Home Federal Bancorp, Inc. of Louisiana announced a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share on its common stock, marking the 13th consecutive annual increase. The dividend is payable on August 10, 2026, to shareholders of record at the close of business on July 27, 2026. This represents the 85th consecutive quarterly cash dividend for the company.

James R. Barlow, Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer, stated that the increase reflects the company's commitment to creating shareholder value and confidence in its financial strength. Based on diluted earnings per share for the trailing four fiscal quarters ended March 31, 2026, the dividend reflects a payout ratio of approximately 31.3%.

Home Federal Bancorp, Inc. of Louisiana is the holding company for Home Federal Bank, which operates ten full-service banking offices and a home office in northwest Louisiana. The company's stock is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol HFBL.

Key Dividend Details

INE, a provider of cybersecurity and networking training, has launched the AI Systems Security Specialist (eAIS) certification. This new credential is designed to help IT, cybersecurity, and operations professionals understand, assess, and secure modern AI-enabled systems. The certification aims to address the growing gap between general AI literacy and advanced AI red teaming by focusing on practical, operational security outcomes.

The eAIS certification is built for technology and operations professionals who are not AI engineers but are increasingly expected to identify AI-specific risks and apply baseline controls. It targets IT support teams, help desk professionals, system administrators, junior security analysts, SOC teams, DevOps, platform, and cloud operations professionals, as well as students and career changers entering cybersecurity.

Key Learning Areas

The certification emphasizes security-first AI fundamentals, including understanding how LLM applications, RAG pipelines, tools, agents, and logging systems create new exposure points. It covers identifying risks such as prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage, RAG poisoning, tool misuse, and over-permissioning.

Practical safeguards taught in the program include least privilege, parameter validation, fail-closed controls, human-in-the-loop gates, structured outputs, retrieval hardening, and safe logging. The curriculum also focuses on testing and validating mitigations through repeatable, hands-on exercises and using AI safely in SOC, IT operations, automation, and SDLC workflows.

Exam Domains

The eAIS exam covers five core domains:

The learning path includes modules on AI systems for security practitioners, embeddings and RAG security, prompt injection and jailbreaks, tool and agentic workflow abuse patterns, defensive controls, secure integrations, human-in-the-loop automation, telemetry, and AI security testing.

Availability

The AI Security Fundamentals (eAIS) certification and learning path are available now through INE. For details on exam requirements, preparation resources, and enterprise training options, professionals can visit the INE website.