Archive for July 22, 2025

Targus Charts Bold Path to Net Zero in 2025 Sustainability Report

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 22, 2025 by itnerd

Targus today announced the release of its new 2025 Global Sustainability Report. The comprehensive report provides an in-depth look at how Targus is continuing to advance sustainability with increased transparency and mutual accountability and shares its forward-looking roadmap through 2030.

Throughout this report, Targus communicates what it is doing to support common sustainability goals and its vision for the future by aligning its journey with five of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) where the company believes it can make the most meaningful positive impact. It begins with an overview of the company’s year-over-year progress and carbon footprint results – reinforcing our commitment to transparency and continuous improvement. The second section focuses on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that the company has prioritized and the actions it is taking to support them. The final section presents a roadmap including a look at its long-term goals and commitments through 2030.

Key 2025 Achievements:

  • EcoSmart® Milestones: Targus has now recycled over 37 million plastic bottles into its EcoSmart® product line, to date, equivalent to 2,257,191 lbs. CO₂ emissions compared to virgin plastic. In the past year, Targus has launched several new EcoSmart products, including its Geolite laptop cases, Terra EcoSmart Backpacks, Avila women’s collection, HeritageLuxe executive backpack, and EcoSmart™ mouse and keyboard bundles.
  • Sustainable Packaging: Over 95 percent of Targus packaging is now fully recyclable, with an average of 50 percent made from recycled or compostable materials. The company has also eliminated problematic single-use plastics from all of its packaging.
  • Increased Global Reporting and Certifications with Stronger Results:
    • EcoVadis Bronze Rating: Targus has earned a Bronze Sustainability Rating from EcoVadis in 2025. This signifies that Targus ranks among the top 35 percent of sustainable companies, globally, and is advancing its sustainability progress faster than the industry.
    • Walmart Project Gigaton™: The company has achieved Giga-Guru status for the second consecutive year, recognizing leadership in supply chain emissions reduction.
    • Scope 1, 2, and 3 Emissions Reporting: Targus has established a clear CO2 footprint reduction strategy that aligns with the UN SDGs through Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 reporting across its global network.

Looking Ahead

Targus is on a mission to achieve Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050 by driving real and meaningful change to help safeguard our planet for future generations. Read the report at Targus.com.

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LexisNexis Launches Protégé in Canada

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 22, 2025 by itnerd

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional today announces a range of enhancements to Lexis+ AI™ and the Canadian launch of LexisNexis Protégé™. This follows the successful launches of Protégé in the USA, Australia, and the UK. The personalized AI assistant intelligently supports legal practitioners in drafting, researching and advising their clients faster and more accurately, helping them focus on higher-value work.

Built with the highest levels of security, compliance and privacy, Protégé is now available in the Lexis+ AI legal workflow solution and will soon be available in the Microsoft Word drafting solution, Lexis® Create+.

Developed responsibly with human oversight, the agentic AI capabilities in Protégé allow it to complete multi-step tasks, review its own output and suggest improvements, leaving lawyers free to focus on strategic work.

Leveraging proprietary agentic and generative AI technology from LexisNexis, Protégé can:

  • Draft full, tailored transactional documents. It can check its own work before turning to human legal professionals for a final review. Documents can be further edited directly in Lexis+ AI or in Microsoft Word.
  • Produce fully drafted litigation materials with precision and consistency. It can create context-aware litigation drafts, such as motions, legal memos, arguments, and client correspondence.
  • Suggest legal workflow actions based on the type of documents uploaded (e.g. draft a memo, summarize).
  • Provide prompt assistance, proactively suggesting refinements to queries to help the user accomplish their goals efficiently.
  • Store tens of thousands of legal documents to secure Vaults. On each Vault, users can perform numerous AI tasks to summarize, draft, research and more.
  • Generate a graphical timeline of events from uploaded documents.

Protégé can be tailored to each user by integrating with Document Management Systems (DMS). This allows users to query, extract clauses and draft from their firm or organization’s knowledge base, making it easier to access and apply relevant precedents. Supported DMS integrations include iManage, SharePoint and others.

Through a customer-driven innovation program, LexisNexis have developed Protégé by working closely with several Canadian customers across the industry.

The LexisNexis global technology platform seamlessly integrates each wave of AI innovation, including extractive AI, which finds relevant results within data and provides deep insights; generative AI, which creates new content from data based on user-entered prompts or instruction;

To learn more about LexisNexis Protégé capabilities, visit www.lexisnexis.ca/protege. To learn more about Lexis+ AI, visit www.lexisnexis.ca/ai.

