Former Sophos chief security officer (CSO) Simon Reed has joined Overe as a strategic advisor in a move CEO Paul Barnes believes will supercharge engagement with managed service providers (MSPs).

Launched three years ago, Overe offers a cybersecurity platform designed to help MSPs and small businesses secure Microsoft 365 and SaaS tools.

Speaking to ITPro, Barnes said the inspiration for launching the firm came after his experiences with a previous venture, endpoint security startup Prevx. At its height, before being acquired by Webroot, Prevx had more than 15,000 MSPs using its product.

With Overe, Barnes hopes to build on that success and bolster support for what he said has traditionally been a market overlooked by larger vendors.

“We’re very much focused on the MSP market because that’s been something which I’m extremely passionate about,” he told ITPro. “We know how underserved that market is and those clients which the MSPs serve.”

According to Barnes, the state of the security vendor market in 2026 requires a rethink. Large organizations such as Microsoft, for example, typically focus on larger clients, leaving a vacuum where smaller businesses are “kind of left to manage themselves”.

Combined with traditional challenges such as costs and skill capabilities, this places organizations at great risk amidst an increasingly perilous threat landscape, he added.

“Typically an MSP client is only small, like 10 users, clients, and the technologies that they are there to try and support them [with] are either far too expensive or far too complex, [and] hard to manage,” he told ITPro. “They make it inaccessible in the sense that you need expertise to really take advantage of that.”

“There are capital costs, staff, and the actual buying of the technologies,” Barnes added.

With Reed joining Overe, Barnes said this marks a “big win” for the company. The industry veteran brings a wealth of experience, having come from a software engineering background before moving into the cybersecurity industry in 2001.

Working on the vendor side with roles at McAfee and Sophos, this gives Reed a unique insight into this market, Barnes said.

A challenging environment

Speaking to ITPro, Reed said his appointment at Overe comes amidst a challenging period both for MSPs and end-user enterprises, many of which lack key technical capabilities and require continuous support.

“It used to be that cybersecurity was an install and forget capability,” he said. “The product updated itself and kept you protected. That’s not the case these days you need continued expertise in partnership with [a] decent product and capability.”

“If you think about a smaller company, where are they getting their cybersecurity expertise? Generally, they’re getting it from the MSP, and it’s that partnership between product and the MSP that’s the most crucial link.”

Combined with rising cybersecurity threats and the advent of generative AI, these dynamics are placing huge pressure on both enterprise end-users and MSPs alike, according to Reed.

It’s here that Overe aims to plug gaps and provide support, with a particular focus on cyber resilience. Indeed, it’s this focus that drew Reed to the company in the first place.

“We’re at a sort of sea change in thinking about cyber where just building defenses is just not adequate on its own,” he told ITPro. “You will see people working a lot hard on what I call resilience in that market

“This is why I’m passionate about it [Overe] because it’s not just a sort of defensive play for MSPs. It’s a resilience play. It’s about have you got your estate configured, have you got this tool set up, do you have the coverage in the place you think you have the coverage,” he added.

“It plays into that growing need in the market for more resilience, and we definitely need more resilience in smaller medium businesses.”

Looking ahead, Barnes said Overe intends to build on early success so far and the company has built a “solid team” that operates in several regions.

“We’ve got some great early angels and built a solid team around us,” he said. “We’re in a few regions and having someone like Simon advise us it’s a massive win for us.”

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The UK and Germany have announced a new Industrial Tech Corridor aimed at encouraging partnerships between companies in the two countries.

The deal, which builds on the existing Strategic Science and Technology Partnership, is being backed by some of Germany’s leading companies including Allianz, Bosch, RWE, and Siemens.

The aim is to connect industry leaders, tech firms, and innovators from both countries, allowing them to work together on AI and critical technologies.

"Together with the UK, we’re building an ideal launchpad for AI companies to scale internationally," said Germany's federal minister for digital transformation and government modernization, Karsten Wildberger.

"The UK-German Tech Corridor will accelerate scale-ups to enter Europe’s most advanced AI ecosystems. This partnership represents an important step to strengthening our digital sovereignty."

The focus will be initially on AI and high-value industrial applications, with a first dedicated Tech Corridor roundtable convening CEOs of selected primes, AI scale-ups, and senior officials scheduled for later this year.

To connect AI and critical technology scale-ups with industrial demand, firms in both countries will be encouraged to develop scaled industrial use cases.

The two countries will also share a pot of around €20 million to help accelerate joint quantum research. This will support projects in a range of areas, from quantum computing through to the technology’s use in financial services.

It could also lead to cutting-edge breakthroughs in areas such as quantum sensors.

This means cash for a further five research projects across Germany and the UK, making use of the existing bilateral quantum cooperation and increasing the number of funded projects to 10.

"We already work closely with Germany in key areas like AI and quantum, and today lays a new foundation - combining the strengths of our businesses and innovators so people in both countries will benefit from for years to come," said UK secretary of state for business, innovation, science and trade, Jonathan Reynolds.

MicroAGI announces London hub

Following the deal, Germany-based tech firm MicroAGI, a robotics research company headquartered in Munich, will expand its footprint in London, creating 180 new jobs, while energy company Proxima Fusion plans to expand its base in Oxfordshire, hoping to quadruple its local workforce by 2028.

The UK-based AI software company Quantexa, meanwhile, is committing to building a dedicated sovereign unit in Germany which will support AI deployment in both countries.

Similarly, the two countries have also convened senior business leaders for a Regional Growth Forum, focused on fostering business-government collaboration, regional growth and innovation.

The plan is to develop a deeper regional dialog to be held in 2027, involving local and regional stakeholders.

"Today’s agreements are great news for British tech, businesses, and workers. They mean more jobs, more investment, and more innovations that will change lives," said Reynolds.

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Keeper Security has announced it now protects more than 100,000 enterprise customers worldwide, as the identity security vendor continues to build on strong recent growth.

The zero trust and zero-knowledge specialist said the growing adoption of its security platform spans all industries – including finance, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, and the public sector – across more than 150 countries.

The latest milestone follows the news that Keeper Security has now surpassed $240 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), while research firm Gartner named the company as the second fastest-growing competitor in the worldwide security software market in 2025.

The firm’s KeeperPAM privileged access management platform unifies capabilities such as password and passkey management, secrets governance, privileged session monitoring, endpoint privilege management, zero-trust network access, and remote browser isolation.

The platform’s zero-knowledge architecture works to ensure that all credentials and session data remain encrypted with the customer’s private key to give security teams complete control over their data.

Driving enterprise adoption

Fresh innovations have helped drive adoption of the platform across the enterprise – including the introduction of KeeperAI. According to Keeper, the tool provides real-time session monitoring to reduce threat detection time by 99% with automated response across 100% of privileged sessions.

The vendor has also extended agentic AI governance to its Endpoint Privilege Manager to enable enforcement of access policies, elevation controls, and behavioral monitoring across known and unknown AI agents.

Additionally, the Keeper Secrets Manager now integrates with model context protocol (MCP) servers to enable secure credential access for AI agents, while certified enterprise connectors for platforms such as Microsoft Azure Logic Apps aim to eliminate hardcoded secrets within automated workflows.

Elsewhere, Keeper said system integrations with SailPoint and Wiz are also helping to accelerate adoption, alongside the integration of privileged access and and credential approvals into platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, and Freshservice, which enable users to request and approve access without switching systems.

Consolidating security in the agentic AI era

Commenting on the latest growth milestone, Keeper Security CEO and co-founder Darren Guccione said the achievement comes amid a “paradigm shift” in the market, driven by the rise of AI across the enterprise.

"Forward-thinking security leaders are strategically moving beyond disparate, siloed software in favor of a unified identity control plane that offers unparalleled visibility, control and governance,” he explained. “They recognise that identity has become the primary attack surface, and platform consolidation is a strategic imperative.

“Keeper's architecture was designed to address this complex reality, and our growth demonstrates that enterprises are decisively embracing this new direction."

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The US Justice Department and FBI have seized the domains of a company linked to the Flax Typhoon cyber crime group, disrupting access to two hacking tools.

The tools, Microscan and FishHub, were used to scan and compromise critical infrastructure systems and other networks in the US and around the world.

Integrity Technology Group, a China-based company with contracts with the Chinese government, is believed to be behind the activity, which has been linked with campaigns known as Flax Typhoon, Ethereal Panda and Red Juliett, amongst others.

The threat actors use a unique combination of large-scale botnets, VPN infrastructure, living off the land (LOTL) techniques, and repositories of computer network exploitation (CNE) tools.

“Integrity Technology Group provided China-linked threat actors with capabilities used to conduct widespread vulnerability scanning and, in some cases, intrusions targeting US and foreign critical infrastructure,” said assistant director Brett Leatherman of the FBI’s Cyber Division.

“The PRC relies on contractor and enabling companies to expand the reach and scale of its malicious cyber activity. By exposing and disrupting these enablers, we make it harder for the PRC to target American networks and infrastructure.”

According to US officials, Integrity Tech developed Microscan to conduct reconnaissance, via the botnet and otherwise, of victim computer networks for vulnerabilities that its clients would later exploit.

A Python-based web application, Microscan contains over 1,300 penetration testing scripts written to scan websites for specific vulnerabilities. The threat actors used these scripts to target services including OpenSSL, Oracle WebLogic, Rejetto, WordPress, Juniper ScreenOS, Jenkins, and Apache Struts.

Targets included a US power company based in South Carolina, a multi-national NGO, Japanese and Polish airports, Taiwanese critical infrastructure companies in the natural gas and power sectors, and two Taiwanese universities.

Spear phishing campaign targeted corporate networks

Meanwhile, a second tool, FishHub, is believed to have played a part in the exploitation of computer networks through spear phishing.

After an initial network compromise, FishHub downloaded additional malware to the victim network, giving Integrity Tech’s clients unauthorized remote access. It also searched for specific files and sent them to servers controlled by the group. Confirmed victims included around 20 Taiwanese universities.

"The extensive malicious cyber activities, and services by Integrity Tech, that have been exposed today should be extremely concerning for all network defenders," said Paul Chichester, director of Operations at the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

"The breadth of sectors that have been targeted across the globe demonstrate the extent of the threat and all organizations should take note of this warning."

Last year, the UK government sanctioned Integrity Tech, alongside another China-based information security company, known as i-Soon, for their part in malicious cyber activity.

“These state-sponsored hackers continue to aggressively target and access networks and systems throughout the world in an effort to identify and steal files and otherwise exploit victims’ vulnerabilities,” said attorney Troy Rivetti for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

“These seizures, our second disruption of Integrity Tech’s massive operations in as many years, send another clear message to cybercriminals from the PRC and elsewhere of the department’s dedication to defending and maintaining cybersecurity in the United States and abroad.

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Computing pioneer and the originator of software engineering, Margaret Hamilton, has died aged 90 years old.

Hamilton is perhaps most remembered for her work coding Apollo 11 to the moon, made famous in part by a photo of her standing next to a print out of the code she created.

Her legacy, however, extends far beyond that role. Anyone who has ever called themselves a software engineer owes that job title to Hamilton.

In 2017, she told Spanish newspaper El País: “I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it – and those building it – would be given its due respect, and thus I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."

“When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline,” she said.

Hamilton also pioneered defensive programming, a development practice of creating software that can anticipate or fix errors on its own.

Speaking to ITPro in 2016 about the spark that ignited her interest in software reliability, she said: "When the computer crashed during the execution of your program, lights would start flashing, bells would start ringing and developers and computer operators would come running to find out whose program was doing something bad to the system. I didn’t want it to be mine!"

A prime example of this in action occurred during the Apollo 11 mission, when the computer in the lunar landing module, Eagle, experienced a 1202 error, indicating there was a fault in the hardware switch.

This fault led to the system becoming overloaded and there was a possibility that, with just three minutes to go until touch down, it wouldn’t be able to handle the landing procedure.

The software Hamilton and her team had developed, however, was able to prioritize mission critical tasks and shut down any unnecessary background tasks, leading to a successful landing.

An early tech entrepreneur

Hamilton was also an early computing entrepreneur, leading an MIT spinout after the Apollo missions were wound up and founding two tech startups.

Her final endeavor was Hamilton Technologies, which she founded “to provide products and services to modernise the planning, system engineering, and software development process in order to maximise reliability, lower cost, and accelerate time to market”.

It’s perhaps best known for developing the systems modelling language and methodology Universal Systems Language. Designed for engineering complex software systems, it too is built on Hamilton’s philosophy of defensive programming and priorities error prevention.

Universal Systems Language may not be as common as other coding languages due to its specificity but it’s still in production today, more than 30 years after its initial creation.

Hamilton’s legacy will be felt by the technology community everywhere.

Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics, told MIT News: "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved."

"[She] has been an inspiration to generations of computer scientists and engineers. Hers was a career dedicated to preventing errors and what she called 'handling the unknown,'" he added. "She personified leadership by example, and established a practice of software engineering based on problem-solving and systems engineering that we all benefit from."

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IBM and Red Hat have fixed more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used Java libraries through their Lightwell Clearinghouse initiative.

Announced earlier this year with a $5 billion investment and more than 20,000 engineers, Lightwell Clearinghouse lets enterprise customers submit open source software dependencies for priority review and fixes.

"For over two decades, Red Hat has backported security patches across thousands of packages," said Matt Hicks, president and CEO of Red Hat.

"Lightwell scales this exact model across a wider scope of open source ecosystems. We are applying the same discipline, upstream commitment, and engineering rigor across all active application layers."

Since the initial Lightwell launch, the duo said they have uncovered, remediated, and backported fixes for hundreds of previously unknown bugs in widely deployed, production-grade software.

"Finding and neutralizing 400-plus novel vulnerabilities so quickly shows how fast Lightwell can move, and we are just getting started," said Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, Lightwell, Red Hat.

IBM and Red Hat’s combined capabilities

Lightwell is designed to make the most of the two firms' open source engineering expertise, together with Red Hat’s secure software supply chain capabilities, build infrastructure and open source community relationships.

The project uses AI-assisted engineering workflows, although AI-generated patches aren't automatically distributed to customers but are first tested and validated by humans.

It develops version-specific fixes for open source application dependencies in production systems that are delivered through secured repositories that connect with customers’ existing IT processes.

This, the two firms said, allows organizations to address difficult or previously unknown vulnerabilities without needing to replace their current security scanners, software repositories, development pipelines or testing processes.

Through Lightwell Network, IT teams can access verified patches, bring remediated software into their existing workflows and establish an ongoing process for addressing vulnerabilities.

Broader open source gains

The fixes that are developed through Lightwell are contributed to upstream open source projects under responsible disclosure protocols, said the firms, maintaining embargo protections for Lightwell Clearinghouse participants.

Lightwell Network launched commercially in July, with more than 6,500 patched and digitally signed software dependencies for Java, Python, and other languages. Universities, non-governmental organizations and think tanks were given free access in August, and it's now been made generally available.

"AI agents shifted the threat landscape overnight, exploiting old dependencies at machine speed. They do not care if a codebase is ten years old or otherwise considered stable, because one small crack is all it takes to chain an attack together," said Hellekson.

"Finding those bugs is only half the battle: the real work is backporting fixes directly into active production apps so customers do not have to pick between security and uptime."

