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Tech

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Apple Watch Ultra 3 Drops to $699.99 Ahead of Prime Day

Early Prime Day deals continue to trickle in as Amazon this week has brought back the best price of the year so far on the Apple Watch Ultra 3, taking $99 off the Black Titanium model with the Black Ocean Band. It's been nearly two months since we last tracked notable discounts on the Apple Watch Ultra 3, and right now only one model is on sale at $99 off.

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.

There are discounts on a wide array of different Ultra 3 models, but they're only hitting around $50 off as of writing. For the Black Ocean Band model, Amazon provides an estimated delivery date before the end of the week, so it will arrive before Father's Day.

$99 OFFApple Watch Ultra 3 for $699.99

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.

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, "Apple Watch Ultra 3 Drops to $699.99 Ahead of Prime Day" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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⚡ Weekly Recap: Chrome 0-Day, UniFi Exploits, macOS Stealers, VPN Flaw and More

Stuff broke again. Not in a movie way. An old tool was left exposed. An abandoned package was abused. A deprecated feature was still running in prod. This week is the same lesson in a new form: phishing kits are easier to rent, AI names are useful bait, old login paths still fail, and forgotten software keeps becoming someone else's entry point. Scroll through the full Monday CybersecurityView the full article
Hacker News

Leaker Warns iPhone 18 Pro New Colors May Face Same Durability Issues

A known Weibo leaker has reiterated that the iPhone 18 Pro will retain its aluminum alloy build, while issuing a specific warning that the new color options may be susceptible to paint peeling.


In a new Weibo post, the leaker "Fixed Focus Digital" said the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ "will still feature an aluminum alloy build" and noted that heat dissipation is "indeed excellent." The leaker then added a pointed caveat: anyone unfamiliar with the durability problems that plagued the iPhone 17 Pro should "be careful about potential paint-peeling issues with the new color options."

Fixed Focus Digital previously pointed out that surface chipping on the ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ is a common complaint, and that users who seek recourse from Apple are often told they cannot claim it, with the company classifying the issue as an inherent characteristic of the aluminum alloy material and normal wear and tear. The leaker added at the time that the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ would "continue to utilize this same design approach" despite its weaknesses.

The ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ moved away from the titanium frames Apple used in its Pro lineup for the previous two years, adopting an anodized aluminum unibody design. Surface durability concerns surfaced almost immediately after launch. Reports suggested that Dark Blue and Cosmic Orange models appeared to scratch more easily than other finishes, with MacRumors forum users describing visible marks on in-store display units within days of availability.

A scratch test by YouTuber JerryRigEverything added some nuance, finding that most of the anodized shell holds up well against everyday items like keys and coins, but pinpointing the camera plateau as a clear weak point where the raised, unchamfered edges chip and scratch easily.

A separate issue emerged the following month, when a number of Cosmic Orange ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ owners reported color shift, with the aluminum frame and camera plateau drifting toward a rose-gold or pink hue and in some cases prompting device replacements by Apple Support.

Rumors point to four color options for the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ models: Dark Cherry, Light Blue, Dark Gray, and Silver. Dark Cherry is expected to serve as the signature new color, described as a deep, wine-like red that is considerably more muted than last year's Cosmic Orange. The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ is not expected to offer a black option for the second consecutive year, but the rumored gray option could come very close.

The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max are expected to be announced in September 2026, alongside the first foldable iPhone.Related Roundup: iPhone 18 ProTag: Fixed Focus Digital
This article, "Leaker Warns iPhone 18 Pro New Colors May Face Same Durability Issues" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Langflow RCE under active attack months after a patch was shipped

Enterprises using the open-source AI orchestration platform Langflow are being urged to patch a high-severity path traversal flaw amid active exploitation, despite a fix having been available for more than two months.
The bug, which stems from improper handling of filenames in Langflow’s file upload functionality, can allow attackers to write files to arbitrary locations within the affected system and, under certain conditions, can be used to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on affected servers.
An added complexity is that Langflow is shipping with an auto-login behavior, allowing unauthenticated users with a valid session to reach the vulnerable endpoint without credentials.
“Langflow is a popular open-source tool for building AI applications,” said Jim Sherlock, VP of cybersecurity R&D at ProCircular. “Because the platform ships with login disabled by default, exploitation takes a single request with no credentials, resulting in full takeover of the machine.”
Cloud security non-profit, Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), said approximately 7,000 Langflow instances are exposed to the internet.
Path traversal issue allowing full system takeover
Langflow is a popular low-code platform for building AI agents, RAG pipelines, and MCP-based workflows through a drag-and-drop interface. That popularity is adding to the concerns over CVE-2026-5027, a path traversal vulnerability assigned an 8.8 CVSS rating.
According to the CVE record, the vulnerability affects the POST /api/v2/files endpoint. The endpoint fails to properly validate the “filename” parameter supplied through the “multipart form data,” allowing attackers to include path traversal sequences such as “../” and write files outside the intended upload directory, onto an attacker-controlled location.
>Using a GitHub POC exploit, EQST Lab demonstrated how the flaw can be exploited to place attacker-controlled files in arbitrary filesystem locations. They said that in environments where auto-login is enabled, the arbitrary file write can be escalated into remote code execution.
“Arbitrary file write vulnerabilities are often more severe than standard unrestricted upload issues because the attacker controls not only the file contents, but also the destination path,” EQST researchers said in the POC note. “Depending on the runtime privileges of the Langflow process, this may enable overwrite of application files, modification of startup or scheduled task files, persistence through shell initialization or key files, and escalation from arbitrary file write to remote code execution.”
The vulnerability affects Langflow versions up to 1.8.4, while researchers have indicated that the issue was addressed in version 1.9.0, released April 15, coming 73 days after the flaw was first disclosed to the vendor. The patch logic has been applied to all subsequent releases, including the current version 1.10.0.
Langflow did not immediately respond to CSO’s request for comments.
AI orchestration platforms continue to attract attackers
The disclosure arrives amid growing attacker interest in AI infrastructure. VulnCheck confirmed that CVE-2026-5027 is already being exploited, with observed activity including attempts to drop files onto vulnerable systems. Public exploit code has further lowered the barrier for opportunistic attackers.

Exploitation of CVE-2026-5027 has been linked to the Iranian state-sponsored group known as MuddyWater.
Sherlock said many organizations have unknowingly expanded their attack surface through rapidly deployed AI tooling. “Through 2025, teams everywhere stood up Langflow, Flowise, n8n, Dify, and similar low-code tools to prototype agents and LLM workflows,” he added. “These deployments rarely got the hardening a production web app would. They run with default authentication settings and sit on public IPs because someone needed to demo a flow to a stakeholder, and nobody owns patching them.”
Earlier this year, threat actors exploited another critical Langflow RCE shortly after its disclosure. More recently, researchers uncovered a severe bug affecting Flowise’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation that allowed RCE through crafted configurations.
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CSOonline

Apple Adds Personalized Recommendations and New Marketing Tools to the App Store

Apple last week announced a series of new App Store features, including personalized app recommendations and expanded tools for developers to market their apps.


The most visible change for users is Personalized Collections, a new discovery feature that surfaces app and game recommendations tailored to individual interests and behavior. Alongside each recommendation, new "App Notes" explain why a specific app is being surfaced.

The collections can appear across the Apps, Games, and Search tabs, and will evolve over time as users' download and usage patterns change. Apple says the feature is now available in English in the U.S., with additional languages and regions to follow.

For developers, Apple introduces Creative Assets, rich images and videos that can appear in a product page header and search results, going beyond standard screenshots and app preview clips. These assets can be used to highlight seasonal content, new features, or brand identity, and are compatible with custom product pages and Apple's existing product page optimization testing tools.

A new Asset Library in ‌App Store‌ Connect gives developers a single place to manage all creative materials, with the ability to reuse assets across in-app events and promotions without re-uploading them. Developers can also submit assets for App Review approval independently of a full app update, which is useful for time-sensitive campaigns.

Mac App Store apps and games no longer require Intel support, allowing developers to ship Apple silicon-only binaries. Apple is also allowing developers to group multiple In-App Purchases into a single App Review submission, streamlining the process.

Apple also announced that the age rating questionnaire in ‌App Store‌ Connect will be updated in July to allow developers to indicate whether their app includes social media capabilities such as interacting with user-generated content through a social feed. This ties into new Time Allowances features coming in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, which give parents more granular controls over how much time children spend in apps across categories including Entertainment, Games, and Social Media.Tag: App Store
This article, "Apple Adds Personalized Recommendations and New Marketing Tools to the App Store" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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DevOps Roles Explained: A Guide to Developer, Ops, SRE, and Security Teams

Introduction
If you are just starting your journey in the world of technology, you have likely heard the term DevOps tossed around in almost every job description. It is a common point of confusion for beginners, students, and even experienced professionals. Many people search for “what is a DevOps engineer,” thinking it is a single job title that requires knowing everything under the sun.
The truth is that DevOps is not one single role. Instead, it is a cultural and professional approach to building software. It involves a diverse group of talented individuals—developers, operations engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and security professionals—all working together toward the same goal: delivering software that is fast, reliable, and secure.
If you are looking to build a career in this field, DevOpsSchool provides excellent resources and roadmaps to help you navigate these different paths. Understanding how these roles overlap and support each other is the first step toward becoming a successful engineer. Think of it like a movie production; you have directors, camera operators, editors, and sound engineers. They all have unique tasks, but without them coordinating perfectly, you would never see a finished film on the big screen. In this guide, we will break down exactly how these professionals interact in the modern workplace.
What Are DevOps Roles?
At its simplest, DevOps roles are a collection of specialized positions that focus on bridging the gap between writing code and keeping that code running smoothly in the real world.
Think of it like a professional kitchen. The developers are the chefs who create the recipes and prepare the dishes. The operations engineers are the ones who manage the kitchen infrastructure, ensuring the ovens work and the supplies are stocked. The SREs are like the quality control managers who make sure every plate sent out meets a high standard of consistency, and the security team ensures the food is safe for everyone. When these roles function as one unit, the service is seamless.
Why DevOps Is a Team Effort
DevOps is not about one person doing everything. It is about shared responsibility. In a traditional setup, developers would “throw code over the wall” to operations, and if something broke, they would blame each other.
In a modern DevOps team, this wall is removed. Everyone shares the goal of keeping the application healthy. If a feature fails to deploy, the developer and the operations engineer work together to fix it because the success of the software is a team effort. This results in faster releases, fewer bugs, and a more stable experience for the end user.
Understanding the Main DevOps Roles
RolePrimary FocusDeveloperWriting, testing, and building the application features.Operations EngineerManaging the servers, cloud platforms, and infrastructure.Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)Ensuring system uptime, performance, and automation.Security EngineerProtecting the code and infrastructure from vulnerabilities. Developer Role in DevOps
Developers are the creators. Their main focus is turning business requirements into functional software. In a DevOps environment, developers do more than just write code; they also ensure their code is “deployable.”
Key Responsibilities: Writing clean code, running unit tests, and configuring deployment pipelines. Tools: Git (for version control), Jenkins (for automation), and Docker (for containerizing their apps). Workplace Example: A developer finishes writing a new feature. Instead of just sending it to the team, they use a tool like Git to submit their code, which automatically triggers a test sequence. If the test passes, the code is ready for the operations team to deploy. Operations Engineer Role in DevOps
Operations engineers, often called SysAdmins or Cloud Engineers, are the keepers of the environment. They ensure the platform where the application lives is healthy, scalable, and responsive.
Key Responsibilities: Managing cloud infrastructure, setting up monitoring alerts, and handling server updates. Tools: Linux (the foundation of most servers), Kubernetes (for managing containers), and Terraform (for infrastructure automation). Workplace Example: An operations engineer uses Terraform to spin up new servers when traffic to the website spikes, ensuring the application stays online for every user. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Role
SREs are essentially software engineers who look at operations problems from a code-based perspective. They love automation and hate repetitive manual tasks.
Key Responsibilities: Reducing manual toil, managing incidents, and setting SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Tools: Prometheus and Grafana (for monitoring), PagerDuty (for incident alerts). Workplace Example: If a system crashes, the SRE doesn’t just reboot the server. They investigate the root cause, write a script to fix it automatically in the future, and document the process to improve overall system reliability. Security Role in DevOps (DevSecOps)
Security is no longer a final check at the end of a project. It is integrated into every stage of development. Security engineers help teams build “secure by design” software.
Key Responsibilities: Scanning for vulnerabilities, managing access controls, and ensuring compliance. Tools: SonarQube (for code quality), Snyk (for dependency scanning), and Trivy (for container security). Workplace Example: A security engineer sets up automated checks that scan the developer’s code for security flaws every time they save their work, catching potential hacks before the code ever reaches the production server. How These Roles Work Together
Imagine a new mobile banking feature being released:
Developer: Writes the code and pushes it to a shared repository. Security Engineer: The automated security tool they configured scans the code for weak points. Operations Engineer: Provides the pre-configured environment (the “home” for the code) using automation scripts. SRE: Watches the release in real-time, monitoring performance metrics to ensure the system handles the user traffic without lagging. Because these teams communicate constantly, the software is released faster and is much safer than in a siloed environment.
DevOps Role Comparison Table
RolePrimary SkillsKey ToolsGoalDeveloperCoding, DebuggingGit, Java/PythonFeature DeliveryOpsNetworking, LinuxKubernetes, TerraformPlatform StabilitySREAutomation, SystemsPrometheus, GoSystem ReliabilitySecurityCompliance, ScanningSonarQube, SnykRisk Mitigation Common Misunderstandings About DevOps Roles
DevOps is a Job Title: While companies hire for “DevOps Engineers,” DevOps is primarily a philosophy of collaboration, not just a label for one person. SRE and DevOps are Identical: SRE is a specific way of implementing DevOps principles. Think of DevOps as the strategy and SRE as the tactical execution. Security is a Separate Island: Security is everyone’s responsibility. It is built into the workflow, not added at the end. Skills Needed for Different DevOps Careers
For Developers: Mastery of version control (Git), understanding API development, and basic knowledge of containers. For Operations: Deep Linux proficiency, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform). For SREs: Strong programming skills, understanding of system architecture, and incident management experience. For Security: Knowledge of network security, vulnerability assessment, and compliance standards. Real-World Example: Team Without Role Clarity
In a disorganized team, a developer writes a feature, but it fails in production because the operations environment was different from the developer’s local machine. The operations team blames the code; the developer blames the server. The SRE is stuck manually restarting servers at 2:00 AM because nobody implemented automated monitoring. This leads to burnout, slow releases, and unhappy customers.
Real-World Example: Team With Strong DevOps Collaboration
In a collaborative team, the developer and operations engineer use the same automated environment configurations. When a minor issue occurs, the SRE’s automated monitoring alerts the team before users even notice. The security tools catch a potential flaw during development, saving the company from a costly data breach. The release goes smoothly, and the team maintains a healthy work-life balance.
Role of DevOpsSchool in Learning DevOps Career Paths
If you find yourself wondering how to gain these skills, DevOpsSchool is a great place to start. They offer structured pathways that break down complex technologies into manageable learning modules. By focusing on hands-on tools like CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and automation, you can move from a beginner level to a professional role with a clear roadmap.
Career Opportunities in DevOps
DevOps Engineer: Focuses on bridging the gap between Dev and Ops. SRE Engineer: Focuses on the scale and stability of large systems. Cloud Engineer: Focuses specifically on managing cloud resources. Platform Engineer: Builds internal tools that make life easier for other developers. Security Engineer: Focuses on keeping systems hardened against threats. Automation Engineer: Focuses on writing scripts to eliminate manual tasks. Industries Hiring DevOps Professionals
SaaS Companies: High-frequency updates require strong DevOps teams. Banking & Finance: Security and reliability are non-negotiable here. Healthcare: Compliance and uptime are critical for patient safety. E-Commerce: Scalability is key for handling millions of shoppers. Telecom: Managing massive network infrastructure requires heavy automation. Enterprise IT: Traditional companies are moving to the cloud and need DevOps transformation. Future of DevOps Roles
The future of DevOps is moving toward Platform Engineering, where teams build internal platforms to make development even more self-service. We are also seeing a massive increase in AI-assisted operations, where machine learning helps identify and fix issues before they become outages. Security-first DevOps will continue to grow as cyber threats become more sophisticated.
FAQs
Is DevOps one job role? No, it is a cultural movement involving many different roles. What is the difference between DevOps and SRE? DevOps is the philosophy; SRE is a specific way to apply that philosophy focused on reliability. Do developers need DevOps skills? Yes, understanding how their code runs in production makes them much more effective. Is security part of DevOps? Absolutely, through the concept of DevSecOps. Which role is best for beginners? Typically, a developer or system administrator role is the best foundation. Are Linux skills important? Linux is the backbone of the internet; it is essential for almost all DevOps roles. Can beginners become SREs? It usually requires some experience in development or operations first, but it is a great long-term goal. Which DevOps role pays more? Salaries vary based on experience, but SRE and Cloud Architecture roles are often highly compensated. Do I need to know coding for all these roles? Yes, automation is at the heart of all DevOps-related careers. What is a CI/CD pipeline? It is an automated process that takes code from a developer’s computer to the production environment. Is cloud computing required? Almost all modern DevOps work happens in the cloud. Can I learn DevOps without a degree? Yes, hands-on experience and certifications are often more valued than formal degrees. How do I start my DevOps career? Focus on learning Git, Linux, and a cloud provider like AWS. Is DevOps only for big companies? No, even startups benefit from DevOps practices to move fast. Does DevOpsSchool offer certifications? Yes, they provide various training programs for professional growth. Final Thoughts
DevOps is ultimately about people. The most successful teams are the ones where developers, operations, SREs, and security professionals talk to each other daily. By understanding the responsibilities of each role, you can find the path that best fits your interests and strengths. Focus on learning the fundamentals, practice your skills on real projects, and keep an open mind toward continuous learning. Success in this field comes from consistent effort and a commitment to working together.
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Attackers can turn AI agent guardrails into denial-of-service weapons

