E-Business
HP Wolf Security Report Reveals Perfect Storm of Cybersecurity Risks that Threatens Hybrid Workplace
HP Inc. yesterday released its latest HP Wolf Security report: Out of Sight & Out of Mind, a comprehensive global study highlighting how the rise of hybrid work is changing user behavior and creating new cybersecurity challenges for IT departments.
The research shows that a growing number of users are buying and connecting unsanctioned devices outside of IT’s purview. It also highlights that threat levels are rising, with attackers increasingly successful at bypassing defenses and tricking users into initiating attacks through phishing. All of this is making IT support more complex, time-consuming, and costly than ever.
The report combines data from a global YouGov online survey of 8,443 office workers who shifted to Working from Home (WFH) during the pandemic, and a global survey of 1,100 IT decision makers conducted by Toluna. Key findings include:
- New Shadow IT buying and installing endpoints with security out of mind: ‘Shadow IT’ typically refers to non-IT departments deploying software beyond the purview of IT. This shadow is now spreading, with individuals procuring and connecting devices without being checked by IT. 45% of office workers surveyed purchased IT equipment (such as printers and PCs) to support home working in the past year.
However, 68% said security wasn’t a major consideration in their purchasing decision, while 43% didn’t have their new laptop or PC checked or installed by IT, and 50% said the same of their new printer.
- Phishing becoming increasingly successful: 74% of IT teams have seen a rise in the number of employees opening malicious phishing links or attachments on emails in the last 12-months. 40% of office workers surveyed aged 18-to-24 have clicked on a malicious email with almost half (49%) saying they have done so more often since working from home.
Of office workers that clicked or nearly clicked a link, 70% didn’t report it to IT – 24% didn’t think it was important, 20% cited the “hassle factor”, while 12% had a fear of reprisal or being punished.
- Increase in devices being compromised fuels growth in rebuild rates: 79% of IT teams report rebuild rates increased during the pandemic. Rebuild rates directly correlate to the number of endpoints that require wiping and reimaging because they have been compromised, which implies more attackers are successfully breaching outer defenses. The real figure could be higher still: 80% of IT teams worry that employee devices might be compromised and they don’t know about it.
“People often don’t know if they have clicked on something malicious, so the real numbers are likely much higher,” comments Ian Pratt, Global Head of Security for Personal Systems, HP Inc. “Threat actors don’t always announce themselves, as playing the ‘long game’ to move laterally and infiltrate higher-value infrastructure has proven to be more lucrative. For example, by using cloud backups to exfiltrate sensitive data in bulk, encrypting data on servers, then demanding a multi-million-dollar ransom.”
Pratt continues: “It shouldn’t be this easy for an attacker to get a foothold — clicking on an email attachment should not come with that level of risk. By isolating and containing the threat you can mitigate any harmful impact, preventing persistence and lateral movement.”
With threats rising, it’s becoming more difficult for IT teams to deliver security support. 77% of IT teams said the time it takes to triage a threat has increased in the past year, while an estimated 62% of alerts relating to the endpoint are false positives, leading to wasted time. With IT teams tied up dealing with alerts, it’s becoming harder for them to onboard employees and identify threats:
- 65% of IT teams said that patching endpoint devices is more time-consuming and difficult due to the mass shift to home working, while 64% said the same of provisioning and onboarding new starters with secure devices.
- As a result, IT teams estimate the cost of IT support in relation to security has risen by 52% in the last 12-months.
- 83% of IT teams said the pandemic has put even more strain on IT support because of home worker security problems, while 77% of IT teams say homeworking is making their job much harder and that they fear teams will burnout and consider quitting.
“As IT continues to grow in complexity, security support is becoming unmanageable,” Pratt concludes. “For hybrid working to be a success, IT security teams need to be freed from spending hours provisioning and fielding user access requests so they can focus on tasks that add value.
“We need a new security architecture that not only protects against known and unknown threats, but that helps to reduce the burden to liberate cybersecurity teams and users alike. By applying the principles of Zero Trust, organizations can design resilient defenses to keep the business safe and recover quickly in the event of a compromise.”
HP is helping organizations to secure the hybrid workplace by delivering endpoint security that provides teams with greater visibility and management tools. With HP Wolf Security organizations benefit from robust, built-in protection from the silicon to the cloud, and BIOS to browser.
HP Wolf Security provides the ideal support for securing the hybrid workplace – for example HP Sure Click Enterprise reduces the attack surface by rendering malware, delivered via email, browser or downloads, harmless through threat containment and isolation.
HP Wolf Security enables teams to deliver defense-in-depth and enhanced protection, privacy, and threat intelligence, gathering data at the endpoint to help protect the business at large.
Nvidia, world leader in accelerated computing, lost about $589 billion of its market value on Monday amid rise in DeepSeek.
DeepSeek, a private Chinese company founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, is an open-source large language model that relies on what is known as “inference-time computing,” meaning “they activate only the most relevant portions of their model for each query, and that saves money and computation power”
Nvidia, on the other hand provides a variety of products and services, including GPUs, AI software, and cloud gaming.
According to Bloomberg, the loss was driven by the company’s shares plummeting by 17 percent during midday trading on Wall Street.
The steep decline reverberated across global markets due to Nvidia’s substantial influence on major indices.
In the United States, the S&P 500 fell by 2.3 percent, while the Nasdaq 100 dropped 3.6 percent.
European markets were similarly affected, with Frankfurt and Paris stock exchanges closing in the red, while London finished flat and Asian stock markets recorded losses.
Technology giants like Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, also saw their shares decline, however, Meta managed to buck the trend, trading in the green.
Nvidia has been a major beneficiary of the influx in spending on artificial intelligence (AI) because of the company’s semiconductors, which are essential for AI technologies to work efficiently.
However, the publication said the recent emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese chatbot platform, appears to have shaken up the AI industry.
DeepSeek recently overtook ChatGPT as the top-rated free app on Apple’s US app store.
In 2022, the US imposed restrictions to limit exports of advanced GPU chips to China.
However, DeepSeek’s researchers claimed they trained their latest model on Nvidia’s H800 chips.
The training was approximately $6 million, which is a fraction of the usual expense for developing high-end AI systems.
DeepSeek’s breakthrough in the AI industry comes as the US intensifies its efforts to maintain dominance in the field with the unveiling of the Stargate Project.
The Project, which was announced by President Donald Trump, is a strategic collaboration between Oracle, Japan’s SoftBank, and OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.
OpenAI stated that the initiative would strengthen US AI capabilities, create thousands of jobs, and enhance national security.
By 2027 mobile app usage will decrease by 25 per cent due to AI assistants, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone users will turn to AI assistants, such as Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Meta AI, and others to replace apps for many functions.
In addition to the impact of AI assistants, apps will be consolidated across separate brands and companies, creating mobile app partnerships or consortiums to reach more users per app at scale and defray the cost of creation and maintenance.
“CMOs should begin scenario planning for the impacts of decreased mobile app usage,” said Emily Weiss, senior principal for the Gartner Marketing Practice.
“Brands with low app engagement and retention will likely be first impacted – this will be a positive development for brands that are not overly reliant on driving revenue via apps as app development costs will decrease.
Other brands may be severely impacted by the disintermediation of users turning to AI assistants for services.
The loss of app users will also result in the loss of first-party data collection and the ability to reach fewer users via mobile push notifications,” she added.
By 2026, over 1/3 of web content will be created for the purposes of Gen-AI powered search.
According to Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend Survey of 395 respondents between February and March 2024, the average CMO allocated almost a quarter of their digital marketing budget to search.
Other than end users directly visiting a website, search currently drives more traffic to the average commercial enterprise website than any other referral source.
Given this, a loss of search driven traffic due to algorithmic shifts by major search engines would result in tangible, negative commercial impact to any organisation.
“CMOs will need to direct their teams to hire talent with a strong understanding of how GenAI, and broader AI influences, impacts the performance of their content in search algorithms,” said Weiss.
“It will be important to upskill the function by investing in search and content talent with AI skillsets. These associates will need to have familiarity with creating or optimising content to train and rank within evolving search algorithms,” Weiss added.