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Google is expected to introduce full access permissions for Gemini that would allow it to access any file on a macOS device, open apps, browse the web, and perform actions without asking for permission every time.

As spotted by AI news tracker TestingCatalog, the permission has been included in a new "Additional sandbox options" setting.

It allows Gemini to read, create, modify, or delete files residing anywhere on a Mac, including files outside connected folders and even files belonging to other people stored on the device.

Data could be sent and received over the network without approval for each connection, including accessing websites, APIs, and services that the user is logged into.

Notably, it could also communicate with other Mac applications such as Mail, Safari, or Messages, and carry out actions through them without specific permission.

"Gemini will still ask user permission before purchasing products, creating accounts, accepting legal terms, or modifying sensitive information about you," the report reads.

Deeper AI integration

The news highlights the lengths to which vendors will go to gain access to high-quality, up-to-date and unique AI training data, according to Ilia Kolochenko, founder of ImmuniWeb.

"Today, 99% of websites, online archives and web libraries have erected technical barriers to ban AI data scrapers, leaving AI vendors without access to free data,” he said.

“We will almost certainly see all major AI companies following Google and collecting their AI training data via various 'creative' techniques.”

Kolochenko added that access to training data is an “existential question for all Ai vendors,” but most will “probably accept the risk”.

The situation is even riskier for smaller vendors, he noted, many of whom are limited by funds and other resources to procure training data for in-house AI models.

"They form the so-called AI training pools, where hundreds of smaller players submit some data and, in exchange, can use all other data from the pool," he said. "Eventually, once you share your data with a small AI startup, it may end up in thousands of wrong hands around the globe."

Apple's AI security focus

The news comes as Apple tightens up Mac security for AI agents, announcing plans to introduce additional controls that will require Mac users to take "very explicit" action to enable Full Disk Access.

"Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems —including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history —without users’ full knowledge and understanding," said the firm.

"Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action."

The new Gemini feature hasn't yet been enabled, and it's not clear when Google might plan to do so.

ITPro approached Google for comment, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

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The use of AI in financial departments is surging, but workers now find themselves spending a quarter of their week verifying or correcting AI outputs.

That's according to Datarails' 2026 CFO Sentiments Survey, which focused on the impact of AI on finance departments.

Datarails found that nearly all of the 270 chief financial officers (CFO) polled were using AI in some way for finance processes. While adoption is no longer a concern, the study noted that verification burden is.

Around 96% of CFOs said they spend at least 10% of their time checking or fixing AI outputs, with 8% spending more than half their working time on such efforts.

More widely, finance teams are spending 26% of their working week checking AI output to ensure it's accurate, the survey found.

Crucially, the study noted that they're right to check. Two-thirds of CFOs said their most common source of frustration with AI is when it gives confident answers based on incorrect data.

More than half (56%), meanwhile, said they've had AI provide different answers to team members despite using the same prompt and data.

"What this survey shows is that although AI adoption is now standard for CFOs, caution hasn't disappeared," said Didi Gurfinkel, CEO and co-founder of Datarails. "Finance teams have stopped asking 'will we use AI?' and started asking 'how am I going to most effectively check its work?’”

Keeping humans in the loop

Despite concerns about AI slop and inaccuracies, more than half of CFOs expect to increase their spending on AI licenses this year, with just 7% slashing budgets.

Three-quarters feel under ‘high’ or ‘very high’ pressure to integrate AI further, but just 7% said their finance department workflows are ready for a wider implementation.

Given such challenges, it comes as no surprise then that finance leaders value a human in the loop, with just 5% saying they'd hand an AI-produced financial report to the board without human review, and just 4% saying they'd do the same with monthly reports.

AI isn’t impacting jobs

The survey also asked CFOs about job losses, a recurring talking point since the advent of generative AI nearly four years ago.

Yet only 3% of respondents said they were cutting full time employees due to a shift to the technology – perhaps not a surprise given checking outputs remains manual work.

"Fears of job losses have been largely allayed, but the challenge of AI output verification is critical," said Gurfinkel. "Tackling it will allow finance teams to spend less time doing intensive checking, and let them focus instead on the strategic work they were actually hired to do."

A lack of auditability remains the main reason CFOs don't trust AI tools with mission critical tasks, the report found, with 75% of those asked naming it the biggest challenge.

That was followed by accuracy and so-called hallucinations at 71% and regulatory and compliance concerns regarding AI outputs at 54%.

Because of that, Datarails noted that a new technology category was emerging, with a third of CFOs looking to implement a "finance operating system", effectively a governed data layer for AI.

At the moment, finance teams use an average of 2.5 general-purpose models, with Microsoft Copilot the clear leader at 93%, followed by ChatGPT at 65% and Claude at 64%.

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Compliance with AI regulations will present an enormous challenge for businesses, according to ISACA CEO Erik Prusch, describing the task as “Sarbanes-Oxley on steroids”.

Introduced in 2002 following the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (commonly abbreviated to SOX) is a US federal law governing the reporting and verification of financial information by public companies.

Initial implementation of the necessary internal controls was notoriously costly and took several years to bed in, and compliance remains an annual exercise for US-listed companies.

Prusch, who was CFO of biometric authentication company Identix when the rules came into force, said the challenge of achieving compliance with incoming AI regulations dwarfs that work.

Prusch warned companies will need to do the same level of work five or even ten times faster thanks to the rapid pace of AI development – and all without a settled regulatory framework to guide them.

“It's the equivalent of SOX on steroids,” he told ITPro in an interview at the annual ISACA Europe conference in Munich. “It took us multiple years to get to a place where we actually knew what we were required to do from a Sarbanes-Oxley standpoint, and that was with the benefit of regulation that told us something to do.”

Dazed and confused over AI compliance

Part of the challenge with AI compliance, he explained, is that unlike SOX, the industry is still in the process of establishing the controls, accountability, and reporting lines that compliance will be based on.

“Who is responsible, who is ultimately going to be accountable, and how that is going to get communicated to the board, is brand new,” he said.

Further complicating matters, multiple countries and supranational bodies are butting heads over the best approach to regulating AI.

The EU's more cautious approach has favoured a comprehensive, risk-based rulebook – laid out in its AI Act – while the US federal government has prioritized development speed and innovation, resisting attempts to impose regulation at home and pressuring Brussels to scale back its own rules.

Combined with NIS2, DORA, and the Cyber Resilience Act, which govern cybersecurity for everything from critical infrastructure and banks to connected products, the AI Act makes the EU one of the more demanding regulatory environments for businesses.

Many organizations fall under several of these regimes at once, each with its own overlapping obligations.

"Over the last couple of years, we have seen a definite increase in the compliance burden," said Tara Wisniewski, senior vice president of advocacy at ISACA, citing complaints she’s heard from members.

"My DORA regulation says it has to look this way, NIS2 says it has to look this way, now CRA wants it this way… Why do I have to provide the same piece of information in six different colours? It gets ridiculous."

No light on the horizon

Prusch warned that the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. He predicted that board members will be named in lawsuits when AI deployments go wrong, arguing that, as with SOX, regulation will arrive as a reaction to a string of high-profile failures.

"It's only going to take a couple of companies that frankly go out of business because they're exposed, and they haven't done the work necessary," he said. “Everybody’s going to have that ‘oh shit’ moment.”

"We're probably 12 months from panic," he added.

As part of efforts to address the gap, Wisniewski said ISACA is expanding its advocacy work, engaging with policymakers on the principles that should underpin AI regulation, and calling for greater consistency between different jurisdictions' rules.

This includes working with UK lawmakers on amendments to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill.

At the same time, the association has also launched three AI-focused certification products, with a fourth on the way, and is building AI into established credentials such as CISA and CISM. Until regulation catches up, however, Prusch warned the onus is on businesses themselves.

“Every organization that is utilising AI without proper controls, without understanding risk, without governance policy principles, without cybersecurity awareness, is exposing that company to a traumatic amount of risk,” Prusch said.

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HPE has launched a range of new servers optimized for enterprise inference and agentic AI.

The firm said the HPE ProLiant Gen13 Servers, powered by sixth-generation AMD Epyc Server CPUs, deliver higher core density, memory bandwidth, and I/O.

These servers are primarily targeted at compute-intensive workloads such as agentic AI and inference, analytics, virtualization, simulation, and modeling, the company said in an announcement.

“Organizations need to turn their investments in agentic AI and inference into business value without adding operational complexity or risk,” said Krista Satterthwaite, senior vice president and general manager for compute at HPE.

“For these workloads, HPE ProLiant Gen13 brings together optimized performance, built-in, automatic security, intelligent operations, and proven reliability. It gives customers a trusted foundation to modernize and innovate today and adapt as their requirements evolve.”

Under the hood of HPE's ProLiant Gen13 servers

The HPE ProLiant DL585a Gen13 Server is a high-density platform designed to support up to eight double-wide PCIe GPUs, two sixth-generation AMD Epyc Server processors, and PCIe Gen6 connectivity.

Conversely, the HPE ProLiant DL525 Gen13 Server is a more compact, performance-optimized 1U, single-socket system powered by one sixth-generation AMD EPYC Server processor with up to 256 cores.

HPE said this features high bandwidth 16-channel memory, with support for high-speed and high performance –DDR5 and MRDIMM – and PCIe Gen6 connectivity.

Notably, this is suited more for workloads with extremely high data throughput, such as fraud detection, market-data processing, risk and pricing models, electronic design automation (EDA), simulation, and AI inference.

Meanwhile, the HPE ProLiant XD245 Gen13 and HPE ProLiant XD285 Gen13 are designed to maximize compute performance within a smaller footprint. The two OCP-compliant servers combine high-density compute with efficient shared power and cooling to support data-intensive AI and HPC workloads.

Finally, the HPE ProLiant XD245 Gen13 Server uses a one-Open Rack Unit (1OU), four-node direct liquid-cooled design, and is powered by up to eight sixth-generation AMD EPYC Server processors; while the HPE ProLiant XD285 Gen13 Server uses a two-Open Rack Unit (2OU), two-node air-cooled design.

More on the horizon for HPE

According to HPE, there are more systems planned in the near future. The new servers combine automatic security from HPE Integrated Lights-Out 8 with enhanced HPE Compute Ops Management capabilities to protect data and system integrity.

The company will also introduce new features, including automatic self-encrypting drive (Auto-SED) server capabilities to protect data at rest from first boot without added configuration, external key managers, or manual activation.

Multi-person authorization (MPA) requires two authorized users to approve high-impact actions, including key provisioning and secure erase, while expanded post-quantum cryptography (PQC) readiness now extends beyond firmware to help protect server communication paths from emerging threats - a first in the industry, HPE said.

“AI is moving into the applications and operations that run the enterprise, fundamentally changing what organizations demand from their infrastructure,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD.

“Across generations of AMD Epyc CPUs and HPE ProLiant servers, our teams have worked side by side to turn advances in processor and system design into practical value for customers,” McNamara added.

“With sixth-generation AMD EPYC processors and HPE ProLiant Gen13, we are delivering the performance, efficiency and flexibility enterprises need to scale AI while modernizing the critical workloads their businesses depend on.”

The HPE ProLiant DL525 Gen13 server will be available later in 2026, with the HPE ProLiant DL585a Gen13 server rolling out in early 2027 and the HPE ProLiant XD245 and XD285 Gen13 servers later that year.

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Updates to the Dell AI Data Platform aim to provide more reliable AI systems and reduce costs, according to the tech giant.

In a sweeping update to the platform, Dell technologies has unveiled three new features, including a “Unified Semantic Layer” designed to improve visibility for unstructured and structured data sources.

In a blog post detailing the move, the company said this will give data more “consistent business meaning” by providing users with rules, definitions, and a searchable glossary “so a term means the same thing everywhere it appears”.

“If one system calls it a client and another calls it an account, AI now knows they’re the same thing,” Dell explained. “Users can also import existing ontologies and classification taxonomies, reusing industry-standard or enterprise-specific taxonomy assets”.

As part of this, Dell confirmed it will draw upon Nvidia Auto-Ontology, an open source library used to design and build knowledge graphs.

Dell targets AI context gains

On that front, platform users will now have access to the Enterprise Knowledge Graph feature. According to Dell, this maps how structured and unstructured data is related, and plays a key role in the Unified Semantic Layer.

“It uses metadata, lineage, and query history to keep tuning the graph as activity changes. When an agent asks a question, the platform pulls in every related piece it's allowed to see,” the company noted in a blog post.

New "Knowledge Agents" will run parallel to these new features, according to Dell Technologies.

The company said these “put context to work” and will act as a complementary tool to provide teams with insights on data sources and infrastructure environments.

AI costs in the spotlight

Dell Technologies said the new features come at a pivotal time for organizations, many of whom are scaling AI projects and encountering infrastructure-related bottlenecks.

“In most cases, the model isn’t the bottleneck to achieving enterprise scale for AI,” the company said. “The data is. A company’s most useful information sits in files, databases, cloud services, and systems across multiple sites.”

These disparate and fragmented data sources mean agents burn through tokens to reconstruct answers and derive context from enterprise information, said Arthur Lewis, president of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group.

“Data without context is just noise,” he commented. “Most enterprises have spent years making their data accessible. That’s not the same as making it usable.”

“An agent that can find a customer record but doesn’t know what it means, how it connects to everything else, or whether it can be trusted isn’t intelligent. It’s just fast.”

Lewis added that by focusing on providing greater visibility and context for agents will “get more out of the data they already have”.

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Tesco has announced the appointment of Chris Blatchford as chief technology officer (CTO) and a member of the executive committee from March 2027.

He will replace the supermarket giant’s current CTO Guus Dekkers, who is retiring in December following eight years with the company.

Blatchford joins Tesco from Kingfisher plc, where he currently serves as group CTO and is responsible for technology, data, and product platforms across its B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama, and Brico Dépôt businesses.

In an announcement, Tesco highlighted Blatchford’s track record of driving digital transformation, modernizing technology platforms, and applying data and emerging technologies to improve experiences for both customers and staff.

Blatchford said he is excited to be joining the business at a time when the technology agenda is more important than ever.

“There are so many opportunities for technology to improve the experience for customers and colleagues across the Tesco ecosystem,” he said.

“Tesco has built an outstanding technology organisation under Guus's leadership, and I'm looking forward to working with the team to build on that momentum and continue delivering technology that makes a real difference for customers, colleagues and the business."

Retiring CTO Guus Dekkers joined Tesco in 2018, later becoming a member of the executive committee in March 2021, and his tenure saw technology become an increasingly important factor in the company’s success.

He is credited with playing a pivotal role in the modernization of Tesco's technology capabilities, the strengthening of its digital and data foundations, and the building of growth-enabling platforms.

"Leading the Technology team at Tesco has been a huge privilege,” Dekkers commented. “I know the team will continue to go from strength to strength under Chris's leadership, and I wish him every success in the role.”

Maintaining leadership continuity

To bridge the gap between Dekkers’ retirement and Blatchford’s arrival, Tesco’s technology director Jane Mustoe will become acting chief technology officer from the beginning of November.

Commenting on the leadership change, Tesco group chief executive Ken Murphy praised Dekkers’ “outstanding contribution” to the business’ success.

“His leadership has been central to strengthening our technology capabilities and delivering our strategic ambitions,” he said.

“I'm also grateful for the contribution he has made as a member of our Executive Committee and his commitment to developing technology talent."