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AWS Signs Strategic Collaboration Agreement With Saviynt to Advance AI-Driven Identity Security

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 22, 2025 by itnerd

Saviynt announced today that it has signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help organizations create a scalable and secure foundation for digital transformation through AI-driven identity security. The strategic collaboration will focus on delivering Saviynt’s next-generation Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) capabilities through deeper integration with AWS generative AI services, Amazon Q Business.

As an identity security vendor that is natively embedded as a Data Accessor within Amazon Q index, Saviynt will enable enterprises to harness the power of real-time identity data and insights directly within AWS. The collaboration includes dedicated AWS investments in co-selling, marketing, and product innovation – positioning Saviynt to deliver AI-driven identity governance at scale through the Amazon Q ecosystem.

By integrating with Amazon Q index as a native Data Accessor, Saviynt will extend its powerful analytics and governance capabilities into the Amazon Q experience. Enterprise customers will gain:

  • Faster Compliance and Audit Reviews: Instantly surface access assignment events, approval tickets, and policy documentation – streamlining audits and accelerating compliance reviews.
  • Simplified Investigations: Eliminate manual searches across disparate systems like ServiceNow, Jira, GDrive, or SharePoint. Analysts get a unified view of identity events and related tickets in real time.
  • More Accurate Access Decisions: Easily validate user access against internal policies, compliance rules, and documented approvals – ensuring decisions are both fast and aligned with governance standards.
  • Greater Operational Efficiency: Reduce response times and improve team productivity with immediate access to historical identity data and governance context.

These capabilities are especially valuable for regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing – where compliance, audit readiness, and least-privilege access are business-critical.

To learn more, please visit the website.

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A Weak Password Tanks 158 Year Old Company

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 22, 2025 by itnerd

Getting pwned has its costs. Which is why one should do everything possible not to get pwned.

Too bad KNP which is a transport company in the UK didn’t follow that advice. Because one weak password allowed hackers to not only pwn them, but put this 158 year old company out of business:

KNP director Paul Abbott says he hasn’t told the employee that their compromised password most likely led to the destruction of the company.

“Would you want to know if it was you?” he asks.

And:

In 2023, KNP was running 500 lorries – most under the brand name Knights of Old.

The company said its IT complied with industry standards and it had taken out insurance against cyber-attack.

But a gang of hackers, known as Akira, got into the system leaving staff unable to access any of the data needed to run the business. The only way to get the data back, said the hackers, was to pay.

“If you’re reading this it means the internal infrastructure of your company is fully or partially dead…Let’s keep all the tears and resentment to ourselves and try to build a constructive dialogue,” read the ransom note.

The hackers didn’t name a price, but a specialist ransomware negotiation firm estimated the sum could be as much as £5m. KNP didn’t have that kind of money. In the end all the data was lost, and the company went under.

Darren James, a Senior Product Manager at Specops Software had this to say:

“While high-profile cases make headlines, over 19,000 ransomware attacks hit UK businesses last year, many going unnoticed except by those directly impacted. A common cause? Weak, reused, or already breached passwords.”

“Stronger password policies, continuous breached password scanning, secure self-service resets, and proper service desk verification are simple, cost-effective measures that can dramatically reduce risk. In today’s cyber threat landscape, your first line of defense is still one of the most critical.”

Consider this example a warning to get your house in order. Because it doesn’t take much for a bad actor to kill your company.

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Guest Post – Meta’s Shrug, Your Risk: How Facebook’s Data Leaks Became the New Normal in Silicon Valley

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 22, 2025 by itnerd

By Jurgita Lapienytė

It began, as these stories often do, not with a bang but with a boast. Almost two months ago, a hacker, posting on a shadowy forum, claimed to have siphoned off 1.2 billion Facebook user records – names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, locations, the digital breadcrumbs of real lives. 

The research team at Cybernews set out to verify the claim. They examined a sample of 100,000 unique Facebook user records shared by the attackers, and the data appeared legitimate.

If the hacker’s numbers are even half right, it means hundreds of millions of people could soon find their inboxes flooded with targeted phishing scams, their phone numbers sold to spammers, and their personal details circulating in criminal marketplaces – fuel for identity theft, financial fraud, and years of privacy headaches.

