Most Americans would opt for a one-time root canal rather than face a year of scam messages

• Global study reveals consumer overwhelm, caused by the onslaught of increasingly believable text, email, and social media scams amid a rising AI-powered scam surge

• People receive an average of nearly 12 fake messages or scams daily, via email, text, or social media

• The average American spends 94 minutes each week reviewing, verifying, or deciding whether a message sent through text, email, or social media is real or fake, equating to more than two standard work weeks per year

McAfee Corp, a global leader in online protection, today released its first-ever Global Scam Message Study. The study surveyed more than 7,000 adults in seven countries to understand how scam messages, and the increased scam sophistication brought about by artificial intelligence (AI), have impacted the lives of consumers worldwide.

This study reveals that Americans receive an average of 11.6 fake messages or scams each day. Additionally, two-thirds (65%) of Americans have clicked or fallen for a scam, 45% of those people have lost money as a result, and 15% have lost more than $1,000.

AI is a scammer’s favorite tool, helping cybercriminals increase the scale, sophistication and speed of phishing and text message scams. These fake emails, text messages and phishing sites are more believable than ever thanks to the advancements in artificial intelligence. In fact, a new phishing site is created every 11 seconds and McAfee detects and protects against more than a million phishing attempts every single day, illustrating the deluge of scam messages consumers are faced with.

“It’s truly a sign of the times that most Americans would rather subject themselves to the pain and distress of a root canal than be subjected to scam texts and messages throughout the year,” said Roma Majumder, SVP of Product at McAfee. “And it’s not just the speed and volume, but the sophistication. Thanks to AI it can be incredibly difficult to know if that delivery text message or bank alert notification is real or not. So much so that 55% of Americans believe they have a better shot at solving the Rubik’s cube than identifying a scam message.”

“This onslaught of scam messages is a drain on people’s time, energy, and finances. And it’s why we all need AI to beat AI. Unfortunately, seeing is no longer believing and we need to be equipped with advanced AI technology that can stop and block scam messages in real time. I’m proud that McAfee offers solutions to protect people’s privacy, identity and personal information and helps make the online world more enjoyable for everyone,” said Majumder.

The 2023 McAfee Scam Message Study

McAfee’s research revealed four key insights about online scams and spotlights the level of stress people face as AI drives an increase in the number and sophistication of scam messages, along with the need for an AI-driven solution to the problem. The survey results are detailed below.

Today’s scam messages are cleverly camouflaged

84% of Americans surveyed feel that it’s harder than ever to spot when a text, email, or social media message is a scam, and 52% believe hackers are using artificial intelligence to be more accurate and believable with their scams. Further, 39% of people said they noticed that scam messages no longer have typos or errors, and are very believable as a result, and that scam messages are harder to identify because they are often very personal.

This sophisticated trickery takes five common forms. The below numbers indicate the percentage of U.S. survey respondents who’ve received each type of message in the past year:

• You’ve won a prize!” – 62%
• Information about a purchase the recipient didn’t make – 57%
• Fake missed delivery, or delivery problem, notification – 56%
• Amazon security alert, or notification messages regarding account updates – 43%
• Netflix (or a similar streaming service) subscription updates – 42%

People are drowning in a scam message sea

In a time when one-third of U.S. adults report not getting enough daily rest or sleep, an increasing amount of their valuable time is being used to filter through an overwhelming number of scam messages. The average American spends 94 minutes each week reviewing, verifying, or deciding whether a message sent through text, email, social media is real or fake. This amounts to more than two full work weeks each year, spent on scam-spotting. More specifically:

• Email: 95% of Americans surveyed indicate that they receive fake messages or scams via email on a daily basis. 40% receive 5 or more fake email messages each day.
• Text: 87% of U.S. survey respondents indicate that they receive fake messages or scams via text each day. 30% receive 5 or more fake text messages each day.
• Social Media: 75% of the people surveyed indicate that they receive fake messages or scams via social media every day. 30% receive 5 or more of these social media scams daily.

