#Behavioral data

[jcmarchi]

Securing Access at Machine Speed: Why SASE Is the Architecture for the AI Age

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/securing-access-at-machine-speed-why-sase-is-the-architecture-for-the-ai-age/

Securing Access at Machine Speed: Why SASE Is the Architecture for the AI Age

AI-powered adversaries have redefined what fast looks like. Credential stuffing at machine speed. Behavioral mimicry that defeats anomaly detection. And automated reconnaissance that probes VPNs and lateral movement paths without fatigue or friction. In this threat environment, traditional secure access models are no longer just outdated—they’re dangerous.

According to the 2025 State of Secure Network Access Report, 52% of cybersecurity professionals say remote connectivity is now the single hardest resource to secure. VPNs are breaking under the weight of hybrid work. SaaS and remote endpoints are slipping through fragmented security stacks. The perimeter has not only disappeared—it has dissolved into an unpredictable, cloud-native reality.

In this AI-fueled arms race, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) isn’t just a security architecture. It’s the foundational control plane for defending the enterprise.

The Real Threat Isn’t Just Exposure — It’s AI-Accelerated Exploitation

Every modern breach involves abuse of access. Whether it’s a compromised VPN session, stolen OAuth token, or overly permissive SaaS role, attackers aren’t breaking in—they’re logging in. AI simply makes this process faster and harder to detect.

Machine learning models can now generate spear phishing payloads tailored to user roles. LLMs are used to write malware and obfuscate scripts. Compromised endpoints feed behavioral data back to attacker systems that refine their evasion tactics in real time.

And yet, most organizations still rely on static policies, brittle network controls, and legacy access methods. The result? An unguarded runway for AI-assisted lateral movement.

SASE: Designed for This Moment

SASE unifies SD-WAN, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) into a single, cloud-delivered fabric. It treats access not as a static configuration, but as a dynamic decision.

Every request is evaluated in real time. Who is the user? What device are they on? Where are they logging in from? Are they behaving like themselves? Based on this context, access is granted, challenged, or revoked instantly. This is how Zero Trust is enforced in practice—not just in posture decks.

SASE flips the model: users and apps no longer connect to the network. They connect to each other, through policy. And that policy is where your control resides.

Goodbye VPN: Legacy Access Is an Open Door

VPNs are the analog solution to a digital problem. They create flat network access, route traffic inefficiently, and rely on static credentials. They’re slow for users, opaque for defenders, and goldmines for attackers.

The report confirms it: over half of respondents say VPNs are their hardest access layer to secure. High latency. Poor visibility. Inconsistent enforcement. Worse, 42% of organizations say employees themselves are the highest risk group to business security—not outsiders. That’s a damning indictment of legacy access.

SASE eliminates the VPN choke point. Instead of tunneling everything back to a data center, users connect directly to the apps they need—through inspection points that enforce policy, detect anomalies, and block malicious behavior in real time.

AI on Your Side: SASE as Security Infrastructure for Machine Speed

AI threats require AI defenses. But AI can’t protect what it can’t see or control. That’s why SASE is more than just a security delivery model. It’s the infrastructure that enables intelligent, automated defense.

SASE platforms generate unified telemetry across users, devices, locations, apps, and behavior. This rich, normalized data set is what fuels AI-based detection models. It enables machine learning to find patterns, surface anomalies, and continuously optimize policy enforcement.

With SASE in place, you don’t just detect threats faster—you respond in real time. Contextual access controls can throttle bandwidth, trigger re-authentication, or isolate risky sessions automatically. Human responders focus on strategy, not fire drills.

The Choice Is Now: Fragmented or Future-Proof

SASE isn’t a trend. It’s an inevitability. The question is whether organizations adopt it on their terms—or after a breach forces their hand.

In an AI-dominated threat landscape, the winners will be those who design for machine-speed security. Unified visibility. Adaptive controls. Real-time enforcement. These are not future requirements. They are today’s minimums.

SASE makes them possible.

So the real question isn’t whether you can afford to deploy SASE.

It’s whether you can afford not to.

[raybittechnologies]

Understanding the Internet of Behavior: Transforming Technology Through Personalization

We are no longer living in a ‘hyper-connected world’ where the technology has graduated from just connecting devices to understand and anticipate our needs, desires, and even our behavior. This is called the Internet of Behavior, an emerging concept building on top of IoT but adding a powerful layer of behavioral insights. IoB seeks to interpret data about human actions and patterns to offer tailored experiences, improve business outcomes, and even enhance public welfare. But it comes with ethical issues regarding its use on questions of privacy and proper applications for personal data.

