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Finance Company Stores DB Credentials in Helpfully Labeled Spreadsheet
During a compliance audit, Innowise discovered that a fintech startup stored its production database root credentials and AWS IAM master keys in a password‑protected Excel file on a publicly accessible SharePoint folder. The file, misleadingly named “Prod_DB_Root_Creds_DO_NOT_SHARE.xlsx,” used a weak password combining the company name with the year, making it easily guessable. The practice stemmed from a disagreement over which password manager to adopt, leading the DevOps and DBA teams to resort to a temporary spreadsheet solution. The audit highlighted a critical lapse in credential management despite the firm’s investment in advanced security controls.
Trump Admin Pays Wind Developers to Quit, Back Fossil Fuel Projects
The U.S. Department of the Interior announced two historic agreements that will reimburse offshore wind developers $765 million for Bluepoint Wind and $120 million for Golden State Wind in exchange for terminating their leases. Developers must reinvest an equivalent amount in qualifying...
Have I Been Pwned Claims Pitney Bowes Hit by 8.2M Email Address Leak
Pitney Bowes, the U.S. logistics‑technology firm behind mailing and shipping software, suffered a data breach exposing 8.2 million unique email addresses. The leak, verified by Have I Been Pwned on April 27, also contained names, phone numbers, physical addresses and employment details....
Pentagon Wants to Water Down Drone Program with Autonomous Subs
DARPA has launched the Deep Thoughts program to create compact, low‑cost autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) capable of full‑ocean‑depth operations. The initiative seeks novel materials, free‑form designs and rapid, weeks‑long development cycles, diverging from traditional, bulky AUVs. It aligns with the...
US Clarifies Mobile Hotspots Part of Foreign Router Ban Despite Rarity of American Made Consumer Kit
The FCC has clarified that its ban on foreign‑made consumer routers now also includes portable Wi‑Fi hotspots and LTE/5G customer premises equipment (CPE) used in homes. The restriction applies only to new models; existing devices already authorized can continue to...
Governments on High Alert After CISA Snuffs Out Firestarter Backdoor on Fed Network
CISA disclosed that a previously unknown backdoor malware, dubbed Firestarter, breached a U.S. Federal Civilian Executive Branch agency by compromising a Cisco Firepower ASA firewall. The malware can retain persistent access even after firmware updates, allowing attackers to re‑enter networks...
Weak Security Means Attackers Could Disable All of a City's Public EV Chargers
Researchers at Black Hat Asia demonstrated that rented IoT infrastructure—such as public EV chargers and shared e‑bikes—often sacrifices security for convenience. Hetian Shi of Tsinghua University uncovered shared authentication keys, exposed debug ports, and backend services that fail to verify users. Using his...
Dev Targeted by Sophisticated Job Scam: 'I Let My Guard Down, and Ran the Freaking Code'
A Serbian web developer was duped by a fake LinkedIn recruiter claiming to represent blockchain firm Genusix Labs. After two seemingly legitimate video interviews, the scammers sent a live‑coding test that contained a hidden shell script, which installed a Go‑based...
Solid-State Batteries Hold More Juice, but Keep Cracking Up. Now Researchers Know Why
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute identified mechanical stress as the primary driver of dendrite‑induced cracking in ceramic solid electrolytes, debunking the electron‑leak theory. Using cryogenic vacuum experiments, they showed that lithium dendrites act like a high‑pressure water jet, fracturing the...
YouTuber Has DIMM Idea, Builds Working DRAM in Backyard
AI‑driven demand has driven DRAM prices to record levels, prompting a YouTuber known as Dr. Semiconductor to turn his garden shed into a makeshift cleanroom and fabricate a 5 × 4 array of memory cells. The DIY chips store 12.3 pF per capacitor...
Hybrid Clouds Have Two Attack Surfaces and You’re Not Paying Enough Attention to Either
Researchers at Black Hat Asia uncovered four critical CVEs in Microsoft’s Windows Admin Center (WAC), exposing a two‑way attack surface for hybrid cloud environments. The flaws allow malicious actors to drop payloads on on‑premises WAC installations and forge proof‑of‑possession tokens...
