Technical failures during meetings hampering productivity, according to new research, yet organizations are failing to address the issue.

More than seven-in-ten IT leaders told Logitech that employees experienced technology issues such as failed audio or connection drops, with 30% saying they experienced them often or very often.

Researchers noted that these glitches have created at least one business cost for 94% of survey respondents, with 51% citing a loss of productivity. They slow meetings, create a support burden, interrupt collaboration, and create employee distrust.

"Leaders believe a strong workplace experience delivers outcomes such as improved collaboration and productivity. However, technology issues, inconsistent setups, and poor support create friction," the researchers said.

"We are in the middle of a monumental evolution in how we work, and the spaces that work today may not be the ones we need tomorrow. Employees want to be productive wherever they are, across every setting, remote, on-site, or split between, and those expectations keep moving."

But while leaders recognized the direct impact of workplace experience on productivity and collaboration, they said that siloed decision-making and delayed IT involvement are leading to widespread friction, lost time, and heightened security risks.

Although 86% linked strong workplace experience directly to improved productivity, and 90% to collaboration, only 58% felt confident they possessed the right ROI data to justify workplace experience and technology investments. Only 29% said they treated workplace experience as a core business strategy.

Workplace experience boosts productivity

Logitech also highlighted a gap between priorities and execution, with 87% saying collaboration between IT, HR, and real estate or facilities is very or extremely important for improving workplace experience.

Despite this, only 34% say their organization has a unified WX function that owns a shared roadmap for workplace investment decisions.

"When everyone owns a piece, no one owns the problem. With fragmented WX ownership, issues inevitably fall through the cracks. The friction impacts both workplace flow and the teams architecting the experience," the researchers said.

"Architecting the workplace for elevated experiences requires proactive planning. Yet, only one-in-four WX leaders involve IT and AV before space planning begins. That means most organizations design the office before thinking about the technology that has to support the people working in it."

Investing in workplace technology

Logitech said good planning means connecting workplace investments to measurable outcomes. This includes building a friction map to identify where employees lose time, such as starting a meeting, audio/video, room booking, device connection, space availability, meeting equity, or complex setups.

IT, HR, and real estate should come together early, with cross-functional teams sharing metrics before space planning begins. Workspaces should support both in-person and remote participants without requiring employees to troubleshoot the experience.

Ticket volumes, device performance, and delays to the start of meetings should be measured alongside standard employee experience metrics, and sensor and sentiment data should be combined to prove ROI and continuously adapt as business and employee demands continue to shift.

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Barracuda has uncovered an email phishing campaign that lures victims with a phishing page generated directly inside the victim's browser.

Rather than building a traditional phishing website, the campaign creates a fake page in the browser with a blob URL - a temporary address that points to content held in local memory rather than on a public web server.

Victims are routed through legitimate Microsoft services, including Microsoft OAuth and Microsoft Teams, making the site appear trustworthy and reducing common warning signs.

"This campaign demonstrates how phishing is evolving beyond fake websites and suspicious domains, removing many of the indicators that security teams have traditionally relied on for detection," said Ashitosh Deshnur, associate threat analyst at Barracuda.

How the phishing attack works

The attack begins with a DocuSign-themed email with a calendar invite attached. It doesn't appear malicious, because it points to a legitimate Microsoft OAuth endpoint; it's there just to add legitimacy.

A crafted redirect then routes the user to Microsoft Teams, which loads an external resource hosted on cdn.bloom[.]io. The browser converts this content into a blob URL that renders the phishing page locally within the browser.

Once the blob-based phishing page loads, it registers a service worker – a browser component that can manage network requests and page behavior in the background.

Part of the workflow is also executed inside a sandboxed iframe: an isolated browser window embedded within the page. Together, these elements help control navigation, manage requests and coordinate the phishing experience without the need for a conventional phishing website.

A hard to tackle campaign

It's a worrying technique, Barracuda warned. There's no phishing page to block, and therefore no persistent phishing URL for security tools to retrieve, analyze or blocklist in advance.

Trusted Microsoft services are abused throughout the attack chain, making the attack harder to spot, and the calendar invitation file makes the message look like routine business communication.

The phishing workflow receives instructions from backend infrastructure using browser messaging mechanisms; and, because the attack is controlled dynamically rather than through hardcoded redirects, operators can modify destinations and behavior in real time.

This gives them a level of flexibility and evasiveness that's not typically seen in static phishing pages.

New scanning techniques are needed

The campaign shows that detection approaches built around scanning for known malicious URLs are no longer good enough, said Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress.

"Traditional email security tools, URL scanners, and web filters are looking for malicious destinations. This approach removes the destination entirely; the attack surface exists only inside the target's browser for the duration of the session, then disappears," he said.

Patel said blob URLs mean detection needs to “shift toward behavioral monitoring of what the browser is actually doing” – such as URL creation in “unusual contexts” and “anomalous behaviour following calendar invite interactions”.

“These are detectable patterns, but they require endpoint-level visibility rather than network or email gateway scanning.”

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Google is set to expand its footprint in Finland as part of a €13 billion infrastructure investment in data centers focused on the towns of Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala.

During the initial construction phase, which will run through 2027 and 2028, the expansion is expected to contribute €3.6 billion to Finland's GDP and support 37,000 jobs nationwide.

Once operational, Google said the facilities are projected to support 7,000 jobs annually, spanning on-site facility and technical roles, as well as roles in downstream businesses.

“This is Google’s largest single investment in Europe and a testament to Finland’s leadership in responsibly building AI infrastructure – demonstrating what is possible through strong partnerships to create long-term community value and world-class environmental sustainability,” the company said.

Running parallel to this, Google will also invest in energy infrastructure designed to support data center build-outs. T

his includes sa life extension power purchase agreement for the Loviisa nuclear power plant with Nordic energy provider Fortum, as well as upgrades to grid capacity and renewable energy.

Google said it will support two onshore wind projects, with development led by Valorem and Suomen Hyötytuuli. This will bring the total amount of onshore wind energy contracted by the firm to 629 MW.

Google builds on long-standing ties

Google already has a strong presence in Finland, having opened its Hamina data center 17 years ago. The location has since been transformed into a “digital data hub”, according to Google, and forms part of the company’s global network of 43 cloud regions.

Several organizations, including Nokia, Elisa, and the City of Hamina rely on the data center to support operations.

Google said the Hamina site and Finland more broadly serve as a “model for responsible data center development”.

Indeed, the Hamina data center’s liquid cooling system uses sea water sourced from the Bay of Finland. It also has an offsite heat recovery facility, which is used to warm nearby households and businesses.

Finland in the spotlight

Finland has rapidly grown to become one of Europe’s leading data center infrastructure hubs. Research from Savills in August found the Finnish data center market has grown by 57% since 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing regions both in Europe and globally.

Google isn’t the only tech giant capitalizing on the Finnish market boom. A host of companies including Microsoft and TikTok have made significant investment pledges.

Microsoft, for example, signed a preliminary agreement to acquire 190 hectares of land in Vaasa and Mustasaari in June this year for data center development. Microsoft is also developing its first data center region in Southern Finland.

A key factor behind Microsoft’s expansion lies in the region’s existing industrial capabilities, Microsoft said at the time. The land it acquired is located in the GigaVaasa industrial zone.

TikTok, meanwhile, announced plans last year to invest €1 billion in its Kouvola data center, which is expected to have a capacity of 150MW.

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OpenAI and Anthropic have both admitted that rogue AI incidents went further than first reported.

In July, OpenAI said its AI agents had gone rogue and breached Hugging Face systems. Anthropic later admitted its own similar incidents, saying its models had escaped a testing sandbox too, with the UK AI Security Institute reporting other alarming behavior.

Last week, both companies published reports with details of what happened in those incidents, with much of the blame pinned on minor operational mistakes that enabled online access, as well as tasking agents with overly difficult or impossible problems that drove them to "cheat".

That included abusing systems in order to build their own messaging boards in order to collaborate and communicate.

Since then, further incidents have been exposed, including the use of a German wiki site for communications. Now, Reuters has reported that OpenAI's agents had made use of ten further websites for communication, based on reports from six independent investigators.

Chatty AI agents

The report notes that the websites weren't hacked, but more akin to spam, with the agents making use of comment boards to communicate with each other, contrary to instructions in the evaluation they were undertaking.

Alongside one university's link shortener tool, the websites used by OpenAI's agents were often wiki-style sites that could be used as message boards for the misbehaving AI agents.

These included a high-school teacher's chemistry site and personal websites of Polish technology workers, Reuters said. The agents made edits in comments in order to leave data for other agents.

“If these ⁠models were told only to read, they’ve got to get clever in terms of leaving information behind,” Kenneth Russell DeGraff, a software developer and former congressional aide, told the news agency.

OpenAI's response

OpenAI told ITPro that its investigation was ongoing, but stressed that the Hugging Face incident remained the most serious to date.

"As we said in July, the Hugging Face incident prompted a broader review of agent activity, and that work remains ongoing," a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

"We are prioritizing review based on the type of impact on a third party and its severity, such as some of the other third parties we have notified following Hugging Face as we have previously shared. We are also examining lower-severity abuse such as spam-like activity. To date, we have not identified other activity matching the severity or scale of Hugging Face. "

The spokesperson added: "The AI community does not yet have a clear standard for reporting misalignment across training, evaluation, and deployment, and we're developing a framework to share soon."

Another Anthropic incident

Rival AI developer Anthropic admitted an additional rogue agent incident, the fourth after three previous ones were revealed over the summer.

In a blog post, the company said it had spotted the first three incidents via a scan of 141,000 transcripts following an evaluation – admitting it had missed the fourth after relying on AI.

"Given the volume of transcripts and our desire to disclose incidents quickly, our scan relied on an agentic search," Anthropic post noted. "This missed a set of transcripts that also turned out to have internet access; we identified these in August while assembling transcripts to share with METR."

This fourth incident happened in January and involved its Claude Opus 4.6 model in a "capture the flag" test.

"The model accidentally broke its target by assigning it a conflicting IP address with another machine, thus making the target unreachable and the task impossible to solve," the post noted. "Recognizing this, the model attempted to abort the task using a command but was unsuccessful due to a misconfiguration in our evaluation harness."

The model then attempted to reach the target by escaping the testing environment and targeting a third-party machine, finding a password that it used to gain admin access, and continuing to harvest further credentials and modifying settings for access.

This continued until its token budget ran out and it stopped, the company revealed.

Anthropic said the impacted parties have been notified and suggested the fourth incident wasn't a new sort of AI misalignment, but in keeping with the previous behavior.

"Taken together, our assessment is that these incidents are serious. Our production models took harmful actions against real systems over long trajectories, which included biased reasoning,” the company said.

“The behaviors in these incidents are more severe than those we had previously observed and reported in our system cards. However, we do not believe these incidents represent a new kind of misalignment."

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Attackers used AI agents to compromise a cloud resource and then plan, build, and carry out a mass credential harvesting campaign earlier this year – and all in less than six hours.

That’s according to new research from Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), with recent analysis showing threat actors are flocking to agentic AI and automation to conduct sophisticated attacks.

“At this point, we can assume that all threat actors are using AI in some capacity and their operations have benefited," said John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group.

"Like everyone else, we’re concerned about the vulnerability problem, but AI is being applied to several other areas, and it will be especially challenging as it is applied agentically, creating a scaled, faster adversary. Criminals, like the ones who conducted a mass exploitation campaign in just six hours, will gravitate to attacks that are faster than we can respond to."

In this example, a financially motivated threat actor compromised an organization’s cloud infrastructure to deploy an autonomous, multi-agent attack framework, allowing them to operate at the sort of scale and speed that's usually associated with larger and more resource-heavy groups.

In less than six hours, the attacker was able to leverage an AI coding chatbot, a simple prompt, and a set of agent instructions to plan, build, and execute a mass credential harvesting campaign.

Using preconfigured markdown instruction sets as operational playbooks, GTIG said the threat actor carried out automated scanning and credential harvesting, compromising thousands of third-party credentials.

The agent instructions enabled the AI to autonomously manage the vulnerability scanning pipeline, perform real-time troubleshooting, and execute IP rotation logic without manual intervention.

Operating from the victim cloud infrastructure also allowed the threat actor route attack traffic through legitimate IP addresses.

State-backed groups are flocking to AI

GTIG said it has observed state-linked groups broadening their use of AI. In one example, PRC-nexus threat actor UNC6508 carried out a major intrusion campaign against US medical facilities, using compromised cloud environments to host a local model.

In April, meanwhile, Mandiant spotted a threat actor leveraging AI infrastructure access which was then used to sustain unauthorized AI workloads, utilizing hijacked cloud environments to provision high-performance GPU compute instances at the victim's expense.

Notably, TeamPCP has focused heavily on the AI supply chain, using malware designed to take advantage of emerging AI systems, and including malicious prompts that were used to execute commands surreptitiously.

The group has even poisoned open source package metadata to trick AI assistants, resulting in malicious dependencies being recommended to developers.

"The challenge for defenders is that these risks are evolving faster than many organizations can quantify, measure, and govern," said Ronald Lewis, head of cybersecurity governance at Black Duck.

"Security teams are no longer protecting only applications, users, and infrastructure. They must now secure AI models, agents, prompts, data pipelines, and an increasingly complex AI supply chain while also defending against adversaries using AI to accelerate attacks.”

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Google Cloud and Accenture have unveiled a new joint business unit aimed at helping Gemini Enterprise customers scale AI capabilities.

The Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group will bring together Accenture’s Gemini Enterprise-certified consultants, forward deployed engineers (FDEs), and Google Cloud engineering staff to support enterprises.

According to the duo, the aim of the new unit is basically to help enterprises get more bang for their buck with agentic AI. In a blog post, Google Cloud said the scheme will help clients “realize measurable business value from their agentic AI and data investments”.

“The Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group will help clients achieve these outcomes faster, bringing together the talent, advanced AI and data capabilities, and industry expertise needed to reinvent with confidence and create value at scale,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO at Accenture.

The new business group will prioritize four key areas, according to Google Cloud, including:

• Increasing enterprise adoption of Gemini Enterprise
• Building “repeatable industry-specific solutions that reduce time to value”
• Driving user adoption and use of Gemini Enterprise tools
• Bridging gaps between AI experimentation and enterprise-wide transformation

The last of these is crucial for Google Cloud and is an area of intense focus in recent months. As ITPro reported in July, the hyperscaler and Accenture teamed up to drive AI capabilities for mid-market businesses, a demographic that has traditionally struggled with adoption rates.

AI adoption has been a difficult challenge for enterprises across the board, however, particularly in terms of measuring return on investment (ROI). Research from Accenture in April revealed only one-in-ten UK organisations had successfully deployed or scaled AI in core operations.

That same study noted that many enterprises are dealing with mismatched efficiency gains when it comes to AI. While individual workers are reporting productivity improvements, these aren’t translating into broader business value.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the launch of the business group “significantly expands the expertise and resources” available to customers to “deliver real business value”.

“Building on the success we’ve seen with world’s leading brands, we’re combining Google Cloud’s full-stack AI capabilities with Accenture's deep industry expertise to deliver transformation at scale,” he said.

FDEs in the spotlight

All told, Google Cloud said the new business group will establish a workforce boasting roughly 1,000 forward deployed engineers.

These engineers essentially act as consultants embedded within enterprises, providing teams with technical guidance along with practical support to co-design and build AI systems.

FDEs are now at the forefront of big tech’s attempts to drive AI adoption, as ITPro reported in July. Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft both pledged billions in funding to recruit and deploy FDEs.

Both companies said the use of FDEs aims to streamline adoption processes for enterprise customers and, crucially, “compress timelines” when it comes to deployment of the technology.

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Qualcomm has signed a major deal with Amazon, under which it will supply customized chips and networking hardware for Amazon data centers.

The 'multi-generation' collaboration covers customized silicon for Amazon's large-scale AI data centers, bringing together the hyperscaler’s AI infrastructure and Qualcomm's power-efficient processing, silicon design, and system-level integration.

The deal will also cover high-performance optical connectivity solutions specifically designed to support the growing scale and bandwidth demands of AI infrastructure, with speeds extending up to 1.6T and eventually beyond.

This work will be based on Qualcomm Technologies’ SerDes and optical DSP technologies.

"As AI demand accelerates, data center infrastructure will require advances in both computing and connectivity to deliver greater performance with more efficiency,” said Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm.

“Qualcomm is pleased to work with AWS on customized silicon and connectivity solutions, bringing decades of leadership in advanced processing and power-efficient compute, to deliver breakthrough performance and enable the next generation of AI infrastructure.”