What is the Internet of Behaviour (IoB)?

Internet of Behaviour is essentially the collection of user data that can be obtained from multiple sources including connected devices, social media, purchasing patterns, as well as location tracking for the understanding and predictability of human behavior. This includes taking a step further to analyze the data and hence creating actionable insights about the people using those devices when making the focus on gathering data from multiple devices in IoT.

This enables the IoB to analyze the “what” and “why” within the actions of users, thereby helping organizations provide more personalized services or tailor their offerings to accommodate particular needs, thereby influencing future user behavior in a directed manner.

How Does IoB Work?

IoB leverages a mix of technologies, including AI, machine learning, and big data analytics, to process and interpret data collected from various sources:

1. Data Collection: It collects data from different sources, including IoT devices, social media activity, browsing history, purchase history, wearable health devices, and mobile applications. Each of them provides evidence to a person’s behaviors, preferences, and motivations in more concrete manners.

2. Data Analysis: AI algorithms analyze such data to find patterns and correlations, which may signify particular behaviors. For example, analyzing what one browses and purchases might show purchase motivations, preferred brands, and needs.

3. Behavioral Insights and Actions: Now that the data is processed, it provides companies and organizations with the ability to decide upon how they engage the individuals. Such insights can be used in tailoring product recommendations, delivering targeted advertising, or even adjusting service delivery according to what resonates best with certain segments.

4. Feedback Loops: The other essential aspect of IoB is that it provides a real-time feedback loop. And while users respond to the customized services, IoB aggregates more data about the interactions that have been made, thus refining the accuracy of future predictions and allowing the systems to “learn” the user’s preferences in a deeper pattern over time.

Real-World Applications of IoB

IoB is already transforming various sectors, bringing personalized, data-driven experiences to users. Here’s how it’s being applied in some critical areas:

1. Healthcare and Wellness IoB allows medical professionals to create highly personalized treatment plans. Wearables, like fitness monitors and smartwatches, can track activity levels, heartbeat, and even sleep patterns. They can, based on this data, provide healthcare professionals with recommendations for lifestyle adjustments, remote monitoring of health, or even the prediction of possible medical problems before they worsen.

2. Retail and E-commerce Online vendors use the Internet of Behavior to learn users’ shopping behavior and styles for a more personalized recommendation, for which, with the information of how and what users prefer or spend on with their interest in products, can effectively be used by e-commerce sites to make recommendations most aligned with the tastes of the buyer, thus increasing conversion rates and loyalty.

3. Public Safety IoB data can be employed to facilitate city authorities to increase public safety through foot traffic patterns, climatic conditions, and previous incidents for the identification of high-risk areas and times. Resource allocation and proactive safety measures through predictive ability

4. Marketing and Advertising IoB greatly benefits the marketing industry. Considering that the behavior of online subjects is now analyzed, IoB can assist marketers in recognizing what message or offer works best for which particular audience segment. Even personalized ads, email campaigns, and dynamic web content are more accurate and attractive with the insight rendered by IoB.

5. Workplace Productivity Companies have just begun to apply IoB tools to understand patterns of employee workflows, communication habits, and other performance metrics. Companies can create a more effective workplace, improve the well-being of employees, and reduce burnout by making suggestions for breaks or changes in routines based on how people work best.

Benefits of IoB

Enhanced Personalization: Hyper-personalized services and products in IoB lead to increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Improves decision-making: Companies can even make more informed decisions based on their products, services, and marketing strategies to appeal directly to their users.

Predictive Capabilities: The IoB allows companies to anticipate or know the need or behavior of a customer, thus solving problems even before they develop, or it provides pro-active support to a customer.

Ethical and Privacy Challenges

While IoB offers numerous benefits, it also raises significant ethical and privacy concerns. Here are some of the main challenges associated with the Internet of Behaviour:

1. Privacy Risks IoB necessitates collecting elaborate data that is associated with privacy risks, as the study of users’ personal and sometime sensitive information is being monitored. Organizations need to be able to ensure that organizations can comply with data protection regulations like GDPR to guarantee the right protection of user privacy.

2. Data Security IoB relies heavily on data sources that could be termed easy preys for cyberattacks. Thus, data security and therefore tightening cybersecurity measures to protect associated sensitive information at large is important.

3. Ethical Use of Data IoB has influence as well as manipulation power over behavior; therefore, companies should ensure that data collected from IoB must be used responsibly without exploiting or manipulating the consumer. Transparency is also essential about data usage, and consent must be obtained.

