Being in the right place at the right time can feel like you’ve struck gold. That’s how Liam Durbin, CIO at the Marzetti Company, must have felt when its initiative to clean corporate data happened to wrap up just as the AI boom started.

Durbin told IT Brew that the Westerville, Ohio-headquartered company, best known for its dips and salad dressings, set off to transform its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software shortly after he joined in 2018. The previous version of its platform had siloed processes across its 16 manufacturing facilities.

“You couldn’t take an employee from one location and put them in another location expecting them to be able to thrive,” Durbin said. “It was just very, very kludgy.”

How a unified data environment is benefitting this salad dressing company.—BM

It doesn’t take a marketing genius to know that building a brand is everything, even for some IT professionals who want to expand their careers.

Just like networking, personal branding can help an IT pro make important connections, set themselves up for future jobs, and even develop a following. But how can they brand in a way that helps them stand out from the crowd?

What even is personal branding? IT Brew caught up with Joseph Liu, a career consultant and host of The Career Relaunch podcast, to break down what exactly personal branding entails.

“In a nutshell, personal branding is about defining and reinforcing who you are and what you want to be known for as a professional,” Liu said, adding that a strong brand can help a professional stand out from others in their industry, especially if they highlight unique skills and experience.

Even introverts can build their personal brand.—BM

According to a recent report from cybersecurity company Huntress, threat actors have driven fraudulent and malicious ChatGPT- and Grok-based troubleshooting conversations to appear prominently in search results.

The entries seem like legitimate help for a task, such as how to “clear disk space on macOS.” Instead of containing helpful troubleshooting advice, however, the manipulated entries offer copy-and-paste steps for installing infostealers.

The chats appear near the top of Google results, and avoid traditional malware downloads in favor of four everyday, often harmless actions: search, click, copy, paste. And IT pros should be concerned, according to Jonathan Semon, principal SOC analyst and co-writer of the December 9 report summary on the Huntress site, given people’s willingness to trust chatbots’ answers.

“It’s stealthy, it’s quiet, it’s quick, it’s cheap, it’s scalable, and it’s most importantly, in my opinion, psychologically effective,” Semon told IT Brew. “All it takes is one admin to have a password leaked or to have a backdoor created on their machine, and that’s how ransomware gets in.”

Why this scheme may feel familiar.—BH

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