Archive for March 4, 2026

Flux Voice AI Platform Now Supports On-the-Fly Configuration 

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 4, 2026 by itnerd

Deepgram just announced Flux “on-the-fly configuration” for its voice AI platform which lets developers dynamically update speech recognition settings — such as keyterms and end-of-turn detection — during a live voice conversation without disconnecting or restarting the audio stream.

This matters because now businesses can automate more customer interactions with voice AI without frustrating users, lowering support costs while maintaining a natural, reliable experience.

Employees love it because when voice AI reliably handles repetitive questions and routine tasks, they spend less time on frustrating, high-volume calls and more time on meaningful work, which tends to improve job satisfaction and reduce burnout. What’s more, when routine work is automated, employees often shift toward higher-value roles such as handling complex cases, supervising AI systems, improving workflows, or managing customer outcomes, which can lead to greater responsibility, new skills, and potentially higher pay.

Deepgram just published a blog detailing the new offering — it can be found here: https://deepgram.com/learn/flux-on-the-fly-configuration

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Abstract’s ASTRO research team just released blog about critical CISCO vulnerabilities: CVE-2026-20079 and CVE-2026-20131

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 4, 2026 by itnerd

Abstract’s ASTRO research team has just published a blog entitled: Critical Cisco Vulnerabilities: CVE-2026-20079 and CVE-2026-20131 Affecting Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center‍.

Earlier today, Cisco published several security advisories addressing vulnerabilities across its Secure Firewall product line. Two of these are rated critical with a CVSS score of 10.0 and affect Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC). Both can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers to execute code on an affected device and obtain root access to the underlying operating system. Cisco has released software updates to address these vulnerabilities. Currently there are no workarounds for either vulnerability, making patching the only path to remediation. At the time of publishing, Cisco PSIRT is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of these vulnerabilities.

This post covers the critical vulnerabilities in detail, along with a summary of additional high-severity issues disclosed in the same advisory bundle. Abstract also offers recommendations for immediate actions to take plus detection and monitoring bullets.

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The Media Trust Releases 2026 Intelligence Report: “When Advertising Entered the Cyber Conversation”

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 4, 2026 by itnerd

The Media Trust (TMT), a global leader in digital trust and safety for more than 20 years, today released its 2026 Intelligence Report, When Advertising Entered the Cyber Conversation: A Look Back at 2025 and the Digital Safety Imperative for 2026.

The report documents a defining shift in the digital ecosystem: in 2025, advertising infrastructure was no longer viewed solely as a revenue engine. It became increasingly recognized by regulators, media companies, and the public as part of the cyber risk landscape.

High-profile enforcement actions, evolving government policy initiatives, and increased scrutiny of platform accountability, including measures undertaken by major publishers and global technology companies, signal a clear shift. Neutrality is no longer viable. For publishers, platforms, and brands, ignoring malicious activity within advertising systems carries measurable consequences: reputational damage, regulatory exposure, lost revenue, and growing legal liability.

The question entering 2026 is not whether responsibility exists. It is how organizations will operationalize it.

Drawing on proprietary, real-time threat detection data from The Media Trust’s global infrastructure, which analyzes more than 200 billion ads monthly across 100,000+ digital properties, the report details how malvertising, malicious redirects, cloaked landing pages, and AI-enabled manipulation tactics are actively exploiting advertising systems as scalable attack surfaces.

TMT’s data shows these threats are not random. They concentrate geographically, target specific user communities, and follow monetization pathways designed to extract economic value at scale. Digital crime within the ad ecosystem is structured, repeatable, and increasingly automated.

Key Findings from the 2026 Intelligence Report

Advertising as Infrastructure


Advertising systems now operate as high-speed execution environments for third-party code, making them efficient pathways for malware, fraud, and surveillance when exploited.

AI is Accelerating Both Defense and Attack


Artificial intelligence is reshaping the threat landscape. Attackers are using AI to scale evasion and automate malicious campaigns, while real-time defensive AI has become essential to detecting and blocking harmful activity before it reaches users.

Digital Crime is Local


Threat activity is no longer diffuse. State-by-state and global analysis shows digital attacks concentrate geographically, exposing specific regions and communities to disproportionate risk.

The Human Cost is Measurable


Malicious advertising produces direct financial loss, brand damage, and revenue disruption. Beyond economics, manipulation campaigns and scams increasingly affect vulnerable populations with real-world consequences.