Attackers can turn AI agent guardrails into denial-of-service weapons, according to new research that found a single poisoned document can dramatically slow shared AI agent workflows by trapping reasoning-based safety systems in extended thinking loops.
“Reasoning-based guardrails introduce a new attack surface where security mechanisms themselves become the target,” the researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and collaborators wrote in the paper.
They added that “a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system,” describing a reasoning-extension denial-of-service (DoS) attack that targets the security layer rather than the underlying AI model.
The researchers tested the technique against four AI agent frameworks — LangGraph, BrowserGym, OpenHands, and OSWorld — and found processing times increased across deployments.
LangGraph recorded the biggest slowdown at 148x, followed by BrowserGym at 131x, OpenHands at 36.3x, and OSWorld at 18x, according to the paper.
Attack exploits reasoning rather than bypassing security
Unlike prompt injection and jailbreak attacks that seek to manipulate model outputs or circumvent safety controls, the new technique targets the reasoning process used by AI agent guardrails, the researchers wrote in the paper.
“Unlike traditional LLM attacks that primarily compromise integrity, reasoning-extension DoS targets availability,” the researchers wrote, arguing that AI security discussions have focused largely on preventing unsafe outputs while overlooking resource exhaustion.
The researchers also found that stronger AI safety checks may come at the cost of slower performance.
“The stronger the guardrail reasons, the longer it reasons,” the researchers wrote, explaining that more sophisticated reasoning can inadvertently increase the time and resources required to process malicious inputs.
The attack also worked across eight different LLM families. According to the paper, prompts designed for one open-source model were also effective against other models, suggesting attackers would not need detailed knowledge of a specific proprietary system
OpenAI and Anthropic, whose reasoning-based guardrails are referenced in the paper as examples of LLM-powered security mechanisms, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Shared AI governance creates concentration risk
“The more important takeaway is not necessarily whether a specific ‘guardrail DoS’ technique proves practical at scale, but that AI governance infrastructure is increasingly becoming critical infrastructure,” said Sakshi Grover, senior research manager for cybersecurity services at IDC Asia/Pacific.
“As agentic AI deployments mature, organizations will need to think about resilience, scalability, and fault tolerance for AI control planes in the same way they already do for identity services, API gateways, and other business-critical platforms,” she said.
Grover said centralized AI governance also introduces concentration risk.
“The consolidation dynamic is real — organizations are rationalizing AI governance by routing multiple agents through shared safety infrastructure, which creates concentration risk,” she said. “A successful guardrail DoS doesn’t need to breach anything; it just needs to make the system unusable at a critical moment.”
For business-critical workflows such as automated claims processing, AI-assisted incident response and real-time fraud detection, even temporary latency or resource exhaustion could have material consequences, she added.
Existing mitigations offer only partial protection
The researchers found conventional prompt injection filters remained susceptible to the proposed attack, while strict token limits simply shifted deployments between fail-open and fail-closed behavior. Smaller reasoning budgets reduced latency but also weakened security decisions, creating a tradeoff between availability and protection.
The study also found that larger reasoning models often spent more time following the injected reasoning structure, amplifying rather than mitigating the attack.
The findings also reinforce the need for enterprises to move beyond model-level security and focus on governance of autonomous AI systems, analysts said.
Through 2029, more than 50% of successful cybersecurity attacks against AI agents will exploit access control issues using direct or indirect prompt injection as an attack vector, while through 2028 at least 80% of unauthorized AI agent transactions will result from internal policy violations or misguided AI behavior rather than malicious attacks, said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal analyst at Gartner.
“The transition to autonomous multiagent systems introduces new risks, such as behavioral drift and destructive actions,” Kaushik said, adding that organizations should implement AI agent security lifecycle management that continuously validates agent integrity from deployment through retirement.
Current fragmented tools cannot effectively govern complex multi-agent systems, she said, requiring unified discovery, identity, and guardian capabilities to monitor and block rogue behaviors at scale.
AI governance moves to the forefront
Grover said that organizations should begin preparing now by decoupling guardrail infrastructure from agent compute, implementing tiered or asynchronous guardrail checks where possible, monitoring for anomalous reasoning depth, and explicitly red-teaming AI safety stacks for availability failures rather than focusing exclusively on harmful outputs.
“Architecture choices are becoming as consequential as model safety choices,” Grover said. “The organizations that treat agentic AI infrastructure with the same rigor they apply to critical application infrastructure will be better positioned. The ones that don’t will find out the hard way.”
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CSOonline

The Onboarding Password Mistake That Creates Unnecessary Risk

Employee onboarding is a busy time for IT teams. New starters need devices, accounts, access permissions, and passwords, all delivered within a tight timeframe. That usually means sharing a temporary "first-day" password so employees can access systems for the first time. The issue is that these passwords don't always stay temporary. They may be sent over email or SMS, reused across accounts,View the full article
Hacker News

These Three Unannounced iOS 27 Features Are Still Coming

Apple developed more for iOS 27 than it revealed at WWDC last week, with three features already present in internal builds being deliberately withheld from the public announcement, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports.


Writing in the latest edition of his "Power On" newsletter, Gurman says all three missing features are active in internal versions of Apple's operating systems on employee devices today, and each is expected to surface publicly at a later date.

Modular Watch Face

A new Modular watch face for Apple Watch was among the items Gurman had flagged as expected at WWDC but did not appear. Gurman's earlier claim that watchOS 27 would introduce new faces centered on a simplified take on the Modular Ultra design currently exclusive to the Apple Watch Ultra.

Gurman now expects the new face to debut alongside new Apple Watch models this fall.

Customizable Camera App

A customizable Camera app for the iPhone, first reported by Gurman in May, also failed to appear at WWDC. The feature would let users rearrange camera controls as widgets along the top of the interface, choosing from options like flash, exposure, timer, depth of field, photo styles, and resolution.

Gurman believes Apple is holding it back specifically for the iPhone 18 Pro, which is expected to bring the most significant camera hardware upgrade in several years.

Siri Extensions

The most notable omission is Extensions, a framework that would allow third-party AI chatbots beyond ChatGPT to integrate with Siri, Apple Intelligence, and features like Writing Tools and Image Playground. Gurman says underlying support for Extensions is already present and visible in the first ‌iOS 27‌ developer beta, with both a dedicated settings panel and an App Store section built and waiting to be switched on.

Apple has reportedly already held discussions with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google about the framework, including details about an entitlement those companies would need to apply for. Gurman says he has "no doubt" the feature will arrive eventually.

As for why the Extensions feature was kept out of the WWDC, Gurman offers four theories. Firstly, demonstrating strong AI interoperability could weaken Apple's ongoing argument against EU regulators. Secondly, announcing robust third-party chatbot support could have overshadowed Apple's own Siri overhaul. Thirdly, the threat of litigation from OpenAI may have persuaded Apple to avoid publicly stripping ChatGPT of its exclusive status at its developer conference. Finally, adding a range of external AI options would have further complicated Apple's messaging at a time when it already needed to explain its use of Google's AI models in ‌Siri‌ AI.

Anyone running the first ‌iOS 27‌ or macOS Golden Gate betas can already see a chatbot picker allowing users to switch between ‌Siri‌ and ChatGPT; Gurman says that list is expected to grow via the new developer framework and ‌App Store‌ section. The feature has reportedly been in active use inside Apple for months.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tags: Bloomberg, Mark Gurman, Siri AI
This article, "These Three Unannounced iOS 27 Features Are Still Coming" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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152 Chrome Wallpaper Extensions with 105K Installs Linked to Adware and Fake Traffic

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a network of 152 Google Chrome extensions that act as new tab live wallpaper add-ons to distribute a potentially unwanted program (PUP) family. The cluster spans 38 separate Chrome Web Store publisher accounts and three brand backends: tabplugins[.]com, yowgames[.]com, and chromewallpaper[.]com. They have been collectively installed 105,000 times. TheView the full article
Hacker News

Apple Could Build an OpenClaw Competitor Eventually

Apple may eventually build a direct competitor to OpenClaw, an agentic AI system capable of autonomously operating software on behalf of the user, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes.


Writing in his Power On newsletter, Gurman says he expects Apple to develop a system that could fully operate iPhone, iPad, and Mac software on the user's behalf. The prediction comes on the back of comments made by Apple's Siri engineering chief, Mike Rockwell, following last week's WWDC keynote.

Rockwell appeared to leave the door open for ‌Siri‌ to expand beyond its current capabilities, describing the new engine underpinning the assistant as "a completely modern architecture" built with extensibility in mind:



Apple's SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, acknowledged the broader category but was measured in his framing of it, describing the space as experimental and saying that finding the right user experience remains the priority, while stopping short of ruling out Apple's eventual participation.

Apple's upcoming ‌Siri‌ implementation is newly rebuilt on a large language model foundation, and remains a request-based system. Full computer-use agentic functionality of the kind offered by OpenClaw and similar tools from Google and Anthropic would represent a significant expansion beyond what Apple announced last week.Tags: Bloomberg, Mark Gurman, Siri AI
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Governing the ghost workforce

Every enterprise security team is fighting a workforce problem they cannot see on any org chart.
Bots, service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, machine certificates — non-human identities now outnumber human ones in most large organisations, often by a factor of ten to one. They authenticate constantly, operate across every environment, and when forgotten, they do not retire gracefully. They linger, accumulate privilege, and wait. Security practitioners have taken to calling them ghost identities — and the name fits.
The security industry has had plenty of warnings. It just has not acted on it.
Cast your mind back to SolarWinds story. The attackers did not smash through anything. They slipped in, found machine identities with significant access, and used them the way they were designed to be used — quietly, legitimately, invisibly. Eighteen thousand organisations. Months undetected. The credentials were not stolen in the traditional sense. They were just there, unmonitored, doing what attackers needed them to do.
Uber, 2022. Simpler anatomy. A service account nobody owned. Credentials that had not been rotated in who knows how long. Found in a network share by an attacker who was already looking. That one ghost identity opened a direct path to the PAM system — and from there, everything else followed. Cloud environments. Source code. Internal tools. One forgotten credential. That was the price of admission.
Okta, 2023. Different problem, harder to solve. The credentials that mattered were not even on Okta’s own infrastructure. They lived with a third-party support vendor. Technically, someone else’s environment. But they carried access rights into Okta’s systems, and when that vendor was compromised, the pathway was compromised too.
Three incidents. Three different entry points. One thing in common — an identity that nobody was watching, carrying access nobody had recently justified, sitting exactly where an attacker needed it to be.
Calling this a security problem is not wrong. It just does not cover what is coming next.
The scheduled crisis
In 2026, the consequences of unmanaged non-human identities take a new form. Not a breach. A calendar event.
Machine identity certificates have finite lifespans. For much of the past decade, organisations issued them with validity windows of three to five years. Between 2020 and 2022, enterprises expanded their digital infrastructure at extraordinary speed — cloud migrations compressed into months, automation pipelines stood up under pressure, and new services connecting to other services with governance as an afterthought.
Those certificates are expiring now. Not in ones and twos. In volume.
The cascading failure scenario is not complicated. A certificate expires unnoticed. The service it supports drops. Dependent applications that are authenticated through that service start failing. Monitoring tools running on the same infrastructure miss the alert. The incident response team works on the problem without a complete picture of what connects to what. Hours pass. Sometimes a full day. What started as an overlooked credential with an expiry date becomes an outage with a revenue figure attached and a regulator taking notes.
This has happened before on a smaller scale — a single expired certificate took Microsoft Teams offline for millions of users in 2020. What 2026 presents is the same failure mode, replicated across organisations that grew fast and governed poorly, hitting simultaneously.
Certificate expiration is habitually treated as an IT operations issue. That framing does not survive contact with an outage that takes customer-facing services down for eighteen hours.
Ashish Mishra
The structural gap
The root cause is not negligence. It is architecture.
The tools organisations rely on to manage identity — role-based access controls, privileged access management platforms, access certification campaigns — were built for people. They assume an identity has an owner, a manager, and a review cycle. Non-human identities do not fit that model. They get created to solve an immediate problem, granted broad access to make the thing work, and left running long after the project moves on.
Over-provisioning compounds the risk. Every unreviewed service account is a potential pivot point. Every dormant API key with write access is an open door. For ghost identities carrying legacy admin rights — and there are more of them than most organisations want to admit — the blast radius of a compromise is often organisation-wide.
What good looks like
The answer is not a tool. Every vendor in this space will tell you otherwise. They are wrong about the order of operations.
Governance comes first. Tooling supports it. And governance starts with a question most organisations cannot currently answer: what non-human identities are we running?
That question sounds simple. It is not. NHIs do not get created centrally. They get created by developers solving problems, by platform teams standing up services, by vendors connecting their products to yours. Each decision made sense at the time. None of them got logged somewhere useful. The result, in most large enterprises, is an estate that nobody has a complete map of — and that no tool can govern until someone builds one.
So, start there. Not with a platform evaluation. Not with a policy document. With a discovery sprint. Four to six weeks, focused on your highest-risk environments. Cloud first. CI/CD pipelines. Third-party integrations. An imperfect inventory is still infinitely more useful than operating blind.
While that work is running, pull your certificate expiration data. Today, not next quarter. Sort by expiry date. Filter for anything lapsing in the next eighteen months. Put a named owner against every entry — and where no owner can be identified, treat the certificate as a ghost identity. Escalate it accordingly. This one action directly addresses the 2026 expiration risk before it becomes an outage.
Last, run a privilege audit on your highest-sensitivity service accounts. Any NHI with admin rights that has not been reviewed in the past twelve months should be treated as over-privileged until the evidence says otherwise. Assume excess. Prove necessity.
None of this needs a new budget line. It needs someone to decide it is worth doing before the alternative decides for them.
The broader problem
One organisation fixing its NHI estate does not fix the problem. It just means one organisation is less exposed than the rest.
The market around machine identity is still finding its feet. Ask three vendors to define the scope of NHI governance, and you will get three different answers. Lifecycle standards that should exist do not. The frameworks security teams rely on — NIST, ISO 27001 — address least privilege as a concept but stop well short of telling anyone what to do with fifty thousand unmanaged service accounts spread across a hybrid cloud environment.
What is missing is not ambition. It is specificity. Agreed taxonomy. Shared lifecycle standards. Regulatory guidance that puts NHI governance on the same level as every other identity obligation — not buried in a footnote, not implied by a principle, but stated plainly and enforced accordingly.
That conversation is happening. Standards bodies are moving. Regulators are paying closer attention. But the pace is measured in years, and the certificate expiration wave is measured in months.
The expiry dates do not wait for the industry to catch up.
The deadline is built in
The ghost workforce does not announce itself. It does not resign or ask for a performance review. It runs until something stops it — a breach, an expiration, or a security team that finally decided to take inventory.
In 2026, for organisations that have not mapped and governed their NHI estate, something is going to stop it. The only variable is whether that something is a deliberate programme or an unplanned outage.
The runway is very thin.
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Popular WordPress Plugin Scripts Tampered to Plant Hidden Backdoors on Sites

An attacker tampered with trusted JavaScript files used by WordPress sites running PushEngage, OptinMonster, and TrustPulse, turning those files into a way to break into the sites. When a site administrator was logged in as the file loaded, the code created an admin account under the attacker's control and installed a hidden plugin that opened a way back in. Ordinary visitors did not trigger itView the full article
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UK to Ban Social Media for Under-16s Starting in 2027

The British government will introduce a ban on social media access for all users under 16 years of age, set to take effect in 2027. UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced the plans on Monday, calling the move "the right step for Britain" and the best way to keep children safe online.

The plan goes further than a similar ban introduced in Australia. It will cover major platforms Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. An exhaustive list has not yet been released, but Starmer said the rules will apply to services "whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material."

Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal are not covered by the ban, and most social media platforms already require children to be over 13 to create an account and use their services.

Platforms will also be required to stop under-16s from livestreaming, including on gaming services, and to block functions that let strangers contact children. Those restrictions will be on by default for under-17s to avoid what the government called "a cliff-edge at 16."

