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Multi-million-dollar Deepfake Campaigns blocked by Gen

2024-09-11T15:31:04+10:00

Gen Quarterly Threat Report shows AI-fueled scams, digital identity attacks and ransomware dominating consumer cybersecurity landscape

COMPANY NEWS: Gen™ (NASDAQ: GEN), a global leader in consumer Cyber Safety with a family of brands, Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender and CCleaner, today released the Q2/2024 Gen Threat Report. The report spotlights the most notable cyberattacks targeting consumers from April to June 2024.

Gen experts warn that it is more important than ever to stay vigilant as cybercriminals increasingly use generative AI to create sophisticated scams using voices, images and videos to make their schemes more convincing. Attackers are using celebrities, global events, and brands as shiny lures. And as more people find themselves navigating economic hardships, the promise of easy money through phony investments, cryptocurrency giveaways and part-time job offers has also become a timely hook for scammers preying upon unsuspecting victims seeking financial security.

“We continue to see cybercriminals expand their toolkits with even more uses of AI to strengthen their attacks,” said Siggi Stefnisson, Chief Technology Officer at Gen.

“Scammers are cunning and adept at exploiting what is most likely to be on consumers’ minds – whether it has to do with elections, love or financial security. Now with AI and other new tech, their schemes are more sophisticated and convincing than ever before. We urge consumers to stay informed and alert. We will continue to keep a watchful eye on the latest threats and provide the latest knowledge and tools needed to be safer despite the evolving threat landscape.”

Gen has one of the world’s largest consumer Cyber Safety networks protecting people around the globe against advanced online threats. Throughout Q2, Gen Cyber Safety brands blocked over one billion unique attacks each month, up 46% compared to last year. Interestingly, a staggering 95% of attacks happen while people use their browser and surf the web. In addition to blocking threats directly as part of our customers’ products and services, Gen researchers discovered and reported security vulnerabilities so that they could be patched by other companies, helping protect people from further attacks.

Gen experts shared some of the most prevalent threats to watch for based on this quarter’s findings:

Scammers’ Playbook: New and Revamped Tactics
The accessibility and rise of AI allow cybercriminals to add a modern twist to their old tricks to lure more victims. We have seen bad actors using deepfakes of celebrities to promote fake cryptocurrency investment schemes, and now, scammers are targeting widely publicized events that will be broadcast live to draw a large audience.

For example, recently, scam group CryptoCore lured victims with highly convincing deepfakes of official events disseminated on compromised YouTube accounts and used QR codes to direct victims to fake crypto giveaway campaigns, stealing $5 million. During the SpaceX Starship integrated flight test (IFT-4) in June, nearly 50 YouTube accounts were hijacked, and the campaign resulted in 500 transactions amounting to a total value of $1.4 million. Gen products helped protect thousands of people from this threat in Q2, with the largest amounts in the US, UK, Brazil and Germany.

Amid challenging economic conditions, scammers are capitalizing on consumers’ needs with part-time job scams that promise quick money by completing simple tasks, like promoting goods on social media. Once trust is established, the scammers convince their victim to send them money so they can steal it. These scams have now evolved from text-based interactions on Telegram to more sophisticated AI-generated voice communications, adding a whole new layer of deception and realism.

This quarter saw the revival of the classic antivirus scam that was first popular in the late 2000s, when cybercriminals were making millions of dollars by selling fake antivirus products. Nowadays, cybercriminals deploy aggressive pop-up alerts that mimic real antivirus programs, often claiming the computer is infected to urge immediate action. These fake alerts abuse the Windows notification system to appear as credible system messages to scare the person into purchasing antivirus software so the scammers can earn commissions through third-party referral programs.

Digital Identity Theft: The New Gold Rush
As large-scale company breaches seemingly become the norm in 2024, cybercriminals turn an eye toward stealing digital identities. Attackers are using direct methods such as Information Stealers (InfoStealers) and Mobile Bankers, going beyond buying data on the Dark Web to snap up consumers’ valuable personal information.

InfoStealers breach devices to steal login details, session cookies, passwords and financial information. While InfoStealers saw a slight decline in Q2/2024, notable malware families continue to grow, with the most dominant AgentTesla increasing its market share by 11 %.

Mobile bankers, on the other hand, specifically target mobile devices to steal banking details, cryptocurrency wallets, and instant payments credentials. In Q2/2024, Bankers such as TeaBot, disguised as a PDF reader, targeted Revolut customers. Meanwhile, spyware threats such as XploitSpy and AridSpy are sneaking onto the PlayStore, stealing files and monitoring users through their cameras and microphones.

Norton LifeLock provides a 12-step guide to help people if they believe their identity may have been compromised.

