Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has called on the government to establish a cybersecurity task force to strengthen defenses against AI.

The call to action follows an emergency meeting of the LDP’s National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters (NCSH).

Hosted on 9 October, Masaaki Taira, head of the NCSH, declared Japan in “a state of emergency in cyber space”.

The announcement comes as a series of cyber attacks have disrupted more than 20 companies across transport, retail, finance, and cloud services, according to the Financial Times.

Rail operator JR East reported the loss of 1.67 million email addresses, while car rental company Times Car lost a large number of customer driving licence scans. Meanwhile, cloud services provider IDC Frontier reported a ransomware attack that reportedly linked data leaks to hundreds of businesses.

In the financial sector, Japan’s financial regulator warned banks against accepting driving licences to open new accounts, following reports from Reuters that nine banks had been hacked using AI.

An investigation by Japanese IT company Macnica found that Japan has been hit with 119 cyber attacks this year as of 6 October, with 68% occurring since July, marking a sharp increase from 86 recorded attacks in 2025 and 62 in 2024.

AI is accelerating the attack frequency

An investigation by the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT) into the attack servers found attackers used AI tools to "scan for known vulnerabilities and conduct attacks via APIs”.

JPCERT noted that evidence was found of attackers analyzing APK files to detect vulnerabilities such as Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF).

Additionally, Japanese security firm GMO Cybersecurity, cited by The Japan Times, alleged that a Chinese-developed AI tool was deployed in cyber attacks against companies in retail, finance, and e-commerce.

Nobuo Miwa, president of Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm S&J Corp, told Reuters that AI makes cyber attacks faster, cheaper, and harder to detect because “AI doesn’t get tired”.

He added, “Japan is essentially being subjected to carpet bombing.”

Building a defense against AI

Reports suggest that Japan’s ageing cyber infrastructure has left it vulnerable to these attacks. With AI making the work easier for attackers, the LDP is aiming to build cyber resilience by establishing a cybersecurity task force under a new headquarters to strengthen defenses using AI as a tool.

Although the plan is yet to be formally submitted to the Japanese Prime Minister's office, the proposal would encourage defenders to adopt AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions and call on regulators to assist small and medium-sized businesses in detecting attacks targeting them.

Mihoko Matsubara, chief cybersecurity strategist at Japan’s NTT Corporation, told ITPro that the LDP's proposal aims to relieve public anxiety by breaking down organizational silos and helping defenders adopt AI-enabled tools.

“Once formalized, the LDP recommendations would help CISOs secure more cybersecurity budget and invest in security hygiene that was overdue because of resource constraints,” Matsubara said.

She added that government-funded support for SMBs would also help strengthen supply chain security. “This would ultimately contribute to the overall resilience of the Japanese economy and industry.”

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TrendAI has made Nvidia Nemotron models available inside customer environments as the Trend Micro unit aims to bolster data sovereignty capabilities.

The move will include integration of Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron models within its Vision One platform for Sovereign and Private Cloud, bringing AI-assisted security operations into customer-controlled environments.

This, the company said, extends capabilities such as guided investigation, security reasoning, and agentic SIEM to organizations, along with sovereignty, data residency, and operational control.

According to TrendAI, the move is primarily aimed at public sector organisations and those operating in regulated environments, many of which now face an expectation to run AI and process data locally.

With Nemotron open models, customers decide where the model runs, which version is deployed, and who can access it, running AI-powered security operations on Nvidia accelerated computing in their own data centers, sovereign clouds, and restricted-connectivity environments.

OpenShell improvements

Meanwhile, TrendAI said the collaboration with Nvidia on OpenShell provides an extra level of security for agents, giving organizations control and visibility of agentic activities.

“Sovereignty extends beyond where data resides. Enterprises also need control over where the intelligence acting on that data operates, and how it is governed.” said Rachel Jin, CEO of TrendAI.

"Organizations shouldn't have to give up the operational benefits of AI because their security data and operations need to remain within a customer-controlled environment. Our work is about bringing AI-powered security operations to the environments our customers choose to control.”

What users can expect

TrendAI Vision One for Sovereign and Private Cloud (SPC) with NVIDIA Nemotron integration will offer users AI-assisted threat analysis. This includes reasoning across security signals to identify threat patterns and attack chains, the duo said.

The firm said that guided security operations help security teams investigate threats and prioritize response activities, while agentic SIEM capabilities correlate telemetry and assist with security reasoning while maintaining team oversight.

The move marks the latest collaboration between the security provider and Nvidia in recent months. The company joined the firm's Open Secure AI Alliance, an industry coalition of more than 30 tech companies aimed at building open-source AI safety, security, and defense tools.

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Agentic AI security incidents are surging at an alarming pace, according to ServiceNow, and the company has warned many firms are unprepared to deal with future incidents.

A poll of cybersecurity leaders found 88% of UK firms have experienced an agent-related security incident in the past year. Crucially, only 36% of those polled said they were able to contain an incident in under 24 hours.

The findings come as agent deployments accelerate across a range of industries, the company said, from financial services and manufacturing to healthcare.

ServiceNow CISO Ben de Bont also highlighted high-profile incidents involving agents this year.

In July, OpenAI revealed that agents had escaped sandbox environments and breached third-party organizations, including Hugging Face. The admission by the firm was followed by similar cases involving agents at Anthropic and Meta.

These incidents underline the potential risks associated with the technology, de Bont said.

“The agentic incidents making headlines this year are a warning about what can happen when AI is deployed without the right controls,” he commented.

“Organizations shouldn’t have to choose between moving quickly and managing risk. The ones that get this right will build governance into how they deploy agents from the start, so they can realise the benefits of AI without losing visibility or control.”

Agentic AI security in the spotlight

According to ServiceNow, security leaders face a dual challenge when it comes to agentic AI security: the scale of adoption and adapting to “machine-speed” capabilities.

The current rate of adoption is “compounding organizations’ exposure”, the company said, with more than 51% of firms now running between 100 and 999 AI agents. Just over one-third (38%) are running upwards of 1,000 agents.

Yet despite the scale of adoption, just over half (53%) of security teams have a “full, accurate record” of every agent in production.

Moreover, 24% revealed they’d identified agents running in production that had never been registered and were unknown to them.

Running parallel to this, ServiceNow warned that the machine-speed capabilities of agents are “outpacing human-speed response” capabilities.

Three-quarters of respondents said they maintain a complete map of what services and systems agents can access, yet only 31% can monitor them in real-time.

This visibility gap means many security teams are unable to respond quickly enough in the event of a security incident or an instance where agents access unauthorized systems.

Observability has become a recurring concern since the advent of agentic AI, with enterprises unable to keep tabs on a growing array of agents operating behind the scenes.

ServiceNow’s findings on this front echo those in a recent study from Salt Labs. A survey by the security firm found the rate of adoption is placing a huge strain on security teams when it comes to visibility and governance.

Many enterprises also lack the appropriate containment controls for agents, Salt Labs warned. Indeed, the study found nearly half of respondents had observed an agent performing an action that wasn’t intended or authorized.

Assessing risk

ServiceNow noted that the use of agents will require a step change in how security leaders assess risk – and so far these efforts are falling flat.

The company said that while many security leaders “self-assess as having established agentic security postures”, just 13% have clear cut programs designed to measure leading considerations.

These key considerations span areas such as attack surfaces, accountability, visibility, and audit readiness.

According to ServiceNow, this shows that agentic AI security is primarily governed by “legacy frameworks and human-driven systems” that are unfit. Just over half (51%) of UK firms said they have governance frameworks that cover the aforementioned considerations.

Similarly, fewer than half (48%) of security teams build “design security” within the agent development process. The study warned this means that various permissions and guardrails are being implemented on an “ad-hoc, after-the-fact basis”.

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Hammer Distribution has announced a new UK-focused strategic partnership with cyber protection vendor Acronis.

Hammer’s channel network now has access to Acronis’ scalable portfolio of solutions, spanning cybersecurity, infrastructure, next-generation AI services, and MSP operations.

The move brings together two companies with established roots in the UK channel at a time when MSPs face increasing pressure to deliver greater value to clients while managing rising costs and complexity.

By pairing its own channel expertise with Acronis’ comprehensive cybersecurity platform, Hammer said partners will benefit from a single, integrated approach to tackling modern customer requirements.

In an announcement, Dominic Ryles, director of Cyber and Cloud at Hammer Distribution, described the collaboration as “a genuine step forward” for the company’s network of partners.

“Bringing together Hammer's channel expertise and Acronis's innovation in GenAI and XDR gives our partners a real competitive advantage, not just new products to sell, but an automated framework to secure and future-proof their clients' businesses,” he explained. “We're excited to see what our partners build with this."

Scalable cybersecurity for partners

Through the new agreement, Hammer partners now have access to a host of cyber security services, which include endpoint, managed, and extended detection and response (EDR, MDR, and XDR) tools, alongside email security, security posture management, security awareness training, and data loss prevention (DLP).

The deal also includes Acronis’ Cyber Frame, a new infrastructure offering designed for modern IT environments, as well as AI-native solutions such as GenAI Protection and Cyber Employee for augmenting and accelerating security operations.

Additionally, MSPs can now leverage automation tools across remote monitoring management (RMM), professional services automation (PSA), and workflow automation to help scale their operations.

Hammer said Acronis’ solutions are backed by its own enablement infrastructure, which covers onboarding support, technical training, and active pipeline development assistance.

Acronis general manager Jo Holliday said the partnership will benefit UK MSPs that find themselves under increasing pressure to deliver stronger protection and more efficient service delivery without increasing complexity.

“Hammer’s channel expertise makes them a strong route to market for Acronis in the UK,” she commented.

“Together, we can help partners bring natively integrated cyber protection, infrastructure management and service automation to more customers, enabling them to protect, manage and automate client environments more effectively while building scalable, profitable managed services.”

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The UK can capitalize on a £75 billion economic boost by 2035 if it acts quickly enough on AI adoption, according to a new industry taskforce, but time is running out to act.

The Project Sovereign AI Leadership (SAIL) report has called for a “Prosperity Compact” between government, business, regions and citizens - which needs to be established within the next 12 months.

This call to action has been backed by senior executives at Microsoft, NScale, Cisco, and BT.

“AI is the defining technology of our generation, but realising its £75 billion economic potential requires genuine mobilization of the entire nation. By establishing a clear Prosperity Compact between government, industry, and local communities, we can build the infrastructure we need, equip our workforce with future-ready skills, and ensure Britain’s digital destiny," said Steve Rigby, CEO of Rigby Group and chair of the Project SAIL Taskforce.

"This taskforce’s goal isn’t another strategy document, but high-impact actions that materially accelerate the UK’s transition to an AI-enabled economy.”

The report makes ten specific recommendations for the government, kicking off with a Compute Accelerator service for mid-scale infrastructure capabilities.

This would see the creation of a dedicated service within the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST) to support local authorities in identifying, matching, and planning mids-cale data center and networking sites.

Of the roughly 73 GW of data center applications in the connection queue, about 93% sit in the two largest size bands - very little sits between 10 and 100 megawatts, the report noted.

It’s this mid-scale range where the UK can build at pace, serving enterprise, research, defence, and health. The taskforce said Downing Street should back the mid-scale with the same ambition it has shown for the flagship tier.

The taskforce also wants to see grid connection queue reforms, prioritizing homes on distribution networks, and fast-tracking data centers on transmission lines.

AI skills and sovereignty are key

Crucially, the taskforce called for a stronger focus on AI training, led by Skills England, across priority sectors including construction, care, professional services, and manufacturing.

The country also needs a clear definition of sovereign AI - often just a marketing label, the report warned. This means creating a workload classification framework that grades sovereignty across each layer of the stack - infrastructure, including data centers, compute and networks, data, models and applications, and workloads.

Elsewhere, the government should publish Cabinet Office guidance and gap analyses, requiring fallback mechanisms for public services reliant on hosted frontier AI models, starting with healthcare; and return the Government Digital Service to the center of government to lead procurement.

"The government has taken important steps to set the UK's AI ambition; now it’s time for government and industry to come together to deliver. Our national strategy must translate into tangible benefits for every region and community," said Sarah Walker, chief executive, Cisco UK & Ireland.

"That starts by recognising that AI is only ever as powerful as the infrastructure that underpins it, the power that sustains it, and the robust cybersecurity that protects it. By backing these recommendations and accelerating digital skills through strong cross-sector partnerships, government and industry can build the secure, trusted ecosystems needed for AI to scale responsibly.”

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More than half of UK organizations have reported "surprise" bills for monitoring IT systems, according to new research from Cisco, and AI is a key factor behind surging costs.

In a new survey from the firm, 65% of respondents said their observability costs had exceeded infrastructure or operational costs this year, with half reporting surprise costs with telemetry data, and another third saying that led to reduced data coverage or retention.

The complaint isn't just high costs, but those that are higher than expected, with 55% of those asked pointing to surprise expenses that are straining operations more than typically baseline costs.

General AI adoption costs are also exacerbating the issue, Cisco found. Another 55% said they are finding it impossible to control AI costs, a problem as AI observability has become a priority, according to nine-in-ten respondents.

That echoes a previous study by KPMG, that found many companies struggle with costs and lack visibility into AI spending.

“For today’s enterprises, the excitement of AI is clashing with the reality of the bill,” added Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM, Splunk at Cisco.

It's not just Cisco spotting this trend, either. A poll by Asana earlier this year found that eight-in-ten UK IT leaders had seen unexpected costs increases from AI over the last year, with Gartner predicting that AI costs could exceed developer salaries by 2028.

Given the rising costs, companies began cracking down on "tokenmaxxing" and other AI overuse this summer, with Uber introducing a monthly AI cap and Accenture telling staff to cut back on AI use for basic tasks.

AI observability

While monitoring AI is a clear priority, more than half of those polled said they don't have a clear business outcome tied to their AI usage, and 56% said they're unable to measure AI workload metrics such as LLM response quality, which Cisco said was a core metric.

Indeed, 85% said they need to have visibility into AI hallucinations, but fewer than six-in-ten said they're effective at spotting such concerns.

“We believe observability is the essential bridge to restoring predictability and confidence to the agentic AI era," Hathi added.

"By providing the necessary guardrails and incorporating observability into an AI tokenomics framework, leaders can transform AI from an unpredictable expense into a measurable and strategic long-term business investment."

Collaboration and teamwork

One silver lining in the confluence of challenges faced by enterprises lies in heightened teamwork and collaboration, according to Cisco. More than half (55%) of those polled are worried about the unintended consequences of AI agents, prompting closer synergy between departments.

Eight-in-ten IT professionals have observed a marked increase in collaboration between observability and security teams as a result.

Nearly three-quarters (73%) also revealed they can accurately trace performance issues to security root causes, an increase from 65% in the survey last year. Similarly, there’s been a marked increase in data sharing between these two teams from 74% to 84% over the last year, with a similar leap seen in working together on troubleshooting.

"Most companies will soon have far more agents at work than people," said Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer (CPO) at Cisco.

"Managing agents at scale requires reimagining both security and observability. Have our agents been compromised? Are they doing their job well? In the world of agentic AI, these questions are inseparable, and they're moving at machine speed."

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AI is speeding up coding, but what about everything else across the software development lifecycle? According to new research from Atlassian, developers still report mixed gains and growing frustration.

As part of its State of Developer Experience Report, 87% of respondents told Atlassian that AI helps them write code faster, but nearly three quarters still face the same – or even greater friction – across the development lifecycle as before.

Indeed, traditional organizational and workflow bottlenecks are still slowing down processes, and that's led to a reduction in time savings that can be attributed to AI.

Last year's version of the poll found that 68% of software developers saved at least ten hours every week thanks to AI. By this year, that had slipped to 25%.

Beyond that, half of developers polled said they spend at least four hours a week managing output from AI, with two thirds adding that they have to spend time fixing errors in work.

Atlassian's study is by no means the first to report mixed gains from AI in software development. Research from Harness, for example, showed that while the technology is speeding up coding, eight-in-ten developers now spend more time reviewing code and completing other "invisible work" tasks.