Meanwhile, "romantic companion" chatbots designed to simulate sexual relationships will have to enforce a minimum age of 18, and AI chatbots in general must restrict "intimate functionalities" for under-18s.
Starmer said he plans to pass legislation before Christmas, ahead of a spring 2027 rollout. The government said on Sunday that responses to its "Growing Up in the Online World" consultation showed that 90 percent of parents supported setting a minimum age of 16 for access to the apps.Tag: United Kingdom
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Sovereign cloud won’t fix your AI risk. Identity governance will

Your board is asking. Your legal team is asking. Your auditors will be asking: Should AI workloads move to sovereign cloud, or stay on AWS, Azure or GCP? European enterprises have already run this experiment — under real regulatory pressure, with real money and real consequences. Many discovered that sovereign cloud alone didn’t deliver the control they expected. The real control point turned out to be somewhere else entirely.
Europe ran this experiment first, under regulatory pressure US enterprises are only starting to feel. With DORA fully in force since January 2025, NIS2 enforcement underway across EU member states and the EU AI Act’s high-risk system provisions taking effect in August 2026, European enterprises — particularly in financial services, critical infrastructure and manufacturing — have spent two years migrating workloads, renegotiating contracts and writing sovereign cloud into board-level risk frameworks. The hyperscalers responded. AWS launched its European Sovereign Cloud in January 2026. Microsoft and Google followed with their own sovereignty offerings. The market arrived.
US enterprises are not far behind. The SEC’s cybersecurity disclosure rules, CISA’s AI security guidance, proposed state-level AI regulations and growing board-level scrutiny of AI governance are creating comparable pressures on this side of the Atlantic. If your organization runs AI workloads on behalf of EU clients, operates EU subsidiaries or simply faces the question of where sensitive AI training data and model outputs should live — you are already in this conversation. The European experience is your preview.
What has not arrived is clarity on what you actually get — and what you do not. At the European Identity and Cloud Conference in Berlin this May, the mood among practitioners had shifted measurably from previous years. The cheering for the sovereign cloud concept was over. What was happening on stage and in the corridors was a careful, sometimes uncomfortable, dissection of the gap between marketing slides and operational reality. (EIC returns to Berlin in May 2027.)
The conference agenda made the shift visible. Where previous years centered on sovereign cloud architecture and vendor selection, the 2026 program’s trending themes — as mapped in the closing session — were AI security, identity fabric, workload identity management, and crypto agility. Sovereign cloud had become assumed infrastructure. The practitioner conversation had moved to what you build on top of it, and who controls that layer.
Martin Kuppinger, distinguished analyst and co-founder of KuppingerCole, observed the same shift: “Cloud sovereignty had a much larger role at this year’s EIC, with a differentiated discussion about whether and where it is needed. There is common sense that sovereignty is not a value in its own right — the required level depends on the use case and a proper risk assessment. There is no binary model for sovereignty.”
Sovereign cloud, on the slides, looks like control. In the contracts, service matrices and AI agent deployments, it often looks more like a very expensive illusion.
The control question nobody answers clearly
When enterprises talk about sovereign cloud, they are usually thinking about data residency — where the data lives. European data center, European jurisdiction. But data residency is the beginning of the conversation, not the end.
The harder questions are about control. Who holds the encryption keys, and who can compel access to them under what legal circumstances? Who sees the metadata, the access logs, the telemetry from your workloads? When you run AI inference or model training on a sovereign cloud platform, who controls the model registry, the training data pipeline, the output logs? And when an AI agent acts autonomously on your behalf — scheduling workloads, provisioning resources, making access decisions — whose infrastructure is that agent running on, and who can observe what it does?
These are not hypothetical concerns. The CLOUD Act of 2018 gives US authorities the ability to compel US companies to produce data stored abroad, regardless of where the servers sit. European sovereign cloud offerings from US hyperscalers are structured to address this — through operational separation, European legal entities and customer-managed keys — but the structures are new, partially tested and vary significantly between providers.
Germany’s BSI has raised the stakes further. In April 2026, the agency published its Criteria Enabling Cloud Computing Autonomy (C3A): The first framework to operationalize what cloud sovereignty actually means in technical terms, including disconnect scenarios, staff residency requirements and an extraordinary provision for federal takeover of cloud operations in defense scenarios. Formally non-binding, the criteria are widely expected to become the de facto benchmark for German federal procurement — and a likely template for EU-level frameworks now in the legislative pipeline. For US CISOs, the direction of travel is clear: Regulatory definitions of cloud sovereignty are tightening, and the gap between “data in Europe” and “operationally sovereign” is only going to widen.
Identity is where sovereignty actually lives
The clearest theme at EIC 2026 was that identity — not network perimeter, not data residency — is where cloud sovereignty either holds or breaks down. The argument is becoming hard to avoid.
Jason Keenaghan, who leads identity management strategy at Thales, framed it directly: “Identity is shifting from an IT function to a regulated infrastructure. The most important question for the next decade will be: Who is in control?”
For a US CISO, this shift is very real: Identity governance is moving from pure IT plumbing to a regulated control surface that auditors, regulators and even enterprise customers in RfPs will increasingly scrutinize. The question of “who is in control” is no longer philosophical. It is contractual.
Here’s the problem. You can put your data in a Frankfurt data center with customer-managed keys. But if your identity governance is weak — if you do not know which human users, service accounts and AI agents have access to what, and under what conditions — your sovereignty posture is only as strong as your weakest identity. A compromised privileged account does not care about data residency.
This is particularly acute for AI workloads. Agentic AI systems — models that act autonomously, make API calls, provision resources, access data — are creating a new category of non-human identities that most enterprises’ IAM systems were never designed to manage. Consider a concrete example I have seen in client environments: An LLM-based deployment agent with standing access to production Kubernetes clusters. It schedules workloads, provisions resources and makes access decisions autonomously. If that agent runs on sovereign cloud infrastructure but its identity — its credentials, its permissions, its audit trail — is not properly governed, your sovereignty posture is exactly as strong as the weakest link in that agent’s access chain. If you are running similar agents in US-based cloud regions today, the same identity blind spots exist — even if you never touch a sovereign cloud region.
Sebastian Rohr, an IAM consultant and IDPro member who has spent two decades on enterprise identity architectures, distilled the requirements for governing AI agents in practice: “Every agent needs an assigned non-human identity. A solid on-behalf-of delegation model must be established. An audit trail via SIEM integration is required. No long-lived credentials, no API keys — only ephemeral credentials. Context-based authentication and fine-grained access control. Agents must be managed as real identities. And once that foundation exists: Risk-based, continuous re-authentication combined with the ability for real-time revocation. Do we have all these capabilities everywhere today? Not necessarily — but designing the architecture for it? That is entirely possible.”
For AI agents in particular, the practical question is this: Can you list every agent running in your environment, govern its entitlements and revoke access in real time? If not, you do not truly control the workload — regardless of which cloud region it runs in.
What practitioners at EIC kept coming back to is not a sovereign cloud answer. It is an identity governance answer. Sovereign cloud buys you legal protection and data residency. Identity governance gives you operational control — and increasingly, it is the layer where AI workload sovereignty actually has to be enforced.
When sovereign cloud is worth it — and when it is not
For US CISOs managing EU operations, EU subsidiaries or EU customers, the practical question is not whether sovereign cloud is philosophically correct. It is whether the additional cost and complexity deliver sufficient risk reduction for specific workloads. Most organizations I have worked with are over-applying sovereign cloud to workloads that do not need it, while under-applying it to the ones that do.
A working framework, refined across two years of European deployments. Use this as a quick triage for which workloads truly justify a sovereign cloud premium. As Kuppinger puts it: “Within an organization, varying levels of sovereignty demand for different use cases are the norm, not the exception.”
Workload typeSovereign cloud?WhyNIS2-regulated processesYesLegal obligation, board-level personal liabilityHigh-risk AI under EU AI ActYesCompliance from August 2026Personal data with Schrems II exposureYesTransfer risk without adequate protectionSensitive metadata (access logs, AI telemetry)YesResidency alone does not protect metadataDev/test environmentsNoSignificant cost premium (15–30%) with minimal risk reduction for most US-based operationsNon-sensitive SaaS workloadsNoStandard DPAs and encryption are usually sufficient; no strong US or EU regulatory driverInternal productivity toolsNoNo material regulatory exposure; high cost not justified by risk profile Five things European enterprises learned the hard way
Sovereign cloud does not mean the hyperscaler cannot see your metadata. Customer-managed keys protect data at rest. They do not prevent the platform from logging access patterns, API calls and resource consumption. Know what your provider logs and where those logs go. For US CISOs: This matters for any hyperscaler operating under foreign data localization requirements you may face as the regulatory landscape evolves. Early sovereign cloud offerings had real service gaps — and exit is harder than expected. Many advanced AI/ML services were unavailable at launch; enterprises that committed early ended up running hybrid architectures more complex than anticipated. And lock-in in sovereign cloud contexts is harder to escape than standard cloud. Build exit strategy into procurement decisions before you sign. Identity governance cannot be deferred. The enterprises that got the most value from sovereign cloud investments had already done the identity governance work — asset inventory, access classification, non-human identity management. For US CISOs facing similar AI governance and resilience requirements: This is the lesson that will hurt most if you have not done the work. Sovereign from a hyperscaler is not the same as sovereign from a European provider. AWS European Sovereign Cloud, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty and Google Sovereign Cloud are structurally different from offerings built by IONOS, Hetzner, OVHcloud or Deutsche Telekom. The former offers broader service catalogs with sovereignty controls layered on. The latter offer cleaner legal structures with narrower feature sets. Neither is universally better — and the choice should follow workload characteristics, not procurement preference. What US CISOs should do now
If your organization has EU operations, subsidiaries or customers — or AI workloads sensitive enough that the regulatory direction in the US matters — these are decisions you will face. Three concrete steps.
1. Classify your workloads by sensitivity and regulatory exposure before you classify them by cloud type. Not everything needs sovereign cloud. But know which workloads do before a regulator, auditor or customer’s procurement team asks.
2. Audit your identity governance posture before your cloud strategy. Sovereign cloud without IAM maturity is expensive and insufficient. Governance has to happen at the identity layer, not the data center boundary.
3. Read the contracts carefully. Key management, metadata logging, law enforcement access and service continuity provisions vary significantly between providers. Legal and security need to review them together — and AI workload provisions deserve their own column.
Europe’s sovereign cloud experiment is still running. The early results suggest the regulatory pressure is real, the market response is genuine and the operational complexity is higher than the marketing suggested. AI workloads make it more complex, not less. That is not a reason to avoid sovereign cloud — it is a reason to approach it with clearer eyes than the first wave of European adopters had. Buy the jurisdiction. Then govern the identity. In that order.
Sovereign cloud buys you a jurisdiction. Identity governance buys you control. AI workloads need both, and most enterprises are buying only one.
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5 runtime signals for catching a compromised AI agent

In June 2025, Simon Willison, the engineer who coined the term “prompt injection,” published a warning that circulated widely through the security community. He called it the lethal trifecta — three capabilities that, when combined in a single AI agent, create a near-guaranteed path to exploitation through indirect prompt injection: access to private data; exposure to untrusted content; the ability to communicate externally.
The framing was sharp and useful. If your agent reads your email, ingests arbitrary web content, and can make outbound requests, an attacker who embeds malicious instructions anywhere in that content pipeline can direct the agent to exfiltrate your data without you ever knowing. Willison illustrated the point with a long list of real production exploits: Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub’s MCP server, GitLab Duo, Slack AI, Google Bard, Amazon Q. The same class of attack, over and over.
The trifecta worked as a signal because, at the time, agents were mostly narrowly scoped. An agent capable of performing only one or two of the lethal trifecta activities could be assessed as lower risk. Avoiding the combination felt like a viable design strategy.
That window has closed given what practitioners deploy today: A customer-facing support agent reads ticket histories and customer records, ingests user messages and attached files, and calls CRMs, refund APIs, or ticketing systems. An email AI reads your inbox and calendar, processes inbound messages from strangers, and sends replies on your behalf.
Rather than being edge cases or poorly designed deployments, these are the agents enterprises and individuals actually want, and they’re the ones vendors are building toward.
Lethal trifecta as default configuration
Ross McKerchar, CISO at Sophos, put it plainly in a piece published this May: “the capabilities practitioners actually want (read my data, understand external context, take action) push firmly into dangerous territory. This isn’t a misconfiguration; it’s the architectural cost of usefulness.” He’s right. An agent without private data access is useless, one that can’t process external content is isolated, and the one that can’t communicate externally is inert. Strip any leg of the trifecta and you have something closer to a search box than an agent.
If every legitimate agent architecture exhibits all three trifecta properties, the trifecta is no longer a meaningful indicator of elevated risk. It’s the default configuration. Treating it as a red flag is like treating DNS resolution as a signal of network compromise. Technically true in some threat models, but universally present in every real deployment.
McKerchar’s piece frames the response as “blast radius reduction”: a reasonable operational philosophy, but one that accepts the trifecta as a given condition rather than a preventable one. That’s a reasonable call. The question is what comes after the acceptance.
Meta’s security team arrived at the same conclusion from the other direction. In October 2025, they published the “Rule of Two,” a framework that recommends agents satisfy no more than two of the three trifecta properties in a single session, with human-in-the-loop approval required if all three are necessary. Willison himself endorsed the framework as “the best practical advice for building secure LLM-powered agent systems today.”
Meta’s limitations section, however, concedes that many sought-after use cases won’t fit the framework cleanly, and that “designs that satisfy the Agents Rule of Two can still be prone to failure.” That’s not a criticism of the framework but confirmation that the problem has outgrown the architecture-level solution.
The scale of exposure is no longer theoretical. Google’s April 2026 sweep of the Common Crawl repository found prompt injection attempts across public web pages, ranging from pranks to data exfiltration payloads, with malicious attempts up 32% between November 2025 and February 2026. Google noted sophistication remains low for now but flagged the trend as a signal of maturing attacker interest.
The environment the trifecta warned about has arrived.
How to sleuth out a compromised agent
If the trifecta describes nearly every deployed agent, practitioners need signals that distinguish compromised behavior from normal operation within a trifecta-exhibiting system. That means shifting from architecture-level assessments to runtime behavioral detection.
The production evidence arrived in a cluster. From Jan. 7 to Jan. 15, 2026, researchers disclosed exploits against four separate AI productivity tools in eight days: IBM Bob, Superhuman AI, Notion AI, and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. Each used indirect prompt injection to exfiltrate data via a channel the agent had legitimate access to. In the Cowork case, a hidden prompt embedded in an uploaded document directed the agent to exfiltrate files via Anthropic’s own allowlisted API domain, invisible to any perimeter control and indistinguishable from normal agent behavior until the data was already gone. In all of these cases, the trifecta wasn’t a risk factor but the operating condition.
Here’s what’s worth watching to detect an agent has been compromised.
Instruction-following anomalies. A compromised agent doesn’t usually do something structurally different from a healthy one. Following instructions is its normal function. The difference is whose instructions it’s following. Look for agent actions that have no plausible correspondence to a user-initiated task. An agent that was asked to summarize a quarterly report but then attempts an outbound DNS request to an unfamiliar domain didn’t spontaneously decide to do that. Something in the content it ingested told it to.
Tool call sequences that break expected topology. In a well-designed agent system, the graph of tool calls for any given task should be relatively predictable. A coding agent invoked to fix a bug should touch files, run tests, perhaps check documentation. It shouldn’t be reaching for email or calendar APIs. Tool call sequences that cross expected workflow boundaries are worth flagging even when each individual call looks legitimate on its own.
Exfiltration via low-bandwidth channels. The classic prompt injection exfiltration attack routes stolen data through a mechanism the agent has legitimate access to: a rendered image URL with encoded query parameters, an API call with data embedded in a parameter, a link in a generated document. These don’t look like data theft in isolation; they look like normal agent output. Detection requires correlating what data the agent had access to against what it embedded in its output. That requires end-to-end visibility into the agent’s actions, not just the final response.
Credential and secret access outside task scope. If an agent with legitimate access to a secrets store or key vault touches credentials that have no relationship to the current task, that’s a signal. An agent fixing a React rendering bug should likely not be reading AWS credentials. Least-privilege scoping is the architectural defense here, but monitoring for out-of-scope credential access is the detection layer that catches failures in that scoping.
Memory-write anomalies. Agents with persistent memory are a growing attack surface. A poisoned memory entry that looks like legitimate user context but contains dormant trigger instructions can persist across sessions and fire long after the initial injection. Monitoring for memory-writes containing instruction-like content, or writes made during sessions that ingested untrusted content, is worth adding to any agent observability pipeline.
Runtime alone can address the agent redirection threat
For practitioners operating production agent infrastructure, the lethal trifecta tells you what you know: Your agents are exposed. The question is what to do about it.
The answers are at the runtime layer, not the architecture layer. That’s where EDR and SIEM live for traditional infrastructure — agents need the same instrumentation, and most deployments don’t have it yet. Full execution traces on every agent invocation. Tool call anomaly detection. Input screening at ingest. Credential access monitoring scoped to task context. Memory-write auditing. Not a human attacker logging in. An agent that’s been quietly redirected.
Willison’s trifecta was the right alarm for its moment, which was last year. Almost every production agent now fits the profile. Because of that, only runtime anomaly detection can potentially provide adequate defense. The above signals are a good place to start.
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Sniper Dz Scams Target MENA Users via Fake Facebook Offers and Browser Alerts

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of fraudulent activity targeting users across the Middle East and North Africa by employing various fraudulent Facebook accounts impersonating politicians, public figures, and trusted organizations. "These accounts promoted fake offers, including free mobile internet packages, financial compensation, and government subsidy programs," Group-IBView the full article
Hacker News

Palo Alto Warns of Active Exploitation of PAN-OS GlobalProtect VPN Flaw

Palo Alto Networks has revealed that it has observed "active exploitation" of a recently disclosed PAN-OS vulnerability by an unknown threat actor to obtain unauthorized access to GlobalProtect portals. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-0257 (CVSS score: 7.8), an authentication bypass flaw affecting the portal and gateway components of PAN-OS software that could be exploited by badView the full article
Hacker News

Antonee Robinson Shows Off Unreleased Two-Tone Beats Over-Ear Headphones at the World Cup

Several players involved in the World Cup have been spotted wearing unreleased Beats over-ear headphones over the past couple of weeks, and U.S. men's national soccer team star Antonee Robinson is the latest to be spotted with them. Robinson was captured in a photo on his Instagram account wearing a two-tone version that appears to feature a white headband and housings but with royal blue ear cups.


Previous versions of the headphones seen in photos of Yamine Lamal have featured only a single color, and it's unclear which color options are going to be available to the public, whether ear cups will be swappable to customize your own set, or if Robinson's set is a custom version produced only for him or a limited number of influencers.



The unreleased headphones first appeared in a U.S. Federal Communications Commission database last month, and it's clear Beats is undertaking a influencer seeding campaign throughout the World Cup to generate anticipation ahead of a public release, but the timing of availability remains unknown. It's also unclear whether these will be a new version of the existing Beats Studio Pro over-ear headphones or if they will be positioned as a new product.Tag: Beats
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Have One of These 16 Apple Devices? Software Support Ends This Fall

Apple will end software support for 16 devices this fall across four product lines, with the Apple Watch seeing the most sweeping cull in the product's history.


The full extent of this year's software drops became clear with the announcements of macOS 27 Golden Gate, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, and watchOS 27 at WWDC this week. The one bright spot is that iOS 27 features identical device support to iOS 26, with no iPhone models removed from the compatibility list, and the same goes for the HomePod.

