Yash Jain discusses how cybersecurity needs to be an institutional ‘fundamental component’, not a ‘compliance checkbox’.

For Yash Jain, a cybersecurity, forensics and privacy manager at PwC, Ireland’s cybersecurity landscape is “evolving rapidly as awareness grows following targeted cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure, such as the Health Service Executive (HSE) and pharmaceutical companies”.

He told SiliconRepublic.com: “These incidents highlight the importance of cybersecurity in modern digital infrastructure, prompting both government and private sectors to prioritise security as a fundamental component, rather than a mere compliance checkbox.”

Can you elaborate upon some of the challenges?

Cybersecurity awareness is widespread, yet many struggle with the practical steps needed to protect both organisations and individuals from cyberthreats. The primary challenge lies in crafting a security strategy that aligns with business goals and compliance requirements. Cybersecurity isn’t just about adopting automated tools or running awareness campaigns. It’s about selecting a strategy that effectively implements protective measures across both people, process and technology. Additionally, skill shortage is another challenge that this sector is facing at this stage. Finding the right talent to deal with security and this has been a key challenge.

What skills do modern day professionals need in their arsenal to manage or stay ahead of threats?

In the current cybersecurity environment, mitigating skills shortages demands a strong grasp of networking concepts and familiarity with foundational development tools, including APIs and commonly used scripting and web technologies. These core skills enable professionals to understand how systems communicate, identify vulnerabilities and effectively analyse and respond to cyberthreats.

This knowledge lays the groundwork for understanding complex technical concepts. Pursuing globally recognised certifications like Certified Information Systems Professional (CISSP) and Certified Information System Auditor (CISA) can further enhance their security expertise. This approach equips professionals to navigate the evolving challenges in cybersecurity. Additionally, leveraging AI to develop these skills offers a modern alternative to traditional learning methods, such as sifting through extensive books.

How can an organisation ensure the workforce is adequately skilled in cybersecurity best practice?

To build a robust cybersecurity culture, organisations should make sure their teams understand the impact of cybersecurity on both them and the organisation. Education should be straightforward and clear, especially for those in non-IT roles like HR, finance and operations. Engage your workforce with interactive sessions, such as in-person training and large-scale phishing simulation exercises. These simulations, managed by your security team or a trusted third party, involve sending fake phishing emails to employees to test their ability to spot and handle phishing attempts – without any real threat to the organisation.

And back to basics, it’s crucial to maintain basic security practices, avoid sharing passwords, refrain from writing them down on desks or laptop covers and don’t use corporate email addresses for personal activities like gym memberships. By fostering these habits, you can enhance your organisation’s cybersecurity resilience.

How critical is cross-collaboration to ensure strong cyber hygiene and quick responsiveness to threats?

Cross-collaboration is critical to building a resilient cybersecurity posture. Cybersecurity is no longer solely the responsibility of the IT or security team, it is an organisational concern that touches every department and individual. When teams across HR, legal, finance, operations and technology work without collaboration, it creates blind spots that threat actors can easily exploit. Effective collaboration ensures that threat intelligence is shared swiftly across the right teams, enabling faster detection and response to incidents. For example, during a ransomware attack, a coordinated response between the security team, senior leadership, legal counsel and communications is essential to minimise damage and maintain compliance obligations.

It is essential that organisations take concrete measures to sustain and strengthen their current state of effective collaboration and consequently consider moving away from traditional cyber assessment exercises, such as conventional penetration testing. Instead, they should shift their focus towards purple team exercises. A purple team exercise is an advanced cyber penetration testing assessment in which penetration testers simulate sophisticated cyberattacks to evaluate an organisation’s security maturity across people, processes and technology, with the objective of detecting and blocking potential cyberthreats.

Are there any myths around your role in cybersecurity that you would like to debunk?

Absolutely. There are a few misconceptions I frequently encounter that I think are worth addressing. The first is that cybersecurity is purely a technical role. While technical knowledge is certainly valuable, a large part of what I do involves strategic thinking, risk assessment and communicating threats in a way that non-technical stakeholders can understand and act upon. You do not need to be a programmer to have a meaningful and impactful career in this space.