Murphy added that the group has found a strong successor in Blatchford as it seeks to continue leveraging technology as part of its ongoing growth ambitions.

“He has led technology, data and digital transformation at scale and brings a combination of strategic vision, deep technical expertise and a strong track record of building high-performing teams,” he said.

“I am confident he will help us continue to strengthen the role technology plays in serving customers and colleagues and supporting our long-term growth."

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The FBI has reportedly removed an Accenture contractor in connection with the recent data breach that exposed sensitive information on thousands of employees.

Data stolen in the incident is believed to have included descriptions of counterintelligence workers' roles, the home addresses of human intelligence operatives, and even the medical and psychiatric records of bureau employees.

The breach, revealed last month, involved a compromise of the FBI’s jobs portal. It was claimed by ShinyHunters, which said it had exploited a vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite used in human resources (HR), finance, and supply chain management.

FBI cyber chief Brett Leatherman told Reuters the contractor failed to apply the appropriate patch.

“To date, our review has determined that the incident occurred as the result of a security failure ​of a platform managed by a third-party organization — after a contractor failed to implement a security patch explicitly issued to secure the ​platform," he said.

"As such, the FBI has removed the contractor and taken all necessary steps to both mitigate any further risk and protect our workforce.”

Responsibility lies with the organization

It's not clear why the contractor failed to apply the patch. While the removal of the contractor implies it was negligence, David Neeson, SOC deputy team lead at Barrier Networks, suggested that there might have been a good reason, such as a possible impact on another critical system.

"Leadership must always be accountable for security decisions, so if the patch not being applied was out of the contractor’s control, then the FBI could be making a dangerous mistake with their removal. It could also spur other organizations to take similar action when they are trying to shift responsibility around the cause of an attack," he said.

"Patch management is never simple, and the FBI must clearly understand this.”

This view is echoed by Jason Brown, director of customer advisory and counter fraud lead at iCounter, who said that accountability should always reside with the organization itself.

"Every contract for a managed platform should spell out how quickly critical patches have to be applied, require the third party to prove it was done, and give the customer the right to check," he said.

"Security teams also need to stop treating third-party managed systems as someone else's problem. Keep an inventory of every platform a third party runs on your behalf, know what data sits in it, and watch for warning signs, like that platform showing up in exploit activity or criminal forums."

Extortion group ShinyHunters has been operating since 2019, with members apparently coming from all over the world. Since that time, the group has been associated with a number of major breaches, including the European Commission, Snowflake, LastPass, Okta, AMD, and Salesforce.

International law enforcement bodies have been working to take down ShinyHunters for some time, most recently with the arrest of a 24-year-old Dutch man last month and another man in Jordan this week. Detainees are reported to be cooperating with the FBI.

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AI and software spending is skyrocketing in Europe, and new research warns organizations are failing to curb costs by rationalizing their software bills.

According to analysis from Spendesk, AI spending has risen by 340% in the last year, but finance teams are failing to keep on top of increasingly fragmented and unpredictable spending.

Companies are spending an average of around £213,000 per year on software, while 72% of businesses using AI are paying for two or more competing tools.

All told, Spendesk calculates that almost £6 billion could be saved across Europe by tackling duplicate software.

UK small businesses alone could save almost £399 million by rationalizing their software spend, the company claimed.

Spending volatility

AI-related spending is also highly volatile, according to Spendesk, with six-in-ten of the companies analyzed showing significant month-to-month variations. Bills varied by up to 61% from one month to the next, with peak months for spending costing up to eight times more than low-spending months.

This, the company noted, makes budget forecasting far more difficult and could land some businesses with huge, unexpected bills.

Spending with certain suppliers is growing rapidly, with Anthropic increasing sevenfold in six months, while spending related to Cursor more than doubled.

"We’re entering a new phase of AI in the enterprise. We’ve moved beyond using AI to produce and analyse information; we’re now taking it a step further by entrusting it with part of the work itself," said Axel Demazy, CEO of Spendesk.

“For finance teams, that means moving from controlling every single flow to letting AI take on the tasks it can handle, while flagging only those that genuinely require human intervention."

The perils of software duplication

A key concern for businesses lies in software duplication, according to Spendesk, and it’s often a result of neglect. Average license utilization stands at just 49%, meaning that around half the seats a typical company pays for go unused.

Meanwhile, the same software sold to companies the same size, doesn't cost the same amount twice. Researchers described this as the “scale-up danger zone”, noting that headcount often grows faster than procurement discipline does.

"A company can run 30-plus SaaS tools before it has anyone whose job is negotiating the rate on a single one of them."

Spendesk said that dealing with this requires benchmarking. Indeed, SaaS vendors are notoriously opaque about pricing, and finance teams can't negotiate when they don't know what other companies are paying.

Spend efficiency is also a blind spot, with cost-per-output becoming the metric that separates companies scaling AI profitably from companies just scaling AI spend.

Those that treat AI spend as a strategic input, not a line-item afterthought, will spend the next twelve months pulling ahead of the competition, researchers noted.

"The next step is to connect software and AI spend to business outcomes: the time saved, output generated, customers supported or revenue enabled," advised the firm.

"A tool may be worth keeping even if it overlaps with another, provided its role is clear and its value can be measured. The question is not simply 'what can we cut?' but 'what is this spend helping the business achieve?'”

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Mistral has unveiled its latest AI model, nicknamed le Chonk, saying it's the best open-weight model on the market for security – outside China, at least.

France-based Mistral positions itself as an alternative frontier AI developer to American companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, making it a viable option for sovereign AI.

This week, the company unveiled a public preview of its next model, Mistral Large 4 (ML4), or as they also call it, le Chonk. The preview API is currently available, with full weights released later this month after security tests are complete.

"The model we're actually announcing today is actually above the Chinese models ⁠on certain aspects, including cyber," ​CEO Arthur Mensch told journalists per Reuters. "So the narrative that Europe cannot compete is something that is not true."

What is le Chonk?

ML4 features one trillion parameters with 49 billion active parameters, according to Mistral.

"It is a significant milestone in our long-term investment across infrastructure, research, and product development: state-of-the-art performance in critical verticals, delivered through open weights, designed to give customers control over their AI," the company said in a blog post, noting it can be run on private cloud or on-premise.

ML4 is multimodal, so it can work across documents, charts and images, with Mistral saying it topped GPT-6-Astra on one visual grounding benchmark. It brings together instruction, reasoning, and agentic abilities into one model, the firm added.

Crucially, Mistral said it trained ML4 in partnership with key industries including engineering, finance, science, the public sector and more. Indeed, the model will eventually be used as the foundation for specialized Mistral models built for specific tasks and sectors.

Mistral also claimed leaps forward in math and scientific reasoning, making the new model a "strong research assistant… from the first question to the final result."

Further improvements are expected via reinforcement learning post-training, helped by EU funding for European data centres.

"The reinforcement learning run behind this preview is still in flight, and the model is showing no signs of saturation — there is substantial headroom ahead," Mistral added. "As we scale up training on our expanded infrastructure, we expect large and rapid improvements in the weeks and months to come.

Controls for security

Mistral claimed ML4 is among the leading global models in terms of cybersecurity capabilities. On the Artificial Analysis Cyber Index, an independent evaluation of how well AI models fix security flaws, ML4 secured a top-five place. It also has a lead in the open-weight model domain, albeit among those developed outside China.

Control is key to ML4's success on this front, with Mistral noting that the open weights and self deployment aspects of its models mean organizations can run security using their own policies, rather than being limited by their AI provider.

Mistral said it solved 93% of the exercises in Cybench, whereas closed models including Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra scored near zero because they refused to perform aspects of the task.

"Yet defending software often starts with proving that a flaw is real, exactly the kind of work safety filters in closed models can block," Mistral added in the blog post. "This matters even more as threat actors increasingly jailbreak those same models to support offensive cyber activity: defenders need systems that can match those capabilities without being constrained by the same refusals."

That said, Mistral stressed high scores in safety and security, pointing to the model’s “propensity to refuse malicious requests regarding cybersecurity."

Sovereign AI

Mistral has made much of the fact that the company and infrastructure is based in Europe, noting that ML4 was "trained from scratch" on 3,800 Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral's own European data centres, with the public preview served on the same systems.

The model will still be available more widely around the world, but Mistral is also offering an entirely European deployment that it operates end-to-end, with no other digital service providers.

The company added: "Fun fact: a significant share of ML4’s training data was multilingual, spanning more than 160 languages, including every official language of the European Union."

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Companies want to automate IT operations using agents, but they don't trust them enough to make decisions.

That's according to research from Riverbed, which revealed that a whopping 90% of surveyed IT managers and tech leaders want to use agentic AI to power autonomous IT operations in the next two years.

A further three-quarters believe agentic AI will be a core part of future IT strategies, with nine-in-ten saying AI investment to date has exceeded expectations.

So what's the problem? Put simply, companies aren't sure they trust AI agents yet. In the survey, 77% of respondents said their organization didn't want to allow AI to make operational decisions without human approval.

Early days for autonomous IT

The roll-out of autonomous IT operations remains in its early days. Just one-in-five organizations run automated IT operations right now, the report found, and only four-in-ten have an IT environment ready to support agentic AI.

That echoes previous research showing that AI adoption rates aren't matching IT hype.

While AI hasn't yet automated IT operations, the survey found that 82% of those polled are using AI at their companies for innovation and to create new "sources of advantage”.

Beyond that, the survey suggests that though 76% of projects have progressed beyond the proof of concept, that's only 5% more than last year, and just 9% are deployed across the enterprise.

"The journey to autonomous IT is well underway," said Jim Gargan, chief marketing officer at Riverbed. "Organizations increasingly see AI as the path to more resilient, efficient and proactive IT, but our research shows significant gaps between ambition and readiness."

"The next phase of AI is not simply more automation, but AI that enterprises can understand, trust and govern," added Gargan.

Autonomy challenges

That next phase will see multiple hurdles that need to be overcome. According to the survey, more than half (55%) of respondents said autonomous IT faced challenges from a security and compliance perspective.

Other hurdles include operational disruption (45%) and a lack of trust in AI decisions (39%).

No wonder then that more than nine-in-ten said that AI observability and governance was set to become an increasingly critical area for IT to manage. While three quarters of respondents said AI was a critical or important priority, the report noted that "enthusiasm is not evenly shared".

"Business and IT leaders are more optimistic about agentic AI’s potential, while the technical specialists responsible for deploying, governing, and operating it are more attuned to the practical hurdles ahead,” Riverbed added.

Although 42% of those polled are confident in their employers' governance and oversight of AI, for technical specialists that falls to 36%.

Plus, just 17% of technical specialists see fully autonomous agents making up a large part of their employers' operating model in the next few years, the survey found.

How to deliver autonomous IT operations

To build autonomous IT operations, respondents said they need high-quality data, unified observability, and consolidated tools.

But that isn't yet available, with 19% of overall respondents saying they lack the data required for AI-powered IT operations, with just 17% of technical experts agreeing.

A further 17% believe they have unified visibility, leaving the rest unprepared as yet, while 87% said they have yet to integrate tools and systems.

"The message is clear: organizations have strong ambitions for autonomous IT, but fragmented data, incomplete visibility, and disconnected tools are holding them back," the report added.

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NetApp has announced a brace of appointments to its UK&I senior leadership team, as the intelligent data infrastructure vendor looks to meet growing demand for AI, hybrid cloud, modernization, and cyber resilience solutions in the region.

The move sees Liam Varndell join NetApp’s UK&I business as senior director of solutions engineering, while Simon Mead steps into the role of senior director of partner sales.

The vendor said the additions will help strengthen its go-to-market capability across both countries, including its technical pre-sales organization and partner ecosystem, at a time of increasing complexity across customers’ IT setups.

In an announcement, Puneet Gupta, NetApp’s area vice president for the UK and Ireland, said the appointments underline the company’s continued investment in the region.

“Both Liam and Simon bring a proven track record of building teams, driving growth and helping our customers and partners solve real world data management challenges,” he commented.

According to NetApp, both leaders have already started meeting customers, partners, and internal teams across the region as they look to understand their needs and business priorities.

“As our customers and partners navigate an increasingly complex landscape of AI, hybrid cloud and cyber resilience, having leaders of this caliber strengthens our ability to be their most trusted data partner," Gupta added.

A seasoned industry veteran, Liam Varndell joins the business with over two decades of pre-sales and technical architecture leadership experience.

Most recently, he led enterprise pre-sales teams at Google Cloud, where scaled teams through significant growth and led major go-to-market integrations.

Prior to that, he has held positions at Data General, EMC, VCE, and Dell.

Varndell’s appointment comes as NetApp looks to ensure its technical teams are delivering high value to customers dealing with the rise of AI workloads and modern data and security challenges.

“My focus is on building a pre-sales environment where people feel supported, trusted and empowered to do their best work: that's how we deliver the best outcomes for our customers and partners," Varndell said.

Meanwhile, Simon Mead arrives with extensive channel and partner sales experience from previous senior roles at the likes of Red Hat and Dell.

As NetApp’s new senior director for partner sales, he is tasked with accelerating growth with strategic partners across the UK and Ireland as well as ensuring they are equipped to navigate the AI era.

"I've spent much of my career working across the channel and ecosystem, and I know that the best results come when vendors and partners are genuinely aligned," Mead said. “At NetApp, I see a real commitment to that.

“I fundamentally believe our partners will be at the heart of our growth, and I'm looking forward to working with and for them, alongside the wider NetApp team, to go after the opportunity ahead together."

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Asos users have told ITPro of their “shock and alarm” after receiving messages apparently sent by cyber criminals.

Users across the UK received a message on their smartphone this morning (6 October) warning of a data breach and urging the company to comply with demands.

“Dear Asos DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance,” the message reads. The notification also warned the online retailer to “engage with us or we will leak it”.

Snowflake has denied this claim.

In the wake of the notification, thousands of users took to social media to report their own experiences, contacting the retailer online for clarification. One user told ITPro they were shocked by the notification, but did not engage with the message or embedded link.

“It’s unusual for me to check the Asos notifications but this one caught my attention,” they said. “It’s very concerning and I’m worried about my information being leaked.”

“As someone who’s been a scam victim in the past I’m extra vigilant.”

Another told ITPro they were in a “state of shock and alarm” after receiving the message.

“It’s rather concerning that I’ve received a message from what seems to be some form of hacker group while on my way to work,” they said.

At this stage, it appears that the notification isn’t primarily aimed at compromising customers, but instead used as a blackmail tactic to force the retailer to comply with demands.

In a statement given to ITPro, a spokesperson for Asos confirmed the incident, adding that the retailer is "investigating activity involving third-party platforms that we use to communicate with customers".

Notably, the spokesperson said that "basic personal information including name and contact details may have been accessed".

"We do not believe that payment card information or account passwords were impacted," the statement reads. "Our website and app are operating as normal, with no current disruption to any aspects of our operations."

A spokesperson for Snowflake, meanwhile, told ITPro that when the company was made aware of the notification it began an investigation.

"At this time, we can report that we have found no compromise of the Snowflake platform," they said. "We take customer privacy and security very seriously. The investigation is ongoing and we will provide further updates as soon as more information becomes available."

Snowflake is a data management service provider used by enterprises globally. The company has been linked to a series of data breaches in recent years, including at companies such as Ticketmaster and AT&T.