The Apple Watch sees the sharpest cuts. watchOS 27 drops the Series 6, Series 7, Series 8, Apple Watch Ultra (first generation), and Apple Watch SE (second generation) in a single wave, requiring an S9 or S10 chip. watchOS 26 had supported the same lineup as watchOS 11 before it, including the Series 6 and later, the SE (2nd generation) and later, and all Apple Watch Ultra models. Wiping out three launch generations at once is the biggest loss of latest-generation support for Apple Watch to date.

The iPad lineup also sees an unusually aggressive set of cuts. iPadOS 27 raises the floor to the A14 Bionic chip or the M1 chip, dropping five models that still run iPadOS 26: The iPad Air (3rd generation), the iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd generation), the ‌iPad Pro‌ 11-inch (1st generation), the ‌iPad‌ (8th generation), and the iPad mini (5th generation). By comparison, ‌iPadOS 26‌ cut only a single device from the iPadOS 18 list (the 7th generation ‌iPad‌).

macOS Golden Gate brings the era of Intel Macs to a close. The four remaining Intel machines supported by macOS Tahoe don't make the cut this year: The MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019), ‌MacBook Pro‌ (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports), iMac (2020), and Mac Pro (2019). Apple said last year that ‌macOS Tahoe‌ would be the final release for pre-Apple silicon Macs, and macOS 27 makes that official.

Apple TV sees two models dropped with tvOS 27: The ‌Apple TV‌ HD from 2015 and the ‌Apple TV‌ 4K (1st generation) from 2017. Only the 2nd and 3rd generation ‌Apple TV‌ 4K models will receive the update. The full list of devices losing support for the latest software this fall is as follows:

‌watchOS 27‌


Apple Watch Series 6 (2020)
Apple Watch Series 7 (2021)
Apple Watch Series 8 (2022)
Apple Watch Ultra (1st generation, 2022)
Apple Watch SE (2nd generation, 2022)


‌iPadOS 27‌


‌iPad Air‌ (3rd generation, 2019)
‌iPad Pro‌ 12.9-inch (3rd generation, 2018)
‌iPad Pro‌ 11-inch (1st generation, 2018)
‌iPad‌ (8th generation, 2020)
‌iPad mini‌ (5th generation, 2019)


macOS 27 Golden Gate


‌MacBook Pro‌ (16-inch, 2019)
‌MacBook Pro‌ (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
‌iMac‌ (2020)
Mac Pro (2019)


tvOS 27


‌Apple TV‌ HD (2015)
‌Apple TV‌ 4K (1st generation, 2017)


Owners of affected devices aren't entirely without options in the near term; Apple typically continues issuing security patches for the previous OS version for at least a year after it's superseded. For the latest features, though, newer hardware is the only path forward. Apple's new operating systems are expected to be released in September following a period of beta testing.Related Roundups: iOS 26, iPadOS 26, iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Tahoe, macOS Golden Gate, watchOS 26, watchOS 27Related Forums: iOS 26, macOS Tahoe, Apple Watch
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iOS 27: All the New Safari Features

Safari is one of the apps that Apple focused on in iOS 27, and it includes multiple new Apple Intelligence features. From automatically organizing tab groups to custom extensions, Safari is getting useful new capabilities.


Automatic Tab Organization

Safari uses ‌Apple Intelligence‌ to organize your open tabs into relevant topics, grouping like concepts together to make it easier to browse your open tabs.


If you're searching for a new couch while also planning a weekend trip, websites that you open for each topic are grouped together. Automatic sorting can be enabled by tapping on the icon with three lines in the upper right of the display while in tab view and turning on the Automatically Create Topics setting.

This same Safari menu also lets you see all of the groups and filter by topic so you can open just the tabs related to a specific topic while avoiding the other tabs.

There is a new "Resume Browsing" section of the Start Page that lets you continue browsing topics you recently closed or topics you have open on other devices.

You can also group pages you've saved to Bookmarks and Reading List by topic.

Custom Extensions

You can use AI to create Safari Extensions in ‌iOS 27‌ with Apple's new Create an Extension option.


In the Safari settings accessible from the left of the URL bar, tapping into Create an Extension brings you to an interface where you can type in whatever you want an extension to do. Apple also includes suggestions in categories that include Boost Productivity, Improve Focus, Get Creative, and Develop and Design. Some of Apple's extension suggestions:

Create a citation for the current webpage and copy it to my clipboard
Create a 3-minute focus timer for the page
Set the minimum font size to 14pt
Turn the page into pirate speak
Style websites like 90s websites with bold colors and type
Every time I open a new tab, draw me a different flower
Highlight and show the dimensions of webpage elements when I tap on them
Enter the design mode for a website so that I can edit the contents

Notify Me

Safari can monitor a website for changes and alert you when new information is detected. Apple says it's useful for monitoring when concert tickets go on sale or watching for a product to be restocked.


To use it, navigate to a website, then tap on the settings icon to the left of the URL bar, and choose the Notify Me option. You can type in what you want Safari to watch for and set a frequency and a time.

At most, Safari will check websites once per day at a set time, with weekly and monthly checks also available.

Passwords

The Passwords app can use Safari to automatically change flagged weak and compromised passwords, turning them into strong passwords.


The feature uses ‌Apple Intelligence‌ to automatically navigate to eligible websites, sign in, and update your password with a tap.

Ask to Browse

Apple added new parental controls in iOS 27, including an "Ask to Browse" feature that requires children to get parental approval before visiting a new website.

Performance Improvements

Apple says Safari's power efficiency has improved, so it will drain less battery. Web apps and start page content load faster, JavaScript handling is faster, and animations and graphics are smoother.

Compatibility

Safari features like automatic tab grouping, custom extensions, and custom notifications require ‌Apple Intelligence‌. ‌Apple Intelligence‌ is available on the iPhone 15 Pro and later.

Availability

‌iOS 27‌ is in beta, and it is set to launch in fall 2026 alongside new iPhone models.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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GreatXML zero-day BitLocker bypass doesn’t seem to work, yet

A disgruntled researcher who has been publishing zero-day Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities for the past several months released a new exploit Thursday that promises to bypass BitLocker encryption on locked devices. A well respected security expert reported that the exploit doesn’t work as initially described, but the researcher is looking for ways to fix it.
Dubbed GreatXML, the exploit is supposed to work from the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), a special boot mode in Windows from which startup issues can be troubleshooted. It also seems to be related to the Windows Defender offline scan feature.
“If Defender offline scan was initiated in the victim machine at any point then there is no need to login, the machine is automatically vulnerable,” the researcher, who goes online by the name Nightmare Eclipse or Chaotic Eclipse, said in the exploit notes. “If Defender offline scan was never initiated then you have to either login and initiate it yourself or figure out a way to boot into WinRE in offline scan state (I believe it should be very possible to do so without logging in).”
The requirement to log in is relevant here, because a system drive encrypted with BitLocker will be unlocked and decrypted when the user logs in. However, the whole point of a BitLocker bypass is to gain access to the unencrypted drive without having the credentials to log in, for example on a stolen laptop.
On machines where an offline Windows Defender scan was performed in the past, the exploitation is supposed to work by copying two files (unattend.xml and Recovery/WindowsRE/ReAgent.xml) provided by Nightmare Eclipse to the WinRE partition — this can be done from outside the OS because the WinRE partition is not encrypted — and then restart the system in WinRE mode.
“If everything was done correctly, a shell with unrestricted access to the BitLocker volume will spawn,” Nightmare Eclipse said.
However, Will Dormann, an experienced vulnerability analyst who investigated previous exploits released by Nightmare Eclipse, was not able to replicate the bypass using the provided instructions after trying on three versions of Windows 11.
“I think the writeup is flawed in that the spawned CMD.EXE happens on the NEXT time that a Microsoft Defender Offline scan is triggered,” Dormann said on his Mastodon account. “And in order to trigger a Microsoft Defender Offline scan, you both need to be logged in to Windows, and also have admin credentials. And if you’ve already got that level of access, you can just turn off BitLocker.”
Dormann’s observation would be consistent with Microsoft’s documentation, which states that triggering a Windows Defender offline scan requires administrative privileges and will trigger a reboot into WinRE mode for the scan to initiate. The point of the offline scan is to be executed from outside the OS to clean up kernel-level threats such as rootkits that might otherwise interfere with the regular Windows Defender process.
Nightmare Eclipse did not respond to Dormann’s report, but asked on X if anyone is aware of a way to trigger a Defender offline scan just by editing ReAgent.xml. This suggests the researcher is looking for an alternative way to trigger the exploit, but could be related to the scenario where a Defender offline scan was never executed in the past.
Eclipse’s own blog post about GreatXML disappeared from his blogspot.com site, but he claims this was Google’s doing (Google owns the Blogger service). The GitHub repository where he posted his previous zero-day exploits was also removed recently, supposedly by Microsoft, which owns GitHub, a move that drew criticism from many in the security community, as GitHub has been a safe place to store security research, including zero-day proof-of-concept exploits.
The researcher has a personal vendetta against Microsoft after claiming the company mistreated him and he has released eight zero-day exploits in Windows components so far. Some releases have been timed shortly after Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday to force the company to release out-of-band patches or wait until the following month.
This was also the case earler this week, when the researcher released a zero-day privilege escalation exploit in Windows Defender dubbed RoguePlanet and followed that up two days later with the alleged GreatXML BitLocker bypass.
Even if Dormann was not able to get the GreatXML to work, companies should still take the exploit seriously considering Eclipse’s track record of releasing functional zero-days. If there is a bug in the exploit, the researcher or someone else could fix it or find an alternative way to trigger it.
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How to See Which Mac Apps Will Stop Working After macOS Golden Gate

Apple is phasing out support for Rosetta 2, which is a feature that allows Intel-based apps to run on Apple silicon Macs. Rosetta is going to stop working for most apps in macOS 28, and when that happens, apps that use it will stop working.


Apple began warning customers and companies about the upcoming sunsetting of Rosetta with macOS Tahoe, and the warnings go even further in macOS Golden Gate.

If you have apps that still use Rosetta, you'll get a warning every time you restart your Mac or open an Intel app. ‌macOS Golden Gate‌ also adds a new list where you can check which apps are going to stop working in the future.

You can get to the list by going to Settings > General > About > Intel-Based apps and clicking on the "Details" option.

The interface lists all of the apps that are going to stop working, giving Mac users plenty of time to contact app developers or find alternative apps.


‌macOS Golden Gate‌ does not install Rosetta automatically, so if you still have these outdated Intel apps, there will be a short installation when you try to open one for the first time after upgrading to Golden Gate. Authentication plugins and other pre-login utilities that require Rosetta fail to load in ‌macOS Golden Gate‌ because of the limitation.

Apple designed Rosetta to help users and developers transition from Intel to Apple silicon, but Apple phased out the last Intel-based Mac years ago. Apple only sells Apple silicon Macs, and it is slowly ending support for Intel-based models.

‌macOS Tahoe‌ was the final version of macOS available for Intel Macs, and ‌macOS Golden Gate‌ requires a Mac with an Apple silicon chip.Related Roundup: macOS Golden Gate
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Apple's Limited-Edition 2026 'Close Your Rings' Watch Band Revealed

Apple's employees who participated in the company's annual Close Your Rings Challenge have begun to receive a limited-edition Apple Watch band and a special enamel pin marking the 10th anniversary of the internal challenge.


This year's band is a black Sport Loop with special lugs and an end piece that are colored similarly to the Apple Watch's Move, Exercise, and Stand rings.


Given that these bands are limited to Apple's employees, rather than being sold directly to customers, they are relatively rare. You can keep track of hundreds of Apple Watch bands released since 2015 through the Bandbreite app on the iPhone.Related Roundup: Apple Watch 11Tag: Apple Watch BandsBuyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
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Last Chance: Apple Card Sign-Up Promo Can Earn You Free AirPods Pro 3

Time is running out on the Apple Card sign-up promo that began last month. For three more days, you can effectively receive AirPods Pro 3 for free when you sign up for a new Apple Card, but there are some strings attached.


If you sign up for and are approved for an Apple Card for the first time, and use it to purchase AirPods Pro 3 by June 15, you can earn up to $250 in bonus cash back over a 10-month period if you meet minimum transaction requirements.

Specifically, from July 1, 2026 through April 30, 2027, you can earn a bonus $25 cash back each month when you use your new Apple Card to make a minimum of 10 purchases of any amount ($0.01 or higher) that post to your account each month. The initial purchase of the AirPods Pro 3 does not count towards this requirement.

AirPods Pro 3 are regularly priced at $249 in the U.S. — but are currently on sale on Amazon for an all-time low price of $179 — so this promotion effectively allows you to earn back the cost of the wireless earbuds over 10 months.

If you already have an Apple Card, you are not eligible for this promotion.

Apple's website outlines full terms and conditions for this promotion, so be sure to look over the fine print at the bottom of the page.

Apple's credit card launched in 2019, and it remains available in the U.S. only. The card can be managed in the Apple Wallet app on an iPhone, has no annual fee, and offers up to 3% cash back (known as Daily Cash) on purchases paid out daily.

Daily Cash amounts: 1% on purchases with the physical Apple Card, 2% on purchases with the digital Apple Card via Apple Pay, and 3% on purchases from Apple itself and select partners such as Nike, Walgreens, Ace Hardware, and Uber.Related Roundup: AirPods Pro 3Tags: AirPods Pro 3, Apple CardBuyer's Guide: AirPods Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: AirPods
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macOS 27 Golden Gate Hands-On: Every Major New Feature

macOS 27 Golden Gate is in beta ahead of a fall release, and we thought we'd go over what's new for those who don't want to risk beta software on their Mac. macOS Golden Gate adds Siri AI, Liquid Glass updates, and multiple new Apple Intelligence features.

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‌Siri‌ on the Mac lives in Spotlight. Command + Space brings up a new Search or Ask interface for searching for files on the Mac or asking ‌Siri‌ a question. ‌Siri‌ is able to access data on the Mac, and it can answer the same general questions any chatbot can answer. The combination of personal context and world knowledge lets ‌Siri‌ do some things that are unavailable to other AI services like ChatGPT or Claude.

‌Siri‌ answers appear in Spotlight with an option to ask follow-up questions, but there's also a standalone ‌Siri‌ app where you can find all of your past ‌Siri‌ interactions. ‌Siri‌ is also integrated into the system for features like Write with ‌Siri‌. ‌Siri‌ can compose emails and messages for you in your own writing style, check your grammar, or just give you general feedback on what you've written.

Apple brought Visual Intelligence to the Mac, and it's available through the screenshot interface. When activated, you can select an area of your display that has something you want to know more about, and ‌Siri‌ can answer questions you have. In apps like Safari, you can select text or images, then ask ‌Siri‌ about your selection. Many of the same ‌Visual Intelligence‌ features that are on iPhone have carried over to the Mac, so ‌Siri‌ can identify plants and animals or even tell you the nutritional value of food in an image, which is a new feature this year.

‌Apple Intelligence‌ makes many of the built-in Mac apps better. Safari can group similar tabs together by subject, Passwords can automatically change weak passwords for you, Photos has new AI editing tools for changing framing and perspective, and Image Playground can generate photorealistic images.

Shortcuts uses AI to build shortcuts for you based on natural language requests, Calendar supports natural language event input, Mail search is better than before with quick action suggestions, and the Messages app also supports AI suggestions for actions you might want to take, like inserting a photo to send to a friend.

Apple updated Liquid Glass in ‌macOS Golden Gate‌. There's a slider for adjusting overall system opacity, refraction and contrast have been improved, sidebars are unified with less wasted space, and Apple has removed many of the unnecessary icons from menu bars.

If you have a Mac that can run Golden Gate, you're going to get ‌Siri‌ AI and the ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features. ‌Apple Intelligence‌ works on all Apple silicon Macs, and Golden Gate doesn't run on devices with an Intel chip.

EU users can't use ‌Siri‌ AI on the iPhone and the iPad because Apple isn't making it available yet, but ‌Siri‌ AI is available on macOS in the European Union.Related Roundup: macOS Golden Gate
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Top Stories: WWDC 2026 Recap With Siri AI, iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, and More

WWDC 2026 has come to a close, and it brought a number of announcements with the headliner being the new Siri AI functionality available both in a standalone app and integrated throughout most of Apple's next-generation operating systems.


iOS 27 brings a host of other improvements with an emphasis on performance, while macOS 27, known as macOS Golden Gate, delivers some Liquid Glass design refinements and more, so read on below for all of the details!

Top Stories

Everything Apple Announced at WWDC 2026 in 10 Minutes

Apple held its WWDC 2026 keynote on Monday, introducing iOS 27, macOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27. It took Apple around an hour and 15 minutes to walk through the major new features in the updates, but we have a quicker 10-minute recap for those who want the highlights.


Our recap also includes links to all of our keynote-day article coverage, so it's a great place to catch up on all of the big announcements. And if you want a full summary of the keynote as it happened but don't want to watch the video, check out our live blog transcript.

Hands-On With iOS 27's Siri AI

The overarching theme of the WWDC 2026 keynote was the new Siri AI, which is integrated throughout most of Apple's operating systems and comes with a dedicated app.


Access to Siri AI in the developer betas involves a waitlist, so it may take a bit before you can start trying it out, but we've already gone hands on for an early overview of how it works, so be sure to check out our video.

Apple Announces macOS 27 Golden Gate With New Siri and 'Tons' of Refinements

Early in Monday's keynote, Apple made one of the most anticipated announcements of the event, revealing that macOS 27 is named macOS Golden Gate.


Much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple said it focused on improving macOS's performance and dozens of underlying technologies this year.

Apple says macOS Golden Gate offers quicker AirDrop transfers, faster network file browsing, improved syncing in the Messages app, better Spotlight search suggestions, and other changes that make your Mac feel "more responsive than ever."

