Billy Hurley

New York

Reporter at IT Brew

Reporter at Morning Brew

Reporter @ITBrew/@MorningBrew, All-Time Leader of the 6-Like Tweet

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Articles

IT pros see vibe-based coding helping with the small stuff

1 week ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Dan Shiebler, Abnormal Security’s head of machine learning, thinks of the approach to coding as “based on the inputs and outputs, rather than how things will work.”Janet Worthington, senior analyst for security and risk at Forrester, sees it as a way to iteratively prompt a GenAI editor “so you don’t have to have any understanding of what the underlying code is.”For Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI at Tesla, it’s……vibes, man.
Google makes end-to-end encryption more accessible for Gmail users

2 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Google recently announced an easier way for Gmail users to send encrypted messages to any email platform—a capability the company hopes will reduce IT pros’ pains when having to deploy the protection mechanism. “We’ve heard from businesses all over the place, across the board: ‘This is too hard for us. It’s not automatic. It’s not as easy as just opening a message and sending it out.’ And they’re frustrated by that,” Julien Duplant, security product manager for Gmail, told IT Brew.
IRS takes down Transformation and Strategy Office

2 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

The wait for your refund might get longer, or at least less innovative. IRS Acting Commissioner Melanie Krause, in an email to staff (seen by Bloomberg Law and reported by Tax Notes), announced a “standing down” of the agency’s Transformation and Strategy Office.
OWASP expands its LLM guidance beyond ‘Top 10’

2 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

A humble “Top 10” list enumerating the biggest GenAI security risks has now turned into a major project. What began in May 2023 as the “OWASP Top 10 for LLM and Generative AI List”—a countdown of AI-related threats, like data poisoning and sensitive information leakage—has become a collection of strategy recommendations, supported by an org of over 600 contributing experts from more than 18 countries.
As the Trump administration pushes crypto, what does that mean for ransomware?

3 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

As the Trump administration gets increasingly keen on crypto, some security pros see both potential benefits and drawbacks for ransomware adversaries. Crypto news from the White House so far includes an announcement of a Bitcoin Reserve, the appointment of David Sacks as a “crypto czar,” and an SEC dismissal of enforcement actions against the Coinbase exchange. There’s even a “$TRUMP” memecoin, and a new dollar-backed stablecoin.
PNNL team tests PageRank algorithm for stopping ‘cascading failures’

3 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory mathematician Bill Kay had been talking with a data scientist concerned about “cascading failures.”Not to be confused with the compounded catastrophe of losing your MetroCard, missing your train, arriving late for work, and ultimately missing out on free office bagels, “cascading failure,” in this case, refers to critical infrastructure.
Abnormal Security’s agents quickly add signals to its threat model

4 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Abnormal Security wants to make sure that email from human resources is, in fact, from a human. To that end, the email protection provider must incorporate new suspicion-seeking signals into its machine-learning detection technology. That includes questioning quirky behavior by the aforementioned HR department.
Coalition finds ‘underappreciated’ IT threat: exposed login panels

1 month ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

If you want to get into a party you’re not invited to, you’ve got two options: Rappel down from the second-story skylight, or hope someone opens the front door for you. Locked-out threat actors have been hanging (high-tensile rope excluded) by the entrance, according to a recent report from cyber insurer Coalition, going after login panels—entry points leading to costly compromises.
GitHub supply-chain attack signals possibility of more code chaos

1 month ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Following the compromise of a popular GitHub tool, developers are in David Bowie mode, having to turn and face their code repo’s strange ch-ch-changes. The poisoning of an automation mechanism used in over 23,000 repositories exposed software-development credentials known as secrets. While GitHub promptly stopped the attack days after the report’s release, the discoverers of the supply-chain threat see similar compromises on the horizon as the secret’s out.
Despite a failing grade, application security is increasingly passing ‘Top 10’ tests

1 month ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Going from 32 to a 52 is still a failing grade, but it’s an improvement that at least one security evangelist believes deserves a proud place—if not on the refrigerator, at least in an application-security report. Veracode, in its 2025 State of Software Security study, released on Feb. 27, found 52% of applications have passed a popular nonprofit’s “Top 10” checklist of common coding weaknesses—up from 32% five years ago.