Cybersecurity vs. Digital Safety


The report distinguishes system-level security from human-level safety, arguing that compliance alone is insufficient in today’s data-driven advertising ecosystem.

Accountability is Becoming Enforceable


Regulatory scrutiny, advertiser expectations, and governance standards are converging. Organizations that fail to address malicious activity within monetization systems face mounting reputational, financial, and regulatory risk.

A Call for Industry-Wide Responsibility

The report concludes with what The Media Trust calls The Guardian Imperative: protecting people and protecting profit are not competing priorities, they are operationally linked.

When malicious creatives degrade user trust, traffic declines. Fraud diverts advertiser spend, weak enforcement increases regulatory exposure, and diminished user trust impacts long-term monetization. Consumer protection, brand integrity, and revenue performance are structurally connected within the advertising ecosystem, and weaknesses in one area directly affect the others.

The organizations that invest in proactive threat detection, real-time enforcement, and shared intelligence do more than reduce risk. They strengthen long-term monetization resilience.

Availability

The full 2026 Intelligence Report, When Advertising Entered the Cyber Conversation, is now available at: https://info.mediatrust.com/2026-intelligence-report

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Forcepoint Secures AI Adoption and Data Everywhere with New ARIA AI Assistant and Endpoint Intelligence

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 4, 2026 by itnerd

Forcepoint today announced major enhancements to its AI-native Data Security Cloud platform, led by ARIA, the embedded Adaptive Risk Intelligence Assistant that uses natural language to create enforcement policies and accelerate incident response across AI-driven workflows. The company also updated its Global Partner Program, aligning incentives and enablement around Data Security Cloud to help partners deploy and scale modern data security for end-users. Together, these innovations advance Forcepoint’s Self-Aware Data Security approach that knows threats as they form, adapts policies and risk scoring in real time and enforces controls wherever data flows.

A recent World Economic Forum report found that 66 percent of organizations say AI will have the most significant impact on cybersecurity in the next year, yet most lack formal processes to assess AI risk. As AI reshapes how sensitive information is created, transformed and shared at machine speed across cloud platforms, collaboration tools and AI-driven workflows, this always-on data evolves long after creation, widening the gap between visibility and control.

Today’s Data Security Cloud updates address this gap with AI-aware automation, on-device web intelligence and a redesigned partner program that brings Self-Aware Data Security to market at scale. Rather than relying on static policies or routing traffic through a remote proxy before responding, Forcepoint adapts enforcement in real time, closing the distance between detection and action to keep up with how modern workforces leverage AI tools. 

Data Security Cloud unifies DSPM, DLP Cloud, Data Detection and Response (DDR), Web and Email security, CASB, RBI, advanced forensics and risk-adaptive protection under a single-policy framework, extending from endpoint to cloud. The platform eliminates multiple point products, making Self-Aware Data Security a practical, day-to-day reality. 

Data Security Cloud Delivers AI-Aware Protection at the Speed of Data Creation

The enhancements extend protection to follow sensitive information everywhere, across AI pipelines, analytics platforms and collaboration tools. By unifying discovery, classification, prioritization and enforcement in one continuous loop, Forcepoint enables organizations to move toward Self-Aware Data Security — gaining clarity and confidence to tame data sprawl, safely enable GenAI, contain insider risk and simplify compliance. Key innovations include:

Forcepoint Adaptive Risk Intelligence Assistant (ARIA). Embedded in Data Security Cloud, ARIA understands risk across the platform, identifying gaps such as newly adopted copilots without policy coverage, and generates recommended policies in seconds with clear rationale for administrator review. Teams can quickly create or update policies and deploy them across channels from a single interface, reducing time-to-value and policy expertise requirements. ARIA also streamlines incident response by integrating with existing tools like ServiceNow and Slack, while continuously delivering risk insights powered by Forcepoint’s AI Mesh, which discovers and classifies billions of structured and unstructured data elements.

Next-generation Data Security Everywhere agent. The new agent brings adaptive protection and web intelligence directly to the endpoint, inspecting and protecting data on devices, without forcing traffic through a traditional proxy. It manages precise protection for sanctioned AI apps while blocking sensitive information from reaching unsanctioned AI tools and personal cloud storage. It combines adaptive enforcement, investigation, forensics and user-level awareness in a single agent that supports cloud and on-premises environments, allowing organizations to modernize without sacrificing protection.

Expanded coverage for modern analytics, cloud data lakehouses and AI-driven environments. Forcepoint extended structured data security to cloud data lakehouses such as Databricks and Snowflake, deepened integration with Google Workspace and broadened consistent protection across SaaS, hybrid, endpoint, web and email channels.

