Instructure confirms a Canvas breach involving user information and messages as hackers claim 275M users and nearly 9,000 schools were affected.
The post Canvas Breach May Put 275M Users, 9,000 Schools at Risk appeared first on TechRepublic.
Vonage’s partnership with Girls Who Code is more than feel-good philanthropy; it’s a blueprint for building diverse AI talent pipelines.
The post Vonage, Girls Who Code Show What ‘Responsible AI’ Looks Like appeared first on TechRepublic.
This week on the Lock and Code podcast…
A dreadful thing happens far too often whenever an older adult falls for a scam: They get blamed for it. Not the scammers who lied and cheated their victim out of money. Not law enforcement for failing to recover funds. Not even the Big Tech companies that could have the most important role in protecting people online—and which, it turns out, knowingly bring in revenue every year from fraud.
Instead, it is the older adults themselves whose stories are often shirked aside because of a mix of ageism and denial. Allegedly left behind by technology, only an octogenarian would hand their password over in a phishing scheme, or open an email attachment from a stranger, or send money to a fake charity online. Everyone else, everyone else believes, is too savvy for the same.
The data disagrees.
When Malwarebytes studied this last year, it found that, depending on the type of scam—especially for things like “sextortion”—younger individuals were far more likely to report falling victim. Further, digging into data from the US Federal Trade Commission revealed entirely separate patterns. For example, while Americans between the ages of 80 and 89 reported the highest median loss due to fraud in 2024, they also made up the smallest share of their population to report a loss at all. And in 2025, that same group represented the smallest share of reported identity theft, a crime far more likely to be reported by people between 30 and 39.
Questions about who reports what crimes at what rate are valid to explore, but it’s important to see the big picture: Americans lost at least $15.9 billion to fraud last year. Protecting older adults is actually about protecting everyone, and that’s because modern scams don’t arrive only where people over 70 spend time. They arrive where we all are, which is online. They come through endless text messages, they slide into social media DMs, and they prey on things any of us can be—a widow, a divorcee, or simply a lonely person.
According to Marti DeLiema, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work, scams and fraud are now the most common form of organized crime globally, rivaling weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and sex trafficking. In 2024 alone, she said, the FTC estimated that older adults in the US had as much as $81.5 billion stolen from them. And the tools meant to fight back—broad consumer awareness campaigns, embedded warning messages at the point of transaction, the training of bank tellers and retail clerks—are nowhere near keeping pace.
So what actually works? And who, if anyone, is doing the work?
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with DeLiema about who is really susceptible to financial fraud, why victims often describe a scam as a form of betrayal trauma, and why the companies best positioned to stop scam messages from reaching consumers may be the ones least motivated to do so.
“This is not a technical capability problem at all. This is a conflict of incentives.”
Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.
Show notes and credits:
Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)
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Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium Security for Lock and Code listeners.
Years ago, around 2015, while working on a digital wallet integration initiative at Lloyds Bank, I realized something fundamental: modern payment capabilities are not traditional software projects.
Digital wallets such as Apple Pay changed how financial institutions design, deliver and govern technology. What appeared externally as a simple “tap-to-pay” feature required deep coordination across device manufacturers, payment networks, security standard bodies, regulators and banking platforms.
Today, as organizations integrate AI platforms, embedded finance and partner ecosystems, the same complexity patterns are repeating.
This article shares the practical lessons for designing and delivering complex requirement ecosystems, using digital wallet integration as a reference model.
Traditional banking delivery assumes:
Digital wallets broke all four assumptions. Instead, delivery depended on:
By 2025-2026, digital wallets facilitated tens of trillions in global transaction value annually (e.g., estimates place combined digital wallet volumes at $10-40+ trillions in recent years), with user bases exceeding 4-5 billion globally and hundreds and millions for a leading platform like Apple Pay.
For Apple Pay specifically, recent estimates show approximately 800 million+ users and approximately $9-9.5 trillion in transaction volume in 2025, making it the second-largest payment processor behind Visa.
The lesson I learned: When a requirement depends on an external platform, you are no longer building a product; you are joining an ecosystem.
One of the most common mistakes organizations make is jumping directly into solution design.
Complex integration design requires mapping the ecosystem first.
Key questions leaders must answer early:
In a payment ecosystem, multiple parties collaborate to enable a single transaction.
Requirement documents may quickly become outdated if the ecosystem mapping is not properly mapped.
The platform rules evolved continuously. Security standards updated. Certification expectations changed. Integration Interfaces matured.
Successful teams shifted from documentation-heavy approaches toward:
Instead of asking: “What are the final requirements?” The team focused on “What capabilities must remain stable even if implementation changes?”
Digital wallets introduced a major architectural shift; payment systems stopped transmitting the real card numbers
Instead, they rely on payment tokenization standard developed by EMVCo, where a unique token replaces the actual card number during transactions. This replaces the sensitive Primary Account Number (PAN) with a device- or domain- specific token, rendering stolen data far less usable to fraudsters.
You can explore how tokenization works here: EMV Payment Tokenization Overview.
This approach dramatically reduces fraud risk because stolen tokens cannot be reused outside their intended context.
For engineering leaders, this creates a critical realization that Security constraints drive architecture decisions long before functional design begins.
Security became the foundation of the design.
Complex integrations expose organizational bottlenecks quickly.
Traditional silos, business, security, engineering and compliance slow delivery when decisions must happen rapidly.
Successful delivery required:
Digital wallet integration previewed the future of enterprise technology.
Organizations no longer control the entire system.
Instead, success depends on orchestrating capabilities across independent platforms.
This shift is visible today in:
Leaders must evolve from system owners to ecosystem orchestrators.
Based on real delivery experience, leaders can apply this framework:
What looked like a payment feature was actually a preview of modern digital transformation.
The real innovation was not contactless payments; it was a new delivery paradigm where value emerges from a coordinated ecosystem rather than standalone systems.
Today’s most complex initiatives, like AI adoption, platform integration and digital partnerships, follow the same pattern.
Organizations that learn to design for ecosystem complexity will deliver faster, safer and with far greater resilience. Will your organization treat the next big iteration as a feature or as an ecosystem transformation?
This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
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Iran has threatened multiple US tech giants in the Middle East, escalating tensions and raising fears of AI-driven warfare turning physical.
The post Iran Threatens to Attack Apple, Google, and Other US Tech Firms in Middle East appeared first on TechRepublic.
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