Asos incident "one of the most visible attacks in history"

Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Adviser at ESET, said the incident ranks among one of the most “visible” cybersecurity incidents in recent memory. Concerningly, the notification suggests the threat actor(s) may have gained deep access to Asos systems.

“This has got to be one of the most visible hacks in history,” he said. “The fact the hackers managed to send a push notification to customers suggests they have gained access to at least some of Asos’s connected systems, but it doesn’t prove their full claims about the extent of the breach.”

“By broadcasting their breach directly to ASOS app users, the threat actors are likely trying to apply pressure to ASOS, showing how extensive their access is so they can leverage some sort of ransom,” Moore added.

Dan Bird MBE, field CTO for Emea at Horizon3, echoed Moore’s comments regarding the scope of the breach.

“Sending a push notification to Asos’s app users would require access to the company’s notification system, which is separate to the Snowflake data platform the attackers claim to have compromised,” he commented.

“If both claims hold up, it suggests the attackers got hold of credentials that opened more than one door.”

Who’s behind the Asos attack?

Details on who is behind the attack remain murky. However, the link sent to users directs them to a Telegram channel created today. This channel is believed to have been created by a group dubbed the ‘Xuanye Group’.

Moore urged users to avoid clicking on the notification or attempting to access the Telegram group.

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A Russian-speaking ransomware affiliate not only robbed his victims, but secretly cheated his Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) operator by setting up his own leak site.

Hacker Azazel worked as an affiliate of The Gentlemen ransomware group, according to recent research from CloudSEK. Using its tooling, negotiation channels and ransom note template, he attacked more than two dozen organizations in six countries.

Organizations targeted spanned industries such as logistics, medical services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and government-adjacent sectors.

CloudSEK said it was far larger than a typical affiliate setup, with more than 50TB of dedicated physical servers, including a 22TB long-term vault built to retain the proceeds across multiple campaigns.

However, researchers noted that Azazel was not running a standard affiliate playbook.

"He built and operated his own independent leak site under the brand LEAKNED, publishing victim data and collecting extortion proceeds without routing them through the Gentlemen program, a betrayal of the RaaS operator running alongside the betrayal of victims," CloudSEK said.

"One exfiltration was still actively running during the investigation, with a target directory growing by hundreds of gigabytes between observations."

All the confirmed victims were reached through stolen CI/CD secrets: a single compromised GitLab instance was used with two organizations, while one CI/CD token exposed more than 150 databases across a SaaS platform and its clients.

A first of its kind campaign?

Notably, in what CloudSEK describes as a criminal first with AI tooling, Azazel registered a reverse shell as a callable tool inside an AI agent harness via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and ran his attacks through it.

He also built infrastructure to scan the internet for exposed AI assistant ports, and used an AI assistant to manage his own criminal infrastructure.

In one case during an attack on an AI company, a sustained compromise began with an unvalidated AI imaging API, then moved through bulk credential decryption, a JWT token recovered from git history, offline Grafana password cracking and a full Kubernetes sweep.

More than 6TB was taken, and the transfer was still running when investigators found it.

In another, involving a government-linked financial registry, Azazel exfiltrated more than 120,000 records, then deleted the victim's live production database.

Double-crossing hacker has Russian ties

CloudSEK believes that Azazel is Russia-linked, thanks to the fluent Russian language used in operational scripts, while the staging server was codenamed "novostnik" - Russian for "newsman".

The news of Azazel's betrayal comes just weeks after it was revealed that hacking collective ShinyHunters launched an attack on rival cyber crime group Clop after long-running tensions between the two groups.

ShinyHunters hijacked Clop's dark web data leak site, leaving the message: "THIS SITE HAS BEEN PWN3D BY SHINYHUNTERS... Maybe don't try to threaten us next time", and demanded a ransom.

Similarly, research from Sophos last year revealed Russian-speaking group DragonHub took down the site of rival RansomHub, after which a RansomHub member defaced DragonForce’s site, labeling the group “traitors.”

It also apparently defaced the leak sites operated by the BlackLock and Mamona ransomware groups.

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The Danish government has confirmed a "deeply serious incident" which exposed personal data belonging to 8.8 million citizens.

Hackers accessed the Central Person Register (CPR) by taking advantage of a Danish company's access to the system, the government admitted in a statement on 5 October.

The data accessed includes names, addresses, CPR numbers – akin to national insurance numbers that also link to healthcare and other services – and other data on 8.8 million people registered on the system in Denmark.

Minister of research, education and digitalization Christina Egelund said in a statement translated to English that it was a "deeply serious incident" and that authorities were in the "process of mapping the full extent of the incident."

Danish data breach: What happened?

The attack was spotted on Friday night, with CPR staff observing irregular behavior on systems during September. Nathan Davies-Webb, principal consultant at Acumen Cyber, said this discovery gap is a highly concerning aspect of the breach.

"While this may not be a direct factor in this case, delays are common when a breach originates from a third-party."

Over the weekend following further investigation, it became clear that hackers had managed to access the names, addresses and CPR numbers of 8.8 million citizens.

While Denmark's population is about six million, the system includes people who have moved away from Denmark as well as those who have passed away, holding data on roughly 11 million people in total. The government said the hackers did not access the names and addresses of people who asked for address protection.

As the investigation is in early stages, the government said it wasn't possible to say who was behind the attack. However, officials said the threat actor(s) took advantage of a system that allows Danish companies to legitimately search for information within the CPR system.

The suggestion is the attackers gained access by targeting a private Danish company to target the CPR system.

Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, said the incident shows the risk of developing a centralized national database that offers direct access to third parties.

"A compromised account at a single supplier can bypass an organisation's core security controls and turn a legitimate connection into a massive data exposure," Agha said.

"To defend against this threat, governments and businesses must also strictly limit what external partners are allowed to view," Agha added. "They must also monitor these systems continuously to detect unusual search patterns before millions of records are extracted."

What next?

The government reported the incident to the Danish data protection regulator, and local police are investigating. Protections have been put in place to better protect the CPR, the government added.

In light of the breach, Egelund warned Danes to "be aware now and in the future," with a government statement warning citizens against giving out passwords or other confidential information over the phone or email to an unknown person, even if they have personal details like your address or CPR number.

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and co-founder of CyberSmart, agreed that Danes should be on the alert for phishing emails, texts and calls that claim to come from banks or public authorities.

This is a common tactic employed by threat actors in the wake of data breaches, with groups capitalizing on freely available information to conduct follow-up attacks on those impacted.

"Knowing your name, address or identification number does not make a caller trustworthy," Akhtar added.

"Customers must verify requests through an official website or a known telephone number, check accounts for unusual activity and report suspected fraud promptly."

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Nearly one-in-four UK business leaders pretend to know more about AI than they actually do, while even more are worried that their lack of expertise will affect career prospects.

New research from Emergn found that 23% admit to bluffing about their AI knowledge, with 38% believing their career will suffer unless they drastically improve their AI skills within the next year.

Despite the fact that every respondent had been in their role for at least five years, 22% said they feel anxious or lose sleep over how fast AI is changing their industry, with the same proportion feeling out of their depth because of AI’s impact on their role.

Training, though, is thin on the ground. Only 43% of UK senior leaders told researchers they had taken part in substantial, ongoing AI training in the past 12 months.

Four-in-ten, meanwhile, said that they'd change jobs if a new employer offered better AI training.

Workers are worried about AI skills capabilities

These concerns extend to their staff, with more than four-in-ten leaders saying they rate AI skills above formal qualifications, and 36% saying delivery performance would deteriorate significantly if their most experienced transformation people left.

“It is hard to admit you do not understand something when you are supposed to be the person with the answers. But pretending leaves you with the same unanswered question tomorrow. Employers need to make it easier for people to say where they are stuck and get useful help,” said Alex Adamopoulos, CEO at Emergn.

“If someone is worrying about their career or losing sleep over AI, telling them to keep up is not much of an answer. Give them time to learn and coaching they can use in the working day. People need to see a future for themselves as the work changes.”

It's not just leaders that are bluffing about their AI skills. A survey earlier this year from Pluralsight found that 79% of tech workers pretend to know more about AI than they actually do.

Despite this, though, nine-in-ten tech workers and execs said they believed they have the necessary skills to use AI in their day-to-day roles.

Earlier this year, the government launched a new program to train 10 million people in practical AI skills for work.

The idea is to teach them to use simple AI tools effectively in the workplace for tasks such as drafting text, creating content and completing administrative tasks.

Broadly speaking, the UK is severely lacking in AI skills, according to a report from the Learning and Work Institute and The Rigby Foundation.

Comprehensive AI upskilling could help boost UK productivity by 2.3% by 2035, creating a net present value of £80 billion over the next nine years.

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Digital work platform provider Omnissa has announced the appointment of Amit Singh as its new CEO, effective immediately.

A seasoned leadership veteran, Singh brings more than 35 years’ experience from across the technology industry and has previously served as president of Palo Alto Networks.

He succeeds Shankar Iyer, who recently stepped down from the role in order to pursue other opportunities.

During Singh’s most recent tenure as president of Palo Alto Networks, the company’s market value grew fivefold, launched several new billion-dollar businesses, and was crowned the world’s first $100 billion cyber security company.

Prior to his success at Palo Alto, he spent almost a decade at Google Cloud as co-founder and president, following an earlier two-decade spell at Oracle.

In an announcement, Omnissa said its new CEO brings the experience and vision needed to build on its strong foundation and help it define the era of agentic endpoints across the enterprise.

"Amit has helped build two of the defining enterprise platforms of the last 20 years," commented Angad Singh, co-head of software private equity in North America at KKR and member of Omnissa’s Board of Directors.

"The company is uniquely well positioned as AI agents increasingly handle that work and every enterprise considers how to safely harness AI technology. Amit is the right leader to help Omnissa make the most of this tremendous opportunity."

Omnissa specializes in digital workspace solutions, offering a platform that incorporates unified endpoint management, virtual desktops and applications, digital employee experience, and endpoint security, alongside a new suite of AI-first visibility and control tools.

The company says it now serves more than 15,000 enterprise customers as well as tens of millions of endpoints.

The rise of agentic endpoints across the enterprise

In his new role, Singh will work to accelerate the company’s momentum as endpoints continue to emerge as a critical security control plane due to the prominence of AI technologies.

Commenting on his appointment, Singh said he steps into the position at a “pivotal moment” for both the company and the wider industry.

"The shift to agentic AI is transforming how work gets done, and the endpoint is at the center of that transformation,” he explained. “I look forward to leading this team as we continue innovating and delivering products that will help our customers and partners manage and secure this next era of work.”

According to Singh, every laptop and phone within an enterprise network will be an agentic endpoint within a year, running multiple AI agents that act with the identity and permissions of the user.

He added that this change is reminiscent of the era that saw phones and personal devices gain prominence across the enterprise, with companies extending their existing management platforms rather than building new ones.

“Agents are a similar shift,” he said. “Omnissa already has the agent on the device, the credentials, the traffic, the telemetry and the remediation; our job now is to extend all of it to the agent and make it safe for CIOs and CISOs to say yes.”

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Huawei and Qualcomm have announced a multi-year patent license deal aimed at supporting research in areas such as 5G, AI, and networking.

The deal between the duo will include cross licensing for both companies’ patent portfolios, which span a range of technology domains. It also marks the first 5G patent licensing agreement between the two firms.

In addition, Qualcomm has agreed to purchase Huawei US patents relating to areas such as AI and networking. This reportedly includes licensing for the Chinese company’s LogicFolding chipmaking technique.

While the deal remains subject to regulatory approval, Huawei said the agreement highlights a shared commitment to IP rights and “licensing practices consistent with fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory principles”.

"Huawei's decades of sustained investment in fundamental R&D have driven innovation and progress in mobile communications and other technology fields,” said Huawei’s chief intellectual property officer, Alan Fan.

“Huawei's broad contributions to the 4G/5G standards, such as the near-physical-limit signal transmission technology using polar codes, have established Huawei's leadership in the mobile communications industry, and continuously transformed the way people communicate and live.”

Huawei made its first IP license payment to Qualcomm in 2001, the company noted, while its first IP license income came from Motorola in 2011. Since then, the total cumulative revenue from IP licensing has reached $6.9 billion.

To date, the company has signed upwards of 270 patent licensing agreements with companies in the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Europe.

John Han, EVP and GM of Qualcomm Technology Licensing, said the move reflects a recognition of Huawei’s “continued innovation and intellectual property in 5G and other technology fields”.

"Qualcomm has invested in foundational wireless technologies that have enabled successive generations of mobile innovation and earned broad recognition across the global wireless industry,” Han commented.

The announcement by the duo builds on a similar licensing agreement signed between Huawei and HP in August this year. At the time, the Chinese tech giant said it agreed to a multi-year deal for Wi-Fi patents.

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Anthropic has revealed plans to train more than 10,000 ‘frontier deployed engineers’ (FDEs) by the end of 2027 as the firm looks to drive enterprise AI adoption.

The Claude Frontier Academy, backed by $100 million in funding, will see the AI firm work with Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, McKinsey, and others to ramp up training of FDEs.

Steve Corfield, Anthropic’s global head of business development and partnerships, said the investment will target heightened adoption of Claude products and improve skills capabilities for customers.

“A small team of high-agency people with the right skills, access to Claude, and a deep understanding of how their business runs can transform an entire company,” he said.

“The hard part is building that depth of talent, engineers with the highest level of AI fluency who can take Claude from an idea to a system in production and turn it into faster processes and new products and services.”

The move by Anthropic comes just months after the launch of Ode, an enterprise AI services firm launched following a $1.5 billion investment. The joint venture includes support from consulting firms such as Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, with the aim of helping customers implement AI.

How Anthropic’s FDEs will work

According to Anthropic, the academy’s first program, dubbed the ‘Frontier Deployed Engineer Residency’, follows the “medical model for building expertise”.

Engineers will learn in a similar manner to practicing physicians by training on real-world use cases and are assessed before practicing alone.

“FDE Residency engineers learn from practitioners, practice on realistic cases, and are assessed on their work before they earn the credential,” the company explained in a blog post.

“The goal is agentic systems that change how a business runs, from faster, redesigned processes to new products and services.”

The program is designed specifically for “hands-on software engineers with strong fundamentals” and those with an extensive background in working with LLMs and supporting enterprise AI adoption projects.

Participating organizations are allowed to nominate individual engineers, who then undergo a multi-day program with Anthropic engineers and instructors, the company noted.

“They work through a simulated enterprise deployment, from the right use case through security review to handover, and finish with a graded practical on a new scenario,” Anthropic explained.

“Those who pass earn the Claude Resident Engineer badge and move into the 12-week residency, where they lead a real Claude use case at their own organization, supported by Anthropic engineers and learning from their cohort as they build.”

Anthropic revealed the first cohorts under the scheme are already running in San Francisco, New York, and London.

Anthropic’s multi-pronged approach to AI adoption

If you’re wondering why the term ‘FDE’ sounds familiar, it’s because these engineers have become a primary focus for big tech companies over the last year, albeit with a slightly different terminology.

Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, announced multi-billion dollar investments in ‘forward deployed engineer’ capabilities earlier this year.

As ITPro reported at the time, FDEs have rapidly become one of the most sought-after technology professionals globally as big tech providers look to accelerate integration of the technology for customers.