4. Bias in Algorithms Since IoB relies heavily on AI and machine learning, biases in the algorithms can skew results at best and may influence decisions about people. Algorithmic fairness has to be considered because IoB cannot unfairly target or exclude certain groups of users.

The Future of IoB: What Lies Ahead?

Further evolution of IoB will spread its impact towards business and society as a whole. Future developments of IoB include more regulations concerning the usage of data, better technologies for transparency and security. Added with IoB could be Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) to create some immersive, behavior-responsive experience in gaming, education, and retail.

Responsible IoB will attract enormous attention because companies balance personalized services with respect to user privacy and ethical considerations. Inasmuch as responsible data is accorded, IoB will revolutionize the way we interface with technology and the world.

Final Thoughts

Internet of Behaviour leaps forward in data-driven insight, thus meaning organizations can serve people more customised and user-centric. But with all new opportunities comes a sense of responsibility by which business will need to ensure good deal of data management through ethical and secure means. Once matured, IoB would need transparency, trust and responsible data practices to make its maximum potential fruitful for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society as a whole.

This balance of innovation and ethical responsibility makes IoB the key player toward a digital future transforming the ways in which we interact and expect from technology.

[encounteratnearpoint]

Just casually stroking your hand down your coworker’s back as you walk by…

[neopuff]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TORONTO on SUNDAY (Feb 23) at Another Story Books, and in NYC on WEDNESDAY (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN. More tour dates here.

The commercial surveillance industry is almost totally unregulated. Data brokers, ad-tech, and everyone in between – they harvest, store, analyze, sell and rent every intimate, sensitive, potentially compromising fact about your life.

Late last year, I testified at a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau hearing about a proposed new rule to kill off data brokers, who are the lynchpin of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

The other witnesses were fascinating – and chilling, There was a lawyer from the AARP who explained how data-brokers would let you target ads to categories like "seniors with dementia." Then there was someone from the Pentagon, discussing how anyone could do an ad-buy targeting "people enlisted in the armed forces who have gambling problems." Sure, I thought, and you don't even need these explicit categories: if you served an ad to "people 25-40 with Ivy League/Big Ten law or political science degrees within 5 miles of Congress," you could serve an ad with a malicious payload to every Congressional staffer.

Now, that's just the data brokers. The real action is in ad-tech, a sector dominated by two giant companies, Meta and Google. These companies claim that they are better than the unregulated data-broker cowboys at the bottom of the food-chain. They say they're responsible wielders of unregulated monopoly surveillance power. Reader, they are not.

Meta has been repeatedly caught offering ad-targeting like "depressed teenagers" (great for your next incel recruiting drive):

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/01/105987/is-facebook-targeting-ads-at-sad-teens/

And Google? They just keep on getting caught with both hands in the creepy commercial surveillance cookie-jar. Today, Wired's Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra report on a way to use Google to target people with chronic illnesses, people in financial distress, and national security "decision makers":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-dv360-banned-audience-segments-national-security/

Google doesn't offer these categories itself, they just allow data-brokers to assemble them and offer them for sale via Google. Just as it's possible to generate a target of "Congressional staffers" by using location and education data, it's possible to target people with chronic illnesses based on things like whether they regularly travel to clinics that treat HIV, asthma, chronic pain, etc.

Google claims that this violates their policies, and that they have best-of-breed technical measures to prevent this from happening, but when Wired asked how this data-broker was able to sell these audiences – including people in menopause, or with "chronic pain, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, arthritis, high cholesterol, and hypertension" – Google did not reply.

The data broker in the report also sold access to people based on which medications they took (including Ambien), people who abuse opioids or are recovering from opioid addiction, people with endocrine disorders, and "contractors with access to restricted US defense-related technologies."

It's easy to see how these categories could enable blackmail, spear-phishing, scams, malvertising, and many other crimes that threaten individuals, groups, and the nation as a whole. The US Office of Naval Intelligence has already published details of how "anonymous" people targeted by ads can be identified:

https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf

The most amazing part is how the 33,000 targeting segments came to public light: an activist just pretended to be an ad buyer, and the data-broker sent him the whole package, no questions asked. Johnny Ryan is a brilliant Irish privacy activist with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He created a fake data analytics website for a company that wasn't registered anywhere, then sent out a sales query to a brokerage (the brokerage isn't identified in the piece, to prevent bad actors from using it to attack targeted categories of people).

