Video Game TesterUbisoftBucharest Bucharest ro19 seconds agoApplyJob DescriptionYour life at Ubi:As a member of Ubisoft’s Quality Control Department, you will be part of an awesome team focused on identifying and reporting bugs on specific areas of a game. Doing so, you will put your attention to detail and creativity to test. Here in Bucharest, we have a ton of experience when it comes to game testing, so you will be learning everything there is to know about game testing from the best. And this will happen while having fun. If you’ve heard stories about the cool atmosphere at our studio, they are true.What’s also cool is the fact that you will perform your testing activities on the latest hardware and with powerful in-house software and more. Yes, you will get to try out new consoles before they reach the market and test amazing games way, way before anyone else sees them. And you’ll do this sitting in a comfy chair in front of a large desk on one of the amazing floors of Jiului 8. The quality of life at work is very important to us and our new building reflects that.Grow with us:When we invite you to take your first step in the gaming industry, we mean it. You should be thinking about a career in gaming, not just a summer job as a game tester.The opportunities in our studio are literally endless. Based on your talents you can evolve and lead teams of testers, become a test specialist in our QC Technical Standards Department (ex. Sony Compliance), get into software development as a product owner or automation analyst through our QC Tech Department or jump ship and join a production team as a dev tester, level designer or whatever you dream about in our Production families (Art, Design, Programming).The best part is that we will offer support and help your plans become reality through various courses and programs meant to prepare you for your future role in Ubisoft.How can you join us?Apply with an Updated CVSubmit your most recent CV through our careers page. Make sure it reflects your latest experience and skills relevant to the role.Phone Screen with RecruitersIf your profile matches our requirements, one of our recruiters will reach out for a short phone conversation. This is a chance for us to learn more about your background and for you to ask initial questions about the role and company.Online TestSelected candidates will be invited to complete an online assessment. This helps us evaluate your technical or role-specific knowledge in a fair and standardized way.Interview with HR & Hiring ManagerThe final step is a comprehensive interview with our HR representative and the Hiring Manager. We’ll discuss your experience, motivation, and how you’d fit into our team and culture.Your responsibilities:You are the key factor in ensuring that millions of end-users will enjoy high quality gamesWork for the development team by using your keen eye for details and express your creativity and intuition by identifying and reporting bugsUse computers, video game consoles and controllers as your main toolsBe ambitious and ready to learn from the best in a studio with a long history of creating and testing gamesQualificationsProfessionally, all you need to bring:Good English skills (written and spoken)We are looking for Basic knowledge of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook)No previous work experience is necessaryLearning appetite to become the best at your tradeMinimum requirement - Baccalaureate diplomaThe Personal Value you bring:Passion for gamesKnowledge of different game genres, consoles, and platforms is also nice to have, but you can also build it herePatience and persistence are key when performing meticulous testing while always ensuring accuracyAs part of the team, you need to interact with other colleagues and have good social and communication abilitiesYou are also a fast learner, creative and proactiveYou are reliable, punctual and you come with a positive attitudeAdditional InformationWhat about our benefits?Meal tickets with value of 30 ron/dayAccess to private medical system and special subscription rates for family membersOn site medical supportWorld Class Bronze subscriptionComprehensive wellbeing program (including physical fitness, mental health, financial education and internal communities)Life insuranceUbisoft bikes, free rentalParking spaces for cars, bikes, motorbikesHybrid: We are committed to promoting a flexible working policy, as we value in-person interaction and collaboration. Our hybrid work model includes a minimum of 3 days a week in the office and the remaining 2 days working from home.Video games and consoles to borrowAccess to Ubisoft games via own Uplay accountBookster (borrow books for free, delivered at home or in the office)On-site cafeteria with special discountsFree fruits and coffee in the officeStudio offered free days, confirmed on an annual basis for different eventsStudy leaveChristmas/ Easter celebration with a special giftPartners’ discountsAbout usUbisoft’s 19,000 team members, working across more than 30 countries around the world, are bound by a common mission to enrich players’ lives with original and memorable gaming experiences. Their commitment and talent have brought to life many acclaimed franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs, Just Dance, Rainbow Six, and many more to come. Ubisoft is an equal opportunity employer that believes diverse backgrounds and perspectives are key to creating worlds where both players and teams can thrive and express themselves. If you are excited about solving game-changing challenges, cutting edge technologies and pushing the boundaries of entertainment, we invite you to join our journey and help us create the unknown.Find us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn, see how we do things, how we like to have fun and join us!Company DescriptionSince 1992, Ubisoft Romania has been a driving force in Romania’s gaming industry. Our passionate team has contributed to some of the world’s biggest franchises, including Assassin’s Creed, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs, and Just Dance. Today, we continue to push boundaries, creating unforgettable experiences that captivate players worldwide.At Ubisoft Romania, we believe in the power of creativity and collaboration. You'll work alongside talented teams from across the globe, grow your skills, and be part of shaping the future of gaming. If you’re passionate about gaming and ready for exciting challenges, this is the place for you.Join us and create the unknown! Create Your Profile — Game companies can contact you with their relevant job openings. Apply

