Disability nonprofit Easterseals filed a breach notification with regulators after the Rhysida ransomware group attempted to extort $1.3 million from the organization this week.
Easterseals, which provides support to disabled children, seniors, military veterans and others, stated that on April 1 its Peoria-based Central Illinois location “experienced a network disruption that impacted the functionality and access of certain systems.”
The investigation determined that the bad actor accessed certain files from Easterseals’ network, some of which includes personal information of almost 15,000 individuals, such as:
- Full names
- Addresses
- Driver’s licenses
- SSNs
- Medical information
- Passports
The nonprofit serves more than 1.5 million people across the country and provides additional services to 100,000 physicians. Easterseals says that more than 80% of its fundraising is spent directly on care for the disabled.
Stephen Gates, Principal Security SME, Horizon3.ai had this to say:
“Nonprofits are no longer immune to cyberattacks, despite their humanitarian missions. Attackers likely target them for three main reasons: their vast stores of confidential donor data, often weak security postures, and constrained IT budgets. These organizations face the growing challenge of doing more with less.
“Now is the time for non-profits to conduct thorough assessments of their networks, identifying blind spots beyond just known vulnerabilities. Easily compromised credentials, exposed data, misconfigurations, weak security controls, and inadequate policies are significant threats. The cost of traditional, human-led risk assessments can be prohibitive, but autonomous solutions are now available to deliver affordable, efficient assessments that anyone can use.”
This of course isn’t good. But it does illustrate that any sector is a target from threat actors like these. Thus every group needs to do what they need to do to keep threat actors out, and by extension not become the next headline.
Zoho Corporation to Leverage NVIDIA NeMo to Build LLMs
Posted in Commentary with tags Zoho on October 24, 2024 by itnerdZoho Corporation, a global technology company headquartered in Chennai, announced today that it will be leveraging the NVIDIA AI accelerated computing platform – which includes NVIDIA NeMo, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software – to build and deploy its large language models (LLMs) in its SaaS applications. Once the LLMs are built and deployed, they will be available to Zoho Corporation’s 700,000+ customers across ManageEngine and Zoho.com globally. Over the past year, the company has invested more than USD 10 million in NVIDIA’s AI technology and GPUs, and plans to invest an additional USD 10 million in the coming year.
Zoho prioritises user privacy from the outset to create models that are compliant with privacy regulations from the ground up, rather than retrofitting them later. Its goal is to help businesses realize ROI swiftly and effectively by leveraging the full stack of NVIDIA AI software and accelerated computing to increase throughput and reduce latency.
Zoho has been building its own AI technology for over a decade and adding it contextually to its wide portfolio of over 100 products across its ManageEngine and Zoho divisions. Its approach to AI is multi-modal, geared towards deriving contextual intelligence that can help users make business decisions. The company is building narrow, small and medium language models, which are distinct from LLMs. This provides options for using different size models in order to provide better results across a variety of use cases. Relying on multiple models also means that businesses that do not have a large amount of data can still benefit from AI. Privacy is also a core tenet in Zoho’s AI strategy, and its LLM models will not be trained on customer data.
Through this collaboration, Zoho will be accelerating its LLMs on the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform with NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, using the NVIDIA NeMo end-to-end platform for developing custom generative AI—including LLMs, multimodal, vision, and speech AI. Additionally, Zoho is testing NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM to optimize its LLMs for deployment, and has already seen a 60% increase in throughput and 35% reduction in latency compared with a previously used open-source framework. The company is also accelerating other workloads like speech-to-text on NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure.
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