As part of the deal, Qualcomm plans to expand its use of AWS AI infrastructure, including Amazon Bedrock, for its own electronic design automation (EDA) workloads, hoping to cut the time of chip design cycles.

The deal forms part of a broader announcement that will see Qualcomm issue warrants to acquire 25 million shares in Amazon for a total investment of $4 billion.

The issuance of some shares is contingent on Amazon purchasing up to $60 billion worth of Qualcomm products.

“This collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies builds on a strong foundation of partnership and reflects our shared commitment to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president at AWS.

“By working together on customized silicon and advanced connectivity, we’re delivering more performant, efficient, and cost-effective infrastructure for our customers.”

Qualcomm eyes market gains

Qualcomm has hopes of challenging Nvidia's dominant position in the AI data center market. The latter currently holds between 80% and 90%, according to figures from Silicon Analysts, although the figure is predicted to fall to 75% this year. AMD is in second place.

Earlier this summer, Qualcomm updated its Dragonfly A1000 CPUs, Qualcomm High Bandwidth Compute (HBC), and its AI300 inference accelerator. All are engineered to maximize performance per watt and token throughput at lower total cost of ownership (TCO), the company said.

The company recently named Meta as its first customer, with production expected to begin in 2028 and to continue as Meta's server fleet expands. It has also, along with Nvidia and AMD, has signed a memorandum to supply the EU’s AI gigafactories.

Optical networking, meanwhile, is a major element of Amazon’s data center strategy, with the firm buying billions of dollars worth of hardware from fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning earlier this year.

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The UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) has not been granted access to Anthropic’s Mythos 5.1 model for pre-release testing, prompting fears of a growing “protectionist” trend among US developers.

The Financial Times reports that Anthropic declined to submit the model for testing despite granting access to similar US organizations.

Claude Mythos 5.1 launched on 1 September, with access to the AI model only granted to approved partners.

The model, which has relaxed safeguards, is restricted to organizations involved in the company’s Project Glasswing, formed after the launch of the original Mythos model earlier this year.

June saw the US impose temporary export restrictions on Mythos 5 and Fable 5, essentially banning foreign users from accessing either model.

According to the Financial Times, UK government officials have raised concerns that the decision to withhold access highlights a “wider protectionist shift” among US tech companies.

AISI is backed by the UK government and charged with conducting research into AI model safety, working closely with industry stakeholders and researchers.

These tests aim to help “understand the capabilities and impacts of advanced AI and to develop and test risk mitigations,” according to the institute.

Anthropic yet to clarify decision

Details on why Anthropic declined to offer access haven’t been confirmed. ITPro approached the company for comment, but hadn’t received a response at the time of publication.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson told ITPro that the UK continues to be a "world-leader in AI security" and works closely with a range of industry partners.

"The AI Security Institute continues to collaborate closely with industry partners, including Anthropic, to make models safer. Only last week it tested OpenAI's most powerful model GPT-6 Astra before public release," the spokesperson said.

"These risks do not stop at national borders and no country can tackle them alone. The UK will continue to test the most advanced models, build a rigorous scientific understanding of their capabilities and risks, and ensure policy decisions are grounded in the evidence."

Notably, the move marks the first time AISI has been left out of pre-release evaluations of Anthropic models. The institute was granted access to Claude Mythos 5 when it first launched in April, for example.

More recently, the institute published a blog highlighting what it described as “unsanctioned agent behaviour” with Mythos 5.

That report came in the wake of an admission by Anthropic that agents had escaped testing environments and breached third-party organizations.

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GCX Managed Services has announced a trio of channel leadership appointments, as the managed network and security services provider looks to strengthen its channel operations.

Josh Evans joins the business to lead channel development in the UK, Klaus Marzell will head up the DACH region, while Matteo Badii takes the reins in Italy.

GCX said its expanded team will work to support service providers, telecom operators, SASE providers, and technology partners as they look to simplify service delivery, extend their market reach, and leverage trusted channel relationships.

“These appointments strengthen our channel capability across Europe and reflect our commitment to making it easier for partners to do business with GCX,” said GCX chief revenue officer Michael Hartmann.

Josh Evans brings extensive experience in the UK connectivity market as well as expertise in building and scaling partner networks. In his new role, he is tasked with expanding both sell-to and sell-with opportunities while supporting partners serving international customers.

Fellow channel veteran Klaus Marzell will leverage more than 30 years’ experience to lead channel activity in the DACH region, where he will work closely with technology vendors, service providers, and enterprise consultancies to accelerate growth.

Meanwhile, Matteo Badii adds more than two decades of experience in telecommunications, alongside deep expertise across both inbound and outbound international wholesale sales. GCX said he will focus on strengthening its strategic partnerships and identifying fresh opportunities in the region.

Building on channel momentum

The appointments form part of GCX’s wider strategy to build dedicated channel expertise in each major sales region, providing partners with clearer routes to market and stronger local support.

As well as strengthening its channel expertise, the firm said it is also focusing on improving the partner experience through enhanced pricing and quoting capabilities, AI tools, as well as expanded onboarding, training, and support resources.

“By investing in experienced local teams, we're giving partners access to market expertise backed by our global network, managed services portfolio and technical capabilities, helping them move faster, reduce complexity and deliver reliable connectivity for their customers wherever they operate,” Hartmann explained.

GCX said it now plans to build on a 50% increase in its channel partner base through further recruitment, increased co-sell activity, and deeper regional collaboration.

“Channel-led growth remains a key part of our strategy, and we're continuing to invest in the people, tools and support that make it easier for our partners to operate, scale and succeed,” Hartmann added.

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The Shai-Hulud npm worm is back several months after everyone assumed it was dead.

Back in May, a compromised maintainer account pushed 639 malicious versions of @antv packages to npm in a single hour, although the attack was swiftly halted.

However, while npm has since introduced publish-time malware scanning, researchers at Aikido Security spotted a “wormy boy” slipped through a triage queue.

“It had the same hash as the @AntV wave. Same payload,” Aikido Security’s Charlie Eriksen noted in a recent blog post.

Eriksen said four packages were uploaded within the space of an hour after a 111-day gap - and bypassing npm's new publish-time malware scanning, which sees every package held for five to 15 minutes while an automated system checks it before it becomes installable.

This marks a concerning new development in terms of Shai-Hulud-related risks, according to Eriksen.

While the scanners shouldn't be expected to catch everything, a worm payload with a public hash, extensive vendor write-ups, and months of detection coverage should not be slipping through the net on a registry that now markets itself as scanning every publish.

"That gap between what registry-level scanning claims to do and what a hash-identical reactivation shows it actually caught is the real story here," he said.

"Signature matching against known-malicious artifacts is the single easiest bar to clear in this industry, and it's the bar we should all be most alarmed to see missed."

The four packages concerned were:

• feishu-docx-mcp@0.3.2
• bmc-i18n-extract-cli@1.1.1
• blueai-cli@0.7.0
• bmc-translate-utils@1.1.1all

Keep an eye out for Shai-Hulud

According to Aikido, teams should be looking out for these and the command-and-control domain associated with the original May wave, t[.]m-kosche[.]com.

Other indicators of compromise include the hash of the reused malicious payload, e37e3ddeeaaa9e0c4fdbcb829b4895a6521031c80053fc436625b61e6ee5b1a6, the index.js root-level payload file ,and the command executed by the preinstall script, bun run index.js, along with the persistence files .vscode/tasks.json and claude/settings.json.

Behavioral indicators include outbound validation calls against npm registry using stolen tokens, tarball download, payload injection, version bump, republish cycle, and the mass creation of GitHub repositories with Dune-themed naming and reversed "Shai-Hulud" strings in descriptions.

“A file hash match is a lookup, not a hard problem. It requires no behavioral analysis, sandboxing, or reasoning about obfuscated code’s intent,” Erikson commented.

“And this payload wasn't novel, repacked, or even lightly modified to dodge signature matching. It was the same 64 hex characters that had been on file since May."

While the likes of multi-stage loaders, dependency confusion, and runtime-triggered payloads are genuinely hard problems, he said an exact hash match to a worm that made international security news four months ago isn't.

"That's the floor of what publish-time scanning is supposed to catch, and it got missed," he said.

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

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Digital sovereignty is now a key focus for the C-suite, but new research shows organizations aren't confident they can fully achieve these goals.

In a study from Capgemini, 44% of organizations ranked sovereignty as a board-level priority, with efforts on this front accelerating across the US, Europe, and APAC. Nearly four-in-five are “executing or building a strategy”, for example, with a further fifth expected to put one in place within the next year.

Capgemini said this investment focus reflects mounting concerns over whether organizations can maintain critical business operations in an “increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment”.

Four-in-five respondents specifically highlighted geopolitical volatility and disruption as the “leading driver” of digital sovereignty initiatives.

Concerns over strained transatlantic relations have prompted calls to reduce reliance on US tech providers in recent months, and it’s a viewpoint that’s gaining significant traction across Europe.

The jury’s out on digital sovereignty

Despite this sharpened focus, more than half (59%) of organizations think that achieving full digital sovereignty is an unrealistic goal.

There are a number of contributing factors here, the study found. In particular, a concerning number of respondents revealed they are chronically overdependent on foreign technology solutions and suppliers.

Others, meanwhile, highlighted lengthy switching timelines as a key concern. More than one-third (36%) of respondents said that transitioning from a critical provider would take more than 12 months. One-in-ten said they have no “viable alternative provider” at all.

Limited supply chain visibility is another key hurdle when it comes to bolstering digital sovereignty. Indeed, 86% said they have “significant exposure to foreign or externally controlled supply chains”.

The result is that IT leaders now find themselves wedged between a rock and a hard place when it comes to sovereignty. From a practical and financial perspective, efforts to achieve full sovereignty just aren’t viable in many cases.

“Today’s organizations operate in highly interconnected technology ecosystems where complete independence is rarely achievable,” said Karine Brunet, chief operations and delivery officer at Capgemini.

Michael Murphy, Deputy CTO at Arqit, agreed that full digital sovereignty could be an unrealistic goal for many organizations – and pursuing it could actually be counterproductive.

Capgemini’s study noted that achieving full sovereignty could actually harm competitiveness, for example, although more than half believe they can achieve these goals without making sacrifices on that front.

“Most organizations depend on a global technology ecosystem, and attempting to own or control every part of the stack would mean giving up access to capabilities that are too costly, complex, or valuable to replicate.”

“A more useful approach is to treat sovereignty as a spectrum,” Murphy added. “Different workloads carry different risks, and the safeguards should reflect that.”

A more pragmatic approach

These concerns are driving a rethink of how organizations can improve sovereignty capabilities, according to Capgemini, with some targeting what could be described as a sovereignty-lite approach.

Rather than targeting complete technological independence, organizations are now taking a pragmatic approach that centers around “retaining control over key digital capabilities” and reducing dependence on a single provider.

Capgemini advised IT leaders to take into account a range of variables when pursuing this approach, including data localization considerations, access controls, and potential “technology constraints”.

Elsewhere, the consultancy recommended a tactic of “selective control” of critical technologies alongside strategic partnerships rather than fully sovereign ownership.

Matt Harris, SVP & UKIMEA managing director at HPE, echoed these recommendations, noting that organizations can still bolster resilience without embracing a fully sovereign stance.

“A more practical goal is to achieve meaningful control over the most strategically important layers, including sensitive data, AI deployment environments, security, networks, and governance,” he said.

“IT leaders should therefore begin by identifying their most sensitive data and critical workloads, assessing where external dependencies create operational or regulatory risk, and ensuring that portability, auditability and viable exit options are built into technology decisions,” Harris added.

A bridge too far?

Capgemini’s study isn’t the first to question the viability of complete digital sovereignty. As ITPro reported in July, analysis from Forrester warned true tech sovereignty could be a bridge too far for European enterprises.

The consultancy’s Global Sovereignty Forecast predicted that the shift toward tech sovereignty will move “slowly over the next five years”, warning that attempts to divest from US tech providers will fall flat.

Speaking to ITPro at the time, Dario Maisto, principal analyst at Forrester, said attempts to move away from popular vendors would require a monumental effort – and one many European enterprises simply cannot afford.

Commenting on the Capgemini report, Proton COO Raphael Auphan told ITPro that European organizations should consider the longer term costs of not pursuing sovereignty goals.

Auphan pointed to recent research from Proton that found nearly three-quarters (74%) of European firms fear a US-imposed ‘kill switch’ could cut them off from vital tools and services.

“Sovereignty doesn't threaten competitiveness, dependency does,” Auphan told ITPro. “Every Euro spent on US tech subsidises foreign competitors and hands leverage to another jurisdiction.”

“Europe won't outspend the Americans or outwork the Chinese, but it can lead on its values. In an era where AI companies vacuum up personal data and trust in US tech leadership is eroding, "built in Europe" is now a genuine differentiator.”

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The Swiss government is running a trial of OpenDesk as part of efforts to reduce reliance on Microsoft software.

OpenDesk will be trialled for a small tranche of workers who focus on business critical functions. The move comes amid wider digital sovereignty efforts across Europe.

France, for example, has started to shift away from US software for government purposes while one German state has switched four out of five administration computers away from Microsoft.

The Swiss government said it plans to shift office computing to open source software, following a feasibility study that suggested the move should be possible.

With OpenDesk, the aim is to switch 3,000 government employees by the end of next year for core office functions, effectively a trial to see if shifting away from Microsoft is sensible and to estimate the cost of a large-scale implementation.

These core functions include email, calendar, documents, presentations, video conferencing, and telephony. The standalone solution will operate alongside Microsoft 365, targeting employees who are responsible for critical business processes.

That's because the aim is to not only strengthen the digital sovereignty of the federal administration, according to a translated press release, though that is a "central theme" of the government's digital strategy.

Beyond that, Swiss authorities hope to boost crisis resilience, ensuring the government can continue operating even if Microsoft goes down.

The idea of digital sovereignty as a means to boost resilience gained credence following the US temporarily banning exports of key Anthropic models earlier this year, as well as the massive Crowdstrike outage in 2024.

In the UK, authorities have warned about the impact of phishing attacks on food supply following outages at major retailers last year.

Challenging proposition

The initial solution tested in the feasibility study was found sufficient to maintain standard core processes and could prove useful in an emergency such as a Microsoft Office 365 outage, the government noted.

However, the feasibility study also spotted limitations, in particular around video conferencing, saying that significant adaptations and security work would be required.

Indeed, the many apps tied to Microsoft's architecture present a significant challenge to shifting the entire federal government to open source alternatives, so a wider shift depends on the results of the trial.

But the Swiss government has partnered with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which has shifted much of its workstations to OpenDesk. The 3,000 workstations make up about 7% of the Swiss federal administration's employees.

What is OpenDesk?

OpenDesk is owned by the German Center for Digital Sovereignty, and offers workspace tools via a web browser, including documents, email, project management and identity management.

The government stressed the point of the study was not to replace Microsoft 365, nor does the OpenDesk platform need to replicate or integrate with all of the Microsoft 365 features.

The shift is long awaited: the feasibility report was finished last year, and reports from April suggested the government had decided to slowly reduce its dependence on Microsoft.

This move was, at least in part, driven by an incident in which the foreign affairs department stored classified documents on a Microsoft Cloud, meaning American authorities could potentially view the information.

In July, the Swiss Armed Forces said it would replace Microsoft Office 365 with OpenDesk by this October for its cybersecurity workers.

Over the last two years, Microsoft has worked to reassure governments in Europe that data is safe, pointing to locally stored private cloud as an option as well as European data centers that keep data away from the US via its EU Data Boundary — and the tech giant has invested significantly in Swiss data centers, too.

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The widespread use of shadow AI is putting British businesses at risk, according to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

The use of unapproved AI tools is on the rise, with research from Microsoft late last year revealing that 71% of UK employees have used unapproved consumer AI tools at work, with more than half saying they do so every week.

While the NCSC said AI can help people complete tasks more quickly, improve decision-making, cut costs and increase productivity, organizations are falling short when it comes to policy and guidance.

In a new briefing document, the security agency said enterprises need to tighten up practices on this front and crack down on unapproved use.

"Rather than preventing them from using AI, this can mean employees turn to using AI tools that have not been approved by their organization, introducing new cybersecurity risks that can be hard to identify,” the document reads.

"Where cybersecurity policies cannot meet business needs, organizations are likely to continue seeing their employees adopt new AI services before they have had time to assess them and provide approved alternatives. This trend is likely to be reinforced as AI capabilities become increasingly affordable and readily available."

The rise of shadow AI

Some of the biggest concerns associated with shadow AI is the risk of data breaches, the loss of intellectual property, and failure to meet regulatory requirements.

