CYBERSECURITY

Hany Farid

As deepfakes become more sophisticated, defenders need to keep up—an increasingly hard job, according to one expert.

The need to defend against deepfakes is critical, said Hany Farid, chief science officer and co-founder of GetReal Security and a professor at UC Berkeley. Widely recognized as an expert in detecting deepfakes, he has witnessed video and audio fakery become increasingly sophisticated in recent years.

In a follow-up email to IT Brew, Farid said that many defenders are doing “nothing” and are “either blind to this new threat” of deepfakes, or “willfully blind.”

“Our entire sense of reality is on shaky ground,” Farid wrote. “So much of our day-to-day personal and professional lives is carried out on a flat screen, 18 inches from our face. We are not fully prepared for what happens when we simply can’t believe anything we see on these screens.”

How to defend against this rising threat.—CN

      

Sponsored By PwC

Episode 2 of The Intelligence Shift, our podcast with PwC, is hot off the presses.

Campbell Brown, a veteran journalist turned tech executive turned AI entrepreneur (and founder of Forum AI) joins Dan Priest to discuss the central trust gap in AI. They also chat about the cultural divide between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world on whether AI is a threat or an opportunity.

They dig into how Forum AI uses senior domain experts to build benchmarks and train AI "judgment agents" to evaluate models at scale, pushing back against the industry norm of crowdsourced evaluation that measures preference rather than accuracy.

What’s the most realistic path to building the trust AI needs to actually get adopted at scale? Tune in to find out.

CYBERSECURITY

J. Eric McAlpine

After a blockbuster 2025 for cybersecurity M&A deals, the industry may be getting an unexpected sequel.

For those who need a quick refresher, there were a total of 261 US cybersecurity M&A deals last year, a 12% uptick from the year prior, according to PitchBook data provided to IT Brew.

It was also a year of colossal transactions. Google’s $32 billion purchase of cloud cybersecurity platform Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’s $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk were just a couple of deals that shook the industry to its core due to their size. J. Eric McAlpine, founder and CEO of cybersecurity investment bank Momentum Cyber, refers to 2025 as the “year of the mega deal” (the bank tracked a total of 400 M&A deals last year).

“We really saw eight substantial deals really drive the market last year in terms of total deal volume by dollar count,” McAlpine said.

It’s a buyer’s and a seller’s market now.—BM

      

WORD OF THE WEEK

Digital forensics: This technique of using digital evidence to investigate crimes, including cyberattacks, is often part of incident response. When it comes to cybersecurity, digital forensics happens everywhere from incident response to disaster recovery. Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

Morning Brew Inc, Photo: Adobe Stock

With astronomical computing bills stacking up, a spendthrift era of “tokenmaxxing” is giving way to a more frugal mindset among companies building AI systems.

Taking a cue from this trend, workflow software platform Pegasystems will soon roll out a new pricing model that eliminates token-based rates in favor of a flat charge per resolved case. The company is one of a wave of software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers rethinking per-seat and other traditional pricing models in favor of charging for actual results.

The shift comes as businesses worry that incentivizing AI adoption at all costs hasn’t necessarily led to higher ROI. Instead, they end up using costly, sophisticated AI for tasks that could be better served by cheaper, simpler tools, one analyst noted to Morning Brew. Meanwhile, SaaS vendors are facing ongoing pressure as the rise of AI agents and coding threatens their own value propositions.

Can a chatbot help you pinch pennies?—PK

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 1 million. That’s how many tons of steel per year are needed for the data center construction boom in the US. (Ars Technica)

Quote: “Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.”—Xbox CEO Asha Sharma on the need for layoffs and restructuring at the videogame console company (Xbox Wire)

Read: “AI wealth” is distorting the San Francisco housing market. (the New York Times)

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