On the Rise: Consumer Ransomware
Consumers remain an attractive target for ransomware as they often have less protection in place than large companies. According to Gen telemetry, there was a 24% rise quarter over quarter in consumer ransomware attacks in Q2/2024. India saw a staggering 379% increase, followed by notable spikes in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

A popular delivery technique is to hide ransomware payload in pirated content. Even though some operators of major ransomware gangs like LockBit have been brought to justice in the last quarter, Gen urges consumers to take precautions to keep their data safe, such as doing regular back-ups.

Gen researchers collaborate with governments across the globe to combat ransomware by providing free decryption tools for victims, and most recently released the Avast DoNex Ransomware Decryptor.

To read the full Q2/2024 Gen Threat Report, visit: https://www.gendigital.com/blog/news/innovation/q2-2024-threat-report

This marks the inaugural Gen Threat Report. Previously, Gen brands separately reported quarterly threat news with the Norton Pulse Report and Avast Quarterly Threat Report. The Gen Threat Report now offers a comprehensive look at the rising threats we monitor and protect our customers from each day and trends we see across the threat landscape.

About Gen
Gen™ (NASDAQ: GEN) is a global company dedicated to powering Digital Freedom through its trusted Cyber Safety brands, Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender and CCleaner. The Gen family of consumer brands is rooted in providing safety for the first digital generations. Now, Gen empowers people to live their digital lives safely, privately, and confidently today and for generations to come. Gen brings award-winning products and services in cybersecurity, online privacy and identity protection to nearly 500 million users in more than 150 countries. Learn more at GenDigital.com.

Zayo partners with RingCentral to launch new comms solution for enterprises

2024-09-11T09:58:05+10:00

Communications infrastructure provider Zayo has partnered with AI communications company RingCentral to launch Zayo UC+, a solution that features AI-powered cloud communications and contact centre capabilities.

Zayo UC+ will deliver cloud-based UCaaS (unified communications as a service) solution that integrates voice, video, chat, SMS, fax, and contact centre services into a single platform.

The offering combines Zayo’s robust network infrastructure, integration planning, and engineering expertise with RingCentral’s native, AI-powered, and secure RingEX and RingCX solutions.

“Bringing RingCentral into Zayo’s lineup means our customers will have access to the best communications solutions from RingCentral, all supported by Zayo’s robust network and our expertise in implementation and management—ensuring everything works seamlessly,” claimed Zayo senior vice president managed services Michael McKerley.

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“With Zayo’s strong history of growth and excellence in key industries, we are delivering reliable communication transformations to businesses who need the purpose-built tools to maximise business efficiency while maintaining enterprise-grade levels of security,” claimed RingCentral senior vice president global service providers Sandra Krief.

STT GDC invests US$3.2 billion to expand data centre capacity in India

2024-09-10T19:48:50+10:00

Singaporean company ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) has invested US$3.2 billion ($4.8 billion) to expand its data centre capacity in India by 550MW, tripling the IT load capacity to meet the demands of India’s economy over the next five to six years.

STT GDC says the investment reflects confidence in India’s economy as well as demand for digital infrastructure, driven by the surge in data consumption, cloud computing, digital transformation, and growing adoption of AI applications.

“Prime Minister Modi's vision for Digital India has paved the way for opportunity; today the India digital economy's growth rate of almost three times overall GDP growth is putting the country on pace to achieve a US$1 trillion digital economy by 2027-2028,” said STT GDC group CEO and president Bruno Lopez.

STT GDC claims the investment solidifies its leadership in India where it has a command of about 28% of market share by revenue.

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STT GDC India is majority-owned by STT GDC in partnership with Tata Communications, which holds a minority stake in the company.

Its portfolio consists of 28 data centres across 10 cities throughout India. Today, its data centre portfolio has a total combined capacity of over 318MW of IT load, with a well-diversified portfolio of about 1,000 enterprise customers that include many Fortune 500 companies.

Previously, STT GDC inaugurated its third data centre campus in India earlier this year.

In April 2024, it was reported India led growth in the APAC region’s data centre market with many hyperscalers choosing to invest in the country.

Helia taps Informatica to ramp up its claims processing

2024-09-10T11:02:29+10:00

Australian lenders mortgage insurer Helia has selected AI-powered cloud data management Informatica to accelerate claims processing with more data governance and streamlined data management.

Helia helps home buyers overcome the 20% deposit challenge, which has become harder to achieve with the rising cost of living.

The situation makes it harder to save or meet mortgage repayments, Helia said.

Handling customer transactions means Helia also manages large amounts of customer data.

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Given the ever-evolving mortgage lending industry landscape and growing data volumes and increased complexity, Helia sought to upgrade systems and processes to enhance customer experience and mitigate compliance risks.

Thus, it looked for a data governance framework that could connect multiple data sources and cloud systems across the organisation and provide data visibility and oversight.

Helia sought a flexible and scalable data governance framework that could connect multiple data sources and cloud systems across the organisation and provide comprehensive data visibility and oversight.

