Prosecutors have been told they cannot rely on intercept evidence from the Sky ECC encrypted phone network in the absence of other evidence, unless they disclose the raw intercept data to defendants in decision that could have a significant impact on future prosecutions
The Security Think Tank considers what CISOs and buyers need to know to cut through the noise around AI and figure out which AI cyber use cases are worth a look, and which are just hype.
β’ Slack has been given a new lease on life from its parent Salesforce, serving as a frontend for the platform.
β’ It is not yet time to include Slack in the discussion along with rivals, but the company merits keeping a close eye on.
When Slack was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for nearly $28 billion, the smart money said that Slack would slide into obscurity. After all, Slack was a second-tier player in the team collaboration space while Salesforce was a premier provider of customer resource management (CRM) technology and a captain of industry at large. Surely, the acquisition would follow the familiar pattern of so many, which preceded it with a βbig fishβ gobbling up a βlittle fishβ never to be heard from again. For certain, Slack would be stripped of its brand name, and its technology capabilities absorbed into Salesforceβs massive stockpile. Well, quite the opposite happened. Slack has not only survived β it has been granted a new and better life by its parent.
Salesforce has kept busy adding features to Slack, repositioning it as the frontend for Salesforceβs AI ecosystem. The poster child for this transformation is Salesforce Agentforce. It allows users to build specialized, task-specific AI agents that operate directly in Slack, handling everything from simple support queries to executing complex processes. The agents have access to company and customer data stored in Salesforce and are integrated with messages, files, and workflows residing within Slack. As a result, the agents provide responses that are highly tailored to the userβs work environment.
At a higher level, Slack is increasingly becoming embedded into Salesforceβs broader product fabric. For example, Salesforce recently announced a comprehensive update that creates a unified space in which teams can collaborate and act without leaving the flow of work. At the heart of the update is a new type of Slack channel labeled βSalesforce Channelsβ. Salesforce Channels reflect Salesforceβs broader strategy to consolidate applications, workflows, AI agents, and data into a single environment. Salesforce Channels connect directly with Salesforce records such as accounts, opportunities, and custom objects. Because Salesforce Channels are bi-directional, being accessible from either Slack or Salesforce with no loss of context, they reinforce Slackβs evolving role as the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform.
Not only has Slack evolved from a product perspective, it has evolved from a management perspective as well. In January 2023, Lidiane Jones, an EVP and GM at Salesforce, succeeded Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield as CEO. Only 10 months later in November, Jones was replaced by Denise Dresser, a long-time Salesforce executive. Dresser departed in late-2025 and Rob Seaman, Slackβs CPO has been acting as interim CEO since.
Slack has come a long way bit by bit since Salesforce purchased it, but it is not yet time to include them in the discussion with competitors such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. Rival organizations have kept busy accumulating AI-driven features across their platforms, not only for team collaboration but for contact center as well, and they have generated substantial brand equity in the process. However, as a central interface into the Salesforce platform, a foundational tool for corporate America, Slack merits keeping a close eye on.
The disruption began Saturday (5am Pacific time, Jan .24) affecting approximately 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide with widespread email misclassification.
It has been an exhausting quarter for system administrators and security teams. The last three months have been dominated by a storm of high-priority security issues. We have seen critical vulnerabilities surfacing in everything from container orchestration platforms to widely used identity management systems. Just as many teams were preparing for the holiday freeze, yet another critical alert dropped on December 23 regarding the Net-SNMP protocol suite.
US lawmakers have extended the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 for another nine months, buying time to enact a replacement for the legislation.