Embracer has announced that it is spinning off Coffee Stain Group – formerly known as Coffee Stain & Friends – into a standalone group of developers and publishers. As a result of this, what remains of Embracer Group, a division formerly known as Middle-Earth & Friends, will be renamed to Fellowship Entertainment. As part of this move, shares in Coffee Stain Group will be distributed to shareholders of Embracer and will go on to be listed on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market in Stockholm. Fellowship’s stocks will continue to be listed on Nasdaq Stockholm. As a result of this move, Coffee Stain Group will take with it 250 employees among its development and publishing divisions. The overall group will include Coffee Stain, Tuxedo Labs, and Ghost Ship, along with some Scandinavia-based studios from Amplifier Game Investment. Some of the IPs under Coffee Stain Group will be Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, Teardown, Valheim, and Welcome to Bloxburg. Fellowship Entertainment, on the other hand, will focus on transforming its business into a group that can handle game development and publishing, as well as the development of new IPs that can be spin-off into transmedia properties, including comics, merchandise, and film. Companies under Fellowship Entertainment include 4A Games, Aspyr Media, CrazyLabs, Crystal Dynamics, Dambuster Studios, Dark Horse, Deca Games, Eidos-Montréal, Flying Wild Hog, Gunfire Games, Limited Run Games, Middle-earth Enterprises, Milestone, PLAION, Tarsier Studios, THQ Nordic, Tripwire Interactive, Vertigo Games, and Warhorse Studios. These are among the 40 different companies under Fellowship Entertianment. “We’re really proud of everything we’ve built as part of Embracer, and grateful for the support and trust we’ve received over the years,” wrote Coffee Stain founder and group CEO Anton Westbergh. “Now, as we take the step to become a separately listed company, it feels both exciting and, honestly, a little bit scary—but in a good way.” “The games industry is more competitive than ever, but also more rewarding if you do things right, and we believe this move gives us the clarity and control to navigate the landscape better on our own terms. We can now focus even more on what we do best—supporting our developers, staying close to our communities, and building an even brighter future for Coffee Stain.” Embracer co-founder and group CEO Lars Wingefors also had a statement where he praised the talent, IPs and communities under Coffee Stain Group. The decision to split the company off was seemingly made because of Westbergh’s strategies and leadership for the long-term health and success of the company. “Coffee Stain Group has incredible talent, IPs and communities. To date, it has been a true recipe for success,” said Wingefors. “I am confident in Anton’s strategy and leadership and see a clear long-term opportunity in attracting and enabling partnerships with like-minded independent game developers and talents.” While the move looks largely like it might end up being a good thing for all parties involved, only time will tell how they might end up affecting the developers at all of the studios, as well as the games that they’re making, that will be affected.

In February 2024, CNN reported, “A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call.” In Europe, a second firm experienced a multimillion-dollar fraud when a deepfake emulated a board member in a video allegedly approving a fraudulent transfer of funds. “Banks and financial institutions are particularly at risk,” said The Hack Academy. “A study by Deloitte found that over 50% of senior executives expect deepfake scams to target their organizations soon. These attacks can undermine trust and lead to significant financial loss.”  Hack Academy went on to say that AI-inspired security attacks weren’t confined to deepfakes. These attacks were also beginning to occur with increased regularity in the form of corporate espionage and misinformation campaigns. AI brings new, more dangerous tactics to traditional security attack methods like phishing, social engineering and the insertion of malware into systems. For CIOs, enterprise AI system developers, data scientists and IT network professionals, AI changes the rules and the tactics for security, given AI’s limitless potential for both good and bad. This is forcing a reset in how IT thinks about security against malicious actors and intruders. Related:How Bad Actors are Exploiting AI What exactly is IT up against? The AI tools that are available on the dark web and in public cyber marketplaces give security perpetrators a wide choice of AI weaponry. Also, IoT and edge networks now present much broader enterprise attack surfaces. Security threats can come in videos, phone calls, social media sites, corporate systems and networks, vendor clouds, IoT devices, network end points, and virtually any entry point into a corporate IT environment that electronic communications can penetrate. Here are some of the current AI-embellished security attacks that companies are seeing: Convincing deepfake videos of corporate executives and stakeholders that are intended to dupe companies in pursuing certain actions or transferring certain assets or funds. This deep faking also extends to voice simulations of key personnel that are left as voicemails in corporate phone systems.  Phishing and spearfishing attacks that send convincing emails (some with malicious attachments) to employees, who mistakenly open them because they think the sender is their boss, the CEO or someone else they perceive as trusted. AI supercharges these attacks because it can automate and send out a large volume of emails that hit many employee email accounts. That AI continues to “learn” with the help of machine learning so it can discover new trusted sender candidates for future attacks.   Related:Adaptive messaging that uses generative AI to craft messages to users that correct grammar and that “learn” from corporate communication styles so they can more closely emulate corporate communications that make them seem legitimate. Mutating code that uses AI to change malware signatures on the fly so antivirus detection mechanisms can be evaded. Data poisoning that occurs when a corporate or cloud provider’s AI data repository is injected by malware that alters (“poisons”) so the data produces erroneous and misleading results.  Fighting Back With Tech To combat these supercharged AI-based security threats, IT has number of tools, techniques and strategies it can consider. Fighting deepfakes. Deepfakes can come in the form of videos, voicemails and photos. Since deepfakes are unstructured data objects that can’t be parsed in their native forms like real data, there are new tools on the market that can convert these objects into graphical representations that can be analyzed to evaluate whether there is something in an object that should or shouldn’t be there. The goal is to confirm authenticity.  Related:Fighting phishing and spear phishing. A combination of policy and practice works best to combat phishing and spear phishing attacks. Both types of attacks are predicated on users being tricked into opening an email attachment that they believe is from a trusted sender, so the first line of defense is educating (and repeat-educating) users on how to handle their email. For instance, a user should notify IT if they receive an email that seems unusual or unexpected, and they should never open it. IT should also review its current security tools. Is it still using older security monitoring software that doesn’t include more modern technologies like observability, which can check for security intrusions or malware at more atomic levels?  