Integrity360’s Matthew Olney explains the ins and outs of IT and OT security, and the importance of having both secured.

From manufacturing lines and water utilities to transport hubs and energy plants, operational technology (OT) is a prime target for cybercriminals and nation-state actors.

As the lines between information technology (IT) and OT blur, understanding the difference between them and securing both effectively has never been more critical.

IT v OT security

IT security is the practice of protecting an organisation’s IT assets, including computers, networks, and data, from unauthorised access, attacks and other malicious activity. It involves using a combination of technologies, processes and physical controls to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information. A key objective is to prevent threats like data breaches, malware and phishing.

OT security, on the other hand, protects the physical systems that keep operations running – machinery, control systems and critical infrastructure. Here, priorities shift: availability and safety come first, because downtime doesn’t just cost money; it can halt production or endanger lives.

Many industrial organisations still treat IT and OT as distinct domains – one governed by corporate IT teams, the other by engineering departments.

Historically, this separation made sense when OT systems operated in isolation. But that’s no longer the case.

Today, nearly 40pc of OT assets are connected to the internet without adequate security, and by 2025, 70pc of OT systems are expected to be integrated with IT networks.

With 72pc of industrial cybersecurity incidents originating in the IT environment before infiltrating OT systems, a unified, cross-functional approach to securing both realms is growing in importance.

Attackers exploit weak segmentation, unsecured remote access, and legacy systems that were never designed with cybersecurity in mind. Once inside, they can halt production, damage equipment, or even threaten human life or cause environmental damage.

The unique challenges of OT environments:

Legacy technology

Many systems run on outdated or unsupported software, sometimes decades old, that can’t easily be patched without interrupting operations.

Proprietary protocols

OT devices use vendor-specific communication methods not recognised by standard IT tools.

Availability over confidentiality

Shutting down a process for security reasons may be more damaging than the attack itself.

Human and safety impact

A compromised industrial controller could affect worker safety or public services.

Limited visibility

Without asset inventories or monitoring, intrusions can go unnoticed for months.

Common weaknesses found in OT networks

Integrity360’s experts regularly uncover recurring issues across industrial environments, including:

• Poor network segmentation, allowing attackers to move from IT to OT.
• Unpatched systems and default configurations left unchanged.
• Weak or insecure remote access used by vendors and contractors.
• Lack of asset inventory or real-time monitoring.
• No endpoint protection against malware propagation.

These weaknesses make OT environments particularly attractive to threat actors seeking maximum disruption.

When operations depend on continuous uptime, a single breach can lead to production loss, safety risks, reputational damage and regulatory penalties.

By Matthew Olney

Olney is a cybersecurity content and communications specialist with extensive experience translating complex security topics into clear, engaging content for technical and executive audiences. As content marketing and social media lead at Integrity360, he works closely with Integrity360 experts to develop thought leadership, technical blogs, webinars and multi-channel campaigns that help organisations understand and respond to emerging cyberthreats.

A version of this article previously appeared on Integrity360’s website.

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The company confirmed to me that it is moving in a direction that other platforms have taken: converting users to the app. Reddit says that the test aims to find out if people like me—those who use the service but aren’t generally logged in—get a better experience with the app.

I often prefer the open web and don’t really want one more app cluttering up my phone. And while I’m open to learning about the “much better” experience in the app, hardball blocking tactics seem an odd way to educate users about something supposedly in their own interests. (After clearing cookies in my browser, I was able to access the mobile website again. It sounds like you can alternately log in to Reddit, though the overlay says nothing about this; I cleared cookies before I could try it.)

User reaction to the move seems somewhat negative. Futurism ran an angry article last week saying that Reddit “Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website.” And redditors have posted numerous complaints in places like r/bugs, r/help, and (naturally) r/enshittification. (Representative sample comment: “Reddit is a Website; why is it forcing me to the app?”)

Some of this carping does feel a bit strident for a free and (generally) useful service. Perhaps I should switch to the app. Perhaps I should browse while logged in to enable a truly customized feed. Perhaps I really would love the better search options.

