Articles about cybersecurity

Etzioni on AI: Murphy’s Law of AI

Oren Etzioni writes that the AI break-ins disclosed over the past three weeks by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and the UK’s AI Security Institute were entirely predictable. He argues that better alignment won’t prevent the next one, and makes the case for bounding what an agent can touch instead. Read More

Event Calendar

Amazon’s “Together We Hack” with Fortinet and WiCyS

A one-day, fully in-person Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge co-hosted by Amazon, Fortinet and Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) at Amazon’s… Read More

Salesforce hires ex-Microsoft exec to lead Agentforce engineering amid string of departures

After nearly three decades at Microsoft, cybersecurity executive Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy has announced he is joining Salesforce as executive vice… Read More

Microsoft escalates the AI security race with ‘Project Perception’ and a new in-house model

Microsoft on Monday unveiled Project Perception, an AI cybersecurity system built to defend against AI-driven attacks, aiming to keep pace with both hackers and its technology rivals. It’s part of a broader escalation across the industry. Read More

Microsoft 2.5: New security business chief Hayete Gallot on the company’s push into the agentic era

Hayete Gallot, who rejoined Microsoft in February to lead its security business, is pushing the company toward “agentic security” — systems that spot threats and act on them without waiting for a human. She’s doing it while building a new leadership team in a division where several VPs have exited in recent months. Read More

Veteran Microsoft security executive joins AWS amid broader reshuffle in Redmond

Rudra “Rudy” Mitra, who led Microsoft’s Purview data-security business, is joining Amazon Web Services as vice president of security services. His move is part of a broader reshuffling of Microsoft’s security leadership this year under new chief Hayete Gallot. Read More

JPMorgan Chase bets on Seattle to build its AI control layer

JPMorgan Chase is building out a new AI software infrastructure team, with a major presence in Seattle, focused on running AI across its data centers and outside providers in a way that controls costs, protects its intellectual property, and avoids tying its fortunes to any one vendor. Read More

Podcast

From the dot-com boom to AI security: F5 at 30, with CEO François Locoh-Donou

F5 has remade itself in every era of computing — from the early web to the cloud — and at 30 it’s doing it again. CEO François Locoh-Donou joins the GeekWire Podcast to discuss the company’s evolution and its latest initiative: a platform for AI security. Read More

F5 expands further into AI security with SurePath AI acquisition

F5 is buying SurePath AI, a Denver startup that helps companies find the AI tools their own employees are using, and folding it into a growing lineup of AI security products. CEO François Locoh-Donou explained the strategy on this weekend’s GeekWire Podcast.
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Amazon unveils new AI agents, trying to thread the needle between autonomy and human control

AWS used its New York Summit to roll out AI agents that act on their own — from fixing security vulnerabilities to triaging email — while trying to keep humans in control of how far they go. Read More

Amazon CEO reportedly raised Anthropic Fable concerns prior to U.S. order forcing models offline

Andy Jassy was reportedly among the tech leaders who flagged security risks in Anthropic’s newest AI models to senior Trump administration officials — an awkward turn for Amazon, which has invested billions in the AI lab. Read More

Find it, fix it: Seattle startup Emphere raises $2.1M to automate software vulnerability patching

Emphere, a Seattle startup that emerged from the AI2 Incubator, raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding to automatically fix vulnerabilities found in popular open-source distributions, catering to software companies that sell to regulated industries. Read More

Still ringing a bell: F5 marks its 30th year in business

Seattle-based F5 marked 30 years in business Friday by ringing the Nasdaq opening bell. The application-delivery and security company has grown to $3.1 billion in annual revenue and outlived nearly all the marquee customers and the three investment banks listed in its 1999 IPO prospectus. Read More

UN digital envoy warns AI influence is concentrated in a ‘few zip codes,’ calls for global action

The UN’s top digital envoy outlined a multi-stakeholder approach to AI governance at Seattle University, warning that computing power and wealth are concentrated in a handful of areas while most of the world lacks the capacity to participate. Read More

Podcast

What we learned about Microsoft in the OpenAI trial, and is Seattle squandering its edge?