Is IT still using IAM (identity access management) software to track user identities and activities at a top level in the cloud and on top and atomic levels on premises, or has it also added cloud identity entitlements management (CIEM), which gives it an atomic level view of  user accesses and activities in the cloud? Better yet, has IT moved to identity governance administration (IGA), which can serve as an over-arching umbrella for IAM and CIEM plugins, plus provide detailed audit reports and automated compliance across all platforms? Fighting embedded malware code. Malware can lie dormant in systems for months, giving a bad actor the option to activate it whenever the timing is right. It’s all the more reason for IT to augment its security staff with new skillsets, such as that of the “threat hunter,” whose job is to examine networks, data and systems on a daily basis, hunting down malware that might be lurking within, and destroying it before it activates. Fighting with zero-trust networks. Internet of Things (IoT) devices come into companies with little or no security because IoT suppliers don’t pay much attention to it and there is a general expectation that corporate IT will configure devices to the appropriate security settings. The problem is, IT often forgets to do this. There are also times when users purchase their own IoT gear, and IT doesn’t know about it. Zero-trust networks help manage this, because they detect and report on everything that is added, subtracted or modified on the network. This gives IT visibility into new, potential security breach points. A second step is to formalize IT procedures for IoT devices so that no IoT device is deployed without the device’s security first being set to corporate standards.  Fighting AI data poisoning. AI models, systems and data should be continuously monitored for accuracy. As soon as they show lowered levels of accuracy or produce unusual conclusions, the data repository, inflows and outflows should be examined for quality and non-bias of data. If contamination is found, the system should be taken down, the data sanitized, and the sources of the contamination traced, tracked and disabled. Fighting AI with AI. Most every security tool on the market today contains AI functionality to detect anomalies, abnormal data patterns and user activities. Additionally, forensics AI can dissect a security breach that does occur, isolating how it happened, where it originated from and what caused it. Since most sites don’t have on-staff forensics experts, IT will have to train staff in forensics skills. Fighting with regular audits and vulnerability testing. Minimally, IT vulnerability testing should be performed on a quarterly basis, and full security audits on an annual basis. If sites use cloud providers, they should request each provider’s latest security audit for review. An outside auditor can also help sites prepare for future AI-driven security threats, because auditors stay on top of the industry, visit many different companies, and see many different situations. An advanced knowledge of threats that loom in the future helps sites prepare for new battles. Summary AI technology is moving faster than legal rulings and regulations. This leaves most IT departments “on their own” to develop security defenses against bad actors who use AI against them.  The good news is that IT already has insights into how bad actors intend to use AI, and there are tools on the market that can help defensive efforts. What’s been missing is a proactive and aggressive battle plan from IT. That has to start now. 

Force of Hobbit Embracer Group says it'll put out 76 different games in the coming year, as it ditches friends for a fellowship and spins off Goat Sim publisher Coffee Stain The lovely, hunky-dory friendship group is no more, Embracer's embracing the whole Middle Earth thing instead. Image credit: Embracer Group/Skydance News by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on May 22, 2025 Damn, the nice little friendship thing Embracer Group had decided to morph into after earning the ire of lots of folks by going hard on the layoffs, closures and sales is no more. The company's decided to ditch the "and friends" tag it had given to different bits of its business, and form a fellowship, as it does yet more corporate shuffling around. It does also plan to actually release some more games. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. As announced by Embracer, the bit of previously dubbed Middle-Earth and Friends will now be known as Fellowship Entertainment. As you might have guessed, that's the part that looks after The Lord of the Rings, as well as housing the studios behind likes of Kingdom Come Deliverance, Tomb Raider, the Metro series, and Dead Island. With Asmodee, the second of the three bits Embracer divided itself into last year, having spun off from the company as of February this year, it's the turn of the third bit formerly known as Coffee Stain & Friends to do the same. Now named Coffee Stain Group, the subsidiary that includes the dev teams behind the likes of Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim and Goat Simulator is being released into the economic wild as a separately stock market-listed company. "The games industry is more competitive than ever, but also more rewarding if you do things right, and we believe this move gives us the clarity and control to navigate the landscape better on our own terms," Coffee Stain Group CEO Anton Westbergh said, "We can now focus even more on what we do best—supporting our developers, staying close to our communities, and building an even brighter future for Coffee Stain." Right, that's enough on the corporate shuffling of people's livelihoods. In the financial results it's published alongside this spin-off announcement, Embracer says that it's got "76 different games" it plans to release in the coming financial year. There'll be "a mix of new IPs, sequels, and remasters", including Killing Floor 3 and the recently delayed Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, with Embracer expecting the latter to "drive notable revenues but to have lower margins due to shared economics with several other partners". Another as of yet unannounced AAA game that Embracer things will have "financial dynamics more similar to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2" is also in the works, but the company reckons it'll have to be pushed back to the 2026/27 financial year to allow for more "polish" The rest of the lineup for the upcoming is being filled by the likes of Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, Metal Eden, and "the next SpongeBob SquarePants game". Spongebob Squarepants tries to get to the Bikini Bottom of where Embracer's friends have gone, maybe?

