Tenable is updating its Vulnerability Precedence Score (VPR) technique of scoring vulnerabilities to allow organizations to focus their efforts on probably the most important and impactful vulnerabilities.
Based on the corporate, Widespread Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which is utilized by the CVE database, flags 60% of vulnerabilities as excessive or important. When Tenable VPR was launched in 2019, it solely flagged 3% as excessive or important, and at this time’s updates deliver that quantity right down to 1.6%.
Tenable says this cuts down on noise, resulting in quicker mean-time-to-remediation, optimized assets, and safety efforts which might be higher aligned with organizational priorities.
A number of the methods Tenable is ready to cut back the variety of vulnerabilities flagged as important is that it recalculates danger prioritization each evening for over 280,000 totally different vulnerabilities, predicts the chance of a vulnerability being exploited within the close to future, and offers a precedence ranking on a scale from 1 to 10.
VPR additionally now makes use of AI to generate menace summaries and remediation insights. Moreover, Tenable added enhanced filtering, querying, and metadata to allow organizations to prioritize vulnerabilities primarily based on threats particular to their trade and area.
“We’re taking our game-changing Tenable VPR to the following stage with these AI-powered enhancements,” stated Eric Doerr, chief product officer at Tenable. “Tenable VPR brings an unmatched precision and depth of menace intelligence, context and explainability to cyber operations. With these important insights at their fingertips, organizations can clearly visualize why an publicity issues, the place they’re weak and find out how to shut their precedence dangers.”
The corporate shall be going by the updates to VPR in a webinar on Tuesday, August 19, 2025 at 11 AM ET (8 AM PT).
Like different know-how breakthroughs, AI presents monumental alternatives to reimagine options to the world’s urgent challenges. Nevertheless, to harness AI’s energy and potential successfully, we should work collectively to make sure it’s used ethically, responsibly, and inclusively.
As a pure extension of our work to assist shut the information divide, Splunk is partnering throughout sectors on utilizing AI for good. We’re thrilled to rely Quick Ahead, a company centered on scaling tech nonprofits, as a deeply valued companion in that work. For a few years, we’ve shared a dedication to empowering tech nonprofits, with an growing give attention to the impactful, AI-powered nonprofits that make up the rising AI for Humanity motion.
Splunk is proud to assist Quick Ahead’s Startup Accelerator and different key applications by way of grantmaking and skills-based volunteering, with Splunkers offering suggestions and experience to Accelerator portfolio organizations. Splunk’s strategic grantees embody seven alums of Quick Ahead’s Accelerator, one more method we companion to assist promising tech nonprofits scale. We’re excited to spotlight two of these excellent organizations: Closegap and Ersilia.
“AI-powered nonprofits are proving that AI can function a power for good throughout well being, local weather, and training. With companions like Splunk, we will speed up this motion—supporting tech-driven options designed with humanity at their core.” —Kevin Barenblat, co-founder of Quick Ahead
Utilizing AI to Establish Crises and Facilitate Significant Connection
The youth psychological well being disaster has intensified over the previous decade; but with college counseling departments understaffed and overwhelmed, many younger folks slip by way of the cracks. Right now, the typical delay between the onset of psychological well being wants and intervention is 11 years.
CloseGap founder and CEO, Rachel Miller
Closegap is on a mission to enhance the psychological well being of Okay-12 college students by equipping colleges with free, enjoyable, and interactive psychological well being check-ins.
College students reply a collection of questions on their feelings, vitality stage, and bodily wants, and the responses are organized and delivered to workers to permit for real-time intervention. These check-ins have uncovered points from gentle to severe; they’ve helped forestall suicides and uncover instances of self-harm, assault, and bullying. Closegap has served over 300,000 college students in all 50 states, with over 9 million check-ins.
AI helps Closegap additional enhance its effectiveness and attain. Closegap is utilizing deep studying strategies that enhance the triage and classification of pupil wants, serving to workers reply to college students quicker. It’s additionally utilizing massive language fashions (LLMs) to supply disaster alerts and generate messages to college students who want to communicate to an grownup. These enhancements imply college workers can attain extra college students, do it quicker, and guarantee college students get the assist they want after they want it.
Finally, Closegap seeks to not solely assist educators reply to college students in disaster but additionally deal with underlying points college students face, like stress and arguments with friends and oldsters. By following up after check-ins, educators and college students construct sturdy relationships rooted in empathy and belief, which improve psychological well-being and more healthy college communities.
Reworking Drug Discovery in Africa with AI/ML Know-how
Ersilia co-founders Miquel Duran-Frigola and Gemma Turon
Africa faces a staggering burden of communicable ailments, exacerbated by restricted healthcare infrastructure and an underfunded drug improvement ecosystem. Recognizing this problem, Splunk social influence companion Ersilia, by way of its Open Supply Initiative, is revolutionizing the struggle towards infectious ailments by equipping African scientists with cutting-edge AI/ML instruments whereas fostering a sustainable well being analysis ecosystem.