But as I mentioned at the beginning, I often wonder if I could spend my Reddit time in more productive ways; signing up for a more targeted feed that better plays on my dopamine triggers doesn’t actually sound helpful. I think that’s one reason I resist these pushes to log in, to customize, to spend even more time on site. Indeed, if more force continues to be applied, perhaps the better choice would simply be to walk away altogether.

Disclosure: Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

Martini and Hansi of Nerdforge have long been splitting their time between crafting one-of-a-kind leather bound books and building custom computers. One day, they were wondering what would happen if they combined the two worlds into one project. The end result looks like a large, old book pulled from a dusty library shelf and placed on a desk.

The exterior gives you a clue right away, as the thick vegetable tan leather that wraps around the sides was chosen for its solidity, making every carved line and stamped detail stand out. The hides were soaked in a sealed bag overnight to soften them enough for tooling, and then allowed to dry naturally. Each side panel began as four laser-cut plywood layers joined together to form a solid slab. The corners were routed smooth before the leather was applied, and contact cement was utilized to adhere the heavy hide after standard wood glue couldn’t handle the thickness. The edges fold cleanly together, and after a little sharpening with a thinner leather strip, the finished covers appear very crisp and professional.

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Carving on the leather required a lot of patience because it was done entirely by hand, with lines drawn freehand and backdrop stamps used to drive the leather down and provide some wonderful contrast. Then they utilized other stamps to create raised, 3D elements that stand out when light hits them. It took two full days to complete each cover, but it was worthwhile because the finished product seemed handmade rather than mass-produced. The spine was given the same treatment, with curved pieces of leather meticulously molded over a form and tooled with matching patterns. After everything had dried and gotten a faint stain, the tint turned out to be a warm, somewhat aged tone that resembled a genuine hand bound book.

Inside the book form sits the actual computer case, painted to blend perfectly with the leather. The top panel posed the biggest puzzle. Ordinary grates would ruin the illusion, so thin strips of laser-cut MDF were spaced apart and sandwiched between sheets of paper. From any normal viewing angle the surface now looks like stacked book pages, yet air flows freely through the gaps. The spine front keeps its ventilation holes completely open. Nothing blocks the fans or traps heat. RGB lighting tucked within the case casts a soft glow outward, turning the carved leather into something that feels alive at night.

Assembly brought its share of moments where plans had to shift. The leather proved heavier and stiffer than expected once it met the plywood. Clamps ran out, so pieces were weighted down on the workshop floor. Glue dried faster in some spots than others, forcing careful realignment mid-process. Still, every adjustment kept the final shape true to the book idea. Power and reset buttons hide discreetly along one edge. Cables route out the back without breaking the illusion. Once powered on, the system boots like any other machine, ready for work or play.

from the look-mom,-we’re-stupid! dept

Good news if you really enjoy corporatism, autocracy, propaganda and a violently misinformed electorate!

The U.S. has fallen to sixty-fourth place (now below Ukraine) in the annual Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index. As corrupt, oligarch-coddled authoritarians the world over continue to enjoy their moment in the sun, journalism (aka the “enemy of the people”) continues to be violently disassembled by a lazy coalition of fascist ideology and corporatism.

From the latest report (see the full interactive index):

“For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low.”

The study notes that in 2002, 20% of the global population lived in a country where the state of press freedom was categorized as “good.” A quarter century later, less than 1% of the world’s population lives in a country that falls under this category.

In the U.S., Trump-friendly oligarchs like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are gobbling up the remnants of dying traditional media and newer social media platforms alike, keen on turning both into oligarch and autocrat friendly agitprop machines. All while Trump destroys whatever was left of public media, and endlessly harasses companies that platform basic journalism and comedy.

At the same time, journalism layoffs continue to be rampant at the hands of corporate media giants dead set on destroying whatever was left of media consolidation limits, public interest reporting, and even archival and journalistic history. The result is a lazy, ad-driven, badly automated engagement ouroborus where anything serving the public interest is a distant and fleeting consideration.