The AI coding conundrum

So what’s slowing down software development? The survey suggests half of developers are spending too much time finding information and attending meetings, with a further 45% pinning the blame on context switching.

That tracks with separate research from Workday, which found one-in-four UK workers spend seven or more hours a week copying information between apps including AI tools.

"AI can help developers move quicker, but faster code is not the same as better software delivered sooner," said Andrew Boyagi, Customer CTO at Atlassian. "If teams still struggle to find information, clarify requirements and move work through the delivery process, speeding up coding alone won’t translate into business outcomes."

Atlassian said that AI has potential to address some of these challenges – such as by streamlining knowledge discovery and automate handoffs – but most uses of AI across the software development lifecycle remains focused on code generation rather than workflow optimization.

"Making one task faster doesn’t improve the whole system," said Boyagi.

Measuring AI

Notably, the survey found that developers feel pressure to use AI, with four-in-ten using the technology more often than is strictly necessary because they feel it's expected of them.

That's perhaps no surprise given six-in-ten report that their employer sees AI usage as a measure of productivity – and that just 17% of devs and 23% of engineering leads say their own organization has a "clearly communicated and implemented AI strategy".

"Leaders need to be clear about the problems they want AI to solve and measure the outcomes for the whole team, not just how often the tools are used," added Boyagi.

When AI does manage to speed up software development successfully, it exacerbates another existing problem: burnout.

This has become a recurring issue for development teams since the advent of generative AI. As ITPro reported in March this year, research from Harness found that the increased velocity created by the technology is creating huge pressure.

Developers now face more after-hours work as a result of botched code and remediation tasks. The majority of those polled by Harness (96%) now report working evenings or weekend multiple times a month due to release-related work.

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Tech industry leaders and security experts have expressed shock amidst a surge of attempted cyberattacks and suspended websites in the wake of critical PHP vulnerabilities.

Speaking at its AI Tour event in Germany, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly said: “I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time.”

“It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks,” Nadella added.

Nadella’s comments come after an update was issued to address critical PHP vulnerabilities that could impact millions of websites globally.

PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a programming language used in web development, which underpins much of the internet. The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, carry a CVSS score of 9.2, ranking them as ‘critical’.

Security experts have warned that both could allow unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and allow threat actors to seize control of servers, disrupt services, and steal data.

Given the severity of the flaws, several international cybersecurity agencies issued urgent alerts. CERT-EU and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) urged organizations to patch immediately when available, or consider shutting down systems to prevent compromise.

“Millions of attempts”

While the PHP Foundation released an update on Wednesday, the patch was pushed forward by a day after a leak of CVE identifiers, meaning threat actors had some understanding of how to exploit the flaws.

An exploit tool known as ‘PHP2Shell’ was reportedly developed and showcased online.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince revealed the company saw “thousands of attempts to exploit it” in the hours before it was publicly announced.

“Across the Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” he wrote in a post on X. “That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post-announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”

Websites taken down

The global impact of the PHP vulnerabilities cannot be understated, particularly given cybersecurity agencies actively encouraged some organizations to take systems offline.

Services worldwide have been taken down as a result of the vulnerabilities while organizations apply patches. Dozens of UK government services have been taken offline as a precautionary measure while updates have been applied, according to reports from BBC News.

In Japan, Asahi shuttered some websites and systems to conduct threat assessments, while French telecoms giant Orange temporarily suspended access to some PHP-based websites.

Matt Cooke, EMEA cybersecurity strategist at Proofpoint, described the incident as a “stake-in-the-ground moment” for enterprises and cybersecurity leaders alike.

“Organizations of every size have a finite window to shore up their cyber defenses, because threats now operate at machine speed,” he said.

“Patch fast, know your attack surface, and limit the blast radius, because that window is closing. If we don't act now, we will see more organizations forced to take their sites offline while they scramble to fix what should have been secured long ago."

Did AI help? find the PHP vulnerabilities

A key talking point in the PHP incident lies in how vulnerabilities were discovered: namely through the use of AI. Cybersecurity researchers at Calif originally identified the flaws using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model as part of the firm’s Patch the Planet initiative.

Researchers at Wiz also independently discovered and reported both vulnerabilities.

In a blog post detailing the discovery, Wiz researchers said the findings “rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history”.

Researchers also emphasized the importance of AI in the discovery, which helped simplify processes and shed light on the flaws.

“The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve,” Wiz researchers wrote.

“Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.”

Tom Exelby, head of cyber security at Red Helix, issued a stark warning, insisting that this “won’t be the last time we see an incident like this”.

“So much of our digital world rests on a comparatively small number of providers, platforms, and open source components, and that concentration means a single flaw can have a global impact in minutes,” he said.

“When a technology is embedded in millions of websites and services, a vulnerability stops being one organization’s problem and becomes everyone’s.”

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Veeam has launched a global initiative that combines its data protection capabilities with local service providers’ local expertise to help customers address data sovereignty requirements.

The new Veeam Sovereign Service Providers Program will be launched in phases, with the first introducing the Data Sovereignty Competency within the company’s Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program. Additional program offerings are set to follow later in the year.

The initiative will see the vendor work with participating service providers to deliver services tailored to customers’ business needs. These services will combine Veeam’s technical capabilities around sovereign data protection with providers’ local operating models, governance, jurisdictional expertise, and established market presence.

Veeam said this will enable customers to assess solutions across data location, operational control, access governance, and legal jurisdiction without compromising cyber resilience or recoverability.

“Sovereignty is defined by each customer’s regional government, legal, regulatory and operational requirements,” commented Michelle Graff, Veeam’s senior vice president of global partnerships. “Meeting those requirements depends on both technology and the way a service is operated.”

Graff said the company’s new initiative brings these two elements together by merging its own data protection capabilities with local expertise across governance and service delivery.

“The VCSP Data Sovereignty Competency gives customers a clearer way to identify providers that have invested in both,” she added.

Highlighting data sovereignty expertise

The VCSP Data Sovereignty Competency arrives as AI technologies become a critical element of business operations, security, and governance.

According to recent Veeam research, 70% of surveyed companies admitted that AI workflows are interacting with sensitive corporate data without full oversight, while 67% said employees are creating autonomous workflows that cannot currently be fully tracked.

The vendor said its new competency will now help customers identify providers that have demonstrated capabilities against its criteria for operational, legal, technological, and governance capabilities.

These requirements include local operating models, jurisdictional controls, in-region personnel, data governance, customer oversight, and resilient data protection.

The competency acts as a reflection of a provider’s alignment with its program requirements, rather than replacing a customer’s own legal, regulatory, risk, or compliance assessments.

Strengthening customer choice

By combining its own capabilities with local providers’ sovereign operating capabilities, Veeam said the resulting solutions will help customers address data sovereignty requirements as regulatory and geopolitical factors continue to evolve.

The new competency sits alongside other offerings in the VCSP program, with customers able to select service providers based on relevant requirements – including data sovereignty, disaster recovery as-a-service, and off-site backup.

Tim Pfaelzer, Veeam’s general manager and senior vice president for EMEA, said Europe has seen sovereignty evolve from a compliance consideration into a key strategic business requirement.

“As regulation expands and organizations scale AI initiatives, they need greater certainty over where data resides, who can access it and which laws govern its use,” he explained.

“Veeam’s technology, combined with the local operating capabilities of trusted service providers, gives customers a practical and defensible route to strengthen data control without sacrificing resilience or recovery.”

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Enterprises still face huge problems pushing AI projects from pilot to production, according to new research from Dell Technologies, with a confluence of factors hampering success.

Infrastructure deficits, regulatory friction, and fragmented modernization efforts are creating major barriers for enterprises, the study noted. Indeed, nearly two-thirds (64%) of EMEA IT leaders said their infrastructure isn’t ready for production-scale AI and analytics workloads.

More than half (55%), meanwhile, pointed to security and compliance-related issues as a leading factor behind stalled projects.

Notably, UK decision-makers are feeling the strain more than their European peers.

Around 84% said that running AI, workplace, and data center modernization in silos creates severe operational challenges, compared with 69% across EMEA as a whole.

Just over six-in-ten said they lack a clear, unified roadmap across AI, data, and security, compared with an EMEA average of 46%.

UK leaders are also more likely to require partners to demonstrate clear business impact and risk management before progressing new AI projects, at 77% versus 66%.

"Businesses are entering the next phase of AI adoption. The focus is shifting from exploring what's possible to connecting the infrastructure, data, security and workplace technology needed to turn AI into real business value at scale," said Steve Young, SVP and UK & Ireland managing director for Dell Technologies.

"Organizations that build these foundations today will be the ones that lead tomorrow."

Uncertainty is hampering AI adoption

Across Europe as a whole, economic uncertainty continues to influence technology investment decisions, with eight-in-ten leaders admitting they are more selective about investment.

There's a growing trend towards simplification and consolidation, with 81% saying they'd prefer to meet more of their technology needs through a single strategic partner.

IT leaders are also demanding more from their providers, with 77% shifting investment towards partners with greater scale, ecosystem, and supply chain capabilities.

Security, compliance ,and privacy have emerged as critical considerations, with 64% of leaders saying they're concerned about complying with government regulations when using data for AI.

More than half (55%) also report that security and compliance concerns have already slowed or delayed AI adoption initiatives.

Legacy hardware pains

With infrastructure capabilities still lagging, IT leaders are now scrambling to bridge gaps and shortcomings, according to Dell.

Indeed, 86% of EMEA firms said they are making AI PCs central to their future strategy with AI. Overhauling legacy hardware is a significant challenge for many, however, and 79% noted that it has a direct impact on AI adoption.

"EMEA organizations are navigating a complex environment shaped by economic uncertainty, accelerating AI adoption, growing cyber threats, and evolving regulations," said the firm.

"As organizations look to balance innovation with resilience and compliance, they are increasingly focusing on technology investments that deliver measurable business outcomes and support long-term competitiveness.”

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Zoom has unveiled a new Unified Context Layer designed to help enterprises bridge gaps between the platform and internal business knowledge sources.

Announced at the Zoomtopia customer conference this week, the Unified Context Layer will help enterprise users link conversation histories with relevant documents and data, the company revealed.

Put simply, the company hopes to close what it describes as a traditional gap between the platform itself and internal operations. Details from various meetings, conversations, and team calls are often left by the wayside, particularly when used alongside third-party applications.

With the new Unified Context Layer, Zoom will now bring together conversations with “near real-time activity” across the platform as well as connected third-party applications.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said this trend shows “AI models are only as powerful as their understanding of your business”.

“That context makes all the difference,” he commented. “Fragmented product experiences isolate conversations, stall decisions, and drag businesses down.”

“With the Unified Context layer, we’re laying the groundwork for a system of action designed to turn conversations into completed work.”

Poor business context has become a recurring pain point for enterprises dabbling in AI, as research shows. In a recent study from Alteryx, 77% of firms said business context is critical for AI, yet 53% said they struggle to incorporate this within AI systems and workflows.

Under the hood of Zoom’s Unified Context Layer

With the new Unified Context Layer, Zoom is rolling out a range of new features and capabilities. Include the ability to “follow the meeting”.

This will provide users personalized transcripts and summaries for those who miss a meeting, or at least parts of it.

“Enriched notes” will also link shared screens, charts, slide decks, and in-meeting chat conversations to specific parts within a transcript.

A key talking point with the new features centers around new notes workflows, according to Zoom. This will carry over meeting summaries into various third-party tools such as Salesforce.

Zoom said this will provide users with “ready-made workflows for sales, marketing, and IT”, or custom workflows built by describing what to automate using natural language.

The result here is that no separate workflow builders are required, improving ease of use and creating a more consistent workflow.

Tackling deepfake challenges

Elsewhere, Zoom also unveiled new tools aimed at tackling deepfake-related security threats. Deepfake risk detection capabilities will automatically flag “potential synthetic media” in meeting scenarios, as well as in hiring processes and customer experience contexts.

The move by Zoom comes amidst huge growth of deepfake-related incidents at enterprises spanning an array of industries.

As ITPro reported in September, nearly half of CISOs reported being hit by AI deepfake voice calls in the last year, with a further 36% reporting the same in a video call.

Deepfake techniques are also being used by cyber criminals to secure roles at enterprises, research shows.

This is a common tactic used by fake North Korean IT workers, with a host of organizations having unwittingly hired cyber criminals over the last 18 months.

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The government should do more to make sure UK taxpayers benefit from tech firms that have received public funding, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has said.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the UK’s largest single public funder of research and innovation, with a budget of £9.2 billion for 2026–27. However, a new report notes that while it’s great at handing out grants, the organization should be taking more equity stakes in companies where it provides funding. .

According to the government, UK universities proportionally generate more spinout companies and patents than in the US - but the way this intellectual property (IP) is then monetized is patchy, according to the PAC.

UKRI is too focused on avoiding inhibiting companies' growth, it said, warning: "The longer UKRI and the government spend thinking, reviewing and considering what they might do, rather than actively intervening on behalf of the taxpayer, the more opportunities will be missed."

UKRI gives free access to publicly-funded supercomputers to AI startups deemed to be 'strategically significant', while DSIT revised its procurement rules to improve UK companies' access to £400 million in specialist AI chips.

The British Business Bank, meanwhile, also invests alongside pension funds, giving the public a stake in supported businesses. However, while ministers hoped for faster pension fund investment, progress has been slow.

“It may strike followers of this committee’s work that our call for government to take a less cautious approach to taking a direct stake in British innovation is an unusual one," said Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the PAC.

"But we are a body dedicated to value for taxpayers’ money, not hoarding it. The nations currently leading the global tech race did not achieve their positions by avoiding more entrepreneurial policies. This is a simple case for the government of nothing ventured, nothing gained."

North-south divide widens

Meanwhile, the report points to a continuing north-south divide for researchers, with London, the South East, and East of England receiving half of all UKRI funding.

Although 20% of UKRI’s spending now takes place in the North – up from 12% five years ago – UKRI should build on this by setting specific targets around regional growth, the committee said.

It is also concerned that the current budget allocated by UKRI to the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which supports UK research facilities, could mean it has to cut its spending on collaborative projects with other nations.

"UKRI’s spending in the North seems to be going in the right direction, but without a dedicated focus on rebalancing the scales, there is every possibility of slipping back to the previous status quo," said Clifton-Brown.

"Further, if the UK doesn’t protect its ownership of innovative ideas, this intellectual property is then exploited by countries around the world who are then better able to compete with us."

Infrastructure bloat in the spotlight

The PAC has also urged UKRI to review the condition of its 'bloated' research infrastructure estate, and should be prioritizing decisions on what infrastructure could be decommissioned much more actively.

The report noted that UKRI cancelled funding for its airborne laboratory five years after deciding to upgrade it, after spending £46 million of the £49 million budget.

According to the committee, the organization should have been quicker in realizing the Science and Facilities Technology Council’s (STFC’s) plans were unaffordable.

"The research infrastructure funded by UKRI is becoming ever more important, as advancements and breakthroughs at the cutting edge of technology determine the new winners and losers on the global stage," the report read.

"The critical role UKRI will play in this race cannot be overstated, and it is vitally important that it spends the money available to it wisely, in accordance with a strategic plan and taking into account its existing infrastructure investments."

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HPE cut the ribbon on new features for its HPE Private Cloud AI service at Nvidia GTC in Berlin this week as the firm continues building out the HPE AI Factory portfolio.

According to HPE, the move aims to further support enterprises developing and scaling AI applications, with new capabilities designed to improve ease-of-use for developers and independent software vendors (ISVs).

This includes new governed APIs enabling developers and ISVs to ramp up inference and model refinement capabilities. With OpenAPI-based development, HPE said this will serve as a “single source of truth” for developers working on various interfaces.

This approach will help automatically generate documentation and software development kits for users, for example, as well as code samples that “help partners build integrations faster”.

Elsewhere, new AI pipelines designed to integrate HPE Private Cloud AI within applications and industry solutions will also streamline processes for customers.

Cheri Williams, SVP & GM for private cloud & flex solutions at HPE, said the capabilities come in direct response to growing agentic AI adoption among enterprises.

