Chinese-sponsored groups are using the popular Brickstorm backdoor to access and gain persistence in government and tech firm networks, part of the ongoing effort by the PRC to establish long-term footholds in agency and critical infrastructure IT environments, according to a report by U.S. and Canadian security offices.
The past year has marked a turning point in the corporate AI conversation. After a period of eager experimentation, organizations are now confronting a more complex reality: While investment in AI has never been higher, the path from pilot to production remains elusive. Three-quarters of enterprises remain stuck in experimentation mode, despite mounting pressure to convert early tests into operational gains.
“Most organizations can suffer from what we like to call PTSD, or process technology skills and data challenges,” says Shirley Hung, partner at Everest Group. “They have rigid, fragmented workflows that don’t adapt well to change, technology systems that don’t speak to each other, talent that is really immersed in low-value tasks rather than creating high impact. And they are buried in endless streams of information, but no unified fabric to tie it all together.”
The central challenge, then, lies in rethinking how people, processes, and technology work together.
Across industries as different as customer experience and agricultural equipment, the same pattern is emerging: Traditional organizational structures—centralized decision-making, fragmented workflows, data spread across incompatible systems—are proving too rigid to support agentic AI. To unlock value, leaders must rethink how decisions are made, how work is executed, and what humans should uniquely contribute.
“It is very important that humans continue to verify the content. And that is where you’re going to see more energy being put into,” Ryan Peterson, EVP and chief product officer at Concentrix.
Much of the conversation centered on what can be described as the next major unlock: operationalizing human-AI collaboration. Rather than positioning AI as a standalone tool or a “virtual worker,” this approach reframes AI as a system-level capability that augments human judgment, accelerates execution, and reimagines work from end to end. That shift requires organizations to map the value they want to create; design workflows that blend human oversight with AI-driven automation; and build the data, governance, and security foundations that make these systems trustworthy.
“My advice would be to expect some delays because you need to make sure you secure the data,” says Heidi Hough, VP for North America aftermarket at Valmont. “As you think about commercializing or operationalizing any piece of using AI, if you start from ground zero and have governance at the forefront, I think that will help with outcomes.”
Early adopters are already showing what this looks like in practice: starting with low-risk operational use cases, shaping data into tightly scoped enclaves, embedding governance into everyday decision-making, and empowering business leaders, not just technologists, to identify where AI can create measurable impact. The result is a new blueprint for AI maturity grounded in reengineering how modern enterprises operate.
“Optimization is really about doing existing things better, but reimagination is about discovering entirely new things that are worth doing,” says Hung.
This webcast is produced in partnership with Concentrix.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
WPA Hash unveils a cloud mining solution to turn major crypto assets into stable returns as holiday market volatility rises. New York, December 4, 2025 — As Christmas approaches, the global cryptocurrency market faces volatility and uncertainty. WPA Hash today…
Remittix gains momentum as traders shift from unclear Bitcoin signals to utility-driven, data-focused projects. Bitcoin price prediction models have always relied on chart structure, liquidity behavior, and investor sentiment, yet the latest market conversations show traders searching for more dependable…
LeedMiner integrates global hosting resources and intelligently matches miners with the most suitable, low-cost, and compliant hosting facilities worldwide. #partnercontent
As market volatility rises, more crypto holders are shifting away from price-driven speculation and toward stable, output-based models like cloud mining for predictable returns. #partnercontent
Mono Protocol steps into this environment with solutions designed to reduce friction and make multi-chain activity easier.
Mono Protocol recently passed its full smart contract audit with CertiK, a widely respected blockchain security firm.
The Mono Protocol presale continues to see strong participation, bringing the total raised to $3.75M so far.
Many users still struggle with the complexity of blockchain transactions, cross-chain tools, and fragmented web3 experiences.
These challenges affect adoption across the wider crypto presale space and limit how people interact with DeFi platforms.
As demand rises, users look for the next potential big presale crypto that solves these everyday issues.
Mono Protocol steps into this environment with solutions designed to reduce friction and make multi-chain activity easier.
Interest in the presale crypto stage has continued to grow as the project gains visibility across the crypto presale list and broader cryptocurrency presale discussions.
Blockchain usability and chain abstraction are redefining Web3
The shift toward better usability is becoming essential across the top presale crypto market.
Many teams building in blockchain face similar issues: complex infrastructure, confusing routing, and high development costs.
Mono tackles these challenges by offering tools that let developers build apps that just work.