Thus, it chose Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IMDC) as the AI-powered platform to support Helia’s needs.

It also adopted Informatica’s Cloud Data Governance and Catalogue (CDGC) to provide data while improving trust, literacy, and privacy across the organisation.

Informatica’s solution helped Helia deliver new ways to engage with customers—from chatbots to automated decision-making for claims that improve customer experience.

“By taking control of our data and implementing AI-powered data governance, we’re building a foundation to surpass our customers’ expectations and maximise value from AI,” said Helia data governance leader Michelle Soakell-Ho.

“It was time for Helia to rethink our approach to exceed customers’ needs. Customers and home buyers trust us to be the custodians of their information, and we needed an integrated platform that would allow us to take charge of our data and deliver on its true value,” Soakell-Ho added.

“IDMC enables Helia to build a centralised inventory of its data, enhance its classification processes using our AI-powered platform capabilities for automating processes and enforcing policies to manage this information,” said Informatica ANZ country manager Alex Newman.

“The AI-powered IDMC platform’s cloud-agnostic connectivity allows Helia to seamlessly integrate their diverse data landscape and improve on its foundations with a more robust yet agile data solution that would supercharge their users’ ability to access trustworthy, reliable data to deliver superior customer experience.”

“This flexible cloud-based solution helps deliver a future-proof approach to data governance and allows Helia to take its data capability to the next level with a contextual 360-degree view of high-quality, consistent data and AI-powered insights,” Newman added.

Please click here to see Helia’s customer story.

Twilio hits new highs in contact centre recognition while advocating for AI transparency

2024-09-09T23:03:28+10:00

Growing from a developer-first programmable telephony platform, Twilio products are now embedded in organisations big and small worldwide. About a third of the world's email goes through Twilio SendGrid, while companies like Electrolux have replaced their contact centres with Twilio Flex.

iTWire has been following Twilio with keen interest for many years, finding it an innovative product much beloved by the software developer community. Twilio head of solution engineering APJ Christopher Connolly took time from his busy schedule to speak with iTWIre about its current growth and how the company is now a major force in contact centre software, being recognised as a strong contender against the likes of Genesys.

A little background: Twilio began life as a toolkit for developers, by developers, helping the world's software engineers make phone calls, send text-based messages, implement IVR systems, and do all kinds of telephony-related things, all via code. The developer focus was a major factor in Twilio's adoption. Twilio made it easy for devs globally to take up Twilio services, to register SIM cards, to perform all kinds of functions, well-backed with solid documentation and code samples. Unlike other platforms, everything you wanted to do was available through an API, while competitors typically offered a web portal that was supplemented by a limited API.

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Twilio embraced the developer community with events and swag; this writer attended a Twilio developer day event in 2018, working through an RPG-style set of missions called TwilioQuest. The missions demonstrated how to make use of the platform. While we worked through the missions a highly entertaining 8-bit Universe soundtrack regaled us. At the end of the day, the three highest scorers won an achievement, along with the most clever username ("Thrillio"). You can see our photo memory here. For the record, iTWire came in second out of all the assembled clever people. I'd like to see other tech publications beat that.

See how our #developers in Sydney crushed TwilioQuest. Mission completed ? #TwilioEngage #Superclass pic.twitter.com/BbtVNruC4L
— twilio (@twilio) May 17, 2018

Going forwards, Twilio developed its Flex contact centre product, built entirely on top of Twilio APIs. Whether rightly or wrongly, at the time iTWire viewed Flex positively, but as a cool tool that was more proof of the amazing things you could do in Twilio, rather than something genuinely intended as a "real product."

Well, how wrong we were! Today, Twilio is still fully committed to its global network of enthusiastic software developers, but is also proving to be a major force in the contact centre market. Flex is not simply a proof of concept; it's a true, genuine, and fully-featured contact centre solution. It's so powerful, so convenient, so efficient that, Connolly said, customers like ANZ Bank and Electrolux are using Flex to replace their traditional contact and make the move to a cloud digital, cloud native world.

As way of background, Connolly explained Twilio entered the Australian market in 2018. "It had been in the US for some time," he said. However, while Australian born, he lived in the US for nine years and on moving back to Australia found despite its US presence, few Australians knew what Twilio does. Even today, six years later, "I'm still trying to explain we do more than messaging," he said. "A lot of people box us into SMS" - echoing my own miscomprehension too, that Twilio is vastly larger than may have been thought.

Fortunately, "we're growing leaps and bounds," Connolly said. "We've exploded in Australia. We've brought on the ANZ Bank and other amazing customers in a short time."

Some of these customers are on the bleeding edge. Some are early adopters wanting to expand into customer experience. However, many are traditional businesses such as MYOB and others.

The business has continued to grow, though transitioned to a remote-first business since COVID. "Our business is strong in APJ," Connolly said. "We have the ISV component to embed our tech inside other's capabilities, as well as direct business. We also have B2C, and the Authy app (now Verify)."