The second myth is that cybersecurity is only a concern for large organisations. In my experience, small and medium-sized businesses are often more vulnerable precisely because they are assumed to be low-risk and therefore invest less in their defences. Attackers are very aware of this.

The third and perhaps most dangerous myth is that having the right tools means you are protected. Technology is only one layer of defence. Some of the most damaging breaches I have seen were not the result of a technical failure, they happened because a person clicked a link they should not have, or shared credentials without realising the consequences.

What is your advice for professionals looking for a similar career in this space?

My advice is simple: start with curiosity and never stop learning. Begin by building a solid foundation in networking and IT fundamentals, and consider pursuing recognised certifications such as CompTIA Security+, CISSP, or CISA depending on your area of interest. Do not be discouraged if your background is not in traditional IT, as some of the most effective professionals in this field come from diverse backgrounds such as law, business and psychology, because soft skills like communication, critical thinking and problem-solving are just as valuable as technical expertise. 

We have witnessed such scenarios where people coming from diverse educational backgrounds like business studies, law and other non-tech courses followed the above approach and enabled them as competent cyber professionals. PwC provides tailored learning programmes bespoke for employees joining the firm from different backgrounds to achieve this goal. The learning path is aligned to develop individuals into cybersecurity professionals capable of managing routine governance, risk and compliance tasks to maintain an organisation’s cybersecurity posture. However, to gain further depth in this career, specifically to become an offensive security engineer additional skills are required.

Leverage AI-driven learning tools and online platforms to accelerate your development rather than relying solely on traditional methods. Most importantly, engage with the wider cybersecurity community through events, forums and networking opportunities, as this field thrives on collaboration and knowledge sharing and those who embrace that will always stay ahead.

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If you had trouble logging into your email today, you’re not the only one. Microsoft Outlook users reported problems signing in to the email client at the start of the week, with reports beginning just before 5 a.m. ET Monday. 

After several hours of login issues, a fix has now been reported. The company said around 3:36 p.m. ET that internal logs tied the issue to a recent configuration change and that it rolled back the update. A recent status report said the service appeared to be recovering.

Microsoft said users on iPhones might have to reenter their passwords in Settings to access Outlook accounts again. 

On Monday, Microsoft reported on its status page that people logging into Outlook.com might experience intermittent failures, including “too many requests” issues. Others may have found themselves unexpectedly signed out. The company tracked repeated efforts to fix the errors on its status page and the Microsoft 365 Status X account. 

“We’re working to mitigate an issue that may cause some users to experience intermittent Outlook.com sign‑in failures on mobile apps,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNET in an email Monday morning.

People reporting errors to Downdetector, which, like CNET, is owned by Ziff Davis, said they were having issues with the client’s iOS app. Outage reports peaked at about 1,500 early in the day.

This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

The traditional approach to academic research goes something like this: Assemble experts from a discipline, put them in a building, and hope something useful emerges. Biology departments do biology. Engineering departments do engineering. Medical schools treat patients.

NYU is turning that model inside out. At its new Institute for Engineering Health, the organizing principle centers around disease states rather than traditional disciplines. Instead of asking “what can electrical engineers contribute to medicine?,” they’re asking “what would it take to cure allergic asthma?,” and then assembling whoever can answer that question, whether they’re immunologists, computational biologists, materials scientists, AI researchers, or wireless communications engineers.

Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU’s vice president for bioengineering strategy and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.New York University

The early results suggest they’re onto something. A chemical engineer and an electrical engineer collaborated to build a device that detects airborne threats — including disease pathogens — that’s now a startup. A visually impaired physician teamed with mechanical engineers to create navigation technology for blind subway riders. And Jeffrey Hubbell, the Institute’s leader, is advancing “inverse vaccines” that could reprogram immune systems to treat conditions from celiac disease to allergies — work that requires equal fluency in immunology, molecular engineering, and materials science.