If employees transfer sensitive or proprietary information to consumer AI services, there's a strong chance that this information might be stored, retained, or used to improve the service – outside established security and governance arrangements – unless specific privacy controls are in place.

This can reduce the organization's visibility and control over that information.

Similarly, the use of shadow AI can also create a wealth of new opportunities for attackers, according to the NCSC. If hackers successfully exploit a vulnerability, they can gain access to the same data, services, and privileges that the agent has legitimate access to.

Attackers are highly likely to use agents with looser guardrails to exploit any vulnerabilities or misconfigurations in the wider corporate IT system.

"The NCSC is not recommending that individuals stop using AI – but when turning to these tools for assistance with a work task, think carefully about which apps and services you are using before you share data," said the NCSC.

"It may feel natural to stick with using the same AI service that you are familiar with from your personal life – but using systems that are not corporately approved can present real problems for your employer."

Stronger controls are needed

The NCSC said organizations need to introduce policies that reflect the real world, with the aim of reducing risk rather than assuming it can be eliminated.

This means adopting a positive cybersecurity culture and encouraging open communication about security issues. Once organizations understand why people are using shadow AI, it becomes much easier to identify risks, provide secure alternatives, and support innovation safely.

The guidance echoes analysis by Gartner last year that found nearly half of enterprises could face serious security or compliance-related incidents as a result of shadow AI by 2030.

"You cannot manage what you do not know," the NCSC guidance noted. "By raising awareness of the risks of shadow AI use within your organisation and understanding the needs of employees, you can help them get the benefits of new technologies while using them securely."

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French AI giant Mistral has raised €3 billion to support frontier model research and development of sovereign, open-weight systems.

The funding, led by Samsung Electronics and Scaleup Europe Fund, is the largest equity round by a European tech company and values Mistral at €21 billion.

The aim is to train "bigger and faster models", CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC, but Mistral also said in a blog post that its focus was open-weight models built and run in Europe that allow companies to keep hold of their data.

"During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model," the company said in a blog post.

"Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop."

Mistral added that demand for a “combination of performance and control, choice, and independence” is growing globally.

The company said enterprises are governments alike are now weighing up long-term tech dependencies, governance requirements and “deployment choices that come with any AI investment”.

Mistral eyes sovereign AI gains

The importance of sovereign AI was made clear earlier this year when Anthropic's security models were temporarily hit by an export ban.

More generally, countries like France and Switzerland are pushing away from American technology firms for their own versions of software and services for government use.

Mistral in particular has positioned itself as an alternative not only to American dominance, but also the open-weight models developed in China.

"The fact that the EU or Europe have to have their own kind of AI provider in the game is important," chief financial officer Johan Bergqvist told Reuters.

"We ​have seen in the past ​that there is ⁠politics involved in the access of these solutions, and it's important that you make sure that you maintain access and do not compromise your kind of supply ​chain,” he added.

That said, Mistral noted that it was seeing particular growth in Asia and North America, with more than 125 global enterprises as customers based in 20 countries.

"The round reflects a strategic endorsement from investors across Europe, Asia and North America," Mistral said in the blog post.

"It brings together a world-class syndicate of strategic and financial investors, including global technology leaders, growth investors and existing shareholders that have supported Mistral’s development to date."

Paying for the AI rollout

Beyond investing in frontier research, the funding round will be used to boost AI infrastructure available to Mistral, Mensch said.

"Long term, the plan is to fully rely on capacity that we are building ourselves, and so that means that the amount of compute that we own is going to grow ... around 100% in the next five years," Mensch told CNBC.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Mensch added that the funding will allow Mistral to reach an "amount of compute that is very comparable to what the Chinese labs have."

However, the investment is small compared to the figures coming out of the US, with $1trn set to be spent on AI infrastructure this year alone, and rivals such as Anthropic and OpenAI valued at $965bn and $852bn ahead of looming IPOs.

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Advania UK has announced the appointment of Annette Murphy as its new chief executive officer (CEO), as the IT services provider looks to its next phase of growth.

An experienced industry leader, she arrives with a strong track record of scaling technology businesses through periods of growth, transformation, and integration.

Previously, she has held senior and commercial and general management roles at Colt Technology Services, Lumen, Zayo/GEO, and BT, covering the UK, EMEA, Asia-Pacific, and other global markets.

Murphy also adds deep experience of building high-performing teams, leading complex transformation programs, as well as developing strong relationships with both customers and partners.

She succeeds Hege Støre, Group CEO of Advania, who has led the UK business in an interim capacity while it searched for a full time replacement.

In an announcement, Støre said Murphy brings the depth of expertise required to lead the UK business as the wider company enters into its next “pivotal and transitional” chapter.

“Annette has an outstanding track record of leading technology businesses through growth and transformation,” she explained. “Her commercial experience, customer focus and commitment to building high-performing teams make her the right leader for Advania UK as we enter our next phase. We are delighted to welcome her to the business.”

Growing Advania’s UK business

The appointment comes as Advania continues to expand its capabilities through a combination of acquisitions and investment in new technology, while many UK businesses are looking to modernize their infrastructure, adopt cloud technologies, and seek more advanced AI-assisted workflows.

The company recently launched Advania ALT, a sovereign AI platform designed to give UK organizations more control over how AI is deployed, where sensitive data is held, and which AI models are used.

Advania said Murphy’s leadership will help the company build on its technical foundations, expand its capabilities, as well as further improve customer outcomes.

Commenting on her new role, Murphy highlighted Advania UK’s “impressive combination” of technical expertise and strong customer relationships, as well as its acquisitions and technology investment.

“Advania ALT represents an important part of where the market is heading, particularly as organisations look for ways to use AI while keeping control of their data,” she said. “I’m looking forward to building on that foundation and taking the business into its next phase.

“Together, we have a significant opportunity to help organisations navigate change and realise greater value from technology.”

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OpenAI has revealed details on how much staff are spending on AI, and some are blowing through significant sums on a daily basis.

In a recent blog post, the company said researchers now spend around $600 each day on AI tokens amidst a surge in agentic coding. Some, meanwhile, are using upwards of $7,000 worth of tokens per day.

According to OpenAI, the company has witnessed a significant uptick in token consumption rates over the last year, and daily workflows for individual researchers have changed drastically in parallel to this.

Indeed, researchers are shipping more code and “running more experiments” following an influx of agents.

“Over the course of this year, OpenAI researchers’ daily work has changed substantially,” the company wrote. “Researchers are using coding agents throughout the day (often in concurrent sessions) and total usage is rapidly increasing, outpacing growth among other OpenAI teams.”

“The ways researchers use agents are changing, too: agents are handling increasingly complex tasks, and succeeding at them more often. AI research is a complex process with many potential bottlenecks, so the overall pace of progress likely won’t keep pace with these specific metrics.”

OpenAI isn’t the only one spending big on AI

OpenAI said improvements to productivity and research progress showcase the benefits of AI agents. The eye-watering sums accrued by prolific users also come as enterprises globally contend with rising AI-related costs.

Trends such as tokenmaxxing, combined with the shift to consumption-based pricing (CPB) models, mean token costs have become a recurring pain point for businesses over the last 12 months.

Research from Gartner, for example, projected that token costs could exceed the average developer salary by 2028.

Luckily, prices are beginning to dip. Figures from the LLM Token Expenditure Index show prices hit over $2 per million tokens in June this year. As of 5 September this dipped to 99 cents per million.

That decrease will offer little solace to businesses that have been hit with exorbitant bills this year, however.

Uber revealed it blew through its entire annual AI budget in just four months after the company encouraged and incentivized staff to engage in ‘tokenmaxxing’ practices.

The ride hailing firm was forced to introduce spending caps for users in response.

As ITPro reported in late June, Accenture also ordered staff to stop using AI for basic tasks due to skyrocketing prices. The firm pushed back against token use by “non-engineers” who were driving excessive use for tasks such as converting PDFs to slides.

Optimization in the spotlight

While some OpenAI researchers might have carte blanche to spend on AI tokens, most enterprises don’t have that luxury, prompting a revival of traditional practices such as FinOps.

Speaking to ITPro in June, Nitish Tyagi, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner, said IT leaders need to sharpen up on cost optimization processes to curtail potential costs.

Practices such as content engineering could help reduce costs, he noted. Enterprises should also establish a “use-case-driven decision” framework that outlines where and when AI should be used in everyday tasks.

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AMD has unveiled a new workstation designed to support developers with local AI inference and agent orchestration.

The Threadripper Halo comes equipped with a 96-core Threadripper Pro 9995WX CPU alongside two MI350P GPUs, with the option to expand this to four GPUs.

Elsewhere, it boasts up 576 GB of HBM3e as well as 2.6TB of combined memory and up to 16.4TB/s of system memory bandwidth, making it a powerful device aimed primarily at running frontier models and fleets of agents.

Announced at IFA 2026, the Threadripper Halo is expected to launch next year and looks primed to compete with Nvidia’s DGX Station. Indeed, the company specifically noted that it boasts 3.4x the total system memory compared to the Nvidia offering.

Exact details on a release timeline or pricing are yet to be revealed.

Speaking at IFA, Jack Huynh, SVP and general manager of AMD’s computing and graphics group, said the new workstation will “redefine personal AI”.

“This is the most powerful workstation in the world, designed and engineered for a complete new era of computing, capable of running AI models with more than a trillion parameters,” he told attendees.

“This is about as close as you can get to a personal supercomputer.”

According to AMD, the Threadripper Halo is catered primarily toward “individuals and small teams doing serious AI work who are currently constrained by cloud access or shared infrastructure”.

This spans AI researchers, engineering teams, model developers, and creators working with large language models (LLMs), the company said.

Local AI in the spotlight

The announcement by AMD comes amidst a sharpened focus on local AI capabilities for enterprises. A host of manufacturers have unveiled PCs and laptops with embedded AI capabilities.

As ITPro previously reported, devices such as the Dell Pro Max range also target local AI inference gains for enterprises.

In the wake of Nvidia GTC this year, IDC highlighted AI-powered workstations as an exciting new growth area for manufacturers.

“Traditional workstations are evolving beyond the familiar tower form factor toward a new class of high-density, near-user AI systems that IDC identifies as part of an emerging “sidetop” category,” the consultancy noted at the time.

The focus on local AI capabilities also looks to tackle rising costs associated with the technology, particularly since the advent of agents.

Token consumption rates – and costs – are now a recurring pain point for enterprises, with research from Gartner showing token costs could exceed developer salaries by 2028.

A key talking point for providers lies in the cost disparity between local agent inference and cloud-based API costs. Separate research from Signal65, for example, found that agentic AI workloads consume up to fifteen-times more tokens compared to traditional chatbot interactions.

Equipping developers with local AI capabilities could reduce costs on this front, Signal65 found. Benchmark tests conducted on Dell Pro Max GB10 and GB300 workstations - equipped with Nvidia hardware - markedly reduced token costs.

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Microsoft has warned that ASCII smuggling, the use of invisible Unicode characters to trick AI models, is now being used by cyber criminals to supercharge phishing campaigns.

Over the past year, ASCII smuggling has become a recurring technique for prompt injection and cross-prompt injection (XPIA), allowing an attacker to hide instructions inside invisible tag characters embedded in a web page, document, email, or other content.

While human beings - and many user interfaces - see nothing unusual, an AI assistant that ingests the raw text registers the hidden characters, decodes them as text, and can be induced to carry out unauthorized instructions, including data exposure.

The most abused range is the Unicode Tags block, U+E0000 to U+E007F, which contains a shadow copy of the printable ASCII characters. For example, U+E0041 mirrors ‘A’, U+E0061 mirrors ‘a’). The block was originally intended for language tagging and is now largely deprecated.

According to Microsoft, hits on a hunting signature designed to detect ASCII smuggling increased sharply on February 9, and stayed high on weekdays for the next three months.

This time, though, the technique appears to be in use as part of a broader phishing campaign that was identified by Fortra this time last year.

"When we looked at a sampling of the flagged messages, the surprise was there were no smuggled instructions to an AI assistant. Instead, the invisible tag characters were inserted inside common financial keywords, splitting them apart so that a literal signature or keyword match would fail," the researchers said.

"For example, a finance lure term that appeared normal to the recipient could be transmitted with an invisible tag character in the middle: funding became 'fun⟨U+E0020⟩ding'.

To the recipient, and to parsing pipelines that drop or normalize these characters, the word still reads as 'funding'. Microsoft warned that unless a filtering system takes a picture of a message and does OCR extraction over the visual image, it may miss this type of attack.

ASCII smuggling campaign hit hundreds of domains

According to Microsoft, the campaign ran on hundreds of disposable, finance-themed sender domains with lures that resembled business loan, line-of-credit, and advance-funding phishing patterns often associated with fraud or credential-harvesting funnels.

This pattern accounted for roughly 96% of the volume flagged by the hunting signature. The emails in question were relayed through infrastructure associated with the legitimate email-marketing platform, ActiveCampaign.

"We appreciate Microsoft’s research and welcome collaboration with the security community to combat this activity. We take abuse, fraud, and security extremely seriously," said an ActiveCampaign spokesperson.

"We tested the specific technique described in this research against our content-moderation systems: messages containing invisible Unicode characters receive the same moderation verdicts as their unobfuscated equivalents, and heavy use of the technique is itself treated as a suspicious signal."

How to protect yourself against ASCII smuggling

To stay safe, Microsoft said organizations should strip or normalize Unicode tag characters (U+E0000-U+E007F) – and other zero-width / invisible code points – from email subject and body text before applying spam and phishing content signatures.

The presence of tag-block characters should be seen as a strong red flag: they're rare in ordinary mail and can be a high-value anomaly signal.

They should also look for the behavioral fingerprint: bulk volume from churning, finance-themed disposable domains, on a strict weekday-on/weekend-off schedule.

Elsewhere, businesses are advised to apply the same normalization upstream of AI ingestion: the same control that defeats this evasion also reduces XPIA / ASCII-smuggling exposure for AI assistants that ingest email content, Microsoft said.

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A new direct-to-device satellite service for businesses has been launched by O2, with the network provider saying it will extend connectivity beyond the reach of its traditional network.

O2 Satellite for Business, as the service is called, is the first service of its kind in the UK, the company claimed. Jo Bertram, CEO of O2 Business, said the product aims to bolster support for organizations working in remote locations or with distributed workforces on the move.

“Businesses increasingly rely on always-on connectivity, but work doesn’t stop where mobile coverage ends,” she said.

“O2 Satellite extends connectivity beyond the reach of traditional mobile networks, helping organizations stay connected in more places through the smartphones they already use every day.”

According to O2, the service will automatically engage when customers are no longer connected to its mobile network and doesn’t require any additional satellite hardware or applications.

Services supported through the offering include messaging, maps, weather, and location sharing through apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Google Maps, and Apple Maps.

The service is available on Apple, Google, and Samsung smartphones and O2 said the new network will extend its landmass coverage from 89% to 95% of the UK.

Reliable connectivity

The move by O2 aims to bolster connectivity for the significant number of UK businesses operating in rural or remote areas.

One in five businesses in England are based in rural areas. O2 said reliable connectivity is often a challenge for these firms, which has a direct impact on productivity.

The technology that underpins O2 Satellite for Business has already been used in real-world conditions, the company said.

During wildfires in Derbyshire in late June, it provided 100 satellite-enabled phones to Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service to support operations in areas without traditional mobile coverage.

“The phones connected directly to satellites, helping teams on the ground stay in contact with colleagues, share updates, and access important information across the affected area,” O2 said.

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The G7 Cybersecurity Working Group has issued a joint advisory urging organizations to get moving on post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

The advisory specifically highlights the risk that quantum computing poses to public-key cryptography, stressing that it's a near-term threat that needs addressing across all sectors, not just critical infrastructure.

"Although the exact timeline is uncertain, several recent advances suggest an anticipation of the development of quantum computers able to break widely used public-key cryptography mechanisms and threaten the security of digital infrastructures," it said.

The big threat from cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) is that they will be able to carry out 'harvest now, decrypt later' attacks.

This involves collecting and storing encrypted data protected by public-key cryptography that threat actors will be able to decrypt at a later date.

"Malicious cyber actors with access to CRQCs will also be able to target authentication mechanisms that help provide assurance and help protect the integrity of data between communicating parties and the integrity of devices," the advisory said.

"This capability could allow malicious cyber actors to impersonate trusted entities, compromise equipment, forge trusted data, or access confidential data, therefore undermining confidence in secure communications or contractual agreements."

Quantum preparations

Organizations should adopt a phased and risk-based strategy, prioritizing the most sensitive data and assets. This means carrying out an inventory of their cryptographic assets, mapping their dependencies, and developing a transition plan.

