November 05, 2026

Presented By

Thursday’s here! Want to spike sales of your beef jerky? Just make sure an imprisoned healthcare founder is filmed eating it in a blockbuster documentary.

In today’s edition:

⌨️ Put together

🥸 Who’s there?

🧾 Bill me

—Eoin Higgins, Jordyn Grzelewski, Billy Hurley

IT OPERATIONS

Restoration

images of workers at a table together working on computers

Getty Images

It’s a familiar story for any IT pro: In the wake of a ransomware attack or other system-destroying incident, you need to restore your workflows as quickly and effectively as possible.

As IT Brew reported earlier this year, ransomware attacks in particular have left enterprises scrambling. Executives have to decide whether to pay the ransom and restore operations. Setting up successful restoration workflows requires testing the system and establishing timelines for uptime.

RapidScale CISO Brent Neal told IT Brew that, rather than a quick flip of the switch, restoration is a process that demands time and preparation. The first step is an audit to gauge the reliability and preparedness of your response.

Keep it growing.—EH

Sponsored By Hyland

A little assurance for insurance

Car insurance sounds like it should be simple, but anyone dealing with claims notes, call transcripts, policy docs, legal correspondence, and other bits of unstructured insurance data knows that’s far from true.

That’s why Alex Kantrowitz sat down with Erie Insurance’s CIO. They discuss how a legacy insurer intends to use AI on call transcripts, adjuster notes, and claim files to support adjusters in near-real time, and speed up payouts while keeping humans in the loop.

Since 80–90% of insurance data is unstructured, GenAI helps them tap into it without replacing traditional, deterministic models. Hyland ECM can now act as a consolidated, governed repository for all policy, underwriting, claims, and medical documents.

To learn more about how AI can make the experience faster and fairer, watch their full interview here.

CYBERSECURITY

Stashed stache

Photo collage showing 4 overlapping browser windows showing different parts of a man's face when combined. One half of the face has a mustache, and the other doesn't.

Illustration: Shannon May, Photos: Unsplash

A missing mustache was the tipoff that something was amiss.

A job candidate had sailed through the hiring process at people search engine and data broker Spokeo. They seemed so well-suited to the role that COO Harrison Tang recalls telling his team, “I hope this is not too good to be true.”

Spoiler alert: It was. Even worse, the candidate ended up being what Tang calls a “real fake,” or someone misrepresenting their identity. Hours after the new hire started the job, Spokeo fired them—in part, because it became clear that the person who interviewed for the role wasn’t the one who logged in to work.

“The person who onboarded, who got hired, during the orientation did not have a mustache,” Tang told Morning Brew. “But the person I interviewed looked like Mario.”

It’s-a me, deepfake.—JG

IT STRATEGY

Billing and able

Jean-Philippe Avelange

In the early 2000s, a young engineering intern Jean-Philippe Avelange accepted the position of billing specialist at systems integrator Capgemini—an exciting shift that would take him from Paris to Mexico City.

He just needed to figure out what a billing specialist actually did. “I literally remember Googling ‘what is billing?’ because I had no clue,” he recalled.

Avelange’s IT career began with aiding Capgemini’s telecom clients to fit billing systems to their specific needs. He helped customize Portal Software’s Portal Infranet for use by Avantel, a Mexican telecom provider at the time, assessing its billing requirements and how those could be translated into coded designs and an implementation plan. (Portal Infranet was later acquired by Oracle, which processed telecom usage in real time to support phone features of the era, like prepaid balances and ringtone download limits.)

Top billing.—BH

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 20 minutes. That’s how little time it took hackers to steal billions from Binance, according to the crypto exchange. (Wired)

Quote: “A seismic shift that will have a negative impact on the pace of the AI revolution build-out in the US over the next few years.”—Dan Ives, analyst at Yorkville Ives, on the potential impact of the election on the tech industry (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Palantir’s earnings were strong in the third quarter—but the stock dipped. Here’s why. (TechCrunch)

The more sure insurer: Alex Kantrowitz sat down for an interview with Erie Insurance’s CIO. They discuss how a legacy insurer uses AI to support adjusters in near-real time, and speed up payouts. Watch it here.*

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Written by Eoin Higgins, Jordyn Grzelewski, and Billy Hurley

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