CYBERSECURITY

Morning Brew Inc.

Cheaters never prosper—especially not if the engineers at video game company Electronic Arts (EA) have anything to say about it.

It’s never a dull day for EA CISO and SVP of Security Engineering Mike Reavey, whose job entails not only keeping hackers away, but ensuring games remain fun and fair for players.

“There’s not a lot of other industries where you have to do things like fight cheaters and try and keep the experience super fair,” Reavey told IT Brew.

Cheat code. That mission often means defending against the cheating ecosystem, which has a sophisticated business model and resources like customer support and advertising to support it.

“There’s a real commercial enterprise at play here that we’re up against. It’s no longer the left-right, left-right kind of fun cheats,” Reavey said.

What’s EA Javelin Anticheat?—BM

      

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CYBERSECURITY

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For many employees, cybersecurity training is a quarterly video warning them not to click on mysterious links. For senior executives, though, helping defend against internal and external threats can involve simulations, tabletop exercises, and intensive group activities—which can take a lot of time.

But what happens when executives claim they’re too busy running the company to actually participate? How can IT teams ensure that leadership actually locks in for the big defensive plan?

Timing is key. Tim Rawlins, director and senior adviser at NCC Group, suggested the best time for busy executives’ cybersecurity training is in conjunction with board meetings and other big corporate events that place the C-suite in the same room.

“The fact that they are there to make strategic decisions, they are there to manage senior stakeholders, and they are there to approve communications, we drum that into them,” Rawlins said. “You get them in the room, you identify who is in the room…because you want to figure out, have you got the right people in the room.”

The case for war room exercises.—CN

      

SOFTWARE

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Rogue AI agents are attracting a lot of buzz within the cybersecurity and IT communities after a few high-profile incidents, but experts suggest that more stringent oversight of security controls can help organizations face down their agentic fears.

Probably the most high-profile example of the chaos that rogue agents can potentially unleash is OpenAI’s AI models recently breaking free of its testing sandbox and attempting to hack the IT infrastructure of Hugging Face, which builds tools for machine-learning applications.

Cillian Kieran, the founder and CEO of Ethyca, an AI governance and data privacy company, told IT Brew that with rogue AI agents generating “fantastically salacious headlines,” it’s critical for organizations to pay attention to strong governance policies for agentic AI, including requiring AI vendors to show their governance infrastructure such as runtime controls.

“You need a layer of tooling that says I can make my data safe to use with these models or vendors,” Kieran said. “If those models and vendors aren’t providing those tools, the enterprise should be investing in it.”

How IT pros can take accountability for their agents’ actions.—CN

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $200. That’s how little synthetic identities cost on dark web marketplaces, according to Coveron and NordLayer. (TechRadar Pro)

Quote: “I’d personally find it much more interesting to learn about someone who has built one to two agents that have completely changed the way a person operates, as opposed to someone who has opened the floodgates to 100 thrown together agents that maybe aren’t great.”—Aryeh Needle, founder of LevelUp Growth Consulting, on the “bot bragging” trend (Business Insider)

Read: Some companies are tying employee promotions to their use of AI. (BBC)

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