Author: InfoForTech

Microsoft’s restyled Xbox logo. (Microsoft Image) Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, roughly 100 days into her tenure, delivered a blunt assessment of Microsoft’s gaming business in a memo to employees Wednesday, saying that heavy spending with thin profit margins and declining revenue “cannot continue.”  The memo, posted publicly on the Xbox blog, came as Bloomberg News reported that the division is planning major job cuts next month, soon after the close of Microsoft’s fiscal year on June 30. Xbox is also planning significant cuts to marketing and other budgets, according to the report. The exact scale of the layoffs is not…

Why the ones that exist today are already failing the organizations that built them. Every breach has a before and after. The before is a system that looked fine. Dashboards green. Tickets closed. Leadership satisfied with the quarterly security review deck. The after is a war room. Legal on the phone. PR managing the fallout. Engineers reverse-engineering how someone spent three months inside the network before anyone noticed. And right in the middle of all of this is a group of people who were supposed to prevent exactly this: the Security Operations Center. The honest question to ask is not…

How do we know when the world has changed?On June 1, a team of scientists published a preprint scientific paper claiming they had edited human embryonic DNA with more precision than any previous attempt. As a technical achievement, the work is undoubtedly impressive, largely avoiding the errors that had accompanied earlier efforts to gene edit embryos. With further development, such embryonic editing could free future children from fatal or debilitating genetic diseases, but as the veteran science writer Carl Zimmer reported in the New York Times later that week, the real headline news was that the work “could open the…

As artificial intelligence becomes a go-to tool for everything from homework to workplace research, many people are also turning to chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok to verify whether news stories are true. But new research suggests that habit could actually make people worse at spotting misinformation over time. A new study from the MIT Media Lab found that relying on AI to determine whether news is accurate can weaken a person’s ability to independently identify fake or misleading content. Researchers compared the effect to GPS navigation systems, which make travel easier but can gradually reduce a person’s natural…

On-PremisesDecoy servers, databases, file shares built from your actual terrainLateral movement, insider threats, privilege escalationEndpointFake credentials, planted browser passwords, registry breadcrumbsAccount hijacking, credential harvesting, pass-the-hashNetworkDecoy services across DNS, TCP, HTTP, SSL, and custom app protocolsUnauthorized reconnaissance, port scanning, lateral movement. Provides early threat detection across the network fabric.Cloud (AWS)Fake IAM entries, decoy storage buckets, cloud-native trap resourcesCloud credential abuse, cloud-native lateral movementOT / ICSDecoy ICS devices running industrial protocols (Modbus, DNP3, etc.)Recon against industrial control systems and SCADAActive DirectoryFake accounts, fake service principals, honeytokens inside ADAD enumeration, Kerberoasting, credential theft at recon stage

New research from SmarterX surfaced not just where B2B marketers are in their AI journey but how they feel about it.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Valve Valve will not be renewing its stock of physical gift cards for Steam. The gaming company anticipates that the cards will be completely gone from retailers’ shelves by the end of 2026. In an update to one of its support pages, Valve explained that is making this change in response to scammers. Using gift cards to con people out of money has become a common enough trend that the Federal Trade Commission has an FAQ about the practice. In Valve’s case, it seems the business’ escalating steps…

With new generations of AI models fueling both rapid software vulnerability discovery and the potential for faster exploitation by malicious hackers, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a new directive on Wednesday that requires more rapid and efficient software patching by federal civilian agencies. The “binding operational directive” (BOD) lays out a rubric for how quickly bugs must be fixed based on four assessments of urgency, with a turnaround time in critical cases of just three days.Chris Butera, CISA’s acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity, told reporters on Wednesday that the goal of the directive is to…

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a “resurgence and expansion” of JDY, a covert network associated with China-nexus state-sponsored threat actors. “The JDY botnet comprises over 1,500 SOHO [small office and home office] and IoT devices and operates as a centrally controlled, high-performance scanner used to discover, fingerprint, and continuously map exposed services at scale,” Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. JDY was first flagged as a cluster within another botnet codenamed KV-botnet in mid-December 2023. Primarily used for broader scanning against internet targets, the stealthy network comprising compromised SOHO routers, firewalls, and IoT…

Amazon Web Services Inc.’s next-generation custom silicon is finally being made accessible to customers for the first time with the launch of the Elastic Compute Cloud M9g and M9gd instances. They’re powered by the all-new Graviton5 central processing unit, which is designed to deliver superior compute performance for diverse cloud workloads, including artificial intelligence applications. The company said Graviton5 is designed to support real-time AI reasoning, code generation, multistep task orchestration and complex, always-on workloads to enable “AI that takes action.” By that, it’s referring to autonomous AI agents that can be set to work performing tasks on behalf of…