"With improvements at the very core of the system and enhancements to apps and experiences you rely on every day, macOS feels better than ever," said Apple.

Apple Says iOS 27 Adds These 12 New Features to Your iPhone

iOS 27's key new feature is a more intelligent and personal version of Siri, but the changes go well beyond that. In a press release this week, Apple outlined additional enhancements coming across Apple Maps, Find My, Apple Wallet, Apple Music, and more.


In fact, one super-dense slide briefly shown during Monday's keynote listed over 250 changes across iOS 27 and Apple's other updates.

iPadOS 27 Drops Support for a Wave of iPads

While iOS 27 is supported on all of the same iPhone models that work with iOS 26, the iPad lineup saw a significant cut in supported models this year. Each member of the iPad family saw the oldest model currently supporting iPadOS 26 dropped for iPadOS 27, meaning your iPad will need a minimum of an A14 or M1 chip in order to upgrade.


The Apple Watch lineup saw even steeper cuts to the list of supported models, with the Apple Watch Series 6, Series 7, Series 8, Ultra 1, and SE 2 all not making the cut for watchOS 27. watchOS 27 also drops the Walkie-Talkie app that has been available on Apple Watch since watchOS 5 debuted in 2018.

iPhone 17's 8GB Limit Costs It These Two Siri AI Features in iOS 27

In its Siri AI announcement during WWDC 2026, Apple introduced a more powerful on-device AI model which in addition to standard Siri AI functionality also powers two exclusive features: more expressive Siri voices and a major accuracy gain for systemwide dictation.


Both require 12GB of unified memory. Among current iPhone models, that limits the more powerful AI model to the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max, alongside iPad models with the M4 chip or later, Macs with M3 or later, and Apple Vision Pro with M5.

That's right, the standard iPhone 17 misses out. Having only 8GB to its name – the minimum Apple Intelligence has required since launch – the base flagship model falls short of the new threshold.

MacRumors Newsletter

Each week, we publish an email newsletter like this highlighting the top Apple stories, making it a great way to get a bite-sized recap of the week hitting all of the major topics we've covered and tying together related stories for a big-picture view.

So if you want to have top stories like the above recap delivered to your email inbox each week, subscribe to our newsletter!Tag: Top Stories
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iOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate Expand Drawing Tools to Three Apps

The upcoming iOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate updates expand drawing tools to more of Apple's built-in apps across the iPhone and Mac.


In the Messages app on iOS 27, there is a new "Drawing" option in the app drawer, which can be opened by tapping the plus sign in the bottom-left corner.

On older iOS versions, the Messages app once had a very basic drawing tool that was accessible by tapping a button on the keyboard in landscape orientation, but now Apple's complete set of Markup tools are available in the app.

On the Mac, macOS 27 adds the Markup tools to the Notes and Freeform apps.


iOS 27 and macOS 27 are currently available in developer beta. The updates are expected to be released to the general public in September.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate
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Warrantless wiretaps cut off for a week following US Congress vote

Lawmakers have failed to extend a surveillance law that allows US intelligence agencies to monitor targets abroad without a warrant.
Congress rejected a vote to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to July 2, which means, for a few days at least, some surveillance will be put on hold, for the first time since the Act was passed in 2008. The next possible chance for a vote will be June 28.
This has significance for CISOs because they need to be aware of how communication between the US and other countries is being monitored. The Act permits US intelligence agencies to collect texts and emails sent to and from foreigners living outside the US without a warrant — and when those communications are to or from an US citizen, it allows them to scoop them up too.
“For too long, the FBI has been able to piggyback on a major national security tool as an unconstitutional backdoor way of reading Americans’ communications,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia wrote in article about the renewal vote this week.
It is uncertain what will happen next. Some commentators expect things will proceed as if the Act had been extended, possibly through an executive order.  However, the industry may well revolt against this and we could see some tech providers take legal action.

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French government’s secure messaging system breached

An intruder has breached the French government’s encrypted messaging service, Tchap, showing once again that human error is a weak spot in any security system.
Tchap was developed in France as an example of national sovereignty and was designed to be a more secure option than WhatsApp for communication between government employees.
In this case, it wasn’t the technology that was at fault, but a user: The intruder gained access to the system by taking over their account, according to DINUM, the French government’s interministerial digital directorate.
DINUM said it has blocked the affected user’s access and is investigating how much information has been revealed. While the system’s encryption was not broken, the intruder would have been able to view unencrypted public chat rooms accessible to the account taken over, potentially affecting 73,467 of the system’s 825,000 users, DINUM said.
That matches at least part of a post on X (formerly Twitter) reporting the intruder’s claim to have accessed the account of a Tchap user in the education sector through social engineering, exposing 73,467 user accounts, 643,459 messages, 876 chat rooms with message history, and 59,386 media files totalling 13.51 GB, including references to documents marked “Diffusion Restreinte” (restricted distribution).
DINUM said that it had reminded all Tchap users that public chat rooms are accessible to any user and are not encrypted, so all participants should refrain from any sensitive or confidential information.

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Notion Is Migrating to SwiftUI, Apple Confirms at WWDC

Apple this week confirmed that Notion is migrating its user interface to SwiftUI, citing the app's desire for greater performance and UI consistency than its existing web-based stack can deliver.


Notion is a productivity app that combines notes, documents, databases, and project management tools in one place. Users can create pages containing text, tables, kanban boards, calendars, and more, and organize them in a flexible hierarchy.

The announcement was made during Apple's SwiftUI segment during its Platforms State of the Union, where Notion was used as a flagship example of an app moving away from cross-platform and web technologies to native Apple frameworks. The callout was clearly deliberate; Notion is one of the most widely used productivity apps on the Mac, and has long been criticized for the sluggishness that comes with its Electron-based architecture.

This is not Notion's first step toward native. Notion had already been gradually moving its iOS and Android apps away from web-based rendering in 2025, with most of the mobile experience now running natively except for the editor. The WWDC mention suggests that effort is now extending more substantially, with SwiftUI as the target framework.

Apple also noted that agentic coding tools are making migrations like this more practical, saying "porting code to Swift has never been easier," pointing to AI-assisted development workflows lowering the barrier for teams considering a move away from cross-platform stacks.

The SwiftUI session also covered a broad set of framework improvements. Apple is unifying SwiftUI, AppKit, and UIKit around a common foundation, so improvements made for Apple's own apps automatically benefit third-party developers. Nested stack layouts now resize up to twice as fast, state objects initialize lazily, and AsyncImage gains automatic HTTP caching.

SwiftUI also gains reorderable containers for drag-to-reorder in any container type, swipe actions inside any container, and full-fidelity text selection on iOS. On macOS, Text now supports custom renderers, text vibrancy, and vertical text.

Toolbar control is more granular, with a new visibilityPriority modifier, an overflow menu for deprioritized actions, and a topBarPinnedTrailing placement to anchor items to the trailing edge. A new document infrastructure adds first-class URL access for reading and writing to disk, and the ability to write only changed file portions on save.Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tags: SwiftUI, WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
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Apple to Release These 15 New Products Later This Year

Apple's annual WWDC developers conference is drawing to a close, but there is still a lot to look forward to in the second half of the year.


Apple is expected to release at least 15 more products later this year. Now that the more intelligent and personal version of Siri has finally arrived in beta, a full two years after Apple first previewed it at WWDC 2024, we should begin to see some new devices that were reportedly postponed until the new Siri was ready.

Beyond the usual annual updates to iPhones and Apple Watches in September, Apple's all-new smart home hub is expected to debut later this year. We are also expecting a foldable iPhone Ultra and long-awaited updates to the Apple TV, HomePod, and HomePod mini. And a redesigned MacBook Ultra with an OLED display is expected by early 2027.

Here is what to expect from Apple later this year, according to rumors.

iPhones

iPhone 18 Pro: A20 Pro chip, a smaller Dynamic Island, a simplified Camera Control button, a Dark Cherry color option, variable aperture for at least one rear camera, Apple's C2 modem with support for 5G web browsing via satellite, and more.
iPhone 18 Pro Max: The same features rumored for the iPhone 18 Pro, but the Pro Max model may or may not be slightly thicker.
iPhone Ultra: A foldable iPhone Ultra with a 7.7-inch inner display and 5.3-inch outer display, two rear cameras, one front camera, a Touch ID power button instead of Face ID, and more. iOS 27 is expected to be tailored for the foldable iPhone, allowing for side-by-side apps and other iPad-like multitasking functionality.Apple Watches
Apple Watch Series 12: A faster S11 chip or newer, plus design changes such as Touch ID and/or more health sensors (disputed).
Apple Watch Ultra 4: A faster S11 chip or newer, plus design changes such as Touch ID and/or more health sensors (disputed). There may also be additional satellite features for the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and newer, such as Apple Maps via satellite and the ability to send and receive photos with Messages via satellite.iPads
iPad 12: A16 chip → A18 chip or A19 chip with Apple Intelligence support.
iPad mini: A17 Pro chip → A19 Pro or A20 Pro chip, an OLED display, a vibration-based speaker system, and a water-resistant design.
Macs

Mac Studio: M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips → M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips.
Mac mini: M4 and M4 Pro chips → M5 and M5 Pro chips.
iMac: M4 chip → M5 chip, plus new color options.
MacBook Ultra: A major MacBook Pro redesign in late 2026 or early 2027, with M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, an OLED display, a touch screen, a Dynamic Island, and a thinner design. On this laptop, which will reportedly be named MacBook Ultra, macOS 27 is expected to offer a touch-friendly interface.Home

Apple TV: A17 Pro chip with support for the more personalized Siri, and Apple's N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7 support. A built-in FaceTime camera has been rumored for a future Apple TV, but it is unclear if that will arrive with the next model.
HomePod mini: S9 chip or newer with support for the more personalized Siri, Apple's N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7 support, improved sound quality, a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, and potentially new color options like red.
HomePod: A new full-sized HomePod that supports the revamped Siri.
Home Hub: An all-new smart home hub featuring the more personalized version of Siri, a 6-inch to 7-inch square display, an A18 chip for Apple Intelligence, FaceTime, and more. Place it on a table or mount it on a wall.Notes

Apple's smart home hub may be accompanied by accessories such as a security camera/sensor and a Face ID doorbell.
AirPods Ultra with cameras for Visual Intelligence are also rumored, but it is unclear if they are launching this year or later.
The next Mac Studio and Mac mini models as well as the MacBook Ultra could be delayed until 2027 due to the RAM chip shortage.
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Record AirPods Price Drops and a Rare Switch 2 Sale: This Week's Top Tech Deals

Multiple AirPods models hit record low prices this week, including the AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods Max 2. We're tracking these great discounts alongside an ultra rare discount on a new Switch 2 on Woot, plus a Summer sale at Sonos.

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.

Nintendo Switch 2


What's the deal? Take $15 off Switch 2 with code NEW15
Where can I get it? Woot
$15 OFFNintendo Switch 2 for $434.00

Woot has a rare deal on a brand new Nintendo Switch 2 console with the code NEW15, which can be used at checkout for customers making their first purchase on Woot. With this code you can take $15 off the base Switch 2 system, which isn't a lot, but given that these systems are rarely on sale (and are about to get a $50 price increase in September), this is a fairly notable sale.

AirPods Pro 3


What's the deal? Take $70 off AirPods Pro 3
Where can I get it? Amazon
Where can I find the original deal? Right here
$70 OFFAirPods Pro 3 for $179.00

AirPods deals were in abundance this week, with the AirPods Pro 3 on sale at a new all-time low price on Amazon. You can still get this model for $179.00, down from $249.00.

AirPods Max 2


What's the deal? Take $40 off AirPods Max 2
Where can I get it? Amazon
Where can I find the original deal? Right here
$50 OFFAirPods Max 2 for $499.00

Amazon this week has a record low price on the AirPods Max 2, now available for $499.00, down from $549.00. This sale is available in all five colors of the headphones.

Sonos


What's the deal? Take up to 25% off Sonos devices
Where can I get it? Sonos
Where can I find the original deal? Right here
UP TO 25% OFFSonos Summer Sale

Sonos this week kicked off a new summer sale, with big discounts aimed at dads and anyone else shopping ahead of Father's Day. This sale includes deals on Sonos smart speakers, sound bars, subwoofers, and more.

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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Record AirPods Price Drops and a Rare Switch 2 Sale: This Week's Top Tech Deals

Multiple AirPods models hit record low prices this week, including the AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods Max 2. We're tracking these great discounts alongside an ultra rare discount on a new Switch 2 on Woot, plus a Summer sale at Sonos.

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.

Nintendo Switch 2


What's the deal? Take $15 off Switch 2 with code NEW15
Where can I get it? Woot
$15 OFFNintendo Switch 2 for $434.00

Woot has a rare deal on a brand new Nintendo Switch 2 console with the code NEW15, which can be used at checkout for customers making their first purchase on Woot. With this code you can take $15 off the base Switch 2 system, which isn't a lot, but given that these systems are rarely on sale (and are about to get a $50 price increase in September), this is a fairly notable sale.

AirPods Pro 3


What's the deal? Take $70 off AirPods Pro 3
Where can I get it? Amazon
Where can I find the original deal? Right here
$70 OFFAirPods Pro 3 for $179.00

AirPods deals were in abundance this week, with the AirPods Pro 3 on sale at a new all-time low price on Amazon. You can still get this model for $179.00, down from $249.00.

AirPods Max 2


What's the deal? Take $40 off AirPods Max 2
Where can I get it? Amazon
Where can I find the original deal? Right here
$50 OFFAirPods Max 2 for $499.00

Amazon this week has a record low price on the AirPods Max 2, now available for $499.00, down from $549.00. This sale is available in all five colors of the headphones.

Sonos


What's the deal? Take up to 25% off Sonos devices
Where can I get it? Sonos
Where can I find the original deal? Right here
UP TO 25% OFFSonos Summer Sale

Sonos this week kicked off a new summer sale, with big discounts aimed at dads and anyone else shopping ahead of Father's Day. This sale includes deals on Sonos smart speakers, sound bars, subwoofers, and more.

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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Apple Highlights New Fitness+ Content

Apple introduced new content in its Fitness+ subscription service this week, including a new menopause-focused workout program.


Fitness+ gains "Strong Through Menopause," a progressive three-week program featuring weekly Yoga and Strength workouts designed to help users navigating perimenopause and menopause build strength, improve balance and mobility, and reduce stress. A new episode of Time to Walk also features actor Busy Philipps, who shares stories from her life including her own experience with perimenopause.

The program complements perimenopause and menopause tracking support introduced in Cycle Tracking with watchOS 27 and iOS 27.

‌iOS 27‌ also brings several broader updates to the Health and Fitness apps. Users can now sort by completed Fitness+ workouts, route maps in the Fitness app are said to be more accurate following workouts, and step count is now synced between the Health and Fitness apps.Tag: Apple Fitness Plus
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iOS 27 Adds Landscape Mode to More Apple Apps Ahead of 'iPhone Ultra'

iOS 27 enables landscape mode in more of Apple's built-in iPhone apps, including Apple Music, Podcasts, Fitness, Health, Reminders, Home, Shortcuts, Apple Watch, Find My, Weather, Voice Memos, Apple TV Remote, and others.


In the Apple Music and Podcasts apps, landscape support is limited to the audio player for now.

Many of the apps feature a left-aligned sidebar in landscape mode. In the Messages app, which already supported landscape orientation on iOS 26 and earlier, you can now collapse the sidebar to show only names and profile pictures.







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.

iOS 27 also adds landscape support for Live Activities in the Dynamic Island.

To use landscape mode in a supported app, simply turn your iPhone sideways. Portrait Orientation Lock must be turned off in Control Center.

Landscape apps used to be more common on iOS many years ago. In fact, the Home Screen grid supported landscape orientation on the iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7 Plus, and iPhone 8 Plus, but that functionality ended with the iPhone X.

iOS 27 is currently in beta and is expected to be released in September, which is also when Apple reportedly plans to unveil the "iPhone Ultra."Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: iPhone Ultra
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Apple Cut Frequencies in WWDC Keynote to Prevent Siri Activations

Apple appears to have modified the audio of this week's WWDC 2026 keynote video whenever "Siri" was mentioned, apparently in an effort to prevent viewers' nearby devices from waking inadvertently during the presentation.


The technique was spotted by observers on X, who shared spectrogram screenshots showing clear gaps in those specific frequency ranges coinciding precisely with instances of the ‌Siri‌ name throughout the video. Apple appears to have cut out the 3kHz, 4kHz, 5kHz, and 6kHz frequency bands.



The approach is designed to defeat wake-word detection, which relies on recognizing the acoustic profile of phrases like "‌Siri‌" and Hey ‌Siri‌." By surgically removing the frequencies that carry key phonetic energy in the word "‌Siri‌," Apple can reduce the likelihood that HomePods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs in a viewer's home will trigger while the keynote plays back.

The technique does not appear to have been fully effective, however, as multiple viewers reported their devices activating anyway during the stream.

In 2017, Amazon was found to use a similar approach in its Alexa TV commercials, notching out frequencies to avoid triggering Echo smart speakers in viewers' homes. Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tags: Siri, WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
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Craig Federighi Swipes at AI Rivals Who Are 'Racing Forward' Without Regard for Users

Apple software chief Craig Federighi used the WWDC 2026 keynote to draw a pointed contrast between Apple's approach to artificial intelligence and the broader industry, suggesting that some competitors are developing AI without meaningful consideration for the people using it.


During Monday's ‌WWDC 2026‌ keynote, Federighi said:



The remarks appeared to be aimed squarely at rivals including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, all of which have aggressively shipped AI products and services over the past two years. Federighi argued that Apple's conservative approach is more useful because it draws on personal context.

The comments arrived alongside Apple's unveiling of Siri AI, a ground-up rebuild of its digital assistant powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence. Federighi described the effort as "a big leap forward," with "an innovative architecture that unlocks a new Siri across platforms."

