General

Malicious actor considering his next act of dysinformation

Defining Dysinformation

Lou Covey

Happy Holidays – our last issue of the year is out, and it’s all about Disinformation or, as we like to put it: Dysinformation.

Dysinformation is a scourge of society, fueled by social media and malicious actors, but you may not have heard the term spelled this way. Dysinformation simply means “damaging information.” It puts misinformation and disinformation in the same bucket, but what is the difference?

Disinformation

Disinformation is intentional. The authors know it is false and distribute it with the desire to defraud, destabilize and delegitimize issues and individuals. It is often defended as, “Hey, I’m just asking questions.” The first recorded instance of disinformation occurs in Genesis. After Eve explains to the serpent why she should not eat forbidden fruit, the serpent replies “Has God really said…?”

Disinformation authors do not need to prove an allegation. They just need to get a small credulous audience to wonder if what they say is true. If the allegation reflects a particular opinion of the audience, they are more likely to accept the allegation as true. Every piece of disinformation may contain an element of truth to establish the author’s qualifications, but the majority is sheer speculation.

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Sarah Ralston, CPO of Proxyware

The problem with proxies

Lou Covey

Proxies are absolutely crucial to the operation of the internet, but they also represent a clear and present danger to users. Finding that balance is pretty much a full-time job for cybersecurity. The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure outages are good examples of that.

Amazon explained the outage was caused by “failing intermediaries” monitoring system health, preventing proper traffic routing. Another word for intermediaries is “proxies”. When the monitoring subsystem malfunctioned, health check updates were not propagated properly, causing backend servers to appear offline even when they were active, which invalidated DNS lookups. This created a cascading failure.
Likewise, the Azure outage was caused by a misconfiguration of the proxy Front Door, a global entry point for content delivery network functionality, load balancing, and application acceleration.

How Proxies Function

When a user wants to access a website, the request goes to the proxy server instead of going directly to the internet. The proxy server receives the request, then forwards it to the target website. It modifies the request header to hide the user's original IP address.

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scam bucket explains digital fraud

Scam Bucket: The Docusign scam is back

Lou Covey

For almost a decade and generally in the summer and early fall, email boxes get hit with several phishing attempts claiming to be from Docusign. This reporter received seven just in the past few weeks. It seems appropriate to give out a few tips about how to recognize them, avoid dealing with them and what you may have to do if you clicked on the link.

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Gartner hype cycle shows generative AI well down the slope into the trough if disillusionment

Credibility and fortunes at risk with AI

Lou Covey

The failure of the current iteration of generative AI to live up to its promises is putting severe strain on its credibility. A collapse could result in the destruction of personal wealth on a massive scale. While it is probably a given that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is here to stay, questions are many. What form will survive, what will it really cost, and what is the near-term effect on other sectors like the cybersecurity industry?
There are more than 5,000 cybersecurity tool providers and thousands more MSSPs and all of them, in some form, are reliant on AI to some degree. Cybersecurity marketing, investment, and especially technology development could be a disastrous dependency… or not.
AI startup funding reached $333 billion in 2024 AI in 2024. Global venture capital funding for generative AI reached approximately $45 billion in 2024, from $24 billion in 2023 AI Investment Trends 2025. AI-related investments accounted for 33 percent of total investments into VC-backed companies in the U.S. This year, global venture capital investment in generative AI appears ready to dwarf those totals, with $49.2 billion in the first half of 2025. It is on track to exceed $100 billion this year .
The big knock on AI is the lack of an effective infrastructure to support the claims the AI companies are making on potential uses. In response, tech giants are making massive infrastructure investments: More than $300 billion has been invested this year on AI infrastructure tech megacaps plan to spend more than $300 billion in 2025 as AI race intensifies.

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