This direction supports the growing interest in new crypto presale platforms focused on function instead of noise.
Developers save time and reduce expenses because they no longer need to build cross-chain infrastructure from scratch.
The system manages routing and execution so teams can focus on product design and quicker shipping.
This aligns with trends seen across crypto ICO presale discussions as builders aim to create smoother user experiences.
Mono also introduces transaction fee configuration, helping teams generate revenue while offering users dependable execution and MEV protection.
As web3 adoption grows, this type of clean, reliable process supports the rise of strong presale ICO projects and helps shape what the community expects from a next potential big presale crypto.
Rewards hub that simplifies earning in the crypto presale journey
Mono’s Rewards Hub acts as the central space where users complete tasks during the presale crypto stage.
It includes social quests, referral steps, and presale challenges that reward participants with promo codes.
These codes can be redeemed for bonus MONO once connected through a supported wallet, giving users a simple path to engage with the presale process.
The clear structure helps new users navigate web3 interactions without confusion.
By making each step easy to follow, the system supports growth across cryptocurrency presales and gives users an active role in the process.
This approach has made Mono stand out among crypto presale projects that aim to streamline participation.
As users complete quests and claim their promo codes, bonuses are delivered directly as MONO.
This strengthens involvement within the top presale crypto market and shows how clean design can improve presale experience across the broader blockchain ecosystem.
CertiK audit complete
Mono Protocol recently passed its full smart contract audit with CertiK, a widely respected blockchain security firm.
This achievement supports growing confidence across the presale ICO stage as users look for secure options in the crypto presales environment.
With increased attention on blockchain safety, this milestone plays a central role in shaping long term trust.
The technology enables faster and cheaper on-chain transactions while remaining consistently reliable during peak activity.
Chain abstraction ensures compatibility across networks, tokens, and routes, reducing friction that often affects DeFi and web3 users.
As part of this system, Mono Balances introduce a single balance per token across networks.
Instead of switching chains or facing failed routes, users experience unified execution across blockchain environments.
This solves a major problem across the crypto presale list, helping Mono stand out among the best presale crypto 2025 projects focused on practical improvements to cross-chain use.
Presale growth and upcoming milestones for this presale ICO
The Mono Protocol presale continues to see strong participation, bringing the total raised to $3.75M so far.
This growth reflects rising interest across the crypto presale market as users search for the next potential big presale crypto based on utility and long term vision.
Exciting updates continue to expand the ecosystem, offering new ways to connect, explore, and earn through the platform.
Stage 19 is now live, with a current price of $0.0550. The projected launch price of $0.500 represents around 809% potential profit once the token goes live.
This data has placed Mono among the most discussed new crypto presale options within the wider blockchain and web3 community.
As more users engage with DeFi and web3 platforms, the demand for simple workflows, dependable routing, and reliable infrastructure becomes more important.
Mono’s approach directly addresses these challenges and contributes to improving how users interact with connected chains.
The CertiK audit, Rewards Hub activity, and chain abstraction tools highlight the direction many crypto presale projects are now moving toward.
These improvements support the rise of platforms that focus on clarity instead of complexity, making blockchain easier to navigate for new and experienced users.
Crypto holders may now have an easier time acquiring mortgages after William Pulte's new direction on using crypto in mortgage applications. #partnercontent
CrowdStrike deepens its AWS partnership with automated Falcon SIEM configuration, AI security capabilities, EventBridge integrations and new MSSP-focused advancements.
XRP is back in focus as payment utility becomes the main driver of market attention, placing new PayFi projects like Remittix in the spotlight alongside established networks. #partnercontent
Twenty One Capital, Inc. (“Twenty One”) led by CEO Jack Mallers and Cantor Equity Partners, Inc. (“CEP”) announced on the 3rd of December that their shareholders approved the combination of the two businesses, meaning that Twenty One is set to go public very soon.
The vote is expected to have received a lot of attention from retail shareholders, as the Mallers announced it on their podcast to more than 43 thousand subscribers and their X with half a million followers. The vote took place at the Extraordinary General Meeting of CEP’s shareholders, who approved the previously announced proposed business combination between the parties as well as all other proposals related to the Business Combination.
“The final voting results for the Meeting will be included in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by CEP,” according to a press release published by the company.
