From afar, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about Workleap’s IT department, which supports roughly 450 employees each day. However, some may raise eyebrows upon learning that the team of roughly eight employees doesn’t report to an IT manager, but is instead supervised by another unsung hero department: HR.

Since August, Workleap’s IT team has reported to Cyril Boisard, Workleap’s director of people, a move he told IT Brew has been in the works for a long time and one that he made after seeing many “parallels” between HR and IT in how they support the “experience of the user.”

“It was making a lot of sense to add it to the HR because [in] HR, we define policy,” Boisard said. “We talk with users and [our] primary focus is the experience of the employee. But that’s also what we want to be the focus of IT.”

The process. Boisard told IT Brew the first steps of the transition involved him learning what was going on in Workleap’s IT department, including ongoing projects and the overall vision Martin Sirard, Workleap’s IT support manager, had for the team moving forward.

Read the rest here.—BM

Like that one kid in every group project in high school, malicious hackers are tricking you into doing a lot of the hard work.

Cybersecurity company Gen examined its Q3 threat data and saw a 614% quarterly increase in “scam-yourself” attacks: fake tutorials, updates, CAPTCHAs, and fixes that trick users into deploying step-by-step malware installation. Several researchers and vendors have noticed the social engineering trend this year.

“For security solutions, it might be harder to identify that this is a malicious action, as we’re seeing it’s the user doing it,” Luis Corrons, security evangelist at Gen, told IT Brew.

In its report, Gen observed deceptive examples:

• YouTube tutorials: A video, cited by Gen, walks the user through a software installation, but a download link, found in the comments, leads to malware.
• README files: The cybersecurity company shared screenshots of instructions that lead to malicious actions, like disabling antivirus software.
• ClickFixes: Gen observed alert windows that convince users to remediate a problem by copying a script to a clipboard, pasting it to the command prompt, and hitting “enter.”

It’s not just Gen. IT Brew has also reported on fake CAPTCHAs that weaponize copy-and-paste and trick humans-just-trying-to-prove-they’re-humans into running malicious commands. (In Q3 alone, Gen claims it stopped fake CAPTCHA attacks against 2.1 million users.)

Read more here.—BH

Google unveiled a new quantum chip that has racked up some mic-dropping achievements.

The chip, which goes by Willow, was introduced in a research paper published on Nature and a blog post by Google Quantum AI lead and founder Hartmut Neven earlier this week. In the post, Neven touted some of Willow’s accomplishments, including how the chip cracked a “key challenge” in quantum error correction, techniques used to shield quantum information from errors. Willow is capable of reducing errors “exponentially” as the amount of qubits, a basic unit of information in quantum computing, increases (usually, more qubits equals more errors).

If that’s not impressive, Willow also completed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes. For comparison, today’s fastest supercomputer is able to complete the same computation in 10 septillion years (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years!).

“As the first system below threshold, this is the most convincing prototype for a scalable logical qubit built to date,” Neven wrote in a blog post. “It’s a strong sign that useful, very large quantum computers can indeed be built.”

Keep reading here.—BM