Archive for January 27, 2025

Issues With Fitbit Devices Costs The Company A Measly $12 Million

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 27, 2025 by itnerd

You might recall that Fitbit had a bunch of devices that burned people a few years ago which forced a recall. Fast forward to today and those devices have cost Fitbit…. Wait for it….. $12 million:

Google-owned Fitbit has agreed to pay a $12.25 million civil penalty for failing to alert consumers that its Ionic smartwatches could overheat and cause burns, federal regulators said Thursday.

In addition to the $12.25 million civil penalty, the settlement agreement requires Fitbit to maintain internal controls and procedures designed to ensure compliance with the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA), including enhancements made to its compliance program.

You know, that’s not a whole lot of money given that Fitbit is owned by Google and Google has more cash than some countries. This fine is pretty much a rounding error for them and won’t serve as any sort of deterrent as far as I am concerned. But then again, some punishment is better than nothing.

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The United Healthcare Hack Is Worse Than Thought

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 27, 2025 by itnerd

The UnitedHealth 2024 breach is worse than thought. It has now impacted 190 million Americans:

The hack at Change Healthcare affected the personal information of 100 million people, the U.S. health department had posted on its website in October.

The final number will be confirmed and filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ office for civil rights at a later date, the company said in an emailed statement.

Ouch.

Rebecca Moody, Head of Data Research at Comparitech, has the following comment: 

“This breach on Change Healthcare was already the biggest-known ransomware breach to date even before the figure increased from 100 million to 190 million, according to our data. But this latest figure puts it way ahead of second-place MOVEit which saw nearly 96M records breached (at least) in its exploit in 2023.”

“In 2024, we tracked 236 confirmed ransomware attacks on companies operating within the healthcare sector across the globe (this includes those offering direct care, e.g. hospitals, as well as companies like Change Healthcare who offer services/products within the industry). These attacks breached 231,664,818 individual records, making it a record-breaking year for the number of records breached within any industry. We also noted an average ransom demand of $7.4 million across these attacks.”

“This high volume of data breached in ransomware attacks on healthcare companies highlights hackers’ continued double-extortion attempts (encrypting systems and holding data to ransom). And due to the high volumes of sensitive data on offer at these companies, we’ll likely see a continued focus on healthcare companies throughout 2025.”

This is very bad. And I have a feeling that it’s going to get even worse than this. Buckle up your seatbelts because this is going to be a bumpy ride.

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CNOC Argues That TELUS Doesn’t Need Loopholes When It Comes To Providing Internet Access

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 27, 2025 by itnerd

For a few months now, TELUS has been promoting a petition that they want you to sign so that you can push for better choice when it comes to Internet choice in Ontario and Quebec. Now I covered their Internet offering here and at the time I wasn’t impressed. And to be fair to TELUS, more choice and more options are a good thing. But a group called The Competitive Network Operators of Canada (CNOC) are pointing out that TELUS are one of the “big three” telcos in Canada. And as such don’t need “loopholes”. They argue that TELUS isn’t telling the whole story when it comes to this petition. Regulated wholesale access is meant to remove barriers for local and regional carriers so they can bring additional competition to Canada’s broadband market. It was not intended to help Canada’s Big Three dominant telecom companies from growing even larger. They also argue that the CRTC must act and close this loophole.

The organization has set up this website that goes into the issue more: www.breakfreefromthebigthree.ca

My take on this is as follows. When TELUS first popped up with this campaign, I found it to be as the kids say “sus” or suspect for the reasons that CNOC points out above. So I didn’t report on it. CNOC today has pretty much validated my thinking. Canadians do want more choice. Not just in Internet access, but in all telco services. The TELUS argument really doesn’t advance that goal in my mind. Thus I would argue that Canadians should continue to press politicians to enact real change to get real competition in the Canadian telco space.


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Jeff Giannetti Joins Hammerspace As Chief Revenue Officer

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 27, 2025 by itnerd

Hammerspace, the company orchestrating the next data cycle, today announced the appointment of Jeff Giannetti as its Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to support rapid growth in demand around the world for its Global Data Platform. With more than three decades of global sales leadership experience, Giannetti will drive the company’s global sales team to continue to accelerate revenue growth, new customer acquisition, and use case expansion within existing customer environments. 

Giannetti joins Hammerspace from WEKA, where he served as CRO since 2022. Giannetti was also CRO at Cleversafe (acquired by IBM) and Deep Instinct and held several leadership positions at organizations including Sun Microsystems, Veeam, Digital Ocean and Forcepoint. He worked in NetApp’s sales organization for more than a decade, where the company grew from $700 million in revenues to over $6 billion during his tenure.

Hammerspace’s Global Data Platform revolutionizes the management of data and storage in a world where digital assets can no longer be locked into a single vendor’s storage silo. It enables organizations to use existing data center and cloud storage resources without compromising the ability to explore artificial intelligence and deep learning (AI/DL) and other next-generation uses to extract unrealized value from their data, wherever it may be.

Giannetti joins at a pivotal time in the rapid growth of Hammerspace.  The Tier 0 technology introduced in November of 2024 had already begun to transform GPU computing infrastructure design by transforming local NVMe storage on GPU servers into an ultra-fast, persistent shared storage. By activating this previously “stranded” and siloed local NVMe storage seamlessly into a unified parallel global file system, Tier 0 delivers data directly to GPUs at local NVMe speeds, accelerating checkpointing, reducing power utilization and dramatically improving the cost efficiency of shared storage. 

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Facebook infested with porn and gambling ads

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 27, 2025 by itnerd

A recent investigation by the Cybernews team uncovered a trend plaguing Facebook’s advertising ecosystem: a surge in pornographic and gambling ads infiltrating users’ feeds despite Meta’s strict ad guidelines. 