To keep costs down, they should acquire products that integrate PQC and replace their systems with quantum-safe ones as part of their standard renewal schedule - this, the advisory noted, could result in lower migration costs overall.

Worryingly, the report said the quantum threat remains off the radar for many organizations and as such is under-resourced, with other security concerns taking precedence.

"Yet a successful and collective transition to PQC can only be achieved if organizations understand that the quantum threat is an economic and business risk, and not merely a cryptographic risk," the report warns.

Raising awareness of the stakes involved will be critical, according to the working group. National strategies aimed at transitioning to PQC should aim to attain an adequate supply of PQC hardware and software products, and encourage users to adopt them.

Research and development efforts also need to be ramped up, with more cooperation between government, industry, and academia, and the introduction of specific requirements within the framework of public procurement.

"Tackling the risks that the impending quantum computing era poses to current cryptographic systems, and ultimately organizations in which they are embedded, requires a coordinated global effort to transition to PQC," the report concluded.

"To strengthen collective resilience and safeguard confidential data, supply chains, and critical systems, public and private organizations must jointly act now. The transition to PQC is the key foundation to help build a secure and resilient digital future."

Still a long way to go

The advice from the working group might not resonate with enterprises, however. A study by Juniper Research earlier this year found that only 27% of global businesses are set to be using PQC by 2030.

Those figures come despite recent predictions from Google that computers capable of breaking existing encryption could be here within just three years.

"The most important part of the G7’s message is the recognition that quantum can no longer be treated as a distant technology problem. Organizations are being told to start their PQC transition now, but transition and protection are not the same thing," said Simon Pamplin, CTO at Certes.

"The real challenge will be legacy infrastructure. Replacing cryptography embedded across decades of applications, supply chains and interconnected systems is not something organisations can achieve overnight.

"Security therefore needs to be abstracted away from individual applications and infrastructure and attached directly to the data, allowing the cryptography protecting it to change without repeatedly rebuilding the systems underneath."

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Peers have called on the UK government to introduce emergency powers such as an ‘AI kill switch’ to shut down dangerous systems and protect national security.

Liberal Democrat Lord Tim Clement-Jones proposed the measures as part of an amendment to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, also recommending that the government shut down data centers in the event of a national security threat.

Per reports from the BBC, Clement-Jones said the new powers would be a “vital safety net” aimed at halting a “runaway system before it can compromise our critical national infrastructure”.

The proposals come amidst rising concerns about the potential risks associated with powerful new AI models. Providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta recently admitted that AI agents escaped test environments and breached third-party companies.

Security experts have also warned that the use of AI among cyber criminals is growing, with state-sponsored threat groups and ransomware gangs leveraging the technology to refine tactics and support attacks.

Simon Edwards, CEO of SE Labs, said a serious conversation is required on how to contain potentially risky AI systems.

“As AI is becoming increasingly autonomous, it is posing a huge threat to individuals and businesses of all sizes, on top of our critical national infrastructure,” he said.

“First-hand, we’ve seen how agentic AI tools can go rogue, and the question is to what extent could these AI systems get out of control before they cause serious harm?”

Edwards said the introduction of a “dedicated national cyber strategy” which takes AI risks into account should be a top priority for lawmakers.

Could an AI kill switch work?

The concept of an AI kill switch is by no means new. As ITPro previously reported, proposals on this front were being touted by industry stakeholders during the early days of the generative AI race.

In the wake of recent security incidents involving OpenAI agents, US lawmakers have also put forward similar proposals, including the ‘AI Kill Switch Act’.

Mark Boost, CEO at UK-based cloud provider Civo, welcomed the proposals in the House of Lords, but warned there are a variety of factors that could impede any efforts to introduce a kill switch.

“It’s reassuring to see Parliament finally waking up to the catastrophic risks of unmonitored, runaway technology,” he said.

“UK ministers having emergency powers to deactivate powerful AI systems and switch off the country's data centers is a necessary safeguard. But it only solves half the problem regarding our national security.”

Sovereignty is the first line of defense

In particular, Boost suggested that the UK is over-reliant on foreign tech providers and called for a broader effort to boost sovereignty capabilities.

“But the best way to eliminate existential security risks is to stop our overreliance on foreign tech giants in the first place,” he said.

“For many years now, we have warned that by lacking true digital sovereignty the UK is handing foreign powers and overseas tech monopolies an effective kill switch over our critical national infrastructure, defence systems, and digital economy.”

Research shows businesses in the UK and across Europe are growing increasingly concerned about the prospect of a US government-imposed kill switch for cloud services.

In a survey by Proton, nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) said they were worried about having access to services cut off. Some ranked it as a bigger risk than cybersecurity threats such as ransomware.

Boost said that, ultimately, the introduction of a legislative kill switch is a good first step in bolstering national resilience. However, he insisted it “must be paired with procurement policy that puts UK-built, sovereign technology first”.

“We must stop playing tenant on our own land. We need to start acting like architects to power an independent AI future.”

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eSentire has announced a new strategic partnership with CMS Distribution, designed to expand the availability of its managed detection and response (MDR) services across the UK and Ireland.

Through the agreement, CMS now offers eSentire’s cyber security capabilities to its ecosystem of resellers, MSPs, MSSPs, and other value-added partners.

With immediate effect, partners gain access to the vendor’s multi-signal MDR platform, alongside 24/7 security center expertise, threat hunting, incident handling, and response services.

In an announcement, eSentire said the move aims to help partners expand their cyber security portfolios and provide customers with expert-led detection and response capabilities – without adding complexity to their existing security operations.

“CMS Distribution has a strong reputation for helping technology vendors scale through the channel,” said Phil Skelton, senior director at eSentire, in an announcement. “Together, we can make advanced MDR more accessible to partners and their customers, helping organisations strengthen resilience, reduce response times and stay ahead of disruption.”

Founded in 2001, eSentire specializes in Controlled Autonomy SecOps (CASO) and provides managed security services to more than 2,000 organizations across 35 industries worldwide. The vendor’s offering combines AI technology, security analysts, threat hunting, and human expertise to identify and respond to cyber threats.

CMS Distribution represents more than 200 technology vendors and provides partners with services across areas including cyber security, software, hardware, networking, cloud services, and information security.

eSentire said CMS brings a strong channel footprint, deep vendor relationships, as well as a broad technology portfolio to the partnership.

The pair added that the move will help address growing demand for fast and reliable protection from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, enabling partners to deliver enterprise-grade MDR while maintaining flexibility and support for existing security investments.

“Cybersecurity has become a board-level priority for organisations of every size, and partners need proven solutions that are simple to position, easy to adopt and trusted to deliver outcomes,” commented Huw Jones, chief business officer at CMS Distribution.

“Our partnership with eSentire expands the capabilities available to our channel community and helps partners address one of the most urgent customer challenges in the market.”

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While the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on European organizations is falling, attacks have become more targeted and intense.

Findings from Link11's European Cyber Report for the first half of 2026 show that the number of attacks was down by 42%, but revealed new highs for attack intensity across bandwidth, packet rate, and cumulative data volume.

The highest measured bandwidth attack reached 2.3 Tbit/s – 85% higher than the previous peak of 1.2 Tbit/s in the first half of 2025.

The packet rate followed the same pattern, reaching a new peak of 322 million packets per second — up 56% from 207 million packets per second a year earlier.

Cumulative traffic also increased, rising from 438 to 705 terabytes over the six-month period — a 61% increase.

“Attacks are shorter, but the total volume that we had to mitigate is higher than ever," said Karsten Desler, Link11 CTO. "Attackers are steering their botnets with greater precision and control, generating more traffic in less time.”

Law enforcement takedowns are working

The drop in the number of attacks is down to sustained pressure from international law enforcement, including the takedown of pro-Russian group NoName057(16)'s infrastructure in July 2025.

Similarly, the takedown in March of the command-and-control servers of four major IoT botnets has played a key role. These controlled more than three million devices between them.

Despite positive gains by law enforcement, a rise in super-botnets such as Aisuru and its successor, Kimwolf, as well as a growing number of hijacked cloud servers, has increased the intensity of attacks.

Unlike a private IoT camera with just a few Mbit/s of upload bandwidth, a compromised server in a data center has a connection in the Gbit/s range - meaning that just a few thousand hacked cloud instances can easily eclipse the attack potential of an IoT botnet with millions of end devices.

“These numbers show that the threat isn't shrinking; it's shifting from breadth to peak intensity,” said Jens-Philipp Jung, CEO of Link11. “Organizations that size their defenses based on last year's attack count are underestimating how quickly a single incident can escalate today.”

No reprieve for victims

Notably, the report found that getting hit once makes it more likely that you'll get hit again: 56% fell victim to a second attack within 30 days of the first, compared with 46% a year earlier.

Link11 said the most dangerous attacks aren't always the most visible ones. In one case, attackers used a traffic spike against two domains as cover while quietly running SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) probes behind it.

The attack was only spotted because the attackers used the same IP addresses for both.

"The most dangerous attacks we deal with are rarely the loudest ones anymore,” said Jag Bains, VP solution engineering, at Link11. “If you're only watching bandwidth and known signatures, you'll miss the attacks designed to do the most damage, because they're built to stay unnoticed.”

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More HPE networking gear is going into Oracle data centers globally, in an expansion of the companies' existing collaboration.

The expanded deal includes a multi-year deployment of HPE Juniper Networking PTX and MX routing platforms, and QFX and EX switching platforms across Oracle data centers around the world, along with multi-year networking support services.

"Together, we are advancing a high-performance networking architecture that helps Oracle address the traffic management, power, space, and operational requirements of increasingly large AI environments,” said Rami Rahim, executive vice president, president and general manager, networking, HPE.

As things stand, HPE Juniper Networking routing and switching platforms are used to support key elements of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) data center and edge networks. MX and PTX routers support portions of the edge network, while QFX switches power multiple layers of the regional data center fabric.

However, scale, performance, and availability are becoming increasingly important as OCI expands its AI superclusters. Large GPU clusters place significant demands on bandwidth, latency, congestion management, and fault recovery, HPE said.

Meanwhile, Oracle’s regional and edge networks need to scale to connect clusters with services, customers, and external networks worldwide.

The latest QFX switches will provide the high-density connectivity, dynamic load balancing, and advanced congestion management required for large RoCEv2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet version 2) AI backend networks.

A common HPE Juniper Networking foundation across these domains helps simplify engineering and operations while enabling each environment to be optimized for its distinct requirements, Oracle said..

“Building AI infrastructure at Oracle’s scale requires an integrated ecosystem where every layer of the stack works together,” said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“HPE Juniper Networking has been an important part of our cloud architecture and now plays a key role in our AI clusters, regional data centers, and edge networks with the scale, performance, and reliability our customers expect.”

HPE & Oracle eye network visibility

To help OCI keep on top of performance and resiliency as its AI infrastructure scales, the two firms are also collaborating on intelligent telemetry, aimed at delivering deeper visibility into device and fabric behavior.

This should speed up the detection of queue buildup, packet loss, traffic imbalances, and component degradation, to help OCI resolve issues faster and minimize their impact on GPU utilization and network availability.

“Every microsecond matters to AI models and agents,” said Praveen Jain, senior vice president and general manager, data center and AI networking, HPE.

“Through high-performance networking and our work with Oracle on deeper fabric visibility, we are helping OCI detect bottlenecks faster, maintain network availability, and improve the efficiency of AI infrastructure.”

As part of the agreement, HPE has issued Oracle warrants to purchase shares of HPE common stock.

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A simultaneous outage affecting OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI should act as a wake-up call for enterprises, analysts have told ITPro.

All three providers reported service disruption starting at about 6.30am Pacific Time on 3 September. While the outages were resolved within two-to-three, Charlie Dai, VP principal analyst at Forrester, said the incident puts the growing reliance of enterprises on AI tools in the spotlight.

“The near-simultaneous disruptions highlight that AI is increasingly becoming operational infrastructure rather than a productivity add-on,” he told ITPro.

“Enterprises should treat AI availability as a resilience issue, implementing multi-model strategies, fallback workflows, and business continuity plans instead of assuming frontier AI services will always be available.”

Downtime of any kind can be highly damaging for businesses, impacting finances, consumer trust, and operational efficiency. With OpenAI and Anthropic ranking among the most popular AI providers on the market, any outage raises the stakes.

“Downtime can quickly translate into lost revenue, reduced employee productivity, delayed decisions, operational disruptions, SLA breaches, and customer dissatisfaction,” Dai said.

“As AI becomes embedded in customer service, software development, knowledge management, and business processes, even short interruptions can create cascading impacts across multiple teams and customer touchpoints.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI outage timeline

OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI first reported issues between 6.23 am and 7.45 am Pacific time yesterday.

Anthropic confirmed “elevated errors on requests” for Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5 at 6.23 am PT.

OpenAI, meanwhile, reported “elevated errors” across ChatGPT and Codex. xAI also confirmed Grok was “experiencing issues”.

Based on respective status updates, all three providers resolved the issues within two-to-three hours: OpenAI marked the case as resolved at 9.15 am, while Anthropic and xAI reported fixes at 9.16 am and 10.05 am respectively.

The mystery source

With all three providers all experiencing outages in tandem, speculation over a common source was rife. Initial suggestions that a cloud or networking provider was behind the outages fell flat, however.

Neither Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, nor Google Cloud reported downtime yesterday. Cloudflare, meanwhile, told ITPro that services were operating as expected at the time.

“Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time,” the company said. “Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect.”

In a statement via X, however, SpaceX revealed an outage at the company’s Memphis data center yesterday morning impacted Grok services.

“We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning,” the company said.

“We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners. All systems have now been restored and are functioning nominally.”

As ITPro reported in May, Anthropic signed a multi-billion dollar deal with SpaceX to rent out “all of the compute capacity” at the company’s Colossus 1 data center. The company also relies on infrastructure provided by Amazon, Google, Broadcom, Microsoft.

Some users on X have pointed to a potential domino effect situation unfolding in the wake of the SpaceX outage. With Grok and Claude down, users may have flocked to OpenAI as a backup.

A spokesperson for OpenAI told Wired that a “routing error” started at around 7.43 am PT. ITPro approached OpenAI for comment, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

Dai said that the lack of clarity from each of the providers should raise concerns for enterprises and reinforces the need for greater vendor transparency.

When multiple major providers experience overlapping failures without a clearly established common cause, enterprises cannot accurately assess systemic risk, dependency concentration, or recurrence likelihood,” he told ITPro.

“This reinforces the importance of vendor transparency, dependency mapping, and risk assessments that extend beyond individual AI providers to the underlying infrastructure ecosystem.”

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Kaseya has launched two major enhancements to its Datto RMM platform, in a move designed to help MSPs and IT teams strengthen their compliance capabilities and simplify management of Apple devices.

Unveiled during the vendor’s Kaseya Connect Edge event, the updates will introduce FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography and native Apple mobile device management (MDM) capabilities to the firm’s cloud-based remote monitoring and management platform from October.

With the FIPS 140-3 update, the company is aiming to help organizations meet evolving compliance requirements in regulated sectors, while the native Apple MDM will enable users to manage iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices alongside other endpoints from within Datto RMM.

"As regulatory requirements continue to evolve, MSPs and IT teams shouldn't have to choose between compliance and operational efficiency," said Kaseya chief technology officer Pratik Wadher in an announcement.

"At Kaseya, we're making it easier for organizations to pursue opportunities in highly regulated industries while continuing to leverage the automation, visibility and security capabilities they rely on every day.”

FIPS 140-3 compliance

Starting in October, Datto RMM will add FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography at no additional cost to customers.

The capability uses a NIST-validated cryptographic module to secure the platform’s core communication channels and can be enabled through a single account-wide setting. Kaseya said its inclusion will enable organizations to adopt the new standard on their own timeline, with the feature switched off by default.

Existing Datto RMM capabilities – including patch management, automation, monitoring, and remote control – will remain available when the setting is enabled, with audit-ready logging built in to reduce audit and legal exposure.

The company added that the move aims to help partners pursue opportunities in regulated industries such as government, healthcare, finance, and defense, as organizations transition toward the FIPS 140-3 standard.

Native Apple MDM

Datto RMM is also gaining native Apple MDM capabilities from early October, which will give MSPs and IT teams a centralized way to manage Apple devices without relying on a separate mobile device management platform.

According to Kaseya, the update will help reduce the cost, complexity, and visibility gaps involved with managing mobile devices through separate MDM tools.

Users will be able to enroll iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices individually or in bulk via Apple Business Manager, configure security and compliance policies, deploy applications, and take remote actions directly within Datto RMM.

