Archive for February 6, 2026

Whitepaper: AI Chatbot and Youth Safety 

Posted in Commentary on February 6, 2026 by itnerd

AI can shift how developing minds understand technology and where they turn for support, leading to issues when chatbots are designed to feel “personal”. Magic School, the educational AI platform, has just released a white paper explaining how these risks can develop and what schools should know about AI in the classroom. 

You can find out more details here: https://www.magicschool.ai/blog-posts/student-safety-companionship

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DataBee Launches DataBee RiskFlow

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 6, 2026 by itnerd

DataBee today announced the launch of DataBee RiskFlow™, an innovative agentic AI capability that lets security and IT teams query enterprise security and compliance data in simple conversational language. With DataBee RiskFlow, teams can ask questions like:

  • “Which assets have critical vulnerabilities that haven’t been patched in the last 30 days?”
  • “Show me users with risky login patterns across cloud and on‑prem environments.”
  • “What evidence do I need to demonstrate MFA compliance for my audit?”

DataBee RiskFlow interprets the question, identifies the relevant data, and returns a clear, defensible answer – complete with the underlying logic and data lineage. The result: faster investigations, simplified audits, and more consistent control validation.

Ask. Understand. Act.

DataBee RiskFlow transforms how organizations engage with their data. Any user can ask a question and receive:

  • A clear, concise answer
  • Full data lineage showing exactly where the answer came from
  • Traceable logic that demonstrates how conclusions were drawn
  • Defensible, audit-ready evidence
  • Recommended next actions to validate controls or address deviations

Because it is built directly into the DataBee security data fabric, it requires zero setup. The new capability is already in use across nearly all DataBee customers following its initial rollout, supporting security operations, IT teams, compliance groups, and business leaders who need fast, trustworthy insights.

2025: A Breakout Year for DataBee

The launch of DataBee RiskFlow caps a year of accelerated innovation and market momentum for DataBee. In 2025, the company delivered major advancements that further strengthened its position as a leader in unified security and compliance data.

Key milestones include:

As DataBee continues to expand and enhance its security offerings, organizations across healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and media are leveraging its unified data foundation to validate controls, uncover previously unknown risks, and drive better security and compliance outcomes.

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Understanding Cyber Risk in the Insurance Industry

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 6, 2026 by itnerd

Cyber risk is one of the most significant threats facing financial services, with insurers among the most frequently targeted organizations. Over the past year, there has been a notable increase in the number of attacks on the insurance industry, with several major insurers having reported major cybersecurity incidents, including Allianz Life Insurance, Aflac, Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance, and Erie Insurance.

In response to this, Specops Software have published a look at cyber risk in the insurance industry.  You can read it here: https://specopssoft.com/blog/cyber-risk-insurance-industry/

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Lessons From 2025: Zero-Day Exploitation Shaping 2026 

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 6, 2026 by itnerd

Outpost24 researchers have published an analysis into the major zero-day exploitations of 2025. Zero-day exploits were some of the most defining cyber threats of last year, with flaws affecting major platforms like React2Shell, Oracle EBS, and CitrixBleed 2.  This analysis is insightful for those who need to defend against zero days.

You can read the analysis here: https://outpost24.com/blog/top-zero-day-exploits-2025/

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TELUS achieves its 100% renewable and low-emitting electricity target

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 6, 2026 by itnerd

TELUS Corporation is the first Canadian telecom to achieve its target of sourcing 100% of electricity for their global operations from renewable or low-emitting sources as of December 31, 2025. Building on this milestone, TELUS unveiled its new Climate Transition Framework, a comprehensive roadmap to reach net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2040 while helping to enable Canada’s own transition to a low-carbon economy.

In 2025, TELUS secured Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) validation for comprehensive climate targets (from a 2019 baseline) aligned with contributing to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, including:

  • Net-Zero across its value chain through direct sources (Scope 1), indirectly through electricity consumption (Scope 2) and indirectly through TELUS’ value chain (Scope 3) by 2040
  • 46% absolute reduction in operational emissions (Scopes 1 and 2) by 2030
  • 85% absolute reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2033
  • 46% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions from business travel and employee commuting by 2030
  • 75% reduction per million dollars of revenue in Scope 3 emissions from purchased goods and services, capital goods, and use of sold products by 2030
  • By 2028, 65% of TELUS’ suppliers by spend will have also set their own SBTi-approved targets

As a continuation of TELUS’ 25 year focus on sustainability, the Climate Transition Framework outlines the next phase in its commitment to protect the planet for future generations, addressing emissions reduction and climate resilience through five interconnected strategic pillars:

