In this threat landscape, it’s advisable to keep your friends close and your C-suite executives closer. Fortunately, one digital executive protection company is setting standards to ensure the latter can be done thoroughly.

BlackCloak has released a digital executive protection framework that intends to provide organizations with a set of holistic principles that can be followed to help secure executives and other high-level team members from cyber threats. The framework, which it claims is the first in the industry, has 14 areas of focus, including deepfake protection, personal device hardening, incident response, and physical protection.

Perfect timing. IT Brew spoke with BlackCloak founder and CEO Chris Pierson, who designed the set of standards in response to the interest he was seeing from security leaders for more digital executive protection guidance last year, especially following the death of former UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot and killed in a targeted attack last year.

“More individuals, more executives, more chief information security officers, CISOs, and more chief security officers, CSOs, have really been asking for and wanting definitive guidance in a framework that is neutral [and] that addresses all the potential aspects of digital and data protection together,” Pierson said. He estimates that he saw a three-to-five-fold increase in inquiries from CIOs and CISOs following Thompson’s death.

Let’s talk “holistic protection.”—BM

Professor Paris Smaragdis often needs neural networks for his audio-related research. The AI systems allow him, for example, to extract specific sounds from a noisy jumble—a feature that came in handy when extracting conversations for the 2021 Beatles documentary series Get Back.

The neural networks processing his data sets require fast-computing GPUs: specialized electronics, often housed in on-campus data racks.

But at the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he’s not the only professor who needs the AI hardware.

“We have people doing a lot of computer vision, a lot of language processing, and these are folks that need to train really big models and really big data sets,” Smaragdis said.

Smaragdis said he has seen “exponential” growth in the use of GPUs among students and staff, especially his colleagues studying computer vision, language processing, and of course, AI.

So, how can a GPU cluster be optimized to meet demand?—BH

Another day, another opportunity for Elon Musk to open a potential Pandora’s box of IT security risks inside the federal government.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Trump administration initiative effectively run by the tech billionaire, has now reportedly accessed internal federal payrolls affecting around 276,000 people working at dozens of agencies, according to the New York Times. DOGE staffers are now able to access reams of sensitive employee information, including Social Security numbers. The new access has raised concerns about an expanding threat surface for vital information and operations. Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told NPR in mid-March why she doesn’t trust DOGE.

“Part of what is unnerving and is scary both to companies whose data is involved and also Americans whose most sensitive financial information is at risk, is that we don’t know what they’re doing,” Meyer, who resigned in February, said.

Guess what happened to the CISO who tried to stop DOGE access…—EH