Gone are the days of 2022, when we brought our biggest questions to one giant, occasionally hallucinating platform like ChatGPT.

Cloud vendors are increasingly offering “agents,” or AI tools that perform very specific tasks, like booking a flight or turning $10 into $1,000 through investment—those are two examples that Matt Wood, PwC global and US commercial technology and innovation officer, shared with CNBC this month. Google’s new platform Agentspace aims to help enterprise users get their questions answered from the array of today’s agentic AI.

“In addition to the applications we’ve been using for years, enterprises now feel like they need to leverage new generative AI tools and technologies just to stay competitive. So, switching across multiple apps to find and stitch together data can slow productivity,” Raj Pai, VP of product management for cloud AI at Google Cloud, said last week in a press conference before the release of the product on December 13. “Every time a new tool is added, we introduce more risk from a privacy and data leakage perspective.”

With an employee prompt, Agentspace provides info across multiple connected enterprise systems, with pre-built connectors to agents from third-party applications like Microsoft SharePoint, ServiceNow, and Jira.

“It’s finding the most relevant results across those data sources with the access controls and permissions so I can only see search results that I am authorized to see,” Kalyan Parmathy, group product manager for generative AI and search, told reporters on the prelaunch call.

Read the rest here.—BH

Hack for the holidays? Some Rhode Islanders have found themselves compromised, just in time for Christmas.

State officials announced Dec. 14 that hackers had accessed RIBridges, a services portal that residents can use to apply for public benefits. The system helps Rhode Islanders apply for SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, and other programs.

RIBridges is managed by Deloitte, which announced the breach on Dec. 13. Deloitte believes an international criminal gang was behind the attack and added that the company is working with law enforcement to track down the threat actors responsible.

Bell, rung. Jim Routh, chief trust officer at cloud access management company Saviynt, told IT Brew in an email via PR rep Tila Pacheco that attackers “first got access to an online account and then moved laterally to attack replication infrastructure (servers that run data management and replication applications).”

“Once they accomplish this, they exfiltrate data from core applications before encrypting the data,” Routh added. “They increase their probability of getting an extortion payment by leaking the data from core systems publicly. All of these steps are designed to encourage the victim enterprise to pay the ransom.”

The company is now facing a number of class-action lawsuits. Peter Wasylyk, a former state representative who is the attorney for plaintiffs in one suit, said that the “incident is just another example of the critical need for entities to take strong measures to safeguard such sensitive personal information.”

Read more here.—EH

The plot has thickened on this week’s episode of, Is your remote IT worker secretly trying to defraud you?

Last week, a federal court in St. Louis, Missouri, indicted 14 North Korean nationals who it claims were part of a six-year fake IT worker scheme that generated at least $88 million in illicit revenue.

Operation F.A.K.E. According to the indictment, the scam is estimated to have taken place between April 2017 and March 2023. During this period, the named defendants were said to have sought out remote IT work with the assistance of stolen, borrowed, and purchased identities. To better deceive the businesses they applied to, the group allegedly embellished their résumés with roles at fake US-based companies, which had sham websites that were purchased and designed by the schemers to accompany them.

When successfully securing interviews, the defendants on some occasions sought the help of US-based workers to aid their ruse by making them sit in their place for the scheduled meeting and guiding them through the process. The indictment further claims that the group also tapped Americans to receive work laptops from the US businesses they were employed by to create the “false appearance” that they were working in the country. Once employed, the accused group extorted payments from some of their employers by threatening to expose sensitive information.

Keep reading here.—BM

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