Indeed, agents are now becoming an “essential part of how enterprises operate”, meaning IT teams require more robust and flexible infrastructure capabilities.

“As organizations deploy AI across industries and increasingly sensitive environments, they need infrastructure that gives them greater control over security, sovereignty, and how enterprise data is accessed and used,” Williams commented.

“We’re helping customers scale AI across hybrid environments while maintaining the governance and operational control required to move from experimentation to production.”

HPE eyes governance and identity gains

Governance and identity security capabilities are a key focus for HPE with the new feature roll-out. New MCP servers, for example, will now be versioned and governed based on roles, tenants, and projects.

New auditing capabilities also allow multiple agents to interact with enterprise systems while maintaining “organizational governance”.

Notably, role-based access controls alongside machine identity monitoring capabilities are designed to help IT and security teams manage human and autonomous access to services in a more efficient manner.

Tackling boisterous workloads

HPE revealed it will also expand GPU flexibility within its Private Cloud AI service to help organizations support a more “diverse” array of AI workloads.

With this, enterprises operating under the private cloud service can now combine Nvidia H200 GPUs and Nvidia RTX Pro 600 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs within the same cluster.

According to HPE, this will help support a “broader mix of AI workloads through a common, governed operating environment.”

“Nvidia’s open source KAI Scheduler provides quota- and priority-based scheduling to improve GPU utilization and workload placement across projects,” the company explained.

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Japanese media giant Nikkei, owner of financial publications including the Nikkei and the Financial Times, has revealed a data breach in which 1.83 million records have been stolen.

The incident, which took place from the early hours of 7 October, involved the unauthorized access of a cloud service used by the firm for system development.

Nikkei said the credentials that were used have now been disabled, and that it doesn't yet know how they were stolen.

"As of October 16, we have found no secondary damage, such as misuse of the leaked personal information," said the firm. "We have also found no other problems, such as Nikkei system outages or data tampering."

Of the 1.83 million records that were stolen, around 150,000 contained one or more name, email address, postal address, phone number, or date of birth. Of these, about 120,000 included an email address - putting these people at risk of phishing attempts.

About 1.68 million items contained information that couldn't be used to identify an individual, Nikkei said, and no credit card information was leaked.

The firm said it's now working to assess the extent of the damage and find the cause, and that it is contacting all those whose data has been affected.

It has also reported the incident to Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission, but has found no evidence that the leaked data has been misused in any way.

"For businesses, this incident highlights the importance of strong access controls and protecting employee credentials. Implementing multi-factor authentication, regularly reviewing account permissions and monitoring for suspicious login activity can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access," commented Jamie Akhtar, CEO and co-founder of CyberSmart.

"Employee cybersecurity awareness training is equally important, helping staff recognise phishing attempts and avoid inadvertently exposing sensitive information."

A hat-trick of Nikkei breaches

The breach is the third to have hit the company in the last few weeks. Earlier this month, it disclosed a breach that occurred in late July, when hackers compromised employees’ Microsoft 365 business software accounts and accessed personal information belonging to employees and business partners.

It also revealed a second breach, in which a cloud service it used had been accessed without authorization since late July.

“Three breaches in a month point toward a systemic problem that a series of individual incident responses isn’t resolving. The investigation and remediation approach clearly needs to widen beyond what’s been done so far," commented Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress.

"For an organization whose core business is the integrity and trustworthiness of financial information, a month of successive data breaches is now a reputational problem.”

Looking further back, in May 2022, the firm revealed that it had fallen victim to a ransomware attack, while, in November last year, it disclosed a data breach that was caused by the compromise of a Slack account.

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An update has been issued for two critical PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) vulnerabilities after a working exploit was published online this week.

PHP is a server-side programming language used in web development, powering millions of websites globally.

The two vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and carry a CVSS score of 9.2, ranking them as ‘critical’. Both enable unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE), according to analysis.

On Monday 20 October, the PHP Foundation issued an advisory warning of the two vulnerabilities, urging organizations to prepare for an impending patch. The advisory was issued following reports that an exploit tool known as ‘PHP2Shell’ has been made available, with a video guide of the tool in action posted online.

In a follow-up announcement, the PHP Foundation said fixes for both flaws are now available, outlining organizations at risk of attack.

“Who is at risk: All PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed,” the foundation said.

“We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs.”

How to patch the PHP vulnerabilities

According to the PHP Foundation’s advisory, organizations are required to update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35. Sources for the patches can be found via the foundation’s downloads page.

Windows sources and binaries are also available on the same page, according to the organization.

Linux distributions and LTS vendors were given access to the patches in advance, according to the foundation. Admins are advised to check with their respective vendors for updated packages.

Notably, PHP 8.1 and older versions no longer receive support from the PHP project, the foundation warned. Admins are therefore advised to contact vendors for details on a potential backported fix or to upgrade to a supported version.

PHP flaws had the cyber industry scrambling

A host of security agencies worldwide have issued alerts over the critical vulnerabilities amid warnings that both were being actively exploited.

CERT-EU said the vulnerabilities could affect all versions from PHP 5 onwards, which, given this dates back to 2004, underlines the scale of the potential threat.

This warning was echoed by similar analysis from cybersecurity firm watchTowr.

Crucially, CERT-EU said that if organizations cannot immediately patch, they consider “isolating internet-facing applications from public networks until a fix can be applied”.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) gave similar advice for organizations.

“Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated,” the agency said in a statement.

Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisory at ESET, said that given PHP underpins large parts of the web, mass exploitation of the flaws represented a huge threat.

“When vulnerabilities are leaked before their patch is available, it is usually a scramble to do whatever possible to mitigate the damage,” he said.

“But the sheer scale of PHP across the internet makes this far more serious than the usual exploit. A vulnerability in technology used by millions of websites could immediately give cyber criminals an enormous number of potential targets.”

Notably, Moore said the leak gives attackers a “huge head start” and urged businesses to identify vulnerable systems and patch immediately when available.

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The Microsoft AI Tour is now the Microsoft Frontier Tour. A change that reflects the fact that we are no longer at the adoption stage of AI, but are now putting it to work, according to Microsoft.

However, this new frontier is fraught with challenges. One of the biggest of these appears to be a very human problem: confidence. From top to bottom of all businesses, there appears to be a crisis of confidence with AI.

The confidence to use the technology, confidence that it won’t make our working lives worse, and even confidence that it will ultimately deliver a return on investment.

Trust issues were a main theme of Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Report, released ahead of the Tour, which was covered by ITPro. It revealed a stark divide between UK leaders and employees on AI, with eight-in-ten leaders confident the UK can lead in the technology, while only half that number of employees agreed.

The reasons for low employee confidence were varied, though many suggested it had reduced their own job security and also limited opportunities for younger workers.

Speaking on stage, CEO Satya Nadella talked about the importance of the human element with AI.

“How do you put the human in the loop?” he said. “How do you really ensure that, ultimately, that sense of empowerment is not lost?”

Confidence in AI

Microsoft has made substantial commitments to the UK, investing in data centers and partnering with UK organizations like the NHS. And it dedicated a large portion of its keynote to call for more work to be done across the country.

UK and Ireland CEO Darren Hardman used his segment to talk about building confidence in AI across the UK. Laying out the challenge of turning AI’s potential into improvements that people can feel in their work or the services they use, and also the opportunities that are open to them.

“Our role at Microsoft is to bring intelligence and trust together,” Hardman said. “AI that puts your organization’s knowledge to work, helping people achieve more, while providing the safeguards and visibility to stay in control.

“You can give your people a say in how AI changes their work. You can set clear boundaries on the data AI can access. And the actions it can take. With human approval where it matters.”

A key pledge here is observability. Specifically with agents, which have raised questions of governance and control over the last year.

“For a leader, it means being able to answer a very straightforward question: ‘Do I understand and remain in control of what this system is doing?’”

“That is how we put Microsoft's mission into practice with you,” Hardman explained. “Helping people achieve more with the confidence and control to do it responsibly.”

Hardman ended his keynote with a call to action to build more confidence, more skills, and more opportunities in the UK so that AI opens doors for people “whatever their background, wherever they live”.

Talent, as he rightly pointed out, is everywhere in the UK, but there is a responsibility to make sure that the opportunity reaches all of it.

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NetApp has announced a new partnership with Emma Technologies (emma), which will see the pair deliver sovereign AI for European businesses.

The joint venture combines NetApp’s high-performance storage capabilities with emma’s GPU capacity and cloud operations platform for distributed architecture to create a single sovereign AI stack.

The new offering aims to provide organizations across the continent with sovereign AI infrastructure that doesn’t lock them into a single cloud platform.

In an announcement, Willem Hendrickx, NetApp’s senior vice president and general manager for EMEA and LATAM, said the move will help prevent European enterprises having to choose between AI innovation and data sovereignty.

"emma is building exactly the kind of next-generation sovereign cloud infrastructure that the European market needs,” he said. “With the NetApp Platform at its core, we are helping emma build the Intelligent Data Infrastructure it needs to make its vision a reality.”

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Enterprise software vendor emma’s cloud platform enables organizations to manage workloads across hyperscalers, regional and sovereign clouds, as well as AI-optimized providers and on-premises environments.

The firm also operates its own high-performance AI infrastructure in European data centers to help businesses retain control over their data, costs, and compliance without being constrained by vendor lock-in.

emma said its cloud-agnostic platform will help European organizations balance the running of high-performance, data-intensive AI workloads with the need to meet strict data sovereignty goals.

The NetApp Platform – which includes high-performance AI storage powered by the company’s ONTAP software – will provide both file and object storage within a single architecture to support emma’s multi-tenant AI environment.

The companies said the combined offering will provide data protection and cyber resilience while enabling the movement of workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments in line with emma’s flexible deployment strategy.

"The conversation with European customers has changed,” commented Dmitry Panenkov, founder and CEO of emma. “They no longer ask whether to run AI, but where they can run it without losing control of their data. With NetApp, we can give them a clear answer."

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HPE has unveiled the HPE Spaceborne Computer-4, an advanced compute module designed specifically to operate in space – and it’s heading to the moon.

The system will be deployed on Astrolab’s Flex Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) rover as part of an upcoming mission for the Moon Base II program. The move will see tests conducted to assess suitability of advanced computing capabilities for future missions.

According to HPE, these tests will benchmark AI and high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities, helping to create the “technological foundation” required for research on the lunar surface.

“Large language models (LLMs) will deliver insights, analyze visual data, and support autonomous monitoring at the lunar edge,” the company said in a blog post.

“Additional tests will process LiDAR data for mapping, navigation, terrain analysis, and infrastructure development, while an AI services container will demonstrate reliable deployment of scalable AI service applications on the Moon.”

Astrolab was selected by NASA earlier this year to provide lunar rover capabilities for Artemis astronauts as the agency prepares for a full return to the moon.

In a press briefing ahead of the announcement, Jaret Matthews, founder and CEO of Astrolab, said the move marks a significant first step in scientific research from the lunar surface.

“I think for the foreseeable future, the most valuable export from the moon is going to be data,” he said. “The technologies to collect, process, store data so that we can return that value to our customers are, you know, central to our business.”

The moon is “far away”, as Matthews noted, and this means the system faces problems in terms of time delays and bandwidth constraints. He told attendees that this project is essentially redefining the concept of edge computing.

“Pushing compute out to the edge so you can do more, create more value, and ultimately satisfy customer needs, these technologies are imperative for that,” he commented.

Under the hood of HPE Spaceborne Computer-4

HPE Spaceborne Computer-4 is a “lightweight, self-contained, and fanless” compute module designed specifically to survive harsh environments, according to HPE.

The system will be operating on the lunar south pole, and will be equipped with a lower-power CPU and GPU. Similarly, the module will leverage 1TB of flash storage through Japanese data storage firm, Kioxia.

Kioxia’s involvement builds on long-standing ties with the HPE Spaceborne program, the company said, with the two companies having worked extensively on mission activities and tests of data storage under lunar conditions.

As part of the move, HPE will also provide support for Astrolab’s mission control site in Hawthorne, California, with the company relying on HPE Private Cloud for storage purposes, and HPE CloudOps Software for workload management.

Lunar experiments

As part of the Spaceborne Computer-4 project, NASA and Deloitte will deploy a series of AI workloads on the moon and conduct experiments.

The Federated Learning for Unbounded and Intelligent Decentralization (FLUID) experiment, for example, will see NASA run an AI neural net model trained with data from the earth, moon, and on the International Space Station (ISS).

According to HPE, this aims to demonstrate how to coordinate three separate AI models from immensely disparate locations. NASA will also carry out tests on a tuned LLM with semantic processing capabilities to help find and interpret onboard documents.

Meanwhile, Deloitte’s Silent Shield will provide predictive cyber analytics and anomaly detection capabilities. This is a new cybersecurity system developed by the firm.

Extreme conditions

Faraz Valani, senior director and head of go-to-market at Kioxia, echoed Matthews’ comments regarding challenges, noting that the “rules are very different” for storage operating in harsh environments.

“You have a lot more challenges up there than we’re accustomed to down here,” he told attendees. “In space, everything is constrained.”

When deploying in a traditional data center, Valani noted that operators naturally have access to power, cooling, connectivity, and crucially, physical space. The upcoming lunar mission creates huge challenges across all those fronts.

“If something fails, you can simply just go out and replace it. In space, however, you don’t have that luxury because every watt of power, every gram of weight, and every inch of space makes a significant difference,” he explained.

“The slightest variation in any of these variables could simply make or break anything that you’re trying to accomplish up there.”

Scott Wiest, HPE’s CTO for global sales, noted that HPE “goes to pretty far extremes” when it comes to testing durability of traditional infrastructure, including freezing hardware, shaking it, and even putting it ovens to ensure it can handle extreme conditions.

“We have stuff deployed in extreme conditions, so this taught us to really go extreme,” he said. “Think about cooling differently, as you referred to. Think about being maximally efficient about weight, thermals, power, performance.”

Wiest said that long-running tests of HPE hardware on the ISS played a key role in fine-tuning capabilities on this front and will stand the compute module in good stead for the lunar mission.

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A lengthy Google Cloud outage has raised questions over the UK’s reliance on a handful of cloud providers, with organizations across a range of industries having been affected.

The incident began just after 7am UK time on 20 October and affected Google Cloud’s europe-west2-b region, one of three local availability zones in London.

Notably, the outage lasted roughly eight hours, with Google mitigating the issue at 3pm and services coming back online an hour later. By 6pm, the hyperscaler said services were restored for most customers.

Only a “very small number” of those impacted in the outage were still experiencing issues, the company added.

In a statement in the wake of the outage, Google Cloud said it will publish a full analysis of the incident once it has completed an internal investigation, urging any customers still affected to contact its support team.

Who was affected in the Google Cloud outage?

Organizations across an array of industries were impacted by the Google Cloud outage.

One of the worst-affected was online bank Revolut, with customers unable to make card payments, withdraw cash, or make transfers for several hours.

The neobank said customers’ funds and data remained secure throughout the incident.

Customers of Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland, all part of the Lloyds Banking Group, also reported issues, as did HSBC, with some customers unable to log in via the app and online.

The outage also hit the video system used by defendants, lawyers, and other parties to attend remote court hearings across England and Wales. DPD and Royal Mail are also believed to have been affected, along with Screwfix and Rightmove.

What was the cause?

As noted, Google Cloud is still to publish a full post mortem of the outage, meaning that at this stage there is very little information on the exact cause of the incident.

What we do know so far is that Google has blamed the incident on a “power event”, which is believed to have taken place at its London cloud facility.

Google is preparing a report on the outage, which should be available in the coming days or weeks. ITPro will update this article accordingly when a full explanation from Google has been published.

What happens next?

The Google Cloud outage has triggered the interest of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority.

The company is designated under the Critical Third Parties regime as critical to the financial services sector, and as such the two authorities have requested more information.

Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress, said the incident will naturally prompt serious discussions about its impact and resilience.

“[The] outage will generate a significant number of post-incident reviews and likely some difficult conversations between firms and their regulators about whether their cloud resilience testing adequately reflected a scenario where a major provider goes down in a key region.”

What can we learn from the Google Cloud outage?