"Verify is a bit unknown," Connolly said, "but if you've ever used OTP - one-time passwords on your phone, which is hundreds of thousands of people, you've used it." Earlier this year, Twilio replaced Authy with the Verify API, which is a consolidated version of earlier versions of its phone verification and 2FA APIs.

Along its journey, Twilio acquired SendGrid, the well-known programmable email platform. "We've made a tremendous amount of integration. Twilio SendGrid processes about a third of the world's email every 30 days, we have private links to Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others," he said. "It's been folded into the comms platform and is part of our stack."

So, with Twilio, you can "use email, SMS, and so on independently, or go up the stack and opt for more out-of-the-box and less code."

This is where capabilities like the Flex contact centre come in, which features in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service. It's something that gives Connolly personal pride. "I came from Genesys, and Twilio wasn't initially on quadrants or market analysis so this is good recognition of what we've achieved. Our strategy is good, and customers such as ANZ and Electrolux are using the Flex capability to replace their contact centres," he said.

Macquarie Bank has recently gone live with Flex and 1,500 users, and their migration was under 12 months. "To move to cloud, to digital, to omni-channel within 12 months - it brings you personal pride," Connolly said.

Under the hood, Flex uses Twilio APIs, of course, but also SendGrid for its email sending. "It's all absorbed and integrated."

It's a similar story with Segment, Twilio's tool for analysing customer data. "All email outreach uses SendGrid by choice," he said, "but we believe in choice, so you can plug in MailChimp or other tools."

In Australia specifically, Connolly says the company goes to market directly, as well as via software and services and partners. "Partners like Synergy and Cloudwave extended our reach into Government panels," Connolly said. "Then there's the ISV component where partners like Atlassian embed our tech inside Jira. It's all serviced out of Australia."

Twilio is also growing its team. "We have a healthy set of individuals with engineering mindsets." In fact, coming back to Australia from the United States Connolly says it was so refreshing to see technologists really going deep, coding, and building solutions. "A lot of US-based companies in Australia only have sales. Twilio has engineering on-shore, a guest engineer component, and more connection to the product. We can influence the product roadmap here in Australia."

One example he cites is the MOLI mobile line identification protocol, which only exists at Australian telcos. "No other country uses this standard," Connolly said. Yet, "one of our local engineers got it into our product."

"As we're a virtual carrier around the world, now customers can use MOLI without any separate agreement with carriers."

It's a great example of taking local Australian engineering work, and offering functionality globally.

Another Australian Twilio customer Connolly referred to is Domino’s Pizza. "They moved from the legacy on-premises IVR capability to the cloud, using Twilio IVR to distribute calls to stores. It was built mostly in-house, with some Twilio professional services involved."

And, the previously mentioned ANZ Bank is doing more than contact centre. "The ANZ+ app is an innovative app for home loan origination," he said. "All its communications come through Twilio - voice, video, and text. It reimagines what banking can look like."

"ANZ+ is all in-app. There's no branch or broker. You can speak with a coach in the app. It provides challenges and pushed the limit of our platform, but was all done in house by about five engineers in Melbourne. They went down the infrastructure-as-code path through Terraform pipelines and GitHub actions. They can hit run and completely stand up an environment in 10 minutes with users, code, routing workflow, and validating the whole product."

"ANZ Bank is a world leader in their adoption of tech," Connolly said, "and the digital experience they provide is pretty cool."

Elsewhere, Mox, a virtual bank by Standard Chartered Bank, the Union Bank of the Philippines, and others are all going down the same path, leveraging Twilio. "They can do digital voice and make two-way comms from the app over WiFi. They don't need phone services."

Other customers include Fisher and Paykel, doing "some cool things in contact centre and communications," and Foxtel, "using Twilio Segment to understand data, customer behaviour, and churn, and influence what they can do about it."

Having a customer analytics platform such as Segment allows Twilio customers a lot of options. "Imagine if once you understand something about the customer you can make a real-time outreach to them. Display an ad or text, play a video, make a phone call ... the real-time data gives context into AI models to allow real-time actions."

And, when it comes to AI, the Twilio portfolio offers a rich suite of AI-based tools and functionality. These are things from predicting churn and customer lifetime value and next-best activity scenarios, as well as customising conversations based on what the customer has done in the past.

These are under the hood; more visibly, Twilio has added Copilot capabilities for contact centre workers, surfacing insights over customer information and event history, and more.

These features all combine to bring vast AI-based customer insights that help a company trace all the way from their customer satisfaction scores down through phone calls, messages, and interactions, down to individual workers and customers that contributed to that score.