This issue reveals a larger systemic failure within Facebook’s ad approval process, raising critical concerns about the platform’s ability to ensure user safety. Despite claims that its AI-driven moderation system effectively blocks illicit content, Facebook appears overwhelmed by an influx of sexually explicit material and gambling promotions that violate its own rules.

As Facebook continues to profit from these campaigns, this raises questions about the platform’s commitment to enforcing its ad guidelines. 

Key findings of their investigation include:

  1. There’s a rise of Facebook ads promoting undressing AI apps, like CrushAI, which allow users to erase clothes, and this way generates nudity-containing content involving anyone. 
  2. There’s also a surge in sponsored gambling ads featuring sexually suggestive content, and they explicitly encourage the transfer of funds and supposedly real monetary gain.
  3. Users often report them but remain active for extended periods before being taken down. Even more troubling is the lack of accountability for the advertisers, who continuously find ways to bypass Meta’s ad policies.
  4. These ads are persistent – they come back in waves when taken down. Over a short period of time, ads that featured full nudity or pornography under the keywords “AI girlfriend” and “eraser clothes” rose exponentially, at one point reaching 1900 active campaigns.
  5. They are supported by bot accounts created almost simultaneously in 2023. Most of them lead to pages like crazybody.online, dizyer.info, and pharmacity.today.
  6. These ads also target underage Facebook users. 
  7. Facebook is profiting significantly from those nudity-featuring ads. For instance, a week-long ad campaign can cost from 300 USD, and our team, as mentioned earlier, found 1900 active nudity-featuring ad campaigns.
  8. The process of entering user payment details on the CrushAI page isn’t entirely secure—VirusTotal has found that one vendor for CrushAI was marked as malicious.
  9. Undress AI apps amplify child pornography, and Facebook ads contribute to its promotion. They permit uploads with no content moderation, and there have been cases of child predators using AI to generate deep-fake pornographic content. 

You can access the full article here. 

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Applied Labs raises $4.2M In Funding

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 27, 2025 by itnerd

Every company today faces mounting pressure to deploy AI, but most solutions fall short on reliability and cannot handle complex, critical workflows. Applied Labs, founded by early Scale AI leaders, announced $4.2 million funding to transform how businesses deploy AI agents for complex support and operations tasks.

The seed round was led by Abstract, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Outlander, and Tetra. A few notable angel investors include Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Modal CTO Akshat Bubna, and ex-Twitter exec Ali Rowghani. This latest round brings the total raised by Applied Labs to $5.2 million.

Founded in January 2024 by Michael Woo and Soham Waychal, Applied Labs emerged from their firsthand experience with AI applications at Scale AI, where they recognized how much time was spent on critical yet repetitive support interactions and ops workflows. Woo – who joined Scale AI as employee #20 and led a team of 30 focused on ops scalability – saw the opportunity to build AI agents that could handle complex workflows with unprecedented reliability. Waychal, who previously led engineering at a16z-backed Canal and holds 5 AI patents, brings deep technical expertise to the challenge.

The company focuses on support and operations teams. Their current solution is an end to end AI customer support agent fine-tuned to the businesses’ knowledge base and empowered with AI actions which typically involve first and third party integrations. Digital employees in other domains like operations are incoming. 

Uniquely, the Applied Labs team is using their expertise at Scale AI to build high quality, reliable and easy to use AI agents. The solution uniquely combines three critical components to get what they believe are the best results: omnichannel interactions spanning chat, email and phone to handle 100% of volume; sophisticated AI agent orchestration for handling Q&A and AI workflows; and comprehensive evaluation tools for testing, auditing and monitoring AI outputs. This approach includes built-in human-in-the-loop escalations, recognizing that finding the right balance between AI efficiency and human touch for complex, emotional interactions remains crucial.

The stakes are high – a single misstep in handling customer inquiries or operational tasks can erode trust and escalate problems. “At Scale when we first did AI labeling or if you think about self-driving cars or even these AI sales agents, if you scale up a poorly thought out AI response or workflow on high volume, it’s deeply damaging.” Woo said. Applied Labs addresses this by building guardrails and monitoring systems to rigorously test the AI with human-in-the-loop auditing before any new capabilities are broadly deployed. 

Applied Labs plans to double its headcount in the coming months to meet growing customer interest. The funding will accelerate hiring of engineers to advance the company’s ambitious product roadmap.

Looking ahead, while the AI industry races to replace human workflows, Applied Labs is pioneering a more nuanced vision: high quality AI agents that combine machine efficiency with human judgment. By focusing on quality, reliability and empowering non-technical teams to resolve the most complex, painful issues with AI, the company is building toward a future where almost every company can confidently deploy AI across their most complex operations—transforming not just how work gets done, but redefining what’s possible when artificial and human intelligence work in harmony.

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New threat research: 300% surge in SaaS attacks signals a shift in threat actor targets

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 27, 2025 by itnerd

Obsidian has released its new 2025 SaaS Security Threat Report that reveals SaaS breaches have surged by a staggering 300% over the past year and that SaaS applications were the attack vector behind the majority of the biggest incidents, including MGM, Microsoft, AT&T, and Okta.

These findings signal a shift among nation-state and criminal threat actors – including groups like Midnight Blizzard,  Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and more – who are targeting SaaS platforms as the new “frontline” attack vector as more data shifts to popular SaaS apps like Microsoft Office 365, Google Workspace, ServiceNow, Slack and Okta.

The new report is based on the industry’s largest repository of SaaS-related attack data, including direct involvement in over 150 incident responses alongside leading firms like GuidePoint and Kroll.

You can read the report here.

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