Leveraging Splunk’s know-how, funding, and expert worker experience, Ersilia has made vital strides in enhancing drug discovery and empowering native researchers. Splunk’s assist has been instrumental in enabling Ersilia to streamline knowledge ingestion and analytics, saving over 700 hours of guide work yearly. This partnership has led to a 10x enchancment in antimalarial drug candidate discovery and facilitated the coaching of over 150 scientists, together with by way of workshops just like the “AI for Drug Discovery” occasion in Ghana.
Central to this collaboration is the Ersilia Mannequin Hub, an open-source platform providing low-code entry to pre-trained AI/ML fashions tailor-made for uncared for and infectious illness analysis. Splunk’s contributions have enhanced the Hub’s monitoring and analytics capabilities, enabling Ersilia to trace mannequin utilization and enhance efficiency throughout its four-phase deployment plan—from inside monitoring to native deployment in low-resourced settings within the International South.
Ersilia’s influence extends internationally, fostering partnerships throughout Africa, South America, and past, with organizations just like the H3D Centre in Cape City and the College of Buea in Cameroon. With Splunk’s assist, Ersilia is advancing its mission to shut the information divide, democratize entry to AI applied sciences, and empower Africa-led scientific analysis to deal with international well being inequities.
Working Collectively for a Human-Centered Future
Each nonprofits exemplify the extraordinary good that may end result when cutting-edge AI permits innovation. Many social influence organizations are racing to leverage the transformative energy of AI, however Quick Ahead’s Kevin Barenblat reminds us that the kind of tech-fueled success loved by Closegap and Ersilia hardly ever occurs in a vacuum.
“We’re seeing a surge in nonprofits utilizing AI to sort out international points,” he notes. “However constructing sustainable, impactful options takes assist. By partnering with AI-driven nonprofits, extra firms may be a part of making a human-centered future.”
To study extra, go to Quick Ahead’s web site to dive deeper into its Accelerator and different assets for nonprofits.
Google is including a number of new options to its cloud-based AI workspace Firebase Studio, following its replace a number of weeks in the past when it added new Agent modes, assist for MCP, and integration with the Gemini CLI.
Now it’s saying up to date workspace templates for Flutter, Angular, React, Subsequent.js, and normal Internet that use the Agent mode by default. Customers will nonetheless have the ability to toggle between the “Ask” and Agent mode, relying on what the duty at hand requires.
The templates now have an airules.md file to supply Gemini with directions for code era, like particular coding requirements, dealing with strategies, dependencies, and improvement greatest practices.
Google says it will likely be updating templates for frameworks like Go, Node.js, and .NET over the subsequent few weeks as effectively.
Builders will even now have the ability to combine Firebase backend companies into their software utilizing Gemini, which is able to counsel the correct Firebase companies based mostly on the immediate. It can import the required packages, replace code to combine the companies, and supply steerage on configuration steps.
One other replace is that a whole workspace will be duplicated, preserving the complete chat historical past with the agent. This permits builders to have a backup that may be restored at any level, fostering confidence to construct new options and take a look at new issues.
The corporate additionally added an “improve prompts” function to supply builders strategies on the right way to enhance their prompts earlier than sending it off to Gemini.
And at last, Google is rising the challenge add dimension to 100MB in order that builders can import bigger, extra complicated initiatives into Firebase Studio.
“We’re devoted to creating AI-assisted improvement with Firebase Studio extra intuitive, quicker, and pleasant so anybody, wherever on the earth can deliver their most formidable app concepts to life – whether or not you may have many years of coding expertise or none in any respect,” Google wrote in a weblog submit.
The Nautobot platform consolidates info from numerous sources —together with different administration platforms, configuration administration databases (CMDB), and IP handle administration instruments—and aggregates it right into a single repository, which then acts because the authoritative supply for community automation and administration. This single supply of reality is vital for making a “true self-service community automation technique,” Schwen says, and as soon as it’s established, automation can start.
“Automation in itself, when you’ve got tunnel imaginative and prescient on automation, the tech is definitely fairly simple. It’s been round for a very long time, and there’s a lot of expertise on the market for it,” Schwen says. “What’s onerous is the individuals and the processes. That’s greater than half the work.”
Having a centralized platform permits for constant onboarding, change requests, and deployment processes throughout the whole community infrastructure. With Community to Code and Nautobot, Humana was capable of:
Create a uniform platform for community requests.
Standardize cloud deployments.
Get rid of the necessity to ask completely different groups about community info.
Present a constant location for anybody interacting with the community.
“We wished to get to the purpose the place we had sort of self-service, the place anyone who wanted assets from the community aspect, or interactions from the community aspect, there was one place to go they usually knew the place that was,” Schwen says.