Subject to the satisfaction of other closing conditions described in the CEP’s definitive proxy statement and Twenty One’s final prospectus, the consummation of the related transactions should take place in the coming days, leading to Twenty One Capital, Inc. and its Class A common stock to start trading on the NYSE with the symbol “XXI” on December 9th, 2025.
The company is expected to exit its “quiet period” after this point and make a series of announcements about the future of the business. XXI announced earlier this year that it had received investment from Tether and Softbank, leading to the purchase of 42,000 bitcoins, which will position it as one of the largest public owners of the asset and is expected to unlock new financial service offers for Strike customers, Jack’s growing Bitcoin financial services app, and Cash App competitor.
The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes.
Strictly speaking, we’ve already seen one: sulfide melt deposits are associated with flood basalts and meteorite impacts, which absolutely are happening on-surface. They’re totally an igneous process, though, and so were presented in the article on magmatic ore processes.
For the most part, you can think of the various hydrothermal ore formation processes as being metamorphic in nature. That is, the fluids are causing alteration to existing rock formations; this is especially true of skarns.
There’s a third leg to that rock tripod, though: igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Are there sedimentary rocks that happen to be ores? You betcha! In fact, one sedimentary process holds the most valuable ores on Earth– and as usual, it’s not likely to be restricted to this planet alone.
Placer? I hardly know ‘er!
We’re talking about placer deposits, which means we’re talking about gold. In dollar value, gold’s great expense means that these deposits are amongst the most valuable on Earth– and nearly half of the world’s gold has come out of just one of them. Gold isn’t the only mineral that can be concentrated in placer deposits, to be clear; it’s just the one everyone cares about these days, because, well, have you seen the spot price lately?
Since we’re talking about sediments, as you might guess, this is a secondary process: the gold has to already be emplaced by one of the hydrothermal ore processes. Then the usual erosion happens: wind and water breaks down the rock, and gold gets swept downhill along with all the other little bits of rock on their way to becoming sediments. Gold, however, is much denser than silicate rocks. That’s the key here: any denser material is naturally going to be sorted out in a flow of grains. To be specific, empirical data shows that anything denser than 2.87 g/cm3 can be concentrated in a placer deposit. That would qualify a lot of the sulfide minerals the hydrothermal processes like to throw up, but unfortunately sulfides tend to be both too soft and too chemically unstable to hold up to the weathering to form placer deposits, at least on Earth since cyanobacteria polluted the atmosphere with O2.
Dry? Check. Windswept? Check. Aeolian placer deposits? Maybe! Image: “MSL Sunset Dunes Mosaic“, NASA/JPL and Olivier de Goursac
One form of erosion is from wind, which tends to be important in dry regions – particularly the deserts of Australia and the Western USA. Wind erosion can also create placer deposits, which get called “aeolian placers”. The mechanism is fairly straightforward: lighter grains of sand are going to blow further, concentrating the heavy stuff on one side of a dune or closer to the original source rock. Given the annual global dust storms, aeolian placers may come up quite often on Mars, but the thin atmosphere might make this process less likely than you’d think.
We’ve also seen rockslides on Mars, and material moving in this matter is subject to the same physics. In a flow of grains, you’re going to have buoyancy and the heavy stuff is going to fall to the bottom and stop sooner. If the lighter material is further carried away by wind or water, we call the resulting pile of useful, heavy rock an effluvial placer deposit.
Still, on this planet at least it’s usually water doing the moving of sediments, and it’s water that’s doing the sortition. Heavy grains fall out of suspension in water more easily. This tends to happen wherever flow is disrupted: at the base of a waterfall, at a river bend, or where a river empties into a lake or the ocean. Any old Klondike or California prospector would know that that’s where you’re going to go panning for gold, but you probably wouldn’t catch a 49er calling it an “Alluvial placer deposit”. Panning itself is using the exact same physics– that’s why it, along with the fancy modern sluices people use with powered pumps, are called “placer mining”. Mars’s dry river beds may be replete with alluvial placers; so might the deltas on Titan, though on a world where water is part of the bedrock, the cryo-mineralogy would be very unfamiliar to Earthly geologists.
Back here on earth, wave action, with the repeated reversal of flow, is great at sorting grains. There aren’t any gold deposits on beaches these days because wherever they’ve been found, they were mined out very quickly. But there are many beaches where black magnetite sand has been concentrated due to its higher density to quartz. If your beach does not have magnetite, look at the grain size: even quartz grains can often get sorted by size on wavy beaches. Apparently this idea came after scientists lost their fascination with latin, as this type of deposit is referred to simply as a “beach placer” rather than a “littoral placer”.
