The REvil ransomware group has been ripping off its own affiliates since early last year, taking the full ransom payments, report malware developers and cybersecurity researchers. REvil operators have reportedly tapped cryptobackdoors, allowing them to decrypt files without notifying the affiliates and secretly conduct their own negotiations with victims.

Human oversight is likely insufficient to counter flawed artificial intelligence, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy assistant professor Ben Green asserts in a recent paper, because people are bad at evaluating decision quality and use biases when deciding whether or not to override algorithms. "We should be putting much more scrutiny on whether it's actually appropriate to use an algorithm in a given situation," Green concludes.

Artificial intelligence has advanced to the point that false information can be presented as truth, even to the point of fooling cybersecurity experts, software developer Nahla Davies argues. "It's not that AI creates misinformation, it's that AI can be used by people either for good or ill," Davis writes.

Almost 7 in 10 Internet users find news about data breaches stressful, reports cybersecurity company Kaspersky after a survey of 2,500 individuals. The report also finds that 3 in 10 use a security platform to protect their information and devices.

Australian startup Tide Foundation says its unique, blockchain-employing encryption protocol could stop ransomware. The company has raised $2 million in startup funds and also has the backing of major names from the cybersecurity sector.

Assuring the cybersecurity of the Internet of Things starts with Domain Name System capabilities, writes Ronan David of EfficientIP. "Protecting industrial IoT control devices not only at [the] network level, but also at the DNS level, helps avoid threats such as DNS Cache Poisoning, which capture the IoT traffic to exploit all other flaws," David notes.

Ransomware attacks leaped to "stratospheric" levels in the second quarter, notes a report from Positive Technologies, a cybersecurity firm. The top targets were government and health care entities, with manufacturing a close third.

The global cybersecurity market was valued at almost $180 billion this year and is projected to grow to $372 billion by 2028, Grand View Research reports. Shelby Hiter examines the state of the job market, pointing out that nearly 100,000 cybersecurity jobs are listed on LinkedIn.

The ability to access unstructured data near its source and move it around as needed "is driving the shift from closed, proprietary and siloed IT architectures to open, hybrid models," says Seagate executive Jeff Fochtman. In hybrid models, data is stored around the enterprise, closest to the points where it is needed.

Ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated and more common, which has increased costs tied to them over the last few years, NetDiligence reports. Ransomware incident cost averages have risen every year since 2016, with 79% of claims involving a business-interruption loss tied to ransomware attacks, per the report.