Global Partner Program Accelerates Data Security Everywhere 

Based on partner feedback, Forcepoint updated its Global Partner Program to align incentives, enablement and deal structures around Data Security Cloud. The redesigned program introduces a simplified three-tier structure with transparent requirements and clearly defined economic benefits at every level, including deal registration margins with no minimum thresholds and deal families aligned to data security use cases. Expanded enablement includes billable capability development to help partners differentiate as trusted data security advisors.

Learn More at AWARE Virtual Event and RSA Conference 2026 

Forcepoint will showcase Data Security Cloud enhancements at the AWARE Spring 2026 virtual event on March 4 and during RSA Conference, March 23–26. Both forums will feature real-world use cases and a closer look at the innovations announced today. Register to access on-demand AWARE content at forcepoint.com/aware. RSA attendees can request in-person meetings and demos.

To learn more about Forcepoint Data Security Cloud, read the announcement blog and visit the platform page. More details about the Global Partner Program can be found on this blog and the partner page.

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Check Point Software Launches Dedicated Canada Data Region, Enabling Full Data Residency for Canadian Organizations

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 4, 2026 by itnerd

Check Point today announced the launch of a dedicated Canada data region for its Check Point Web Application Firewall (WAF), ensuring that all configurations, logs, and security processing remain fully within Canada.

This launch enables Canadian organizations, particularly those in regulated industries, to meet strict data residency, privacy, and sovereignty requirements, while maintaining enterprise-grade application and API security. Organizations can now protect applications and APIs within Canada using Check Point’s AI-powered Web Application Firewall to stop threats early, reduce compliance complexity, and eliminate cross-border data exposure. The Launch highlights Check Point’s continued investment in locally hosted security aligned with national regulations. 

Key benefits of the Canada data region include:

  • Full Canadian data residency for logs, configurations, and inspection data
  • Local performance with reduced latency
  • Prevention-first security that blocks known and unknown threats
  • Reduced operational overhead and improved security efficiency

This milestone is particularly significant for finance, healthcare, government, and critical infrastructure organizations that must comply with increasingly stringent regulatory and privacy frameworks.

Check Point WAF leverages AI-powered, prevention-first architecture to protect applications and APIs from both known and zero-day threats — without relying on signatures, emergency patching, or manual rule tuning. Key performance highlights include:

  1. 99.5% detection rate with near-zero false positives
  2. 90%+ of deployments operating in full prevention mode
  3. Fully automated protection requiring no manual tuning
  4. Proactive blocking of zero-day attacks in advance

Its effectiveness has been validated through the WAF Comparison Project 2026, which assessed 14 leading WAF vendors under real-world conditions. Check Point WAF has also been recognized as a Leader/Fast Mover in the GigaOm Radar and included in the Gartner WAAP Market Guide.

Check Point WAF’s Canada data region is now available for eligible customers and partners.

Check Point will showcase the new data region and discuss its prevention-first approach to application security during its concurrent keynote session and throughout the exhibition at the Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit (VIPSS) in Victoria, BC, March 4–5, 2026.–

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Guest Post: Why SK Square Invested in Hammerspace: Data Orchestration for AI at Global + Sovereign Scale

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 4, 2026 by itnerd

By Molly Presley, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Hammerspace

AI infrastructure has hit a new hard limit and it’s not compute, it’s data. As organizations scale training and inference, the bottleneck has increasingly become the ability to find, govern, and deliver the right data to the right GPUs fast enough – across sites, clouds, and jurisdictions.

That’s why TGC Square, the overseas investment arm referenced in SK Square’s announcement this week, invested in Hammerspace: to back a platform purpose-built to eliminate data fragmentation and data-path friction, all while making sovereignty enforceable in the real world.

In the AI era, performance isn’t limited by how many GPUs you can buy; it’s limited by whether data can reach those GPUs fast enough. That’s why SK Square invested in Hammerspace: to back a data orchestrator that can logically unify distributed data and then move the right data to available GPUs without interrupting access. In a world where datasets span sites, clouds, and jurisdictions, orchestration is how you turn fragmented storage into an AI-ready data plane – globally and in sovereign environments.

AI Needs Distributed Data
AI pipelines don’t stay neatly inside one storage system, data center, or geographic location. Data is created in one place, enriched in another, and consumed wherever GPU capacity exists. The common “fix” is to duplicate datasets into new AI silos per region or per cluster.