As he speaks with customers, Connolly sees the rise of AI voicebots as something that's most exciting to them. "Since the 1990s we've been pushing speech systems in one form or another like Telstra 101 or Vodafone Lara. They've evolved completely from there," he said. "In January we did a hackathon to set the state of the art for voicebots. It's moved at lightning speed. We added capability in our cloud comms platform to be the voice you want, to let you put in a prompt, connect real-time data ... when we show customers what they can do with it, this excites them the most."

Of course, it's not all roses. "Companies worry about how to make sure they're not displacing workers, and whether AI offers commercial practicality," he said.

On the first point, Connolly suggests AI can and should take some tasks that can help human agents focus on more important matters. "If you're calling to reschedule a flight, a bot can help. But if you're calling about losing something on a flight, or a death on a flight, the bot isn't the best option."

Additionally, "data privacy is of growing concern locally, especially in the age of AI" to which Connolly says it is important to ensure a privacy-first approach when embarking on an AI strategy.

Additionally, "informed consent is the number one challenge we have as a whole industry, and that responsibility is on regulators as much as it is on companies."

These conversations arise in every country, he indicates, with no country more or less concerned than others. On this, "messaging opt-in and opt-out has become the norm. GDPR is the standard," Connolly said.

"We think there will be an extension of those where the responsibility and consent is embedded in the model. Right now customers have the right to be expunged, but what does it mean for AI models? We advocate for coming back to nutrition facts; have transparent usage and labelling on how the data is used, and allow people to opt-out or not opt-in."

Twilio wants to be transparent with how it uses data and how it employs AI. "AI is exploding everywhere and in all businesses," Connolly said. "AI nutrition labelling is something we want to push as an industry standard. It's essentially food packing for AI. We open-sourced nutrition-facts.ai to clearly state where the human sits in the loop, data retention, redaction, etc. Putting these labels on products say 'this is the AI inside' so it is clear to customers."

The modern world of data and AI needs a new approach to data warehousing explains Teradata CEO

2024-09-09T22:45:09+10:00

Although Teradata has almost a half-century of on-prem data warehousing experience, it's a cloud-first business today and is bringing its considerable experience to help its customers modernise. Teradata CEO Steve McMillan spoke to iTWire about growth, AI, and the changing nature of data.

Teradata has been in the business of data warehousing so long, the term "data warehouse" didn't even exist back then, some four plus decades ago. Today Teradata is still a massive data company, but when CEO Steve McMillan took the helm in June 2020 he declard it would be a cloud-first business. That journey has paid dividends, with hundreds and hundreds of customers now part of its cloud business.

Teradata sees half a billion dollar in annual recurring revenue (ARR) through its cloud arm, and is growing over 30% year on year.

Major organisations are dependent on Teradata, and the cloud-first strategy "has given us the opportunity to demonstrate our Teradata platform can run mission critical workloads successfully in the cloud," McMillan said. "The success has built up a head of steam, and enabled us to demonstrate our maturity in this space."

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Australia is a significant part of the Teradata story. "I'm really proud of the Australian team," he said. "The majority of our customers in Australia are on a modernisation journey with Teradata."

Now, you don't need to read too far in the news these days to find companies talking about cloud and modernisation. However, when it comes to Teradata these words are significant. Teradata customers are huge; the business is known for its on-premises strength since 1979. Finance, retail, telco, government, and other major industries live on Teradata with vast mountains of data. To help these organisations shift into hybrid operations with a cloud component is no mean feat, and is not without challenges of inertia. These are not overnight projects; these have complex rules around governance, providence, sovereignty, and more.

Yet, Teradata has made it happen. "Over 70% of our customers are operating in a hybrid environment today," McMillan said. "Still a lot is on-premises, but data sets are moving or have moved to the cloud."

What drives this is the desire to get the best out of that data. "Enterprise data warehousing has evolved over the last 30 to 40 years of taking data from all kinds of silos and putting it into one single store," he said. "But data has gravity."

"We have a capability called QueryGrid that enables customers to move a query to the data as opposed to moving all the data to the query. With QueryGrid we can have a Teradata ecosystem in Azure, in AWS, on-prem, and the QueryGrid enables you to send the query to the appropriate Teradata ecosystem sending back results without moving lots of data."

This is the way of modern companies. "We've found customers have a whole range of workloads, some of which require highly advanced dedicated storage mechanisms with Teradata on top to run super-complex workloads."

In fact, today's customers most likely "have 10x the data in native object stores than in structured data warehouses."

A major factor pushing companies to consider their data strategies is the real power of artificial intelligence, as seen in machine learning and generative AI, both made viable by the sheer power of today's compute engines.

"A Gartner study said over 90% of ANZ CIOs would have AI implementations in 2026," McMillan said. He's seeing huge growth in the Teradata platform being used from that AI perspective.

In fact, back in August 2022 - "just before the ChatGPT craziness in November 2022" - Teradata launched new AI and ML capabilies named ClearScape. "We've been helping customers take advantage of AI, and now GenAI, through the Teradata platform. We've seen super-interesting answers driving good use cases from Teradata customers," he said.

