Category Archives: Published work

SiliconANGLE: It won’t be long before we are all chatbot prompt engineers

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Back in January, Andrej Karpathy, who now works for OpenAI LP and used to be the director of artificial intelligence for Tesla Inc., tweeted: “The hottest new programming language is English.” Karpathy was only semiserious, yet he has identified a new career path: AI chatbot prompt engineer. It could catch on.

The term describes the people who create and refine the text prompts that users type into the chatbot query windows — hence the use of English, or any other standard human language. These types of engineers don’t need to learn any code, but they do need to learn how the AI chatbots work, what they’re good at doing and what they’re not good at doing.

I interviewed several experts about whether the discipline will become its own career path in my post for SiliconANGLE here.

SiliconANGLE: ChatGPT detectors still have trouble separating human and AI-generated texts

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The growth of ChatGPT and other chatbots over the past year has also stimulated the growth of software that can be used to detect whether a text is most likely to originate from these automated tools. That market continues to evolve, but lately there is some mixed news that not all detector programs are accurate, and at least one has actually been discontinued.

I examine two different academic reviews of several of these detector tools, and how they have failed under varying circumstances, for my post for SiliconANGLE here.

SiliconANGLE: That Chinese attack on Microsoft’s Azure cloud? It’s worse than it first looked

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The revelations last week that Chinese hackers had breached a number of U.S. government email accounts indicate the problem is a lot worse than was initially thought, according to new research today by Wiz Inc. Indeed, this hack could turn out to be as damaging and as far-reaching as the SolarWinds supply chain compromises of last year.

In my post for SiliconANGLE, I summarize what Wiz learned about the attack, what you have to do to scan and fix any potential problems, and why people who choose “login with Microsoft” are playing with fire.

SiliconANGLE: The state of collaboration: It’s the people, not the tech, who make it all work

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Business collaboration is finally fulfilling its promise — but less because of new technology than people finding better ways to use it.

The technology has gotten a boost, thanks to post-COVID distributed work teams that have embraced video conferencing and instant messaging. But figuring out the collaboration workflows isn’t just choosing between Microsoft Teams and Zoom. but becoming more adept about when and how to work with others. In other words, having the right people with the right mindsets and operating under the right corporate culture are more important than having the right technical infrastructure.

My take on the evolution of collaboration tools for SiliconANGLE can be found here.

Next week, tune in for this webinar that I am doing for Vonage that will cover this ground in more detail.

SiliconANGLE: Attackers target the Domain Name System, the internet’s phone book. Here’s how to fight back

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The foundational Domain Name System, essentially the phone book for the internet, used to be something nobody using the net much noticed, but lately it has become more of a target, and the cost of attacks against it are huge and growing.

Recent events have once again brought issues involving the DNS, as it’s called for short, to the forefront.

One reason has to do with the expansion of the internet. There are more targets, more bandwidth and more automated tools to launch attacks, making it easier for the bad guys to cast a wider net with more destructive power.

I explore the role of DNS, the collection of various attacks, and the role this protocol plays in my latest story for SiliconANGLE here.

 

SiliconANGLE: Understanding these nine ransomware stages can help harden cyber defenses

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Ransomware payouts are on track to make 2023 another banner year for criminals, netting more than $440 million since January, according to a recent analysis by Chainalysis. But there are ways for organizations to blunt the impact. Ransomware continues to be a growth business opportunity for criminals, whether or not victims pay up, because stolen data carries a certain value on the dark web, the shady corner of the internet reachable with special software.

For my latest post for SiliconANGLE, I put together a nine-stage model for how ransomware operates, to bring some clarity and be useful in figuring out how to detect an attack before it develops into a full-on multidimensional threat.

SiliconANGLE: Managing supercloud authentication remains tricky – with no easy solution in sight

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Authenticating people and apps in the cloud stretch SSO tools to the breaking point, not helped by sloppy access controls, continuous auth and rising MFA bypass hacks — read my analysis for SiliconANGLE here. The issues stemming from poorly provisioned containers, inconsistent access rights and over-privileged users will remain for the near future — all the more so as clouds become more pervasive and more complex.

SiliconANGLE: US-EU data privacy framework approved but still could be inadequate

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The E.U.-U.S. Data Privacy Framework was adopted today by the European Union. This follows their adoption by the U.S. Department of Commerce last week. The action also creates a new U.S.-based judicial body, called the Data Protection Review Court, which will review cases about EU privacy rights that fall under the framework’s jurisdiction. Some privacy analysts feel this isn’t enough protection, as I describe in my story for SiliconANGLE today.

SiliconANGLE: State data privacy laws are changing fast – here’s what businesses need to know

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With no federal data privacy law on the books, states are doubling down on new laws governing the protection of people’s data.

In the past year, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas have all enacted such laws, more than doubling the number states had them previously — those being California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia.

Although that represents progress, it’s also a challenge for companies doing business nationally to keep track of the subtle differences among the various laws. My analysis for SiliconANGLE here.