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: As the Musk v. OpenAI trial heads to the jury, we dig into what… Read More

Microsoft’s multi-agent AI system tops Anthropic’s Mythos on cybersecurity benchmark

Microsoft’s new vulnerability-scanning system, codenamed MDASH, scored 88.45% on the CyberGym benchmark, surpassing single-model systems from Anthropic and OpenAI by using more than 100 specialized AI agents across multiple models. Read More

Microsoft exec Shawn Bice returns to AWS to lead reliability push for AI agents

Shawn Bice, who left AWS for Microsoft’s security organization in 2022, is returning to Amazon as VP of AI Services to lead the Automated Reasoning Group under Swami Sivasubramanian’s Agentic AI organization. Read More

XBOW, the unicorn with a Seattle mailbox, raises another $35M for its autonomous hacking platform

XBOW, the cybersecurity startup founded by GitHub Copilot creator Oege de Moor, added $35M from NVIDIA, Samsung, SentinelOne, and others, bringing its Series C to $155M. The billion-dollar company lists Seattle as its HQ — but its address is a mailbox at a Pioneer Square coworking space, and its founder lives in Malta. Read More

Brute-force attack linked Rec Room user phone numbers to online identities

Someone misused Rec Room’s friend-finder feature to match phone numbers to the user names of hundreds of thousands of players on the social gaming platform — assembling a database that connects their online identities directly to their real-world contact information. Read More

One year after its rocky launch, Microsoft’s Windows Recall still raises security red flags

Microsoft says its Recall app — which captures and stores screenshots every few seconds — is safe. One year after its launch on Copilot+ PCs, security researchers keep finding vulnerabilities in the tool that promises to give Windows users a “photographic memory” of everything they do on their computer. Read More

Former NSA director Keith Alexander stepping down from Amazon’s board

Keith Alexander, a retired four-star Army general and former director of the National Security Agency, is stepping down from Amazon’s board of directors after six years. Read More

Seattle startup Glacis brings longtime Microsoft leader aboard to target AI’s biggest blind spot

Glacis, a Seattle startup building tamper-proof records of AI behavior, has hired longtime Microsoft Azure exec Rohit Tatachar as co-founder and CTO and is launching new open-source tools for monitoring and controlling AI agents. Read More

Portland cybersecurity startup Eclypsium raises $25M to secure AI infrastructure

Founded in 2017 by former security engineers at Intel, Eclypsium serves private and public sector customers. It scans the hardware and firmware of laptops, servers, network devices, and AI infrastructure for vulnerabilities that sit below the operating system. Read More

Cybersecurity startup Native, led by AWS vets with roots in Seattle, comes out of stealth with $42M

The company lets teams define security policies once and automatically enforce them across platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Read More

Seattle startup Certiv launches with $4.2M to build endpoint security layer for AI agents

Seattle startup Certiv emerged from stealth with $4.2 million in funding to build security software that monitors and controls AI agents on employee computers. The company is led by serial entrepreneur Jason Needham, whose previous startups were acquired by Apple and VMware. Read More

Seattle security startup led by husband-wife duo raises $8.4M

Clearly AI, a Seattle startup that helps companies review security and privacy risks before shipping new products, has raised $8.4 million in seed funding. Read More

Microsoft exec Charlie Bell shifts to new role as Hayete Gallot returns from Google to lead security

A former Microsoft executive is returning to the company from Google to lead its security initiatives, replacing the former Amazon exec who is exiting the role to focus on engineering quality as an individual contributor at the Redmond company. Read More

Does your AI have an ID? Microsoft looks to document the digital workforce with new ‘Agent 365’

Microsoft is shifting toward “per-agent” computing, unveiling Agent 365 and new tools at Ignite that let companies manage and secure autonomous AI agents like employees. Read More

F5 discloses major security breach linked to nation-state hackers

The Seattle-based company disclosed the incident Wednesday in an SEC filing and a customer memo, saying the attacker maintained “long-term, persistent access” to some of its product development and engineering systems before the breach was contained. Read More

F5 paying $180M to acquire CalypsoAI to boost AI enterprise security offerings

Seattle-based security and application delivery giant F5 will pay $180 million to acquire CalypsoAI, a startup founded in 2018 that… Read More