As with the AWS outage this time last year, experts have warned the incident highlights how many essential services rely on a handful of infrastructure providers.

Scott Dawson, CEO at DECTA UK, said there will undoubtedly be “uncomfortable conversations in IT departments” as a result of the outage.

“Banks and payment providers spend a fortune on keeping their systems running, but how many know whether their backup supplier is using the same Google infrastructure as their main one? That's something I'd want an answer to," he said.

"We've known for years that cloud services can fail, and there's really no excuse for waiting until customers are locked out of their accounts to find out whether your contingency plans work.”

Other industry experts have reiterated that the Google Cloud outage shows the importance of digital sovereignty and stronger regional infrastructure capabilities.

Mark Boost, CEO of UK-based cloud provider, Civo, said the outage highlights the risk of overreliance on foreign infrastructure providers.

"True operational resilience simply cannot exist when critical workloads are concentrated in a handful of foreign platforms; it requires open, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments,” he said.

“When the failure of a single foreign hyperscaler has a large-scale impact on the UK’s digital economy, then the tech stack is not robust; it is merely a business risk.”

Boost added that the outage should serve as a “clear directive” that greater investment is needed in UK sovereign capabilities.

Jon Lucas, director and co-founder of Hyve Managed Hosting, echoed Boost’s comments regarding overreliance on foreign cloud providers.

“The incident highlights how businesses relying too heavily on a single cloud provider risk being left without a viable alternative when services fail,” he said.

Lucas noted, however, that diversification of services isn’t quite enough.

“Workload portability is essential,” he said. “Businesses must be aware and avoid unnecessary vendor lock-in and ensure they can move critical applications and data between environments without major disruption.”

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More than eight-in-ten business leaders are confident that the UK can lead in AI, but only half as many UK employees agree on that front, according to new research from Microsoft.

A survey of 5,000 UK employees and 1,000 of their bosses as part of Microsoft's AI Diffusion Report reveals a growing gap between how business leaders and their employees see the potential benefits of AI.

Of the business leaders surveyed, 84% reported feeling confident that the UK can become "a world-leading economy within five years," but only 41% of UK employees agreed.

Mind the AI gap

What's behind the gap? According to Microsoft, 35% of the surveyed workers believed AI had reduced their own job security, with 57% saying it hurts job prospects for younger people.

Despite those concerns, 71% also agreed AI had a positive impact on their work and 69% believe it had boosted the quality of their work.

While business leaders and workers may disagree on the job risks and utility of AI, about six-in-ten of both groups believe the government should do more to help the UK reap the benefits of the technology. Indeed, more than a third from each group are now calling for heightened regulation and safeguards.

"Government and industry must work together to respond to British business leaders' calls for greater action on skills, build trust in the technology and ensure its benefits reach everyone," said Darren Hardman, CEO of Microsoft UK & Ireland.

"If we remain divided on whether AI will have a positive impact, if we fail to build trust in the technology and if we cannot put the necessary safety ecosystem for models in place, then we will not create the society we want.

"The UK has a chance to lead, not just in AI adoption, but in AI safety. Get both right, and we can unlock growth while ensuring the benefits of AI are open to all."

AI diffusion in the UK

Microsoft's wider AI diffusion report shows the UK has leapt from 35.6% adoption to 43.7% as of the second quarter of 2026. That ranks the UK second in the G7 when it comes to adoption rates after France, and eighth globally, according to Microsoft's figures.

The report noted that this shows a disconnect between the countries making frontier AI and applying it, with the US and China centered in most discussions about the technology.

"This overlooks a distinction between frontier AI and the more prosaic routine, task-level AI use through which most productivity gains are likely to be realised: tools embedded across routine business processes, public services, and everyday work," the report notes.

"Frontier capability does not automatically produce broad diffusion, as the United States’ comparatively low adoption rate of 33.0% illustrates, ranking at 21st globally in Q2 of 2026."

Development vs diffusion

Notably, the study found that the UK can't match the US or China in frontier capital spending, adding that an "excessive focus on that contest" risks distracting from how the UK can gain economically from the technology.

As a nation, the UK "does not need to be a leader in model development to reap the benefits", Microsoft said. The report added that countries that use these technologies will see the greatest long-term gains.

Regardless, Microsoft said the UK should still strive to meet the government's stated goal of becoming the country with the fastest AI adoption in the G7.

"Our thriving technology sector is playing a fundamental role in the economic growth recognised by the IMF," Hardman commented. "Business leaders and employees across the country are embracing AI to change not only what they do and how they get things done, but how quickly."

The report from Microsoft comes amidst increased investment in AI-related support for British businesses. The company has committed to £23 billion in investment over the next three years to help drive adoption rates, including $15bn in cloud and AI infrastructure.

However, recent reports show the company has pulled out of a data center deal with Nscale. As ITPro reported on 19 October, the deal has fallen through due to lingering concerns over power supply for the Essex-based site.

The Loughton development was set to deliver 50 MW of AI capacity, scalable to 90 MW, and to initially house 23,040 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. It was expected to create 250 permanent jobs.

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Security updates are vital in keeping software secure and users safe, but they could also act as a map for hackers to find weak spots in code, including subsequent patches.

That's according to research from Terra Security, which said the rate of patches later reported to be broken has surged from a "low, steady rate" by eight times.

"Software security fixes are both bug closers and maps: they show where a given bug used to live and how the developer chose to close it," Terra security researcher Oren Yomtov noted in a blog post. "Narrowing down the fix so that it only blocks the reported case can point the next attacker toward undefended gaps around the repair."

While Terra didn't pin the leap in patches needing patching on AI directly, the jump happened this spring, as security models such as Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber were announced, though were only released later and in a restricted way to approved partners.

That said, AI has unquestionably led to a boom in the number of flaws being spotted this year.

Spotting broken patches

Terra noted this pattern of patches requiring subsequent fixes in its own efforts over the last year, with bypasses quickly found, necessitating yet another patch. To check that this wasn't simply the company's own experience, Terra researchers looked at every flaw listed in the CVE system as well as GitHub advisories.

Researchers noted it wasn't just Terra seeing an increase in patches requiring fixes.

"Broken fixes have been reported for years at a low, steady rate until 2026, when the share of open-source fixes on GitHub later reported broken rose about eightfold," Yomtov said.

A chart shared in Yomtov's blog post showed reports of open source fixes that needed their own patches within 90 days jumped from below 0.5% to 2.3% in a matter of months, with the leap happening after March 2026.

"The CVE record database gives much wider coverage than our GitHub data and shows the same jump in the same year," Yomtov added.

He added that patches for bugs on the known-exploited list are four times as likely to be reported as broken as flaws from the very same vendors.

"The likely reason is attention: exploited bugs draw more researchers, who study the patch and find what it missed," he added.

What can be done?

Security teams should be aware that patched flaws may still remain a vulnerability, according to Yomtov.

"The upshot is that the "patch and move on" habit is a bad one, especially for the bugs that matter most," he noted.

Yomtov added that one of the most common types of broken fixes are server-side request forgery and prototype pollution, where the usual solution is to create a list of inputs to automatically reject.

"The reason is simple: if the blocklist doesn't foresee every encoding of a bad input, the attacker only needs to find one," Yomtov added.

Beyond that, this technique for addressing flaws highlights what's broken to would-be attackers. As Yomtov noted, a patch that only blocks reported inputs can “give the impression the bug is addressed”, even if it’s still present in the underlying code.

"It functions as a map for attackers, marking out both vulnerable code and what the defender thought the bug was."

That means that security professionals should look "just outside the diff" – as opposed to looking only at the code that was changed – in order to spot potential problems. Calling it the "cheapest form of bug hunting," Yomtov added: "We believe a growing share of attacker effort, and AI tokens, goes into exactly this."

Because of that, he advises security pros should "diff-hunt your own fix before shipping it," as attackers certainly will, taking into consideration whether the patch actually fixes the root cause – rather than merely blocking one input – and whether it covers the whole bug class or might break anything else.

"The same goes for patches you install," he adds. "If a vendor fixes an exploited bug, assume someone is reading the patch for a way around it."

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Amazon unveiled TorchNeuron, a new developer tool designed to make it easier to deploy PyTorch applications on its Trainium chips.

PyTorch is a free, open source toolkit that developers use to build, train, and run AI models. According to Amazon, TorchNeuron will allow developers to run their existing AI code on AWS Trainium chips by changing just one line of configuration, making it easier to adopt new hardware.

Long-term, aim appears to be aimed at providing developers with an easy-to-use alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem for AI training and inference.

"Today, 85% of AI researchers and developers write their code in PyTorch. Until now, the hardware that code could run on was far more limited than the code itself, and expanding to new chips meant rewriting and revalidating work that took months to perfect," said the firm.

"Amazon is now closing that gap. With TorchNeuron, the PyTorch code developers already write runs natively on Amazon's AWS Trainium chips, with a single configuration change and no rewrite."

The company said that when its engineers ran the same AI training script on a conventional chip and Trainium, the AI model learned the same things at the same rate; the only difference was a setting that told the code which chip to use.

This, Amazon noted, means that the tools developers already use to test, debug, and scale their AI models all work on Trainium without modification.

A boon for startups?

PyTorch said early adopters include startups, enterprises, machine learning industry partners, and academic institutions, with applications spanning autonomous vehicles, robotics, video generation, speech, telecommunications, healthcare, and geospatial modeling.

"With PyTorch native support on AWS Trainium, we ran our standard inference pipeline with minimal changes to our PyTorch code," said Arjun Desai, co-founder of voice AI firm Cartesia.

"Small, fast ops map efficiently through the native path, so we didn’t have to hand-write kernels for them. That lets our team concentrate on writing high-performance NKI kernels for the layers that are called repeatedly and drive end-to-end latency."

TorchNeuron will roll out as free and open source software under the Apache 2.0 license at PyTorch Conference North America.

Looking ahead, Amazon said that it's contributing changes upstream to PyTorch itself, working with the community to remove code that ties the framework to specific chips.

The aim is to make PyTorch more hardware-agnostic for the entire developer community, not just Trainium users. Google is already working on TorchTPU, a similar project to run PyTorch natively on its chips.

"By reducing the friction of adopting new hardware, TorchNeuron introduces something the AI industry has largely lacked: meaningful choice," said Amazon. "When developers can move between chips without penalty, chipmakers have to earn developers' business, and developers benefit from lower costs and faster iteration."

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ConnectWise has entered day three of disruption to its cloud services, which it had to take offline following a breach of its systems detected on 16 October.

ConnectWise Cloud Backup – formerly SkyKick – offers backup and recovery services to MSPs to protect their customers’ Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 environments.

The company announced it had discovered “recent attempts of unauthorized access associated with the ConnectWise Cloud Backup environment”. The firm said its incident response procedures were “promptly initiated” and containment measures put in place.

A little under 12 hours after publishing the initial advisory, at 5.00am UTC on 17 October, the company shut off Cloud Backup access as a “protective measure”. Approximately eight hours later, CloudWise SaaS Security and Cloud Management were taken offline as well “as an additional precaution”.

Customer Microsoft 365 environments accessed

According to security organizations like Huntress and Todyl, which monitor ConnectWise tenant environments on behalf of their customers, the attack started with the application’s identity signing into Microsoft 365 tenants from a hosting provider and receiving Microsoft Graph access tokens.

“This is not how the app normally behaves,” Huntress explained in a blog. “Legitimate traffic comes from Azure private IP space. As of [7.00pm UTC] on October 16, Huntress has confirmed unauthorized sign-ins in 162 tenants.”

Expanding on the nature of the threat, Todyl said: “Because the application already held broad, previously granted permissions in each tenant, those sign-ins gave the attacker the technical ability to read and write mail and attachments, OneDrive and SharePoint files, and Teams chats.”

According to Huntress’s observations, in the two tenants it has been monitoring that have been compromised, the behaviour after access had been established was “fast, scripted, and notably indiscriminate”.

“The procedure was the same each time: the application granted itself Global Administrator, then planted a new secret on a small number of other applications in the tenant to keep a foothold,” Huntress said, though there were some differences in where the secret was planted.

The incident isn’t over

The issue for ConnectWise MSP customers, as security firm CoreView pointed out, is while it has disabled new logins to its applications, “this should not be read as if the incident is over for businesses that had the affected service principals in their tenant".

Indeed, ConnectWise said in its own advisory that disabling the affected connections only prevents new connections.

“It does not reverse changes previously made inside a tenant,” ConnectWise said.

The company added that while its investigations have established that “existing backup archives remain encrypted, isolated, and preserved,” these findings don’t extend to live Microsoft 365 environments.

As of 19 October, Huntress has discovered “almost 1,000 Entra tenants with sign-in activity from the IP address associated with the unauthorized activity (144.172.64[.]128). Over 300 of these succeeded”.

What should MSPs do now?

ConnectWise has said partners should review their own Microsoft 365 tenants, as well as each managed customer tenant. This includes environments with dormant SkyKick connections.

The company has offered detailed instructions on what MSPs should do now, including:

• Verifying local status and preserving evidence
• Reviewing sign-ins across identities from 13 October minimum – possibly as far back as 1 October – to date. Filter for the IP address listed by Huntress as well as 144.172.64[.]99 and 144.172.64[.]60
• Reviewing directory audit events
• Checking credentials and federation trusts
• Checking roles, application owners, and consent
• Checking policy changes
• Checking exchange and resource activity
• Reviewing remaining connections and recording the outcome.

Further information can be found on the ConnectWise advisory page under the entry listed as Update: Sunday, October 18, 2026 at 01:00 UTC.

Huntress added additional actions impacted customers should take, including:

• Disabling ConnectWise Cloud Backup and ConnectWise Cloud Management - MS Teams in their Microsoft 365 tenant
• Consider also temporarily disabling other ConnectWise Cloud Management application IDs
• Don’t delete the application IDs, only disable them
• Don’t re-enable affected applications until ConnectWise confirms all credentials have been reset.

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Enterprises are spending more than one-quarter (28%) of their software budgets on upgrades and licensing changes – and rising fees are expected to cause additional financial strain.

That’s according to research from Dublin-based software provider Origina, which warned that IT leaders now face a troublesome “software tax”.

The company describes this as a “recurring burden embedded in the enterprise software model that consumes capacity, diverts talent, wastes working assets, and adds costs”.

Adding insult to injury, the study claimed many enterprises have “little practical ability to refuse” software upgrades, forcing them into paying up. A key factor behind this, according to Origina, lies in accelerating vendor-driven upgrade and refresh cycles.

The vast majority (95%) of IT leaders polled said they have paid for a vendor-driven upgrade in the past three years, for example. These cost large enterprises an average of $12.87 million, the study noted.

Moving away from major software vendors would create additional complexity and strain, according to 80% of IT leaders.

No wiggle room for IT leaders

According to Origina, IT leaders now have “little room” when it comes to software purchasing and subsequent upgrades.

More than three-quarters (78%) of respondents said their primary vendor “sets the timing and terms of change”, rather than their organization. A similar number (76%) also revealed they have “very little real leverage” in negotiations with major vendors.

Put simply, IT leaders are dancing to a tune set by their provider, preventing flexibility and forcing costs upon them. More than half (53%) also revealed that mandatory software upgrades impacted business value, performance, and reliability.

Tomás O'Leary, CEO and founder of Origina and co-author of the report, said this trend means many IT leaders stick with existing providers to avoid hassle. They ultimately end up paying higher costs, however.

“When the alternative to an unwanted upgrade is losing support on systems the business runs on, saying yes is often a rational response,” he said.

“That’s exactly the problem. The market has left some of the most experienced technology leaders in the world with little room to refuse, and that cost shows up in budgets, in engineering time and in innovation that never gets funded.”

IT leaders are increasingly pushing for stronger protections for enterprises, according to Origina. More than nine-in-ten (92%) said they would actively support legislation giving firms “protections comparable with those in long-term residential rental relationships”.

82%, meanwhile, could support software-support requirements akin to those imposed on manufacturers under EU hardware repairability rules.

Downstream impact

According to Origina, the effect of this trend reached “well beyond the IT budget” and has a direct impact on broader innovation goals – particularly AI adoption.