When pricing your interior design services, competitive does not mean equal. Rather than basing your fees on those of your peers, what you charge should reflect the specific metrics of your business. There is a lot of industry noise around pricing, so avoiding non-credentialed, unaccountable, and clickbait-peddling Instagram “experts” is crucial. Instead, follow this data- and market-driven guide to set your interior design studio’s optimal pricing, one that will maximize your revenue and profitability.Define your business’s purposeIn an industry where designers can have drastically different whys, clarify yours. For instance, your business may be the primary means of supporting your household while another designer whose work you admire, and who is operating in your region with similar clients, is doing this “for fun.” Perhaps that designer is billing at an artificially low rate and giving their clients trade pricing with no markups. Your reasons are very different—and you’re not going to be able to compete with that model. It’s futile and expensive to try.Join NowAD PRO members enjoy exclusive benefits. Get a year of unlimited access for $25 $20 per month.ArrowIgnore your peersWhat another studio charges is irrelevant to what you can charge. Some lesser-known studios can get away with charging incredibly high fees, while very well-known studios might experience a lower maximum price threshold. Identify what price the market will bear for your unique interior design services. When studios set prices based on others they deem to be competitors, they are very often leaving money on the table and undervaluing their own services.Don’t reverse-engineer your feeSome studios run through the time-intensive exercise of using their own historical financials to calculate their desired net income or profit and then reverse-engineer pricing that will accommodate their net income target. This approach is flawed. By calculating the least amount of money you can charge, you are once again potentially leaving heaps of dollars on the table. In many cases, the market price of your interior design services can be significantly more than the price you will get by backing into a target net income figure or net margin percentage.Given all these dynamics, never speculate on pricing. Take a data-driven approach, like the one we’ve developed over the last ten years, to maximize your studio’s revenue.To maximize revenue and profit…Bill hourlyFor residential projects, hourly billable professional fees alongside a furniture, fixtures, and equipment markup is the pricing model that maximizes revenue, profitability, and client acquisition, when positioned correctly. When diligent about tracking their time, 99% of studios make more money than they otherwise would by charging flat fees. There are rare instances when a studio can charge stratospheric flat fees and the market will bear it, but these are edge cases.What You’re Getting Wrong With Your Interior Design ContractBusiness advisor Seth Kaplowitz on optimizing your interior design contractWrite a client-friendly contractWhen a studio moves to hourly billing, their contract terms become more client-friendly and drive up their client conversion rate. Conversely, a flat-fee-based contract tends to have a lot of limitations and restrictions that can turn off potential clients. For example, a flat fee contract often stipulates a list of services where additional fees apply. If your client wants value engineering, more than one design concept, or additional specifications for procured items, it costs extra. A flat fee contract can introduce friction and ultimately prevent a client from signing and moving forward. The goal is to eliminate this friction.Taking a “billable hours plus procurement fees” pricing approach, you can reverse-engineer the approximate price per square foot of decorating, design, and full renovation projects for a studio. By defining price per square foot by project type alongside average timeline, your clients are armed with the ability to calculate the approximate cost of the project themselves (while protecting your studio’s revenue and profitability). This approach gives the client the confidence and feeling of control they need to sign a contract.Test pricing elasticityAfter identifying the approximate price per square foot by project type for your studio, test its limits. Push pricing up and closely watch the client conversion rate. Focus on qualified inbound traffic—leads and referrals from architects, contractors, or past clients—and disregard the subset of unqualified leads from Instagram, which can generally be classified as shoppers, not buyers. Then calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of qualified inbound leads by the number of leads that signed a contract. If this rate is above a desired threshold, there is room to raise prices. They can continue to rise until the conversion rate drops below that threshold, at which point you’ve maximized your pricing. This exercise relates exclusively to a studio’s unique demand curve and what the market will pay for its unique interior design services, avoiding unhelpful peer comparisons.Reanalyze your current approachIf you’re a studio principal, look at the following data sets:

Reading Time: 4 minutes Lifecycle marketers are facing a profound shift in how they engage customers. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as both a promise and a pressure point, positioned as the key to delivering hyper-personalized, timely, and impactful experiences. Yet behind the AI hype lies a more nuanced reality: executing AI-driven lifecycle marketing at scale is often messier than advertised. Marketers are caught between high expectations and systemic challenges, from fragmented data to stalled adoption and internal roadblocks. Understanding what’s holding AI back (and how to move forward with confidence) is essential for modern lifecycle teams.   The Great Data Disconnect One of the most persistent obstacles to realizing AI’s potential in customer engagement and lifecycle marketing is the inability to access and seamlessly activate customer data. Many marketers report being bottlenecked by their reliance on centralized data teams, which slows down the ability to test, iterate, and personalize campaigns at scale. While platforms frequently advertise integrations with major data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Amazon Redshift, the reality often falls short. These connections may exist in name but not in function. Instead of enabling real-time audience segmentation or event-triggered personalization, many marketers are forced to rely on manual data exports, SQL queries, or engineering support just to get campaigns off the ground. This idea reinforces what many already know from experience: a tech stack is only as powerful as its weakest connection. The end goal isn’t just connection, but cohesion.  You need platforms that support bi-directional data sync, real-time event streaming, and transparent visibility across the customer journey without additional tools or workarounds. Until these capabilities are widespread, you’ll continue to feel like your AI ambitions are constrained by outdated infrastructure.   When AI Falls Short: Fatigue, Friction, and Fading ROI Even with the right data, many marketers are growing skeptical of AI’s ability to deliver tangible results.  AI fatigue is real.  Teams have poured time and resources into personalization engines, predictive analytics models, and generative content tools…only to find underwhelming returns. This disconnect isn’t imagined. Many AI projects ultimately fail to deliver on their promised ROI, often due to unclear use cases, lack of stakeholder alignment, or insufficient change management. For lifecycle marketers, this often plays out as prolonged proof-of-concept cycles (hello, year-long POC that never seems to end…) that absorb months of energy with little to show. It’s not uncommon for teams to invest in tools that generate predictive churn scores or optimal send times, only to realize those insights aren’t actionable within their rigid engagement platforms. The issue is compounded by the flood of marketing tools claiming AI capabilities. In many cases, the “AI” is little more than rule-based automation in disguise, creating confusion around what real AI looks like and how it should be evaluated.   