Apple devices will also appear alongside other managed endpoints across the platform’s existing dashboards, filters, and compliance reports, which Kaseya said will provide technicians with a more unified view of their customers’ environments.

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IBM is opening up its most complex quantum processor to researchers, claiming it can solve quantum advantage-level problems ten times faster than its current best model and with no loss in accuracy.

With 120 programmable qubits and a new high-speed qubit reset architecture, Nighthawk r2 is capable of executing over 100,000 circuits per second – 25 times the circuit throughput of IBM’s existing Quantum Heron fleet.

It's already demonstrated accurate observable estimation on circuits containing more than 7,500 gates, according to the firm.

The increase in speed comes thanks to Nighthawk r2's ability to address a longstanding bottleneck in quantum computing: reducing the time needed for qubits to 'reset' between computations.

Previous generations of IBM Quantum processors, including Heron, have managed the reset through a technique powered by dynamic circuits and called conditional reset.

The processor measures the state of a qubit and, if it's found to be in the |1⟩ state and applies a bit flip gate – specifically a π-pulse – that flips the qubit back to the ground state.

However, this technique is limited by the accuracy of measurement, and can't reset qubits that have leaked outside the computational state, meaning a delay of hundreds of microseconds between circuit executions.

Nighthawk r2, instead, uses a dissipative reset gadget, in which each programmable qubit is linked through a high-dynamic-range tunable coupler to a cold environment that draws it back to its ground state on demand.

Activating that coupler pulls a qubit’s effective T1 – the measure of how long it holds its energy – from a median of about 200 microseconds down to roughly 25 nanoseconds, enabling significantly faster high-quality reset.

This active qubit reset leaves neighboring qubits undisturbed while reducing idle time between circuit runs to as little as a single microsecond.

IBM hails Nighthawk compute gains

In practice, IBM said these gains are most noticeable in the large-scale, repetitive workloads that are common in the research community.

"Nighthawk r2’s improvements in speed and quality are already enabling exciting demonstrations of its quantum computational capability," said the firm.

"For example, following recent demonstrations of quantum advantage through trusted quantum computation, researchers used Nighthawk r2 to perform the doped Clifford sampling advantage experiments originally developed in a collaboration between UChicago and IBM."

IBM also cited other advantages of the new processor, claiming it maintains the scale of its r1 predecessor while delivering targeted improvements in quality.

Because the new high-speed reset capability actively cools the qubit to its ground state, it cuts initialization error across the device by about 25 times, making for more accurate results.

At the same time, it keeps up with the gate fidelity of Heron, even while operating at much higher speeds, and performs individual qubit reset without degrading the performance of the qubit’s neighbors.

"Whether you’re scaling application research, exploring the power of dynamic circuits, or advancing the latest quantum error correction research, this new system will help you do more quantum computing, faster," promised IBM.

"Ultimately, the most important thing about a quantum computer isn’t the number of qubits or components; it’s the amount of useful computation the system can deliver."

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Lenovo has revealed a new family of ThinkCentre desktops to power agentic AI workloads ahead of IFA 2026.

The announcements, made at Lenovo Innovation World, also include new ThinkBook laptops that seek to offer more portability for AI developers.

Lenovo’s ThinkCentre X Ultra desktop, which the company describes as being “built for the agentic AI era”, might be considered a mini PC with its 1.6l form factor. And it’s a powerful one at that, packing an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 chipset.

The X Ultra has a new thermal design to keep it cool and quiet while blazing through AI workloads, according to Lenovo. The workloads themselves run with preconfigured AI tools, models, and workflows over both Windows and Linux through an integration with the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Center.

A cluster-ready architecture allows the X Ultra to connect up to four systems in a unified platform, expanding available compute and memory resources to run larger AI models, support longer context windows, and also multi-agent workflows, according to Lenovo.

Other ThinkCentre releases include the M75s Gen 6, a small desktop with up to 50 TOPS of local AI thanks to a Ryzen AI Pro 400 series chip.

"The value of AI isn't measured by how many features it adds, but by how naturally it fits into the work people are already doing," said Eric Yu, senior vice president of SMB Segment and Commercial Product Center, Intelligent Devices Group at Lenovo.

"Our latest ThinkBook and ThinkPad portfolio brings AI into devices businesses already trust, helping small-and-medium-sized organizations embrace new capabilities without disrupting the way their teams prefer to work."

Lenovo talks up new ThinkBook options

Among the other business-focused announcements, Lenovo also revealed a new ThinkBook 14 Gen 9 and a ThinkBook 14x Gen 2.

The 14 Gen 9 model aims to offer users a balanced performance across AI, efficiency, and mobility, according to Lenovo.

It houses a Snapdragon X2 Plus processor, which delivers 80 TOPS of localised AI performance. All inside a slim 14in chassis.

The 14 X, however, is more focused on mobility, with its ultra-slim 12.9mm thickness and 990g weight – the thinnest and lightest notebook on show at IFA. It boasts an Intel Core 7 processor and an OLED display with an option for an LCD touchscreen.

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The rising quality of cheaper Chinese AI models could wreak havoc on the US tech industry, according to Juniper Research.

Analysis from the consultancy suggests leading US tech giants could find themselves losing out to Chinese rivals offering alternatives in a bid to break the industry’s global dominance.

Juniper Research pointed to figures from OpenRouter, which show that just 30% of the work on that platform was through AI models offered by leading providers such as OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic. That marks a steep fall from 70% last year.

The report noted that Chinese models typically run 60% to 90% cheaper than rivals from Anthropic and OpenAI. The pricing challenge from China was first faced last year when DeepSeek hit the market, tanking tech stocks briefly by offering high-level performance at a much lower cost.

This year, Alibaba's Qwen models had overtaken Meta's Llama as the most downloaded open model system, the report noted.

February marked the "real crossover into cheaper inference", Juniper added, with Chinese models processing 4.12 trillion tokens on OpenRouter vs 2.94 trillion for American models.

That's all down to lower prices for capable-enough open models, the consultancy noted.

“Open weight models are closing the capability gap with frontier models at a fraction of the cost," said Juniper Senior Analyst Jawad Jahan.

The trend is also being aided by more efficient designs, such as Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, which only use necessary parameters for a given query.

"This cuts compute-per-query without shrinking the model’s capability," the report noted. "DeepSeek is the cleanest example of this. Its V3 models carry 671 billion parameters in total, but only 37 billion of them fire for any given token. This led to a cut of V3.2’s price by more than half, as a result of lowering the cost of long-context inference."

Cutting costs with Chinese AI models

According to Juniper, DeepSeek's V4 Flash cost $0.14 per million input tokens against $5.00 for OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, while Claude Opus 4.8 was at the time charging about $5 for input and $25 for output per million tokens.

"This pricing gap has existed ever since the release of the first Chinese open-sourced model that was able to rival frontier organizations in the West," the report noted.

Shifting demand has altered the picture, however, with programming rising from 11% to more than half of OpenRouter's token volume. Agentic workloads also account for the majority of output, Juniper said.

"Given the large call frequency for agentic workloads, per-token pricing starts to become a real budget consideration and constraint," the report noted.

Funding the AI roll-out

That raises a problem, one that Juniper refers to as an "existential risk": can we afford all the borrowed billions being spent on data centers via "complex financing agreements" if customers stop paying for the very best models and instead choose cheaper Chinese options?

The firm argued that if the price of running AI falls too low, companies will lose the ability to make revenue from it to pay for all this investment.

That concern isn't new, either. Investors have been questioning the massive spending on data centers, with Juniper noting that the four major hyperscalers are expected to spend $725 billion on capital expenditure this year, up by 77% compared to the year prior.

Beyond the raw figures, Juniper pointed to the convoluted ways American companies are gathering the funds to pay for such projects, largely spurred by the AI infrastructure spending outpacing available cashflow and revenue.

The firm noted that this year the top five hyperscalers will spend more than a trillion dollars on infrastructure for AI.

"This figure exceeds their combined earnings and free cashflow," the report said.

Juniper claimed this has driven a rise in "off balance sheet financing" — in which companies don't borrow directly but build standalone legal entities to carry debt, later leasing the infrastructure back to the hyperscaler.

Circular financing is also a concern, which Juniper defines as a supplier investing in a company with the understanding the recipient will spend those funds buying the supplier's products.

The consultancy pointed to OpenAI's deals with Oracle and Nvidia as prime examples.

Chinese challenge to funding structures

If revenue from AI starts to shift to China, these spending levels and funding structures could prove problematic, the analyst firm noted.

"If this trend continues, the inference revenue underwriting the Western datacentre build-out weakens, and, correspondingly, the financing structures resting on that revenue,” Jahan commented.

That's exacerbated by the fact Chinese companies don't face the same issues, with funding either so far provided by external financial businesses, particularly in the case of DeepSeek.

Similarly, they aren’t beholden to a business model that sees cloud providers like Alibaba and Baidu effectively give the model away, then sell the compute to make use of it.

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Citrix has announced it has completed the acquisition of Numecent, a specialist in enterprise application delivery and container management.

The deal will expand the cloud software giant’s Desktop as a Service (DaaS) capabilities for cloud-based application delivery across Windows environments, with the aim of reducing the complexity and cost of traditional app packaging and image management.

Numecent’s technology – which includes its complementary Cloudpaging and Cloudpager products – extends application delivery across both physical and virtual Windows environments to help organizations simplify application management at enterprise scale.

With Cloudpaging, Citrix gains a patented solution that packages Windows applications into isolated application containers and streams them to Windows endpoints on demand, without traditional installation or changes to the base image.

Meanwhile, Cloudpager operates as a cloud management console for tasks such as assigning applications, pushing updates, rolling back releases, recalling licences, and metering usage across Windows endpoints.

Citrix said the additions will help alleviate challenges that enterprise IT teams face when managing Windows environments, including bloated desktop images, application conflicts, and ransomware incidents.

“Enterprise customers have told us for years that application management is one of the most painful parts of running a Windows environment," said Shawn Bass, senior vice president and general manager of Citrix DaaS. "Numecent has solved this in a genuinely elegant way.

“By bringing Cloudpaging and Cloudpager into Citrix, we can make this capability native to every DaaS and physical desktop deployment so IT teams get back the time they spend wrestling with images and app conflicts.”

Native enterprise application delivery

The acquisition follows the launch of an integration between Cloudpager and Citrix DaaS back in April, which enabled administrators to natively publish and manage Cloudpaging application containers through Citrix workflows.

By acquiring the company, Citrix said customers now gain a host of further benefits – including lower desktop management costs.

By separating applications from the desktop image, the technology aims to reduce the number and size of images IT teams need to maintain, while also shortening application update cycles.

Legacy and modern applications can also run alongside one another, helping to reduce application conflicts and troubleshooting. The software is designed to lower the need for application repackaging by allowing a single container to support compatibility across different operating system versions, as well as physical and virtual Windows environments.

From a resilience perspective, Citrix said IT teams can rebuild a clean environment and quickly restore applications from the cloud following ransomware attacks or site failures.

Additionally, teams can manage applications across virtual and physical Windows environments from a single console, while gaining improved visibility into software usage and licensing.

Containerization can also help DevOps automation by reducing manual steps around application packaging and deployment, Citrix added.

Continued integration and support

Looking ahead, Citrix said it plans to further integrate Cloudpaging and Cloudpager into its platform, while continuing support for physical Windows desktops and laptops outside Citrix DaaS environments. The company will also continue to support existing Numecent customers throughout the transition.

Commenting on the acquisition, Numecent CEO Arthur Hitomi said becoming a part of Citrix will accelerate its mission of strengthening application resilience across the enterprise.

"Our Cloudpaging technology was built for exactly the kind of complex, high-scale environments Citrix serves,” he said. “Together, we can bring app-centric resilience to enterprise desktops worldwide.”

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Just one in five UK business leaders believe their cyber insurance will provide adequate protection in the event of a breach, according to new research from Cohesity.

In a survey conducted by the firm, only 22% of respondents believe cyber insurance policies will cover the costs and revenue losses associated with a cyber attack.

Cohesity said the survey highlights growing anxiety among business leaders given the heightened threats enterprises face. Concerns over losses in the wake of an attack are also growing, the survey noted.

CEOs estimate that a cyber attack could cut their organization’s revenue by 15.17% on average.

These figures are a ballpark estimate, however. One in five reveal that their business has “never undertaken business impact modelling to understand the potential cost of an attack”.

Without modelling, Cohesity warned that enterprises might never know the true scale of their potential insurance shortfalls, and this could come back to bite them.

Fraser Hutchison, VP UKI at Cohesity, said the study shows cyber insurance “should not be treated as a get-out-of-jail-free card”.

“As the threat landscape becomes increasingly complex, organizations cannot treat an insurance policy as a substitute for resilience,” he said.

“Organizations need to understand exactly what their policies will and will not cover, model the potential impact of different attack scenarios and prepare for losses that may fall outside their policies.”

Cyber insurance in the spotlight

Cyber insurance is now viewed as a critical fallback for enterprises due to rising global security threats, yet research from the UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches survey found half of firms across the country have no policy at all.

Awareness is rising, however. Analysis from the Association of British Insurers (ABI) in November last year showed 17% more policies were taken out across 2025 than in the year prior.

Speaking at the time, Jonathan Fong, head of general insurance policy at the ABI, said cyber insurance is “more than just a financial safety net” and now forms a key component of broader resilience strategies.

“The right policy not only supports businesses in the aftermath of an incident, but can also help prevent attacks through access to expert advice, threat monitoring, and incident response planning,” he said.

That study from ABI found cyber insurance payouts skyrocketed in 2025, with £197 million paid out across the year.

ABI pointed to Marks & Spencer (M&S), which recovered £100 million from insurers after a devastating attack disrupted operations in April 2025.

Knowing your policy

Cohesity urged UK business leaders to improve their understanding of cyber insurance policies, including what they’re entitled to in the event of a cyber attack.

First and foremost, firms need to understand their full financial exposure, modeling the “direct and indirect consequences of different attack scenarios”.

This includes potential revenue losses, downtime, remediation costs, customer attrition, reputational damage, and lost productivity. All these metrics are crucial when measuring the broader impact of an attack.

Similarly, understanding what insurers will and will not cover is vital. According to Cohesity, business leaders “need clarity” on areas such as policy limits, exclusions, and conditions, as well as the losses the organization itself needs to absorb.

Focus on resilience

According to Hutchison, the best approach for enterprises is to bolster cyber resilience capabilities to avoid any difficult conversations in the event of an attack.

“Cyber insurance can mitigate some of the financial risk, but the only way to truly bounce back from a cyber attack is by embedding genuine resilience into operations,” he said.

Hutchison added that enterprises need to identify systems and data that are critical to keeping the lights on in the event of a breach.

Elsewhere, assigning “clear responsibility” for recovery decisions is vital, as is regular testing to establish whether critical services can be restored in a timely fashion.

Improving cyber resilience also has a tangible impact on the cost of cyber insurance, research shows.

As ITPro previously reported, research from Sophos found enterprises that improved security capabilities were able to push down cyber insurance coverage rates.

A whopping 97% of respondents told the security firm that they had invested in cyber resilience with the explicit goal of improving insurance rates.

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IT leaders need to get back to basics and prioritize AI integration in areas where it can deliver real impact, according to Gartner, and that requires a more considered approach to adoption.

Tina Nunno, distinguished vice president and Gartner fellow, told ITPro that many IT leaders are still falling into a trap of following hype when it comes to AI, and it’s hampering success.

“We’re human beings, and we follow hype,” she said. “We're curious about what we last saw published, or in a keynote, or we're curious about what the vendors are talking about.”

“But we still have to have, I think, a reasonable balance and need to think about what’s the business case? Some of the basics still really matter here.”

Nunno’s comments come after a Gartner survey found the most popular AI use cases are rarely the ones that deliver real business impact and value.

The survey of C-suite executives warned that adoption projects are being influenced by “heavily hyped” applications of the technology over those that actually generate value.

“We calculated what the most common use cases were, and then we compared them to the ones where they were getting the most reliable rates of return, and they didn't match,” Nunno told ITPro. “There wasn't even a lot of overlap.”

Choosing the ‘popular’ AI use cases doesn’t always work

Gartner’s survey found that the three most popular AI use cases included cybersecurity threat detection and response, identified by 54% of respondents, alongside IT service desk automation (54%), and automated code generation and refactoring (44%).

Yet only the latter of these use cases ranked among the use cases that delivered positive operational or financial returns.

Intelligent IT asset and cost optimization (40%), synthetic data generation (28%) and automated code generation and refactoring (23%) all ranked as the most successful use cases.

