Failure to patch known vulnerabilities contributed to twice as many confirmed security breaches in 2023 than the previous year. Fourteen percent of breaches began by exploiting a vulnerability, almost triple the previous year. Don’t discount human fallibility either: Clicking on phishing emails and failing to correctly configure security controls made a contribution.
The new iteration of Alembic’s marketing attribution platform aims at demonstrating marketing ROI with mathematical precision using a set of AI techniques including causal AI and a graph neural network. Alembic seeks to be able to base attribution on causality rather than correlation. The new system will be powered, says Alembic, by a “supercomputer.”
Microsoft changed its terms of service to disallow US police departments’ use of facial recognition in Azure OpenAI, its generative AI enterprise platform. It also explicitly bars use of real-time facial recognition technology for trying to identify people in uncontrolled environments. However, OpenAI and Microsoft have pursued project work with the Pentagon and US Department of Defense.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)