Top 5 Stories of the Week: Ransomware Takes a Hit, Intel Struggles, CIOs Get Their Own Special Issue and More

It’s hard to believe that January is almost over. Time flies!

And things are not slowing down in the technical world either.

Notably, there was big news this week in cybersecurity: the FBI has finally caught up with the Hive ransomware gang. Security writer Tim Keary reported on the coordinated effort that seized the website of the long-elusive hacking company.

The second most important story of the week comes from crack reporter Dean Takahashi (usually from GamesBeat), who wrote about significant slowdowns at Intel.

In our third story, lead AI reporter Sharon Goldman explored how CIOs are coping with the increased pressure to do more with less. This story was part of our new CIO special issue.

Our fourth major news release from Louis Columbus covers both the cybersecurity and programming worlds: IT developers are increasingly embracing low-code/no-code tools that can be used by people with little to no programming knowledge. This story is also part of our special CIO issue.

Finally, our fifth top story of the week from staff writer Shubham Sharma reported on Airbyte, a startup tackling issues around ETL integrations. The company has released more than 200 free-to-use pipelines.

Read more? Here are the top five stories for the week of January 23.

On Thursday, the FBI confiscated the dark web website of the Hive ransomware gang as part of a “coordinated law enforcement action” together with the Secret Service and other European enforcement agencies. This appears to be just the beginning of a coordinated crackdown on Hive’s criminal enterprise.

From a broader perspective, the takedown also shows that international enforcement against ransomware threat actors is on the rise, making it more difficult for these entities to target organizations in the future.

Intel reported fourth-quarter earnings that fell short of analyst expectations as the major chipmaker struggles with declining demand.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker also said it had already taken steps to “sizing” the company’s fourth-quarter workforce. While Intel has been a benchmark for games, its rival Advanced Micro Devices has grown much faster and gained market share. AMD will report the results on January 31.

CIOs are under pressure in 2023, experts say, as chief information officers are called upon to drive growth and transformation, not just keep the data center running and enterprise software running.

“It’s about ‘show me the money,'” Janelle Hill, chief of research for Gartner’s CIO division, told VentureBeat. After a decade of investing in digital, she explains, organizations want to know the value of their investments while accelerating digital initiatives such as artificial intelligence and hyperautomation, and ensuring security and privacy across an ever-expanding attack surface.

Today, CIOs are quick to look for low-code/no-code platforms to democratize app development, enabling line-of-business teams to build the apps they need. The intuitively designed, declarative drag-and-drop interfaces are at the core of leading platforms Microsoft, Sales team, Serve now and other suppliers lead to rapid initial adoption and pilot projects.

Already overwhelmed IT teams welcome the chance to delegate development to business units that show a strong interest in learning low-code and no-code development. Faced with a severe ongoing labor shortage, CIOs are looking to low-code and no-code platforms to ease the workload in their departments.

San Francisco ETL connector company Airbyte has made some 200+ data connectors free on its platform, enabling any enterprise to connect almost any data source to target data platforms such as Snowflake and Google BigQuery.

While ETL platforms have been around for quite some time, they all had one major problem: lack of integration with much smaller sources on the market. Usually when someone uses these platforms, they can only create a data pipeline from reputable sources like Salesforce or Stripe.