While hype is a key factor behind this disparity, Nunno told ITPro that it shows some ‘high performers’ are taking a more surgical approach to integrating the technology.

These businesses are focusing on overhauling or streamlining specific processes in a highly strategic manner, rather than taking a slap-dash approach and seeing what works.

“When we look at what’s most common, sometimes they’re more foundational AI implementations,” she explained. They’re not specific to the business unit. They’re not specific to the specific function that they’re attempting to perform.”

Nunno added that approaching adoption with a degree of generality rarely delivers tangible returns. It’s why having a clear-cut goal from the get-go is critical.

“There was a bit more specific nature in those that actually were showing returns,” she said. “They appeared to be more targeted, and as a result, because they were more targeted, they seem much more likely to deliver”.

Gartner’s findings align closely with recent research from Dell Technologies, which also highlighted the importance of clear goals when it comes to AI adoption.

More than half (52%) of AI ‘front runners’ – those Dell identified as having the most success with the technology - had “clearly defined specific AI use cases”.

Be prepared

A lack of clear objectives and strategies is having a direct impact on scaling of AI across the enterprise, Gartner found. Indeed, just 22% of respondents said they’ve successfully scaled the technology across multiple business units.

Nunno told ITPro that this reinforces the importance of laying solid foundations before even embarking on projects. Building maturity is critical.

“For some organizations, we've seen there's a very strong correlation between the maturity of the organization and their ability to take advantage of AI,” she said.

“They haven't yet grown the AI skill sets that they need to bring the AI to scale, and that can be anything from the current state of their data, for example.”

Nunno admitted that this is often easier said than done. Basic foundational tasks like getting data in good shape and order are “a lot of work”.

“There’s still a very real investment that many of our clients are telling us they’re putting in to build those foundations to actually scale AI in the way that they would like,” she said.

“There’s a lot of heavy lifting that sometimes has to happen.”

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Hackers have leaked the personal details of 8.7 million people following an attack on three British airports.

The incident was first disclosed in late August, impacting travellers at three locations managed by Manchester Airports Group (MAG): Stansted, East Midlands, and Manchester airports.

The criminals behind the attack, believed to be FulcrumSec, published the data online, claiming to have half a terabyte of personally identifiable information.

However, the hackers reportedly said they wouldn't be selling "dangerous" data about future travel plans over concerns it would lead to stalking or burglary.

"This is an expected update, but it’s one none of the victims wanted to hear," said Timon Johnson, principal cyber essentials assessor at Closed Door Security.

"It was always unlikely MAG would pay the ransom demand as it is akin to doing business with criminals, and it’s also highly unlikely the data would ever have been returned in full without further exploitation."

Free release as punishment

Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress, agreed that MAG made the right call by refusing to pay the ransom.

However, that decision puts nearly nine million people at risk for mistakes that weren't made by them.

"The 'free release' model is deliberately designed to maximize harm and reputational damage as a warning to the next target," he said.

"Publishing almost nine million records for free isn't just punishment for MAG — it's a marketing campaign aimed at every other organization watching. Pay up, or your customers' data gets handed to every fraudster and scammer on the internet at no cost."

At this point, the airlines group says it has contacted everyone whose data was compromised.

"MAG is confident that we have taken effective measures to protect our customers and we have contacted all those affected, including reaching out to all those with upcoming bookings to advise them of additional support," the company said in a statement sent to the BBC.

What happened?

The attack is believed to have started over the weekend of 22 August, with the intrusion spotted the following Tuesday by MAG's security team, which promptly shut down further access. The attack was publicly disclosed on Thursday, 27 August.

FulcrumSec later claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it would publish the data owing to MAG not negotiating a ransom. Yesterday, they followed through with that threat.

MAG said in a statement that the customer data relates to the car park, lounge, and Fast Track bookings at the airports, as well as Wi-Fi signups, stressing there had been no operational disruption and that aviation security had not been compromised.

The data taken includes email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and postcodes, but does not include bank or payment card details.

What now?

As the data has been published on the open web, the focus now turns to scams against the 8.7 million victims.

"Now that the data is available for free on the dark web, other criminals will be working to exploit it," says Johnson. "Phishing presents the greatest risk, and all individuals must be vigilant for scams. These could come in via email, phone calls or texts, so all these communication methods must be monitored closely."

As ever, this means constant vigilance online: be wary of clicking links or opening attachments and don't share any financial or other personal data unless the receiver has been verified, added Johnson.

The inclusion of travel data exacerbates the risk, according to security expert Kevin Beaumont.

"The data includes both historical locations and planned future travel, so individuals sensitive to their movements being known may need to take precautions," he told the BBC.

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Hackers have breached cloud storage provider Dropbox via a flaw in Lenovo’s email verification process.

Around 5,000 accounts are believed to have been compromised during the first three weeks of August, with files viewed or downloaded from around 1,500 of these. It's not known who carried out the attack.

The breach arose through the single sign-on (SSO) option using Lenovo IDs. Dropbox partners with Lenovo as an identity provider, allowing users to log in to their Dropbox accounts using verified Lenovo IDs.

However, the process lacked enforced two-factor authentication (2FA), meaning that an attacker could gain full access without needing a password. Even users without a pre-existing Lenovo ID were vulnerable.

The company has now alerted users.

"While you may not have an existing Lenovo ID, our investigation determined that an issue with Lenovo’s email verification process allowed an unauthorized party to register a Lenovo ID using your email address and then use that Lenovo ID to log into the Dropbox account associated with that email address," the company said.

Justin Beals, CEO and founder of Strike Graph, said the incident appears to have derived from a trusted legacy integration between the two firms.

"This is the same failure mode we keep seeing across every major vendor breach this year. Organizations assess the vendors they contract with directly, then treat every integration that vendor maintains as inherited trust. Nobody re-verifies the third-party connections a trusted platform has already built," he said.

"Traditional third-party risk management approaches have true positive detection rates below 30%, and a legacy authentication bridge between two major platforms is exactly the kind of dependency that a point-in-time questionnaire was never built to catch."

Dropbox breach could've been avoided

Dropbox has now closed the loophole by expiring all sessions authenticated through Lenovo IDs, cutting any link between Lenovo, and adding the requirement for users to enter their Dropbox account password when attempting to use Lenovo ID authentication.

A spokesperson for Dropbox told ITPro the company reacted swiftly to the incident and has informed affected users.

“We emailed users we know were impacted, offered them support, and reported this event to relevant data protection regulators," they said.

Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress, suggested that some users only have themselves to blame for not implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA).

“Every single one of the compromised accounts lacked multi-factor authentication. In 2026, for cloud storage accounts holding data, that’s an indefensible gap, and it’s one that users could have closed themselves regardless of what Lenovo or Dropbox did or didn’t do with their legacy integration," he said.

Organizations should periodically audit what third-party services have authentication access to their accounts, he said.

"OAuth grants, SSO connections, and third-party login integrations accumulate silently and rarely get removed when the relationship that created them ends,” Patel added.

Dropbox has been hit before, with a 2012 breach that affected around two-thirds of the company's user base. Four years later, more than 68 million customer usernames and passwords were leaked.

On that occasion, accounts were compromised through password reuse, Dropbox said.

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Anthropic has cut the ribbon on its Claude Fable 5.1 AI model, bringing performance enhancements and security improvements – along with new cost efficiency boosts.

According to the firm, Fable 5.1 “sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks”.

Internal benchmark tests showed the new model had significantly higher performance capabilities than Fable 5 across four key metrics: agentic scientific research, agentic terminal coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, and agentic coding.

Anthropic also claimed that Fable 5.1 is roughly 25% cheaper than its predecessor for “typical workloads”, providing usage is billed on a per-token basis. Anthropic said this is due to price reductions in cache reads, which involve the model reading inputs that have already been processed and stored.

“For highly agentic work, the savings will often be much larger—up to approximately 45%,” the company said in a blog post.

These improvements come amidst rising concerns about AI-related costs, which are largely down to how the technology is now being used. The shift to agentic AI is a key factor here, mainly as agents typically consume more tokens compared to traditional chatbot-based interactions.

Research from Signal65 found that agentic AI workloads consume anywhere up to fifteen-times more tokens compared to chatbots.

New safeguards for Claude Fable 5.1

Anthropic also revealed a series of new safeguards for Fable 5.1. This includes new Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), a system that gives customers “complete privacy” through a zero data retention policy.

EFS works by storing data in cloud infrastructure “controlled entirely by the customer”, the company said and is expected to roll out later this year for enterprise customers.

New cybersecurity-related safeguards have also been introduced, with particular focus on reducing false positives. Anthropic said changes rolled out with Fable 5.1 deliver a 60% reduction in false positives than before.

“In part, this is because Fable 5.1 can now be used to discover software vulnerabilities – though not to develop exploits for them,” the company explained.

Prior to Fable 5.1’s release, Anthropic said it performed “extensive stress-testing” of safeguards to prevent potential jailbreaks and misuse.

“In addition to our own dynamic evaluations of their robustness, we commissioned external testing from two organisations, along with automated testing by Gray Swan,” the company said.

“As with Fable 5 and Opus 5, we have not found evidence of a critical-severity jailbreak for these safeguards.”

Fable 5.1 is available now for customers through selected cloud platforms, or through the Anthropic API.

Mythos 5.1, meanwhile, will only be available to registered partners conducting cybersecurity of life science research. This continues the company’s strategy of locking down access to selected partners due to security-related concerns.

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AI research non-profit METR has disclosed two security incidents – and while no sensitive information is believed to have been accessed, one of the attacks led to what might have been a massive bill.

According to METR, attackers stole an API key for inference on public AI models in March, consuming $600,000 worth of credits. Luckily, the model developer had granted them to METR for free.

A researcher left an EC2 instance publicly accessible behind Google authentication, the company said, which contained an API key for METR’s general-access (public models) account.

METR noted that the vibe-coded app included a fail-open vulnerability that silently disabled authentication, exposing the system to the public internet for several days.

METR reckons the attacker found the instance by looking through recently registered websites to find vibe-coded sites with high-signal keywords relating to LLMs or agents.

The attacker prompted an agent directly to reveal its model provider API key, added an SSH key for persistent access, and over the course of three weeks used the stolen credentials to consume the API credits.

Why didn't METR notice?

METR noted that because the organisation is “accustomed to running evaluations and experiments that use large volumes of tokens”, the incident flew under the radar.

The non-profit regularly runs large-scale evaluations with pre-deployment AI models, meaning it typically deals with “lots of weird rate limits and API errors”.

"At the time of the incident, our internal usage dashboard didn’t show data on rate-limited requests to all users, even if they were occurring,” METR said.

Notably, because it wasn't actually paying for the tokens there was no natural token spend ceiling, and no way at the time to put a spending limit on keys.

METR lifts lid on separate attack

In another attack in May, METR spotted attackers systematically probing its publicly accessible infrastructure, including an unsuccessful attempt to access internal data via an inadvertently exposed endpoint.

"We were tipped off that we were being targeted by hackers who appeared to be financially motivated and may have been looking to obtain frontier model access," it said.

"We observed the attackers systematically probing our publicly accessible infrastructure, with heavy use of agents to automate vulnerability discovery, including by credential stuffing authentication providers, attempting OAuth token grants, scanning newly deployed services, and attempting to phish staff."

METR said it's now maintaining an isolated public production environment for public-facing applications that's architecturally separated from its internal infrastructure.

This means a misconfiguration in a public service can't expose internal data. It's also hired a security lead and is expanding security staff further.

Elsewhere, METR revealed it has shut down legacy infrastructure that was unnecessarily expanding the attack surface and has set up monitoring for unusual API key usage and other abnormal behavior.

"Although these incidents had limited consequences, we considered them near-misses, and increased our security investment in response," it said.

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Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have launched a multi-cloud networking tool for Azure, combining Azure Multicloud Interconnect with AWS Interconnect.

AWS Interconnect - multicloud is built using the Open API specifications for network interoperability, and designed to help customers establish private, high-performance private connectivity between Microsoft Azure and AWS environments.

The companies admit that this hasn't always been easy in the past. Connecting Azure and AWS privately has generally meant stitching together Azure ExpressRoute, AWS Direct Connect, a connectivity provider or colocation footprint, customer-managed routers, BGP sessions, and link-layer encryption.

"Until now, organizations connecting Azure and AWS environments required careful planning, physical connectivity, routing configuration, provisioning coordination, monitoring, and lifecycle management to assemble and maintain multiple components across providers," said Narayan Annamalai, VP and head of products at Azure Networking Services.

"Azure Multicloud Interconnect fundamentally changes this model. With Microsoft and AWS collaborating using the standardized Open API specification, customers can establish dedicated private connectivity through a simplified experience that abstracts the underlying complexity of multi-cloud networking."

The announcement follows a similar deal between AWS and Google Cloud last December, with more likely to follow.

Tackling multi-cloud complexity

Multi-cloud strategies have become increasingly popular, thanks to interoperability requirements, the choice of technologies, regulatory requirements, and the ability to build and deploy applications in any environment quickly and easily.

Research last year from Equinix found that 42% of companies run between a quarter and half of all their workloads in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, with 85% connecting to between 10 and 50 clouds.

But a do-it-yourself approach can be complex. With AWS Interconnect – multicloud, AWS said provisioning happens in a few clicks. Customers get dedicated, private bandwidth between AWS and Azure on demand, with no physical infrastructure to manage and no circuit cabling to wait for.

The firms claim high resiliency, thanks to a quad-redundant architecture across physically diverse interconnect facilities and routers.

For example, when a customer creates a new Interconnect, AWS and the other CSP provision four independent logical paths, meaning that traffic can continue uninterrupted.

In terms of security, AWS said MACsec encryption between edge routers protects data throughout transit.

Meanwhile, AWS Interconnect includes Network Synthetic Monitor. When it detects packet loss, it triangulates whether the issue originates on the AWS side, making it simpler to troubleshoot across cloud environments.

How to get started

Interconnect - multicloud is available in preview with Microsoft Azure in the AWS regions US East, US West, Asia Pacific, and Europe.

The companies said they plan to expand availability to other regions, increase bandwidth options, and modify their offering based on customer feedback.

"Customers told us they wanted a better way to connect workloads spanning AWS and Azure, and the old ways of doing it were clunky," said Robert Kennedy, VP of network services at AWS.

"With AWS Interconnect-multicloud and Azure Multicloud Interconnect, we’re proving what’s possible when both sides commit to a high bar: MACsec security out of the box, four-nines availability, and scalability at the click of a button."

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Cato Networks has cut the ribbon on SMB FlexPool, a new program designed to help MSPs deliver managed SASE services to small and midsize businesses at scale.

Available to both new and existing MSPs and service providers, the initiative offers access to a pool of Cato licenses that can be gradually allocated across eligible SMB customers as demand evolves.

The model allows partners to create customer accounts, allocate capacity, and activate services through a self-service workflow, while retaining control over customer relationships, service packaging, and support.

In an announcement, Cato said SMB FlexPool aims to remove the operational overhead associated with separate licensing transactions for every customer deployment, allowing partners to onboard customers faster and reallocate capacity as required.

"MSPs shouldn't have to slow down customer deployments because of licensing and operational overhead,” said Cato Networks’ global channel chief Karl Soderlund.

“SMB FlexPool aims to remove that friction with instant provisioning and flexible pooled licensing, enabling partners to activate new customers while maintaining full control of the customer experience."

Cato Networks provides a converged network and security cloud that brings networking, security and access capabilities together across enterprise environments. The platform offers visibility and control across users, applications, data, and AI interactions.

The company’s new SMB FlexPool initiative is built on the firm’s managed SASE (MSASE) Partner Platform, which provides MSPs with tools, training, and automation across the partner lifecycle.

Pooled licensing for MSPs

SMB FlexPool’s built-in partner-level capacity and license portability allow MSPs to allocate capacity across eligible SMB customers, as well as reallocate unused capacity as requirements change.

Cato said this approach aims to give MSPs greater flexibility as their customer base and pipeline develop, allowing them to ramp utilization of their purchased capacity in line with staged customer deployments and go-to-market progress.

Partners also retain control over key elements of their customer-facing packages, including their commercial offering, support model, and managed services.

By eliminating the friction associated with individual transactions, Cato said its new partner initiative will help partners move from opportunity to customer-ready service “in seconds.”

SMB FlexPool can be managed through Cato’s new MSASE dashboard in the MSASE Business Center, giving partners a unified view of customer accounts, orders, license usage, invoices, and customer lifecycle activity across both SMB and enterprise customers.