Kondike, eat your heart out: Fifty thousand tonnes of this stuff has come out of the mines of Witwatersrand.
While we in North America might think of the Klondike or California gold rushes– both of which were sparked by placer deposits– the largest gold field in the world was actually in South Africa: the Witwatersrand Basin. Said basin is actually an ancient lake bed, Archean in origin– about three billion years old. For 260 million years or thereabouts, sediments accumulated in this lake, slowly filling it up. Those sediments were being washed out from nearby mountains that housed orogenic gold deposits. The lake bed has served to concentrate that ancient gold even further, and it’s produced a substantial fraction of the gold metal ever extracted– depending on the source, you’ll see numbers from as high as 50% to as low as 22%. Either way, that’s a lot of gold.
Witwatersrand is a bit of an anomaly; most placer deposits are much smaller than that. Indeed, that’s in part why you’ll find placer deposits only mined for truly valuable minerals like gold and gems, particularly diamonds. Sure, the process can concentrate magnetite, but it’s not usually worth the effort of stripping a beach for iron-rich sand.
The most common non-precious exception is uraninite, UO2, a uranium ore found in Archean-age placer deposits. As you might imagine, the high proportion of heavy uranium makes it a dense enough mineral to form placer deposits. I must specify Archean-age, however, because an oxygen atmosphere tends to further oxidize the uraninite into more water-soluble forms, and it gets washed to sea instead of forming deposits. On Earth, it seems there are no uraninite placers dated to after the Great Oxygenation; you wouldn’t have that problem on Mars, and the dry river beds of the red planet may well have pitchblende reserves enough for a Martian rendition of “Uranium Fever”.
If you were the Martian, would you rather find uranium or gold in those river bends? Image: Nandes Valles valley system, ESA/DLR/FU Berlin
While uranium is produced at Witwatersrand as a byproduct of the gold mines, uranium ore can be deposited exclusively of gold. You can see that with the alluvial deposits in Canada, around Elliot Lake in Ontario, which produced millions of pounds of the uranium without a single fleck of gold, thanks to a bend in a three-billion-year-old riverbed. From a dollar-value perspective, a gold mine might be worth more, but the uranium probably did more for civilization.
Lateritization, or Why Martians Can’t Have Pop Cans
Speaking of useful for civilization, there’s another type of process acting on the surface to give us ores of less noble metals than gold. It is not mechanical, but chemical, and given that it requires hot, humid conditions with lots of water, it’s almost certainly restricted to Sol 3. As the subtitle gives it away, this process is called “lateritization” and is responsible for the only economical aluminum deposits out there, along with a significant amount of the world’s nickel reserves.
The process is fairly simple: in the hot tropics, ample rainfall will slowly leech any mobile ions out of clay soils. Ions like sodium and potassium are first to go, followed by calcium and magnesium but if the material is left on the surface long enough, and the climate stays hot and wet, chemical weathering will eventually strip away even the silica. The resulting “Laterite” rock (or clay) is rich in iron, aluminum, and sometimes nickel and/or copper. Nickel laterites are particularly prevalent in New Caledonia, where they form the basis of that island’s mining industry. Aluminum-rich laterites are called bauxite, and are the source of all Earth’s aluminum, found worldwide. More ancient laterites are likely to be found in solid form, compressed over time into sedimentary rock, but recent deposits may still have the consistency of dirt. For obvious reasons, those recent deposits tend to be preferred as cheaper to mine.
That red dirt is actually aluminum ore, from a 1980s-era operation on the island of Jamaica. Image from “Bauxite” by Paul Morris, CC BY-SA 2.0
When we talk about a “warm and wet” period in Martian history, we’re talking about the existence of liquid water on the surface of the planet– we are notably not talking about tropical conditions. Mars was likely never the kind of place you’d see lateritization, so it’s highly unlikely we will ever find bauxite on the surface of Mars. Thus future Martians will have to make due without Aluminum pop cans. Of course, iron is available in abundance there and weighs about the same as the equivalent volume of aluminum does here on Earth, so they’ll probably do just fine without it.
Most nickel has historically come from sulfide melt deposits rather than lateralization, even on Earth, so the Martians should be able to make their steel stainless. Given the ambitions some have for a certain stainless-steel rocket, that’s perhaps comforting to hear.
