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 nearly over. Time is flying by! 

And things aren’t slowing down in the tech world, either. 

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

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

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

Our fourth big news story from Louis Columbus covers both the cybersecurity and programming realms: IT developers are increasingly embracing low-code/no-code tools that can be used by those with little-to-no programming expertise. 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 that addresses issues around ETL integrations. The company has released more than 200 free-to-use pipelines. 

Interested in reading more? Here are the top five stories for the week of January 23.

On Thursday, the FBI seized the Hive ransomware gang’s dark web website as part of a “coordinated law enforcement action” alongside the Secret Service and other European enforcement agencies. This appears to be just the start 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 increasing, which will make it more difficult for these entities to target organizations in the future. 

Intel reported fourth-quarter earnings that failed to hit analyst expectations as the big chip maker struggles with slowing demand.

The Santa Clara, California-based chip maker also said it had already taken measures to “right-size” the company’s headcount during Q4. While Intel has been a bellwether for games, its rival Advanced Micro Devices has been growing at much faster rates and taking market share. AMD reports earnings on January 31.

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

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

CIOs today are quick to pursue low-code/no-code platforms to democratize app development, enabling line-of-business teams to create the apps they need. The intuitively designed, declarative drag-and-drop interfaces core to leading platforms from Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and other vendors lead to quick initial adoption and pilot projects. 

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

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

While ETL platforms have been around for quite some time, they all have had one major problem: lack of integration with many smaller sources in the market. Typically, when someone uses these platforms, they only get to create a data pipeline from well-regarded sources like Salesforce or Stripe.