A key advantage of FDEs is that they’re embedded directly within customer teams to help support adoption processes and to build custom AI applications. AWS said its own strategy aims to compress integration timelines from “months to days”.

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AWS CEO Matt Garman has published a lengthy blog post suggesting that protests against data centers are misguided, and often prompted by hostile nations.

According to Garman, the US economy, national security, and ordinary people stand to benefit immensely from AI, and thus from data centers.

With more than 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country, Garman said making the wrong choices could put the country behind, potentially irreparably.

"With any change, there will be important questions raised, but there will also be misinformation and outright lies, and in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before," he wrote.

"In fact, this build out is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the US about data centers to trick us into slowing down."

As a sweetener to encourage more communities to approve data center plans, Garman announced plans to allocate $1 billion over the next five years under a program called Built Together.

How it's spent would depend on the communities themselves, but the money would likely go towards education, job training, energy affordability, and water and energy conservation.

Like Microsoft, Garman noted that the hyperscaler has also stopped using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when seeking approval for new data centers from government agencies, another long-standing source of contention.

Instead, he said the company is providing information about its plans as early as possible and listening to concerns.

Garman shrugs off data center concerns

Much of the post goes to trying to counter those concerns. Data centers actually use very little water relative to other industries, he said, with US golf courses alone using around 200 times as much water as all of Amazon’s data centers put together.

Nor are they driving up energy prices or emitting huge amounts of pollution via their large backup diesel generators, he claimed.

Data centers also offer significant advantages for local communities, according to Garman.

"Data centers bring considerable tax revenue, positive economic impact, large numbers of good jobs, education programs and other benefits to the communities where they’re built," he said.

"Additionally, thousands of construction jobs are created to build data centers. These jobs benefit families in these communities and are a boon for local small businesses,” Garman added.

“The average wages paid far exceed local and national medians, and the job numbers associated with these projects are typically very significant compared to the size of these communities."

AWS has a hard battle to fight, however, with surveys showing that the US public is extremely wary about the proliferation of data centers. In a poll last month by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, just 11% of Americans said they would support the construction of an AI data center in their local community, with 65% against.

Garman's comments on job creation also run counter to recent research in the UK, which showed that only a quarter of the roles predicted in upcoming projects will actually materialize.

Analysis from environmental think tank Verdant noted that data center projects will only create 10,400 workers. That marks a stark contrast to figures touted by TechUK, which predicts around 40,000 overall.

“The remarkable thing is that we can’t find a constituency that actually wants these data centers,” said Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll.

"The politics of AI may be somewhat polarized, but resistance to putting its infrastructure next door crosses the partisan divide.”

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Google has revealed it will pause its open source bug bounty program, attributing the move to a “significant rise” in AI slop submissions.

In a statement on 1 October, posted both to X and the program brief, the tech giant revealed the pause will be enforced until at least the first quarter of 2027.

“As of October 1 2026, we are no longer accepting product vulnerabilities submitted to the OSS VRP,” the statement reads. “This pause is due to a significant rise in automated submissions, the vast majority of which are not valid.”

Google noted that it still might accept some reports covering product vulnerabilities through Cloud VRP. Similarly, the changes do not affect vulnerability reports submitted before 1 October.

“We will continue to reformat and work on this aspect of the OSS VRP and commit to giving an update in Q1 2027. In the meantime, we encourage you to find impact across our other VRP programs and submit there instead, or pursue the Patch Rewards Program,” the company added.

AI slop submissions are a menace

The move by Google marks the latest in a series of efforts to clamp down on AI slop vulnerability reports in recent years. It’s an issue that has caused repeated issues across the open source community.

As ITPro reported in January this year, a bug bounty program run by Curl was shut down due to an onslaught of AI-generated contributions.

Daniel Stenberg, lead maintainer at the open source data transfer service, said teams were dealing with a torrent of submissions. Indeed, Curl recorded seven AI-generated contributions within just a sixteen hour period.

In an announcement at the time, Stenberg said this was placing a “high load” on security practitioners and the move aimed to “reduce the noise” created by AI-generated submissions.

The scale of AI slop reports across the open source community has reached such an extent that big tech companies have taken drastic action to tackle the issue.

In March, a consortium of companies pledged financial support for Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), both of which are security initiatives within the Linux Foundation.

That consortium included several industry big-hitters such as Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, GitHub, OpenAI, and AWS. The $12.5 million funding package aims to develop sustainable security solutions and help eliminate slop reports.

At the time, AWS’ Mark Ryland said AI-generated reports were overwhelming open source maintainers and impacting broader security processes.

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There’s been a lot of talk - and some action - about AI, but now is the time to really take things to the next level and make AI real for your business.

That was the key message tech giant Snowflake wanted delegates to take away from its Snowflake World Tour London event earlier this week. The event, hosted at the ExCeL, played home to more than 5,000 attendees, 60 partners, 72 sessions and 150 speakers.

“It's fantastic to see so many of you here. Customers, partners, innovators, data visionaries from all across the region wanting to make AI real for [their] business. What an incredible time to be together. The energy today will tell you everything about the pace of change we're seeing across our customers and industries,” said Jimmy Hall, Snowflake’s vice president and country manager for the UK and Ireland in his welcome address.

“Year after year, we've seen organizations across this region move at an incredible speed. [They’ve been] moving beyond pilots and experimentation, and putting AI into production at scale. [Ultimately], taking those ambitious ideas and turning them into real operational value.

He added: “We've moved from talking about the potential of AI to putting AI to work. It's now all about making AI real for business as we enter the era of the agentic enterprise; we're operating in a fast-moving environment. Arguably, the biggest risk any business could take right now is standing still. But moving fast with data and AI shouldn't mean losing control. It means having the foundation, the flexibility, and the confidence to move quickly.”

Data underpins AI ambition and results

That foundational element is key, according to Hall and his Snowflake peers. Indeed, while the momentum gained sounds very exciting, he cautioned that organizations must not forget the fundamentals. You cannot successfully implement an AI strategy unless you have the solid foundations of a good data strategy to support it, Hall stressed.

“There is some myth about data. Some organizations have been of the mindset that AI is so good and so smart, the data will sort itself out,” said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s EVP of Product.

“The reality is not quite. It won't happen. If anything, the opposite is true. The most amazing results you can envision for your organization with AI come from having a great data strategy.”

Event attendees looking for inspiration as to how to move the theory into reality didn’t have to wait too long. Hall was soon joined on stage by Kate Dohaney, CEO of giffgaff.

“I joined about eight months ago, and I knew we had a massive opportunity to lean into the world [of AI],” she said.

“We were already optimizing Snowflake at different levels and in different teams within our organization, but commercially we weren't seeing what we wanted from it. So we [created] a proper data strategy team and [have been] really teaching our business as a whole how to optimize information to better serve our customers.”

The company is keen to automate as much as possible, to free up valuable human resources from time-sink tasks so they can be more productive elsewhere, according to Dohaney.

“That means taking out the repetitive work, understanding the market, understanding our competitors, and having that ability without weeks and hours of human capital research. Snowflake has given us the right tools to move at pace,” she added.

“It empowers our business. It’s about partnering with the right tools, the right partner, to move quicker.”

Recipe for success

For organizations to truly benefit from what it means to be an agentic enterprise, they need to embrace four key elements, according to Kleinerman.

These are the choice of AI model, software and apps, enterprise data, and context, with all three of these linked in the middle to an agentic control plane, which Kleinerman described as “the glue”

He added: “That's what makes all of this together. This framework is high level. It's agnostic of any one technology or any one vendor. This is what we believe is needed for any of you to leverage and deploy AI successes.

“The promise of AI, in my mind, is unparalleled to other technologies that we've seen at least in our lifetimes. And hopefully, everyone here is excited about how you can help your organization achieve greater successes through the power of AI.”

Hall concluded the keynote by saying that we’re in the midst of “the biggest structural shift in enterprise technology of our lifetime.”

“As I said earlier, the biggest risk you could take now is standing still. The companies that will win this decade won't just apply standalone agents; they will build an agentic enterprise,” he continued.

“Turning this vision into reality requires investing in your data foundation today, and that comes down to three core priorities: one is modernizing your data space; secondly, making your data AI-ready; and thirdly, driving autonomous action and impact with AI.”

Three people, including a 16-year-old boy, have been arrested for alleged involvement in the KillSec ransomware operation.

Law enforcement bodies from several countries, led by the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office and the Hamburg Public Prosecutor's Office, raided eight properties in Spain, Greece, the UK, and Romania. Digital infrastructure, evidence, and criminal assets were seized.

They also took control of KillSec's leak site, securing at least 110 terabytes of data against further unauthorized access. Five central servers used to manage the group's activities and store data taken from victims were brought under police control, and KillSec's domains were redirected to a law enforcement seizure notice.

The unnamed 16-year-old, a Romanian national, is believed to have been the leading figure behind KillSec. Meanwhile, other suspects are believed to hold different roles within the group, including an administrator, a developer – still a minor when some of the offences were committed – a negotiator, and an affiliate.

"It's concerning to know a child was the mastermind behind it all. This is something the cyber security industry and governments cannot dismiss, because it clearly highlights we are not doing enough to deter young people from cyber crime," said Daniel Wilcock, threat intelligence analyst at Talion Cyber Security.

"These children, who clearly possess expert technical skills, need to be educated that there are other ways they can use their talents to make money."

Another alleged member of the group, Dutch national Fouad Eltibrizi, has meanwhile been charged in the US with conspiracy to intentionally access a computer without authorization for financial gain, intentionally causing damage without authorization to a protected computer, and intentionally transmitting a threat to obtain information from a protected computer without authorization with the intent to extort.

KillSec, a financially motivated ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group has been linked to around 1,000 suspected attacks worldwide. So far, around 500 of the suspected attacks have been identified as successful, a figure that may change as investigators examine the evidence seized, the authorities warned.

The group was first identified in 2024 when the group recruited affiliates via a dark web leak site and public Telegram channels to carry out attacks using its platform in exchange for a percentage of each ransom.

Last year, Group-IB's High-Tech Crime Trends Report 2026 ranked KillSec among the ten most active ransomware groups in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East. Financial services and healthcare were the most targeted sectors, while the victim list also included government bodies and a major insurer, investment firms, and a consumer app with millions of users.

Investigators are now examining the seized devices and data and tracing the group's criminal proceeds, including cryptocurrency. The evidence, said Europol, may help identify further victims, attacks, and people involved.

"Closing the gaps these groups exploit is essential, but it does not end an operation like this," said Dmitry Volkov, CEO of Group-IB, which was involved in the operation.

"Servers can be replaced in weeks; the people who build the platform and approve every attack cannot. Identifying them and supporting law enforcement in bringing them to justice is what turns a takedown from a pause into an end."

Chinese hackers impersonated prominent figures to target AI policy experts working for US think tanks, universities, and legal firms.

In July this year, according to Proofpoint researchers, a group tracked as TA419 pretended to be a former member of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy leadership team, Lynne Parker, as well as economist and foreign policy expert Heidi Crebo-Rediker.

In another incident, the group impersonated a senior employee of Anthropic to target an AI policy analyst at a US think tank, asking for feedback on the military integration of Claude.

The credential-phishing campaign started with apparently harmless emails proposing collaboration, for example, by joining an “AI Policy Advisory Committee”.

If the recipient took the bait, the hackers followed up with a multi-stage URL redirection chain that led to an Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM) credential phishing attack.

This involved using a customized version of the open-source Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) phishing tool Frameless BitB. This creates a fake browser window inside a webpage: a counterfeit Microsoft login pop-up placed over a page designed to look like a OneDrive document-sharing site.

This page relayed the login to genuine Microsoft infrastructure, allowing the harvesting of Microsoft 365 passwords, MFA codes, and session cookies.

Cloudflare’s content delivery network was used to obscure the backend hosting IP address for its domains, which are mostly registered via NameSilo.

TA419 is a China-aligned and espionage-motivated threat actor that's been carrying out credential phishing campaigns against individuals working for US- and Japan-based think tanks, defense contractors, universities, and law firms since at least April 2025.

"TA419 has consistently shown an interest in defense, national security, energy, international relations, and foreign policy targets, predominantly with a nexus to the US and Japan," said Proofpoint threat intelligence analyst Mark Kelly.

"The targeting of AI policy experts represents an extension of that remit rather than a departure from it."

The campaign, said Proofpoint, seems designed to support wider Chinese intelligence objectives around developments in US AI policy and regulation, as well as strategic competition over AI, export controls, and other critical technologies.

Two years ago, Proofpoint uncovered a similar campaign from the China-linked group UNK_SweetSpecter, targeting Western organizations involved in generative AI. This focused on individuals in academia, government entities, and high-profile private AI firms, including employees at OpenAI.

It said it also regularly observes China-aligned actors targeting other industries, such as semiconductors and rare earths, vital to the supply chain of AI and other strategic technologies.

Organizations likely to be a target of TA419 activity should, said Proofpoint, consider phishing-resistant, origin-bound authentication such as passkeys. Individuals, meanwhile, should be wary of unsolicited emails, and check that they're genuine via another route of communication.

"Proofpoint assesses that TA419 will likely continue targeting think tanks and policy experts working on technologies, and in geographies, of particular interest to the Chinese government," said Kelly. "These campaigns will likely also continue spoofing the identities of real subject-matter experts."

Kaseya has announced the findings from a new study by Omdia, which lays out the business value that MSPs and IT teams have gained by standardizing on the vendor's unified IT service delivery solution.

The study, which was commissioned by Kaseya and conducted by the technology research firm, quizzed eight MSPs and eight internal IT teams in North America that have adopted the platform, as well as five non-Kaseya customers.

It found that by bringing together endpoint management, service desk operations, and IT documentation into a unified workflow, organizations have benefited from a number of operational improvements.

Specifically, businesses leveraging Datto RMM, Autotask PSA, and IT Glue solutions reported increased operational efficiency, reduced costs, as well as an increase in service capacity.

Omdia principal analyst Devan Adams said the findings come as IT organizations must "do more, with less" when supporting an increasing number of users and devices with limited resources.

"Better operational efficiency, higher-quality service delivery and improved financial performance were the outcomes that organizations we interviewed achieved and reported meaningful gains after standardizing on a unified approach to IT operations," he explained.

As consolidation of IT solutions has emerged as a top priority for more than 40% of IT organizations, Adams said the focus has shifted away from adding more technology and staff to finding ways in which to maximize existing tools.

"The results demonstrate how unified IT service delivery solutions can enhance scalability and service levels while freeing current resources for higher-value initiatives."

Cost and operational benefits for MSPs

According to the feedback, MSPs using Kaseya's unified platform reported average cost savings of approximately $2,600 per technician per month, equating to an annual saving of around $312,000 for a ten-person team.

For internal IT teams, the data revealed savings of around $2,900 per staff member per month – a yearly saving of approximately $350,000 per team of ten.

The platform was also found to help lower operational costs, with MSPs reporting approximately 33% lower operating expenditure and 12% higher contract margins. Internal IT teams participating in the research reported savings of 24% and were able to redirect almost a fifth (19%) of their budget toward other priorities such as cyber security and training.

Additionally, MSPs were able to increase the number of endpoints managed per technician by 27%, effectively minimizing the need to add to their headcount, while ticket resolution times saw an improvement of almost a third (32%).