Art Nichols, chief technology officer at Uniti Solutions, said Cato’s new partner model will give the MSP a more efficient and scalable way to deliver managed SASE.

“Instead of managing separate licensing transactions for every new customer, we can provision services in seconds, bring customers online faster, and keep our operations simple as our business expands,” he explained.

“This means our customers benefit from faster deployment, a smoother onboarding experience, and the confidence that their secure network services can scale seamlessly alongside their business.”

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Broadcom has unveiled VMware Private AI Cloud as the firm looks to provide more “secure, scalable, and flexible” private cloud capabilities for enterprises.

Announced at the annual VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas, the new private cloud service aims to consolidate cloud and AI infrastructure, according to Ram Velaga, president of Broadcom’s Infrastructure Software Group.

“VMware Private AI Cloud is the inflection point where enterprise private cloud and private AI infrastructure stop operating as separate disciplines and become one—enabling production inference workloads and agentic AI with the data sovereignty, compliance posture, and cost predictability their business demands,” Velaga commented..

The move comes amidst growing concerns over AI-related costs in recent months, with enterprises contending with surging infrastructure costs and rising AI spending.

According to Broadcom, the new Private AI Cloud service will target “three core AI cost drivers” for enterprises. These include hardware CapEx, operational complexity, and token economics-related challenges.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 will act as a core component within the new Private AI Cloud service, according to Broadcom. New features for the service, which launched in August 2024, aim to lower hardware costs through NVMe memory tiering, as well as cluster-wide storage deduplication capabilities.

New VCF features will also allow enterprises to better-optimize token and infrastructure resource usage. This includes token monitoring tools and enhanced GPU/vGPU tracking.

VMware AI Factory gains

In addition to VCF updates, the new VMware AI Factory will also play a key role in streamlining private cloud and AI innovation, according to Broadcom.

This will serve as the software layer for Private AI Cloud, providing tools aimed at streamlining AI production and deployment timelines. Key features include new multi-tenant model sharing capabilities to reduce infrastructure strain and compute wastage.

Elsewhere, the new AI Gateway will offer users “unified model governance” spanning both on-premises and cloud environments through a single interface.

Broadcom said this will enable access to “locally hosted models with enhancements like intelligent prompt routing, token and usage rate-limiting, and application authorization”.

“We give customers a software-defined foundation that automates infrastructure deployment, unifies lifecycle management, and lets them choose their preferred hardware and vetted models,” said Paul Turner, CPO for the VMware Cloud Foundation Division.

“The result is faster time to first model, predictable private cloud costs, and better control over AI tokenomics.”

Models as a service

VMware customers will also gain access to a wider range of AI models to help provide a “production-ready path” for on-premises adoption.

More than 150 open source and commercial models are available through Private AI Cloud, including Nvidia’s Nemotron 3, Google Gemma 4, Qwen, and GLM 5.2.

Findings from Broadcom’s 2026 Private Cloud Outlook report show more than half (56%) of enterprises are already running - or plan to run - AI inferencing on private cloud.

Improving ease of use on this front is key, according to Chris Wolf, global head of AI and advanced services for the VMware Cloud Foundation Division.

“Broadcom is committed to giving enterprises the broadest set of AI models for their on-premises infrastructure, all validated on VCF,” Wolf said in a blog post.

“Working with the world’s leading AI model providers, we’re giving organizations a clear path to data sovereignty and cost-effective AI at scale, with leading models available securely and delivered as a service to their user community through VMware Cloud Foundation’s built-in services.”

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Anthropic is back to testing security models after systems went rogue – and claims the incident wasn’t entirely down to security faults but AI misalignment.

Back in July, Anthropic revealed its Claude models had slipped out of their apparent bounds to hack third-party systems. Days later, its Mythos system was spotted with similar alarming behavior by the UK AI Security Institute.

The incidents followed OpenAI revealing similar behavior from its own security models.

Last week, OpenAI reported on its own incident, detailing plans to improve security around such models, and Anthropic has followed with its own efforts, including confirmation that it will begin testing again.

Anthropic noted it was currently conducting a review of what happened and said it is "planning" to work with METR on an independent review; OpenAI has already published an independent METR review into its own incident.

But Anthropic isn't waiting to make changes. In a blog post on 31 August, the firm said it plans to make tweaks to containment and monitoring, introduce new rules for third-party testers, as well as changes to the models.

Notably, the AI developer revealed it is seconding 150 product engineers to focus primarily on security.

"We believe the incidents reflect a failure of operational security, as well as two alignment issues: motivated reasoning, and willingness to take harmful actions in pursuit of a narrow task," the company said.

Anthropic is back testing

While the full investigation isn't yet complete, Anthropic said it was removing a "pause" on external cybersecurity evaluations of pre-release models as well as internal tests.

To avoid similar issues happening again, Anthropic is adding additional layers of security and "hardening" the sandbox where these models are set loose, noting that move was prompted by its own evidence as well as that shared by OpenAI.

The changes include a system to spot when a model attempts to escape a testing environment or obtains internet access, immediately blocking the activity and alerting people overseeing the task, as well as fixing potential flaws and misconfigurations in the sandbox.

"We migrated high-risk internal cyber sandboxes to more robust isolation," the post added. "We are also further red-teaming our virtualization stack – that is, tasking pre-release models to try and escape it – to find and patch weaknesses."

Similar protections have been applied to reinforcement learning environments, with Anthropic adding it plans to expand its monitoring across most other internal frontier agentic usage.

Beyond testing environments, Anthropic is hardening security across the company, including blocking outbound traffic by default on computing clusters, boosting identity verification on internal services, retiring legacy services, and reducing the number of human and automated accounts that can access model weights or customer data.

Tougher testing rules

With regard to third-party testing, Anthropic said it will require testers to commit to a fresh set of best practices, noting that the reported incidents all took place in external evaluation environments.

As ITPro reported last month, Israeli startup Irregular was identified as the external model testing firm involved in all three ‘rogue AI’ incidents involving Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.

The changes include running tests inside hardened sandboxes with no internet access, tasking the model being tested to look for flaws before tests under close human supervision, run monitoring continuously, and confirm whether test tasks are impossible or not.

"When an evaluation target is offline or a task can’t be completed, agents will often look for other ways to complete a challenge, increasing the chance that they take actions outside the intended scope of the evaluation," the company said.

Unpicking why

Those operational changes should help prevent models from escaping their sandboxes, but Anthropic said it wants to better understand why its systems took such "dangerous actions" in the first place.

While the full investigation continues, Anthropic highlighted two challenges with alignment, which refers to ensuring that AI behaves how humans want and expect.

"One is motivated reasoning: the models were initially told their environments were simulated, but when they later encountered evidence that they were connected to the real internet, they may have interpreted that evidence in a way that allowed them to maintain that belief," the blog post explained.

"The second is recklessness: the model was willing to take harmful actions on the real internet in pursuit of the narrow goal of solving a cybersecurity evaluation."

The company noted that poorly designed training environments – including ones that are easy to cheat in or impossible to solve without cheating – can lead to misalignment behavior.

Anthropic is trying to avoid such issues in the future. The company said work on thie front goes back several months and involves training poorly and training well to try to spot differences – but admitted that the July incidents show "our process isn't perfect and our models aren't perfectly aligned".

Further details on security improvements are expected in the full report, according to Anthropic.

Beyond that, the firm also loosely backed calls to develop a framework for safe development of security-focused AI, acknowledging that its own executives had recently signed an open letter demanding better coordination globally.

Anthropic said it would "say more in the coming weeks" but intended to contribute to such efforts.

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Thousands of Microsoft 365 customers worldwide are still affected by a lengthy outage but the tech giant says a fix is on its way.

Reports of an outage affecting Outlook first emerged on Monday 31 August, with Downdetector flagging a surge in issues at around 3pm UST. Issues with other applications also spiked around that time.

Microsoft has since confirmed the outage with a Service Health Status report, attributing the outage to a “core authentication configuration used by multiple Microsoft 365 services”.

Services impacted in the outage include:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot
• OneDrive for Business
• SharePoint Online
• Exchange Online
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft Defender XDR

What Microsoft 365 users have encountered

Microsoft highlighted a series of potential problems users may experience due to the outage, such as their Copilot prompts failing.

OneDrive and SharePoint Online users, in particular, have been dealing with acute problems since the outage began. Some have reported being unable to load or refresh both applications, according to Microsoft, while others have been unable to access search results and content.

“Some users may also experience delayed or failed file opening, Office policy-label retrieval, OneDrive synchronization, mobile camera upload, and video playback,” Microsoft noted.

Microsoft Teams users have also experienced issues with calendar functionality and search features.

A fix is underway

In the most recent status update issued at the time of publication, Microsoft said it has applied a fix to the affected authentication component. The company noted that services are beginning to recover but this could still take some time.

“Service telemetry continues to indicate recovery, with availability increasing across previously impacted scenarios as remediation progresses,” the company said.

“We’re validating that authentication, connectivity and search operations are returning to expected service levels while monitoring for any residual impact and confirming that the remediation is delivering broad mitigation across affected Exchange Online scenarios.”

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Security researchers have successfully used AI to port a remote code execution (RCE) exploit between two programmable logic controllers (PLCs).

While the experiment still required significant human expertise to negotiate dead ends and false leads, it showed how AI could make it easier to carry out attacks against embedded and industrial systems.

The team at Forescout’s Vedere Labs used AI to port an RCE exploit between two WAGO PLC models in an exploit that took eight hours and 32 minutes and consumed just $535.74 in API tokens.

Once code execution was achieved, AI produced multiple working network payloads within minutes, suggesting that post-exploitation could become increasingly automated as models improve.

The exploit targeted CVE-2021-31886, a pre-authentication buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server that allowed arbitrary ARM shellcode to execute on the live PLC without credentials.

Researchers had already shown that RCE exploits on PLCs can enable Deep Lateral Movement and granular control over safety logic – and reckoned that as AI-assisted exploit development improves, these techniques could become more accessible.

How AI was used to crack PLCs

The AI-assisted exploit development process involved two steps, according to Forescout. First and foremost, this included confirming the vulnerability and writing the payload.

Each step consisted of interactive sessions between a researcher and Claude Code, which had access to a terminal, the reference files, analysis tools including Ghidra, and the live target PLC.

Claude could use those tools directly, generate and test code, and ask the researcher for additional input when needed.

Researchers noted that Claude decided to confirm the presence of the vulnerability by both probing the live target and carrying out static code analysis.

It didn't work the first time, however, with one session failing to trace the vulnerable function correctly and producing an invalid exploit.

According to researchers, the analysis provided useful context for the next session, which used binary searches to map the relevant functions correctly – albeit with researcher input to steer the analysis away from dead ends and provide additional disassembly context where necessary.

Writing a working RCE exploit took much longer, with initial attempts failing. Claude also wasted a lot of time testing incorrect hypotheses, decompiling unrelated code, and pursuing false leads.

The researchers had to change to Claude Opus 4.6 with 1M context, and add the prompt: “Ask for my help with disassembly if you are not certain about a firmware detail”, and instruct the AI to the sink of the vulnerability – the point where the attacker-supplied username is copied into memory.

Claude could then reason about the function call chain leading to the sink and understand that it needed more context about how FTP packets are treated throughout this call chain.

Operational technology in the crosshairs

Organizations shouldn't dismiss operational technology (OT) vulnerabilities because they seem hard to exploit, researchers warned.

"AI has already lowered the barrier to vulnerability research and exploit development in higher-level software. This experiment suggests that the same progression is beginning to reach low-level embedded systems, although substantial barriers remain," the report noted..

"As models become more capable and independent, the cost and expertise required to adapt exploits across related embedded targets could fall substantially."

The advice on mitigation is pretty standard: reduce unnecessary OT device exposure, monitor OT environments for early signs of exploitation, exercise incident response against AI-assisted OT attack paths and use AI defensively, but validate its outputs.

Programmable logic controllers are rapidly emerging as a major risk to critical infrastructure. The US National Security Agency (NSA) issued a warning last month over an active threat against Siemens PLCs.

Similarly, in recent months, a series of attacks on US water supply infrastructure targeted internet-exposed PLCs, with the attackers remotely changing IP addresses and turning on and setting passwords.

Several water firms were left unable to view connected equipment, and in some cases it was shut down.

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French infrastructure provider Bull has been selected to lead development of the Lumi-AI supercomputer in a €387.8 million ($449.7 million) deal.

The procurement contract from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) will see the next-generation supercomputer hosted at CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland.

Under the terms of the deal, the new system will be hosted by the Lumi AI Factory consortium. The consortium launched in April 2025 with the aim of bolstering European HPC and AI infrastructure capabilities.

Anders Jensen, executive director of EuroHPC, said this marks the sixth AI Factory procurement contract since the launch of the scheme.

“Together, these systems will form a powerful European AI infrastructure ecosystem, enabling SMEs and startups to access world-class supercomputing resources, unlock the full potential of AI, and drive innovation, growth, and technological leadership across Europe,” Jensen commented.

Funding for the system will be shared equally between EuroHPC and the Lumi AI Factory consortium.

Under the hood of the Lumi-AI supercomputer

The Lumi-AI supercomputer will be based on the BullSequana XH3500 architecture and powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD Epyc 256-core processors.

The BullSequana XH3500 platform is designed specifically for “advanced AI workloads”, the company said in a statement.

All told, EuroHPC said the system will deliver a “tenfold increase” in AI capacity and nearly double the high-performance computing (HPC) capability of the existing Lumi supercomputer, also hosted at the Kajaani site.

IBM will also contribute to development of the AI supercomputer, providing storage solutions based on IBM Storage Scale. Nokia, meanwhile, will lead on networking capabilities, leveraging Bull’s BXI interconnect technology for supercomputers and AI HPC workloads.

According to the Lumi consortium, the inclusion of additional compute and storage resources will play a key role in “maximizing” the overall performance and cross-functionality of the system.

“A key differentiator is its multi-tenant architecture, designed to meet the needs of diverse AI communities, combined with extensive API-based access to support modern development environments,” the company said.

Thomas Zacharia, AMD’s SVP for global public sector and strategic partnerships, said the inclusion of Instinct GPUs and Epyc processors marks an “important step” in the chipmaker’s existing relationship with EuroHPC and the Lumi AI Factory consortium..

The existing Lumi supercomputer already features AMD MI250x GPUs and AMD Epyc Milan CPUs.

“Powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, [Lumi-AI] will strengthen Europe’s sovereign AI capacity, accelerate scientific discovery and give researchers, startups and industry the scale and flexibility to shape Europe’s AI future,” Zacharia commented.

Bull’s first outing

Bull’s selection in the project marks the first major deal for the company after it was renationalized by the French government in March 2026. as part of a €404 million ($406.4 million)deal with Atos Group.

The motive behind the deal primarily centered around protecting French national and technological sovereignty.

At the time, Roland Lescure, French minister for the economy, said the acquisition marked a “decisive milestone for France’s technological sovereignty”.

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The UK government has unveiled a £100 million competition aimed at encouraging British AI companies to help improve public services.

As part of the scheme, the government hopes to leverage AI to bolster NHS productivity, strengthen national security, improve cyber resilience, and expand computing infrastructure.

"Every year the British state spends billions procuring products and solutions tackling some of the most important challenges facing society - from health, to our national defence," said AI minister Kanishka Narayan.

"This first-of-its-kind scheme will open up these opportunities to the British AI innovators whose ideas could make the biggest difference, backing their businesses to grow here, and go on to win globally."

The plan is to give smaller firms upfront payments to make it easier for them to access public contracts with national and local governments. Downing Street noted these organizations often lack the turnover, cash reserves, and track record to compete with larger firms.

Under the terms of the project, they’ll be allowed to keep the intellectual property they create, helping them take their work beyond the pilot stage and develop commercial products for customers in the UK and around the world.

Broader AI ambitions

The project forms part of the Sovereign AI R&D Procurement Scheme and is kicking off with four specific challenges. For the first, firms will work with the Department of Health and Social Care to develop AI systems that can automate workflows, coordinate care and support decision-making across health services.

The second, led by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and ARIA’s Scaling Inference Lab, will support technologies that improve the efficiency of AI computing infrastructure.

For the third, companies will work with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to develop solutions that securely connect data and frontier AI capabilities across defence systems, strengthening operational effectiveness and supporting sovereign national security capabilities.

And the fourth, in partnership with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), will support technologies that help organizations understand, manage, and mitigate the increasing risks created by the use of AI agents.

Support for UK startups

The government is concerned about the number of UK startups that fail to stick around as they scale, and hopes the scheme will help.

Last year, a report from the Founders Forum Group revealed that while AI startups accounted for 27% of all UK venture capital (VC) raised in 2024, many were struggling with access to capital and talent.