Grafana Offers AI Assistant for Free, Warns Users Not to Go Mad
Grafana announced that its AI‑driven Grafana Assistant is now free for on‑premise and open‑source users, though it still requires a Grafana Cloud account for the large‑language‑model backend. At the same event the company unveiled Grafana 13, featuring dynamic dashboards, DORA‑style templates,...
Murder, She Wrote: Ex-FBI Chief Wants some Ransomware Crims Charged with Homicide
Former FBI cyber‑division deputy chief Cynthia Kaiser urged the Justice Department to treat ransomware attacks on hospitals as felony murder, citing at least 47 deaths between 2016 and 2021 and likely hundreds today. She called on State, Justice and Treasury...
Scot Becomes Second Scattered Spider-Linked Crook to Plead Guilty in US
Tyler Robert Buchanan, a 24‑year‑old Scottish national linked to the Scattered Spider cybercrime group, pleaded guilty in California to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for a phishing and SIM‑swap scheme that stole at least $8 million in...
You Too Can Build a Nuclear Battery From Junk You Have Lying Around the House
YouTuber Double M Innovations demonstrated a DIY tritium‑based nuclear battery built from discarded calculator solar cells, tritium keychain vials, and tin foil. The beta‑decay of tritium excites a phosphor that powers the cells, producing a voltage in the nanowatt range and a...
Ruby Central in 'Real Financial Jeopardy' Following RubyGems Maintainer Ruckus
Ruby Central, the nonprofit steward of the Ruby language ecosystem, announced it is in "real financial jeopardy" after cutting its executive director, CFO, and PR agency. The board, newly joined by Jey Flores and Ran Craycraft, is moving to a...
Opsec Oopsie: Dutch Navy Frigate Location Outed by Mailing It a Bluetooth Tracker
Journalists tracked the Dutch air‑defence frigate HNLMS Evertsen by mailing a €5 (≈$5.40) Bluetooth tracker concealed in a postcard. The device transmitted the ship’s movements from Heraklion, Crete, to near Cyprus for about 24 hours before being discovered and disabled....
Users Complain that UK Azure Is Having Capacity Problems
Microsoft Azure users in the United Kingdom are reporting that both the UK‑South and UK‑West regions have reached full capacity, preventing the allocation of new virtual machines or Azure Kubernetes Service clusters. Companies spending several million pounds (≈$3‑5 million) annually on...
Microsoft Closes Book on Rogue Windows Server 2025 Upgrades
Microsoft finally marked the rogue Windows Server 2025 upgrade as resolved after more than a year of disruption. The unintended upgrade, which auto‑installed on many servers in 2024, was mitigated with cumulative update KB5082063. However, that same patch introduced a new...
Attention Data Hoarders: Alexa Loses Its Plex Appeal as Voice Feature Gets Canned
Plex announced that its Alexa skill will be discontinued on June 15, 2026, citing low usage. The voice‑controlled playback feature for Plex media servers will stop working on Amazon Echo devices, though the core Plex apps and web interface remain...
Cops Hand Motorola £25M No-Bid Deal to Keep 2000-Era Radios Alive
UK police have awarded a no‑competition £25 million (≈$31.8 million) extension to Motorola and Sepura to keep the legacy Airwave TETRA radios operational. The Airwave replacement, now slated for 2029, is twelve years behind schedule and £3 billion (≈$3.8 billion) over budget. The National...
Bullet Train Upgrade Brings 5G Windows and Noise-Cancelling Cabins to Japan
Japanese rail operator JR Central announced that its Shinkansen will feature premium private suites equipped with windows that embed 5G antennas and cabins fitted with NTT’s Personalized Sound Zone noise‑cancelling system. The antennas, supplied by AGC, weave microscopic wires into...
AI-Powered Mainframe Exits Are a Bubble Set to Pop: Gartner
Gartner warns that more than 70% of AI‑driven mainframe exit projects launched in 2026 will fall short of promised benefits, citing the limited ability of generative AI to automate legacy code conversion and preserve performance. The firm predicts that by...
GitHub Invokes Spirit of Phabricator with Preview of Stacked PRs
GitHub has introduced Stacked PRs, a private‑preview feature that lets developers create a series of dependent pull requests. Each PR in the stack can be reviewed and merged independently, provided its predecessors are merged first, encouraging smaller, more manageable changes....