  • Business operations: Decarbonizing network infrastructure and buildings through renewable electricity, energy-efficient TELUS PureFibre and 5G networks (which are up to 85% more efficient than traditional copper networks), fleet electrification, and climate adaptation programs
  • Supply chain: Engaging suppliers to set science-based targets and implementing ESG audits and due diligence to reduce value chain emissions
  • Low carbon products and services: Minimizing environmental impacts through responsible product design, energy efficiency standards, and participation in the Canadian Energy Efficiency Voluntary Agreement program (CEEVA)
  • Stakeholder engagement: Collaborating with suppliers, industry peers, government, and communities to drive transformational climate action
  • Enabling emissions reductions outside of our value chain and protecting nature: Enabling emissions reductions beyond TELUS’ value chain through remote work solutions, virtual healthcare, smart energy management, and precision agriculture. Investing in nature-based solutions including actively planting more than 25 million trees to date

Following today’s release of the framework, TELUS plans to unveil a comprehensive Climate Transition Plan later this year that will outline strategies for climate resilience and provide detailed pathways for achieving its net-zero ambition, with a particular focus on addressing Scope 3 emissions across its value chain.

To learn more about TELUS’ commitment to global sustainability, visit telus.com/sustainability.

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AI Agents Now Building 80% Of Certain Key Enterprise Infrastructure – data & cyber experts comment 

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 6, 2026 by itnerd

Databricks has just published “The State of AI Agents” summarizing its telemetry revealing that enterprise adoption of AI has spread well beyond copilots, isolated pilot projects, dashboards, and analysis functions, and is now widely entrusted with core systems.

“The State of AI Agents” specifies four key findings:

  • Multi-agent systems are becoming the new enterprise operating model. Enterprises are transitioning from single chatbots to multiagent systems built on domain intelligence. Use of these systems grew by 327% in just four months.
  • AI agents are driving core database activities. 80% of databases are built by AI agents. 97% of database testing and dev environments are now built by AI agents. This shift is driving the need for a new kind of database called Lakebase.AI is now part of critical workflows across industries. Most GenAI use cases are focused on automating routine necessary tasks, with 40% related to customer experiences. Model flexibility is the new AI strategy, with 78% of companies are using two or more LLM model families.
  • AI evaluations and governance are the building blocks of production. Companies that use evaluation tools get nearly 6x more AI projects into production. Companies using AI governance put over 12x more AI projects into production. AI governance is a top investment priority, and grew 7x in nine months.

You can get the Databricks paper here: https://www.databricks.com/resources/ebook/state-of-ai-agents#:~:text=Key%20findings%3A&text=Enterprises%20are%20transitioning%20from%20single,more%20AI%20projects%20into%20production.

Sunil Gottumukkala, CEO, Averlon:

   “When AI agents create databases at machine speed, ‘Secure by default’ becomes critical. Agents today optimize for the fastest path to completion, not safe configurations, so insecure defaults get replicated at scale. We saw this with row-level security gaps like the Moltbook incident. Teams need guardrails that catch risky configurations as they’re introduced and an operating model that prioritizes remediation when insecure defaults slip through.” 

Ryan McCurdy, VP, Liquibase:

   “When AI agents can create and modify database environments on demand, the database becomes a high frequency software event. The risk is uncontrolled change. Policy enforced in the workflow, automatic audit evidence, drift detection, and trusted rollback are essential to keep velocity without sacrificing control.

    “Moreover, agentic development will multiply database changes. If governance stays manual, you get drift, surprise outages, and you can’t explain what changed when it matters. Database Change Governance is how enterprises keep the data layer fast, trusted, and auditable as it goes agentic.

   “The answer isn’t more humans reviewing more changes. It’s policy enforced in the workflow, automatic evidence capture, and trustworthy rollback.”

John Carberry, Solution Sleuth, Xcape, Inc.

   “The discovery that 80% of new enterprise databases are currently created by AI agents signifies a historic transition from human-centric administration to “vibe coding” on an industrial scale. Although this increase in autonomous infrastructure speeds up development, it also adds a significant “governance debt” by directly incorporating security logic into AI-generated code that is rarely submitted to human peer review.

   “The main risk is “excessive agency,” whereby these agents might unintentionally produce vulnerable endpoints, excessively lenient access rules, or unsafe schemas that get beyond conventional perimeter defenses. Moreover, these databases produce a vast, undetectable attack surface called Shadow Data, which is usually left out of centralized logging and auditing because they are routinely spun up in real-time “branches” for testing and development. In response, SOC teams must switch from post-deployment scanning to infrastructure-level enforcement, in which the security border is located outside of the code that is generated and checks each database operation against a policy that is hardcoded at runtime. The function of the DBA is changing from being a builder to a high-level auditor of autonomous systems as AI progresses beyond creating chatbots to designing the enterprise’s basic foundations.

    “The ‘human in the loop’ becomes a myth when 80% of your data infrastructure is built by AI.”

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