The underlying problem these collaborations address is conceptual as much as organizational. In his field, Hubbell argues that modern medicine has optimized around a single strategy: developing drugs that block specific molecules or suppress targeted immune responses. Antibody technology has been the workhorse of this approach. “It’s really fit for purpose for blocking one thing at a time,” he says. The pharmaceutical industry has become extraordinarily good at creating these inhibitors, each designed to shut down a particular pathway.

But Hubbell asks a different question: Rather than inhibit one bad thing at a time, what if you could promote one good thing and generate a cascade that contravenes several bad pathways simultaneously? In inflammation, could you bias the system toward immunological tolerance instead of blocking inflammatory molecules one by one? In cancer, could you drive pro-inflammatory pathways in the tumor microenvironment that would overcome multiple immune-suppressive features at once?

This shift from inhibition to activation requires a fundamentally different toolkit — and a different kind of researcher. “We’re using biological molecules like proteins, or material-based structures — soluble polymers, supramolecular structures of nanomaterials — to drive these more fundamental features,” Hubbell explains. You can’t develop those approaches if you only understand biology, or only understand materials science, or only understand immunology. You need an understanding and a mastery of all three.

“There will be people doing AI, data science, computational science theory, people doing immunoengineering and other biological engineering, people doing materials science and quantum engineering, all really in close proximity to each other.” —Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU Tandon

Which logically leads to the question: How do you create researchers with that kind of cross-disciplinary depth?

The answer isn’t what you might expect. “There may have been a time when the objective was to have the bioengineer understand the language of biology,” Hubbell says. “But that time is long, long gone. Now the engineer needs to become a biologist, or become an immunologist, or become a neuroscientist.”

Hubbell isn’t talking about engineers learning enough biology to collaborate with biologists. He’s describing something more radical: training people whose disciplinary identity is genuinely ambiguous. “The neuroengineering students — it’s very difficult to know that they’re an engineer or a neuroscientist,” Hubbell says. “That’s the whole idea.”

His own students exemplify this. They publish in immunology journals, present at immunology conferences. “Nobody knows they’re engineers,” he says. But they bring engineering approaches — computational modeling, materials design, systems thinking — to immunological problems in ways that traditional immunologists wouldn’t.

The mechanism for creating these hybrid researchers is what Hubbell calls a “milieu.” “To learn it all on your own is hopeless,” he acknowledges, “but to learn it in a milieu becomes very, very efficient.”

NYU is expanding its facilities to include a science and technology hub designed to force encounters between people across various schools and disciplines who wouldn’t naturally cross paths.Tracey Friedman/NYU

NYU is making that milieu physical. The university has acquired a large building in Manhattan that will serve as its science and technology hub — a deliberate co-location strategy designed to force encounters between people across various schools and disciplines who wouldn’t naturally cross paths.

Juan de Pablo is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and Executive Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.Steve Myaskovsky, Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau

“There will be people doing AI, data science, computational science theory, people doing immunoengineering and other biological engineering, people doing materials science and quantum engineering, all really in close proximity to each other,” Hubbell explains.

The strategy mirrors what Juan de Pablo, NYU’s Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and Executive Dean at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, describes as organizing around “grand challenges” rather than traditional disciplines. “What drives the recruitment and the spaces and the people that we’re bringing in are the problems that we’re trying to solve,” he says. “Great minds want to have a legacy, and we are making that possible here.”

But physical proximity alone isn’t enough. The Institute is also cultivating what Hubbell calls an “explicit” rather than “tacit” approach to translation — thinking about clinical and commercial pathways from day one.

“It’s a terrible thing to solve a problem that nobody cares about,” Hubbell tells his students. To avoid that, the Institute runs “translational exercises” — group sessions where researchers map the entire path from discovery to deployment before launching multi-year research programs. Where could this fail? What experiments would prove the idea wrong quickly? If it’s a drug, how long would the clinical trial take? If it’s a computational method, how would you roll it out safely?

