Inbox danger

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With today’s scam artists becoming spam artists, good luck getting to inbox zero ever again.

Jeff Sample, IT consultant and senior industry development manager for trades at construction-collaboration platform Bluebeam, said that he and his industry peers have been seeing “subscription bombing,” where bots overwhelm a victim with thousands of legitimate newsletters, digital services, and mailing lists.

The idea is to overwhelm your inbox so you miss legitimate invoices—and fall for fraudulent ones.

In early 2025, IT Brew reported on a subscription-spamming tactic, in which adversaries blast inboxes with a flood of messages, then call up as “IT” to add malware under the guise of saving the day.

What Sample is seeing is slightly different: The spammed inbox buries legitimate emails, leaving an opening for an adversary to throw a fraudulent bill on top of the growing pile.

Welcome to Spam-a-lot.—BH

IT OPERATIONS

Me, myself and AI

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How many on-prem IT professionals does it take to run a data center? The number might drop even further in coming years.

The push to automate data centers is commonplace these days, and many believe that AI can make things more efficient from a personnel perspective. Michael Gale, chief marketing officer at AI and data company EnterpriseDB, told IT Brew that as enterprises employ AI for tasks with repeatable patterns, like rebooting systems, humans will be increasingly left to take the outlier events.

“Those moments of crisis or moments of learning are going to be really, really human-oriented,” Gale said. “Particularly as AI moves from these sort of incubated experiments to mainline production.”

Welcome to the person-free data center.—CN

CYBERSECURITY

Build-a-malware

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A March 12 report from an IBM research team reveals how even ransomware actors are seeking a GenAI shortcut.

The good news: IBM’s X-Force threat analysts described the AI-generated malware script they studied as “mediocre” and “unspectacular.”

The bad news: The malware—named “Slopoly” by the group—shows how easily threat actors can use AI tools to throw together malware frameworks “in a fraction of the time it used to take,” IBM’s Malware Reverse Engineer Golo Mühr wrote in the report.

Oh, and about that good news: The mediocrity is “likely temporary,” according to another member of the X-Force team.

See X-Force’s exact breakdown of the threat.—BH

PATCH NOTES

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 512,000. That’s how many lines of source code constitute Anthropic’s Claude Code, which recently leaked due to internal error. (Ars Technica)

Quote: “It was a time of both great promise and great trepidation…The ability to have a great idea, start a company and then either not find your customers and go out of business or not manage growth and go out of business—that was just the rule.”—Chris Espinosa, Apple’s longest-tenured employee, describing what it was like to work for the company in the 1970s (the New York Times)

Read: New global and US regulations could impact how businesses deploy AI. (CIO)

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From The Crew

Phish happens

Phishing, credential abuse, and sneaky entry points aren’t going anywhere.

Join us April 15 to learn how ransomware gets in, what signals to watch for, and how to tighten defenses before “we missed it” becomes the takeaway.

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☕ “Subscription bombing” is a rising security threat