The Hidden Cost of Vendor Lock-In Another growing concern is vendor lock-in. As marketing tech stacks expand, so does the risk of becoming overly dependent on a single vendor’s ecosystem. This can be especially problematic when marketers outgrow their existing platforms but fear the complexity and disruption of switching. Model Context Protocols (MCPs) offer a path forward. These emerging frameworks are designed to create portable, standardized models for audience segmentation and campaign orchestration. With MCPs, marketers can define core elements—like audiences, campaign flows, and experimentation strategies—in a vendor-agnostic way. This means if they switch platforms, they don’t have to rebuild everything from scratch. The appeal is clear: reduced rework, faster time to value, and more flexibility in choosing best-of-breed tools. MCPs are still gaining traction, but their potential to reduce friction and future-proof marketing strategies is significant. Meanwhile, marketers continue to seek out credible migration stories that show what platform transitions look like in practice. Clear documentation, proven onboarding frameworks, and peer testimonials are increasingly essential for vendors looking to attract modern, data-savvy teams.     Practical Tips for Testing and Evaluating AI Tools Despite the challenges, marketers can adopt a more strategic approach to AI: one that reduces risk and increases clarity. Instead of jumping into full-scale deployments, teams can take smaller, more deliberate steps.  Using the following tactics, you can better differentiate between hype and real capability, allowing you to adopt AI tools that align with your goals and constraints. 1. Use sandbox environments Ask for a sandbox to simulate real use cases without impacting production data. This allows teams to pressure-test capabilities before committing. 2. Prioritize transparent case studies Look for success stories that offer a behind-the-scenes look at implementation, challenges, and actual results, not just polished outcomes. 3. Test integration depth, not just compatibility Don’t stop at “Yes, we integrate.” Ask: Can you trigger journeys based on real-time data? Can attributes update dynamically? Does data flow both ways? 4. Evaluate vendor support and education The best tools come with great training, responsive support, and documentation that accelerates onboarding and learning. 5. Learn from your peers Communities like the Lifecycle Luminaries Slack channel offer real, unfiltered feedback from practitioners. These sources are often the most trustworthy and valuable for unbiased opinions.     Embracing AI Realistically and Strategically AI has the power to transform lifecycle marketing, but only when it’s applied with clarity, intention, and the right foundation. Success doesn’t come from chasing the flashiest tools. It comes from solving real problems: fragmented data, limited visibility, and disconnected systems that prevent marketers from executing the strategies they already know will work. That’s why the most effective marketers right now aren’t asking, “How do I use more AI?” They’re asking, “Where can AI remove friction and help me act faster, smarter, and with more confidence?” At MoEngage, we’ve seen meaningful results when AI is embedded directly into the marketing workflow, not layered on top as an afterthought. Our AI engine, Sherpa, supports use cases like predictive segmentation, intelligent send-time optimization, and creative performance insights. These features are designed to help marketers spend less time reacting and more time proactively engaging their customers. This isn’t about replacing human decision-making. It’s about making smarter decisions, faster, with AI as the assistant, not the driver. As lifecycle marketing continues to evolve, the marketers who succeed won’t be the ones with the most tools. They’ll be the ones who combine strategic thinking, team alignment, and well-integrated AI to deliver personalized, timely, and scalable customer experiences. Marketers must remain curious but skeptical, innovative but grounded. Those who strike the right balance will be best positioned to harness AI’s full potential (not just as a trend), but as a lasting engine of engagement and growth. The post Navigating the AI Revolution in Lifecycle Marketing: Challenges & Opportunities appeared first on MoEngage.

In February 2024, CNN reported, “A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call.” In Europe, a second firm experienced a multimillion-dollar fraud when a deepfake emulated a board member in a video allegedly approving a fraudulent transfer of funds. “Banks and financial institutions are particularly at risk,” said The Hack Academy. “A study by Deloitte found that over 50% of senior executives expect deepfake scams to target their organizations soon. These attacks can undermine trust and lead to significant financial loss.”  Hack Academy went on to say that AI-inspired security attacks weren’t confined to deepfakes. These attacks were also beginning to occur with increased regularity in the form of corporate espionage and misinformation campaigns. AI brings new, more dangerous tactics to traditional security attack methods like phishing, social engineering and the insertion of malware into systems. For CIOs, enterprise AI system developers, data scientists and IT network professionals, AI changes the rules and the tactics for security, given AI’s limitless potential for both good and bad. This is forcing a reset in how IT thinks about security against malicious actors and intruders. Related:How Bad Actors are Exploiting AI What exactly is IT up against? The AI tools that are available on the dark web and in public cyber marketplaces give security perpetrators a wide choice of AI weaponry. Also, IoT and edge networks now present much broader enterprise attack surfaces. Security threats can come in videos, phone calls, social media sites, corporate systems and networks, vendor clouds, IoT devices, network end points, and virtually any entry point into a corporate IT environment that electronic communications can penetrate. Here are some of the current AI-embellished security attacks that companies are seeing: Convincing deepfake videos of corporate executives and stakeholders that are intended to dupe companies in pursuing certain actions or transferring certain assets or funds. This deep faking also extends to voice simulations of key personnel that are left as voicemails in corporate phone systems.  Phishing and spearfishing attacks that send convincing emails (some with malicious attachments) to employees, who mistakenly open them because they think the sender is their boss, the CEO or someone else they perceive as trusted. AI supercharges these attacks because it can automate and send out a large volume of emails that hit many employee email accounts. That AI continues to “learn” with the help of machine learning so it can discover new trusted sender candidates for future attacks.   Related:Adaptive messaging that uses generative AI to craft messages to users that correct grammar and that “learn” from corporate communication styles so they can more closely emulate corporate communications that make them seem legitimate. Mutating code that uses AI to change malware signatures on the fly so antivirus detection mechanisms can be evaded. Data poisoning that occurs when a corporate or cloud provider’s AI data repository is injected by malware that alters (“poisons”) so the data produces erroneous and misleading results.  