To click, or not to click, is a potentially complicated question

With the increased volume, and more advanced appearance of scam messages, just 35% of Americans have avoided clicking on or falling for fake messages in the last 12 months. In line with this finding, 65% of survey respondents have believed the content of one or more scam messages was real, with the most believed messages being:

• “You’ve won a prize!” – 25%
• Fake missed delivery, or delivery problem, notification – 20%
• Information about a purchase the recipient didn’t make – 22%
• Sign in and location verification messages – 20%

Engaging with scam messages can be costly and stressful.

Nearly half (45%) of Americans who clicked on a scam message lost money as a result. The people surveyed indicated they would prefer the following painful or scary experiences over dealing with online scam texts and messages throughout the year:

• A one-time root canal – 54%
• 24-hour food poisoning – 40%
• Doing taxes every month – 57%
• Sleep in a haunted house for one night – 55%

An AI ally is needed as scam stakes rise and online trust sinks

As the number of AI-powered scams continues to rise, 40% of U.S. survey respondents say their trust in digital communications has decreased. This trend is largely due to a lack of depth in digital defense knowledge: 37% of people say they don’t know if they are doing the right things to protect themselves. People manage this knowledge gap in different ways:

• 33% of people ignore an email, when they receive an email or text that they think might be a scam
• 31% block the sender when they receive this type of message
• 26% report suspected scam messages

How to Protect Yourself from Scam Messages

• Think before you click. Cybercriminals use phishing emails or fake sites to lure people into clicking links that could lead to malware. If you receive an email or text message asking you to click on a link, even if it’s a great-sounding deal or indicates it’ll provide useful information, it’s best to avoid interacting with the message altogether. Always go direct to the source and interact with reputable companies.

• Remember that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Many scams are effective because the scammer creates a false sense of urgency or preys on a heightened emotional state. Pause before you rush to interact with any message that is threatening or urgent, especially if it is from an unknown or unlikely sender.

• Use AI to beat AI. From blocking dangerous links that appear on text messages, social media, or web browsers, customers across all platforms can take advantage of the AI-driven technology behind McAfee Scam Protection to engage with text messages, read emails, and browse the web peacefully and securely.

Adding Freehand teams and technology positions Miro to deliver deeper support and value for teams driving innovation at scale

Miro®, the visual workspace for innovation, announced the acquisition of the visual collaboration platform, Freehand, from Invision. The deal includes the technology and brand assets, customer relationships and talent associated with Freehand.

As part of the acquisition, Jeff Chow, former Freehand Chief Product Officer and recently promoted InVision CEO, joins Miro as the company's new Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO), along with the core team supporting Freehand, bringing together top talent in the visual collaboration space to build stronger products and drive better outcomes for customers.

"Over the years, we've made significant investments in the Miro platform – like robust agile workflows support, diagramming, deep integrations across collaboration and product development stacks, extensible platform, and deep enterprise capabilities  – all designed to help teams drive innovation at scale.Today's announcement represents another exciting opportunity to advance our capabilities by leveraging some of the developments from the Freehand team" said Andrey Khusid, founder and CEO, Miro. "The Freehand team shares our passion for solving the hardest problems in collaboration to help customers do more, faster. We're excited to bring these two teams and technology together, and for Jeff's leadership, as we deliver the future of collaboration technology."

Jeff Chow brings 25 years of experience in designing and building organizations focused on delivering customer-centric products designed to solve critical business problems, particularly those around team communication and collaborative problem solving. Prior to his leadership roles at Invision, Chow held product and engineering leadership roles at Google and TripAdvisor as well as co-founding Springpad, a personal assistant mobile app, which was acquired by Google. Chow will now serve as Miro's CPTO, where he will be responsible for the continued evolution of Miro's innovation workspace.

"We share Miro's vision for the future of visual and intelligent collaboration technologies, and the transformative impact the combination of these two teams and technology platforms will have on Freehand and Miro customers moving forward," said Jeff Chow, CPTO, Miro. 