Foreign states, including China – a favorite boogeyman of the US national security establishment – can buy Google's data and target users based on Google ad-tech stack. In the past, Chinese spies have used malvertising – serving targeted ads loaded with malware – to attack their adversaries. Chinese firms spend billions every year to target ads to Americans:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/business/google-meta-temu-shein.html

Google and Meta have no meaningful checks to prevent anyone from establishing a shell company that buys and targets ads with their services, and the data-brokers that feed into those services are even less well-protected against fraud and other malicious act.

All of this is only possible because Congress has failed to act on privacy since 1988. That's the year that Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have at home. That's also the last time Congress passed a federal consumer privacy law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The legislative history of the VPPA is telling: it was passed after a newspaper published the leaked video-rental history of a far-right judge named Robert Bork, whom Reagan hoped to elevate to the Supreme Court. Bork failed his Senate confirmation hearings, but not because of his video rentals (he actually had pretty good taste in movies). Rather, it was because he was a Nixonite criminal and virulent loudmouth racist whose record was strewn with the most disgusting nonsense imaginable).

But the leak of Bork's video-rental history gave Congress the cold grue. His video rental history wasn't embarrassing, but it sure seemed like Congress had some stuff in its video-rental records that they didn't want voters finding out about. They beat all land-speed records in making it a crime to tell anyone what kind of movies they (and we) were watching.

And that was it. For 37 years, Congress has completely failed to pass another consumer privacy law. Which is how we got here – to this moment where you can target ads to suicidal teens, gambling addicted soldiers in Minuteman silos, grannies with Alzheimer's, and every Congressional staffer on the Hill.

Some people think the problem with mass surveillance is a kind of machine-driven, automated mind-control ray. They believe the self-aggrandizing claims of tech bros to have finally perfected the elusive mind-control ray, using big data and machine learning.

But you don't need to accept these outlandish claims – which come from Big Tech's sales literature, wherein they boast to potential advertisers that surveillance ads are devastatingly effective – to understand how and why this is harmful. If you're struggling with opioid addiction and I target an ad to you for a fake cure or rehab center, I haven't brainwashed you – I've just tricked you. We don't have to believe in mind-control to believe that targeted lies can cause unlimited harms.

And those harms are indeed grave. Stein's Law predicts that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Congress's failure on privacy has put us all at risk – including Congress. It's only a matter of time until the commercial surveillance industry is responsible for a massive leak, targeted phishing campaign, or a ghastly national security incident involving Congress. Perhaps then we will get action.

In the meantime, the coalition of people whose problems can be blamed on the failure to update privacy law continues to grow. That coalition includes protesters whose identities were served up to cops, teenagers who were tracked to out-of-state abortion clinics, people of color who were discriminated against in hiring and lending, and anyone who's been harassed with deepfake porn:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[backwardscapcarlos]

(x)

[egophiliac]

I have never been more concerned for a JP update from your art than I am seeing a Cheka knowing the context of Leona’s dream.

My bois ok right?????? My sweet nephews ok right??????

well

uhhhh

I'm sure the real one is fine :)

[mostly-natm]

can you draw bashir?

I can. The jury is still out on if I should.

[segretecose]

"i am 15% scandinavian 18% french 3% eastern europea-" okay well i will kill 100% of you

[vampirecatprince]

I know I'm on my Sonic AU bullshit, but I'm also really sitting down and thinking about the moral implications of what's going on with AIVOs here...

An sentient AI copy of a proud, stubborn, incredibly intelligent man forced through it's own programming to be more submissive and subservient because it's "only a virtual assistant" is kinda... Fucked up? And I wanna play in with the implications of that ngl, especially given Stone's probably extremely loose sense of personal boundaries after spending the last 7 or so years of his life with Robotnik.

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“There are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces. Like transit environments…Gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.” - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)

[the-most-humble-blog]

<div style="white-space:pre-wrap"> <meta species-shame="irrecoverable"> <script> ARCHIVE_TAG="HUMANITY::DEATH_GOD_PRIMATE::KILLSTREAK_COSMIC" EFFECT: ego fracture, ancestral guilt, laughter through blood TRIGGER_WARNING="statistical war crimes, species-wide roast, extinction prophecy" </script>

🩸 THE MOST HORRIFICALLY MURDEROUS PRIMATE IN HISTORY? LOOK IN THE FUCKING MIRROR. 🩸

—

You ever wonder what the most blood-soaked, batshit insane, nightmare-fueled apex predator ever to soil the surface of this planet is?

Chimp? Gorilla? A baboon with an inferiority complex and a machete?

Nah, bitch.

It’s you.

Not “humankind” in a feel-good, TED Talk tone.