The new cross-institutional initiative represents a major investment in science and technology, and includes adding new faculty, state-of-the-art facilities, and innovative programs.NYU Tandon

The approach contrasts sharply with typical academic practice. “Sometimes academics tend to think about something for 20 minutes and launch a 5-year PhD program,” Hubbell says. “That’s probably not a good way to do it.” Instead, the Institute brings together people who have actually developed drugs, built algorithms, or commercialized devices — importing their hard-won experience into the planning phase before a single experiment is run.

The timing may be fortuitous. De Pablo notes that AI is compressing timelines dramatically. “What we thought was going to take 10 years to complete, we might be able to do in 5,” he says.

But he’s quick to note AI’s limitations. While tools like AlphaFold can predict how a single protein folds — a breakthrough of the last five years — biology operates at much larger scales. “What we really need to do now is design not one protein, but collections of them that work together to solve a specific problem,” de Pablo explains.

Hubbell agrees: “Biology is much bigger — many, many, many systems.” The liver and kidney are in different places but interact. The gut and brain are connected neurologically in ways researchers are just beginning to map. “AI is not there yet, but it will be someday. And that’s our job — to develop the data sets, the computational frameworks, the systems frameworks to drive that to the next steps.”

It’s a moment of unusual ambition. “At a time when we’re seeing some research institutions retrench a little bit and limit their ambitions,” de Pablo says, “we’re doing just the opposite. We’re thinking about what are the grand challenges that we want to, and need to, tackle.”

The bet is that the breakthroughs worth making can’t emerge from any single discipline working alone. They require collisions —sometimes planned, sometimes accidental — between people who speak different technical languages and are willing to develop a shared one. NYU is engineering those collisions at scale.

Joby Aviation is kicking off 10 days of electric air taxi demo flights in New York City. Before you try to book one to bypass the city’s awful traffic, Joby’s aircrafts aren’t taking customers yet. Instead, the company is trialing the air taxis in “real flight routes and real environments,” as indicated in its press release.

With the first point-to-point flight of its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft completed, Joby said that one of its electric air taxis made it from John F. Kennedy International Airport to NYC’s heliports in Lower Manhattan and Midtown in less than 10 minutes. Unlike helicopters, Joby’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, said this “quiet, zero operating emissions air taxi service” will better serve New Yorkers. These demo flights are part of Joby’s participation in the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, the Federal Aviation Administration’s program to fast-track the commercial rollout of air taxis.

Joby said it’s still in the final stages of securing FAA certification, but this latest campaign in NYC should propel its process forward, especially after having completed piloted demos in the San Francisco Bay Area in March. Joby was previously targeting to launch its air taxi service in 2025, but that goal has since been pushed back. The company’s CEO said that Joby is planning to start passenger flights in New York, Texas and Florida as soon as the second half of 2026, according to Bloomberg.

Canadian authorities have arrested three men for operating an “SMS blaster” device that pretends to be a cellular tower to send phishing texts to nearby phones.

Such tools trick devices into connecting to them by emitting signals that mimic a legitimate tower. Mobile phones in its range automatically link to them as there is stronger reception.

Once the connection is established, the operators of these rogue cellular base stations can push SMS messages directly to connected devices, which appear to come from trusted entities such as banks or the government.

“An SMS blaster works by mimicking a legitimate cellular tower. When nearby phones connect to it, users receive fraudulent text messages that appear to come from trusted organizations,” explains the police.

“These messages often prompt recipients to click on links that lead to fake websites designed to capture personal information, including banking credentials and passwords.”

No phone numbers are required for these messages to be sent; only that the targets be within range. In densely populated areas, this practically means mass distribution, and hence the name “blaster.”

The Canadian authorities noted that this is the first time that such a device has been spotted in the country.

The Toronto Police said the investigation, dubbed ‘Project Lighthouse,’ began in November 2025 after receiving tips about suspicious activity in downtown Toronto.

Police found that the equipment was operated from vehicles, allowing it to move across the Greater Toronto Area and target large numbers of people.

The investigators believe that during the SMS blaster’s operation, 13 million cases of mobile network entrapment occurred.

Besides the phishing aspect, devices connected to those rogue stations are temporarily disconnected from their provider’s legitimate network and cannot reach emergency services if needed.