However, Meta’s response was a shrug and a hyperlink: a brief statement, then a redirect to a four-year-old blog post about “combating scraping.” No fresh explanation, no sense of urgency. Just another corporate brush-off, as if the world’s largest social network hadn’t just sprung another leak. It’s as if they don’t even understand what we’re fussing about.

This isn’t a one-off. In 2021, Facebook lost control of data on over 500 million users, and the price was a European slap on the wrist – $266 million. Since then, the leaks have kept coming, each time with the same ritual: denial, deflection, and a vague promise to “do better.”

Why does this keep happening? Because the modern internet runs on APIs – digital pipelines that let apps and services talk to each other, and, too often, let bad actors – in many cases, opportunistic marketists not bothered by ethics or troubled by the notion of privacy – siphon off whatever they please. Facebook’s APIs are gold for anyone with a script and a grudge. In the past few years, many companies – such as LinkedIn, Dell, Duolingo, and DeepSeek – have seen their APIs probed and plundered.

What can criminals do with this data? With a haul this size, they can automate scams at industrial scale. They can impersonate, phish, and defraud with uncanny precision. For the average person, it means a future where your inbox, your phone, and your sense of privacy are under constant siege.

It’s not only criminals who can and will make use of such data. Advertising firms and various data brokers simply blossom on these datasets. With them, our privacy is dead on arrival, as numerous examples show. They don’t even shy away from publicly acknowledging they’re listening to you using your phone just so they could serve you better ads.

We should stop pretending this is a technical inevitability. It’s a choice – a choice to treat user data as a resource to be mined, not a trust to be guarded. It’s a choice to react to breaches with PR instead of prevention.

What would real accountability look like? For starters, transparency: Meta should spell out exactly what was taken, how, and what it’s doing to prevent the next round. 

Regulators should stop accepting apologies and start demanding airtight safeguards for APIs and user data, and also impose penalties that actually sting. 

And we, as users, should demand tools that put control of our digital lives back in our own hands – because accepting business as usual only guarantees we’ll be the next victims.

Until then, the cycle will repeat. Another breach, another apology, another round of “unprecedented” headlines. The only thing truly unprecedented is our willingness to look away.

ABOUT THE EXPERT 

Jurgita Lapienytė is the Editor-in-Chief at Cybernews, where she leads a team of journalists and security experts dedicated to uncovering cyber threats through research, testing, and data-driven reporting. With a career spanning over 15 years, she has reported on major global events, including the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 Paris terror attacks, and has driven transparency through investigative journalism. A passionate advocate for cybersecurity awareness and women in tech, Jurgita has interviewed leading cybersecurity figures and amplifies underrepresented voices in the industry. Recognized as the Cybersecurity Journalist of the Year and featured in Top Cyber News Magazine’s 40 Under 40 in Cybersecurity, she is a thought leader shaping the conversation around cybersecurity. Jurgita has been quoted internationally – by Metro UK,  The Epoch Times, Extra Bladet, Computer Bild, and more. Her team reports on proprietary research highlighted in such outlets as the BBC, Forbes, TechRadar, Daily Mail, Fox News, Yahoo, and much more. 

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Xona and Dicofra Partner to Deliver Secure Access for Critical Infrastructure Across Mexico, Latin America, and the United States

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 22, 2025 by itnerd

Xona today announced a new channel partnership with Dicofra Cyber Security, a leading OT cybersecurity solutions provider based in Mexico. The partnership enables Dicofra to deliver, deploy, and support Xona’s secure access platform for critical infrastructure operators throughout Mexico, Latin America, and the United States.

As demand for secure remote access solutions accelerates across Latin America’s energy, utilities, manufacturing, and transportation sectors, this partnership expands access with a purpose-built platform that enables operational teams, OEMs, and third-party vendors to connect to industrial assets—without exposing critical systems to insecure endpoints or compromising uptime.

As an official Xona channel partner, Dicofra will provide sales, deployment, and tier-one technical support for the Xona Platform, leveraging their local engineering teams and regional presence. Customers in Mexico, Latin America, and the U.S. will benefit from onboarding, training, and support—alongside Dicofra’s OT cybersecurity offerings, including threat detection, managed services, and regulatory compliance advisory.

Dicofra will also offer the Xona Platform as a managed service, enabling flexible deployment as a standalone secure access solution or integrated with platforms such as Nozomi Networks, enhancing both access visibility and OT threat detection. This approach is designed to reduce the cyber risk of VPNs, jump servers, and legacy remote access tools—while accelerating digital transformation across industries.

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