Schwen explains with Nautobot, there’s a workflow that’s operating on a schedule, and it’ll decide up any community adjustments and evaluate them to the configuration requirements for that system. It is going to auto-remediate any discrepancies discovered within the configuration of that system. The community operator simply has to “add a tool to the database and stroll away, as a result of all the pieces you want for that system is finished,” Schwen says. Community to Code’s current launch of NautobotGPT, an AI-powered assistant to the platform, additionally helps by accelerating community automation workflows.
“One factor that’s extremely helpful is automation duties as prompts. We took present workflow automations that we had and turned the targets into prompts. We had been capable of recreate these in GPT and routinely deploy particular workflow programs,” Schwen says.
Mosquitoes kill extra folks every year than every other animal. In 2023, the blood-sucking bugs contaminated a reported 263 million folks with malaria, main to almost 600,000 deaths, 80% of which had been kids.
Current efforts to dam the transmission of malaria have been stalled as a result of mosquitoes have tailored resistance to pesticides and the parasites inside mosquitoes that trigger malaria have change into proof against medicine. These setbacks have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which impeded ongoing anti-malarial efforts.
Now, researchers on the College of California San Diego, Johns Hopkins College, UC Berkeley and the College of São Paulo have developed a brand new methodology that genetically blocks mosquitoes from transmitting malaria.
Biologists Zhiqian Li and Ethan Bier from UC San Diego, and Yuemei Dong and George Dimopoulos from Johns Hopkins College, created a CRISPR-based gene-editing system that adjustments a single molecule inside mosquitoes, a minuscule however efficient change that stops the malaria-parasite transmission course of. Genetically altered mosquitoes are nonetheless capable of chew these with malaria and purchase parasites from their blood, however the parasites can not be unfold to different folks. The brand new system is designed to genetically unfold the malaria resistance trait till whole populations of the bugs not switch the disease-causing parasites.
“Changing a single amino acid in mosquitoes with one other naturally occurring variant that stops them from being contaminated with malarial parasites – and spreading that useful trait all through a mosquito inhabitants – is a game-changer,” stated Bier, a professor within the UC San Diego Division of Cell and Developmental Biology (College of Organic Sciences). “It’s arduous to imagine that this one tiny change has such a dramatic impact.”
The newly developed system makes use of CRISPR-Cas9 “scissors” and a information RNA to make a genetic minimize at a exact location inside the mosquito’s genome. It then replaces the undesirable amino acid that transmits malaria with the useful model that doesn’t.
The system targets a gene that produces a protein often known as “FREP1” that helps mosquitoes develop and feed on blood after they chew. The brand new system switches an amino acid in FREP1 often known as L224 with a genetic alternate, or allele, referred to as Q224. Illness-causing parasites use L224 to swim to the insect’s salivary glands, the place they’re positioned to contaminate an individual or animal.
Dimopoulos, a professor within the Division of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the Johns Hopkins Malaria Analysis Institute (Bloomberg College of Public Well being), and his lab examined strains of Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes, the primary vector of malaria transmission in Asia. They discovered that the L224-to-Q224 swap may successfully block two various kinds of malarial parasites from reaching the salivary glands, thereby stopping an infection.
The great thing about this method lies in leveraging a naturally occurring mosquito gene allele. With a single, exact tweak, we’ve turned it into a robust defend that blocks a number of malaria parasite species and certain throughout various mosquito species and populations, paving the way in which for adaptable, real-world methods to manage this illness.”
George Dimopoulos, Johns Hopkins College
In a variety of follow-on checks, the researchers discovered that though the genetic swap disrupted the parasite’s an infection capabilities, the mosquitoes’ regular development and replica remained unchanged. Mosquitoes carrying the newly inserted variant Q224 exhibited comparable health to these with the unique L224 amino acid, a key achievement because the FREP1 protein performs an essential position within the biology of the mosquito, which is separate from its position in being exploited by malarial parasites.
Much like a gene-drive, the researchers created a method for mosquito offspring to genetically inherit the Q224 allele and unfold it all through their populations, halting the transmission of malaria parasites. This new “allelic-drive” follows a comparable system not too long ago engineered within the Bier Lab that genetically reverses insecticide resistance in crop pests.
“In that prior examine, we created a self-eliminating drive that converts a inhabitants of fruit flies from being proof against pesticides again to its native insecticide-susceptible state. Then that genetic cassette simply disappears, leaving solely a re-wilded insect inhabitants,” stated Bier. “An identical phantom drive system may convert mosquito populations to carrying the parasite-resistant FREP1Q variant.”
Whereas the researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of the L224-to-Q224 swap, they don’t but totally grasp why this transformation works so effectively. Ongoing analysis into how the Q224 amino acid blocks the parasite’s an infection transit route is underway.
“This breakthrough is the results of seamless teamwork and innovation throughout establishments,” stated Dimopoulos. “Collectively, we’ve harnessed nature’s personal genetic instruments to show mosquitoes into allies towards malaria.”