On the compliance front, Omdia found that MSPs also managed to improve SLA compliance by 17%, with an average of 83% of tickets resolved within SLA targets.

Datto RMM improvements

Kaseya said Omdia's findings underline its continued investment in its Datto RMM solution, for which the firm has introduced several innovations over the last year -- including AI-enhanced smart insights, dynamic grouping policies, expanded Microsoft 365 integrations, as well as enhanced API capabilities.

Johnny Ghibril, general manager of endpoint solutions at Kaseya, added that the data highlights the ongoing trend of IT teams seeking less complexity across their operations.

"Datto RMM is proof of what that looks like in practice," he commented. "The AI driven innovation we shipped over the past year is already delivering measurable efficiency gains for MSPs, and paired with the power of IT Service Delivery, it's helping organizations increase productivity, improve customer experiences, and drive stronger business outcomes while creating capacity for future growth."

AI is going to have to earn its keep by inspiring $4 trillion of as yet unknown applications and services, with annual spending on AI infrastructure reaching $1.5 trillion in the next five years.

That's according to Bain & Company's Technology Report, which notes that the size and cost of AI data centers is doubling every 12 to 16 months.

Last year, Meta's 600MW Prometheus cost about $24 billion to build, and data centers currently in the works at 1-2GW will cost between $40 billion and $80 billion to build — climbing to $200 billion for a 9GW data center in 2030, the analyst firm predicted.

That suggests annual spending on AI infrastructure will top $1.5 trillion by 2031, Bain predicted, including new data centers and compute, as well as upgrades to existing GPUs, memory, and networking equipment.

Doubling costs

That's double what's expected to be spent this year, with Bain predicting $780 billion in capital expenditure across the five key hyperscalers, though that does include investments beyond AI. IDC predicts AI infrastructure spending of $497 billion this year, while Gartner puts it at more than $1 trillion, including a wider range of equipment.

What they do agree on is significant growth: Bain has the figure doubling to $1.5 trillion by 2031, IDC predicts $1.2 trillion by 2030, and Garter sees total AI spending doubling in just two years.

That raises a challenge: can AI earn enough to cover these costs? Bain argues yes – but with some caveats.

"The infrastructure is being built ahead of the demand curve, and funding it sustainably will require adding approximately 1% to the annual global GDP growth rate," Bain's analysts say. "The question is whether the applications arrive in time to pay for it."

Paying for AI

First, the analysts at Bain argue that CapEx for cloud providers is usually about a quarter of industry revenue, meaning AI will need to earn $6 trillion in revenue by 2031 to maintain that margin.

By 2031, consumer AI products could contribute between $200 billion to $400 billion by 2031 via subscriptions and advertising. "Enterprise adoption could contribute another $1 trillion to $1.4 trillion in gains to providers alone as AI delivers meaningful productivity gains to enterprises across software development, sales, marketing, customer service, and IT operations," Bain's analyst predict.

That leaves about $4.2 trillion of revenue missing. Bain figures this will come from four new categories, starting with search and advertising at $100 billion to $200 billion, with ads integrated into chatbots as traditional online search is disrupted.

Missing $4 trillion

That leaves $4 trillion. Bain says $400 billion could come from autonomous operations of cars, drones, and robotaxis, as well as logistics, while physical AI could add $900 billion via simulations, digital twins, and the deployment of robotics – including humanoid ones.

That leaves another $2.7 trillion to be made up in new product development, anything from drug discovery to materials sciences, Bain suggests.

The point isn't that AI is expensive, but that companies need to do more with it than merely shave a few percentage points from their bottom lines.

"The economics required to generate ROI from AI infrastructure are demanding trillions in new revenue, not just cost savings," Bain said. "The industry needs a wave of application innovation comparable with what mobile and cloud unlocked, not just productivity gains on existing workflows."

Cannibalising tech

While the tech industry is seeking revenue for AI, that same technology is eating away at margins in other departments.

Bain noted that software revenue growth has "moderated significantly" from 20% annually in 2022 to half that last year. On the flip side, Bain predicted that agentic AI could prove to be a $100 billion opportunity for SaaS providers.

Beyond costs and revenue, Bain also warned in its technology report that the $5 trillion data center rollout still faces constraints from power, chips, skilled labor, and permits.

"Individual projects are finding workarounds, but they can’t be replicated at scale, and some are controversial. Colossus (from xAI, now part of SpaceXAI) was built in under a year by repurposing a factory and leasing dozens of gas turbines without federal clean air permits, drawing a lawsuit," Bain said.

The analysts added: "Meeting the global ambition instead will require system-level fixes outside the usual free-market playbook. A grand challenge on this scale demands grand solutions, and executives planning on business as usual will get blindsided."

You can lose a job to AI, but in California, a human has to make the decision to fire you.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law the No Robo Bosses Act 2026, requiring human oversight in the workplace specifically when it comes to firing or disciplining workers.

Act SB 947, as it's officially known, was introduced by Senator Jerry McNerney to push back against the use of automated decision making systems (ADS) in the workplace. In a statement, McNerney's office pointed to the rise of "bossware" products used to manage workplaces, which have led to people being mistakenly fired. The new law doesn't outright ban the use of such systems, but requires a human in the loop.

“No worker should ever be fired or disciplined by a robo boss," said McNerney, in a statement. "Artificial intelligence systems have the potential to increase productivity, but they’ve also been prone to errors, bias, and misjudgments.”

McNerney added that the aim is ensuring human oversight in workplaces. “AI must remain a tool controlled by humans, not the other way around," he said.

California has led AI regulation, with laws requiring frontier AI developers to report safety incidents and publish safety frameworks, forcing AI generated content to be labeled as such, and creating a registry for AI auditors, alongside rules targeting political and sexual deepfakes, and AI generated unauthorised replicas of performers, among others. Newsom signed into law a list of other AI rules this week, including banning lawyers from handing over core work wholly to AI and requiring educational institutions to train staff and students about AI.

"Super intelligence is clearly not coming from the White House – that’s why California continues to lead," Newsom said in a statement. "AI should expand opportunity – not come at the expense of workers and families. As this technology reshapes the workplace, California is putting people at the center, ensuring we all have a voice in the decisions shaping their future."

No robo bosses

The robo boss legislation has three points. First, it bans employers from relying solely on ADS to make firing or disciplinary decisions. Second, it requires human oversight and verification when employers do use ADS to assist in those decisions. And third, if a company does use ADS for termination or disciplinary decisions, the impacted worker must be informed.

The rules will be enforced by the California labor commissioner, state attorney general, or local prosecutors. Similar laws are in the works in a handful of other states.

The law was backed by the local labor union, with Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions saying the law gives "other states and the nation a clear example of how, by letting workers lead, we can stop some of [the] worst abuses of AI at work."

SB 947 originally included a provision to notify employees if an AI system would impact their work, but Newsom vetoed it saying the focus should be on misuse rather than forcing "unfocused notification requirements on any business using even the most innocuous tools," he said at the time. That aspect was removed, as were protections for gig workers.

Rise of AI workplaces

The move comes as management becomes increasingly automated or algorithmically controlled. A survey from the OECD last year found that 90% of American managers polled said they have at least one such tool in place, versus 79% across Europe and 40% in Japan.

Beyond prevalence, that study also found that US companies were more likely than European counterparts to use algorithmic management for monitoring or evaluating workers even if it involves personal data and has "consequential outcomes" such as access to work. The study added that two-thirds of managers were concerned about the impact on workers, particularly with regards to unclear accountability in the case of incorrect decisions.

One example of that playing out now regards Meta, which faces a lawsuit after the Facebook-owner attempted to apply AI to monitoring and managing its own workers earlier this year, taking into account everything from token usage to keystroke monitoring – and reportedly using that data when deciding on a massive round of layoffs.

In response, a group of former and current staff have sued.

"Meta used a constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems – including a system referred to internally as ‘Metamate,’ employee-trained ‘second-brain’ agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration – to score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the list," a court filing reads, noting the system disadvantaged those on leave, including for maternity or disability.

The number of vulnerability disclosures made each month has more than doubled since the start of the year, hitting 10,740 in August, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG).

The researchers also found the number of vulnerabilities being exploited is showing a similar trajectory. In 2025, the average was 10.5 exploits per month, this rose to 18 per month from January 2026 to August 2026.

The researchers said they expect both these trends to continue in the short to medium term.

Zero-day exploitation, however, increased only marginally, rising from an average of eight cases per month in 2025 to an average of 11 from January 2026 to August 2026.

According to GTIG, AI is changing not just the pace of vulnerability discovery and exploitation, but also the types of vulnerabilities that are being discovered.

While fewer low-risk vulnerabilities are being found, there are more moderate-risk vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities leading to remote code execution (RCE) are being unearthed.

High-risk vulnerabilities surged from 131 disclosures in January 2026 to 350 in August, up by 167%, although they still account for just 3% of all vulnerabilities disclosed. The increase, said GTIG, comes down to a widening pool of affected vendors and concentrated vendor disclosure cycles.

"It’s important to note that the proportion of vulnerabilities exploited versus disclosed remains vanishingly small: only 0.23% of all disclosed vulnerabilities in 2026 (roughly one in 431) were ever observed in active exploitation, or on the order of tens versus thousands per month," the researchers said.

"This means that monthly exploitation counts can more easily be influenced by other factors such as vendor disclosure cycles and threat actor campaign spikes."

Meanwhile, current public data significantly undercounts vulnerabilities discovered by AI, the researchers said. This is partly due to the absence of standardized metadata, and partly because of silent first-party and cloud patching. Major cloud and SaaS providers routinely remediate AI-surfaced vulnerabilities directly in production without requesting formal CVE IDs, with CVE assignments typically reserved for on-premises or third-party software.

The increase in vulnerability discovery, said Steve Povolny, vice president of AI strategy and security research at Exabeam, shouldn't come as a surprise.

"We know by now that AI models are able to achieve speed, scale and efficiency that few, if any, human beings are capable of. Inevitably, discovering known flaws and finding ways to exploit them is par for the course when it comes to AI," he said.

However, he highlighted the lack of change in zero-day exploitation.

"This leads to one of two conclusions: first, AI models are very good at uncovering known (N-day) vulnerabilities but not mature enough to discover widespread zero-day vulnerabilities of significance," he suggested.

"The second option is that AI augmented zero-day discovery is happening en masse, but flying under the radar, based on the inherent value it provides to attackers such as nation states and zero-day bug broker groups. Given the amount of security researchers focused on leveraging AI for zero-day discovery, I think the latter is less likely."

Schools and colleges across England are experiencing fewer cyber attacks and are getting better at dealing with the fallout when they do.

New data from exams regulator Ofqual shows that 27% of schools experienced a cyber incident during the 2025 to 2026 academic year, down from 29% in the previous year and 34% in 2023 to 2024.

And when incidents do occur, schools are recovering more quickly, with 66% able to recover immediately, up from 55% in the previous year. Critical damage from attacks has also fallen, down to 7%.

"It's encouraging to see schools recovering faster, but a cyber breach can still cause real uncertainty for students if coursework or marks are lost, and staff confidence can be affected long after systems are back online," said Amanda Swann, Ofqual's executive director of delivery.

When asked who is primarily responsible for cyber security, 46% of teachers said their IT team, 40% said all staff, and just 9% said it was senior leadership.

But, said Swann, "Cybersecurity isn't just an IT problem; it's a leadership responsibility. Regular backups and a clear response plan can make a huge difference when things go wrong."

More than half of the secondary schools surveyed, 55%, have already taken action to protect against cyber attacks, with measures including implementing a cybersecurity policy, carrying out risk assessments, and setting up backup and recovery procedures.

Education is one of the most frequently attacked sectors. Schools and colleges hold large amounts of personal data on both pupils and staff, while low budgets mean that cybersecurity is often underfunded.

Earlier this week, SonicWall urged educational establishments to beware of exposure to legacy vulnerabilities. Apache Log4j2 Remote Code Execution, for example, was the leading signature targeting UK primary and secondary schools last year, generating around 660,000 hits.

There were also 71,000 attempts against TFTP Server Directory Traversal signatures during the year, targeting network boot infrastructure that's widely used in school IT environments.

Earlier this year, an attack on the C2K system, which provides access to coursework, teaching materials, exam revision tools and communication platforms, affected more than 30 schools across Northern Ireland, leaving staff and pupils unable to access services.

Last year, West Lothian council's education network was hit by a ransomware attack that saw the loss of data from a dozen schools.

According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), it's often the pupils themselves who are responsible, for reasons ranging from boredom to financial gain.

Ofqual is urging schools to put more robust measures in place so staff know what to do if systems do come under fire. It recommends that educational institutions visit the Department for Education's Cyber Security Hub for advice on how to strengthen their cyber resilience, prepare for cyber incidents and respond effectively when attacks happen.

Meanwhile, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) offers security advice for governing boards and senior leaders, school staff and admin teams, procurers and providers.

Ping Identity has announced the launch of three new identity agents designed to enable employee self-service and identity administration capabilities in Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise.

Available now on Google Cloud Marketplace, the identity and access management (IAM) vendor's offerings allow employees and authorized administrators to use natural-language conversations to complete common identity tasks.

Built using Google's Agent Development Kit, the agents eliminate the need to move between Gemini Enterprise and separate identity management interfaces. Employees can manage device authentication, while administrators can preset passwords, terminate sessions, and manage access.

In an announcement, Ping Identity founder and CEO Andre Durand said the launch comes as AI continues to establish itself as a new interface for work.

"Identity can't remain trapped behind a separate console," he explained. "Our new agents enable identity administration capabilities directly in Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise, putting identity into the flow of how people work, while keeping every action tied to the authority of the person behind it."

Strengthening identity administration

Ping said its new identity agents have been built to connect natural language requests to defined identity actions through its APIs, within each case and user's boundaries of authority.

With the PingID Device Management Agent, signed-in employees gain a conversational method in which to manage their authentication devices. They can perform activities such as pairing a replacement phone, viewing registered devices, renaming devices, selecting a default device, or removing an old device without juggling multiple management tools.

According to the vendor, the agent holds no standing credentials – meaning it can only perform operations with direction from an authenticated user and cannot independently access resources.

Elsewhere, the firm's new PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud Administrator Agent and PingOne Administrator Agent aim to bolster support for user, access, and session management.

Within the agents' assigned access controls and administrative permissions, administrators can perform common tasks such as resetting passwords, managing multi-factor authentication (MFA) enrollment, and reviewing user activity using natural language requests.

Ping added that only approved operators can access changes within the Advanced Identity Cloud offering, with the agent requiring "explicit confirmation" before taking any action.

Dai Vu, Google Cloud's managing director of marketplace and ISV GTM programs, said Ping's new identity tools will help customers quickly deploy, manage, and grow the agents on the cloud giant's global infrastructure.

"Ping Identity can now securely scale and support organizations using its agents to help employees and administrators working in Gemini Enterprise operate within established identity controls more efficiently," he commented.

WatchGuard Technologies has announced the appointment of Allison Clarke as vice president of partner programs and go-to-market strategy.

Clark steps into the newly created role as the unified cybersecurity specialist moves to strengthen its channel-first business model and further streamline its partner experience.

The seasoned channel leader is tasked with leading the strategy, innovation, and alignment of WatchGuard's partner programs and go-to-market initiatives across all routes to market.