With enterprises ramping up integration of the technology, innovation budgets are feeling the pinch due to rising software-related costs.

More than one-third (34%) of respondents, for example, said vendor-related costs were a “major contribution” in their decision to slow, pause, or cancel AI projects outright.

AI projects aren’t the only enterprise domain affected by vendor-driven software upgrades, the study added.

Indeed, the company claimed “people and hardware are affected too”. Around 84% of senior engineers said they “always” or “often” spend time working on upgrades rather than “building future capability".

“Ninety-one percent report they have scrapped functional hardware in the past three years purely to meet a software vendor's support deadline, losing an average of 1.65 years of useful hardware life,” the company said in a blog post.

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The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has banned the use of DeepSeek by civilian federal agencies, citing security concerns.

The ban covers any technology built with the aid of the company's AI models, and applies to agencies including the Department of the Treasury, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice, as well as prime contractors and subcontractors serving federal agencies.

It also bars DeepSeek from future procurements, and requires agencies to remove versions put into place prior to the ban.

The main worry is that DeepSeek servers are located in the PRC, where government cyber and intelligence operations legally have broad authority to access private company infrastructure.

"For DeepSeek-hosted instances of their models, DeepSeek's account generation process collects personally identifiable information (PII) and may also track and digitally fingerprint users. DeepSeek's most widely used applications function through a prompt-and-response process that requires presenting information to the model, and which may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC if used by US government employees or vendors," the notice reads.

"The transfer of the aforementioned information to the PRC, either independently or in combination with publicly available data could produce actionable intelligence on US persons and/or government programs."

DHS cites DeepSeek vulnerability concerns

The DHS is also concerned that the models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities. Indeed, open source security research has already found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities.

Agencies that have been using DeepSeek are warned that they should check that they haven't already been compromised. According to the DHS, these organizations should monitor the flow of traffic in and out of the agency, implement enhanced logging and controls for relevant systems, and flag any anomalous activity.

Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam, said the advisory “raises some significant questions” with regard to supply chain security.

"What I find particularly interesting about the DeepSeek order is the breadth of its language," Hempel commented.

"The restriction extends beyond DeepSeek itself to third-party products and services developed using its implementations, which raises some significant questions about software provenance and supply-chain compliance."

DeepSeek is already banned from state systems in Texas, New York, and Virginia, as well as in Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan. Individual US government bodies, including the Commerce Department and the US Navy, have also removed it from use.

It remains to be seen how effective such bans can be, however, and how quickly existing systems based on DeepSeek can be replaced or redesigned.

"I suspect we're going to see increasing tension between national security policy and the practical realities of AI development, particularly as governments begin imposing restrictions that extend beyond the models themselves and into the broader software supply chain," said Hempel.

"The challenge will be making those requirements sufficiently clear and technically enforceable.”

The ban comes just days after the release of DeepSeek's latest AI model, V4.1-Flash-1017, which the company described as faster and more efficient than previous models.

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Deliverance AI has cut the ribbon on a new HPE-validated architecture in a bid to strengthen deployment of AI-driven workflows in private enterprise environments.

Combining HPE’s Private Cloud AI platform with its own Agentic OS, HPE Agentic Knowledge Solution with Deliverance AI targets regulated and business-critical use cases that require enterprise-grade governance, security, and data sovereignty.

Deliverance said the joint architecture provides a tested foundation for applying AI-powered agentic automation to workflows that involve sensitive data, with support for private cloud, on-premises deployment, as well as air-gapped environments.

The solution works to ensure sensitive information can remain within the customer’s security boundary, with workflows controlled through defined permissions, guardrails, human oversight, cost management, and audit controls.

In an announcement, Deliverance AI co-founder and CEO Mick McNeil said organizations need the controls expected from any other production system when deploying AI agents across their businesses.

“This validation shows how Deliverance Agentic OS workflows can run on HPE Private Cloud AI, providing that foundation,” he commented. “Organizations can put agents to work on sensitive and regulated processes while retaining control of their data, models, permissions and approvals. They can trace how an answer was produced, intervene when required and keep an audit record of the work.”

Key workflows validated

HPE’s Private Cloud AI is built on optimized compute, networking, and storage and comes pre-integrated with Nvidia AI software and HPE AI Essentials.

The platform gives businesses a shared control plane for models, tools, workflows, and agent sandboxes to provide sovereignty over sensitive data, predictable use costs, as well as a validated entry point sized to their workload.

Deliverance said its Agentic OS has been deployed and validated on the platform through HPE’s Unleash AI partner program.

The vendor said the solution targets four areas of enterprise work: responding to tenders and due-diligence requests, producing materials such as business and regulatory documents, reviewing contracts and claims against defined policies, and investigating incidents using authorized data.

The joint architecture allows Deliverance AI’s SmartRouter to select approved AI models based on factors such as cost, performance, and task complexity, according to the firm.

Meanwhile, multi-agent orchestration enables specialized agents to work together within scoped knowledge collections under defined permissions, guardrails, audit controls, and human oversight.

Agents can also access approved enterprise documents without shifting sensitive data outside of the customer-controlled environment, and automated quality assurance checks assess work against defined criteria, flagging anything substandard for reruns or human review.

Strengthening existing deployments

According to Deliverance, existing deployments of its Agentic OS have already been producing strong results across the enterprise.

The firm cited a deployment at a global systems integrator that saves its bid team around 30 hours per week thanks to the Deliverance AI agent team completing 80% of a first-pass RFP response before human review.

A use case at a tier-one mobile operator has also helped cut network fault investigation times from a few hours to under five minutes.

Commenting on the launch, Robin Braun, vice president of AI business development at HPE, said organizations now require trusted ways to apply AI to their business process, rather than simply adding another AI pilot.

“HPE Private Cloud AI provides the governance, security, and operational foundation required for enterprise AI, while Deliverance AI helps automate workflows such as investigations, RFP responses, and compliance reviews,” he explained.

“All while helping our customers manage their costs and sovereign requirements. Together, we're helping customers move AI into production with confidence.”

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Microsoft has reportedly pulled out of a deal with Nscale under which it would have been the anchor tenant for a major UK data center, over concerns about the power supply.

The development, in Loughton, Essex, was set to deliver 50 MW of AI capacity, scalable to 90 MW, and to initially house 23,040 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. It's expected to create 250 permanent jobs.

But now, according to the Daily Telegraph, power supply problems mean that the project will face significant delays. UK Power Networks (UKPN), which owns the electricity grid across London and the south-east of England, is believed to have told Nscale that it won't be able to supply enough power to the site until the early to mid-2030s. The development was originally set to be finished early next year.

The two companies are still working together on projects in Norway, Portugal and the US – although the Norway facility is believed to be behind schedule too.

"We remain committed to our partnership with Nscale, including work to build robust digital infrastructure and support AI growth globally," a Microsoft spokesperson told ITPro. "This decision relates to a single site."

Supplying adequate power to data centers is becoming an increasing problem, with Gartner warning as far back as two years ago that 40% of data centers could face constraints in power availability by 2027.

And late last year, a report from Savills found that the issue is slowing data center construction, with only 850MW of power capacity delivered across EMEA since the start of 2025, down by 11% compared with the same period in the previous year. New transmission, distribution, and generation capacity could take years to come online, said the firm.

UKPN recently signed up as a strategic partner of the Data Centre Alliance (DCA) as part of efforts to strengthen engagement with the data center sector and ease supply problems, publishing an Introduction to Connections guide on the DCA's member portal.

To try and deal with power supply constraints, it said it could offer a range of connections beyond non-curtailable or unconstrained connections, including ramped connections, with flexible capacity that increases over time; flexible connections managed in real time; and profiled connections, in which customizable capacity profiles are created to match operational patterns.

Energy regulator Ofgem, meanwhile, has complained that many applications are speculative in nature, and is proposing that data center projects should have to pay between £237,500 and £712,500 per megawatt when they accept a connection offer.

Microsoft is currently the only customer to have signed up for the Loughton data center, and its decision to pull out could have an effect on Nscale's planned flotation in the US later this year, where it is targeting a valuation of $35 billion.

But the move is not only a problem for Nscale, but a potential embarrassment for the UK government. Last year, as part of its AI Opportunities Action Plan, it trumpeted plans from Nscale to invest $2.5 billion to support the UK's data center infrastructure over three years. These plans included the building of the Essex data center, described as the UK's largest sovereign AI data facility.

In a statement, Nscale told ITPro: "We remain committed to both the Loughton project and the UK and we are exploring alternative power sources for the site, in addition to other expansion sites in the UK. Our relationship with Microsoft remains strong and long-term, and this unfortunate London-wide grid issue has no impact on our other contracts."

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The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has proposed designating Microsoft a Strategic Market Status (SMS) firm, meaning it would come under stricter market scrutiny.

The regulator is looking into the company's position in business software and how this impacts businesses and public sector organizations. It’s now calling for views on where it should gather further evidence.

The CMA already plans to investigate – and potentially take action over – issues such as how Microsoft bundles its software and wants to make it easier for developers to integrate their products with Microsoft’s business software ecosystem.

"We’re now consulting on whether to designate Microsoft with strategic market status," said Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA. "If we do, our focus would be on promoting competition and giving businesses greater freedom to choose and combine products in business software."

The proposal relates to Microsoft's position across personal computer operating systems, productivity software suites, security software, server operating systems, and relational database management systems.

The CMA also said Microsoft’s strength in business software comes from the barriers customers face when switching. This includes commercial practices and integration advantages that incentivize customers to adopt the company’s products, making things harder for other software developers.

Before taking action, though, the CMA is planning further investigation into whether customers can freely choose the best AI tools and functionalities for their needs. It’s also investigating whether alternative AI providers have a level playing field when competing with Microsoft’s Copilot.

The regulator also wants to examine:

• Whether the way Microsoft bundles and integrates its security products limits customer choice
• Whether customers have an effective choice over which cloud to deploy their software licenses
• The impact of Microsoft’s licensing practices on these choices

"Business software and cloud services underpin workplaces across the UK, from small firms to vital public services. The evidence shows Microsoft has a long-standing and significant presence in the UK’s business software market," said Cardell.

"Organizations should be able to choose the products that work best for them, switch provider when they want to and combine services from different suppliers. We want to ensure businesses have the freedom to choose how they use Microsoft’s products alongside alternatives."

Unusually, the CMA hasn't set a timeline for its actions – something that concerns the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) UK.

"It is welcome news that the CMA still has software licensing restrictions in its sights. However, the lack of a firm timeline for action is hard to square with claims that the lack of guardrails in its new digital markets powers was necessary so the CMA could respond promptly to well-evidenced barriers to competition," said CCIA senior director and head of CCIA’s London office Matthew Sinclair.

"We have now had an Ofcom investigation, a CMA Cloud Market Investigation which found the restrictions had an adverse effect on competition, and could have taken action directly, and still no timeline from the CMA for action."

The CMA has been looking at cloud services in the UK for some time. It's already secured commitments from AWS and Microsoft to connect their data centres with rivals, scrap data transfer fees for customers changing cloud providers, and reduce these fees where customers use more than one cloud provider.

The firms are also introducing a new mechanism for competitors and customers to request greater interoperability, and rolling out AI tools to automate the technical steps needed to make the switch.

Israeli digital advertising agency Discover-Tech has been caught serving millions of online adverts that installed spyware on the phones of targets around the world.

Through a zero-click technique dubbed "AdFection", Discover-Tech's Controlium platform has been used by financially motivated customers to de-anonymize, fingerprint, and automatically infect devices the moment an advertisement is rendered.

Apps found displaying Discover-Tech ads include Duolingo, dating apps, period trackers, German weather apps, Yahoo Mail, Viber, and calling apps such as Truecaller.

This is the first example, said Citizen Lab, of in-the-wild infection of devices with zero-click mercenary spyware via targeted advertisements.

The spyware, said Citizen Labs, was used against dozens of devices belonging to journalists who reported on sensitive subjects at Qatari news network Al Jazeera. Its ads also appeared in critical networks used by the Pentagon, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Criminal Court.

And it's also been used to hit media organizations in Austria, Denmark, France, Mexico, Israel, Italy, Norway, and Sweden, as well as networks of international media services.

"Discover-Tech presents itself as a legitimate online advertising business. In fact, the Israel-based company provides a bridge between multiple mercenary spyware companies engaged in hacking and the legitimate online advertising ecosystem," the researchers said.

"We have found billions of instances of Discover-Tech bidding to send such advertisements to users, and no sign that the company is engaged in any legitimate advertising business activities."

The firm's Controlium platform, the researchers said, allows mercenary spyware firms to infect targets via online ads. After mass-profiling and deanonymizing millions of users, they can then covertly hack individual targets by sending them seemingly harmless ads containing zero-click exploits to install spyware on their devices.

The device is sent malicious JavaScript code, which is executed by the browser or app and then exploits and infects the device.

Controlium's users include mercenary spyware company Candiru – reportedly now owned by US-based Integrity Labs. This firm has already been called out by the US Commerce Department for developing spyware used to target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.

The platform's also linked to Israel-based Bindecy, which specializes in zero-click mobile exploits, and another mercenary surveillance firm called Intelos.

"Our analysis reveals a dangerous lack of due diligence in the advertising ecosystem that Discover-Tech actively exploited. Despite supporting mass-profiling and mercenary spyware hacking, Discover-Tech has nonetheless appeared on several lists of "certified" and "approved" advertising vendors maintained by Google and IAB Europe, the advertising industry association," the researchers said.

"The fact that a "certified" company could target millions of users for years with no signs of legitimate activity highlights the dangerously inadequate controls over a sector that by its very nature touches almost every individual with a mobile device or a web browser in extremely invasive ways."

Google and digital marketing and advertising platform IAB Europe have now removed Discover-Tech from their ad vendor lists.

The Metropolitan Police Service (‘the Met’) has landed itself in hot water with the UK’s data regulator, the ICO, after members of staff uploaded sensitive data to an unauthorized third-party platform.

Between March 2023 and September 2024, officers and staff in the Greater London police force used the Auror intelligence-sharing platform as part of a crackdown on shoplifting, despite it not being formally approved for use.

Auror is a third-party, cloud-based platform from SaaS provider Auror Europe Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of New Zealand firm Auror Limited.

It's accessible via a website and mobile application and is mainly used by retailers to record, manage and analyse incidents of retail crime. It does this using a range of technologies, including facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and AI.

Retailers can upload incident reports, images and CCTV footage relating to suspected shoplifting and other retail-related offenses, which can then be shared for free with law enforcement authorities.

This may seem not only harmless but actively helpful in the detection and prosecution of crime, however the tool wasn’t subjected to the usual data protection assessments or governance before use.

"Police forces hold large volumes of sensitive personal information and must have robust safeguards in place to protect it," said David Doodson, ICO head of investigations.

"Whilst new technologies can deliver significant operational benefits, organizations cannot allow innovation to outpace their data protection responsibilities. Before introducing new systems or platforms, they must properly assess the risks, put appropriate safeguards in place and ensure effective oversight."

Specifically, said the ICO, the Met unlawfully processed personal information without individuals’ consent and in situations where sharing wasn't actually necessary for law enforcement purposes.

In all, around 500 accounts were created, with 375 actively used for policing activities. The ICO found that, between January and September 2024, personal information relating to 179 people – three of whom were under the age of 18 – was uploaded to the platform as part of efforts to identify individuals suspected of shoplifting.

This included names, dates of birth and, in a small number of cases, home addresses.

The police force also failed to put the appropriate technical and organizational measures in place to make sure that personal information was protected or that assessment and approval processes for third-party technologies were followed.

Additionally, the ICO found that, not only did the Met not carry out a data protection impact assessment, it still isn't ensuring that only approved third-party technologies are used to process personal information.

Since the issue first emerged, MPS has tightened up its procedures. However, the ICO said it still needs to do more.

It has ordered the force to strengthen its approach to identifying, assessing and approving any third-party services used to process personal information. It must also review its controls, improve governance processes, enhance staff awareness and regularly test the effectiveness of the measures it has in place.