Physicist Reckons Two-Button Calculator Can Do All Elementary Math
A post‑doctoral researcher at Jagiellonian University proposes a two‑button calculator that can perform all functions of a standard scientific calculator. The device relies on a single binary operator, eml(x, y)=exp(x) − ln(y), combined with the constant 1 to generate arithmetic, algebraic, trigonometric functions and...
Fake Linux Leader Using Slack to Con Devs Into Giving up Their Secrets
In early April, a threat actor impersonated a Linux Foundation leader on Slack and lured open‑source developers from the TODO and CNCF projects to a spoofed Google Sites page. The page mimicked a Google Workspace sign‑in flow, prompting users to...
WARNING: Oracle's AI Obsession Could Mean Higher Prices and Worse Support
Oracle is accelerating AI‑focused datacenter expansion, highlighted by a projected $300 billion five‑year deal with OpenAI. To fund the build‑out, the company has lifted its fiscal 2026 restructuring cost by $500 million to $2.1 billion and already raised $18 billion in debt, with more...
Veterans Affairs Has Lost Track of Software Licenses Amid $985M Bill
The GAO report reveals the Department of Veterans Affairs struggles to accurately track software licenses within its roughly $985 million annual software budget. The VA has identified its five biggest vendors but cannot determine if it is over‑ or under‑licensed. Preliminary...
Adobe Finally Patches PDF Pest After Months of Abuse
Adobe released a patch on April 11 for CVE‑2026‑34621, a critical zero‑day in Acrobat and Reader that allowed arbitrary code execution on Windows and macOS. The flaw was actively exploited for months, using heavily obfuscated JavaScript to profile victims and deliver...
Growing Void Between Enterprise and Frontier AI Puts Open Weights Models in the Spotlight
Open‑weights AI models such as Google’s Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5 and Microsoft’s MAI are transitioning from research curiosities to enterprise‑grade products. These models can run on a single RTX Pro 6000 GPU costing around $9,000, or even on modern CPU servers, dramatically lowering deployment...
Apple Update Looks Like Czech Mate for Locked-Out iPhone User
Apple’s latest iOS 26.4 update unintentionally disabled the háček character on the lock‑screen Czech keyboard, preventing users from entering alphanumeric passcodes that include the symbol. University student Connor Byrne, who relied on a custom passcode containing the háček, was locked...
How Salesforce and ServiceNow Are Squaring Off in the Battle for the Helpdesk
Salesforce’s newly launched Agentforce IT service, now six months old, has attracted 200 sign‑ups – less than 0.2% of its 150,000‑customer base – and the company claims it has won five customers from ServiceNow. ServiceNow still dominates the ITSM space...
Snowflake Manager Explains the 'Spider-Man' Theory of AI Agent Data Access
Snowflake says the biggest hurdle for AI agents is clean, accessible, governed data, not model quality. To address this, the company is building an interoperable stack around the Apache Iceberg open table format, including Iceberg REST and Polaris‑based governance. The...
Red Hat RHELocates Its Chinese Engineering Team to India
Red Hat has terminated its entire engineering team in China, laying off an estimated 300‑500 staff and relocating most positions to India. The move follows a memo from CTO Chris Wright outlining a new location strategy that prioritizes hiring in...
Microsoft's Copilot Strategy Is Just More User Abuse From Redmond, Says Mozilla
Mozilla has publicly condemned Microsoft for embedding its Copilot AI across Windows without explicit user consent, labeling the practice as user abuse. In response to mounting criticism, Microsoft announced it will pull Copilot from several built‑in apps such as Snipping...
Electronics Industry Says FCC's Foreign-Made Router Policy Is a Bit of a Mesh
The FCC’s new “Covered List” bans approval of any new consumer‑grade router made abroad unless the vendor commits to U.S. production. The Global Electronics Association says the rule is impractical because most routers are imported and adds a DoD/DHS clearance...
Amazon Would Rather Shareholders Did Not Look Too Closely at Carbon Footprint
Amazon’s board is urging shareholders to reject a proxy proposal that would force the company to disclose detailed carbon emissions from its rapidly expanding data center portfolio. The proposal, backed by activist investors, questions Amazon’s ability to meet its Climate...
