IBM released its annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, showing the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million in 2023 – an all-time high for the report and a 15% increase over the last 3 years. Detection and escalation costs jumped 42% over this same time frame, representing the highest portion of breach costs, and indicating a shift towards more complex breach investigations.

At its annual Think conference, IBM announced IBM watsonx, a new AI and data platform, planned to be released in July 2023, that will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data.

IBM announced plans to expand its relationship with Amazon Web Services to help more mutual clients operationalize and derive value from generative artificial intelligence.

Appier announces that it has integrated Generative AI (GenAI) technology into three major marketing capabilities across its product lines. By connecting its advanced GenAI algorithms with OpenAI's ChatGPT language model, Appier can leverage the power of pioneering technology to help businesses increase productivity through advertising keywords and targeting parameters generation; intelligent conversational chatbot creation; and marketing copywriting and automatic content generation.

The democratization and acceleration of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) originated in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market with the release of popular applications like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. But the B2C market will barely scratch the surface of generative AI’s potential economic value.

F5's latest Curve of Convenience 2023 report shows data security taking a back seat with APAC consumers, with an increased willingness to save and share personal payment data on multiple platforms.

October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month and with online safety being top of mind, Google has launched new products and features to help people everywhere. These releases include in-built features that work around-the-clock to take the security burden off users, and updates to privacy controls that help to easily protect personal information.

• Dark web report: Users can check if their Gmail address has been exposed on the dark web as well as get guidance on how they can protect themself online by accessing the Dark Web Report in their account menu in the Google App. They just have to sign into the Google App and tap their profile picture to open the menu.
• Passwordless by Default: Passkeys are a simpler and more secure way to sign into sites online and can be used with the Google Accounts. To make transition to passwordless even easier, Google is offering the ability to set up passkeys for all users — by default.
• A new requirement to make email safer for everyone:  Gmail recently announced new requirements for large senders to make email safer and more user-friendly for everyone, including enforcing authentication, enabling easy unsubscription, enforcing a clear spam rate threshold. This is in addition to Gmail’s AI-powered defenses, which block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware — that’s 15 billion unwanted emails every day. 
• Easier access to clear browsing data: Google added an option to quickly delete users’ browsing history in Chrome without interrupting current activities. Users just need to click the three dots in the top-right corner of the Chrome browser and select “Clear browsing data”.
• Use the Google App as the credential provider for your iOS device: Google Password Manager is built into the Google App and you can already use it to securely save your passwords and sign in faster when you’re using the app. Now, you can set it as your Autofill provider so that the Google App can help you quickly and securely autofill your passwords into any app or website on your iOS device.

Feel free to read more about the announcements in Google’s blog post.

By MediaBUZZ

Google is making Google Play Protect’s security capabilities even more powerful with real-time scanning at the code-level to combat novel malicious apps. Google Play Protect will now recommend a real-time app scan when installing apps that have never been scanned before to help detect emerging threats.

A new study from Juniper Research forecasts that the greatest merchant losses to fraud will be via remote physical goods purchases, with losses reaching $5.1 billion across emerging markets in 2028, up from $1 billion in 2023.

Remote work, home office or hybrid work, have become the norm in today's business world and that most likely will stay that way. But the more employees work remotely, the greater the company's risk of falling victim to a cyberattack, making a sophisticated and multi-layered security concept the more essential for any company.

Three prominent digital services companies in Asia – Digile Technologies, Reveron Consulting, and Innopia Global – have merged to create a digital services powerhouse with a formidable presence in the Asian region.

Google and the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) announced a strategic collaboration to bolster Singapore’s cyber resilience. This partnership covers four key pillars: threat intelligence sharing, joint operations, technical collaboration, and ecosystem development.

Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA), with Dr Paul Watters of Cyberstronomy, have released a new report, Consumer Risks from Piracy in the Philippines, that once again highlights the possible dangers Filipino consumers face when accessing pirate sites.

After years of steadily picking up steam, online learning is experiencing undeniable explosive growth. The market is racing toward $1 trillion, with the corporate e-learning space expected to skyrocket 250% in the coming years. As e-learning continues to expand beyond the walls of academia, another game-changing phenomenon is going mainstream in a big way: artificial intelligence (AI).