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IT Brew

Eoin Higgins

itbrew.com

A person uses a computer in a darkened office.

FBI investigation into Hive hacking group breaks gang; State offers $10 million for more information

The operation was a ‘21st century cyber stakeout,’ the DOJ says.

an image of the US capitol building from the east

Federal officials are increasingly being targeted by commercial spyware

Rep. Jim Himes is leading a drive to take action against firms selling the spyware. 

Federal officials are increasingly being targeted by commercial spyware, raising alarm for lawmakers

‘This is the most intimidating thing that can happen on a mobile device,’ says one digital forensics expert.

Pegasus spyware targets journalist’s mobile devices, raising questions about state surveillance

The US capital on two computer screens in front of binary code on a purple background

Government

Caroline Nihill

In case of a government shutdown…don’t panic? That might be hard to do for IT pros who work for the government, either directly or as contractors—but experts suggest there are helpful steps to take during these events.

Every week of the current shutdown could cost the economy $7 billion, 

reporting. The last government shutdown cost the national economy approximately $11 billion and lasted for 34 days, CBS said, sharing data from the Congressional Budget Office.

, a California Democrat, during the 2018–2019 shutdown, an estimated 4.1 million people were working under government contracts, “though the exact number of those furloughed is unclear.” The number of IT contractors is unknown, but the Government Accountability Office 

 that the government spent approximately $10.2 billion on IT and telecom labor in fiscal year 2023.

Shutdowns can disrupt both contracted work and purchased services from the private sector, including data science, IT infrastructure maintenance, and cybersecurity. Additionally, government contractors face different challenges in the face of a shutdown than federal workers because they do not receive back pay once the government reopens.

Kevin Brancato, the SVP of product strategy at TechnoMile, told IT Brew that during a government shutdown, those contracting IT services to the government can do nothing more than look to win more business.

“That’s basically all they can do, and what they should be attempting to do right now,” Brancato said. “Make sure they’ve got their ears to the ground, listening for where the opportunities are.”

Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior advisor with the Federation of American Scientists, said “any industry that touches the federal government is going to be able to avoid any near-term harm where industries may be able to, through proper training and risk management.” These contractors can also help themselves by thinking through how they might recover financially in the long term from a shutdown.

Schulman pointed to another IT contractor concern when the government shuts down: cyber vulnerabilities. Shuttered government agencies and furloughed cybersecurity pros can make infrastructure more vulnerable to bad actors and threats. While some federal employees may still be working without pay, contractors might not be operating in any official capacity during a shutdown, making things confusing and risky.

“So much of [IT] work is not just day to day, but minute to minute, second to second,” Schulman said. “Those minutes and seconds really matter in terms of the ability to keep track of any potential risk, vulnerabilities, and updates that go on.”

Since non-essential activities are stopped during a shutdown, Brancato said, contractors should have plenty of time to provide mission-critical activities, like IT services that are necessary for security: “There’s no one there calling IT, the support staff because there’s nobody there doing these things because they’re not being worked on.”

Brancato emphasized how, with the pause in operations, contractors have the bandwidth to consider how to approach the broader IT marketplace when the shutdown is over…whenever it’s over.

What a government shutdown means for IT providers

One expert said those contracting IT services to the government can do nothing more than look to win more business.

In September, the Trump administration announced employers will need to pay a flat $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa petitions. The visa is used to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations, making it a useful tool in the IT sector. If the fee stays, what will that mean for IT?

, the administration alleged IT firms have “prominently manipulated the H-1B system, significantly harming American workers in computer-related fields.” It added that the use of H-1B outsourcing within the IT industry has taken advantage of low labor costs and increased the challenge for college graduates looking to find a job within IT.

Experts highlight the urgent need for tech talent, with analyst firms 

 writing in June 2024 that IT professionals are driving both operational efficiency and business strategy at a time when integration of technologies such as AI is critical. Executives look to the H-1B program as necessary for bringing specialized talent into a company. A $100,000 fee per visa application could impact companies’ operating models and margins, according to a 

In the same post, Forrester pointed to the possibility of large IT service providers facing a $500 million increase in annual costs if they choose to maintain H-1B visa practices for staffing. The research company predicts that costs will go up, delivery models will shift offshore for talent, and innovation within the US will suffer.

Some experts, like Ann Dunkin, former CIO for the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency respectively, said that companies looking for specialized IT talent aren’t finding enough domestic talent to satisfy the need for innovation.