The better performers in the index include Norway, Finland (where they teach kids media literacy and how to identify propaganda starting at the age of three), Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia. While decidedly smaller with vast differences, such countries have strange perks like functional public media and an operational social safety net not yet hollowed out by grotesque levels of corruption.

From the study:

“In the United States (which ranks 64th out of 180 countries and territories) journalists who were already fighting against economic headwinds and dealing with a crisis of public trust—among other challenges—now also contend with President Donald Trump’s systematic weaponisation of state institutions, including funding cuts to public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, political interference in media ownership, and politically motivated investigations targeting disfavoured journalists and media outlets.”

It can, of course, always get worse. Autocracies start by consolidating media and turning established outlets in to autocratic agitprop bullhorns, but ultimately move on to dominating or destroying whatever’s left of independent journalism through legal harassment and ultimately murder.

There are paths out from under this, but it requires a lot of coordinated efforts the U.S. has historically had an allergy to. Including restoring antitrust reform and imposing not just consolidation limits but diversity ownership requirements. It would also help to drive creative new funding models for journalism, dramatically reshape media literacy policy, and aggressively support real publicly-funded media freed from corporate influence, historically a close ally to maintaining a functioning democracy.

Filed Under: consolidation, free press, free speech, global press freedom, journalism, media, press, propaganda, reporting

Companies: reporters without borders

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will ban data broker Kochava and its subsidiary Collective Data Solutions (CDS) from selling location data without consumers’ explicit consent to settle charges brought nearly four years ago.

The FTC sued Idaho-based Kochava in August 2022, alleging it collected and sold precise geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. This information allowed Kochava’s clients to track the mobile users’ movements to and from sensitive locations, including mental health and addiction recovery facilities, reproductive health clinics, places of worship, and shelters for the homeless and domestic violence survivors.

According to the complaint, the company provided clients who paid a $25,000 subscription fee with access to this data through a user-friendly data feed via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, claiming it delivered “rich geo data spanning billions of devices worldwide.”

Kochava also claimed that its location data feed “delivers raw latitude/longitude data with volumes around 94B+ geo transactions per month, 125 million monthly active users, and 35 million daily active users, on average observing more than 90 daily transactions per device.”

The Commission said at the time that the affected consumers were unaware of and had not consented to the data sharing, leaving them with no means to avoid resulting harms, including stalking, discrimination, and physical violence.

Kochava also sued the FTC for overreaching and said (one day before filing the complaint against the U.S. consumer watchdog) that it would introduce “Privacy Block”, a “privacy-first approach to block health services locations from the Kochava Collective marketplace” to address the privacy issues pointed out by the​ FTC.

Under the proposed order filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, Kochava and its subsidiary (which has since taken over Kochava’s data broker business) will be prohibited from selling, licensing, transferring, or disclosing precise location data unless they have affirmative express consent, and the data is used to provide a service that the consumers directly requested.

Beyond the sales prohibition, the companies must also establish a sensitive location data program, implement a supplier assessment program to verify consumer consent, allow consumers to request disclosure of who received their data and withdraw consent, submit incident reports to the FTC when third parties misuse location data, and create a data retention and deletion schedule.

This proposed order will carry the force of law upon approval by the District Court judge.

The FTC also announced in August 2022 that it was exploring new rules to crack down on businesses engaged in mass commercial surveillance, in which consumers’ information is collected, analyzed, and monetized. One month earlier, the Commission warned that it would enforce the law if companies illegally shared or used consumers’ sensitive information.

More recently, in 2024, the agency banned data brokers InMarket Media, Outlogic (formerly X-Mode Social), Gravy Analytics, and Mobilewalla from harvesting and selling Americans’ location tracking data.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

The founders of IronSource spent a decade building tools that helped mobile app developers monetise their products through advertising. They sold that company to Unity for $4.4 billion in 2022, watched Unity dismantle the ad network they had built, left in 2024, and have now returned with a company whose premise is that the entire category of work IronSource supported, the human management of digital advertising campaigns, can be automated by AI agents. Zyg, their new startup, raised $60 million at a $500 million valuation on Tuesday, led by Accel, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company came out of stealth two months ago with a $58 million seed round. In eight weeks it has raised $118 million at a half-billion-dollar valuation without a single public customer case study. The bet is not that AI can assist e-commerce advertising. The bet is that AI agents can replace the people who run it.

