Up Times • March 2025

Why give away more info than is necessary? This tool can be used with a chatbot or on message boards if you want to ask a question.

Anonymizer: We don’t log data

As it says on the site: With this online tool, you can protect secret information by redacting certain patterns or phrases of the given text. Several popular use cases of this tool include concealing personal information such as names and surnames, addresses, and phone numbers, as well as blacking out other confidential data that you don’t want others to see …

All conversions and calculations are done in your browser using JavaScript. We don’t send a single bit about your input data to our servers. There is no server-side processing at all … [2 min. read; free version available] onlinetexttools.com

Who owns the resources that AI’s process? Who should decide if these resources become weaponized?

US and UK governments withdraw from committing to regulating AI

Last year both nations signed the Seoul Declaration for the safe use of AI.

But with the White House resident change, US (and UK) policy has changed about trying to put controls on AI. These LLMs (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok) are powerful tools.

Do you think it’s right to put their potential in the hands of tech titans, when the tech was built on devouring what you and I and millions of others have posted on the internet? A few months ago Microsoft detailed its concerns about the anticipated misuse of AI. Last month Google dropped its policy that its AI could not be used for weapons development … [6 min. read] computerweekly.com

We can get to Worcester, Boston, Cambridge or Allston, but that doesn’t mean we’re actually free to explore. We go where the infrastructure directs.

Choice ain’t freedom

The vast choices presented to us by technology feel like they ought to be freeing. But are they? Historian Dr Sophia Rosenfeld lays out the paradox between the appearance of abundance and the limitations of plenty.

Think of … trying to buy a mundane household item on amazon.com, Rosenfeld offers, … making selections in such circumstances has never felt to me like a pleasant form of freedom or even freedom at all. And it turned out there is a whole literature by psychologists and other social scientists about how bad we actually are at picking according to our desires, how stressed the whole business makes us, and even how it produces pernicious and largely unacknowledged social effects, such as failures to think about the collective good … [4 min. read] linkedin.com

XDR (Extended Detection and Response) is a defensive AI that observes your organization’s network activity and can contain and, if needed, escalate unusual activity to the attention of 24x7x365 security personnel.

Manufacturer protected from the severity of a ransomware attack by layered security

Bryley partner Barracuda reported that they successfully blocked an unusual attack vector: a manufacturer no longer had a relationship with a vendor, but did not remove the inactive account and/or access. The so-called ghost account was compromised. Barracuda says that access might have been cut off by turning on multifactor authentication. But that was not deployed on the account and the manufacturer apparently had an unpatched vulnerability in its firewall that the criminals exploited.

But XDR (Extended Detection and Response) observed and flagged unusual behavior that was contained by the threat hunters at the SOC (Security Operations Center).

The story goes to show the value of multi-layered security approach and of the tools and people that actually finally stopped the spread of ransomware: XDR and the SOC analysts … [8 min. read] barracuda.com

Shipping out of Boston: a ransomware scare

Down by the banks of the river Charles

Boston’s well-known muggers and thieves have come up with a new wrinkle on ransomware-related attacks – through the USPS.

“Time Sensitive Read Immediately,” the envelopes say. Letters had been mailed to business managers and the contents – for believability – are usually customized to show a breached email/password combination and allege that the recipient’s organization fell victim to a cyberattack in which thousands of sensitive data files were stolen.

The FBI reports that the mailpiece is lying and just hoping to scare the businesspeople into sending money … [5 min. read] securityweek.com

^{Note: The section directly above is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}