Miro's mission is to empower teams to create the next BIG thing. The company has supported the innovation journey for its more than 200,000 customer organizations since pioneering the visual collaboration space in 2011. Today, 7 out of the 10 most innovative companies^[1] use Miro to increase the speed and impact of innovation within their organizations.

Miro has become the standard for collaborative innovation by delivering an enterprise-grade platform with core capabilities purpose-built for teams that bring new products and services to market every day. It starts with six bundles of capabilities built for all stages of the innovation journey – all in one tool. These include:

• Product Development Workflows
• Diagramming & Process Mapping
• Workshops & Asynchronous Collaboration
• Miro AI
• Content & Data Visualization
• Visual Project Management

The six bundles are combined with an open and flexible platform designed to enable enterprises to adapt Miro to their specific needs through integrations, applications, templates, etc., and it's all supported by a secure and compliant enterprise foundation designed to help keep data protected and enable Miro to be easily managed across the organization. 

Cloud storage platform will now offer image recognition and enhanced file management

Playbook, the visual cloud storage platform built for creatives, announced today the acquisition of CanFY, developer of a cutting edge AI assistant. Playbook will now provide designers, photographers, videographers and the vendors who support them, with AI capabilities including enhanced image recognition and file management technologies so creators can focus on their craft, free from storage concerns.

Traditional cloud storage companies provide an insufficient experience to design teams and freelancers where images are hard to find, sharing is confusing and people get lost in nested folders. Playbook’s visual cloud storage solution provides a Pinterest-like gallery of assets with tools like image tagging for photos and videos, inviting collaborators at any point of the creative process, and a variety of templates and creative tools. Over 600,000 marketers and designers worldwide use Playbook to manage assets, including design teams at Opendoor, Literati, Blendjet and Stytch. With the acquisition of CanFY’s AI capabilities the enhanced platform will streamline workflows and enable new possibilities for designers and marketers.

“We pride ourselves in being the solution that works best for creatives, and to continue delivering on our promise to let creatives focus on what they’re good at, we want to make sure they have access to all that technology has to offer,” said Jessica Ko, CEO and Co-Founder of Playbook. “Acquiring CanFY and the platform their team has built allows us to quickly and continuously deliver AI-driven innovations to empower creative professionals worldwide.”

With the acquisition of CanFY, Playbook will integrate advanced AI into the platform, elevating its visual search capabilities. Designers will now be able to effortlessly issue commands like 'create a moodboard from my assets' or 'find images featuring a fireplace,' and help users accomplish tasks in seconds. This integration includes features like:

• Auto-tagging, including videos
• Facial and custom object recognition
• Natural language and guided search
• File organization and mood board creation
• Plugin recommendations

CanFY was co-founded by Max Kushner and Alex Gaziev and focused on developing an AI assistant designed to simplify complex data structures, including help center systems and file metadata, for businesses.

"We are thrilled to bring our technology to Playbook to enable designers to concentrate on their creative pursuits rather than mundane tasks,” said Max Kushner, CEO of CanFY. “The potential of AI to support and extend what creatives can do is yet to be fully realized and we’re excited to be part of a team helping to deliver its potential.”

“Generate Script” and “Generate Audio” Transform Audiate Into Full-Scale Audio Production House

TechSmith Corporation, an industry leader in visual communication and video creation, announces the launch of generative AI scripting and voiceover features in Audiate, the company’s audio recorder and text-based editing solution. The new functionality, Generate Script and Generate Audio, allows creators of all skill levels to efficiently produce comprehensive, near-instant audio projects without a writer or voice actor.

Audiate is the groundbreaking application leveraging AI to generate a transcription from recorded or imported audio or video files so users can edit content as easily as a text document. Building upon its existing AI capabilities, such as the removal of hesitations and fillers ("ums" and "ahs"), Audiate now offers faster speech-to-text transcription as well as generative scripting and audio to transform the solution into a complete audio production house.

