Nvidia's agentic AI push; Snowflake cuts inference costs
Today on Product Saturday: Nvidia and Snowflake try to get more enterprises on the AI train by focusing on safety and costs, and the quote of the week.
Today: How AT&T might have limited the damage from a devastating breach, Google goes shopping for security talent, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: How AT&T might have limited the damage from a devastating breach, Google goes shopping for security talent, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
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For obvious reasons, Friday's disclosure of a massive breach of user data stolen from AT&T's Snowflake account earlier this year got lost in the shuffle of a wild news weekend. But while the breach could have potentially affected nearly anyone who has made a mobile phone call in the U.S. over the last year, AT&T's response — defying cybersecurity conventional wisdom — appears to have mitigated the fallout.
Wired's Kim Zetter reported Sunday that AT&T paid a hacker behind the breach about $370,000, and in return the hacker provided video proof that the data had been deleted from a cloud server. Bloomberg later confirmed that report, adding that AT&T doesn't believe the data, which was stolen during two weeks in April, was ever made public.
Cybersecurity experts have long advised against paying ransom to threat actors, partly to take away some of the economic incentives for hacking but also because it can be extremely difficult to verify if the hackers held up their end of the bargain. But companies keep doing it; 84% of security professionals surveyed earlier this year said their company had paid ransom after being attacked.
The hackers involved in the AT&T incident also shed a little more light on how Snowflake became ensnared in these attacks. According to Wired, the security researcher who facilitated the payment from AT&T to the hacker has been involved in "a number of negotiations" between Snowflake customers and the hackers.
After ending its dalliance with Hubspot, Google Cloud is back on the acquisition hunt. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Google is "near" a deal for Wiz that would value the cloud security startup at $23 billion.
Two years ago Wiz declared itself "the fastest-growing software company ever," and little seems to have changed since then. Demand for its cloud security platform, which scans customer cloud environments for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, has soared to the point where it expects to record $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by next year, according to The Information.
The deal would be the largest in Google's history, and comes two years after the company paid $5.4 billion for Mandiant. The steady parade of Snowflake customers coming forward to acknowledge they didn't properly secure their accounts underscores just how important cloud security will remain for the modern enterprise into the foreseeable future.
Fireworks AI raised $52 million in Series B funding for its AI infrastructure service, which helps companies deploy AI models in production systems.
Vectara landed $25 million in Series A funding to build out its RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) as a service platform, a crucial but complicated technique used to reduce generative AI errors.
Kindo scored $20.6 million in new funding for its security services, designed to help administrators manage AI deployments across an enterprise.
Merly.ai raised $6.8 million in seed funding to expand its "code reasoning" service, which uses AI to help companies find and fix problems in their code bases.
Disney also suffered an embarrassing breach last week, as hackers made off with more than a terabyte of data from its internal Slack platform.
The FTC is taking a closer look at the IBM-HashiCorp deal, which could delay the close beyond the end of the year.
Salesforce laid off 300 members of its "ohana" last month, which is a fraction of the thousands it has laid off in a push for profits over the last several years.
Google tried to offer European cloud providers about $500 million in cloud credits to keep up their fight against Microsoft, but they decided to take Microsoft's $22 million in cash instead.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!