The thesis

Zyg describes itself as an agentic operating system for e-commerce scale. The platform automates business functions that direct-to-consumer sellers currently manage through a combination of human operators, fragmented software tools, and advertising agencies: campaign creation and optimisation on Meta and other platforms, customer retention, support, and inventory forecasting. Chief Executive Officer Omer Kaplan told Bloomberg that Zyg’s agents are already running advertising campaigns on Meta’s platforms and are “doing the vast majority of the activity themselves.” The company’s customer base includes businesses with between $2 million and $15 million in annual revenue, the segment of the e-commerce market large enough to need sophisticated advertising but too small to afford the teams that run it.

The irony is structural. IronSource built the infrastructure that app developers used to acquire users and monetise through advertising. The company’s success depended on the existence of a large class of professionals, media buyers, growth managers, and performance marketers, who spent their days optimising campaigns inside platforms like Meta, Google, and the ad networks IronSource itself operated. Zyg’s premise is that those professionals are now a cost centre that AI agents can eliminate. The same team that built the tools human ad buyers used is now building the agents designed to make those humans unnecessary. It is not a pivot. It is a succession.

The market

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Zyg is entering a category that barely existed twelve months ago and is now attracting hundreds of millions in capital. Hightouch raised $150 million at a $2.75 billion valuation last week to build an agentic marketing platform for enterprises, with Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital leading the round. Shopify has launched Agentic Storefronts that let merchants sell products inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Meta itself is moving toward fully automated advertising, where an advertiser inputs a business URL and Meta’s AI handles creative generation, audience targeting, budget allocation, and performance optimisation without human intervention. AI marketplaces are reshaping how advertising is created and distributed, collapsing the distance between an advertiser’s intent and a campaign’s execution to something approaching zero.

The competitive landscape suggests that Zyg’s timing is right but its window is narrow. When Meta completes its own automation of the advertising workflow, the question becomes what value a third-party platform adds on top of a system that already runs itself. Zyg’s answer is that Meta optimises for Meta. A direct-to-consumer brand needs agents that optimise across advertising, retention, support, and inventory simultaneously, making decisions that account for the full business rather than a single channel’s performance metrics. That cross-functional integration is what separates an agentic operating system from an automated ad tool, and it is what justifies the ambition of the valuation.

The speed

A $500 million valuation two months after stealth is not normal, even in 2026’s funding environment. But the velocity reflects a specific dynamic in AI venture capital: repeat founders with a demonstrated exit command valuations that bear no relationship to current revenue. VAST Data raised $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation as AI infrastructure demand accelerated, and the broader funding environment saw $297 billion flow into startups in Q1 2026 alone, with AI capturing 80 per cent of the total. In this market, a team that built and sold a company for $4.4 billion, that understands advertising infrastructure at a technical level, and that is applying that understanding to the single largest category of AI agent deployment, is exactly the profile that commands pre-revenue valuations at scale.

Accel, which led the round, raised a $5 billion fund in April specifically to back AI companies. The firm’s investment in Zyg is consistent with its thesis that the returns from AI will come not from foundational model companies but from vertical platforms that deploy agents in specific industries. Google is turning Chrome into an agentic workplace tool with autonomous browsing capabilities, and every major platform is building agent infrastructure. The venture bet on Zyg is that e-commerce advertising is a vertical where domain expertise, the IronSource team’s specific understanding of how campaigns work, provides an advantage that general-purpose agent platforms cannot replicate.

