#cybersecurity

#cybersecurity

Peter Williams, a former executive at U.S. defense contractor L3Harris, was sentenced on Tuesday to 87 months in prison for leaking his former company's trade secrets in exchange for $1.3 million in crypto between 2022 and 2025. Williams sold the exploits to Operation Zero, which the U.S. government calls 'one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers.'

Passwords get hacked all the time, but they can't be hacked if they don't exist...this allows a small team like 404 to spend less time managing security administration, and more time investing in bringing you stories you care about.

Headline numbers were solid: revenue grew 15% year-over-year to $2.59 billion, adjusted EPS of $1.03 beat expectations, and next-generation security ARR jumped 33% to $6.33 billion. But management trimmed its full-year profit outlook due to acquisition costs, and Q3 EPS guidance missed expectations, sending shares down 5-7% in after-hours trading.

Whole Foods shelves sit empty after a data breach shut down its wholesale distributor. Meat packers working for JBS Foods are paralyzed as an $11 million ransomware attack takes out their processing facilities. Some 2.2 million workers at Stop & Shop and Hannaford have their personal data exposed as the result of a cyberattack on parent company Ahold Delhaize USA. These scenarios, straight from a William Gibson novel, are becoming increasingly common in supply chains across the world.

Because of this massive shift, the pressure on business owners has never been higher. Consumers today have zero patience. If your mobile application is slow, or if your website lacks the features they want, they will instantly move to a competitor. To survive and grow, a modern business must be able to create and update its digital tools incredibly fast. However, rushing to build technology introduces a terrible risk: you might accidentally leave your digital doors wide open to criminals.

In an effort to transform this portfolio, the agency is launching a challenge to gather ideas from industry on how to move these old systems to cloud-native architectures and reduce its technical debt. According to a Tuesday notice on Sam.gov, the agency is forgoing a traditional acquisition in favor of a challenge-based approach. The multi-phase competition will allow the FAA to watch vendors perform, not just pitch.

"Deutsche Bahn has been and continues to be subject to attacks on its IT systems," the company said in an update posted hours after the initial service restoration. "The current attack is specifically targeted at DB and has occurred in waves. "The scale of the attack is considerable. Our defense mechanisms are working. We will not comment on speculation regarding the background of the attack."

Data scientists pore over data to tease out key insights. For example, they may gather data from a survey or by scraping the internet. They then develop algorithms and models to analyze data, helping their organizations craft effective business strategies. A bachelor's degree in mathematics, statistics or computer science is often required for this role. As with many tech jobs, data scientists can work from almost anywhere, including home.

Livingston HealthCare in Livingston, Montana, says its phone system has been restored after a cybersecurity incident disrupted communications and led the hospital to take some systems offline, but network disruptions continue as restoration work proceeds. The nonprofit hospital said Feb. 13 that a "potential cybersecurity incident" disrupted its phone systems and network and that it temporarily took certain systems offline "out of an abundance of caution" while it assessed the situation and worked with outside experts.

Organizations traditionally approach security risk through a narrow lens, often equating "security" primarily with cybersecurity. While cybersecurity is critically important, it represents only one subset of a much broader security landscape. Cybersecurity focuses on the protection of technologies that collect, store, process and transmit data. By contrast, security-related risk encompasses all forms of loss arising from the failure to protect organizational assets.

The 62nd Munich Security Conference opened on 13 February 2026 in Munich, Germany, and this year's gathering feels different from past editions. For decades, Munich was about jets, troops, and treaties. Today, cyber and AI are no longer peripheral; they are part of the architecture of security itself. Cyber risks, digital infrastructure, and emerging technologies like AI now sit alongside tanks and treaties on the agenda as European leaders try to make sense of a world where digital threats and geopolitical tensions are deeply intertwined.

A likely partial government shutdown after Friday would impair the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's operations, leading to diminished capabilities in critical areas including cyber response, security assessments, stakeholder engagements, training exercises and special event planning, a top official said this week. CISA would furlough a majority of its workforce and just one-third would remain on the job under shutdown conditions, agency acting director Madhu Gottumukkala told House appropriators on Wednesday.

A Chinese government hacking group that has been sanctioned for targeting America's critical infrastructure used Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to auto-analyze vulnerabilities and plan cyberattacks against US organizations, the company says. While there's no indication that any of these attacks were successful, "APT groups like this continue to experiment with adopting AI to support semi-autonomous offensive operations," Google Threat Intelligence Group chief analyst John Hultquist told The Register. "We anticipate that China-based actors in particular will continue to build agentic approaches for cyber offensive scale."

New data is reinforcing a structural shift in how AI systems access publisher content: AI models are increasingly scraping publisher content, regardless of bot-blocking measures or content licensing deals meant to control usage, improve attribution or drive referral traffic. New research from analytics firms and bot-tracking companies shows AI tools are increasingly crawling publisher sites as inputs for AI-generated summaries and training, while sending back only limited referral traffic.

Born on 17 May 1991 at Evanston Hospital, Bobby grew up on Chicago's North Shore. He attended Hubbard Woods Elementary, Washburne Middle School, and New Trier Township High School. Early on, he gravitated towards how systems behave under pressure, not just how they look when everything is running smoothly. He built that mindset through computer science coursework, networking classes, and hands-on tech support for school events.

STL Partners predicts one AI-related growth area among telcos but warns of a slower adoption or pullbacks in three others. First, the AI optimism: Telcos will increasingly adopt voice-based AI, analysts believe. Already, some of the biggest global telcos are using embedded voice assistance in AI channels for enterprise customers. In 2026, telcos are likely to adopt voice technologies for customer calls as well. Immediate benefits could include live translation and integration of digital assistance services.

Every January, millions take on Dry January , a ritual of restraint and resetting after the holiday season. If that's the benchmark for kicking off the year with moderation, Europe's startup ecosystem clearly didn't get the memo. In the opening weeks of 2026, the region saw five startups join the unicorn club, crossing the $1 billion valuation mark across sectors as varied as cybersecurity, cloud optimisation, defence tech, ESG software, and education technology.

Japan and Britain agreed Saturday to accelerate cooperation on cybersecurity and the supply of critical minerals, as China's influence grows in the region. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said his visit to Japan comes at a time "when geopolitical, economic and technological shocks are literally shaking the world." Starmer's overnight Tokyo visit comes on the heels of his trip to Beijing, where he and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to seek a long-term, stable "strategic partnership."