And over the last 12 to 18 months McMillan has definitely observed a maturing in AI projects. He's observed three important characteristics that measure if a project will be successful or not. This is valuable information from a global CEO, gleaned from the experiences of major organisations. These are:

The project must ensure trust. "Make sure it's training with trusted data inside your ecosystem to have more assurity over the outputs," McMillan said. Even if you don't want to have generative AI talk directly to your customers, you can still have it augment data for your staff. "We're seeing human-centric GenAI solutions that empower people inside the organisation, giving advanced capabilities."
The generative AI models must be ethical. "Trusted and ethical are super important," McMillan said. You must make sure no bias is introduced. "Some AIs are put in place with implicit bias in them. For example, against certain members of the population, either by economic stature or racial stature, or other. We make sure we can help customers with those ethical solutions. For example, you can have a capability to run A/B comparisons for advanced models."
The project must be sustainable. It has to have some green credentials; there's no point having a super advanced AI that costs so much to run it's taking your business backwards. Here Teradata can bring all its expertise to bear. "We help implement AI that can be cost effective, and cost efficient, leveraging Teradata technology to optimise language models," McMillan said.

These are the three factors that successful AI projects have in common. However, you might still be wondering what would be a good use case for AI in your company, in the first place. You know AI is the key to getting ahead, to unlocking the hidden value of your data to speed up customer service, to accelerate time to market, to create content quickly, and more. But what does this mean in a practical sense, in your specific situation? Again, McMillan has three observations from his experience. "These are the three horizons in terms of customers utilising AI," he said.

Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of people inside your company. This might be achieved by using commercially available AI features in tools you already use, such as the various Copilots being released.
Embed AI, such as generative AI, into your product or services. In this way you help your customers gain efficiency and effectiveness.
Identify a way to use AI to transform your industry. An example McMillan provides is that of Unilever; the chief data officer for Unilever told him how merchaniders would speak with buyers like Walmart to negotiate over the price of a bar of soap, for example. Now Unilever has developed advanced models in terms of demand and supply to help augment the merchandiser with information, while Walmart has done the same for its buyers. "It's like how high-frequency trading transformed the stock exchange. It moves to a battle of models. We find that really interesting," he said.

McMillan adds, "our approach in Teradata is not to lock a company into one kind of model. We believe in the future companies won't just use large language models with trillions of parameters, but will use small and medium language models with much smaller parameters but far more specialised in terms of results that come out."

"This will ensure better data quality, minimised hallucinations, bias removed, and better output sets."

Infoblox, Baidam launch fraudulent website takedown service

2024-09-09T09:34:27+10:00

Cloud networking and security services provider Infoblox and indigenous Australian ICT and cyber security provider Baidam launched Baidam Takedown Services, an Australian-first capability that can take down lookalike websites and scam domains within a week using the Domain Name System (DNS).

The takedown service weaves together Infoblox’s validation, mitigation, monitoring, and reporting features by using DNS to track, identify, confirm and remove websites.

Infoblox leverages rapid escalation, its DNS, and threat intelligence expertise, backed by its relationships with Australian and global internet service providers (ISPs), telcos, and domain administrators to achieve this.

This service can also track and remove stolen proprietary information – including access credentials, personally identifiable information, and credit card data – from online forums or fraudulent hosts.

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Further, it can confirm the existence of potential malware and remove malicious files from organisations’ legitimate websites.

The services come as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) National Anti-Scam Centre reported that Australians lost $2.74 billion to scams including investment, identity theft, and online shopping scams in 2023.

The companies devised the takedown service as more fraudulent websites are targeting Australians with investment scams.

This led the government to “boost work by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to identify and take down investment scam websites.”

Baidam CEO Jack Reis says fraudulent domains are a rising threat for any organisation – from sole traders to major enterprises – but indigenous and regional businesses could be particularly vulnerable to internet fraud.

The ACCC report highlighted First Nations people reported almost double the number of scams in 2023 compared with 2022.

“There are parts of Australia where the internet is very new, or not available yet at all,” said Reis.

“It’s one of the most important resources we can bring to the bush, but lack of experience and education on cybersecurity and online scams can leave indigenous people and businesses more vulnerable.”

“Together with Infoblox, we’re committed to helping organisations across Australia maintain a secure and trustworthy online presence and quickly mitigate the impact of fraudulent or lookalike websites.”

Baidam Takedown Services operate out of the company’s Gundan Security Operations Centre (SOC) in Brisbane, Australia’s first indigenous-designed and managed SOC.

The centre was opened by Minister for Cyber Security Clare O’Neil and was built using an Indigenous co-design methodology. Baidam provides training and experience that offers pathways for First Nations people to become cyber leaders.