That approach creates a familiar failure mode:

  • More copies → more drift
  • More silos → more policy gaps
  • More manual governance → more operational risk
  • More storage sprawl → more cost and slower AI cycles

Global namespace + orchestration is what makes Sovereign AI real: one consistent view of data everywhere, with policy-driven control over where each file can live, move, and be computed on, so data stays where it must, access is provable, and AI runs at full speed.

The Basis for the Investment 
Hammerspace addresses the modern AI constraint with data orchestration within a global namespace that turns fragmented data sets into a unified data estate – across distributed environments while staying within sovereign boundaries. Our unique data platform can:

  • Orchestrate data in place by indexing and leveraging file metadata, so teams can use distributed datasets without disruptive migrations or creating new storage silos.
  • Orchestrate access through a global namespace so users and applications see one consistent view of data across on-premises, multi-site, and cloud environments.
  • Orchestrate policy-driven outcomes so data movement, placement, performance, durability, and compliance behaviors are automatically enforced, and continuously re-evaluated as infrastructure and requirements change.

AI Data Access: Controlled Participation, Not Copied Isolation
AI only delivers value when the right data can be found, accessed, and delivered to GPUs quickly.  This is more complex, requires more humans, and is much slower when that data is spread across sites, clouds, and storage systems. The instinctive response is to copy everything into a dedicated “AI zone” or per-cluster silo. That creates delays, duplicate datasets, and governance drift.

Hammerspace takes a different approach: one global namespace for access, paired with policy-driven orchestration that determines what data can be used where, by whom, and under what conditions—at file granularity. Teams get the speed and simplicity of local access, without forcing new silos or breaking the guardrails that matter in regulated and sovereign environments.

Proven in Demanding Environments
Hammerspace has been adopted in high-scale, high-performance environments, including top-tier customers referenced in the announcement such as Meta and Los Alamos National Laboratory, where data bottlenecks pose an existential threat to productivity and compute ROI.

And it’s driven by deep systems expertise: David Flynn previously founded Fusion-io, which was acquired by SanDisk — experience that shows up in a platform built to remove I/O friction instead of adding new layers of overhead.

The Flynn Factor
Hammerspace was founded and is led by Flynn, a first mover who sees what infrastructure must become next and builds it before the market even has the language for it. Flynn invented the PCIe flash model at Fusion-io (the NVMe precursor) and sold it to SanDisk. Hammerspace is the next act: a global namespace data orchestrator engineered to remove I/O friction and feed GPUs at full speed—without creating new silos or breaking sovereignty.


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Hisense Leads Global TV Shipments in 2025 Across 100-Inch and Laser TVs

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 4, 2026 by itnerd

Hisense has reaffirmed its leadership in the global large-screen TV market. According to Omdia’s full-year 2025 global shipment data, Hisense ranked No. 1 worldwide in the 100-inch-and-above TV segment for three consecutive years (2023–2025), with global shipment share reaching 57.1 per cent in 2025.

Hisense also maintained its No. 1 position in the global Laser TV category in 2025, marking seven consecutive years of worldwide leadership, with a global market share of 70.3%. These results confirm Hisense’s dominance across the most strategically important large-screen categories, where both scale and technological capability matter.

This sustained leadership is driven by Hisense’s long-term commitment to advanced display technologies, most notably the innovation of RGB Mini-LED. As the originator of RGB Mini-LED, Hisense has led the technology’s evolution from early research to large-scale commercialization, establishing clear advantages in colour accuracy, brightness control and viewing comfort on ultra-large screens.

Omdia’s CES 2026 recap further supports this trajectory, identifying RGB Mini-LED TVs as a key driver of the industry’s next growth phase, with rapid expansion expected from 2026 — reflecting a broader shift toward technologies where Hisense has long held leadership.

Looking ahead, Hisense is uniquely positioned to extend this advantage. It is the only brand with a complete display technology ecosystem spanning RGB Mini-LED, TriChroma Laser and Micro-LED, enabling a comprehensive approach to next-generation visual innovation. At CES 2026, Hisense showcased the 116UXS, the first TV powered by RGB Mini-LED evo, alongside the UR8 and UR9 RGB Mini-LED lineups and the Laser Projector XR10, all recognized with multiple CES awards.

By leading critical technology transitions in large-screen displays and transforming them into premium viewing experiences, Hisense is setting the visual benchmarks for the next generation of high-end screens worldwide.

For more information, please visit hisense-canada.com. 

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