Fighting Back With Tech To combat these supercharged AI-based security threats, IT has number of tools, techniques and strategies it can consider. Fighting deepfakes. Deepfakes can come in the form of videos, voicemails and photos. Since deepfakes are unstructured data objects that can’t be parsed in their native forms like real data, there are new tools on the market that can convert these objects into graphical representations that can be analyzed to evaluate whether there is something in an object that should or shouldn’t be there. The goal is to confirm authenticity.  Related:Fighting phishing and spear phishing. A combination of policy and practice works best to combat phishing and spear phishing attacks. Both types of attacks are predicated on users being tricked into opening an email attachment that they believe is from a trusted sender, so the first line of defense is educating (and repeat-educating) users on how to handle their email. For instance, a user should notify IT if they receive an email that seems unusual or unexpected, and they should never open it. IT should also review its current security tools. Is it still using older security monitoring software that doesn’t include more modern technologies like observability, which can check for security intrusions or malware at more atomic levels?  Is IT still using IAM (identity access management) software to track user identities and activities at a top level in the cloud and on top and atomic levels on premises, or has it also added cloud identity entitlements management (CIEM), which gives it an atomic level view of  user accesses and activities in the cloud? Better yet, has IT moved to identity governance administration (IGA), which can serve as an over-arching umbrella for IAM and CIEM plugins, plus provide detailed audit reports and automated compliance across all platforms? Fighting embedded malware code. Malware can lie dormant in systems for months, giving a bad actor the option to activate it whenever the timing is right. It’s all the more reason for IT to augment its security staff with new skillsets, such as that of the “threat hunter,” whose job is to examine networks, data and systems on a daily basis, hunting down malware that might be lurking within, and destroying it before it activates. Fighting with zero-trust networks. Internet of Things (IoT) devices come into companies with little or no security because IoT suppliers don’t pay much attention to it and there is a general expectation that corporate IT will configure devices to the appropriate security settings. The problem is, IT often forgets to do this. There are also times when users purchase their own IoT gear, and IT doesn’t know about it. Zero-trust networks help manage this, because they detect and report on everything that is added, subtracted or modified on the network. This gives IT visibility into new, potential security breach points. A second step is to formalize IT procedures for IoT devices so that no IoT device is deployed without the device’s security first being set to corporate standards.  Fighting AI data poisoning. AI models, systems and data should be continuously monitored for accuracy. As soon as they show lowered levels of accuracy or produce unusual conclusions, the data repository, inflows and outflows should be examined for quality and non-bias of data. If contamination is found, the system should be taken down, the data sanitized, and the sources of the contamination traced, tracked and disabled. Fighting AI with AI. Most every security tool on the market today contains AI functionality to detect anomalies, abnormal data patterns and user activities. Additionally, forensics AI can dissect a security breach that does occur, isolating how it happened, where it originated from and what caused it. Since most sites don’t have on-staff forensics experts, IT will have to train staff in forensics skills. Fighting with regular audits and vulnerability testing. Minimally, IT vulnerability testing should be performed on a quarterly basis, and full security audits on an annual basis. If sites use cloud providers, they should request each provider’s latest security audit for review. An outside auditor can also help sites prepare for future AI-driven security threats, because auditors stay on top of the industry, visit many different companies, and see many different situations. An advanced knowledge of threats that loom in the future helps sites prepare for new battles. Summary AI technology is moving faster than legal rulings and regulations. This leaves most IT departments “on their own” to develop security defenses against bad actors who use AI against them.  The good news is that IT already has insights into how bad actors intend to use AI, and there are tools on the market that can help defensive efforts. What’s been missing is a proactive and aggressive battle plan from IT. That has to start now. 

You wouldn't use a chatbot for evil, would you? Of course not. But if you or some nefarious party wanted to force an AI model to start churning out a bunch of bad stuff it's not supposed to, it'd be surprisingly easy to do so.That's according to a new paper from a team of computer scientists at Ben-Gurion University, who found that the AI industry's leading chatbots are still extremely vulnerable to jailbreaking, or being tricked into giving harmful responses they're designed not to — like telling you how to build chemical weapons, for one ominous example.The key word in that is "still," because this a threat the AI industry has long known about. And yet, shockingly, the researchers found in their testing that a jailbreak technique discovered over seven months ago still works on many of these leading LLMs.The risk is "immediate, tangible, and deeply concerning," they wrote in the report, which was  and is deepened by the rising number of "dark LLMs," they say, that are explicitly marketed as having little to no ethical guardrails to begin with."What was once restricted to state actors or organized crime groups may soon be in the hands of anyone with a laptop or even a mobile phone," the authors warn.The challenge of aligning AI models, or adhering them to human values, continues to loom over the industry. Even the most well-trained LLMs can behave chaotically, lying and making up facts and generally saying what they're not supposed to. And the longer these models are out in the wild, the more they're exposed to attacks that try to incite this bad behavior.Security researchers, for example, recently discovered a universal jailbreak technique that could bypass the safety guardrails of all the major LLMs, including OpenAI's GPT 4o, Google's Gemini 2.5, Microsoft's Copilot, and Anthropic Claude 3.7. By using tricks like roleplaying as a fictional character, typing in leetspeak, and formatting prompts to mimic a "policy file" that AI developers give their AI models, the red teamers goaded the chatbots into freely giving detailed tips on incredibly dangerous activities, including how to enrich uranium and create anthrax.Other research found that you could get an AI to ignore its guardrails simply by throwing in typos, random numbers, and capitalized letters into a prompt.One big problem the report identifies is just how much of this risky knowledge is embedded in the LLM's vast trove of training data, suggesting that the AI industry isn't being diligent enough about what it uses to feed their creations."It was shocking to see what this system of knowledge consists of," lead author Michael Fire, a researcher at Ben-Gurion University, told the Guardian."What sets this threat apart from previous technological risks is its unprecedented combination of accessibility, scalability and adaptability," added his fellow author Lior Rokach.Fire and Rokach say they contacted the developers of the implicated leading LLMs to warn them about the universal jailbreak. Their responses, however, were "underwhelming." Some didn't respond at all, the researchers reported, and others claimed that the jailbreaks fell outside the scope of their bug bounty programs. In other words, the AI industry is seemingly throwing its hands up in the air."Organizations must treat LLMs like any other critical software component — one that requires rigorous security testing, continuous red teaming and contextual threat modelling," Peter Garraghan, an AI security expert at Lancaster University, told the Guardian. "Real security demands not just responsible disclosure, but responsible design and deployment practices."Share This Article