Infoblox Australia and New Zealand managing director Scott Morris said internet fraud can be the spark that ignites other malicious activity, including ransomware, as stolen credentials taken through fake websites, imitated multi-factor authentication (MFA) and phishing campaigns that are often used to conduct these attacks.

“We’re seeing internet fraud playing a more prominent role in how cybercriminals infiltrate organisations in Australia,” said Morris.

“Our takedown service helps companies neutralise fraudulent domains impersonating them for criminal activities. While blocking malicious domains should be a priority for every user, this takedown service lets companies become proactive in defending their good name and customers.”

Baidam’s Infoblox-supported Takedown Services are available across Australia now. Organisations can purchase or pre-purchase “packs” of takedowns for current or future suspected fraudulent websites and domains.

reMarkable announces world's thinnest paper tablet with a colour display, the reMarkable Paper Pro

2024-09-05T21:57:30+10:00

The reMarkable tablet is already pretty schmick, but the Oslo-based company has taken it to a new level with the Paper Pro, a brand-new colour paper tablet, and the world's thinnest.

In a world of distraction, sometimes you need the simplicity of paper but yet combined with the brilliance of tech to capture your notes, store them, file them, make them searchable, and to carry tomes of notebooks in a light package. That's what the reMarkable tablet brings; it's way thinner and lighter than a regular tablet. It doesn't run apps, it won't take your focus with pop-up messages, but it will help you record your thoughts and action items and mark up documents with ease - the natural, intutitive, simple ease of writing on paper.

reMarkable has upped the ante with its brand-new reMarkable Paper Pro, bringing an 11.8" colour display and adjustable reading light, while maintaining the unmatched feel of writing on paper. The new Paper Pro is available for pre-order now on remarkable.com.

“Millions of people around the world rely on reMarkable to find focus and do their best work,” said reMarkable CEO Phil Hess. “reMarkable Paper Pro makes the experience even better, adding just enough technology to your workflow without getting in your brain’s way. We’ve built upon the success of reMarkable 2 to create a device that offers the best writing and reading experience ever on a paper tablet.”

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For the first time on a reMarkable paper tablet, users can write and read in colour. This experience is made possible by reMarkable Paper Pro’s biggest innovation: the new Canvas Colour display stack, custom-made by reMarkable.

The introduction of colour creates completely new opportunities to express, visualize, and arrange thoughts — whether it's signing a contract in blue pen, marking up a report in red ink, or adding eye-catching yellow highlights to meeting or study notes. The display supports nine different colours — which can be blended and layered — when writing and sketching, and thousands when reading.

Other paper tablets put a filter on top of a black-and-white display to produce colours. On reMarkable Paper Pro, coloured ink particles inside the display move around to render what users write and read. The natural colours evoke the feeling of a printed newspaper page.

Compared to LCDs or LED screens found on laptops and smartphones, the Canvas Colour display doesn’t use bright, flickering lights to produce colours. The low-glare display reflects natural light for a more comfortable reading experience. In dim lighting conditions, a new adjustable reading light softly illuminates the display, making it possible to read and work for hours without eye strain.

The display sets a new industry benchmark for responsiveness, with latency as low as 12 ms — a 40% improvement compared to reMarkable 2. It also gives users 30% more space to fill with their thoughts and ideas, and reduces the distance between the Marker tip and the digital ink to less than 1 mm.

“reMarkable Paper Pro uses advanced technology to recreate something unimaginably complex yet incredibly simple: the feeling of putting pen to paper,” said reMarkable chief design officer Mats Herding Solberg. “It’s perfect for anyone who wants to bring the focus and clarity you get from working on paper into the digital age.”

At just 5.1 mm thin, it’s the thinnest device of its kind in the world, yet it lasts up to two weeks on a single charge. Users can personalize their reMarkable Paper Pro by adding a protective folio, available in six different colours and finishes.

Pricing and availability

reMarkable Paper Pro is available to order today on remarkable.com, where it comes bundled with a Marker ($US 579) or Marker Plus ($US 629). Add a Book Folio in Mosaic weave or premium leather for a discount.
Book Folio for reMarkable Paper Pro is available in six colours and finishes: recycled polymer weave ($US 89) in Gray; recycled Mosaic weave ($US 139) in Basalt, Burgundy, and Cobalt; and responsibly sourced premium leather ($US 179) in Black and Brown. It features auto wake-up and a magnetic Marker strap.
Type Folio for reMarkable Paper Pro ($US 229) is available in recycled Mosaic weave in Basalt, with layouts in seven different languages: US English, UK English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Nordic (including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish). It features backlit full-size letter keys, auto wake-up, and a magnetic Marker strap.
Creating and editing in the reMarkable mobile and desktop apps requires a Connect subscription. By subscribing to Connect, users can also enjoy unlimited cloud storage, automatic sync, the reMarkable Protection Plan, and exclusive offers. New reMarkable users get a free 100-day Connect trial. Afterward, Connect costs $US 2.99/mo. or $US 29.90/year. Cancel anytime.
reMarkable 2 will continue to be sold alongside reMarkable Paper Pro on the reMarkable website bundled with a Marker or Marker Plus, starting at $US 379.