YOU. Right now. Reading this. Sitting there with murder in your bloodline and a Wi-Fi connection.

—

🧠 YOU ARE A HIGH-FUNCTIONING MASSACRE ENGINE.

You aren’t just violent. You are performance-art-level violent.

🦈 Sharks kill because they’re hungry. 🦁 Lions kill to eat. 🐍 Snakes kill to defend themselves.

You?

You kill because you got ghosted. Because a flag looked different. Because a guy walked into your parking space.

And you’ll do it with flair, hashtags, and historical revisionism.

—

📉 STATS THAT MAKE GOD FLINCH

🧬 Chimps kill 1-2% of their group. You?

You were clocking 12–15% murder rates in prehistoric societies before literacy.

Middle Ages? 30-40 per 100,000 murdered every year in Europe. Not counting all the unrecorded shankings over bread, women, and vibes.

Modern era? Just a sample platter of your greatest hits:

�� WWII: 85 million dead

🍚 Mao’s Great Leap: 45 million starved

❄️ Stalin’s purges: 20 million deleted

⛓️ Atlantic Slave Trade: 15+ million moved like furniture, millions more dead

🌄 Native genocide: 90% wiped out like a fucking software update

Y’all killed entire civilizations and gave it a name like Manifest Destiny.

This isn’t war.

This is performance homicide with branding.

—

😈 SERIAL KILLING? THAT’S FOLKLORE TO US.

You are the only species that kills:

✅ For fun ✅ For art ✅ For profit ✅ For theology ✅ For lunch ✅ For no reason at all

Dolphins might be freaky.

But only humans looked at a beating heart and thought:

“Y’know what? I bet I can make furniture out of that.”

Ted Bundy? Dahmer? Gein?

They're not anomalies. They're proof-of-concept.

You evolved just enough empathy to feel the kill, then just enough abstraction to enjoy the aftermath.

—

🏆 YOU ARE THE MICHAEL JORDAN OF DEATH.

If murder was a sport?

Humanity invented the court, killed the referee, and played naked for drama.

You kill:

For land (colonialism, gentrification, turf wars)

For faith (crusades, jihads, “convert or die”)

For oil (aka “freedom”)

For resources (the Congo’s blood-soaked minerals)

For politics (genocides, death squads, Twitter beef)

For TikTok clout (yes, we’re here now)

And sometimes?

You just do it.

Because "he looked at me wrong."

—

🤡 “BUT WE’VE EVOLVED!” — SWEETIE, NO.

You think we’re peaceful now?

You just moved the slaughter to spreadsheets.

Now we:

☑️ Drone strike families from climate-controlled bunkers ☑️ Starve nations through economic sanctions ☑️ Destroy lives via algorithm ☑️ Gaslight history with AI ☑️ Disappear whistleblowers behind corporate logos

You didn’t evolve.

You rebranded.

Now murder wears a fucking lanyard.

—

🌍 THE 21ST CENTURY IS SHAPING UP GREAT 🔥

🌪️ Climate collapse? We’re about to kill ourselves with weather.

🤖 AI war systems? Robots with machine guns and zero emotional baggage.

🏛️ Rising fascism? Been there. Mass graves. Black boots. Coming back like a reboot no one asked for.

You’re not better.

You’re smoother.

You’re murder with UX design.

—

🪞 LOOK IN THE MIRROR, EXTINCTION MONKEY.

You are a walking extinction event.

Lions stop when they’re full. You kill until God hits reset.

You kill the future. You kill infrastructure. You kill your own blood. You kill while praying.

And the scariest part?

You call it progress.

So next time you brush your teeth, and glance up at your reflection?

Just say:

“There it is. The deadliest apex predator in planetary history. Homo sapiens. Made of meat. Designed for violence. And I love brunch.”

—

📢 REBLOG. FOLLOW. SPREAD THE APOCALYPSE.

This isn’t a mood board. This isn’t a meme. This is your species profile.

You are what nightmares have nightmares about.

—

🧠 FOLLOW [The Most Humble Blog] for more brain-cracking transmissions- Now on Patreon! 🔁 REBLOG to slap someone awake with data 💬 COMMENT if you’re ready to get roasted alive with stats

You don’t escape this.

You either accept it or get eaten by it.

</div> <!-- END TRANSMISSION [BLOOD-INDEX: 100%. MIRROR STATUS: SHATTERED.] -->

[spotaus]

Sudden realization that when Pretender makes it to the surface he'd actually be a perfect social engineer/hacker. Send post.

[javert]

i want to be in your dataset. put me in your dataset. let me innnnnn