HYTE Readings - February 2025
Our monthly running blog post of articles from all around the web. Read what WE read at HYTE.
The Cyber Insurance Reckoning: Why AI-powered attacks are breaking coverage (and what comes next)
Modern cyberattacks, increasingly powered by AI, are outpacing the coverages typically provided by traditional business and professional liability insurance, making specialized cybersecurity insurance essential. These policies are intricate, often excluding social engineering and insider threats, and require firms to have robust security posture as a precondition for coverage. As AI-driven threats evolve, the future of cyber insurance will likely see more stringent coverage criteria and higher premiums, with a particular focus on compliance and third-party risk management.
Taryn Plumb - February 20, 2025 - VentureBeat
The Cloud Giants Stumble
David discusses a notable slowdown in growth among major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, with their recent financial results falling below market expectations. This trend is attributed to enterprises repatriating applications to on-premises environments, driven by the high costs of public cloud services and dissatisfaction with the return on investment in AI. The market is shifting towards more specialized providers and private cloud solutions as companies seek to address issues of cost-efficiency, data sovereignty, and the need for infrastructure that better suits their specific needs.
David Linthicum - February 11, 2025 - InfoWorld
Evolving our Middleware Strategy
The Red Hat middleware engineering and product teams will join the IBM Data Security, IAM, and Runtimes organization, to form a single team within IBM.
Matt Hicks - February 6, 20205
Technical Debt (Something that we talk about often)
Ransomware: Victims Who Pay a Ransom Drops to All-Time Low
The percentage of organizations that opt to pay ransoms after suffering ransomware attacks has dropped to an all-time low of 25%, according to incident response firm Coveware's analysis of data from the last quarter of the year. This decrease is attributed to a combination of improved defenses, enhanced business resilience, law enforcement actions against ransomware operators, and a growing tendency among victims to refuse payment to criminals. Despite this positive trend, the report also notes an increase in attacks involving data exfiltration, suggesting that while fewer are paying ransoms, attackers are shifting tactics to maintain profitability.
Mathew J. Schwartz - February 5, 2025 - Data Breach Today
8 Million Requests Later, We Made The SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack Look Amateur
The research team at WatchTowr successfully demonstrated a substantial, hypothetical, Internet-wide supply chain attack by exploiting abandoned Amazon S3 buckets, showing that simple oversight can have major security implications. Over a two-month period, they intercepted 8 million HTTP requests from diverse and critical sectors, including government and military networks, proving the potential for severe vulnerabilities. The experiment underscores the ongoing need for meticulous attention to infrastructure maintenance and highlights the escalating threats in cybersecurity, urging the software development community to harden their systems against seemingly minor threats.
watchTowr Labs - February 4, 2025
Technology skills gap plagues industries, and upskilling is a moving target
Thois article discusses the pervasive technology skills gap impacting US industries, exacerbated by the rapid development and adoption of generative AI (genAI), which is forecasted to see companies investing $42 billion annually by 2030. It highlights the challenges organizations face in finding skilled workers, with a 2000% surge in job postings for AI skills not matched by current education and training rates. To bridge this gap, the piece advocates for significant upskilling and reskilling efforts, noting a shift towards valuing skills over degrees and the necessity for continuous learning in the evolving tech landscape.
Lucas Mearian - February 3, 2025 - ComputerWorld