Senior Community ManagerCD ProjektWarsaw Masovian Voivodeship pl54 minutes agoApplyJob DescriptionWe are looking for a passionate and experienced individual to join our team as a Senior Community Manager. In this role, you will design and execute community activities revolving around our brands and constantly think of innovative ways to engage with the members of our community. You will work on projects within The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 universes, engaging with our global community and ensuring our players experience memorable moments that extend beyond our games.Key Responsibilities:Engage with the community on a daily basis through a variety of owned social media channels and discussion boards.Design, execute, and report on community programs and activities for all projects within The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 universes.Develop strategies to help our channels grow, converting players into engaged community members.Coordinate team efforts to deliver planned communication.Identify and collaborate with the most prominent community members to engage them in various initiatives.Serve as the link between the community and our studio, reporting on key topics and nuances discussed by players regarding our games and other projects in development.Plan, attend, and run dedicated, in-person community events as well as support the company's presence during general industry events.Assist in planning, overseeing, and spending the global community budget effectively.Track, measure, and report on community sentiment as well as growth across owned channels.Qualifications5 years of proven experience as a Community Manager or in a similar role, preferably in the gaming industry.Strong understanding of community engagement and social media management in the video game industry.Experience working on projects in cross-departmental teams and with external parties.Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.Very high proficiency in English.Ability to think creatively and strategically.Experience with tracking and reporting on community metrics and sentiment.Familiarity with The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 universes is a plus.Strong organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously.Additional InformationWorking modeHybrid: working from the Warsaw studio for a minimum 1 day a week.Perks & Professional GrowthFlexible working hours — start your workday anytime between 8:00 and 10:00 AM.A welcome pack filled with goodies — to help you feel right at home once you join the team.Trainings, lectures and courses — internal workshops, external training for each employee, ‘Meet a star’ events, knowledge-sharing initiatives, online tutorials, and e-learning classes are all available. There’s always something to learn!Merch — gifts for newborn rebels and regular chances to nab some cool swag!Health & Well-beingPrivate medical healthcare — a selection of medical plans with dental care to choose from, which are also accessible for your partner and relatives.Psychological care — free mental health support and various well-being webinars.Multisport card — gain access to a wide number of sporting and fitness facilities across the city.Social Activities & Life in the OfficeDog-friendly office — dog owner? Bring your pooch with you and look after them while working! There’s always a furry friend or two to meet at the studio.Social events — we host regular gatherings at the studio where we can all unwind, play games, and just have some fun together.Healthy selections — organic fruit, snacks, muesli, organic honey, vegan milk, and speciality coffee are all at your disposal around the studio. Enjoy!Truly international working environment — a chance to meet and work with a diverse selection of people from all around the world.Head office in WarsawSustainable campus with an eco ethos — solar panels provide green energy, 2000 plants and an air-filtering system to help provide clean air, electric car charging points, flower meadows, and more green features in the works.An onsite, well-equipped gym with a climbing wall, daily Gym Assistant support and yoga and healthy spine classes.Car and bike parking spaces.A designated space for your bicycle, as well as bicycle repair equipment and showers available whenever you need them.No dress-code — we like to keep it casual.Relocation supportRelocation package – flight ticket, company apartment for your first month, relocating your pet, shipping your belongings: it’s all covered. Who said moving countries needs to be complicated?Relocation assistance — processing your legalization operations for you, assistance with finding residence, tax settlements, helping out with translations if needed, and much more — we have dedicated teams to help make sure that all you need to feel right at home is taken care of.Polish lessons for foreign employees — and for your spouse or partner, too.Paid Leave — from 20 to 26 days of holiday for every team member per year, paid sick leave, and paid maternity & paternity leave.If you've observed any irregularities in our recruitment process please click here to report them.Company DescriptionTo create revolutionary, story-driven RPGs which go straight to the hearts of gamers — this is our mission. Want to dive deeper into our company’s culture? Explore our social media and check out our YouTube channel where we share behind-the-scenes insights and stories direct from our team members! Create Your Profile — Game companies can contact you with their relevant job openings. Apply

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown Score Details “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown makes turn-based tactics feel as fast-paced as a John Wick brawl.” Pros Very original approach to TMNT Thoughtful characterization Fast-paced tactics Compact size is a plus Cons Repetitive missions A bit anticlimactic Buggy at launch “Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Found out more about how we test and score products.“ Please link here Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is a shining example of how the way a game plays can completely change what it says about its characters. Growing up, my perception of New York’s finest reptiles was shaped by beat-em-ups. GameCube drawlers like Battle Nexus taught me that the boys were a bunch of rowdy goofballs. They were deadly, but sloppy. They aren’t the same turtles I find in the turn-based action of Tactical Takedown. There, I meet hyper efficient assassins who don’t waste a single movement. They aren’t just members of a squad who need one another to take out waves of enemies; each is a one turtle wrecking machine. I’m left to wonder just how devastating they must be as one unified band of brothers. Recommended Videos Fast-paced strategy makes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown’s turn-based action feel as active as an arcade brawler. Each level offers a jolt of arcade excitement that gives each turtle their chance to shine rather than treating them as interchangeable heroes. Its small scope leaves it vulnerable to bugs and repetition, but Tactical Takedown’s best quality is how much it’s willing to break the mold and offer a new spin on a familiar TMNT power fantasy. Together alone Rather than revisiting a scenario that’s been done to death, Tactical Takedown tries its best to steer away from TMNT clichés. It pits the boys against a new Foot Clan leader who is filling a void left behind by Shredder. Rather than tackling that threat together with a carefree attitude, we’re left with four brothers who have grown distant as each comes to terms with impending adulthood. The big shock is that the four of them never appear together during their mission, as an attack on the Turtle Lair takes out their communication system. Each one sets off on their own solo objective, only interacting with their bros through interstitial dialogue between missions. A broken Turtlecom turns out to be a perfect metaphor for a more human kind of distance. That may sound a little sacrilegious at first, but it’s a purposeful swing. The physical separation drives home how much the team is growing apart through the story. It’s a little sad, like waking up one morning and realizing that you haven’t seen the cousins you used to play all night with on Christmas Eve in years. We’ve so rarely, if ever, gotten to see a version of the Turtles that feels this lonely and introspective. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I walked away from Tactical Takedown with a new appreciation of their dynamic. Tactical Takedown isn’t a big licensed project and shouldn’t be approached as such. That separation isn’t played as a bummer, though. Instead, developer Strange Scaffold uses it to shine a spotlight on each hero. Every level has me playing as a specific Turtle, as they all work towards the same goal using their own skills and expertise. Michelangelo attacks the problem at a street level, taking out goons with his nunchaku. Donatello sticks to the sewers, Raphael dashes over rooftops, and Leonardo sticks to the subway like a real New Yorker. In any other Turtles game, these would be locations that every turtle would explore by the end of the story. Here, each feels like one of the hero’s turf, giving them a specific home field advantage that their other brothers don’t have. That builds to a climax you can probably see coming, but not in the way you’re expecting. We’re never quite given a moment where all four heroes are playable together, sharing a pool of actions and synergizing their skills with one another. There’s a much different interpretation of their union here that undercuts their individuality. It’s functional enough, but the finale feels less like a natural conclusion and more like a concession to not mess around with the core tactics formula too much. That philosophy makes for some repetition as each of its 20 levels plays out the same with little variation aside from swapping the hero. Strange Scaffold Tactical Takedown isn’t a big licensed project and shouldn’t be approached as such. It’s a micro indie from a studio known for playing things fast and loose. Like every Strange Scaffold game I’ve ever played before launch, I encountered some form of game breaking bug that will no doubt be fixed by the time you actually play it. A broken special attack that I could spam multiple times by hammering a button, reset levels due to a glitched “end turn” button, and a loadout menu that I could not for the life of me figure out how to edit. It’s not that I hold those issues against it much, just as I didn’t mind I Am Your Beast’s few game-breaking issues that halted my progress for a few days. They’ll get fixed promptly by a nimble team, but sometimes I wonder what just a little more time in the oven could do for some of the studio’s best ideas, whether it’s polishing them to perfection or having time to build in one more creative twist that snaps everything into place. All action Though there are limits to its compact nature, Tactical Takedown’s focused scope is its greatest asset too. Each bite-sized level drops a turtle onto a small grid-based map. Every few turns, a new piece of the map forms while another goes away. It’s built to feel exactly like an old beat-em-up in that way, with the screen scroll of an arcade game stopping to frame a brawl before prompting players to move on. It’s an ingenious way to bring the feel of those games to an entirely different genre. That same philosophy extends to its brilliant spin on turn-based combat, which takes a genre known for careful decision making and makes it feel like John Wick. Each Turtle has five moves that they can use on each turn and a whopping six action points that can be spent in any way. When playing as Michaelangelo, my initial skill set is largely about leaping around enemies. I can skateboard over a foe and hit them on the way over or dash past a few enemies with my whirling nunchucks. Even my most basic attack, a simple bonk, moves me to the enemy’s square once defeated. With six whole points to spend per turn, and more if I equip moves that replenish AP, I’m able to do a whole lot of damage in one go. There’s a maturity to the boys here reflected in precise strategy rather than drunken brawling. There’s a strategy to each turtle and the brisk four hour runtime gives me just enough time to perfect each over time. With Michaelangelo, I learn to chain my way through enemies by knocking my way through one so that I can directly move to another without spending a movement point. Donatello is more about shocking enemies to keep them in place and create distance between them, allowing him to pick them off from afar or trap them in poison sewer pits. Leonardo is more about standing his ground, creating stacks of evasion that allow him to survive in tight subway car melees. And Raphael is all about yanking faraway enemies to reposition them and boot them away. Each strategy is distinct and rewards mastery. Once I got the hang of each, I couldn’t believe just how much I could do in a turn. Sometimes I’d be greeted with a screen full of ninjas and assume that I couldn’t possibly take them all out. With careful enough positioning, I’d realize that I could punt a foe off an edge here to instantly kill it, slash another weak one to finish it off and get its AP, jump over to a pizza box to heal, and still have enough actions left to take out a few more enemies. All of this happens quickly in my brain. I don’t need to think about what to do next; I reflexively fire off actions one after another, often taking out a whole screen full of enemies in seconds flat. It’s like playing a beat-em-up, but somehow faster and more precise. It’s through that ironclad combat hook that my perception of the Turtles changes. While most TMNT games hone in on the teenage part, Tactical Takedown is concerned with the anagram’s N. Each one truly feels like a ninja here, dispatching enemies in the blink of an eye. If you cut out the bits of decision making between move selection, you’d be treated to a thrilling little sequence on every single turn that plays out like Oldboy’s hallway sequence. Strange Scaffold I do wish that there were a few more ways to really drive that point home outside from the fairly static gauntlet of fights that never really changes. Some levels can feel long, throwing out waves of enemies with little pace until they just suddenly end. Perhaps some bosses or stage hazards could have given me a few more ways to think about the most efficient ways to use my moves, especially since the difficulty winds up feeling flat even in its enemy-filled finale. There’s more room to grow the great seed Strange Scaffold has planted here if the studio decides to take the team for another spin one day. Even if it’s destined to be a one-shot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is a welcome little addition to TMNT’s storied video game canon. In just a few short hours, it gave me a new appreciation of each individual bro by deconstructing the team dynamic and showing how each part of the unit functions on its own. There’s a maturity to the boys here reflected in precise strategy rather than drunken brawling. You can break up a team, but the mark of a strong family is its ability to fight through hell and back to come together again. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown was reviewed on PC and Steam Deck OLED.