Controlling the spread of shadow AI

Shadow IT – and shadow AI in particular – is a growing problem. A survey from SailPoint earlier this year found that two-thirds of organizations can’t account for the information staff are sharing with AI platforms and large language models (LLMs). It also found that 35% of staff are sharing data through external tools, rather than approved internal applications.

"This action should send a message across the policing sector, and beyond: if you are using new technology to process people's information you must do so lawfully, transparently and with appropriate governance from the outset," said Doodson.

"Where organizations fail to protect people's information, we will take action. Our role is not only to hold organisations to account, but to drive improvements and promote the standards people have a right to expect."

Dell, HPE, NetApp, Oracle, and CoreWeave all saw their shares stumble this week, amid concerns that the AI infrastructure buildout is poorly timed and the significant investment may not pay off.

The selloff follows concerns that data centre and cloud companies may be overvalued and that enterprise spending on AI isn't enough to cover the costs of the trillion-dollar infrastructure buildout. At the same time, Gartner warned that enterprise and consumer demand is failing to prop up that spending.

Dell, HPE and NetApp’s shares all declined yesterday — 11%, 8% and 7%, respectively — following a damaging report from analysts at Barclays, which downgraded the companies ratings saying they "don't see a meaningful AI inflection yet," and raised concerns about "enterprise AI timing."

Though the decline caught attention, all three firms have seen their shares climb dramatically over the course of the last year, with Dell's share price up more than 300%.

Still, the share slide spread to others in the industry, with Oracle down 9% and CoreWeave slipping 15%.

The Barclays analysts suggested that businesses are spending just 5% of IT budgets on AI, adding that the strong profits seen at data centre-adjacent companies may reflect high prices caused by component shortages rather than an industry shift to AI.

"There is growing sentiment about enterprise AI adoption creating a hardware refresh," the analysts reportedly said. "We believe the strong enterprise revenues are more of a function of memory costs than a move to enterprise AI at this time."

Not enough AI demand?

Major hyperscalers and AI leaders are expected to spend more than a trillion dollars rolling out AI infrastructure such as data centres this year alone, via a network of deals that sees cloud providers, hardware makers and AI developers investing in each other.

AI developers continue to struggle to pay for the high costs, however, with reports that OpenAI's annualized revenue is on track to be $50bn — up significantly from the year before but $20bn behind previous estimates. Anthropic's annualized run rate exceeded $65bn over the summer, and it's set to top $100bn by the end of 2026, according to Reuters reporting.

"In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030," said Will Sommer, senior director analyst at Gartner. "However, our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period."

Earning its keep

Previous research by Bain & Company suggested that the AI industry is going to need to be worth $6trn within the next few years — with $4trn in entirely new applications and services — in order to pay for the ongoing investment.

Gartner's latest analysis suggested AI data centre owners will need to generate $8.5 trillion in revenue to cover already announced capital spending, financing costs and a 12% return on invested capital. The analyst firm thinks this won’t happen until 2032 at the earliest, leading to trillions of dollars in write-downs.

"However, total enterprise and consumer AI revenue that can be attributed to AI data centers during this period is forecast to reach no more than $3.6 trillion," said Sommer. “Because most AI-native providers operate asset-light business models, we predict that less than half of AI revenue will be earned by providers that own significant AI infrastructure."

Neocloud providers — those who build specifically for AI workloads — could be the most at risk, Gartner added, as hyperscalers have more diversified revenue sources to keep them afloat. The analyst predicted that 80% of neocloud providers will "cease independent operations" by 2030 because of such pressures.

Releasing AI-enabled services is one thing – what’s crucial is that your customers find value in your products. During the Workday Community Keynote at the tech firm’s Rising event in Las Vegas, two business leaders explained how their organizations are making the most of AI.

Rob Enslin, chief commercial officer at Workday, opened the keynote by suggesting that Workday’s product announcements this week have been focused on bold AI-enabled innovations with customers at the center. “It’s all about how you move from asking AI questions to getting the real work done,” he said.

To highlight Workday’s customer-centric approach, Enslin welcomed two business leaders to the stage. First up was Mike Harmer, VP of enterprise business platforms at Intermountain Health, who said his healthcare organization must deliver high-quality care cost-effectively, with technology playing a crucial role.

As a long-time Workday customer, the organization wanted its data consolidated in one place to exploit AI. Harmer also wanted to move beyond a system of record and create a system of action, where professionals could use data-powered services to make it easier for caregivers and administrators to boost their efficiency and spend more time with patients.

With solid Workday foundations in place, Harmer’s team explored AI. Intermountain Health leaned into Workday’s early adopter programs to test agents in a sandbox and build confidence. So far, they’ve used Developer Agent, Payroll Agent, and Self-Service Agent to develop use cases and solve business challenges.

Harmer is excited about the promise of Workday’s AI and data technologies: “When these tools get into the hands of our caregivers, it's exciting to see what they do with them. I think they're going to very intentionally disrupt and invent new ways to do things that weren't possible before.”

Sarah Clements, head of HR and shared services at BMO, explained to the audience how the bank launched Workday’s self-service agent to all 55,000 employees in June. Her digital-first organization is eager to embrace AI while simultaneously managing risk.

To move forward with agentic technology, Clements and her team engaged stakeholders across the business and created a responsible AI Forum: “We spent time with them explaining what the agent would do, and actually, more importantly, what it wouldn't do.”

The HR team looked at the bank’s policies and procedures and brought everything into the Workday platform. With the foundations in place, they began to explore use cases for agents, checking that technology answered questions in the way people anticipated.

“The number one thing we're trying to do is make things easy for employees and managers so that they can do their jobs,” Clements said, referring to the implementation of Workday’s Self-Service Agent and the use of natural language to ask key questions about key business activities, such as producing a mortgage letter for a customer.

European businesses are over-reliant on American AI providers and their laissez-faire attitude risks putting the continent at the mercy of closed systems and unexpected access restrictions.

That’s according to Mistral AI co-founder Arthur Mensch, who penned a column in Le Monde arguing Europe will be subject to an “an economic regime of dependence without equivalent in the history of civilization”.

Mensch claimed that “serious people” in Europe have suggested it’s better for the US and China to spend the millions or billions of Euros needed to create frontier AI models, rather than strain the European economy.

“According to them, it’s better to follow the recipe of the internet, where the value is in creating new applications and focus our efforts on what Europe knows how to do: its industrial data, its SMBs, and professional expertise. For everything else, open models created by others will suffice,” said Mensch.

“This is a fundamental error, which will cost Europe its place in the world,” he added. “AI isn’t the internet. The internet relied on open protocols that nobody owned. Closed AI models are proprietary. What an application or agent knows to do is decided by the model.”

Mensch pointed out not only can the owners of these proprietary models hike prices or retire a version of the model without user recourse, they can also cut access without notice. This isn’t hypothetical, as evidenced by Anthropic cutting off access to Fable and Mythos in June 2026.

“Access was reestablished, but the decision wasn’t taken in Europe, nor for Europeans. Nobody asked our opinion,” he added.

Mensch’s column comes amid heightened tensions over AI dependence and a rising interest in sovereign cloud and sovereign AI.

In the UK, the government established a £500 million startup fund to boost the country’s sovereign AI ambitions. Businesses in the country have also started to turn their attention towards sovereign AI in order to reduce their dependence on overseas providers.

Nevertheless, sovereign AI can have hidden costs. According to Forrester senior analyst Dario Maisto, this can mean slower roll out due to a skills deficit and a misunderstanding of what ‘sovereign’ is when it comes to infrastructure.

There’s also a monetary cost: research commissioned by CCIA Europe has claimed the EU sovereign AI bill could cost six times more than the bloc’s own upper estimate of €18 billion. Instead, the trade body – which is made up of non-EU businesses, primarily from the US – has predicted a potential cost of €115 billion over 10 years.

According to Mensch, however, the price is worth paying.

“If Europe resigns itself [to the status quo], AI will continue to be created elsewhere and we will only have access to second tier export versions, in exchange for licenses that will cost trillions of Euros,” he said.

Two critical flaws in one of the most widely-used LLM gateways, LiteLLM, could let low-privilege users execute code, hijack admin accounts, and steal AI provider API keys.

With 97 million downloads per month and more than 59,000 GitHub stars, LiteLLM runs inside large enterprises, startups and many of the platforms used to build AI applications.

It functions as an LLM gateway, used for storing API keys for every AI provider the organization uses, managing user access through roles and permissions, routing prompts and responses between applications and providers and tracking usage and costs across models.

However, according to Checkpoint researchers, CVE-2026-35029 allowed any user – including those with read only access – to reach administrative functions and take over the gateway. CVE-2026-59823, meanwhile, allowed attackers to redirect gateway requests to their own server and capture AI provider API keys.

"In practical terms, anyone holding an account on a vulnerable LiteLLM deployment could take over the gateway and use it for malicious purposes," said the firm.

LiteLLM uses role-based access control, where administrators manage the system and other users receive limited or read-only access. However, the CVE-2026-35029 access control vulnerability means that users with minimal privileges could reach administrative functions controlling the gateway’s core configuration.

From there, an attacker could read files stored on the server, including configuration files and system files containing sensitive information. They could also overwrite administrator credentials with their own, locking legitimate administrators out of the system, and instruct the gateway to download and execute code from an external source, enabling malware installation, data exfiltration or movement to other systems on the network.

CVE-2026-59823 is a server side request forgery vulnerability that allowed any gateway user to direct LiteLLM to send API requests to a server under the attacker’s control without validation.

Attackers could steal AI provider API keys without any compromise of OpenAI, Anthropic or other providers, use the organization’s AI provider accounts without authorization and cause unexpected costs to be billed to the organization.

LiteLLM has now resolved CVE-2026-35029 and CVE-2026-59823 in version 1.83.9, with all later versions including the fixes.

It's notable that the two vulnerabilities are nothing new: they include missing authorization checks, path traversal, RCE via dynamic module loading, and insecure password storage, and all have established mitigation patterns.

"Both vulnerabilities belong to well understood classes of security error, which shows that AI infrastructure is now exposed to the same risks that enterprise software has faced for years," warned Checkpoint.

"As tools like LiteLLM gain adoption at speed, attackers are paying close attention to them, and organizations need to secure their AI gateways with the same rigor they apply to any other business critical system."

AI gateways are starting to emerge as high-value targets, holding credentials, managing trust relationships, and controlling access to multiple AI services, said Li Zhao, principal strategic services consultant at Black Duck.

"Because many organisations consume these technologies indirectly through platforms, frameworks, and internal tooling, the risk extends beyond a single product and becomes a broader ecosystem concern," she said.

"Organizations should treat AI gateways with the same level of scrutiny they apply to identity platforms, API gateways, secrets-management systems, and other high-trust enterprise infrastructure."

The European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) think tank has issued a report claiming that the EU's proposed sovereignty rules could cost the bloc billions.

The research, funded by CCIA Europe – a trade body with members including Amazon, Google, and Meta – examined the costs associated with the European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), which excludes non-EU providers from parts of the cloud and AI market.

The research found, the Act risks imposing €115 billion in costs over the next decade – six times the Commission’s upper estimate of €18 billion.

The reasons, said the researchers, come down to three critical blind spots in the Commission’s impact assessment:

• Failure to include €33.3 billion in direct public budget exposure
• Ignoring the cost of software re-architecting and code-rewriting, which ECIPE said accounts for 69% of CADA’s real-world impact
• Failure to take into account the cost of private-sector spill-overs, which, the report found, could amount to as much as €80 billion.

"Member states can’t rely on the Commission’s incomplete estimates when deciding CADA’s strict sovereignty requirements for cloud and AI providers," said CCIA Europe’s policy manager, Mitchell Rutledge. "Taxpayers and businesses will foot the bill, yet the official assessment missed 70% of CADA’s true impact.”

CCIA Europe is particularly bothered by Article 31 of the act, which allows the Commission to extend strict sovereignty restrictions beyond public procurement to certain private sectors, including banking, energy, healthcare, and transport.

This, it said, would increase the cost enormously, as European software vendors and digital SMEs would be forced to redesign applications currently built on global cloud architectures and AI platforms.

“Governments must recognise that CADA’s massive spillover costs for essential private-sector entities are not hypothetical but inevitable," said Rutledge. "Businesses cannot simply switch servers; they must redesign software and rewrite code across entire supply chains.”

Not entirely unexpectedly, CCIA Europe is calling on EU member states to drastically overhaul CADA, limiting sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads where specific public-order risks are demonstrated.

Describing corporate-origin and personnel-nationality requirements as 'discriminatory', it wants to see these rules replaced with risk-based technical safeguards.

Meanwhile, 'trusted international partners' with bilateral EU procurement commitments – like its members – should be exempted from Article 18 country screening.

“These sweeping restrictions risk draining European innovation and penalizing highly digitized member states," said Rutledge. "EU decision-makers must refocus CADA on objective, risk-based security rather than discriminatory rules that fragment the single market.”

Big US tech firms have put a lot of effort into convincing Europe that they too can provide sovereign European services. AWS's European Sovereign Cloud, for example, sees enterprise data hosted and stored solely in the region, and kept separate from other AWS Regions worldwide. Microsoft's Sovereign Cloud and Google's sovereign solutions make similar promises.

However, there are still concerns: US tech firms are subject to the US Cloud Act, which allows US law enforcement to demand access to the data they hold, even when it's stored outside the US.

Thanks to these concerns, according to Gartner research earlier this year, a fifth of European workloads are shifting to local clouds, with sovereign cloud infrastructure spending in the region set to triple between 2025 and 2027.

How many security professionals does it take to clean up the flaws found by AI? About a third more than you've got now.

That's how many more security professionals and other third-party consultants Bank of America has temporarily hired in order to work through the patches and other fixes necessary to address vulnerabilities spotted by Anthropic's Mythos and other AI security models. In addition to 3,000 existing staff, the bank added 1,000 external contractors to address the challenge.

Anthropic unveiled its Claude Mythos security model in April, but initially only gave access to approved partners via Project Glasswing. Mythos was then temporarily banned for export by the US government, alongside its Fable model, lifting the restrictions three weeks later.

In an interview with CNBC, the bank's CEO Brian Moynihan said the company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last quarter fixing software as well as sorting out anti-money laundering compliance following a near-record fine from US regulators.

Finding flaws

Banks were included in the list of organisations given access to Mythos, with JPMorgan Chase an early partner, though reports from earlier this year suggest Bank of America has been testing the model since April. The main concern is the ability of the model to spot flaws in systems, sparking a wave of patching to avoid security risks.

"That risk is real risk, and that's why when the frontier-type models came out... A lot of us sat down and said, 'How do we figure out how to get through this quickly?'" Moynihan said in an interview with the American news network.

"We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the 3,000 people we have in that area," he added.

However, Moynihan admitted concerns around the fact that companies rolling out AI products spotting these flaws were also offering services to mitigate them.

"We've got to stay ahead of them, and we've got to be mindful that the people doing the software development are the people trying to sell us the services," Moynihan said.

High costs

While the security work comes at a high cost, Moynihan said the company expects that to reduce over time. "Once you patch, you don't have to patch as much. ... The pipeline moves through," he added in the interview.

Bank of America predicts it will save $300m this year thanks to internal AI projects, rising to $700m by next year – however, Moynihan also suggested the bank was spending $4bn a year on new technologies, including AI.

Moynihan said on the call with analysts that "AI has helped us", with 130 projects implemented. Though he admitted "none of them are huge contributors," Moynihan predicted a 10% boost in efficiency at the same cost.

Bank of America's share price slid 8% after its quarterly results revealed a 17% slip in third-quarter profit – and after $1.2bn in fines for violating anti-money laundering rules was announced Tuesday.

Data integration and analytics specialist Qlik has achieved the AWS Data Competency in the cloud giant’s relational database category.

The AWS Competency program aims to help customers identify and grow their business with AWS partners that can offer deep industry experience and expertise across industries, use cases, and workloads.

The relational database credential now recognizes Qlik’s ability to deliver unified data architectures on the AWS platform and help organizations integrate, govern and activate data across complex environments.

The vendor said the designation differentiates it as a member of the AWS Partner Network that is capable of providing deep technical proficiency and customer success delivering data solutions on the cloud platform.

