The obsession with yield and what it's costing your security.

Why humanity's need for speed keeps outrunning it's cyber hygiene. ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

The UpGuardian Feature A Day in the Life of an Iranian Bot Farmer Listicle No Hackers Required: 10 Shadow AI Leaks Hiding in Plain Sight Resource Your Employees Are Already Using Unapproved AI Letter from the Editor Whether you are a farmer in a field, a scammer in Tehran, or a corporate marketer at a tech company, your goal is the same: grow your output as fast as possible. Before it's all said and done, nothing may define humanity more than its obsession with yield (both in terms of speed and scale). But agriculture taught us a harsh lesson decades ago: relentless cultivation without protecting your soil inevitably leads to a catastrophic failure. Today, AI and hyper-automation are our new high-yield crops. Eager to harvest unprecedented productivity, we are planting at a breakneck pace. Yet in this frantic rush for output, fundamental cyber hygiene and defensive controls are routinely sacrificed for speed. In this issue of The UpGuardian, we explore both sides of this high-yield race and offer up a solution on how organizations can protect their digital soil before it gives out. At a Glance March 20th The FBI issues a FLASH advisory warning that threat actors are actively leveraging Telegram messaging bots as stealth command-and-control channels to bypass perimeter defenses and covertly exfiltrate sensitive victim data. 6,500 Over 6,500 distinct generative AI domains have been detected in enterprise network traffic, marking a massive explosion of unsanctioned shadow IT apps operating completely outside company oversight. (Source: Menlo Security) June 18th The Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity issues a warning that threat actors are leveraging unsecured third-party AI pipelines and shadow applications to harvest proprietary corporate data and launch automated ransomware campaigns. Feature A Day in the Life of an Iranian Bot Farmer By Greg Pollock   Tehran, 6am. A Sony Xperia L4 joins the Telegram channel "Instant loan, no guarantor" for Iran’s central bank. They aren’t really one of the Iranians who still use the banned platform, and the channel isn’t really Bank Markazi.   This account is a bot whose job is to provide social proof for financial scam artists, part of a legion orchestrated by a sophisticated tech platform to help cyber criminals prey on Iranians. Later tonight, the bot will hit Telegram’s limit of 500 channels, leave the oldest ones, and be ready to begin the cycle anew. "The day is well underway, with activity climbing from 500k events per hour to 1.9M. The demand curve for bots follows the same diurnal cycle as the humans behind the channels.” Continue reading Listicle No Hackers Required: 10 Shadow AI Leaks Hiding in Plain Sight By Revashni Moodley “The call is coming from inside the house.” It’s one of horror’s oldest lines, and you already know how the scene goes. The team scrambles, rechecks every firewall, audits every login, hunting for an intruder. Then the trace comes back, and there isn’t one because there is no malware or forced entry. Just an employee, at their own desk, with their own login, who pasted a confidential spreadsheet into an unapproved AI tool to save 10 minutes before a deadline. It’s tempting to file that under mistake rather than breach, but the numbers say otherwise. IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that security incidents involving shadow AI (unapproved AI tools employees use without IT's knowledge) jumped to 43% this year, more than double last year's share. Those incidents cost organizations an average of $5.39 million, and nearly half (49%) resulted in data loss or compromise. Continue reading Resource Your Employees Are Already Using AI You Haven't Approved By Shane Moosa   By lunchtime, someone in finance has pasted a live forecast into a chatbot. Support's already fed a customer ticket into one. So has engineering, debugging with a snippet no one vetted. No one asks, because nothing about it looks like a threat.   That's the shadow AI problem: entry points multiplying faster than any team can chase them down. UpGuard research found 81% of your workforce is already using unapproved AI tools, which means sensitive code, forecast models, and proprietary material are in plaintext on servers your organization never vetted.   You can't ban a habit this wired into how people work, so get ahead of it instead. UpGuard's new AI Security Center helps security teams build a clearer picture of workforce AI use and develop policies that support innovation without letting risk grow unchecked. Continue reading Palette Cleanser Barbed Wire & Bypasses In 1883, the invention of barbed wire sparked the Texas Fence-Cutting Wars. By walling off the American West to protect their crops, landowners turned ordinary cowboys into active saboteurs who cut the wire by night. It’s the same friction driving modern shadow tech: government censorship forces Iranian bot operators onto rogue proxies, and rigid IT blocks drive corporate employees to unauthorized AI. When the perimeters or regulations choke out the natural workflow, people will always cut the fence to get their yield. UpGuard Inc., 650 Castro Street, Suite 120-387 , Mountain View, CA , 94041, United States +1 888 882 3223 Unsubscribe | Manage Preferences