“It’s absolutely critical to some of these companies to be able to hire the best,” Dunkin told IT Brew. “We should want the very best talent in the world to come to the United States. If we want to be innovative, if we want to be…the most competitive nation in the world, you get that by getting the very best talent in the world to come.”

 found that bigger tech companies receive thousands of H-1B visas for skilled workers. For example, H-1B approvals totalled 14,667 at Amazon and 5,586 at Tata Consultancy Services (an IT service and consulting tech company), and 5,189 at Microsoft.

These numbers don’t only reflect new employment approvals (i.e., new foreign workers), but also include approvals for existing workers at the same employer, already US-based workers who are shifting employers, and more.

Ashutosh Sharma, a VP and research director at Forrester Research, believes tech companies will respond quickly to any imposed fee on H-1Bs through their foreign research and development centers as talent within the US “will not be able to meet the increased demand.”

“The technology talent that is needed to meet the demand of US-based companies is not available in the US,” Sharma wrote in an email. “At least not at the scale and price point as it is available in other locations such as India, Europe, Southeast Asia. With reduced supply of talent in the US, the cost of tech talent in the US will only go up.”

Sharma said that he expects US-based companies to continue to source talent from locations outside of the US to stay competitive. He and his team see that, based on H-1B registration data, the visa is used mainly by businesses that are dependent on individual consultants’ expertise in providing IT services and solutions.

Those businesses are expected to be impacted more by the $100,000 fee because of the challenge to stay competitive via hourly billing.

Tech companies with the majority of H-1B visa acceptances are trying to secure employees holding the visa (or other visas) to remain in the US, according to 

. At companies such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, H-1B visa holders are reportedly being told to exercise caution when traveling internationally, or avoid it entirely.

“Most large services companies will be able to mitigate the impact relatively easily because [H-1B] in itself does not constitute a major part of their staff in the US,” Sharma said. “Also, they tend to have [a] more solution-centric approach, which makes the location of talent used in building the solution irrelevant.”

Dunkin pointed to the challenges with education in the US, including costs and retention, as a factor limiting US-born tech talent.

“We are doing nothing to improve the American pipeline for students, for these in-demand jobs,” Dunkin said. “Like many other things…slapping a fee on something is not going to suddenly make people do something different if it’s not possible to do that thing.”

Sharma said that he expects the demand for homegrown STEM talent to rise, given how the climate of uncertainty around talent from outside the US “will reduce the supply of foreign technology talent in the US.”

In the long term, the research team at Forrester expects to see an increase in the overall demand for tech talent because of increased need for automation and AI across all sectors of the economy. At the same time, however, companies may end up hiring fewer workers for simpler technology tasks, which could be done with AI.

“On the net, we expect the demand for STEM talent to go up.” Sharma wrote. “This means, more students in the US may end up pursuing STEM careers, and in the long-term…it may give fillip to the overall domestic talent supply in the US.”

President Trump signs orders and hands a pen to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

How a $100,000 H-1B fee could impact IT

“It’s absolutely critical to some of these companies to be able to hire the best,”  one expert says. 

Has the tech industry made its large language models (LLMs) for the government “anti-woke,” in accordance with the Trump administration’s policies? Not yet, tech giants say.

While companies wrestle with issues around “wokeness,” they’re offering federal agencies significant discounts on their core AI products, according to a slew of recent announcements by the federal government.

Tech companies offering chatbots and other AI tools, including Google, OpenAI, and Box, say negotiations for federal contracts do not yet involve conversations about the 

 order taking aim at perceived diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the development of LLMs.

Josh Gruenbaum, the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) commissioner for the General Services Administration, told IT Brew it wouldn’t “make sense” for negotiations with these companies to include navigating the order, as the government has not yet released compliance guidance to accompany the order.

Gruenbaum said, however, “the concept of an executive order and how we are going to prosecute now, being in privity of contract with these frontier models, [the makers of the models] know that these are our expectations going forward.”

The FAS director also claimed the discounts offered to the government at large are a “real acknowledgement from industry since January 20, 2025, that President Trump and the administration that he has built around him is an administration that is very focused on common sense, and particularly with a strong business sense.”

, conversely, that a leading technology group who spoke to the outlet described dealing with the Trump administration as a “circus,” while an unnamed government contractor described the administration as “super aggressive” and having “upset CEOs and others.”

OpenAI’s VP and head of government, said that the company has not yet seen the guidance from the government, but believes the company is consistent with the anti-woke executive order on AI. “We’re waiting for the government to tell us how to certify that in terms of compliance.”

Larson acknowledged that once the government releases guidance, the company will address questions directly to the government “after we’ve absorbed that.”