It’s important to emphasize, as this series comes to a close, that I’m only providing a very surface-level understanding of these surface level processes– and, indeed, of all the ore formation processes we’ve discussed in these posts. Entire monographs could be, and indeed have been written about each one. That shouldn’t be surprising, considering the depths of knowledge modern science generates. You could do an entire doctorate studying just one aspect of one of the processes we’ve talked about in this series; people have in the past, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. So if you’ve found these articles interesting, and are sad to see the series end– don’t worry! There’s a lot left to learn; you just have to go after it yourself.
Plus, I’m not going anywhere. At some point there are going to be more rock-related words published on this site. If you haven’t seen it before, check out Hackaday’s long-running Mining and Refining series. It’s not focused on the ores– more on what we humans do with them–but if you’ve read this far, it’s likely to appeal to you as well.
Solana rebounds above $140, but investors eye utility-driven Remittix as a top contender for the next crypto adoption wave. Solana is back in the news headlines after demonstrating strong recovery powers. The SOL price has gone from less than $130…
Security and developer teams are scrambling to address a highly critical security flaw in frameworks tied to the popular React JavaScript library. Not only is the vulnerability, which also is in the Next.js framework, easy to exploit, but React is widely used, including in 39% of cloud environments.
Most organizations feel the imperative to keep pace with continuing advances in AI capabilities, as highlighted in a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report. That clearly has security implications, particularly as organizations navigate a surge in the volume, velocity, and variety of security data. This explosion of data, coupled with fragmented toolchains, is making it increasingly difficult for security and data teams to maintain a proactive and unified security posture.
Data and AI teams must move rapidly to deliver the desired business results, but they must do so without compromising security and governance. As they deploy more intelligent and powerful AI capabilities, proactive threat detection and response against the expanded attack surface, insider threats, and supply chain vulnerabilities must remain paramount. “I’m passionate about cybersecurity not slowing us down,” says Melody Hildebrandt, chief technology officer at Fox Corporation, “but I also own cybersecurity strategy. So I’m also passionate about us not introducing security vulnerabilities.”
That’s getting more challenging, says Nithin Ramachandran, who is global vice president for data and AI at industrial and consumer products manufacturer 3M. “Our experience with generative AI has shown that we need to be looking at security differently than before,” he says. “With every tool we deploy, we look not just at its functionality but also its security posture. The latter is now what we lead with.”
Our survey of 800 technology executives (including 100 chief information security officers), conducted in June 2025, shows that many organizations struggle to strike this balance.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week made an AWS Security Hub for analyzing cybersecurity data in near real time generally available, while at the same time extending the GuardDuty threat detection capabilities it provides to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Announced at the AWS re:Invent 2025..
KnowBe4, the platform that comprehensively addresses AI and human risk management, has been recognised as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms for the second consecutive year and acknowledged specifically for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
Advanced AI-enabled detection to mitigate the full spectrum of inbound phishing attacks and outbound data loss and exfiltration attempts
KnowBe4’s Agentic Detection Engine that leverages sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) models to protect inboxes from advanced phishing, impersonation and account takeover attacks
Integration in the KnowBe4 HRM+ platform that uses deep per-user behavioural analytics and threat intelligence to deliver personalized security at the point of risk
Continuous behavioural-based training delivered through real-time nudges
A rise in advanced technology to address sophisticated phishing attacks and behaviour-led outbound data breaches has driven significant innovation in email security. According to the KnowBe4 2025 Phishing Threat Trends Report Vol. Six, there was a 15.2% increase in phishing email volume between March 1st – September 30th, 2025, compared to the previous six months.
“We are honoured to be recognised as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms,” said Bryan Palma, CEO, KnowBe4. “Email communication remains the primary attack vector for organisations globally. KnowBe4 plays an instrumental role in providing adaptive AI-enabled technology to build a stronger security culture for customers. In our opinion, this positioning validates our strategic vision and relentless focus on human and agent risk management that goes beyond detecting threats to preventing them before they reach employees’ inboxes.”
This news follows several recent announcements which exemplify the strength of KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security, including the integration of Microsoft Defender O365 and recognition as a Gartner Peer Insights Customer’s Choice for email security platforms.
A threat group dubbed ShadyPanda exploited traditional extension processes in browser marketplaces by uploading legitimate extensions and then quietly weaponization them with malicious updates, infecting 4.3 million Chrome and Edge users with RCE malware and spyware.
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