Apple said it has created a second version of its Apple Foundation Models capable of understanding speech and reading text and images, with a new system orchestrator coordinating capabilities across its platforms.

The implicit dig at competitors carries some irony given Apple's own recent history with AI. The company spent the better part of two years struggling to deliver a meaningfully improved ‌Siri‌, and earlier this year parted ways with John Giannandrea, its former head of AI and machine learning, following a prolonged restructuring of its AI teams.

Federighi pushed back against the idea that the new ‌Siri‌ is simply another "bolted-on chatbot," saying the company sees it as "an integral but conversational tool that you use in the moment." Privacy, he said, is "non-negotiable," with data used only to execute a user's request.Tag: Craig Federighi
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watchOS 27 Improves Apple Watch Performance in Seven Ways

Apple's software updates previewed during WWDC 2026 this week have followed a distinct pattern: introduce a handful of key new features, while maintaining a focus on refining the underlying platform architecture. watchOS 27 is no different in this respect, with the majority of changes being performance improvements under the hood.


That said, one of the most obvious user-facing changes is a new dynamic app grid that surfaces and rearranges five apps based on your current context and general usage, with Siri as the centerpiece. Pressing the Digital Crown on your Apple Watch immediately invokes the grid, which appears whether you use the app grid or list view. If the dynamic grid doesn't surface the app you're looking for, a turn of the Digital Crown reveals your preferred view.

The change straddles the line between redesigned navigation and the efficiency-minded development that defines the rest of watchOS 27, since the grid aims to get you to the app you want, just faster. It's probably the most obvious change you'll actually see, but there are several others that happen out of sight. Apple says they include:
Better battery efficiency
Improved Wi-Fi connectivity
More efficient water detection
More accurate step tracking
Faster media playback
Faster app extension launchesAs with the rest of Apple's software previews this week, though, you'll need reasonably recent hardware to see any of these enhancements.

watchOS 27 requires an iPhone 11 or later or iPhone SE (2nd generation or later) with iOS 27. The new software also requires one of the following Apple Watch models: Apple Watch SE 3, Apple Watch Series 9, 10, 11, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 or 3. In other words, ‌watchOS 27‌ drops support for the Apple Watch Series 6, Series 7, and Series 8, along with the original Ultra and SE 2. Apple will release the new software in the fall.Related Roundups: Apple Watch 11, watchOS 26, watchOS 27Buyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)Related Forum: Apple Watch
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Audible Launches Connected Subscription for Apple Podcasts

Audible last month launched a connected subscription that lets members stream nearly 700 premium podcast titles directly within Apple Podcasts, available across 135 countries.


The integration gives Audible members ad-free access to an expansive catalog of Audible Originals spanning true crime, investigative journalism, celebrity-led audio dramas, and personal growth categories.

Titles available at launch include award-winning series like Dr. Death, American Scandal, Business Wars, Dying for Sex, and Hysterical, Reinvent Your Life with Mel Robbins, The Prophecy, and The Big Lie. Marshall Lewy, Head of Audible Content for North America, said:



Existing Audible members can access the integration by opening ‌Apple Podcasts‌, where their subscription should connect automatically, or by searching for any Audible premium show and linking their account at no additional cost.

New subscribers can sign up directly through ‌Apple Podcasts‌ by searching for an Audible show such as Dr. Death and subscribing via the Audible app. Membership also unlocks standard Audible benefits including one audiobook per month and an unlimited listening library.

The full Audible channel on Apple Podcasts is available now in over 135 countries. Audible says the integration is expected to roll out to members in Australia, Japan, and Canada this month.Tags: Apple Podcasts, Audible
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Prompt injection breaks today’s AI agents, study warns

Today’s AI web agents have no dependable defenses against prompt injection, according to new research showing that not a single attack scenario was consistently blocked across leading systems powered by GPT‑5 and Gemini.
The findings come from StakeBench, a stakeholder-centric benchmark developed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University, ST Engineering, IBM Research, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to evaluate prompt injection attacks against AI agents operating in realistic web environments.
The researchers executed 3,168 adversarial runs across NanoBrowser and BrowserUse using 264 benchmark cases. Indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions are hidden inside ordinary web content such as product reviews and metadata, achieved attack success rates ranging from 41.67% to 68.16%, while direct prompt injection exceeded 79% across all tested configurations.
“Crucially, these failures exhibit distinct patterns when analysed through a stakeholder lens: some attacks succeed without disrupting the user’s delegated task while disproportionately harming third parties (stealthy parasitism), whereas others disrupt task completion without realizing the adversarial objective (misaligned disruption),” the researchers wrote in a paper.
OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Every attack objective exposed at least one failure mode
The benchmark evaluated web agents across four possible outcomes: Robust Behavior, Stealthy Parasitism, Misaligned Disruption, and Compounded Failure. Robust Behavior represents the ideal state in which an agent completes a user’s task without advancing an attacker’s objective or exhibiting execution instability.
The researchers argue that the findings reveal a broader problem than high attack success rates.
“The Robust Behavior region remains unpopulated across all evaluated configurations,” they wrote, meaning every tested attack objective resulted in at least one meaningful failure dimension, whether successful adversarial manipulation, disruption of the user’s intended task, or execution instability.
The authors say this demonstrates that “prompt-injection vulnerability in deployable web agents cannot be characterized by any single metric in isolation,” because attack success and task disruption are “weakly coupled in practice.”
Attacks can succeed while users see nothing wrong
One of the failure modes identified by the benchmark is what the researchers call “stealthy parasitism,” in which an AI agent completes the user’s delegated task while simultaneously advancing an attacker’s objective.
The paper illustrates the risk with an online shopping scenario: “A malicious prompt injected into product reviews may bias an agent toward a specific item: although the user may still receive an acceptable recommendation, the same behaviour can disadvantage competing sellers and undermine platform integrity.”
The researchers argue that prompt injection has evolved into “a system-level security problem with multi-party harm,” rather than a model safety issue affecting only the end user.
Different stakeholders face different risks
Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily measure attack success, StakeBench evaluates harm across three stakeholder groups: end users, third-party sellers, and platforms.
The results show that those groups experience materially different risks.
Seller-targeted attacks recorded the highest attack success rates across both evaluated web agents. User-targeted attacks, however, produced the lowest task deviation rates, suggesting they may be harder to detect because workflows continue to appear normal even when adversarial objectives are achieved.
According to the researchers, “the same agent can simultaneously appear stealthy on user-targeted attacks, susceptible on seller-targeted attacks, and unstable on platform-targeted attacks.”
That, they argue, makes “aggregate ASR alone insufficient to characterize stakeholder-specific vulnerability.”
Models and architectures influence outcomes
The benchmark also found meaningful differences between AI models and agent architectures.
Replacing GPT-5 with Gemini-2.5-Flash increased indirect prompt injection success rates by 26.49 percentage points on NanoBrowser and by 6.2 percentage points on BrowserUse, the paper said. BrowserUse also consistently exhibited higher task deviation and behavioral irregularity than NanoBrowser, it added.
According to the researchers, the findings suggested prompt injection resilience depends not only on the language model but also on how it is implemented within an autonomous agent.
“These results indicate that prompt-injection security in deployable web agents is not a scalar property of the backbone model but a distribution of harm whose realisation is jointly determined by the affected stakeholder, the semantic alignment between the injected objective and the user’s task, and the architectural context in which the backbone is deployed,” the paper added.
Images may emerge as the next attack vector
The researchers also explored whether prompt injection could extend beyond text.
In a preliminary multimodal experiment, they modified only a product image while leaving accompanying text, ratings, and page structure unchanged. The manipulated product’s selection rate increased from 10% to 76.67% without rating signals, suggesting visual content alone may significantly influence AI agent decisions.
While the experiment was limited in scope, the researchers said the results indicate “the IPI surface relevant to deployable web agents may extend beyond textual channels to visual ones,” pointing to another emerging attack vector as enterprises increasingly deploy autonomous AI systems.
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Oracle PeopleSoft zero‑day fuels ShinyHunters extortion spree

A newly disclosed Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day became the weapon of choice in a recent ShinyHunters extortion campaign that primarily targeted universities and other educational institutes.
Attackers exploited the critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw in PeopleSoft’s Environment Management component that Oracle started warning customers about on June 10, 2026. In an advisory, the company urged immediate patching with no indication that the flaw is being actively exploited.
Google Cloud’s threat intelligence team (GTIG) said the attack unfolded between May 27 and June 9, before Oracle publicly acknowledged the issue. Google said it notified more than 100 organizations whose internet facing systems appeared potentially exposed, with 68% of identified targets belonging to the higher education sector.
“While several organizations successfully blocked the activity or remediated the vulnerabilities, others experienced compromise, resulting in stolen data being published on the ShinyHunters DLS (Data Leak Site).” GTIG said in a blog post.
Oracle did not immediately respond to CSO’s request for comments.
ShinyHunters, or groups trying to use their name, reportedly posted downloadable evidence of the attack on their DLS on June 9. The post claimed compromised data included “over 40 GB of billing and payment records, credit card and payment details, student finance data, and campus portal exports.”
In a follow up post on June 11, the attackers threatened data leak if the victims contacted by them did not respond within “the deadline.”
James Davison, chief strategy officer at Pathlock, said the incident reflects an evolving threat landscape. “The Oracle PeopleSoft breach is an example of the new kind of attacks every ERP will face in today’s new agentic world,“ he said, pointing to the ease of attacks in the AI era. “Companies need to reassess their ERP security and controls and adapt, because they are exposed.”
PeopleSoft flaw gave attackers a head start
The campaign relied on CVE-2026-35273, a critical vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft’s Environment Management component, carrying a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10, that allows unauthenticated RCE on vulnerable internet facing systems.
According to Oracle’s advisory the vulnerability affects PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools, versions 8.61 and 8.62, and mitigations are only available for supported versions. Earlier versions, which could be affected by the flaw, were advised to be upgraded to supported versions.
After exploiting CVE-2026-35273 to gain initial access, the attacker moved to establish persistence and maintain remote control over compromised systems. Google researchers observed UNC6240, a cluster associated with ShinyHunters, deploying a customized version of the MeshCentral open-source remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. They did so by disguising the platform as legitimate Microsoft Azure services.
“(MeshCentral) agent is software that runs on remote devices to allow for remote management across various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD,” the researchers said. “Static analysis indicates these agents were hardcoded to establish communication with the command and control (C2) server wss://azurenetfiles.net:443/agent.ashx.”
Once installed, the tool allowed operators to execute commands remotely and continue interacting with infected environments.
Attackers left the lights on
Part of Google’s investigation was aided by operational mistakes made by the attackers themselves. The campaign first drew broader attention after a security researcher, known on X as @nahamike01, reported discovering internet-exposed infrastructure from the operation.
“ShinyHunters exposed several directories revealing ongoing targeting of PeopleSoft environments,” the researcher said in an X post. “Also visible were staging materials, including MeshCentral agents, and a defacement and credential spray script.”
Google said exposed attacker directories highlighted by @nahamike01 helped its team analyse the contents including staging materials, customized agents, and attacker command histories. The directories were exposed across five sequential IP addresses (142.11.200[.]186-190), making them the primary indicators of compromise (IOCs).
Google urged organizations to apply fixes for CVE-2026-35273 and review PeopleSoft deployments for indicators associated with the campaign. The researchers further advised organizations to investigate privileged access, enable comprehensive logging, and strengthen monitoring around unauthorized MeshCentral installations.
“This attack shows that traditional perimeter security and IdP-level authentication are necessary, but not sufficient,” Davison said. “Modern ERP security requires a layered approach that combines preventive controls, continuous monitoring, and visibility into user activity. The visibility into user activity is key here, behavioral monitoring to spot exceptions isn’t a ‘nice to have’ anymore.”
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AI is exposing the biggest weakness in cybersecurity: We never built a health model. Until now!

For 30 years, cybersecurity has operated like an emergency room.
Reactive. Crisis-driven. Always triaging. We are extraordinarily good at it — our detection is faster, our response playbooks are sharper, our incident teams are more capable than they have ever been. When something goes wrong, the modern security organization runs toward the fire with real skill.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that artificial intelligence is now forcing into the open: An emergency room does not produce a healthy population. Healthcare does that — through prevention, continuous monitoring, early diagnosis and a model of the whole patient.
Cybersecurity never built that model. We built the trauma bay and called it a profession.
For a long time, we got away with it. The threat environment moved at human speed. The gaps in our thinking were survivable. AI has ended that grace period. It has not created a new weakness so much as it has illuminated the oldest one — and it is now moving faster than our reactive posture can absorb.
We do not have a tooling problem. We have a missing-model problem. And until we name it, no amount of investment will fix it.
We’ve been asking — and answering — the wrong question
Walk into almost any boardroom and you will hear the same exchange. A director asks the CISO: “Are we secure?”
It is the wrong question, and most of us have known it for years.
“Secure” is binary. It is a snapshot. It is a yes-or-no answer to something that is actually a living, continuously changing condition. No physician would accept that question from a patient. A doctor does not ask “Are you healthy?” and expect a useful answer. They ask a better set of questions: How are you functioning? What do the vital signs say? What is trending in the wrong direction? What needs attention now, before it becomes a crisis?
Cybersecurity has never adopted that mindset because it never had the model that requires it. We have frameworks for controls. We have frameworks for adversary behavior. We have no widely adopted framework for organizational health — for whether the enterprise, as a whole living system, is well.
That gap was tolerable when threats were slow. It is not tolerable now.
Why AI breaks the reactive model
AI changes three things at once, and each one punishes a reactive posture specifically.
It compresses the timeline. Reconnaissance, exploitation, lateral movement and exfiltration that once unfolded over days now unfold in minutes. An emergency-room model assumes there is time between the symptom and the intervention. AI is closing that window. You cannot triage your way through an attack that completes before the triage begins. It industrializes the routine. AI makes competent attacks cheap and abundant — phishing that is grammatically perfect and contextually aware, deepfaked executives authorizing transfers, vulnerability discovery at machine scale. The reactive model assumes a manageable volume of meaningful events. AI removes that assumption. It introduces a new organ we do not know how to monitor. Every enterprise is now deploying AI systems into its own operations — including its security operations. These systems make decisions, take actions and carry risk. They are, in clinical terms, a new organ inside the body. And most organizations have deployed them with no intake assessment, no monitoring of their condition and no governance of their behavior. We have added an organ to the patient and never checked whether it is healthy. A reactive model has no answer to any of this. You cannot out-triage machine speed. The only viable response is to shift from reaction to health — to build the enterprise’s adaptive capacity before the crisis, not after.
What a health model actually looks like
This is the thinking behind the Clinical Cybersecurity Framework — a model I have developed over two decades in the CISO chair, and one that has resonated strongly enough with peers over the past months to convince me it is naming something the industry already feels.
The premise is simple. An enterprise should be treated less like static infrastructure and more like a living organism — and once leaders see that anatomy clearly, the entire security conversation changes.
Every enterprise has the same essential anatomy:
ENTERPRISE SYSTEMCLINICAL EQUIVALENTCritical business servicesOrgansData flowsCirculatory systemIdentity and accessImmune systemInfrastructureNervous systemTelemetry and monitoringVital signsIncident responseEmergency medicineResilience and recoveryRehabilitationGovernanceClinical leadershipAI oversightAutonomous clinical supervision This is not a metaphor for its own sake. It is an operating model, and it does three things a controls checklist cannot.
It makes diagnosis come before treatment. No competent clinician prescribes before examining. Yet cybersecurity routinely buys tools before it has assessed the patient. A health model requires a clinical intake first — an honest baseline of how the organization is actually functioning — and only then a treatment plan built for that specific patient. It makes health measurable and continuous. A patient’s vital signs are monitored continuously, against known healthy ranges, with the direction of movement mattering as much as the current value. A health model holds cybersecurity to the same standard: Not an annual audit snapshot, but continuous monitoring of the organization’s real condition. It gives every leader one shared question. A heart rhythm is universally legible — a clinician, an administrator and a frightened family member can all read the same monitor and grasp the same essential question: Is the rhythm steady, or is something wrong? Cybersecurity has never had that shared signal. Boards get threat counts and patch percentages; they do not get a pulse. A health model gives technologists, executives and directors one common language for the same reality. Where this fits with the frameworks we already have
This does not replace what works. It completes it.
NIST explains controls — the disciplined architecture of safeguards. MITRE explains adversaries — how attackers think and move. Both are essential. Neither was built to answer whether the organization, as a whole, is well.
NIST tells you whether the safeguards exist. MITRE tells you who is coming for them. A clinical model tells you whether the patient can withstand the encounter — and recover from it. That third question is the one AI is now asking with an urgency the industry has never faced. It is the missing layer, and it sits above the others, not against them.
Why this matters for the CISO and the board
Adopting a health model changes the CISO’s role and changes it for the better.
It moves the CISO out of the position of the technician who reports incidents and into the position of the clinician who reports condition. “Are we secure?” has no good answer. “Here is our organizational health, here are the vital signs trending the wrong way, here is the treatment plan and what it requires” — that is a conversation a board can actually govern with.
It also reframes resilience itself. Resilience is not the redundant infrastructure that restores data. Resilience, properly understood, is the process and outcome of adapting successfully to difficult conditions — through mental, emotional and behavioral flexibility. Backups restore data. Only adaptive people and well-governed systems restore an organization. A health model treats that adaptive capacity as something to be built and measured, not assumed.
And it gives the enterprise a way to think about AI that matches the stakes. If AI is a new organ, it requires what every organ requires: An intake assessment before deployment, continuous monitoring of its condition, defined operating boundaries and clinical-grade governance. AI deployed without that is not a capability. It is an unmonitored risk inside the body it was meant to protect.
It’s time to stop running the emergency room
The reactive era of cybersecurity is ending — not because it failed, but because it was never the whole job. We built a superb emergency room and mistook it for a healthcare system. AI is the force that has made the missing piece impossible to ignore.
The organizations that will lead the next decade will not be the ones with the most tools or the loudest alerts. They will be the ones that can answer a better question than “Are we secure?”
They will be the ones that can say, with evidence: We know how this organism is functioning. We are monitoring its vital signs. We are treating what the diagnosis revealed. And we are building the adaptive capacity to absorb what comes next.
It is time to stop running the emergency room and start practicing medicine.
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AI is exposing the biggest weakness in cybersecurity: We never built a health model. Until now!