When asked about whether Gemini for Government meets the Trump administration’s EO on “ideologically neutral models,” Brent Mitchell, VP of go-to-market for Google Public Sector, said that the platform is a public-sector specific instance (i.e., a dedicated and customized AI buildout) and the cloud environment is “100% controlled by our customers.”

According to Mitchell, Google’s models aren’t trained on customer data “whatsoever.”

, a key part of the company’s machine learning (ML) work “involves developing techniques to build models that are more inclusive.”

At the time, the company stated it had strengthened its community-based research efforts with a focus on “historically marginalized communities or groups of people who may experience unfair outcomes of AI.” The efforts include evaluations of gender-inclusive health to scaling speech recognition to recognize “underrepresented languages and adapt to new languages and data.”

 in March that Google had removed the mentions of diversity and equity from its 

On that page, the company states that foundational ML research methodologies aim to represent AI at its best, which it defines as: “responsible, transparent, robust, and inclusive.” It also states the team focuses on fairness through identifying and preventing “unjust prejudicial treatment of people, when and where they manifest in algorithmic systems.”

Mitchell told IT Brew in an email the company is committed to responsible AI practices in building safety filters, fairness checks, and updating its models consistently.

“As model providers we enable government partners to validate the accuracy and help guide tone and response,” Mitchell wrote. “Because generative AI can reflect real-world biases, we’ve developed open-source tools and datasets to help identify and reduce bias, and we partner with external researchers to advance this work across academia and industry.”

As well as giving a 71% discount to the government for its workspace suite, Google is offering its Gemini chatbot for $0.47 for each federal agency. Gemini Business is 

 at $20, which makes the discount for the tool 97.65%.

Ann Marie Clements, the director of communications for Google Public Sector, confirmed to IT Brew that the discounted offering of Gemini for Government priced at $0.47 is related to President Trump being the 47th US president.

“I think it’s really cool, right?” Gruenbaum said. “I thought it was really interesting, and a real hat-tip to…my point where industry is recognizing that this is a historic administration with a historic president and they want to be a part of that.”

FT reported that Gruenbaum’s “sometimes brusque approach—demanding that the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, and Uber identify savings or face the possible cancellation of lucrative contracts” has damaged relationships with the tech and consultancy industries. Gruenbaum disputed these claims to the outlet, saying all negotiations had happened in good faith.

Box CEO Aaron Levie told IT Brew the company was not asked to incorporate any kind of reference to the presidency, including a 47, into any of the pricing options.

Woke AI not yet part of private–public partnerships as companies offer huge discounts

While no guidance is out for the anti-woke EO, FAS commissioner Josh Gruenbaum says “all those frontier models know that these are our expectations going forward.”

The White House released long-awaited AI guidance in July, and it’s a mixed bag. While the Trump administration’s “anti-woke” executive order takes aim at perceived diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the development of large language models, IT pros who spoke with IT Brew were pleasantly surprised to find a focus on open source in its separate AI action plan.

According to the EO signed by President Trump, DEI in regard to AI is considered the “suppression or distortion” of factual information about race or sex. It continues: “DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.” The Associated Press 

 the order as an attempt at censorship, and noted that it “still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules.”

Asad Ramzanali, the current director of AI and tech policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and former official at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Biden, told IT Brew that he imagines the implementation of the “anti-woke” order may look like a government-established test for systems.

“I worry that in the hope of creating neutrality, you just mandated an ideological purity test,” Ramzanali said. “I’m allowed to have a political view, you’re allowed to have a political view, your company can have a political view. That’s really tricky to push companies ostensibly through procurement to meet some kind of neutrality.”

While experts maintain that the anti-woke EO that follows the action plan’s release is concerning, they also agree that the administration’s positioning toward open-source models is a benefit to the private sector.

Seemingly more substantive guidance on AI is outlined in the administration’s action plan, titled “Winning the Race,” which points to the government’s ability to “accelerate the maturation of a healthy financial market for compute” through collaborating with industry and using other vehicles in the federal space, like the National AI Research Resource Pilot and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, for open-source models.

The administration recommends ensuring access to “large-scale computing power for startups and academics by improving the financial market for compute. Currently, a company seeking to use large-scale compute often must sign long-term contracts with hyperscalers—far beyond the budgetary reach of most academics and many startups.”

The action plan further states that the US has “solved this problem before” through spot markets (when assets are purchased or sold immediately without a long-term commitment) and forward markets (where contracts are made to purchase or sell assets at a determined price in the future). This is in concert with the industry and government approach the administration believes can hasten the maturation of a healthy market for compute.

the action plan focuses on infrastructure and diplomacy—pointing directly toward encouraging both open-source and open-weight models.

 webpage points to releasing open-source software as a benefit from the standpoint of having more perspectives. It states that open-source work has “benevolent results” but it is not “an act of charity.” It goes on to say that having an open-source approach can yield higher returns than the initial investment.

, however, pointed to open-source software as having limited support and functionality, compatibility issues, and more. It looks to open-source security risks, as well, if the software is maintained incorrectly—specifically, vulnerabilities can allow attackers to access sensitive information or take control of a system.

Policy and industry experts, like Travis Hall, the director for state engagement at the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology and Dhruv Patel, CEO of Syncurrent—a company that provides digital services to match local governments to grants—point to the action plan’s stance on open source as a positive for the market.

Hall highlighted the open-source and open-weight systems of the action plan as a potential positive.

“I think that this is a big deal, particularly for industry and IT professionals, because there have been debates…on whether or not open systems should be allowed, whether they can be exported, whether there should be expert controls on model weights or open-source systems,” Hall said. “It means that the tendency towards large model, proprietary systems being the only thing that is available is not going to be the case.”

Hall believes this aspect of the plan is a “pro-competitive move that will help IT professionals in particular” through having a broader set of choices than what is currently available—like those provided by Linux, WordPress, and Android. He also said that IT pros can benefit from having the ability to use open-source systems and “innovate on their own.”

“Everybody knows that open-source software is available, it is a thing,” Hall said. “It hasn’t made commercial proprietary software go away, but it does help to diversify the ecosystem and also help support a more competitive ecosystem.”

Patel told IT Brew that those who adopt open-source models will be impacted, but said he doesn’t know if it’s “for the better or for the worse.”

“Right now, I lean more good than bad, particularly because of the emphasis on supporting open source and supporting open models, as opposed to not,” Patel said.

He continued: “For tech businesses, for tech startups, it’s incredibly important that we have robust open-source models. But even more so for nutritional IT tech-enabled businesses, businesses that don’t directly have a fingerprint in tech but they’re tech-enabled.”

Trump administration’s AI plan takes aim at ‘anti-woke’ large language models

The action plan, released at the end of July, also contains language in support of ensuring access to open models for startups and academics.

Ask Huntress CEO and co-founder Kyle Hanslovan about the future of the cybersecurity industry’s public-private partnership and you’ll get a long answer.

Hanslovan, who spent 16 years in US intelligence before launching Huntress a decade ago, is no stranger to the back and forth between agencies and the corner office. Add to that the reality of the federal government and its interplay with the states and you have a recipe for, if not disaster, certainly confusion.

IT Brew had a chance to catch up with Hanslovan in early August, and we asked him where the public-private partnership goes next in an era of budget cuts and an uncertain federal commitment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As we’ve reported, budget cuts have impacted cybersecurity programs at the federal level. The public-private cybersecurity partnership in the US has long been a point of pride for the industry—where are things at now?

At the end of the day, there is stuff that the government will not be funded to do. Today, it might be more on the states to handle things. Tomorrow, it could be more on federal, but I think we have to acknowledge that hope is not a very good strategy.

Private business is in many ways stepping up for some of that predictability… I’m not promoting vigilante hacking, but I think there should be a lot more collaboration when vendors and folks like us see mistakes. 

Whether it’s a cybercriminal doing something and they leave a door open, or they leave a password available, I’m not so sure there shouldn’t be a rapid response capability in the government that says, “I found this mistake.” The government should be able to leverage it.

So it’s safe to say that you’re in favor of the public-private relationship?

Public and private relationships are critical, but we are still very immature on how we collaborate to support offensive operations against cybercrime and nation-state threat actors.

Sometimes it seems the government moves a little slowly on these threats. In the US we have federal and state governments, for example, with differing regulations and policies. How does that play into reaction time and defender decisions?

We just bombed a country without congressional approval. If we really, as a federal government, wanted to take a quick reaction to a threat actor in cyber, we’d do it. We're not. Let’s call that spade a spade first.

Second, I don’t think we should have the ability to fire from the hip and not ask for permission, right? I do think asking for permission is important. Oversight is very important.

There is a hell of a lot of bureaucracy, and the people paying for it are not the largest companies with unlimited budgets and unlimited staff. The people paying for it are the businesses that are the backbone of our economy that don’t have access to unlimited talent, or have limited budgets, or people overworked and underresourced.

This starts with decisive leadership that’s willing to take a more firm stance—and that might mean some imperfection. I think it starts with our new secretary of defense. We’ve talked about returning to the warrior ethos of the military. I would like to see that warrior ethos extend to how public and private collaborations in cyberspace help arm and protect, whether it’s any democratic Western government, let alone the citizens behind it. I think this is something that we really need to consider if we want to keep our edge over cybercrime.

When you look at the state of the last decade in public-private efforts to push back on cyber threats, where do you see us headed? How does the danger of attackers manifest itself?

The next 10 years are going to require better collaboration, better automation, and, to be honest, more reactivity with urgency, even better proactivity or getting ahead of these threats before they happen.

There’s a lot of infrastructure, bureaucratic overhead, a lot of really hard things. Who do you get a hold of if you find a hacker doing this? Do you call the FBI? Do you call the internet cybercrime center? Do you call DHS? Do you call CISA? Do you call the NSA, the CIA? We have to figure it out because the one thing that threat actors have is they’re very small. They’re very agile, and they don’t have the same overhead of the system.

Public-private cybersecurity partnership is strong, but there are still improvements to make

“Hope is not a very good strategy,” Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan tells IT Brew.

ITB VE-Governing AI-video embed

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AI regulation is evolving fast and unevenly, leaving IT leaders to navigate a maze of fragmented rules and rising compliance risks. Join IT Brew and YeshID to learn how to build adaptable frameworks, align teams, and apply proven risk strategies to today’s AI landscape.

Ready or Not: Governing AI in a Fragmented Regulatory Landscape

Billy Hurley

On July 4, just five hours after Joey Chestnut 

, President Trump signed legislation taking a big bite out of Medicaid.

To pay for Big Beautiful’s tax cuts, the bill reduces federal Medicaid spending by approximately $1 trillion from 2025 to 2034, according to estimates from nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The bill limits state-provider tax arrangements (cutting $191 billion, according to the KFF analysis) and state-directed Medicaid payments (cutting 

A June 24 examination from the Congressional Budget Office calculated that the bill’s Medicaid provisions would lead to 7.8 million uninsured individuals by 2034, and lower funds would result in states “reducing provider payment rates, reducing the scope or amount of optional services, and reducing Medicaid enrollment.”

With less money, Michael Hamilton, field CISO of Lumifi Cyber, sees rural hospitals (which rely heavily on Medicaid for revenue) sacrificing in an area they can ill afford to cut: cybersecurity.

“They’re not going to be investing in, ‘Hey, let’s get better at patching.’ They’re just going to try and keep their IT networks alive,” Hamilton told us.

“We are going to start seeing some ransomware or other kinds of extortion events that ultimately end up putting these hospitals out of business or forcing them into a fire sale.”

Tim Powers faced ransomware when he was an executive at a Nevada hospital in 2021; the incident led to downed systems and encrypted files (and a monthlong move to pen and paper, Powers told us).

Now as CFO at nonprofit Idaho Hospitals Association, Powers acts as a “Medicaid guru,” assisting orgs with financial issues and helping facilities as new legislation impacts resources.

While Powers hopes orgs don’t compromise on cybersecurity services, it wouldn’t surprise him to see cyber cuts.

“It’s all about patient care, and ‘Where can I put my best resources and efforts to take care of the patients in my community?’” Powers said. When hospitals consider costs associated with implementing a cybersecurity initiative, “they might think twice about it.”

, examined over 250 US rural hospitals and determined many struggle with basic cybersecurity practices like email security (65% of respondents admitted), multifactor authentication (69%), and network segmentation (62%).

In 2024, Microsoft launched its Cybersecurity Program for Rural Hospitals—a project offering US facilities free security assessments, training resources, and security-product discounts. More than 375 of the roughly 2,000 US rural hospitals are participating in Microsoft-funded cybersecurity assessments, the white paper revealed.

A Georgetown University study released in January found that in 15 states, at least 20% of working-age adults living in small towns and rural areas are covered by Medicaid.

“Large reductions in federal Medicaid funding would put the residents of small towns and rural communities and their healthcare systems at serious risk,” the report concluded.

Almost half (48%) of rural hospitals operated at a loss in 2023, according to the 

 (AHA). Total hospital expenses grew 5.1% in 2024, 

 revealed: labor spend accounted for 56% of hospital costs, drugs took up 9%, and “supplies” reached 13%.

In 2026, according to the July 4 bill, $50 billion over the next five years will be available through a Rural Health Transformation Program, following application proposals from states.

“We will be competing for those dollars with other entities. So, we have to put our best foot forward to make certain our members have front-and-center access to that cash available to them and cyber is a big piece of that,” Powers told us.

Illustration of a hospital with a "sorry we're closed" sign in front of it