New AI-powered functionality in Audiate includes:

Generate Script:

• Script Creation: Create a script from nothing but an idea by specifying desired length, content type (i.e. business presentation or marketing commercial), and style (i.e. enthusiastic or serious) from a variety of options.
• Script Summary and Revision: Easily summarize a script to aid with marketing and promotion of audio/video content or instantly rewrite the script to try new concepts.
• Script Translation: Translate your script into 7 different languages including English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.

Generate Audio:

• Multivoice Audio Generation: Transform text into studio-quality audio, selecting from over 100 different voices and styles with the ability to adjust their speed and pitch to match your desired audio outcome.
• Multilingual Audio Generation: Switch audio into 14 different languages and dialects, including English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.

"With our new Generative AI features, we want to help our users create professional content in minutes, rather than hours or days,” said Dan Latterner, senior technical product manager at TechSmith. “Audiate can now leverage AI to assist with every step of the creation process, getting you from an idea to a polished result, faster and easier than ever before."

Alongside its new generative AI technology, Audiate has improved its integration with Camtasia, TechSmith’s award-winning, all-in-one video recorder and editor. The combination of Camtasia and Audiate creates a powerful AI-assisted video editor allowing users to produce video content more than 40% faster than the standalone solution. Audio edits made within Audiate now automatically synchronize and create video edits in a linked Camtasia project. In addition, the Audiate-based transcription can be transferred over to Camtasia for precise video captioning, including traditional closed captioning and new, customizable Dynamic Captions.

AI-powered assistant enhances marketing insights and campaign orchestration

Mapp, the leading international provider of insight-led customer experience solutions, has today announced the latest addition to the Mapp Cloud – Mapp AI Assistant, designed to enhance and automate marketers' cross-channel campaigns.

Mapp has always been committed to simplifying the marketing landscape by helping marketers in identifying opportunities, analyzing data, and extracting valuable insights. The 2020 launch of Mapp's Insight-led Customer Experience was a breakthrough, unifying data extraction and campaign orchestration in a way that led to 540% ROI over three years for Mapp's customers*.

Steve Warren, CEO of Mapp says, "We're committed to enhancing and simplifying the marketer's experience. With Mapp AI Assistant, we're introducing our customers to AI tools that support more informed decisions and contribute to the success of their marketing efforts. This represents a step forward in our journey towards an AI-empowered future in marketing."

In the latest enhancement to Mapp Cloud, Mapp AI Assistant offers marketers AI-driven support with opportunity and anomaly identification, content and segmentation creation, and even predictive analysis for optimizing campaign delivery.

Key Features Include:

• Automated Marketing Insights: Mapp AI Assistant provides automatic alerts for trends or anomalies, enriches customer data by predicting behaviour like conversion or churn, and offers a 30-day metric forecast.
  
  
• Order Value Monitoring: Automated notifications and integrated root cause analysis are provided if there's a change in revenue metrics.
  
  
• Custom Process Monitoring: Whether it's a checkout process or a different process, Mapp's AI Assistant can detect anomalies, offering hourly or daily checks, and even allows customisation for industry-specific requirements.
  
  
• AI-Driven Segment Detection: Enhance retargeting strategies with Mapp AI Assistant's ability to identify and evaluate new customer segments.
  
  
• AI-Supported Content Generation: Integrating with ChatGPT, Mapp Engage now provides suggestions, improvements, and translations for email subject lines and content, adaptable to various brand tones and target audiences.
  
  
• Best Channel and Best Send out Time: Mapp AI Assistant enables predictive campaign delivery, suggesting the best channel and time to reach individual customers, whether it's through email, mobile push, SMS, or in-app messaging.
  
  
• Smart Predictions: Predict future behaviour of customers, from conversion probabilities to lifetime value, with the ability to instantly act on these insights.

Eric Lubow, CPTO of Mapp adds: "The Mapp AI Assistant marks a new milestone in the evolution of AI integration within our platform, reflecting our vision for more intelligent and streamlined marketing. Our technology is designed to bring improvements that matter, helping marketers navigate the evolving landscape with more effective tools."