The police conducted searches in Markham and Hamilton on March 31, and seized multiple SMS blasters and other electronic devices.

Two suspects were arrested, while a third man turned himself in on April 21.

To defend against rogue towers, users are recommended to disable 2G downgrades on Android, although this measure is not effective against more advanced setups targeting LTE/5G signaling.

SMS should be treated as an insecure channel, and users should avoid following links received over this channel.

For sensitive data or communication exchanges, the recommendation is to use end-to-end encrypted channels.

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.

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Images and details about Samsung’s upcoming smart glasses have leaked, . We knew these were , but we now have what could be actual photos and they look pretty nifty. The glasses are reportedly being developed under the codename “Jinju” and could cost anywhere from $380 to $500.

These are the first smart glasses from Samsung and look to offer a similar feature set to stuff like and the forthcoming . Samsung’s specs will run on the and will likely feature heavy integration with the Google Gemini chatbot.

It has been reported that these glasses will not feature a display, but that’s likely coming with another pair in 2027. The second release is being developed under the codename “Haean” and will reportedly include a micro-LED display, allowing for similar functionality to something like the . These could cost anywhere from $600 to $900.

We don’t know when the Jinju glasses will launch, but later this year is a safe bet. Samsung has a major . We could get some official details at that point, though it’s unlikely the smart glasses will launch alongside stuff like the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and the Galaxy Watch 9.

It’s far more likely we’ll get a tease at that event, with a launch later in the year. This is what Samsung did with its last year.

It’s also been reported that the Jinju glasses will include a 12MP camera, a Snapdragon AR1 chip and directional speakers with bone-conduction tech. These specs are, of course, subject to change before launch. It’s also highly possible the price will tick up beyond the aforementioned range, thanks to and the .

David Liu sat down at his computer, his wrist still aching from whatever had ailed it, and picked up a Kensington SlimBlade Pro trackball in the hopes that it would provide some much-needed relief from all the mouse clicking. Four months later, this became a completely new way to manage 3D applications. Simply roll the ball back and forth like you would on a desk to rotate and move objects with natural ease.

He’d always been fascinated about the two optical sensors that came with this peripheral, which Kensington had begun installing in 2009 to allow users to browse through documents using the twist gesture. But he believed they were capable of much more. They tracked every movement of the trackball in three dimensions; all he needed to do was figure out how to extract the raw numbers. Liu took a close look inside the trackball, scrutinizing the signals originating from the optical sensors. He created new firmware that extracted all of the rotation data directly from both sensors, eliminating the factory chip’s limited output, which only sent out simple cursor motions or scroll steps. He slapped on a bespoke circuit board to run the new software, and before he knew it, he had everything straightened. Plug it in, and a digital cube began spinning as his hand moved the physical ball, which was strange.

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Getting it to function perfectly, however, required weeks of careful adjustments, as he’d roll the ball slowly and then flick it hard, altering numbers until the on-screen movement matched the feel of his fingertips. What he actually needed was position control; a ball moved an inch, and the model turned an inch. No more experimenting with a joystick and hoping for the best. Accuracy arrived without continuously correcting oneself, and the next thing he knew, translation was added. To do so, he just held down one button and the ball slid the view forward, backward, or side to side. Pushing the ball’s edge away causes the model to drift deeper into the screen; pulling it towards you causes it to approach closer. After a few tries, he realized that rotation and movement could be controlled with one hand and six degrees of freedom.

As an added bonus, he retained the trackball’s original mouse function intact, which moved the cursor and clicked like a standard mouse. Press and hold control to rotate the 3D model, then shift to pan or zoom the view. You could keep your left hand on the computer for shortcuts and only utilize one ball for the entire task. Choice was good, but now you didn’t even need to select between a mouse and a dedicated controller, because one ball accomplished everything. Software integration improved the whole experience; in Fusion 360, the controller would read the cursor position and simply orbit the model around whichever surface was beneath the pointer; this also worked in Blender, FreeCAD, and Onshape when he wrote little hooks for each software. A model would remain centered where your gaze was directed rather than floating off-screen every time you turned it a small amount.
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