Meta’s WhatsApp detected a hack targeting 90 users in two dozen countries. Meta said that Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions is responsible and has sent a cease-and-desist letter. The targets apparently included journalists and “members of civil society.”
DeepSeek’s cost-effective, open source gen AI has caused a lot of excitement, but the other shoe did not take long to drop. Cybersecurity experts say DeepSeek contains code that allows it to send user data direct to the Chinese government. You’d think that might provoke calls for it to be banned in the U.S.
OpenAI has a new AI agent called Deep Research to support, well, deep research. OpenAI says it can conduct multi-step research tasks, synthesizing hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst. It will support research into complex purchases, possibly including martech software. There’s no truth to the rumor that it answers every question with, “It depends.”
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).