August 4, 2023
Security: Russian hackers target govt orgs in Microsoft Teams phishing attacks
BleepingComputer
Microsoft says a hacking group tracked as APT29 and linked to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) targeted dozens of organizations worldwide, including government agencies, in Microsoft Teams phishing attacks.

"Our current investigation indicates this campaign has affected fewer than 40 unique global organizations," Microsoft revealed today.

"The organizations targeted in this activity likely indicate specific espionage objectives by Midnight Blizzard directed at government, non-government organizations (NGOs), IT services, technology, discrete manufacturing, and media sectors." Read More
Healthcare IT: Google's medical LLM proves increasing accuracy
MobiHealthNews
A study performed by Google researchers and published in Nature reveals the tech giant's generative AI technology Med-PaLM provided long-form answers aligned with scientific consensus on 92.6% of questions submitted, which is in line with clinician-generated answers at 92.9%.

Med-PaLM is a generative AI technology that utilizes Google's LLMs to answer medical questions. Read More
Homeland Security: The National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan is changing the game for the better – for good
Homeland Security Today
The newly released National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan signifies an unprecedented step toward fortifying the United States’ critical infrastructure protection and bolstering national security. This ambitious effort, while necessary, presents us with a significant challenge: How do we accurately capture the current risk posture across all the enterprise environments comprising the 16 critical infrastructure sectors, which is an essential first step toward achieving enhanced security maturity? Read More
Transportation: TSA unveils open architecture roadmap to enhance screening capabilities
TravelPulse
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published its Open Architecture (OA) Roadmap to help define the government agency’s long-term strategy to enhance screening capabilities. The OA is a technology-designed approach for software and hardware that uses widely accepted standards to ensure interoperability across tools and platforms regardless of the technology designer, manufacturer or supplier. 

By using this approach, TSA officials can increase the number of available partners who supply improved technology quickly and at a lower cost. Read More
Human Resources: CEOs have noticed: People-centric strategies improve the bottom line, survey finds
HR Dive
CEOs are increasingly focusing on culture to achieve specific business outcomes; those who do are overwhelmingly seeing positive results, according to a Spring 2023 survey of 500 CEOs across the globe by advisory firm Heidrick & Struggles. This year, 71% of CEOs see culture as a key driver of financial performance, 44 percentage points higher than two years ago, the survey found. 

Since 2021, CEOs across all industries have shifted their view of culture and the bottom line considerably in a number of ways, the survey showed. More than half (54%) say their main reason for focusing on culture is to bolster employee engagement, compared to 26% two years ago; increasing innovation and improving diversity and inclusion are also top reasons. In addition, almost 7 in 10 CEOs (up from 37% two years ago) recognize that providing employees with direction and purpose — why people show up — is a critical element of culture for driving financial performance. CEOs also cited agility, innovation and growth mindset (57%) and positive spirit and vitality (46%) as key elements. Read More
Business & Technology: A 4-pronged strategy to cut SaaS sprawl
CIO
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has witnessed explosive growth over the past few years, as vendors, thought leaders, and CIOs have hailed the enhanced efficiency, lower costs, and reduced time to benefit the model can deliver. However, in their zeal to make good on the promise of SaaS, IT leaders often lose full visibility into the technology stack across their enterprises, leading to underutilized or even unutilized applications.

According to analyst firm Gartner, organizations will overspend $750 million dollars on unused features of IT software this year alone. Read More