Open Union, L2X Networks to deliver open networking solutions

2024-09-05T17:33:25+10:00

Open Union signed a deal with L2X Networks to deliver networks systems integration and open networking solutions to systems integrators, service providers, and enterprise and government clients across ANZ, the Pacific Islands, and Asia.

The partnership introduces a new range of communications solutions for clients using the global model of open networking.

The companies are leveraging the partnership as open networking, already the standard in Europe, “is gaining momentum” in Asia Pacific and the Americas, driven by hyperscalers capitalising on new hardware and software innovations.

In contrast, traditional telecommunications providers rely on legacy equipment, locking customers into costly hardware refresh cycles and limiting their ability to upgrade or change functionality until the hardware needs to be replaced.

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In a statement, the two companies highlighted the well-documented benefits of open networking.

“Low cost white box hardware can be added to a network with open-source software to update and upgrade individual network components, without relying on a single name-brand vendor for components.”

“This has the effect of reducing costs while increasing network capacity and security capabilities. For example, clients can add AI or 5G capabilities on their own timeline, rather than waiting for traditional vendors to release these features.”

“L2X offers network design, build, management, and consulting expertise, collaborating closely with internal network teams, or as an outsourcing business partner on new or existing networks,” says L2X Networks director and chief experience officer Punyalok Das.

“A long-time advocate of open networking, L2X promotes the benefits and champions cutting-edge cloud and AI native technologies,” he adds.

Open Union provides L2X access to t open networking software, hardware, and services from vendors like Edgecore, which they combine with their network engineering expertise.

This also includes the latest hardware designs for customer premise equipment routers, data centre switches, and open software, such as SONiC and Optics.

“Open Union recognises that while most technology hardware is manufactured in Asia Pacific, much of the value is captured by branded equipment providers outside the region, who lock clients into proprietary networks at premium prices,” says Open Union director Elizabeth Aris.

“Open Union offers a marketplace of industry proven technology, matching the quality of branded equipment, sourced directly from suppliers shortening the supply chain, promoting affordability and flexibility. This approach gives enterprises affordable, enterprise-grade hardware and software, capable of managing the exponential growth in data,” she adds.

Blackstone agrees to acquire AirTrunk for A$24 billion

2024-09-04T20:57:27+10:00

Asset manager Blackstone, along with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, has entered into an agreement to acquire data centre platform AirTrunk from majority stakeholders Macquarie Asset Management and Public Sector Pension Investment Board for A$24 billion.

In a statement, Blackstone said the agreement is capitalising on the estimated US$1 trillion of capital expenditures in the United States and another US$1 trillion of capital expenditures outside the country over the next five years to build and facilitate new data centres.

Blackstone has invested in other data centre companies including as owner of QTS, Coreweave, and Digital Realty.

It is also an investor in power and utility companies such as renewables developer Invenergy in the US.

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Blackstone said the acquisition is the “largest investment in the Asia Pacific region.”

It is also the largest deal in Australia this year.

The deal is subject to approval from the Australian foreign investment review board.

“AirTrunk is another vital step as Blackstone seeks to be the leading digital infrastructure investor in the world across the ecosystem, including data centres, power, and related services,” said Blackstone president and chief operating officer Jon Gray.

“Digital infrastructure is experiencing unprecedented demand driven by the AI revolution as well as the broader digitisation of the economy,” say Blackstone infrastructure global head Sean Klimczak and Blackstone real estate global co-head Nadeem Meghji.

“Prior to AirTrunk, Blackstone’s portfolio consisted of US$55 billion of data centres including facilities under construction, along with over US$70 billion in prospective pipeline development,” they added.

“We look forward to partnering with the outstanding AirTrunk management team to further accelerate its growth.”

“This transaction evidences the strength of the AirTrunk platform in a strong performing sector as we capture the next wave of growth from cloud services and AI and support the energy transition in Asia Pacific,” said AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda.

Previously, Bloomberg reported that AirTrunk was reportedly up for sale at A$12 billion last January.

A month later, Blackstone announced interest in AirTrunk. Then, it made a bid in June with companies DigitalBridge and GIP to make the deal.

AirTrunk this year commenced the construction of its 20 megawatt (MW) data centre OSK1 in West Osaka. In May, it opened its second data centre in Tokyo, TOK2, scalable to over 110 MW.

It then commenced operations in Malaysia, following the opening of its flagship Malaysian 150 MW hyperscale data cenre in Johor Bahru (JHB1).

AirTrunk is a data centre platform based in the Asia Pacific region with a presence in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore.