The practice involves reassigning workers to roles that don’t align with their career goals to achieve workforce reduction by voluntary attrition — allowing companies to avoid paying costly severance packages or unemployment benefits. “Companies are increasingly using role reassignments as a strategy to sidestep expensive layoffs,” said Annie Rosencrans, people and culture director at HiBob, a human resource platform provider. “By redistributing roles within the workforce, organizations can manage costs while retaining valuable talent, aligning with the current trend of seeking alternatives to traditional layoffs.” ... The optics around quiet cutting and its effects on employee morale is a big problem, however, and experts argue it’s not worth the perceived cost savings. Companies reassigning workers to jobs that may not fit their hopes for a career path or align with their skills can be demoralizing to remaining workers and lead to “disengagement,” according to Chertok. He argued that the quiet cutting trend isn’t necessarily intentional; it's more indicative of corporate America’s need to reprioritize how talent is moved around within an organization. 

One of DeFi´s greatest challenges are liquidity issues. In a decentralized exchange, liquidity is added and owned by users, who often abandon one protocol for another offering better rewards thus resulting in unstable liquidity on Defi protocols. A liquidity pool is a group of digital assets gathered to facilitate automated and permissionless trading on a decentralized exchange platform. The users of such exchange platforms don’t rely on a third party to hold funds but transact with each other directly. ... There are many systemic risks currently present in DeFi. For example, potential vulnerabilities in smart contracts can expose users to security breaches. DeFi platforms are often interconnected, meaning a problem on one platform can quickly spread and impact others, potentially causing systemic failures. Another potential systemic risk is the manipulation or failure of oracles, which bring real-world data onto the blockchain. This can result in bad decisions and lead to losses. Ultimately, regulated DeFi can help enforce security standards, fostering trust among users.

There are so many pitfalls in setting up SAS tokens that Wiz's Luttwak recommends against ever using the mechanism to share files from a private cloud storage account. Instead, companies should have a public account from which resources are shared, he says. "This mechanism is so risky that our recommendation is, first of all, never to share public data, within your storage account — create a completely separate storage account only for public sharing," Luttwak says. "That will greatly reduce the risk of misconfiguration. You want to share public data, create a public data externally storage account and use only that." For those companies that continue to want to share specific files from private storage using SAS URLs, Microsoft has added the capability as part of GitHub's monitoring of the exposure of credentials and secrets. The company has rescanned all repositories, the company stated in its advisory. Microsoft recommends that Azure users limit themselves to short-lived SAS tokens, apply the principle of least privilege, and have a revocation plan.

The objective of Chaos Engineering is to unearth system restraints, susceptibilities, and possible failures in a controlled and planned manner before they exhibit perilous challenges resulting in severe impact on the organizations. Few of the most innovative organizations based on learning from past failures understood the importance of chaos engineering and realized it as a key strategy to unravel profound hidden issues to avoid any future failures and impacts on business. Chaos engineering lets the application developers forecast and detect probable collapses by disrupting the system on purpose. The disruption points are identified and altered based on potential system vulnerabilities and weak points. This way the system deficiencies are identified and fixed before they degrade into an outage. Chaos engineering is a growing trend for DevOps and IT teams. A few of the world’s most technologically innovative organizations like Netflix and Amazon are pioneers in adopting chaos testing and engineering. 

At first glance, the pig butchering ring tracked by Sophos operates in much the same way as a legitimate one, establishing pools of cryptocurrency assets and adding new traders – or, in this case, victims – until such time as the cyber criminals drain the entire pool for themselves. This is what is known as a rug-pull. ... “When we first discovered these fake liquidity pools, it was rather primitive and still developing. Now, we’re seeing shā zhū pán scammers taking this particular brand of cryptocurrency fraud and seamlessly integrating it into their existing set of tactics, such as luring targets over dating apps,” explained Gallagher. “Very few understand how legitimate cryptocurrency trading works, so it’s easy for these scammers to con their targets. There are even toolkits now for this sort of scam, making it simple for different pig butchering operations to add this type of crypto fraud to their arsenal. While last year, Sophos tracked dozens of these fraudulent ‘liquidity pool’ sites, now we’re seeing more than 500.”