Britain's Biggest Nuclear Site Skips Competition, Hands SAP £33M to Start ERP Switch
Sellafield Limited, the operator of the UK’s largest nuclear site, awarded a direct £33 million ($41 million) contract to SAP for Core HR SaaS licensing, bypassing competitive tendering. The move initiates the first phase of a four‑deal migration from legacy SAP ECC,...
Fewer than 3 in 10 Register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital Shake-Up
HMRC reports that only about 28% of the 780,000 sole traders and landlords required to adopt Making Tax Digital (MTD) for income tax have registered, with 219,000 sign‑ups to date. The deadline for the first quarterly filing is 7 August 2026,...
Zephyr Energy Loses £700K in Cyber Hit that Rerouted Contractor Payment
Zephyr Energy plc disclosed a cyber‑fraud incident that diverted about £700,000 (≈$890,000) from a routine contractor payment to an attacker‑controlled account. The attack, described as “highly sophisticated,” hit a U.S. subsidiary but left day‑to‑day operations intact. Zephyr promptly involved law...
UK.gov's Top Tech Jobs Pay More than Prime Minister Earns
The UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is hiring three directors‑general for its digital agenda, each earning between £200,000 and £260,000 (about $254k‑$330k), which exceeds the prime minister’s £170,000 salary (~$216k). The roles cover digital products, digital transformation, and...
UK to Spend £15M on AI-Powered Crime Mapping in Knife Violence Crackdown
The UK government is committing £15 million (about $19 million) over the next three years to develop an AI‑driven crime‑mapping platform for England and Wales. The tool divides the region into 1.46 million hexagons, revealing that virtually all knife‑related incidents from April 2024‑March 2025 occurred...
Microsoft Software Resale Appeal Catches Eye of £3.5B Class Action
Microsoft will appeal a UK Competition Appeal Tribunal ruling that resale of perpetual software licences is legal, with hearings set for 28‑29 April. The appeal is closely watched by a £3.5 billion (≈$4.4 billion) class action involving an estimated 2.3‑2.7 million UK customers. ValueLicensing,...
Cryptographers Place $5,000 Bet Whether Quantum Will Matter
Two leading cryptographers, Filippo Valsorda and Matthew Green, are arranging a $5,000 wager to test whether post‑quantum cryptography (ML‑KEM‑768) or classic elliptic‑curve cryptography (X25519) will be broken first, either by classical or quantum attacks. The bet follows Google’s claim that...
Western Union Zaps VMware and Moves to Nutanix
Western Union has begun moving 900 to 1,200 applications from VMware to Nutanix, targeting a 3,900‑core server fleet that supports operations in over 200 countries. The shift follows friction with Broadcom’s post‑acquisition licensing model for VMware, which Western Union deemed...
Nutanix Thinks some Azure Cloud Desktops Belong On-Prem to Make Them Usable
Nutanix announced a hybrid offering that runs Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) on‑premises, promising lower latency for demanding users. The company positions the solution as a game‑changer for enterprises that find Azure Local unsuitable. Nutanix also unveiled support for Cisco’s...
Cloudflare, GoDaddy Team up to Curb AI Bot Brigades
Cloudflare and GoDaddy announced a partnership to embed Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control utility into GoDaddy's hosting platform, giving site owners granular control over AI crawlers. The tool enables owners to block, allow, or even charge AI agents for access to...
Intel Gets Trapped in Elon’s Reality Distortion Field as It Joins in Megafab Delusions
Intel announced it is joining Elon Musk’s ambitious Terafab project, a proposed megafab intended to produce enough chips to power orbital data‑center AI and future Tesla hardware. The company says it will help "refactor silicon fab technology," but offered no...
Nutanix Brings Its K8s to Bare Metal because Hardware Matters Again
Nutanix announced an expanded hardware compatibility list and the launch of NKP Metal, a bare‑metal version of its Kubernetes Platform. The move addresses current memory shortages and server supply‑chain constraints while courting organizations moving away from VMware. By supporting a wider...
Researchers Didn’t Want to Glamorize Cybercrims. So They Roasted Them
Researchers at Trellix launched the Dark Web Roast, a meme‑filled blog that mocks cybercrime groups to counteract industry glamorization. The series lampoons a ransomware crew’s content‑calendar extortion tactics, an exploit developer pricing a Cisco RCE bug at $70,000, and undervalued...