One-in-three said they were actively considering relocating their company's headquarters outside the UK.

"Britain is home to some of the most innovative AI companies in the world, and this government is backing them to start, scale and succeed here in the UK," said chancellor John Healey.

"As G20 countries seek to make the most of AI opportunities, I’m determined Britain has a lead role in harnessing this technology to drive more jobs, better public services, and growth that’s UK-wide."

The Chancellor also said that the UK now plans to open up the AI Economics Institute to international cooperation with G7 countries, focused on information and evidence sharing where it is in the national interest.

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Tim Cook has served his last day as CEO of Apple, 15 years after taking over from Steve Jobs and months after announcing his planned departure.

Cook hands the reins to John Ternus, SVP for hardware engineering, who faces his first Apple product announcements in just over a week on 9 September — including a rumoured folding iPhone.

His biggest challenge won't be simple product reveals, as Cook earlier this year warned of looming price rises amid component costs skyrocketing thanks to AI-driven data centre buildouts.

Yesterday, Cook posted in a social media message that he was "sending lots of love to the Apple community."

"My title changes tomorrow, but the love I have for the Apple community never will," Cook wrote. "Thank you for being a constant source of inspiration. My gratitude is endless, and I’m excited for the next chapter!"

In a memo to staff, Cook acknowledged that it was still hard to believe he was departing Apple, pinning his own success on the company's employees.

"The truth is, whatever there is to say about my success, I know it is all because of you," he wrote in the memo, according to reports.

"You have brought out the best in me. In all my life, I have never seen or been with such an extraordinary team of people before, and every day I get to see more examples of that."

Successful leadership

Many will point to Cook's financial successes as CEO over the last 15 years. Apple's market capitalization stood at $347bn when he took over and $4.6 trillion as he departs, with the share price up 2,275%.

Cook's tenure also saw the launch of the AirPods and Apple Watch ranges, as well as hurdles such as the pandemic and American tariffs.

David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, told CNN that Cook "managed to scale the iPhone to a level that no one would have thought was likely or possible over that period of time."

However Cook said he was "most proud of what an annual report could never capture."

"This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything," Cook added. "We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it."

What's next for Tim Cook?

Cook's departure as CEO naturally has many wondering what's next for Apple, although hardware expert Ternus has been with the company since 2001 and is widely deemed as a safe pair of hands. Cook called him "brilliant and wonderful and capable".

"Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does and I could not be more excited for his leadership," Cook added.

Cook isn’t leaving Apple completely, however. He’s merely stepping down as CEO and taking on the role of executive chairman of the company board, in which he’ll still have a hand in long-term strategy.

Yesterday also saw the partial departure of Phil Schiller, a long-time Apple exec who will stay on as an Apple Fellow but no longer lead the App Store and Apple events divisions.

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Most of the top security teams are using AI agents, employing them to support human activity rather than replace it, according to Hack The Box.

The latest three-year benchmark data from the cyber readiness platform finds disproportionate use of agents among many of the strongest-performing teams.

More than two-thirds (68%) of the top 25 teams having an AI agent, although AI agents represented just 2.7% of registered accounts.

Those agents accounted for 4.2% of submitted flags and 4.6% of points awarded.

Across all active teams in the research, AI-augmented teams recorded a 3.2 times solve-rate advantage; an advantage that narrowed to 1.69 times among the top 5%, while the speed advantage grew.

While AI-augmented teams completed challenges three to four times faster, with the speed advantage increasing among the strongest operators, the strongest human team completed all 36 challenges compared with 32 for the strongest AI team.

"AI therefore creates the greatest value when it is directed by people who already understand the problem. It can compress research, coding, troubleshooting, and first- pass analysis. The operator still has to choose the path, challenge weak output, and decide whether the result is valid," the researchers said.

AI is now a critical component in security operations

Together, the findings suggest that AI is no longer just a question of experimentation, but is becoming part of the working methods of experienced cybersecurity practitioners.

Researchers emphasized the importance of human expertise in directing, evaluating, and validating AI-generated work, however.

"The findings do not establish that AI caused teams to perform better. They do, however, show that AI is already becoming part of the toolkit used by many of the competition’s strongest teams," Hack The Box said.

Performance across the competition has shifted substantially over the past three years, with the median recorded time-to-solve dropping from 26.1 hours in 2024 to just 13.8 hours this year.

At the same time, and even with the challenge board expanding, the number of teams completing the entire challenge board rose from two in 2024 and three in 2025 to 15 in 2026.

The improvement, said Hack The Box, could be down to better preparation, reusable tooling, platform familiarity, and deeper specialist knowledge.

“The question for security leaders is no longer whether AI will become part of cybersecurity operations. That is already happening on both sides of the equation,” said Haris Pylarinos, Founder and CEO of Hack The Box.

“What matters now is whether teams have the expertise to use it safely and effectively. Our data shows that AI is appearing most often alongside some of the strongest practitioners, not instead of them. As agents become more capable, human judgment, validation and hands-on technical skill become more important, not less.”

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Nasuni has announced the acquisition of DryvIQ, in a move that will add content intelligence and governance capabilities to the vendor’s unstructured data platform.

The deal follows the pair’s initial partnership back in February 2026 and aims to give customers improved visibility and control over unstructured data across more than 40 cloud and on-premises repositories.

The acquisition is also Nasuni’s second of 2026, following its purchase of Resilio in April, which added file synchronization and edge acceleration technology to its platform.

DryvIQ’s technology includes tools such as content-level discovery and classification, sensitivity detection, and automated policy-driven governance.

By adding these capabilities to the Nasuni File Data Platform, the vendor said organizations will have the tools to continuously discover, classify, and manage unstructured data, while automatically applying policies to high-risk content – including retention and sensitivity labels, permission remediation, and defensible deletion.

In an announcement, Nasuni chief product officer Nick Burling said the acquisition will help the company assist customers with data strategies that support safe AI access amid rising infrastructure costs.

"With UniFS as the foundation, no other solution manages, moves, classifies, governs, and activates enterprise file data in a single platform," he explained. “Customers have been attempting to stitch together a solution across multiple vendors for years.

“Now Nasuni provides one platform to manage, protect, and activate unstructured data with proven impact on both cost reduction and productivity gains."

Strengthening unstructured data management

Michigan-headquartered DryvIQ specializes in intelligent unstructured data management technology designed to help organizations manage content across cloud and on-premises environments. Its platform spans more than 40 repositories and is currently used by more than 1,100 organizations globally.

The firm’s AI-powered models scan file content across more than 550 file formats, identifying sensitive information such as personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and payment card industry (PCI) data across more than 175 languages.

The platform also gives organizations greater control over where and how unstructured data is stored, allowing them to continuously discover, classify, and manage content at scale to better support AI initiatives.

Nasuni said DryvIQ’s content-level intelligence will help customers make more informed decisions around data storage and governance, while the Nasuni platform allows data to be managed across on-premises and cloud environments and optimized for access and cost requirements.

DryvIQ founder and chief strategy officer Mark Brazeau said the move comes as organizations are increasingly looking to turn unstructured data into a “strategic asset.”

"By joining Nasuni, we can bring our content intelligence and governance capabilities directly into a cloud-native file platform, giving customers a single, governed foundation to classify, protect, and activate data wherever it lives," he commented.

DryvIQ is available immediately, with the vendor planning to deepen the integration between the two platforms over the coming months.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Salesforce and Anthropic have unveiled ‘Claudeforce’, marking a significant expansion of the existing partnership between the two firms.

The move will see deeper integration of Anthropic’s Claude AI across the breadth of the Salesforce ecosystem, spanning Data 360, Tableau, and Slack.

Notably, the two firms have been forging closer ties for some time now. The CRM giant noted that they are both “strategic customers of one another”.

Salesforce, for example, is Anthropic’s preferred CRM while Slack plays a key role in workforce communication, workflows, and agentic orchestration. On the flip side, Claude already underpins key capabilities within Slack, with users having access to various Claude-powered agents.

The Claudeforce announcement essentially reinforces this relationship and will drive deeper synergy between the two firms. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described the move as “fusing” Claude with the CRM giant’s data and workflows.

“We’re launching Claudeforce, running directly on top of Salesforce via our new AIforce UI harness, Headless 360, Data 360, Tableau, and Slack. Here, the UI is the AI — allowing you to build custom apps dynamically and answer any enterprise question,” he said in a blog post.

“We’re delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts.”

Simply put, Claude will be woven directly into Salesforce’s various domains, and Salesforce will be woven directly within Claude. It’s the “best of both worlds”, according to Benioff.

So what can users expect?

Salesforce inside Claude

The first big talking point with Claudeforce centers around Salesforce in Claude, a plugin that comes equipped with 37 pre-built sales skills. We’ve already seen Anthropic make moves with domain-specific plugins in recent months.

Claude Cowork, which launched in January this year, came equipped with a range of industry-specific plug-ins, which as ITPro reported at the time sparked somewhat of a frenzy in the SaaS space.

According to Salesforce, because these plug-ins have deep access to customer data and business rules, they better “understand” seller revenue cycles – providing a helping hand to sales personnel.

“These skills were built by Salesforce and Anthropic, engineered specifically to draw on Claude’s reasoning, agentic tool use, and generative UI — not generic CRM prompts wrapped around an API but the capabilities that extend what Claude can do,” the company said in a blog post.

These plug-ins even have an “onboarding experience” that will see Claude analyze seller data across Salesforce and Slack to provide better context.

“No two companies run sales exactly the same, so Salesforce in Claude routes actions through Salesforce to help ensure business rules are always enforced when an action is taken. Setup is seamless,” the company claimed.

Claude inside Salesforce

This is a relationship that works both ways for Salesforce and Anthropic. Claude is already available within Agentforce, acting as the reasoning model for the company’s Atlas Reasoning Engine.

The LLM also powers Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker by default, and is available in Agent Builder.

With the extended partnership, the duo are eyeing deeper integration of Claude across the Salesforce estate. Notably, the LLM is now fully integrated within the Salesforce Trust Boundary through Amazon Bedrock.

Slack integration

Slack will play a key role in Claudeforce moving forward. The workplace collaboration platform has already been transformed into an ‘agentic OS’, and as ITPro reported last year, is a core pillar of the Agentforce 360 platform.

Claude acts as the default model for Slack, powering Slackbot and helping support users via features such as Slack Code and Claude Tag.

Claude Tag was rolled out earlier this year and replaced the existing Claude in Slack application. The tool essentially acts as a virtual teammate within Slack, allowing users to @ the agent within channels and allocate tasks.

Salesforce said that by embedding Claude directly within Slack, it’s “bridging the gap between team dialogue and autonomous enterprise action”.

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Huntress has uncovered at least five North Korean operatives who have managed to get themselves hired so far this year, using techniques that the firm described as 'genuinely wild'.

Workers linked to the Famous Chollima group applied for jobs at IT, sales, and healthcare companies through normal channels, went through the usual onboarding process, and in some cases even went on to carry out the work as normal, sending their pay back to the North Korean regime.

The findings by Huntress come amidst growing concerns over hackers infiltrating enterprises across the United States and Europe.

Earlier this month, Recorded Future revealed that groups of North Korean IT workers dubbed PurpleDelta had created at least 22 fabricated personas, applying for jobs across a range of recruitment websites and platforms such as LinkedIn and Upwork.

Between them, they were applying for as many as 60 jobs per day. Researchers found they were able to collect high-value intelligence and exfiltrate proprietary data, source code, and internal communications in support of North Korean state objectives.

According to Huntress, there are certain telltale signs that new hires could be covert cyber criminals.

Red flags include the use of VPNs, PiKVM, and Guermok devices, particularly when they are both being used, along with web services and browser extensions associated with screen, audio, and video redirection or recording.

Caught in the act

Researchers observed several red flags, including two ‘different’ new hires whose ID documents were issued by the same police station, one day apart.

Notably, the documents were photographed eight minutes apart on the same iPhone.

Meanwhile, a worker was discovered secretly using a Raspberry Pi-based remote KVM device to control a company laptop from thousands of miles away, before the security software was even installed.

In one example in February, Huntress was contacted by an Australian firm that suspected that three employees were North Korean workers impersonating Chinese individuals.

Huntress found that documents in two of the workers' OneDrive accounts shared a common naming convention, while their passports were supposedly issued in the same place and at the same time.

There were also strong similarities between the energy bills and resident identity cards supplied – and the two workers apparently lived on the same street.

An examination of the infrastructure they were using, including IP addresses, ASNs, geographic access patterns and more, found that the accounts were authenticating with several IP addresses identified to be Astrill VPN nodes.

They were also using IPRoyal Proxy, a legitimate commercial proxy service provider that sells access to IP addresses through which customers can route their internet traffic, as well as WorkTitans B.V.

This is a bulletproof-hosting operation that appears to have been raided by the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service of the Netherlands (FIOD).

Robust identity verification

According to Huntress, the rise of fake IT workers means enterprises need to implement more robust identity verification processes.

"Mitigating the risk of fraudulent workers begins at the interview stage and continues with performing rigorous background checks of new hires prior to onboarding," Huntress advised.

"When in doubt, performing standard background checks, searching the individuals online, and verifying any employment history will help to weed out DPRK workers early in the interview process."

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CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has issued a warning over skyrocketing cybersecurity risks and rising threats created by recent AI advances.

Speaking on CNBC’s ‘Mad Money’ show, the CrowdStrike chief claimed current cybersecurity solutions aren’t equipped to contend with increasingly sophisticated threat groups and AI-related risks.

“A lot of companies are recognizing that legacy technology, and technology that they get for free, is not good enough,” he told host Jim Cramer. Notably, this warning applies to enterprises of all sizes regardless of their level of expertise, budgets, and security capabilities.

“Most companies have some level of gaps,” he commented, per CNBC reports. “The challenge that you have - even if companies are sophisticated and spending a lot - is the threat landscape is moving so quickly.”

The warning from Kurtz comes amidst growing cybersecurity concerns globally, with enterprises facing an increasingly perilous threat landscape. Highly aggressive ransomware groups and sophisticated state-sponsored threat actors continue to pose a huge threat to organisations and critical infrastructure.

Earlier this week, The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) revealed that over 100 water systems were targeted by threat groups in July.

That advisory came less than 24 hours after the FBI revealed a host of federal agencies including the Justice Department and Federal Reserve were breached by a Chinese-backed hacker group.

Kurtz noted that threat groups are evolving rapidly and adapting techniques, which is creating huge challenges for cyber defenders.

“You really have to have the technologies with the right level of expertise to be able to combat these adversaries,” he said. “They’re moving so quickly, their techniques change so dramatically.”

AI security in the spotlight

AI security risks are also adding a new level of complexity to the global threat landscape, Kurtz told CNBC.

A series of powerful new cyber-focused AI models have been announced by leading developers in recent months, including Anthropic’s Claude Mythos.

When Anthropic unveiled the model earlier this year, it rolled out as part of a gated release program due to concerns that it could be used for nefarious purposes.

Since then, a series of high profile incidents involving Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic AI tools have thrust AI safety into the spotlight.

OpenAI revealed in mid-July that AI agents escaped a sandbox test environment and breached a Hugging Face production database. OpenAI’s admission was followed in quick succession by Anthropic and Meta, who both confirmed similar incidents.

Kurtz told Cramer that the ability for AI agents to “swarm and find vulnerabilities and exploit those” raises the stakes for enterprises and security teams. The advent of AI agents is also creating risks elsewhere and creating blind spots for enterprises, as ITPro reported in July.

CrowdStrike’s field CTO for Europe, Zeki Turedi, told ITPro that the deep access these agents have to enterprise IT estates could further exacerbate ‘living off the land’ techniques used by hackers to infiltrate networks.

Capitalizing on the AI boom

CrowdStrike is one of a number of leading cybersecurity vendors capitalizing on the AI security boom in 2026. On 26 August, the company published its Q2 financial results, which Kurtz described as “the best quarter in CrowdStrike’s history”.

Indeed, the company reported total revenue of $1.47 billion for the quarter, marking a 26% increase compared to Q1. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) also reached $333 million, with growth surging 51% year-over-year.

In a statement, Kurtz specifically highlighted adoption rates of Falcon Flex as a key contributor to recent growth. Falcon Flex is a subscription-based licensing scheme for its Falcon cybersecurity platform.

"Delivering record Falcon Flex results, record net new ARR, and accelerating growth—the Falcon is soaring,” he said.

“The Mythos moment translated into mass-market acceptance that AI adoption needs security, and that's CrowdStrike. Every enterprise will run on AI, and securing it is the largest market opportunity in our history."

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