Relational database expertise

Qlik’s open, platform-agnostic model is designed to help organizations work flexibly with data, cloud platforms, and technologies without being restricted to a single technology stack. The firm’s wider capabilities include integration, transformation, governance, analytics, and AI.

Within the relational database category, Qlik provides relational database engines, migration and performance tools, as well as business applications built on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and AWS Aurora.

Support for AWS-hosted databases spans Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, alongside SAP HANA, Sysbase ASE, and IBM Db2.

Benefits for Qlik customers

Qlik said its AWS recognition means customers can connect and work with data across a diverse range of enterprise environments – such as AWS, cloud platforms, on-premises systems, and SaaS applications.

They can also build on their existing environments while being able to adopt new architectures and technologies, as well as create a stronger foundation for analytics and AI.

Matt Hayes, general manager of Qlik’s data business unit, said data strategies now require greater flexibility and cannot be built around a single platform or a single destination.

“Our customers need the freedom to work across the technologies they already depend on while modernizing their data foundations for analytics and AI,” he explained. “Achieving the AWS Data Competency reflects the depth of our data capabilities and our commitment to giving organizations a more open, flexible path from complex data environments to trusted business outcomes.”

Workday announced a raft of agentic products at its 2026 Rising event, and the software giant’s AI-enabled advances over the past 12 months signal what’s to come in the next year and beyond.

That’s according to Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri, who responded to a question from ITPro during a press panel on AI innovation after the firm’s keynote presentation in Las Vegas. “We've transformed the organization to be ready for AI and to deliver products,” he said.

Bhusri, who co-founded the company in 2005 and stepped down from the CEO role in 2024, returned to the CEO role in February 2026 to help lead the firm into the AI era. He recognized he’s overseen a hectic period, leading the integration of AI platform Sana – which was acquired by Workday in November 2025 – into the heart of Workday's technology.

“Sana, as the front end, is becoming transformational,” he said, reflecting on the company’s developments. At the event, it was announced that Sana is now the default home screen for Workday, providing an agentic experience for all users, allowing HR, finance, and other professionals to complete tasks with natural language requests.

“In a short amount of time, we've got 17 agents live,” continued Bhusri, referring to the firm’s rapid development pace during the past 12 months. “The self-service agent is becoming transformational for the company.”

Workday also announced agents across disparate areas, including a Talent Acquisition Agent, a Developer Agent, and Sana Concierge, an overarching HR and IT service that manages multiple activities.

Bhusri said the direction of travel is to refine everything the company does to help professionals complete valuable work more effectively. “Do I know exactly what that looks like?” he said. “It's a journey. I think we'll just be leaner, faster, and more enabled by services for people to do real work, not mundane work.”

In a one-to-one chat with ITPro at the event, Dean Arnold, VP of AI platform at Workday, suggested the things his team builds in prototype are significantly different than before AI.

“We are working faster, working with fully agentic tooling – that's the process. All our teams do it. The jump in velocity is significant,” he said.

Arnold’s team has built a new agentic platform for Workday, including gateways, authentications, and agent-ready tools. Like Bhusri, he suggested the company is prepared to pivot startup-like to deal with new models and priorities.

“Our work is continually evolving all the time,” he said. “I don't think we can ever claim that it's done because there's always the next thing to do.”

In-office meeting rooms leave a lot to be desired in terms of experience. Improving that won’t just make life better for your employees, one company has claimed, it may even directly lead to positive business outcomes.

That was the main message from Logi Work 2026 in London, where VP and GM Henry Levak talked more about its own solution to the problem, the recently released Rally Bar 2.

As most office workers will tell you, the spaces we use for hybrid meetings and video conferencing are complex environments. While there will be some organizations that have made bad decisions, in most cases it isn’t really the fault of IT decision-makers or the business as a whole – it’s the sheer complexity and depth of choice that causes the issue.

Much like a home, a meeting room will be a collection of products bought over time. Unless everything was shrewdly purchased from one vendor in one go and the room specifically designed for the purpose of holding hybrid meetings, it’s likely there’s a mixture of different vendor hardware and software all cobbled together. Some of it works fine but parts of it need upgrading and there’s always a difference in experience between those in the office and those at home.

This can affect office morale and productivity, according to Logitech’s own research: while 89% of employees believe a good workplace experience directly affects business outcomes, only 27% feel they have the necessary setup in the office.

“It’s a broad view of the overall IT landscape, not just specific to video,” Levak told ITPro after his keynote. “But I think most people would agree that when the office works well – that’s everything from the social elements to collaboration, the whole spectrum of collaboration – you get better outcomes from your team.”

When any of those in-office essentials break, that creates a problem, according to Levak – and these aren’t the only problems he believes need solving.

“There’s still more to do around space reservation and space management,” Levak explained. “Wayfinding, I feel like it still hasn’t been completely solved in a lot of offices. So I think from a broad spectrum of tools, IT managers and AV leaders would say there are still areas and pockets where there is still an opportunity for innovations… in some ways, that’s what we’re doing with Rally Bar 2; that’s what our announcement was saying. A lot of what people love about Logitech and meeting room experiences in small, medium, and large rooms are coming to much larger rooms. So hopefully we can bring that number (27%) up a little bit. So that people feel that outcomes are high and they have more solutions and spaces that they really want.”

The simplification of Rally Bar 2

Announced a week before Logi Work, the Rally Bar 2 and the Meeting Room System are Logitech’s answer to overly complex video conferencing setups. The second generation of the Rally Bar is a simplification itself, incorporating the original Rally Bar and the Rally Mini into one piece of kit.

“We looked at both and thought about the feedback. What is the feedback we’ve gotten over the years? What is it that people love? And simplicity is also about fewer options,” Levak said. “As long as you can still satisfy different use cases. Having a long menu of options and things to consider is complex. So we always try to distill things down to their core essentials, and what we find is that the technology today is actually quite capable of doing both things really well in one device.”

The original Rally Bar is a good example of this. Logitech used an optical camera system as it was keen to prove that Android devices could exist in much larger rooms than they were originally designed for.

Levak argued that they had achieved that pretty well, however they also wanted a wide field of view for certain rooms that just needed the different angles. Technically, it was unrealistic to do an optical camera without the wide view they wanted, Lovack admitted, as the camera solution would be quite large.

With new technology, like bigger sensors, better ISP, and faster processing, though, Logitech was able to do wide camera angles and still get that nice in-room zoom.

“Now the technology has sort of caught up; it allows us to simplify even the product catalogue, so instead of having two options, you have one option,” Levak said. “And that one option is even better than the two because it satisfies both use cases.”

The Logitech Rally Bar 2 is available now with prices starting at £3,899.

AI agents are going rogue on a massive scale, with half of enterprises reporting that they've had to deal with at least one taking unauthorized actions over the last year.

In a report based on a survey of more than 380 security and technology professionals, along with production telemetry from hundreds of customer environments, Salt Labs claimed agentic AI has moved into daily operations too quickly for visibility, governance, and containment controls.

Half of survey respondents (49.8%) said they had confirmed or suspected that an AI agent in their organization took an action in the past 12 months that wasn't intended, expected, or authorized.

Of these, more than half reported an unauthorized external API call or transaction, while more than four-in-ten reported that an agent modified or deleted data.

"The data shows a gap that is already producing real operational consequences," said Roey Eliyahu, CEO of Salt Security.

"Organizations are deploying agents and granting them access to enterprise data, APIs, and services before they can trace what those agents are doing or stop them automatically when something goes wrong. Closing that gap is the discipline of agentic security, and it is what lets enterprises give AI agents the autonomy they need without inheriting unmanaged risk."

Enthusiastic deployment meets lack of control

The vast majority of organizations surveyed (86%) are using at least one AI agent, the survey found while 60% run more than ten. Another 77% of respondents said their agents chain actions across other agents, tools, and APIs, in sequences no single team designed in advance.

Only 12.5% said they can consistently trace a complete agent path across all agents, from initial instruction through tools and APIs to outcome. More than six-in-ten believe they would need hours or days of manual work to reconstruct what a specific agent did the previous day.

When problems do occur, they're hard to deal with. Only 17.5% can automatically stop an agent that begins behaving unexpectedly in production. Most can intervene only manually, or by taking the application offline.

More than eight-in-ten said AI-generated or AI-assisted code contributes to at least some of their application security findings. Only 7% resolve issues inside the coding assistant at generation time, rather than through code review, testing, or after deployment.

Meanwhile, shadow model context protocol (MCP) infrastructure is already a live operational problem. 33% of survey respondents said they had found an unauthorized, shadow, or misconfigured MCP server in the past 12 months. 54% said they'd confirmed or suspected one.

Salt Labs' own data shows MCP-related infrastructure in 22% of customer environments in August this year, up from 16.7% in January.

Earlier this year, a survey commissioned by Aembit found that 68% of organizations can’t accurately identify AI agent activity compared to human activity.

Nearly three-quarters said that agents often receive more access than necessary, and 79% believe they create new access pathways that are difficult to monitor. Just over half said agents, at least occasionally, inherit access originally intended for humans or other systems.

The FBI has shut down 40 laptop farms that were being used for a North Korean fake IT worker scheme.

As part of Operation Lonestar Roundup, 187 computer devices being used by North Korean IT workers were seized, and two people were arrested.

In a scheme labelled Famous Chollima, the fake workers were applying for – and often getting – remote positions by using stolen or fabricated identity documents, VPNs and proxy infrastructure to make it look as though they were working from within the US.

They used US-based co-conspirators to receive laptops from victim companies. These individuals then housed and configured those devices, installed remote-access software and transferred earnings to Korean government‑controlled accounts.

“Operation Lonestar Roundup was aimed at disrupting malicious cyber activity perpetrated by the North Korean government with the purpose of supporting its WMD and ballistic missile programs, intelligence program, and nuclear program,” said FBI Dallas special agent in charge R Joseph Rothrock.

"Each laptop seized potentially represents one company that has hired a DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) IT worker."

US nationals Michael James Bostelle of Pennsylvania and Juan Cecilio Pena Carrillo of Texas have been arrested for the scheme, which is believed to have generated more than $3 million in revenue. Another dozen people based in China have been charged.

The companies falling victim included organizations in the health care, communications, cyber support, retail, and manufacturing sectors, with the revenue generated being sent to sanctioned entities controlled by the North Korean government.

The operatives appear to have used a network of fraudulent Google accounts to facilitate their criminal activity.

Employers are being encouraged to add accounts listed by the Justice Department to the list of indicators they use to identify and disrupt North Korean IT worker employment.

CrowdStrike, which worked with the FBI to bring the operation down Famous Chollima operatives have been using a range of deception techniques during onboarding. They've filed fraudulent police reports claiming a laptop was stolen to trigger replacement shipments to farm addresses, and rotated through residential addresses to obscure the final destination.

Others have claimed they've been forced to relocate at the last minute to divert devices mid-shipment. In some cases, operatives secured roles through IT staffing firms, which allowed end-client devices to be quietly redirected to farm infrastructure without the staffing firm's knowledge.

This summer, Huntress uncovered at least five North Korean operatives that were part of the Famous Chollima operation and who, between them, were applying for as many as 60 jobs per day.

“This investigation is about far more than fraud,” said US attorney Ryan Raybould for the Northern District of Texas.

“It is about a hostile foreign regime infiltrating American companies through stolen identities and covert access points inside our own borders. Every laptop farm we dismantle shuts down a revenue stream that the North Korean government relies on to fund weapons programs that threaten global stability."

Sana is now the default home screen for Workday and will provide the standard experience for all users, the tech giant announced at its Rising event in Las Vegas.

Referred to as Workday Home, professionals can ask the user interface what they need in natural language for key operational activities, such as tasks, decisions, and meetings, and Sana orchestrates secure Workday agents to complete the task.

“For too long, enterprise software forced you to do the work, searching for apps, data, and processes,” said CEO Aneel Bhusri during the keynote.

“We're flipping that script with Sana, the new front door to Workday. Instead of hunting through menus, instead of looking for the work you need to get done, you simply ask, like it's a simple AI prompt.”

The Sana announcement was one of the main events from a keynote presentation that focused on the game-changing potential of AI. As well as its work on Sana, Workday presented a series of new agentic services and platform developments.

The key message from the keynote is that Workday is building agentic capabilities into its platform, rather than bolting them on. With an increasingly open platform and strong links to pioneer models, like Anthropic Claude, Workday wants to help a hybrid workforce of professionals and their agentic colleagues to unlock human capabilities.

“Jobs are going to change; there's no question about it,” said Bhusri, reflecting on the changing nature of work. “Jobs are being redefined into skills and roles that are very different than they were pre-AI. But let's embrace that. Let's all learn AI, use the tools, and embrace the opportunity.”

Workday introduced Work Intelligence, which breaks every job role into tasks. The service automatically connects tasks to the skills they require, showing business leaders the areas that AI can automate, what it should augment, and what parts need to stay human. Professionals, freed up from repetitive work, can then focus on value-adding activities, such as the personal relationships that are crucial to hiring and reskilling in HR.

The company also launched Autopilot Agents that work continuously in the background across hiring, payroll, accounting, and compliance. Once again, these proactive agents aim to free up professionals to work on more valuable activities.

“The question is not whether we should embrace AI or fear it. The question is how do we harness its power and make it safe, reliable, and trusted?” said Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday during the keynote.

“We can take big steps towards answering this question by transforming HR and finance with AI in a secure, reliable, and in a lawful way.”

High job satisfaction may not be enough for employers to keep hold of their tech staff, according to new research from professional association ISACA, which warns that burnout and unclear career paths are pushing workers to look elsewhere.

According to the organisation's Tech Workplace and Culture 2026 report, which surveyed more than 1,000 tech professionals worldwide, although 76% are satisfied with their current role and 71% are satisfied with their career progression, nearly three-quarters (73%) said they would consider moving to a new employer in the next two years, or had not ruled it out.

Among respondents who had left a previous job, the most common reasons were better career prospects (29%), higher pay (28%), and more interesting work (23%). An unclear path upwards was also the most commonly cited obstacle to career advancement, named by a third (34%) of respondents and 41% of women.

Economic conditions may be masking the scale of this problem, according to Julia Hermann, head of digital platform services at cybersecurity firm Giesecke+Devrient. Speaking at a media briefing during ISACA Europe 2026, Hermann, who is also a leader of ISACA's SheLeadsTech programme in Germany, said layoffs in sectors such as the German automotive industry had led to a phenomenon known as "job hugging".

"People stick to their jobs, though they might not be totally satisfied, because at the moment it's not really easy to find a new job," she said. "The salaries are partially going down, or at least stagnating, so you're not necessarily making a big jump when you go to another company."

Long probationary periods add to the risk of moving, she added: "If you're the last to come, you're the first to go on the next layoffs."

This trend may be delaying departures rather than preventing them, however. ISACA warned that workplace pressures are feeding into the sector's retention problems, which three-quarters (75%) of respondents said were already a concern for their organisation. More than half (59%) of respondents said they had experienced work-related stress or burnout, rising to 64% among women, with the main causes being heavy workloads (48%) and a lack of resources (43%). Despite this, only a quarter (25%) said their employer offers mental health days, and 23% said it offers no support at all.

AI is adding to this pressure, Hermann explained, noting that while the technology is often deployed with the intention to reduce workloads, companies are not hiring for new roles to run the platforms behind it. As a result, she said, the work lands on existing staff on top of their day-to-day operational duties, noting that AI has created "a lot more work" for her team, which is now responsible for managing and securing the internal platforms that support the company's own AI models.

Entry-level roles may be more affected, however. Younger staff tend to move jobs more often, according to Hermann, and AI may also be squeezing the roles they start out in. ISACA's senior vice president of advocacy, Tara Wisniewski, warned this could make the industry's pipeline problems worse, arguing that organisations like ISACA and universities need to help graduates into the market, "and industry needs to be called to the table there too".

"We do believe that professions will change. We don't believe that they will be eradicated as a whole, but we do believe that they will change," Chris Dimitriadis, ISACA's chief global strategy officer, told media at ISACA Europe. He said he expects AI to take on most technical and orchestration tasks, leaving people to focus on governance, configuring and monitoring AI systems, and making final decisions.