Organizations can send a strong message to IT suppliers by re-engineering procurement processes and legal contracts to align with secure by design and security by default approaches. Updates to procurement policies and processes can set explicit expectations and requirements of their suppliers and flag any lapses. This isn’t about catching vendors out – many will benefit from the nudge. Changes in procurement assessment criteria can be flagged to IT suppliers in advance to give them a chance to course-correct. Suppliers can then be assessed against these yardsticks. If they fail to measure up, organizations have a clear justification to stop doing business with them. The next step is to create liability or penalty clauses in contracts that force IT vendors to share security costs for fixes or bolt-ons. This will drive them to devote more resources to security and prevent rather than scramble to cure security risks. Governments can support this by introducing laws that make it easier to claim under contracts for poor security. 

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023 shows that even large banks are still vulnerable to failure. But instead of requiring trust that their money is still there, Web3 users can verify their holdings directly on chain. Additionally, blockchain technology allows for a more efficient and decentralized financial landscape. The peer-to-peer network pioneered by Bitcoin means that investors can hold their own assets and transact directly with no middlemen and significantly lower fees. And unlike with traditional banks, the rise of DeFi sectors like DEXs, lending and liquid staking means individuals can now have full control over exactly how their deposited assets are used. Inflation is yet another ongoing problem that crypto and DeFi help solve. Unlike fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have a fixed total supply. This means that your holdings in BTC cannot be easily diluted like if you hold a currency such as USD. While a return to the gold standard of years past is sometimes proposed as a potential solution to inflation, adopting crypto as legal tender would have a similar effect while also delivering a range of other benefits like enhanced efficiency.

Most cyberattacks succeed because of simple mistakes caused by users, or users not following established best practices. For example, having weak passwords or using the same password on multiple accounts is critically dangerous, but unfortunately a common practice. When a company is compromised in a data breach, account details and credentials can be sold on the dark web and attackers then attempt the same username-password combination on other sites. This is why password managers, both third-party and browser-native, are growing in utilization and implementation. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is also growing in practice. This security method requires users to provide another form of identification besides just a password — usually via a verification code sent to a different device, phone number or e-mail address. Zero trust access methods are the next step. This is where additional data about the user and their request is analyzed before access is granted. 

If you write code snippets purely by hand, it is prone to errors. If you audit existing code by hand, it is prone to errors. Many things that happen during software development are prone to errors when they’re done manually. No, AI for developers isn’t completely bulletproof. However, a trustworthy AI tool can help you avoid things like faulty code writing and code errors, ultimately helping you to enhance code quality. ... AI is not 100% bulletproof, and you’ve probably already seen the headlines: “People Are Creating Records of Fake Historical Events Using AI“; “Lawyer Used ChatGPT In Court — And Cited Fake Cases. A Judge Is Considering Sanctions“; “AI facial recognition led to 8-month pregnant woman’s wrongful carjacking arrest in front of kids: lawsuit.” This is what happens when people take artificial intelligence too far and don’t use any guardrails. Your own coding abilities and skill set as a developer are still absolutely vital to this entire process. As much as software developers might love to completely lean on an AI code assistant for the journey, the technology just isn’t to that point.

companies mistakenly think that the best way to achieve success is by committing a lot of resources and focusing on implementation at all costs with the solution they have planned. Many organizations get burned by this approach because they don’t realize that markets are shifting fast, new technologies are coming in rapidly, and competitive dynamics are changing swiftly in the digital era. For example, CNN decided to get into digital news after looking at many benchmarks and reading several reports, thinking subscribers will pay monthly for a standalone news app. It was a disaster and they shut down the initiative within a month. To overcome this challenge, companies must first unlearn the habit of assuming things they know that they don’t know and are trying to manage through planning. They should rather manage through experimentation. CIOs can help their enterprises in this area. They must bring what they have learned in their evolution towards agile software development over the years and help apply these rules of small teams, customer centricity, and continuous delivery to every part of the business.