Mapp AI Assistant stands as a testament to Mapp's commitment to innovation and enhancement. With its robust AI capabilities, Mapp is set to redefine the future of marketing, supporting businesses in delivering unique customer experiences.

Level AI launches GenAI-powered VoC Insights, a new product that turns vast amounts of unstructured contact center data into actionable Voice of the Customer insights in real time

Level AI, a pioneer in advanced AI technologies for customer-facing teams and Gartner Cool Vendor, today announced the release of VoC Insights, a groundbreaking generative AI solution set to disrupt the customer experience management landscape a market sized at $17B by redefining the way enterprises capture Voice of the Customer (VoC) data.

Traditional VoC programs rely heavily on focus groups, social media scraping, and customer feedback surveys distributed at various touchpoints in the customer journey. However, this approach is resource-intensive, introduces unnecessary friction to the customer experience, is incomplete with low customer coverage, and produces biased and delayed insights.

Level AI is changing the game with VoC Insights, a turnkey generative AI-powered solution that enables organizations to monitor and visualize real-time trends of customer issues. This powerful tool extracts the essence of every customer-facing interaction across channels — phone, email, SMS, and chat — and intelligently groups these conversations into self-generated topics and subtopics while seamlessly adding new customer concerns as they emerge. Additionally, VoC Insights evaluates the customer sentiment of each interaction, eliminating the need for satisfaction surveys.

“We’re thrilled to empower our customers to truly and proactively understand their own customers' needs without the traditional laborious and intrusive customer feedback surveys,” says Ashish Nagar, founder and CEO of Level AI. “Our generative AI-powered VoC solution is a game-changer in customer experience management by making the process of identifying customer pain points and areas of improvement effortless.”

With VoC Insights, enterprises can redirect their resources away from survey administration and toward actionable insights provided by generative AI. It's the simplest path to adopting a data-driven approach to mastering the customer experience.

Global technology executive brings global business operations and financial expertise to Veritone

Veritone, Inc. (“Veritone”), a leader in designing human-centered AI solutions, today announced the appointment of Michael Zilis to its Board of Directors (“Board”), effective November 8, 2023.

“As Veritone executes its long-term strategy and embarks on its next phase of disruptive growth, I am thrilled to announce the addition of Michael Zilis as an independent director to our Board,” said Ryan Steelberg, Chief Executive Officer and President of Veritone. “Michael is an accomplished public company executive and dynamic leader who shares Veritone’s mission of delivering highly targeted solutions to help companies unlock operational efficiencies and productivity gains. His financial and international operations expertise will bring a valuable perspective to Veritone’s pursuit to prioritize the needs of our customers while driving value for our shareholders.”

Mr. Zilis brings over 30 years of experience empowering companies to deliver leading customer and partner experiences globally. Since January 2020, he has served as EVP and Chief Financial Officer at Ingram Micro Inc., a $50+ billion revenue company and one of the world’s largest providers of technology and supply chain solutions. Zilis has been with Ingram Micro for almost two decades, previously serving as EVP and Group President of Asia Pacific, where he led the region’s operations and drove the company’s global expansion strategy, in addition to running other parts of Ingram Micro’s operations from 2012 to 2019. Mr. Zilis also has extensive financial expertise, as he first joined Ingram Micro in 2006 to lead controllership, financial planning and analysis, long-term strategic planning, financial due diligence and merger and acquisitions. Prior to his time at Ingram Micro, Zilis served as Vice President and Corporate Controller at Avnet, Inc. and as a Senior Manager in the Audit Practice at Arthur Andersen.

Mr. Zilis holds a Bachelor of Science degree in finance and accounting from Boston College.

• Calico Cloud's Security Score and Recommended Actions provide an unparalleled view of security risks, enabling enterprises to identify and mitigate them swiftly.