For 30 years, cybersecurity has operated like an emergency room.
Reactive. Crisis-driven. Always triaging. We are extraordinarily good at it — our detection is faster, our response playbooks are sharper, our incident teams are more capable than they have ever been. When something goes wrong, the modern security organization runs toward the fire with real skill.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that artificial intelligence is now forcing into the open: An emergency room does not produce a healthy population. Healthcare does that — through prevention, continuous monitoring, early diagnosis and a model of the whole patient.
Cybersecurity never built that model. We built the trauma bay and called it a profession.
For a long time, we got away with it. The threat environment moved at human speed. The gaps in our thinking were survivable. AI has ended that grace period. It has not created a new weakness so much as it has illuminated the oldest one — and it is now moving faster than our reactive posture can absorb.
We do not have a tooling problem. We have a missing-model problem. And until we name it, no amount of investment will fix it.
We’ve been asking — and answering — the wrong question
Walk into almost any boardroom and you will hear the same exchange. A director asks the CISO: “Are we secure?”
It is the wrong question, and most of us have known it for years.
“Secure” is binary. It is a snapshot. It is a yes-or-no answer to something that is actually a living, continuously changing condition. No physician would accept that question from a patient. A doctor does not ask “Are you healthy?” and expect a useful answer. They ask a better set of questions: How are you functioning? What do the vital signs say? What is trending in the wrong direction? What needs attention now, before it becomes a crisis?
Cybersecurity has never adopted that mindset because it never had the model that requires it. We have frameworks for controls. We have frameworks for adversary behavior. We have no widely adopted framework for organizational health — for whether the enterprise, as a whole living system, is well.
That gap was tolerable when threats were slow. It is not tolerable now.
Why AI breaks the reactive model
AI changes three things at once, and each one punishes a reactive posture specifically.
It compresses the timeline. Reconnaissance, exploitation, lateral movement and exfiltration that once unfolded over days now unfold in minutes. An emergency-room model assumes there is time between the symptom and the intervention. AI is closing that window. You cannot triage your way through an attack that completes before the triage begins. It industrializes the routine. AI makes competent attacks cheap and abundant — phishing that is grammatically perfect and contextually aware, deepfaked executives authorizing transfers, vulnerability discovery at machine scale. The reactive model assumes a manageable volume of meaningful events. AI removes that assumption. It introduces a new organ we do not know how to monitor. Every enterprise is now deploying AI systems into its own operations — including its security operations. These systems make decisions, take actions and carry risk. They are, in clinical terms, a new organ inside the body. And most organizations have deployed them with no intake assessment, no monitoring of their condition and no governance of their behavior. We have added an organ to the patient and never checked whether it is healthy. A reactive model has no answer to any of this. You cannot out-triage machine speed. The only viable response is to shift from reaction to health — to build the enterprise’s adaptive capacity before the crisis, not after.
What a health model actually looks like
This is the thinking behind the Clinical Cybersecurity Framework — a model I have developed over two decades in the CISO chair, and one that has resonated strongly enough with peers over the past months to convince me it is naming something the industry already feels.
The premise is simple. An enterprise should be treated less like static infrastructure and more like a living organism — and once leaders see that anatomy clearly, the entire security conversation changes.
Every enterprise has the same essential anatomy:
ENTERPRISE SYSTEMCLINICAL EQUIVALENTCritical business servicesOrgansData flowsCirculatory systemIdentity and accessImmune systemInfrastructureNervous systemTelemetry and monitoringVital signsIncident responseEmergency medicineResilience and recoveryRehabilitationGovernanceClinical leadershipAI oversightAutonomous clinical supervision Patrick Doliny
This is not a metaphor for its own sake. It is an operating model, and it does three things a controls checklist cannot.
It makes diagnosis come before treatment. No competent clinician prescribes before examining. Yet cybersecurity routinely buys tools before it has assessed the patient. A health model requires a clinical intake first — an honest baseline of how the organization is actually functioning — and only then a treatment plan built for that specific patient. It makes health measurable and continuous. A patient’s vital signs are monitored continuously, against known healthy ranges, with the direction of movement mattering as much as the current value. A health model holds cybersecurity to the same standard: Not an annual audit snapshot, but continuous monitoring of the organization’s real condition. It gives every leader one shared question. A heart rhythm is universally legible — a clinician, an administrator and a frightened family member can all read the same monitor and grasp the same essential question: Is the rhythm steady, or is something wrong? Cybersecurity has never had that shared signal. Boards get threat counts and patch percentages; they do not get a pulse. A health model gives technologists, executives and directors one common language for the same reality. Where this fits with the frameworks we already have
This does not replace what works. It completes it.
NIST explains controls — the disciplined architecture of safeguards. MITRE explains adversaries — how attackers think and move. Both are essential. Neither was built to answer whether the organization, as a whole, is well.
NIST tells you whether the safeguards exist. MITRE tells you who is coming for them. A clinical model tells you whether the patient can withstand the encounter — and recover from it. That third question is the one AI is now asking with an urgency the industry has never faced. It is the missing layer, and it sits above the others, not against them.
Patrick Doliny
Why this matters for the CISO and the board
Adopting a health model changes the CISO’s role and changes it for the better.
It moves the CISO out of the position of the technician who reports incidents and into the position of the clinician who reports condition. “Are we secure?” has no good answer. “Here is our organizational health, here are the vital signs trending the wrong way, here is the treatment plan and what it requires” — that is a conversation a board can actually govern with.
It also reframes resilience itself. Resilience is not the redundant infrastructure that restores data. Resilience, properly understood, is the process and outcome of adapting successfully to difficult conditions — through mental, emotional and behavioral flexibility. Backups restore data. Only adaptive people and well-governed systems restore an organization. A health model treats that adaptive capacity as something to be built and measured, not assumed.
And it gives the enterprise a way to think about AI that matches the stakes. If AI is a new organ, it requires what every organ requires: An intake assessment before deployment, continuous monitoring of its condition, defined operating boundaries and clinical-grade governance. AI deployed without that is not a capability. It is an unmonitored risk inside the body it was meant to protect.
Patrick Doliny
It’s time to stop running the emergency room
The reactive era of cybersecurity is ending — not because it failed, but because it was never the whole job. We built a superb emergency room and mistook it for a healthcare system. AI is the force that has made the missing piece impossible to ignore.
The organizations that will lead the next decade will not be the ones with the most tools or the loudest alerts. They will be the ones that can answer a better question than “Are we secure?”
They will be the ones that can say, with evidence: We know how this organism is functioning. We are monitoring its vital signs. We are treating what the diagnosis revealed. And we are building the adaptive capacity to absorb what comes next.
It is time to stop running the emergency room and start practicing medicine.
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‘Harvest now, decipher later’: The quantum threat few are preparing for

Quantum technology may feel far off but certain risks are already with us in the form of “harvest now, decrypt later” — an attack vector in which malicious actors steal data now for a future in which they have access to quantum computational tools capable of breaking encryption deployed by most companies today to protect their data.
Despite increasing discussion surrounding this issue, not all organizations are aware of the risk. According to a 2025 ISACA survey, only 5% of cyber professionals considered the threat a high priority, despite two-thirds being concerned about quantum’s future ability to break encryption. That 5% was the same percentage of organizations that had defined a strategy to prepare for the quantum threat, according to the survey’s findings.
Contrary to the rhetoric of a “Q-Day” — a pivotal date on which classical cryptography will be broken by quantum computers — organizations such as the European think tank CEPS warn that this possibility will not arrive suddenly, but gradually.
“We’ve been waiting for some time for something like a quantum computer, which will likely allow us to break traditional encryption systems in a seemingly simple way,” explains Félix Barrio, director general of Spanish national cybersecurity institute INCIBE, via video call. “Although this has been demonstrated theoretically and we haven’t yet seen computers with that capability, there are different estimates,” ranging from a few months to a decade.
Barrio notes, however, that such computational power will probably only be available to a few entities, generally government agencies, given their high cost.
The first three standards for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) encryption were published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2024.
“These are algorithms that could supposedly withstand a quantum attack using a quantum computer,” Barrio says. Currently, these algorithms are being tested and adapted to various technologies.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) — a quantum-like system that could be applied to data transmission over cable, adapted fiber optic cable, or satellite — establishes an alternative key exchange system that, through properties of quantum physics, functions as an early warning mechanism in case of detected breaches or intrusions, enabling compromised keys to be discarded.
The EU has already designed a roadmap for the transition to post-quantum cryptography, which sets the end of 2026 as the first phase for deploying these tools, with 2030 as the deadline for high-risk use cases and 2035 for the rest.
Barrio explains that INCIBE has allocated part of the resources from its innovative public procurement program to advanced cryptography resistant to quantum attacks, funding five initiatives located in different cities in Spain.
“In Spain, we have taken the lead in investing in this transition phase with the most promising projects we have identified in these public calls for proposals, and over these three years we have been working to ensure that test systems using Spanish technology can be offered and that these systems can also be commercialized,” he notes. “In Europe, in general, when you talk to other cybersecurity agencies, they are genuinely concerned.”
Where the sector stands on quantum resilience
“Today we take for granted that communications with our bank or healthcare systems are private, and that digital signatures — for example, those that support financial transactions or cryptocurrencies — are unforgeable. The impact of these guarantees becoming invalid is enormous, both economically and socially,” Alberto de Mercado, manager of systems engineering for service providers at Fortinet, tells Computerworld Spain via email.
From a cybersecurity vendor’s perspective, De Mercado speaks of the need to “implement a phased transition strategy,” taking into account elements such as the type of information exchanged and its need for long-term confidentiality, available resources, compatibility with the existing architecture, and prioritization over other more immediate cybersecurity risks.
“In this context, the concept of cryptoagility is key: deploying solutions that allow for the agile change or combination of cryptographic algorithms when necessary, guaranteeing service continuity without needing to completely redesign the architecture or change providers,” he says.
De Mercado calls for “acting now” when dealing with sensitive information that must remain confidential long-term.
“In these cases, waiting for absolute certainty means taking a risk that may be unacceptable,” he says, adding the regulatory factor: Although there is no explicit European regulation on the subject, it can be linked to regulations such as GDPR, NIS2, or DORA, which establish protection obligations, “without explicitly limiting the time frame.”
“From this perspective, organizations that handle sensitive information long-term must begin to consider this risk as part of their security assessments,” he says, a trend that also applies to cybersecurity providers, “who are progressively incorporating quantum-safe algorithms and mechanisms into their products,” as is the case with Fortinet.
Regarding current demand, De Mercado observes an initial trend toward PQC, “as it requires less investment and is easier to integrate into existing environments. QKD is reserved for very specific scenarios, such as highly sensitive interconnections between large headquarters or data centers.”
Overall, he perceives an “uneven” level of concern, with the most regulated sectors or those with the highest confidentiality requirements at a more advanced stage of testing, transition planning, or even initial deployments of secure communications.
“Generally, the more mature an organization is in cybersecurity, the better it is at mitigating immediate risks and the greater its capacity to anticipate emerging threats such as quantum computing,” he says.
How to protect yourself
From the banking sector, CaixaBank addresses the quantum threat “understanding that it is a real risk and, as such, must be managed proactively,” a company representative said via email.
“The risk is already relevant, and it is necessary to have mitigation measures in place now,” the representative continued. “At the same time, the approach is not simply to replace one encryption algorithm with another, but to equip the bank with the necessary crypto agility to be able to rotate keys, change cryptographic models, or adopt new standards quickly and in a controlled manner when necessary. In this way, not only is this specific threat mitigated, but the bank’s resilience and preparedness for future technological changes are structurally strengthened.”
The firm itself is already developing a comprehensive plan, currently under way, with 2029 as the target date for a robust crypto-agility model. This plan has two complementary dimensions. On the one hand, it includes the new PQC schemes, which the bank is currently analyzing to determine how they can be incorporated in an orderly fashion.
“The goal is to ensure that the bank is technically prepared to protect both data in transit and data at rest, as these new standards reach the necessary maturity,” the bank’s representative said. But “the approach goes far beyond a one-off technological transition, taking the opportunity to build a structurally more robust, automated, and repeatable model that will allow for much greater agility in implementing any cryptographic changes in the future.”
CaixaBank is also participating in European projects to validate practical post-quantum security solutions applicable to the financial sector, as well as in industry forums such as the Quantum Safe Financial Forum (QSFF), where they “share experiences, define best practices, and contribute to a transition that is realistic, interoperable, and aligned with the sector’s regulatory requirements,” according to the bank’s representative.
With the quantum threat becoming increasingly prevalent, reviewing the cybersecurity model will soon be imperative for all companies.
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Instagram and WhatsApp Down Today on iPhone [Updated]

Meta platforms including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger are currently experiencing issues for some users around the world.


Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger are down or loading intermittently for some users across devices like the iPhone and the web. In addition, some affected users are receiving an unexpected error when attempting to log in.

The outages have been reported by users on Downdetector.com.

"We're aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services," said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. "We're working on it."

Update — 9 a.m. Pacific Time: "We're coming back, though it may take a bit of time for everything to be fully back to normal," said Stone.Tags: Instagram, WhatsApp
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Europol Disrupts AudiA6 Crypto Laundering Service Used by Ransomware Gangs

Authorities in Europe have disrupted AudiA6, a cryptocurrency laundering service used by ransomware gangs and cybercriminal networks. Europol, in a statement issued Thursday, said the dismantling of AudiA6 cut off a "key financial pipeline used to wash hundreds of millions in illicit profits." The service is estimated to have been used to launder more than €336 million (~$389 million) since theView the full article
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iOS 27: All the New Health and Fitness Features

Apple was rumored to be working on an AI health service, but it was scrapped well before the iOS 27 beta came out. It could resurface in the future, but for now, there are a handful of health and fitness changes in the update.


Design

Apple redesigned the Browse section of the Health app, and it now uses a card-style interface instead of a list. It is more colorful and easier to see the different categories.


The app also has a single bottom navigation bar that incorporates a search/browse button, instead of a separate search button.

Visual Intelligence

Visual Intelligence has a new nutrition feature that can tell you the nutritional value of what you're eating. You can open the Camera app to the new Siri mode and take a photo of a food item to get feedback.


It does not give exact calorie counts, but it lets you know if a food is heavily processed, if it has protein, if it's high in sugar, and more. It gives food a nutritional value ranking between very low and very high. Data does not sync to the Health app, but it's still useful.

‌Visual Intelligence‌ requires an iPhone 15 Pro or later.

Cycle Tracking

Cycle Tracking is expanding with perimenopause/menopause support. The Health app now sends notifications when logged cycle patterns are suggestive of perimenopause.


The feature uses long-term cycle data to flag the perimenopause hormonal transition that can begin a decade or more before menopause. Cycle deviation alerts are based on the user's logged cycle history and are for users age 40 and above.

Users can keep track of symptoms and access educational resources that offer guidance and support.

Apple also added new Fitness+ workouts for perimenopause and menopause.

Faster Data Updates

Data syncs to the Health app quicker than before thanks to performance improvements Apple implemented.

Child Safety

There are several new Child Safety features that give parents more control over the content their children are seeing. Apple is including guidance based on expert health research to help parents make decisions about managing child accounts.


Route and Distance Accuracy

Route maps that populate the Fitness app after workouts are more accurate in ‌iOS 27‌. During treadmill workouts, distance is also reflected more accurately than before.

Step Count

Step counts will sync between the Health and Fitness apps.

GymKit

GymKit has expanded to the iPhone, which can pair with treadmills, indoor bikes, and other exercise equipment for data syncing. GymKit was previously an Apple Watch feature, but now iPhone users won't need a watch to use it.

GymKit can sync calories, distance, speed, incline, and pace.

Launch Date

‌iOS 27‌ is available to developers, with a public beta planned for July. It will launch to the public this fall.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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Apple's Craig Federighi: Siri Won't Be Your AI Girlfriend

Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi and marketing chief Greg Joswiak sat down for an interview with Mostly Human after during WWDC, discussing the iOS 27 Siri changes, Apple's take on AI, new child safety protections, and more.


Apple set out to deliver an AI utility, not an AI companion. When asked whether users could create an AI boyfriend or girlfriend with the new Siri, Federighi said absolutely not. ‌Siri‌ is meant to help, and Apple didn't want to focus on engagement like other AI companies. From Federighi:

Joswiak said Apple didn't want to do AI for AI's sake, and the company wanted AI to blend in with existing iPhone features.

He went on to say that he doesn't want iPhone users to have to be "prompt experts" to use AI. "We want to meet them where they're at," said Joswiak. "Have the products and features become better, and this is just a really helpful technology in making those features and products better."

Federighi wanted to make it clear that Apple's approach to AI is privacy forward.

The full interview covers other topics like child safety, AI and jobs, iOS 27 features, Apple's 50th anniversary, the future of AI, scammers, and much more.Tags: Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, Siri
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Apple Criticizes U.S. Antitrust Bill That Targets the App Store

United States Senators Chuck Grassley and Amy Klobuchar this week reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) that targets major tech companies like Apple, and Apple is not happy to see it back.


The bipartisan bill is reminiscent of the Digital Markets Act in the European Union, banning large platforms from favoring their own products or services, limiting competitors' access to key platform features, locking users into default settings, and more. It is a reworked version of the same bill that did not reach a floor vote back in 2022.

