CYBERSECURITY

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It’s football season, and opposing NFL teams have more in common with cyberattackers than one might think—for one, they both want to rush the other team into a bad decision.

The San Francisco 49ers, pairing with cybersecurity company Doppel, is one football team trying to avoid fumbling their cyber defenses. The team’s new platform attempts to identify digital risks such as impersonation threats and brand attacks, train staff via AI-driven security simulations, and stop threats to email security.

Costa Kladianos, EVP of technology at the 49ers at Levi’s Stadium, told IT Brew that, instead of outsourcing its cybersecurity to multiple vendors, the organization opted for a holistic platform with one vendor so that they could ensure that “the platforms were talking to each other.”

“You have to come at it with the education, incredibly important, with the technical controls,” Kladianos said. “You want to have many layers, and you want all of them to work together.”

How to prevent a cybersecurity fumble.—CN

      

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CYBERSECURITY

Francis Scialabba

Making sure an AI agent behaves takes a combination of rules and monitoring.

On Sept. 28, chipmaker Nvidia announced its Open Agent Safety Platform, an open-source approach to agentic defenses, combining functions like agent monitoring, restricted workspaces, and zero-trust access enforcement.

Despite these robust AI defenses coming online, many security pros are recommending tried-and-true practices to defend against unexpected AI behavior.

“You have to think about [safeguards] in terms of multiple layers of controls, and that would include, at a very basic level, the same types of best practices and controls that we think about for securing enterprise systems generally,” Andrew Tannenbaum, partner and global cohead of cybersecurity at law firm A&O Shearman, told IT Brew.

Whether you’re trying to keep an agent from exposing sensitive data, deleting that data, escaping its boundaries, or being co-opted by tactics like prompt-injection, here’s a look at the basics that still apply.

Inventory, anyone?—BH

      

WORD OF THE WEEK

In-memory database: Because in-memory databases don’t need to access standard disk drives, they can offer minimal response times to requests, along with ultra-low latency. That makes them an ideal database for applications requiring lightning-fast responses, including e-commerce, autonomous driving, and gaming. Learn more.

CLOUD

Illustration: Shannon May, Photos: Adobe Stock

Ask any small-town reporter and they’ll tell you local reporting is essential—IT pros should take a similar approach when it comes to tracking internal AI agents.

AI agents operating in enterprise environments can access important data. If their actions are not properly monitored, it can lead to problems down the line, Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer told IT Brew.

“You’re basically running around with your master key for all the cars you own…and shouting, ‘Hey, I have a key here that is all my assets that I own,’” Angerer said. “It’s only a matter of time that somebody comes to you and just takes it.”

Warning signs. Enterprises are aware of the issue, as are AI providers. Efforts to secure agents are underway, with agreement frameworks in place to restrict access. In September, AWS, Okta, and Google Cloud announced a coalition, the Blueprint Alliance, to address AI agent security. Nvidia followed suit with a boundary-securing system.

Observability is key to agent management, Neo4j CTO Philip Rathle told IT Brew in September.

Reviewing three levels of agentic access and permissions.—EH

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 66%. That’s the proportion of Americans who oppose building new data centers in the US, according to a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll. (ABC News)

Quote: “We’ve actually seen quite a decent use case here where AI can discover some critical vulnerabilities and then the community can come together to remediate them.”—James Sullivan, director of cyber and tech at the Royal United Services Institute in London, with a positive outlook on last week’s PHP emergency (the Associated Press) 

Read: Why security needs to be a part of customer experience—and how to implement it. (TechTarget)

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