• Streamlined autoscaling with Windows HostProcess Container support simplifies Kubernetes operations, saving time and resources.

• IPv6 support for eBPF in Calico empowers enterprises to enhance the performance and scalability of their applications, ensuring they meet the demands of modern workloads.

• Enhanced observability with VxLAN for cluster mesh offers a scalable solution for multi-cluster deployments, enhancing visibility and security.

Tigera, provider of the industry's only active security platform for containers and Kubernetes, today announced upgrades to Calico Open Source and Calico Cloud centered around the security, performance, and scalability of Kubernetes deployments for enterprises. Tigera continues to set new industry standards, uniquely empowering organizations to navigate the challenges of containerized environments with confidence.

Maximizing Container Security with Security Score and Recommended Actions

Security is paramount in an era where Kubernetes clusters form the backbone of mission-critical applications. However, common factors like limited cloud-native application security experts, narrow skillsets, and faster release cycles complicate this. To overcome these challenges, Calico Cloud now provides a Security Score and Recommended Actions for cloud-native applications. This gives administrators a quantified, at-a-glance view of their organization's security posture by monitoring historical trends, risks by namespace, and more.

Crucially, the feature also provides actionable recommendations tailored to each workload, strengthening the security of individual workloads and the entire cluster.

Streamlined Operations with Windows HostProcess Container

Given that 45% of respondents from the CNCF 2022 Annual Survey utilize Windows containers in production, the manual node pool bootstrapping used for updates or scaling has proven inefficient and detrimental to application lifecycles. As Windows containers become integral to Kubernetes workflows, streamlined node pool deployment is crucial.

The Calico Open Source Windows HostProcess Container feature addresses operational challenges by enabling automated node pool scaling and upgrades, eliminating the need for manual node initialization. This empowers Kubernetes administrators to streamline operations and focus on the management of Windows container-based applications. Tigera is the first to provide native support for Windows HostProcess Containers, simplifying Kubernetes management for enterprises.

Performance and Scalability with IPv6 Support for Calico eBPF Dataplane

Enterprise-class applications demand scalable, high-performance networking. Calico meets this need with its introduction of IPv6 support for the eBPF dataplane. IPv6 and eBPF alleviate IP shortages and enhance performance, ensuring that latency-sensitive applications perform optimally.

As the leading container networking solution for Kubernetes, Calico's IPv6 support on the eBPF dataplane ensures scalable, high-performance networking and security to address the demands of modern applications across diverse cloud and distributed environments.

Enabling Multi-Cluster Deployments with Cluster Mesh on VxLAN

Multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments over VxLAN are on the rise, driving the need for enhanced application layer observability and security. However, current manual approaches lack scalability.

Calico meets this demand with Kubernetes Cluster Mesh for VxLAN, providing a scalable solution for workload communication and security policy enforcement across Kubernetes clusters over VxLAN. As large and leading-edge enterprises accelerate deployments to enhance their services at scale, they have encountered management challenges that can put their environments at risk. Calico provides an operationally simple solution to create a Kubernetes cluster mesh to ensure enterprise infrastructure can run multi-cluster environments efficiently, securely, and compliantly – no matter the complexity.

Calico provides a centralized multi-cluster management plane to enable security, observability, and networking management across multiple clusters in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Calico brings the same capabilities expected from single cluster environments to those with multiple clusters, enabling Calico to scale to any enterprise's needs.

These Calico innovations set a new benchmark in container networking and security, empowering enterprises to secure, scale, and optimize their Kubernetes clusters like never before.

"Calico is the most widely adopted technology for container networking and security. With capabilities like IPV6 support in Calico eBPF and Calico cluster mesh on VxLAN, we are enabling organizations to run their Kubernetes deployments at unparalleled scale. The new security risk scorecard, prioritization and remediation provide container security teams with a nuanced view of risks and things they need to address," said Amit Gupta, Chief Product Officer, Tigera. "With these latest enhancements to Calico, we're delivering the industry's most complete solution for securing and observing Kubernetes environments."