By 2028 digital marketers will move 30 per cent of their paid social budget to support advertising and partnerships on subscription-based channels.
It is becoming more challenging for CMOs to maintain, let alone grow, their reach and engagement among consumers.
This is especially true as consumers shift their tech and media behaviors away from social media, to other platforms and subscription based channels.
Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend survey found that since 2022, paid social has maintained the highest budget allocation for all digital media spend.
In 2024, B2C Marketing leaders reported allocating 14.3 per cent for their digital channel budget to social media advertising (an increase from 12.3% in 2023).
“Closed group communities and subscription channels offer a potential alternative for social media weary consumers and content creators who want to do more than feed the algorithm,” said Weiss.
“Brands can leverage closed-group subscription channels – such as Substack, Patreon, and Discord – and the professional creators on them to reach relevant target audiences who are already engaging with content they self-selected into consuming.”
By 2027, 85 per cent of customer data will be xollected from automated interactions or those led by AI agents. Current AI models, such as large language models (LLMs), lack the agency to autonomously execute tasks and adapt in complex environments.
However, as new levels of intelligence are added, new AI agents are poised to quickly become more capable and reliable as brands seek to address customer facing use cases.
“There will be more AI agents than people, so while current approaches require humans in the loop, this idea will quickly become antiquated.
“Marketers will need to determine when and how they can trust AI agents to act on behalf of the brand and customers across key areas,” said Weiss.
National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has kicked off a three-day training program for 388 personnel aimed at enhancing the National Identification Number (NIN) enrolment process across the country.
The training, tagged “Refresher Training of Trainers on NIN Integration to the National Social Register: Technical and hands-on devices and field operations and procedures”, is in collaboration with the National Social Safety-Net Coordinating Office.
The training is also to equip personnel with the necessary skills to efficiently handle the complexities of enrolment processes
In her address at the event held in Port Harcourt on Monday, Abisoye Coker-Odusote, director-general and chief executive officer, NIMC, noted that the initiative aligns with the commission’s overarching goal of achieving secured and great success for the Renewed Hope social initiatives.
Represented by Adedapo Adedoyin, her technical advisor on ICT, the NIMC DG said the event is a pivotal initiative that marks a significant step forward in our mission to enhance and modernize the National Identification Number enrolment process across Nigeria.
She stated, “Today, I am pleased to announce the launch of a comprehensive training program aimed at refreshing the technical and operational skills of the National Social Safety-Net Coordinating Office State Operations Coordinating Unit and NIMC staff.
“This initiative focuses on practical and field-based exercises, ensuring that our teams are well-equipped to handle the complexities of enrolment processes with precision and efficiency.
“This initiative aligns with our overarching goal of achieving secured and great success for the Renewed Hope social initiatives. Through verified digital identification, we aim to improve the lives of Nigerians by providing them with access to essential services and opportunities that require a reliable and secure identity verification system”.
Coker-Odusote explained that the training program will be conducted in two batches, encompassing four states: Kwara, Nasarawa, Kano, and Rivers. A total of 388 attendees will participate in this initiative, including 225 NASSCO State Operations Coordinating Unit representatives, 35 NIMC facilitators, and 128 State support staff.
She added, “The sessions are meticulously designed to foster knowledge sharing and hands-on experience with NIMC’s enrolment device and software, ensuring that our personnel are adept at using these tools to their full potential.
“By empowering our teams with enhanced skills and practical experience, we are setting the stage for more efficient and accurate NIN enrolment processes across the nation”.
Coker-Odusote further said the training program “is a crucial step toward achieving the World Bank’s Identification for Development Initiative target of enrolling 180 million Nigerians with secure digital IDs.
“By bolstering our technical and operational capabilities, we are ensuring that NIMC is well-positioned to meet and exceed this target, thereby contributing to the global vision of inclusive and accessible digital identification for all”.
The NIMC boss8 called for collaboration between all stakeholders saying, “As we embark on this journey, I urge all participants to embrace this opportunity for growth and development.
“Together, we can build a robust and efficient National Identification System that will serve as the cornerstone for Nigeria’s social and economic progress.”
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