In ISACA's State of Cybersecurity 2026 report, which surveyed security professionals globally, soft skills were the most commonly reported shortcoming among security professionals (57%), while 45% cited missing LLM SecOps capabilities, up 12 percentage points from the previous year. As AI takes on more technical work, Dimitriadis said, security staff will increasingly need the ability to explain to the rest of the business, in financial terms, how investment in security and AI will pay off.

Many teams are already short of people and money, however. The same report, published last month, found that more than half of European cyber security professionals said their teams were understaffed (56%) and underfunded (55%).

"Too often we are seeing budgets being sunk into crisis response, but there's still a distinct lack of investment in the workforce, training, and resources needed to prevent attacks and protect organisations in the first place," Dimitriadis said when the report was published.

He warned that the skills gap is likely to widen as roles change, "not just in terms of the numbers, but also in terms of the type of skills that's needed". It could grow "not because we are going to lose the people, but because... their knowledge may become obsolete very fast as digital ecosystems change".

ISACA's Tech Workplace and Culture 2026 survey of 1,025 tech professionals worldwide was carried out between 17 July and 3 August 2026. Its State of Cybersecurity 2026 report surveyed 1,888 cybersecurity professionals, including 494 in Europe, in May 2026.

OpenAI has announced the appointment of Ismail Elmas as vice president of EMEA sales, as the AI giant looks to continue expanding its footprint in the region.

A seasoned industry leader, Elmas arrives with more than 25 years’ experience in enterprise software and cyber security. He joins OpenAI from SpaceXAI via its acquisition of Cursor, where he held the role of senior vice president for EMEA.

Prior to his spell at Cursor, Elmas served as group vice president of international business at Rubrik, and has previously spent four years at Zscaler, where he led teams across Europe and Asia. Other positions include leadership roles at AppDynamics and BMC Software.

In an announcement, Brian McCarthy, OpenAI’s vice president of worldwide sales, praised Elmas as “an exceptional leader” with expertise in building successful teams and helping companies leverage new technologies to drive value.

“He combines the discipline to deliver results with a clear focus on customers,” he said. “I’m excited to work with him as we grow across EMEA and help more businesses across the region put AI to work.”

Expanding OpenAI’s EMEA footprint

The appointment follows a strong period of expansion for OpenAI in EMEA – a region the company considers one of its largest and most important outside of the US. Over the past year, weekly users of ChatGPT in EMEA grew by more than 40%, while ChatGPT Business Enterprise seats across the region have more than doubled in that time.

The last few years have also seen the business add new offices in Dublin, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Brussels, and Abu Dhabi, following the 2023 opening of its first international office in London.

OpenAI said it is now looking to further build on that progress, with new offices in Madrid, Berlin, and Stockholm due to open in the coming months and further expansion plans slated for 2027.

Commenting on his appointment, Elmas said OpenAI has transformed how people work and how businesses conduct their operations.

“The combination of frontier technology and products people already know and use creates an enormous opportunity for businesses across EMEA in this era of agentic AI,” he said.

“Realising that opportunity means being close to customers, understanding their challenges and working alongside them. I can’t wait to build on what the team has already achieved as we enter this next chapter.”

The owner of Phase Eight, Hobbs, and Whistles, TFG London, has confirmed that it has been hit by a cyber attack.

TFG London is the UK subsidiary of South African retail group The Foschini Group, which includes several UK retail brands.

“On Sunday, 11 October, TFG London identified a cybersecurity incident affecting some of our IT systems, specifically impacting our Phase Eight, Hobbs, and Whistles brands. We are actively investigating and working with external cyber security specialists," a spokesperson told ITPro.

"Stores are open as normal but some of our brand’s website capabilities may not be available as the investigation continues. We apologize for any disruption and will provide additional updates to our customers as appropriate.”

Online orders and returns are believed to be affected.

The firm said it has now put its business continuity plan into place, and has reported the incident to the relevant authorities. It said it was contacting all those customers whose personal data might have been accessed, but that there was no need for customers to change their passwords.

"Importantly, payment processing is carried out by a third-party provider," it told customers in an email.

"Based on our investigation so far, we have no reason to believe that payment information is at risk. As our investigation continues, we will be working to identify if any sensitive information related to our customers was impacted."

TFG's African and Australian operations appear unaffected, as are two other brands it owns, Inside Story and White Stuff.

The hack follows similar attacks last year on M&S, Co-op, Harrods and, most recently, ASOS, which last week warned that an unauthorized party had gained access to some personal data, including names and contact details by impersonating a trusted contact to obtain login credentials.

"It may be a different target but it’s the same hack; impersonate a trusted individual such as an employee, a manager, or a contractor and use that to change passwords and privileges to access systems, and potentially steal millions of customer records and personal information," said Clive Summerfield, CEO at FARx.

"One phone call is all it took to pull down M&S, Co-op, and Harrods. This resulted in systems going offline, supply chains in chaos, millions of customer records stolen or compromised, and commercial losses in the hundreds of millions."

It's not known exactly how the attackers gained access, but – as with the ASOS attack – it seems likely that it was through a third-party supplier, perhaps a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or data hosting provider. So far, no cybercrime group has claimed the attack.

"Organizations need to be shoring up their defenses before attackers find a way in, rather than scrambling to contain the damage afterwards," warned Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club.

"Retailers are particularly attractive targets, sitting on valuable customer data and relying on interconnected systems to keep everything from online orders to supply chains moving. The consequences of a breach can stretch far beyond stolen information, hitting sales, disrupting operations, and eroding customer trust."

PC sales have fallen yet again as AI-driven price increases continue to bite, according to Gartner.

The trillion-dollar AI infrastructure rollout has led to shortages of key components, notably memory and storage, with one report suggesting AI will use a fifth of DRAM capacity this year.

Gartner said that global PC shipments were 55.4 million in the third quarter of 2026, down 22.4% from the 71.3 million shipped in the same quarter last year. That's on par with shipments from the first quarter of 2023, the analyst firm noted – and the decline is double the 10% annual reduction in PC shipments predicted by Gartner earlier this year.

That fall in shipments is largely down to rising costs of components driving up overall prices, Gartner said, leading to slower sales.

"The impact of higher memory and storage costs is now fully reflected in PC pricing," said Namrata Banerjee, principal analyst for research at Gartner. "DRAM costs surged five times year-over-year in the second quarter, and PC vendors passed those higher component costs on to customers, driving the steep decline in PC shipments during the third quarter."

Scarcity rather than oversupply

While sales have hit similar levels as they were two and a half years ago, the dips are driven by different causes, Gartner added.

"PC shipments have fallen to levels last seen in early 2023, though the market dynamics were noticeably different," said Banerjee. "Rather than excess inventory, the decline in the third quarter of 2026 was driven by higher prices, vendor-led reprioritization of scarce components and a shift toward higher-priced configurations."

The AI-driven components shortage has led PC makers to focus on higher-end models in order to help maintain margins and absorb some rising costs, with a separate report from Omdia earlier this year predicting reduced availability of low-budget devices alongside a wider rise in prices.

Banerjee suggested the absence of budget models was leading customers to hold off upgrading, while businesses focus on AI-focused investments. "The resulting reduction in the availability of lower-cost devices made replacement purchases less affordable for consumers, while businesses focused spending on targeted investments, such as workstations and AI PCs rather than broad-based PC deployments," Banerjee said.

Sales slide across the board

The sales decline hit all of the top PC makers, Gartner added.

Apple saw the smallest fall in shipments at 7.1% between the third quarter of this year and last year, but its PC rivals posted double-digit declines. Market leader Lenovo fell 22.4% over the same period, while second-ranked HP tumbled by nearly a third at 30.9%, and Dell wasn't far behind at 25.4%. Asus and Acer had slower slides at 13% and 11.2% respectively.

The report from Gartner follows a separate report from Counterpoint research showing global smartphone shipments had fallen 20% on-year to their lowest for the third quarter since 2021 – also driven by higher memory costs and supply shortages of other components. Over the summer, Apple admitted that the AI buildout would lead to more expensive iPhones.

Hackers have sparked fires and floods in French supermarkets after targeting temperature gauges in internet-connected refrigerators.

The attackers remotely took over refrigeration systems, resetting target temperatures to 50ºC, leading to fires as well as floods from sprinkler systems, destroying fresh and frozen food.

The hack hit hundreds of supermarkets, including Intermarche, Carrefour, Cooperative, and Monoprix, according to reports. Authorities said an investigation had been started into the "large-scale cyberattack" that targeted the country's food supply.

"Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is extremely serious and is unprecedented. It is unacceptable," CEO of Cooperative U, Dominique Schelcher, wrote on X.

Dutch supermarkets also reported security issues, with some digital systems taken offline at the Albert Heijn chain, while reports suggest supermarkets across Europe may also be affected.

What happened?

The attack began overnight, with temperatures slowly rising over the course of several hours. The hackers appear to have targeted store fridges and freezers via control panels that are accessible via the internet in order to be adjusted and maintained, Reuters reported.

"The attack was probably launched at about 11.00pm but we didn't become aware of it until 4.00am, when our delivery driver saw that the stock room was flooded," said Charles Dezon, manager of the Intermarché supermarket in Gradignan (Gironde), in a report from Le Monde. "The temperature had risen to 50ºC in the cold room and activated the automatic sprinkler system."

Reports suggest the hackers forced the equipment into a constant defrost cycle, leading to overheating.

Known flaw, legacy systems

A source told AFP that the hacked systems appeared to be largely made up of refrigeration control systems from Danfoss, a Danish equipment manufacturer. Danfoss told that news agency that the attack targeted "legacy" systems that no longer received software or security updates, notably the AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 regulator systems that had "outdated firmware".

Danfoss added, in a statement sent to Reuters, that it had "long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions".

Indeed, the attacks come two months after Claroty's Team82 spotted multiple vulnerabilities in Danfoss's AK-SM 800A platform. The vulnerabilities were disclosed to Danfoss, which issued fresh firmware to patch the flaws; however, that appears to not have covered the older version, as it was no longer supported by the company.

At the time, Claroty noted: "A compromised supervisory controller grants an attacker the ability to physically manipulate refrigeration systems and silently spoil the contents."

What's next?

Stores are working to clean up after the incident, with staff spotted chucking spoiled food into bins, but full recovery will likely take much longer — and be expensive. Intermarche CEO Thierry Cotillard told local television that the losses were likely to top "tens ​of millions of euros nationwide in a single day." In the UK, last year's ransomware attacks cost M&S and Co-op up to £440 million.

"The impact on French supermarkets will likely last months," said James Neilson, SVP of Global at OPSWAT. "More than a year on, M&S and Co-op are still feeling the financial and organisational effects of their attacks."

He added: "Refrigeration technicians have to inspect and restore systems site by site, and retailers must reassure customers that what’s back on the shelves is safe."

It's as yet unclear who committed the attacks, but they come a month after French President Emmanual Macron warned that critical national infrastructure needed to be protected from Russian cyber attacks.

Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress, noted that the security industry has long been warning about attacks on operational infrastructure, saying that these refrigeration systems had been "weaponised". He added: "The food retail sector across Europe should be treating this as a signal that they are being actively targeted."

It is "likely, if not inevitable" that the UK will fall victim to a major cyber attack similar to Australia's recent healthcare breach, AI minister Kanishka Narayan has warned.

His speech comes as part of a government pledge to introduce greater protections against emerging AI threats, use frontier AI to strengthen cyber defences, look at stronger legal protections and make the UK better-prepared for serious incidents involving autonomous AI systems.

"We will use every power at our disposal. We will legislate wherever necessary," Narayan said.

"And we won’t look to law alone. We will look to British ingenuity: our scientific expertise, technological capabilities and institutions to understand these increasingly powerful systems, defend against emerging threats and respond when things go wrong."

There are plans to build on two existing pilot schemes that have already used frontier AI to help identify and fix more than 1,000 vulnerabilities across government systems.

The government is also looking at stronger protections against emerging AI threats with the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, currently with the House of Lords, looking at how serious AI incidents and near misses can be identified and reported.

It's working with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the AI Security Institute (AISI) – which has once again been given access to major US models before they are released.

Naryan pointed out that the UK is increasingly dependent on technologies developed elsewhere.

"Much of the technology that will shape our economy, our public services, our national security is being developed outside this country," he said.

"That is now a question of national security, also a question of democratic power. If the British state cannot exercise meaningful control over the technologies on which our country depends, neither can the people that it represents."

The announcement follows a series of incidents in which AI agents have autonomously hacked into external systems. In one major example, OpenAI admitted that a combination of its models had breached Hugging Face systems, gaining access to the production database.

In a separate incident, four different versions of Anthropic's Claude AI models were revealed to have breached third-party systems.

"To the companies developing the world’s most powerful AI systems, my message is: Listen when your scientists warn of severe dangers. Investigate unexpected behaviours. And if you can’t adequately control the risks, do not release the system," Naryan said.

However, Nuala Polo, UK Public Policy Lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute, said the announcement contains little in the way of definite commitment.

"Stronger protections will be ‘considered’, strengthening the Cyber Bill ‘explored’ and near-miss reporting ‘looked at’, with the detail to come later. There is no new regulatory power, no timetable and no obligation on AI developers," she said.

"Even incident reporting, the most modest measure on the table, is still only under consideration, and might only apply to the ‘victims’ – the operators of essential services – rather than the AI companies."

Microsoft has boosted its Azure Maia chip program, revealing a broad roll-out of its Maia 200 chips and significant expansion with Maia 300 once they come into production in 2027.

According to a blog from Scott Guthrie, EVP of Cloud and AI at Microsoft: “The multigenerational Azure Maia program has become a foundational element of Microsoft’s AI infrastructure strategy.”

Maia 200, which was announced in January and is already in production, is already serving production workloads in Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI models, and the company’s own Microsoft AI (MAI) models. GitHub Copilot and Microsoft foundry are to follow by the end of 2026, said Guthrie.

Maia 300, which will go into production in 2027, was described as “a complete intelligent system” that can support emerging AI workloads like long-context reasoning, latency-sensitive conversational experiences, and sustained, multi-step agentic tasks.

The company claimed that Maia 300 will offer significant improvements on token use efficiency, capable of delivering 40% more tokens per megawatt than “leading GPU-based systems”. It also will deliver up to 7x rack-scale throughput of Maia 200 when in a full 96-accelerator configuration.

Rani Borkar, president of Azure hardware systems and infrastructure, told Reuters: “It's basically delivering more intelligence for every watt, every dollar, and every byte of memory by optimizing across the entire system.”

Nvidia’s customers become its competitors

While it’s not explicitly laid out in Guthrie’s blog, the shift to Maia 200 and Maia 300 means Microsoft is extricating itself from Nvidia’s ecosystem – at least for some of its AI systems.

Maia will be “the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services”, Guthrie said. This position had previously been held by Nvidia chips, notably Nvidia H100 and H200 ‘Hopper’ GPUs and Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.

Microsoft is not alone in taking an ‘in-house’ strategy, either.

Google has its Tensor Processing Units, which it has been developing and using for several years.

Amazon has its Tranium and Inferentia chip family, which is used both by itself and by generative AI pioneers Anthropic, with OpenAI signed on to use Tranium as part of an infrastructure agreement.

Speaking of OpenAI, it’s co-developing its own chips as well, called Jalapeño, with Broadcom. In August, the company said that when compared to “leading commercially available AI systems … (it) delivered a better combination of throughput, power efficiency, and latency”.

“Across all three public models (GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5), Jalapeño delivered a better combination of performance per watt and latency across the tested operating range, placing it on the Pareto frontier,” the company said.

Meta and Anthropic are also looking into building their own home-grown chips, though there have been no further announcements from either company.

All this doesn’t spell the end for Nvidia, however. Quoted by CNBC, Alistair Speirs, GM of global infrastructure, said the company partners with Nvidia and AMD for training large language models (LLMs).

The companies also have a close relationship when it comes to end-user hardware, such as the upcoming Surface Laptop Ultra.