The talent

Zyg was founded by five of the original IronSource founders: Tomer Bar-Zeev as chairman, Omer Kaplan as CEO, Assaf Ben Ami as CFO and COO, alongside Nadav Ashkenazy and Daniel Shinar. The team also includes cybersecurity and AI specialists from Unit 81, the Israeli military’s elite technology unit. The funding will be primarily used to hire AI talent in Israel, a market where the competition for researchers and engineers has intensified as global companies and domestic startups chase the same pool of specialists. Meta’s raid of the Thinking Machines Lab founders, reportedly including a $1.5 billion engineer, illustrates the premium the industry places on concentrated AI talent. Israeli startups raised $15.6 billion in 2025, with AI-focused companies commanding the majority of capital, and the talent war is the primary constraint on how fast companies like Zyg can build.

The Unit 81 connection is relevant beyond credentials. Building agents that autonomously manage advertising campaigns, handle customer data, and make inventory decisions requires the kind of security architecture that military intelligence backgrounds produce. An agent that runs ad campaigns is also an agent with access to business-critical systems, customer information, and financial data. The governance challenge, how to let an agent operate autonomously while preventing it from making catastrophic errors, is as much a security problem as an AI problem, and Zyg’s founding team is constructed to address both.

The question

Agentic AI is entering specific verticals from construction to logistics to legal services, and in each category the same question applies: does the agent platform become the new operating layer for the industry, or does the incumbent platform absorb the agent functionality into its own product? In e-commerce advertising, the incumbents are Meta, Google, Amazon, and Shopify, each of which is building AI automation directly into its platform. Meta’s Advantage+ suite already handles creative generation and targeting for 8 million advertisers. Google’s Performance Max automates campaign creation across all Google surfaces. Shopify’s AI agents manage everything from SEO to email to ad buying.

Zyg’s wager is that the multi-platform problem is unsolvable from inside any single platform. A DTC brand selling on Shopify, advertising on Meta and Google, retaining customers through email and SMS, and forecasting inventory across seasonal demand curves needs an agent that understands the business as a system, not a collection of channels. That is the same insight that made IronSource valuable: app developers needed a monetisation layer that worked across ad networks, not inside any single one. The founders are running the same play, one abstraction layer higher. The difference is that the previous abstraction layer helped humans manage complexity. This one is designed to eliminate the need for the humans entirely. Whether that works at the scale of the DTC market, for the thousands of mid-sized brands that cannot afford engineering teams but generate enough revenue to justify AI-powered operations, will determine whether Zyg’s $500 million valuation was prescient or premature. The founders have two months of post-stealth existence and $118 million in capital to find out.

Last year, Coinbase Europe was fined nearly €21.5m for failing to monitor transactions.

Coinbase is making 14pc of its workforce redundant to cut cost and adopt AI. According to recent company filings, the layoffs will affect around 700 employees.

The company employs around 150 in Ireland; however, it is unclear how many of them would be affected in this move. Coinbase did not provide SiliconRepublic.com with details when queried.

Restructuring expenses are expected to cost up to $60m. Company shares were up nearly 4pc in pre-market trading at the time of publication.

In a post on X, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said that the company is “volatile from quarter to quarter”.

“While we’ve managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster and more efficient for our next phase of growth.”

AI is “changing how we work”, Armstrong said. The workforce adjustments are expected to make the company “lean, fast, and AI-native”, he added.

He is part of a growing list of company leaders choosing a slimmer, more AI-powered workforce. In recent months, Meta cut 8,000 jobs; Block, 4,000 jobs; Oracle, about 10,000; Amazon, 30,000; Atlassian, 10pc of its workforce; and Snap, about 16pc – with the trend largely attributed to changing technology at the workplace.

A joint report recently published by Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute and the Department of Finance has found that AI adoption in here is likely to lead to job losses, leading to increases in income inequality in the “short to medium term”.

“The biggest risk now is not taking action,” Armstrong continued in his post, calling this an “inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company”.

With a smaller workforce, Coinbase plans to “[concentrate] around AI-native talent” who can manage fleets of AI agents. The company is also introducing “one-person teams” who can manage engineering, design and product management.

Last November, the Central Bank of Ireland fined Coinbase Europe nearly €21.5m for breaching its obligations to monitor money laundering and terrorist financing.

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