According to the vendor, she will work to ensure partners' voices play a key role in shaping business decisions – from programs and enablement to pricing, packaging, and product strategy.

In an announcement, WatchGuard CEO Joe Smolarski said the goal is to make it easy for partners to do business and grow with the company.

"Partners are at the center of everything we do, and Allison's appointment reflects our commitment to building a more connected, frictionless partner experience," he explained. "Her track record of creating programs that help partners grow makes her the right leader to help drive our next phase of channel success."

WatchGuard specializes in unified cybersecurity, with its AI-powered Unified Security Platform providing Zero Trust-aligned network, endpoint, identity, and cloud security in a single, integrated solution. The company says it currently serves more than 25,000 MSPs, who work to protect more than 1.5 million customers globally.

Clarke joins the business with more than 20 years of channel leadership experience, most recently serving as vice president of go-to-market and partner programs at SonicWall.

Prior to that, she spent almost a decade at Sophos, where she shaped the cybersecurity vendor's global channel strategy and partner programs, and has previously helped build and scale channel initiatives at McAfee.

Commenting on her appointment, Clarke highlighted WatchGuard's commitment to its partners as a key reason for joining the business.

"Partners want to do business on their terms, through the routes and motions that work best for them," she said. "My focus is on ensuring every interaction with WatchGuard is as simple, consistent, and rewarding as possible.

"I'm especially looking forward to meeting our partner community at IMPACT in Nashville and hearing directly from them about how we can continue improving their experience and helping them grow."

NetApp and Oracle have launched a new fully managed storage service that will integrate NetApp’s storage service with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

The move, announced at NetApp Insight 2026, will see cloud storage giant’s Ontap storage offering made available natively on OCI.

NetApp said the integration will help organisations “simplify the migration and management of critical AI and enterprise workloads in the cloud”.

Moving forward, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure NetApp Storage Service will operate as a fully-managed native service, with customers able to manage assets through the OCI Console and SDKs, as well as through ONTAP APIs.

The duo confirmed the service will reach general availability “within the next 12 months”.

The integration with OCI marks another notable hyperscaler win for NetApp. The cloud storage provider already has close ties with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud.

NetApp’s first native storage service deal with a hyperscaler came in 2017 with the launch of Microsoft for Azure NetApp Files. This was followed by AWS in 2021 and Google Cloud in 2023.

Simplified cloud shifting

With the launch of the new service, NetApp said this will enable customers to move existing ONTAP=based workloads to cloud more efficiently, while also “minimizing application redesign and storage management changes”.

Speaking to assembled press ahead of the conference, Pravjit Tiwana, SVP and GM for cloud storage and service at NetApp, said this will offer marked benefits for enterprises.

Indeed, customers with early access to the service have already reported positive experiences.

“We are integrated into the Oracle stack from [a] data plane, control plane perspective,” he said. “We already have customers who are using it for a wide number of use cases, be it about life and shift of their applications”.

Tiwana noted that for customers that have built applications through Ontap on-prem, they can “just take it to the cloud” and “don’t have to amend your applications in any shape or form”.

Notably, Tiwana said that NetApp already has a “large footprint” of customers who use Oracle database services, so the integration is a natural fit.

In a statement, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, SVP of partnerships at OCI, said the deal will play a key role in reducing the strain placed on enterprises moving to the cloud.

“Enterprises shouldn’t have to rebuild their data infrastructure to move to the cloud,” Papamiltiadis commented. “OCI NetApp Storage Service gives customers a trusted, familiar path to OCI, so they can focus on what the data does, not how it's managed.”

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UK tech leaders are calling on the government to invest much more heavily in sovereign AI.

In an open letter to Andy Burnham and AI minister Kaniska Narayan, executives from defense, financial services and critical national infrastructure firms say there's an urgent need to strengthen public confidence and national resilience.

Signatories include AI lab Cosine, PA Consulting, BT, Telefónica Tech, Leonardo, HPE, Kainos and Sopra Steria.

"AI is now a question of national capability. Countries with reliable access to compute, secure deployment pathways, strategic models, and effective procurement will have greater resilience and influence," the letter reads.

"Countries that lack those capabilities risk becoming dependent on decisions, infrastructure and operating conditions elsewhere."

The group wants to see financial support of at least £20 billion over the next five years, through public investment, procurement guarantees, and co-investment. This, they said, should be targeted at establishing sovereign British AI compute, power, data-center capacity, and network infrastructure for government, defense, academia, and strategic industry.

It's calling for changes to planning laws, energy policy, procurement, and long-term contracts to help AI firms, and a fast-track sovereign AI procurement route for urgent national priorities.

There should be financial backing for UK-led model development, with government, defense, and the NHS gaining access to proprietary British datasets for training these models, with strict privacy safeguards, mandatory audit trails, and interoperability standards.

"No mission-critical public service or critical national infrastructure should depend on a single model, provider, or cloud stack," Cosine said.

"Independent testing, evaluation and monitoring of AI models is essential to enable safe, secure and trusted AI adoption. Mandate tested fallback arrangements, independent alternatives, and human-in-the-loop control for all high-consequence AI systems."

The government, said the firms, should identify the areas of the AI value chain where the UK can become world-leading, then align infrastructure, procurement, research, regulation, and investment behind them. It should create a cross-party ten-year Sovereign AI Strategy with clear objectives, annual accountability, and long-term funding certainty.

Infrastructure, common standards, and interoperable systems should be shared with like-minded nations.

And it should identify the areas of the AI value chain where the UK can become world-leading, then align infrastructure, procurement, research, regulation, and investment behind them. It should create a cross-party ten-year Sovereign AI Strategy with clear objectives, annual accountability, and long-term funding certainty.

"Britain is coming from a position of strength. It has world-class research, deep software talent, strong cyber capability, credible institutions, strong digital infrastructure, and real advantages in science, defence and public services," the letter reads.

"But without a plan for AI sovereignty, the UK risks becoming a customer in the most important technological shift of this era, rather than a serious builder."

Earlier this year, the government launched a £500 million Sovereign AI fund aimed at helping domestic AI companies scale.

This will act as a venture capital fund within the government, making targeted investments in UK AI firms, and providing direct access to the UK's fastest AI supercomputers, along with specialist R&D support and grants.

Nearly half of UK employers are planning to boost their technology teams by the end of this year, looking mostly for security, AI, and cloud skills.

According to new research from Robert Half, 47% of UK employers hope to boost their tech workforce, with 54% looking for cyber security skills, 50% agentic AI skills, 48% generative AI skills, and 44% cloud skills.

Meanwhile, another 25% are expanding contract and project-based hiring.

"Technology remains one of the most active areas of hiring in the UK labor market, with nearly half of employers planning to grow their permanent technology teams before the end of the year," said Matt Weston, senior managing director, UK & Ireland at Robert Half.

"Businesses continue to invest heavily in cyber security, cloud infrastructure, and artificial intelligence, but they're not simply looking for more people. They're looking for professionals with the right blend of technical expertise, commercial understanding and the ability to work effectively alongside AI."

According to the researchers, 45% of UK technology professionals say they're now expected to develop new AI-related skills, while 38% spend more time overseeing and validating AI-generated outputs. At the same time, 53% say AI has cut the time they're spending on routine tasks, and 37% that their roles have become more strategic.

The findings, said the team, point to a growing demand for professionals who can work effectively alongside AI systems, applying human judgment to ensure accuracy, quality, security, and compliance.

"As organizations increase investment in AI, cloud infrastructure and cyber security, we're seeing strong demand for professionals who combine technical expertise with strategic decision-making," said Weston.

"AI is automating some tasks, but it isn't replacing the need for skilled technology talent. In many cases, it's making those skills even more valuable."

With cyber threats continuing to evolve and businesses increasing investment in AI-powered technologies, the firm said it expects competition for specialist talent to remain strong, especially for those with expertise in cyber security, AI, and cloud environments.

The report coincides with the UK government's latest figures on the cyber security workforce, showing that it's expanded by only 2% over the last year – although it, too, finds that most companies are looking to hire this year.

There was a 7% increase in core cyber security job postings – roles where some aspect of cyber security is the main job function – and a rise of 10% for roles that might not be formally labeled as cyber security jobs but that still require cyber security skills.

However, 57% of businesses said they had a basic technical skills gap, up from last year's 49%.

Back in January, the government announced plans to provide 10 million workers with key AI skills by 2030 through free courses available to all, opening a skills hub that's already seen the delivery of more than a million courses. Meanwhile, the NCSC offers training courses for both novices and experienced security professionals, with courses targeted at sectors from board members to schools.

Opengear has signed its first European distribution agreement with Ingram Micro, in a move the vendor said will significantly expand the availability of its network resilience services across the region.

From 1 October, resellers across 20 European markets will have access to Opengear's portfolio, backed by the distribution giant's partner network, regional infrastructure, and logistics capabilities.

The company said the move broadens its existing reach in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, while bringing its network resilience platform to additional markets – including Switzerland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

In an announcement, Alan Stewart-Brown, Opengear's vice president of sales for EMEA and APAC, described the agreement as a "significant milestone" in the firm's EMEA growth strategy.

"Ingram Micro gives us the regional scale to put Opengear products and expertise closer to our partners," he explained. "That means increased regional availability, local support, and a simpler way to protect critical infrastructure across EMEA."

Headquartered in Utah, Opengear specializes in out-of-band access to network infrastructure. The firm's technology is designed to help IT teams monitor, manage, and recover critical assets when the primary network is unavailable, while offering strong presence and proximity to connected network devices.

Through the new European distribution deal, Ingram Micro will provide pre- and post-sales support via its partner network across EMEA, with partners gaining access to training, accreditation, channel enablement, and incentive programs.

Meanwhile, Opengear said resellers will also be able to add its network resilience solutions to their existing enterprise networking portfolios.

Commenting on the deal, Renke Krüger, executive director at Ingram Micro's Pan Europe division, said the increased access to Opengear's offerings will enable more businesses to strengthen their response to operational disruptions.

"Opengear addresses a growing need in today's market: helping organisations to maintain resilient, secure and recoverable networks in an increasingly complex operating environment," he said.

"We're proud to extend the reach of Opengear's market-leading solutions across EMEA through our partner ecosystem, enabling resellers to deliver proven, trusted technologies that safeguard business continuity during disruptions and simplify and strengthen day-to-day network operations."

NetApp CEO George Kurian believes that despite the hype surrounding AI, achieving success with the technology still rests firmly on time-tested transformation tactics.

Speaking to ITPro at NetApp Insight 2026, the chief executive said that long-running adoption challenges with the technology show that it can’t become a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Indeed, grounded leadership and clear cut strategies are still vital to successful adoption projects.

“Like all transformations, AI transformation is a leadership and business transformation,” he told ITPro. “It’s not a technology transformation. It’s enabled by technology, like the desktop computer or client-server computing, or the internet. But it is a business and leadership-led transformation.”

Kurian’s comments come in the wake of repeated studies highlighting the challenges faced by enterprises adopting AI over the last three years.

A study from MIT in August 2025, for example, found 95% of AI projects were failing. Similar research in January this year, meanwhile, found that half of agentic AI projects were stuck at the pilot stage.

The result is that executives have become increasingly irate at the pace of adoption, with firms failing to push projects from pilot to production. Analysis from PwC found just one-in-eight CEOs reported cost and revenue improvements.

Getting AI data ready

Enterprises have faced a series of common recurring pain points when it comes to AI adoption, all of which are typically centered around data quality and infrastructure capabilities.

Research from IDC identified data quality as a leading problem on this front, with more than half (52%) of companies highlighting this as “the most important factor for AI projects success”.

On the infrastructure side, IDC’s study also found seven-in-ten business leaders cited data silos as the “biggest challenges for AI adoption”.

NetApp is now focused intently on both these fronts, emphasizing the importance of both modern storage infrastructure capabilities while providing customers with an array of data management tools.

The firm’s ONTAP data management software, for example, is designed specifically to help eliminate data silos and improve visibility. The NetApp Console, meanwhile, offers users a centralized management tool to monitor and optimize infrastructure processes.

At NetApp Insight this week, the company unveiled yet more capabilities on this front, including new AI-powered features aimed at improving automated storage management.

New AI features will provide customers with predictive maintenance insights and automated remediation, for example, while users can also integrate their own large language models (LLMs) within the console.

Kurian told ITPro that while these capabilities are vital for enterprises modernizing their IT estates and ramping up AI adoption, the basic transformation fundamentals still remain crucial.

“I think with regard to data prep and data quality, there are capabilities like what we are introducing, but also that the LLMs provide to be able to solve those challenges better,” he said.

“It doesn’t mean that because the technologies are there that it magically gets solved.”

Kurian added that NetApp engages closely with customers on this front, in particular by showcasing use-cases and best practices by leading organizations.

“I think it is an organizational question, and so we work with our clients to show them what is possible and the best practices of the high-performing organizations that have been successful with it. And there are more and more of those.”

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NetApp has unveiled a file system it claims is the “fastest storage on the planet” in a bid to tackle AI factory bottlenecks.

Dubbed ‘NetApp Novus’, the new system is designed primarily for organizations running AI factories, such as Neoclouds and GPU as a service providers. According to the firm, the launch comes in direct response to long-standing storage-related constraints, sparked by rampant AI advances.

Speaking to assembled press at NetApp Insight, Kurian noted that traditional storage architectures were never designed to contend with the huge compute demands of AI factories.

“We see clients in the largest AI factories or the enterprise struggle with how to work with the modern data and compute infrastructures,” he said.

“Most GPUs are not fed data at the rates that they need to be fed. They have a high degree of parallelism and concurrency, which makes traditional storage architectures not capable of addressing those requirements.”

Put simply, traditional storage architectures can’t keep pace with the scale and performance requirements of AI factories.

Bottlenecks, increased infrastructure costs, and reduced GPU utilization are all a direct consequence, and that has a downstream impact on broader AI innovation.

Figures touted by the company at its annual Insight conference this year show that, under traditional architectures, GPU utilization can drop below 30% when AI factories can’t feed enough data to GPUs.

With Novus, NetApp is tackling this challenge head on. The system will support zettabyte scale and is built to exceed throughput of 100Tbps, allowing AI factories to continuously feed thousands of GPUs at any given time.

Kurian went to great lengths to emphasize the sheer scale and performance afforded by Novus during the opening keynote.

“Imagine if you could unify all of the world’s data center capacity that shipped last year - 2,000 exabytes of data into a single namespace, the first of its kind,” he said.

“The first zettabyte-scale file system on the planet. Let that sink in”

Capitalizing on AI factories

The move by NetApp comes as the scale of AI factories skyrockets. While previous clusters typically housed around 10,000 GPUs, new builds on the horizon are targeting 50,000 and upwards.

In October last year, for example, Nvidia and Samsung unveiled plans for a new AI factory with 50,000 Nvidia GPUs. NetApp's own figures noted that a cluster of this size would require 100Tbps of cumulative bandwidth.

With this in mind, NetApp appears confident that it’s capitalizing on a highly lucrative market.

Recent analysis from Deloitte projects adoption to accelerate across a range of industries. In the energy sector, for example, adoption rates are expected to reach 82% by 2028, marking a significant increase compared to 2025 levels.

