more here.—AF

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

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CYBERSECURITY

Public vector

There hasn’t been a cyberattack on government agencies every day this year​​—it’s been more like every three days.

According to recent Q1 data from the research firm Comparitech, 2024’s cyber shakedowns are decreasing compared to the same quarter last year. One number holding steady, however? Attacks against the public sector.

“The government attacks seem to be staying pretty static and not going down,” Paul Bischoff, Comparitech editor, told IT Brew.

Ransomware in action. The group counted a total of 154 attacks as of March 2024, according to its collection of reports, news, and cybersecurity databases. The hundred-high figure, though likely depressing to security pros, is actually a significant decline from Comparitech’s Q1 numbers from last year: 337 attacks.

Government agencies made up 36 of 2024’s 154 first-quarter targets, which also included the additional sectors of business, education, and healthcare. Comparitech’s numbers for government agency attacks in 2023 totaled 202 for the year and 50 in its first quarter. In other words: Ransomware is down overall, since last year, just not if you’re in the public sector.

Read more here.—BH

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

CLOUD

AI brain in the mainframe

AI hype has mostly centered on massive, cloud-based generative AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot.

Yet many organizations may find running their own custom AI services on owned or rented hardware to be surprisingly accessible—and feasible—in the near future, experts told IT Brew. Other factors like European data regulations may also ultimately affect where companies deploy their services.

Up to speed. Brandon Jung, VP of ecosystem and business development for AI assistant developer Tabnine, told IT Brew the most costly up-front components of AI are training data and deep learning. Once both are in place, the game switches to making inferences (the actual outputs of AI) cheaper and more efficient.

While broad-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot are expensive to train and run, Jung said, “If I have my own data, and I can build a custom model—yes, it won’t solve a bunch of problems, but it’s going to be very efficient and cost-effective, and bring a whole lot more value to the problem area that it’s addressing.”

Moreover, Jung said open-source AI like Llama 2 or Gemma that can be run on-premises are converging in performance with more popular proprietary AIs, and may soon be indistinguishable from the average users’ perspective.

Keep reading here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

PATCH NOTES

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