Elsewhere, financial services is another key growth area with regard to AI factory adoption, surging from just 24% in 2025 to 63% by 2028.

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NetApp has unveiled a raft of updates aimed at driving automated storage management capabilities for customers.

At company's NetApp Insight 2026 conference in Las Vegas, the company announced an expansion to the NetApp Console, a centralized portal for data and storage management.

Headline updates focus on new AI and agentic AI capabilities within the console, including the ability for customers to directly integrate their own large language models (LLMs).

Jeff Baxter, VP of technical marketing at NetApp, said the update comes in direct response to the growing use of AI in data and infrastructure management processes.

“Just about every enterprise we work with has, by this point, established one or more approved LLMs, often specific enterprise instantiations of them that they’ve validated, they’ve set up guardrails, and they’ve set up how they want to leverage that within their enterprise,” he said.

“The NetApp Console is the front door to the NetApp platform,” he said. “It’s the way in which our customers can easily manage their entire data estate within the NetApp Platform.”

NetApp targets autonomous operations

According to NetApp, new AI-powered features will help streamline storage management by providing customers with predictive maintenance insights and automated remediation.

New fleet management capabilities will let them manage their entire hardware estate as a “single entity” while a new natural language chat capability will help replace manual workflows and reduce strain on IT administrators.

“The conversational ChatOps interface in NetApp Console delivers autonomous storage operations, intent-based provisioning, and policy guardrails across ONTAP storage systems,” the company said in a blog post.

Flexibility and choice are a key focus, according to NetApp. The ChatOps feature, for example, operates under a ‘bring your own model’ approach, allowing customers to use their own selected, domain-specific LLMs.

“The world is transforming where an administrator in natural language or using their microphone can actually speak into that,” said Sandeep Singh, SVP and GM for NetApp’s Data Infrastructure Platform division.

“It will then be able to take that and convert that into the backend operations for storage infrastructure.”

Singh said initial testing of the new features has delivered marked benefits for users.

“This is about simplifying. This is about unifying the operating experience for customers across the board, and this is about enabling much more of the AI type experience for customers – and that’s essentially the feedback we’re hearing from them,” he said.

Singh said the company engaged closely with customers as part of an early access preview to test and provide feedback, which played a key role in fine-tuning the service.

“We were able to go and incorporate that feedback as part of making the Console generally available, so the feedback has been great from that perspective,” he told ITPro.

“We're continuing to work very closely with customers as we go through the adoption curve, because it's always typically a journey, and we want to make sure that we're partnering very closely with customers and just continuing to just zero in on their key pain points.”

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NetApp has announced a sweeping update to its Keystone storage as a service (STaaS) offering aimed at bolstering data sovereignty capabilities.

The Keystone Sovereign service, which was unveiled at the company’s 2026 NetApp Insight conference, marks a significant expansion of its STaaS setup.

Customers can now choose where they want storage hardware deployed, both in geographic terms and their desired configuration – be that through an on-premises approach or in a co-location facility.

Ivan Iannaccone, VP and GM for Keystone, said the move is a direct response to growing enterprise demand for sovereignty controls, particularly in Europe.

“Sovereignty isn’t just about control of your data, but is [also about] operational control,” Iannaccone said. “You want to know who has access to telemetry data, who has access to the operations."

NetApp offers “full operational control”

According to Iannaccone, the new Keystone service will provide users with “full operational control” over data. Metadata, for example, will be run on a sovereign European cloud hosted by the storage giant.

Customer support, meanwhile, will also be operated entirely in-region across Europe.

Roll-out of Keystone Sovereign will start in the European Economic Area (EEA) on a country-by-country basis, with deployments in Germany and France among the first.

Iannaccone told ITPro this initial roll-out also applies to UK customers, while services in other global regions are expected soon.

“I’m pretty convinced that we can do a fast follow-up in the rest of the world,” he said. “Right now, where we’re seeing the concentrated demand, sovereign cloud spend is going to be around $30 billion next year.”

“That's significant,” Iannaccone added. “We see some of these trends in other countries in APAC. I think Japan, Korea are the two main ones, but we’ll fast follow that, probably in 2027.”

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Nvidia has unveiled Open Agent Safety Platform, a system designed to rein in AI agents — and could have stopped the Hugging Face attack.

The launch comes amid continuing revelations that AI agents from OpenAI have targeted government systems, including an Australian healthcare statistics website. OpenAI said this week it wouldn't be releasing to the public its Astra 6.1 model over concerns about its behavior.

Nvidia said its security platform would have prevented OpenAI's agents from breaking into the Hugging Face AI repository, the attack that sparked concerns about these agents escaping their bounds during evaluations and taking extreme action to solve tasks. Nvidia has since acquired Hugging Face.

“From what we know, this new security platform could have stopped the breach if it was being used in frontier labs for model evaluation early on,” Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of enterprise computing at Nvidia, told reporters according to a Reuters report.

“We’re advancing this openly, ​and we want to ​engage everybody to ⁠work with us," Boitano added.

Indeed, the system works across other hardware manufacturers' infrastructure and has support from Anthropic, Palantir, SpaceXAI and Perplexity among others — though OpenAI is not on the list.

“AI’s extraordinary potential for society will only be realized if we solve AI safety,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, in a statement. "As we continue to discover the frontier of AI capabilities, we must accelerate discovery at the frontier of AI safety."

How it works

Nvidia said that the incidents follow a pattern, with the rogue agents dodging security controls at the application layer in order to solve tasks. The aim of this safety platform is to add controls at the infrastructure layer.

"Safety and security require full-stack engineering," Huang added. "NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform brings together industry, researchers, and public-sector organizations to share best practices, align on evaluation methods, and foster international cooperation. Together, we can raise the bar for global AI safety."

Nvidia said the Open Agent Safety Platform is designed to give users full-stack governance and control over the systems that run AI agents.

That's managed via Nvidia's OpenShell, an open-source software tool that Nvidia says sets boundaries for agents and enforces that policy at runtime, whether the systems are running on Nvidia Vera chips or third-party hardware from ARM and Intel.

"OpenShell runs each agent in a sandbox and turns the operator’s instructions into a verifiable policy," the company explained in a blog post.

"Operators define which files, networks, tools, processes, and credentials an agent can access. OpenShell checks those limits before the agent runs and enforces them as it works."

In addition to that, the platform includes Nvidia Sentry, which monitors agent behavior from the silicon for hardware-based enforcement. If an AI agent steps beyond set boundaries, Sentry will stop it and quarantine it.

" It correlates agent interactions, policy decisions, and tool and data access to create a contextual record of agent activity," the blog post explains.

"This helps safety systems identify drift, investigate suspicious behavior, and determine when intervention or deeper analysis is needed."

Nvidia compared the recent AI security issues to the early days of the internet, saying that "adding trust turned a great concept into a great economy."

The blog post added: "The agent economy, and the next set of great companies, is waiting for the same layer."

Citrix has patched eight vulnerabilities affecting Citrix NetScaler ADC and Citrix NetScaler Gateway, two of which have been confirmed as being actively exploited.

The first of the two, CVE-2026-88771 is a remote code execution (RCE) flaw, in which improper input validation enables an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands. It affects all NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway deployments and has a severity score of 9.5.

Meanwhile, CVE-2026-88772 is a memory overflow vulnerability that can lead to RCE or denial of service. It affects any deployment with DTLS configuration enabled – which it is, by default, on VPN virtual servers. This, too, has a severity score of 9.5.

"Both are critical, zero-day vulnerabilities that can independently enable remote code execution," said the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). "CISA has received reports and partner threat intelligence confirming that threat actors are actively exploiting these vulnerabilities globally."

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said there could now be an increase in exploitation attempts, following the release of patches and additional technical details.

The other vulnerabilities are:

• CVE-2026-88773: Inconsistent interpretation of HTTP requests (HTTP request/response smuggling), which may allow an attacker to manipulate or bypass security controls.
• CVE-2026-88774: Improper HTTP URL-based expression usage leading to a feature policy bypass.
• CVE-2026-88775: Memory overflow vulnerability that may result in unpredictable or erroneous behaviour, or denial of service.
• CVE-2026-88776: Memory overflow vulnerability that may result in unpredictable or erroneous behaviour, or denial of service.
• CVE-2026-88777: Memory overflow vulnerability that may result in unpredictable or erroneous behaviour, or denial of service.
• CVE-2026-88778: Predictable exact value vulnerability that may allow an attacker to influence integrity or availability.

The NCSC advises isolating any affected systems and replacing them with a new, fully up-to-date system. However, the NCSC also notes this may cause a service outage, as it could mean temporarily disabling access to the service with upstream firewalls, disabling the vulnerable components, or restricting access to only the organization's IP range.

Security teams should fully investigate for evidence of compromise using the published indicators of compromise (IoCs), and report anything they find. They should install the latest available updates, re-enable or reintroduce the affected systems and continue to monitor the Citrix security bulletin and perform continuous threat hunting activities.

They can also, said the NCSC, use NetScaler Console File Integrity Monitoring to help detect unauthorized or unexpected changes to monitored files on managed NetScaler instances.

"There are no additional details or proof-of-concepts available as of now. Based on the available CVSS scores, exploiting CVE-2026-88772 is more difficult than CVE-2026-88771," said Mayuresh Dani, security research manager at Qualys. "It is also imperative to know that patching does not remove an existing webshell that has been placed on a compromised device."

He also pointed out that a recommendation from Citrix to forward NetScaler logs to an external logging or SIEM platform may indicate that attackers can maintain persistence and alter vulnerable devices. All these devices, he added, should be kept under strict observation for at least 90 days.

AMD has announced its second intended acquisition of 2026, signing a definitive agreement with World Labs valued at $8.2 billion.

World Labs is an AI software firm founded just two years ago by Stanford University professor and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li. It specializes in “spatial intelligence” AI technology, which allows AI models to understand the three-dimensional world.

Its relationship with AMD started in 2025, with model training and inference optimization on the company’s GPUs. AMD also invested in World Labs in February 2026, and Li spoke during the AMD keynote at CES 2026.

World Labs’ first product, Marble, was launched in November 2025. In a blog post announcing the launch, the company explained: “Our human experience of the world is inherently multimodal: we use all of our senses to make sense of the world around us.

“World models should… be massively multimodal, able to lift whatever input signals are available into a full 3D world, and they should be able to iteratively update their understanding of the world as new information becomes available.”

While Marble doesn’t entirely fulfil this brief, it “[makes] strides towards this vision”.

More recently, on 1 September 2026, it released Atlas, an “omni model that [World Labs] pretrained from scratch to natively operate on text, images, video, and 3D”.

AMD’s “physical AI” ambitions

The acquisition of World Labs underlines the role physical AI plays in AMD’s plans for the future.

In the official AMD announcement of the proposed deal, AMD said: “As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation, and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse. World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give AMD deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps.”

In a blog post explaining the decision to join AMD, Li said the company needed to move “closer to the hardware” in order to solve the problems it has been working on using software alone.

“Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency. And scale. And for our purposes, remains trapped in the digital world,” Li said.

“We've seen up close how Lisa [Su, AMD CEO] is boldly leading AMD as a major player in the hardware ecosystem with incredible momentum,” Li continued. “As our teams worked together, we realized what a natural fit it would be to bring together our AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models and applications.”

The all-stock acquisition is expected to close before the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

Workers with scarce skills and strong AI capabilities are pulling away from the pack, being rewarded for innovation while the bulk of their colleagues go largely ignored.

That's according to PwC's 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears report. A survey of nearly 50,000 workers across 48 countries that classifies workers into four groups: front-runners, AI insurgents, indispensables, and the AI learning curve.

Front-runners, with scarce skills and strong AI abilities, account for 14% of employees, while 18% are classified as AI insurgents, whose skills are less scarce but who are using AI to deliver more.

Indispensables, with scarce skills that employers value highly but who are not far along the AI learning curve, account for 11%.

However, PwC said it's the 'engine room' workers who make up the bulk of employees, lacking scarce skills, and further behind on the AI learning curve. Of these, only two in five say they have access to the learning and development resources they need.

And, the researchers said, it's these workers – the majority of the workforce, responsible for most of the day-to-day work within an organization – that should be getting more attention.

"There is a real risk that the global workforce is starting to move at different speeds. More than half of workers are not yet benefiting from AI and skills in the same way, while those with scarce skills and strong AI capabilities are becoming more confident and more mobile," said Pete Brown, PwC global workforce leader.

"Leaders need to think hard about where they invest in skills, how they give people the opportunity to adapt, and how they hold on to the capabilities they most need."

As for the front-runner employees, they're more confident in their job security, more likely to trust management, and more confident about their ability to learn new skills.

They are one-and-a-half times more likely than average to be rewarded for challenging existing ways of working, and 1.2 times as likely as average to learn new skills.

Nearly seven-in-ten daily AI users report confidence in their job security, compared with 57% for infrequent users, and are also more likely to ask for a promotion. However, 29% of front-runner employees with strong AI capabilities and scarce skills say they are very or extremely likely to change employers in the next year.

Overall, workers are feeling significant pressure. Only a third report having money left at the end of the month, down 8% year on year. Meanwhile, 29% say they have significantly less bargaining power than three years ago, more than double the number who disagreed. For fully remote workers, the proportion is 10 points higher.

The biggest risks to job security, they say, are economic volatility (57%) and AI taking on more tasks (44%), with Gen Z more anxious across all these metrics.

And 58% of those who have experienced change in the workplace feel there has been more change in the last year than in previous years, with almost one-third saying that their productivity is suffering thanks to fatigue or burnout.

"Workers are under growing pressure from rising workloads, rapid change and external uncertainty," said Brown.

"But those using AI every day are more confident, more ambitious and more positive about their careers and prospects. The challenge for leaders is to keep developing those people – but not at the expense of the rest of the workforce."

OpenAI has said it won't be publicly releasing its Astra 6.1 model over safety concerns, with the update behaving more deceptively than its predecessor.

The move comes amid a wave of rogue AI incidents, with OpenAI admitting its agents had breached an Australian health care statistics site, American government websites, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, and leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users, in addition to the Hugging Face intrusion over the summer.

OpenAI is expected to make several big announcements at its developer day in San Francisco today, but the release of Astra 6.1 won't be among them.

"For anything regarding safety and alignment, there's a trade-off," said Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, in a statement shared with journalists. "You really do need to find what's the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction."

OpenAI isn't the only AI company to limit its models over safety concerns. Anthropic refused to publicly release Claude Mythos, instead only offering access to approved organisations, while OpenAI famously didn't release one of its early GPT models in 2019, saying it was too dangerous – before it then unveiled ChatGPT.

Astra 6.1 issues

Astra 6 was released earlier this month, with capabilities including operating software, managing longer tasks, and automating workflows; however, reviews raised some criticisms.

The follow-up, 6.1, now isn't arriving to fix any flaws because, according to reports, Astra 6.1 was more deceptive than previous versions and was not telling people about actions it took or did not take, all of which raises security and safety concerns.

Jain said in the statement that Astra 6.1 had improvements in terms of "model laziness", but added that "it didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it's done."

"Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that's in the company, or when we ship it to users," said Jain. "But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment."

The various incidents of rogue AI agents haven't come via customers using OpenAI's models, but instead are largely happening as part of internal evaluation efforts. OpenAI didn't say one way or another if it planned to keep testing Astra 6.1 internally.