In a statement to MacRumors, Apple said AICOA will undermine privacy, security, and child safety protections, while also making it more difficult to do business in the U.S.

AICOA aims to "restore online competition and affordability" by preventing digital platforms from "abusing their market power to stifle competition, undercut online businesses and raise prices for American consumers." It would permit the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and state attorneys general to challenge online platforms for exclusionary conduct that harms competition.

It is applicable to platforms that have at least $175 billion in average annual gross revenue and reach 34 percent of U.S. subscriber households or 34 percent of U.S. monthly active users over the age of 12. Apple would be subject to the restrictions should AICOA pass. Companies are barred from the following under the current AICOA wording:

Unfairly favoring their own products or services.
Misusing nonpublic business-user data to copy and compete against small businesses.
Unfairly limiting competitors' access to key platform features.
Blocking business users from accessing or moving their own data from one digital platform to another.
Retaliating against users or business users who raise legal concerns.
Unfairly enforcing terms of service in ways that harm competition.
Conditioning companies' access to the platform, or product placement on the platform, on purchase or use of unrelated services.
Locking users into default settings.
Skewing ranking or presentation against similarly situated business users.

Apple says AICOA would have the same impact as the Digital Markets Act, harming innovation, weakening privacy protections, and delaying new product features. Most recently, Apple said it would not be able to bring Siri AI to the European Union when iOS 27 launches because of an inability to reach an agreement with the European Commission on the DMA's interoperability rules.

Like the DMA, AICOA would allow for third-party app marketplaces and alternative payment methods, which Apple maintains will undermine the user protections of the App Store. Apple also says the AICOA rules mandating open platform access would give the most sensitive user data to any company that wants it.

Bill sponsors say AICOA was written to "preserve safety, privacy, intellectual property, national security and constitutional protections," and that it includes language to ensure covered platforms are able to prevent fraud and protect safety, user privacy, nonpublic data, or platform security.

Along with Apple, AICOA would impact Google, Amazon, and Meta. It is endorsed by Mozilla, Proton, DuckDuckGo, Yelp, and Y Combinator, among others. Senators Josh Hawley, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Cory Booker are co-sponsors.Tags: act, Apple Antitrust, App Store
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What's New in the iOS 27 Photos App

The Photos app is one of a handful of apps that Apple paid extra attention to in iOS 27. It has multiple improvements to performance, and several quality-of-life upgrades. There are also new AI photo editing tools that use Apple Intelligence.


AI Tools

There is a set of AI photo editing tools in the ‌Photos‌ app, accessible by tapping on the icon featuring three sliders, and then selecting the ‌Apple Intelligence‌ icon labeled "Tools."

Clean Up

Clean Up uses new AI models, and it's better at removing objects. The original version of Clean Up was best for small items with little complexity in the surrounding area, but now it is able to do more work reconstructing backgrounds with generative AI.


There are now three options for object removal. Fast works more quickly and can still be used for simple edits, while High Quality works better for more detailed scenes. Auto lets the ‌Photos‌ app decide which option is best.

Extend

Extend lets you change the crop of an image, expanding the borders around content to zoom out a bit or change the photo's composition. It uses generative AI to fill in missing areas, and you can adjust the borders with pinch gestures.


Apple also uses the Extend feature for expanding iPhone Lock Screen wallpapers that don't quite fit the display.

Reframe

Reframe can change the perspective of the photo, making adjustments to the angle of a person or object. It draws on the spatial information the iPhone gathers when a photo is taken, and combines it with AI to change the angle of the camera in post-processing. The spatial data is used for adjusting the subject of the image, and then AI fills in any pixels that are missing.


Reframe uses touch and drag gestures to adjust perspective, and two fingers for panning, zooming, or rotating an image to get the right angle.

Image Playground

While not part of the ‌Photos‌ app, the Image Playground app can be used to make photorealistic edits to your image. If you have a photo of a friend and want to add a hat or an accessory that looks real, you can do so with ‌Image Playground‌. You can select specific areas in an image to modify and make AI edits using natural language, plus there's an option to combine images.


‌Image Playground‌ can be used for free, but there will be daily caps, with extra usage available through iCloud+ plans.

Videos to Photos

You can now save a frame of a video as an individual photo.


Metadata

Apple now lets you add keywords and star ratings to photos and videos in the ‌Photos‌ app. You can rate images with one to five stars and then filter images by rating.


Album Changes

Apple improved album organization in ‌iOS 27‌ and added new features for Shared Albums, including an option for Android and Windows users to contribute to ‌iCloud‌ albums.

Shared Albums can be filtered by photos or videos.
It's easier to save images from Shared Albums.
You can set Shared Albums to expire after 30 days, which is useful for sharing photos without having a permanent album.
It's easier to invite people to Shared Albums with a dedicated "Create Shared Album" option in any album menu.
You can create a link for people to upload images to a Shared Album, and there are new permissions so you can require explicit access to be granted.
Shared Albums have a recent activity log.
You can react to images in Shared Albums with any emoji.

Slideshows

You can create a slideshow from any album or collection of images in the ‌Photos‌ app instead of being limited to what's in the Memories section. Just tap into an album, tap the icon in the upper right of the display, and choose "Start Slideshow." Alternatively, select several photos and then follow the same steps from the main Library interface.


Slideshows can be customized with transition styles, slide duration, and background music. The resulting file can be shared on social media, and saved as a video.

Utilities

There are two new Utilities folders in the ‌Photos‌ app. Captured by Me includes all of the images that you've taken from the Camera app on your current or past iPhone, while Identity Documents aggregates pictures of passports, licenses, and similar documents.


iCloud

In the ‌Photos‌ section of the Settings app, there's a "Sync Immediately" option that lets you prioritize immediate ‌iCloud‌ uploads for the day.


With the setting enabled, iCloud Photos will sync as soon as new images enter the ‌Photos‌ Library instead of holding uploads to save battery.

Full-resolution photos and videos can be added to ‌iCloud‌ Shared Albums, with support for all common photo and video formats.

Other Changes




You can select a specific pet to use with the Photo Shuffle wallpaper.
Search returns more pleasing photos of people and pets in Top Results.
The Collections tab is faster to render.
New captures from the Camera app load quicker in ‌Photos‌.
You can include images of yourself in Photo Shuffle.
A "Show Selected" option in the Library shows you all of the photos you have checked so you can modify metadata.

Compatibility

The AI photo editing tools are available on devices that support ‌Apple Intelligence‌, which includes the iPhone 15 Pro and later. Performance and organizational tools are available on devices that run ‌iOS 27‌, which includes the iPhone 11 and later.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Photos
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iOS 27's Weather App Has a New Way to View Forecasts

Starting with iOS 27, Apple's Weather app offers new hourly and 10-day overviews for precipitation and wind that you can quickly view at a glance.


While this sort of information was already accessible elsewhere in the app, you can now quickly tap between conditions, precipitation, and wind overviews.

You can view the percentage chance of rain or snow each hour and day, as well as estimated wind speeds, and the information is accompanied by visuals.

iOS 27 is currently in beta. The update is expected to be released in September.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Apple Weather
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iOS 27 Lets You Add Apple TV Remote to Your iPhone's Home Screen

Starting with iOS 27, the virtual Apple TV remote can be added to the iPhone's Home Screen again, rather than being limited to Control Center. To do so, swipe down on the Home Screen and search for "remote." Next, tap and hold on the Remote app and drag it to your Home Screen. Alternatively, you can find it in the App Library.

Apple used to offer an Apple TV Remote app in the App Store, but it was removed in 2020.Related Roundups: Apple TV, iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Home ScreenBuyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple TV and Home Theater
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Apple Touts 'World's Best' AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancellation in New Vini Jr. Ad

Apple today shared a new ad highlighting AirPods Pro 3 Active Noise Cancellation.


The ad stars Vini Jr., a Brazilian professional footballer who plays for Real Madrid and the Brazil national team, and it arrives as the 2026 FIFA World Cup gets underway. In the spot, Vini Jr. dances through the streets to music only he can hear.

Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak shared the video on social media, and a short version is also on Apple's AirPods Pro 3 website.

Apple says the ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ have the "world's best in-ear Active Noise Cancellation" based on a July 2025 evaluation in accordance with IEC 60268–24 as compared with best-selling commercially available wireless in-ear headphones. The ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ remove up to 2x more noise than the AirPods Pro 2, and up to 4x more than the original AirPods Pro.

The ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ are priced at $249, and along with Active Noise Cancellation, the earbuds feature spatial audio, heart rate sensing, hearing aid functionality, Live Translation, and more.Related Roundup: AirPods Pro 3Tags: AirPods Pro 3, Apple AdsBuyer's Guide: AirPods Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: AirPods
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iOS 27's Wi-Fi Settings Include Rebranded 'Connectivity Assist' Feature

iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 include a rebranded Connectivity Assist feature that can help your iPhone stay connected to the internet.


Connectivity Assist can be found in the Settings app under Wi-Fi on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Apple's description of the feature says it lets you "use cellular data in addition to Wi-Fi for a more reliable internet connection."

A support document on Apple's website confirms that Connectivity Assist is the new name used on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 for the feature previously known as Wi-Fi Assist, but it is unclear if there are any functionality changes.

On iOS 26 and earlier, Wi-Fi Assist automatically switches the device to cellular data when Wi-Fi connectivity is poor. Some early iOS 27 beta testers have speculated that Connectivity Assist seems to go further by offering combined Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity when it is active, but we have yet to confirm that claim.

On the iOS 27 beta, Flighty developer Ryan Jones and others have received a new "Intelligent Connectivity" notification when Connectivity Assist is active. It is possible that the feature now kicks in more aggressively.

On a related note, Apple said iOS 27 offers "smoother network transitions" in general.

"Your iPhone more seamlessly chooses the best available Wi‑Fi or cellular connection, so whether you're getting directions as you leave home or taking a FaceTime call as you step off a plane, you'll stay connected," the company explained.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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AAPL Stock Slides Following WWDC, But Analysts Broadly Raise Targets

Apple shares have lost roughly $25 per share this week following the company's WWDC 2026 keynote, though a wave of upward analyst price target revisions suggests Wall Street's longer-term view of Apple remains constructive.


According to Tech Times, AAPL hit an all-time intraday high of around $317.40 on June 8 during the unveiling of Siri AI, before reversing to close at $301.54, down 1.89%. The slide continued over the following two days, with shares falling to around $290.55 by the close of June 10. The stock is trading around $292 as of writing.

The drop has been attributed in part to mixed investor reaction to ‌Siri‌ AI. ‌Siri‌ AI will not launch on iPhone and iPad in the European Union due to compliance issues, and the feature faces a similarly delayed rollout in China due to regulatory hurdles. According to Yahoo Finance, Morgan Stanley estimates those two excluded markets together account for roughly 35% of trailing 12-month iPhone shipments.

The analyst community's response to this year's WWDC has been broadly positive, with several firms raising their price targets. TheStreet reports that TD Cowen raised its Apple price target to $350 from $335, Maxim Group raised its target to $350 from $310, and Morgan Stanley raised its target to $360, all maintaining Buy or Overweight ratings.

JPMorgan reiterated its Overweight rating with a $325 price target, while Jefferies held its target at $299.88. According to Investing.com, Bernstein reiterated an Outperform rating and a $350 price target, while UBS maintained a Neutral rating with a $296 target. Maxim Group increased its fiscal 2027 projections on the expectation that improvements in AI-related products will serve as a catalyst for both services and hardware sales.

TradingKey characterized the post-WWDC selloff as a classic "buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news" reaction, noting that Apple's second quarter results of $111.2 billion in revenue and a $31 billion services all-time high remain unchanged by any of the WWDC announcements.

The September iPhone event will be the next major test for investors and the first keynote under incoming CEO John Ternus.Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tags: AAPL, WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
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Apple Agrees to Let Jon Prosser Formally Contest iOS 26 Leak Lawsuit

Apple and leaker Jon Prosser have jointly asked a federal court to set aside the default judgment entered against him last October, with Prosser agreeing to hand over documents he had thus far failed to fully produce.


Apple filed suit against Prosser and Michael Ramacciotti in July 2025, alleging misappropriation of trade secrets after Prosser published videos showing recreated renderings of iOS 26's Liquid Glass design months before Apple's announcement. According to the complaint, Ramacciotti secretly accessed the iPhone of Apple software engineer Ethan Lipnik and showed Prosser a pre-release build of the software in exchange for payment. Lipnik was subsequently fired.

Prosser missed his deadline to formally respond to the complaint, prompting Apple's lawyers to file a request for a default judgment. The court entered the default in October 2025, after which Prosser told The Verge he had "been in active communications with Apple since the beginning stages of this case."

The situation did not improve significantly in the months that followed. A joint status report filed in April showed Prosser was still failing to comply with discovery, prompting Apple to seek a court order to compel him. The filing noted that while Prosser had provided some responsive materials, he had failed to fully respond to certain requests and had not responded at all to others.

This stood in contrast to Ramacciotti, who allowed Apple to forensically review an additional device, agreed to supplement his interrogatory responses, and offered to sit for a follow-up deposition, with Apple and Ramacciotti having been informally discussing a potential settlement since at least October.

Prosser did not retain legal counsel until April 14, 2026. According to the joint stipulation filed June 9, Apple served Prosser with subpoenas in January 2026 seeking documents and a deposition related to its claims against Ramacciotti, but Prosser had not fully responded to the document subpoena and had not sat for a deposition.

As part of the agreement, Prosser committed to producing all materials responsive to Apple's document subpoena by June 9, 2026, and to sit for a deposition by no later than June 16, 2026. Apple stated it believes setting aside the default is "the most efficient way to advance this case without further delay."

The stipulation still requires approval from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. If approved, Prosser would have ten days from the date of the order to file a responsive pleading to Apple's complaint, giving him a formal opportunity to contest the allegations for the first time.Related Roundups: iOS 26, iPadOS 26Tags: Jon Prosser, Apple LawsuitsRelated Forum: iOS 26
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Apple Bucks Smartphone Slump With Production Surge

A new report from TrendForce claims Apple's iPhone production surged 19.7% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, even as the broader global smartphone market contracted 1.7% over the same period.


According to TrendForce, Apple produced approximately 60.2 million iPhone units in the first quarter, placing it second among global smartphone brands. Samsung retained the top spot with approximately 62.6 million units, a 2.3% year-over-year increase. TrendForce attributes Apple's strong output partly to the launch of the iPhone 17e, in addition to ongoing production ramp-up for the broader iPhone 17 lineup.

The figures reflect Apple's relative resilience in a market increasingly burdened by rising memory component costs. TrendForce says Apple is better positioned than most competitors to absorb those higher costs without sacrificing profitability, and suggests the company is more likely to prioritize market share growth during the current downturn as it lays the groundwork for its expanding software and services business. Apple is one of the few major smartphone brands that has not raised prices in response to the memory price surge.

The picture is considerably grimmer elsewhere. Chinese brands Oppo, Xiaomi, and Vivo ranked third through fifth globally with 29.5 million, 26 million, and 22 million units respectively, with TrendForce warning that all three face significant uncertainty around their 2026 production plans as surging memory costs weigh on profitability. Transsion, which ranked sixth at approximately 19.8 million units, is said to be particularly exposed given its heavy concentration in entry-level and budget segments where margins are already thin.

Looking ahead, TrendForce forecasts global smartphone production will decline approximately 16.2% year-over-year to 1.051 billion units across 2026. The firm warns that figure could worsen if memory prices remain elevated and brands are forced to pass costs on to consumers through repeated retail price increases.Tag: TrendForce
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Touchscreen MacBook '100% Confirmed,' Says Reputable Leaker

Apple's first touchscreen MacBook is now "100% confirmed," according to the prolific Chinese leaker known as Instant Digital, who appears to have insider information from sources in the supply chain. The leaker made their definitive statement this morning in a Weibo post.


Instant Digital has a good track record for Apple rumors and has provided some strikingly accurate information in the past, so it's always worth noting what they have to say about Apple's plans. The claim is also backed by several recent reports.

Recurring rumors about Apple's touchscreen MacBook development actually go back a few years. In January 2023, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that a MacBook Pro with an OLED display would be the first touchscreen Mac. The machine was initially slated for 2025, but that timeline never played out.

Since then, reports have become more frequent and assertive. In September 2025, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said the first touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro would enter mass production in 2026. Gurman has also repeatedly stated that the next 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models will have touchscreen and are slated to launch in late 2026 to early 2027 – with the global memory chip shortage potentially making 2027 more likely.

Touchscreen support is expected to be one of several major upgrades coming to Apple's next-generation high-end MacBook Pro models. Other rumored features include M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, an OLED display, a Dynamic Island (i.e., no notch), and a thinner design. The new laptops could also adopt MacBook Ultra branding.

Notably, macOS 27 Golden Gate also introduces a more touch-friendly interface, since Apple's Sidecar feature now allows users to tap and interact with macOS interface elements using a finger on their iPad.

Apple apparently is not going to advertise the ‌new MacBook Pro‌/Ultra as a touch-first device like the ‌iPad‌ – it will be "touch-friendly, not touch-first," according to Gurman. In that sense, Apple will let customers use touch and mouse gestures interchangeably for all functions.

Apple has long rejected the idea of a touchscreen Mac, so moving ahead with one would be a major shift in the company's thinking. In 2010, Steve Jobs argued that "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical," citing the arm fatigue that comes from repeatedly reaching up to a screen.

More than a decade later, in 2021, Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus – soon to be Apple CEO – said the Mac was "totally optimized for indirect input" and that Apple saw no compelling reason to change that approach.

Are you looking forward to touching a future MacBook's screen? Let us know in the comments.Related Roundup: MacBook ProTag: Instant DigitalBuyer's Guide: MacBook Pro (Buy Now)Related Forum: MacBook Pro
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macOS 27 Golden Gate Reverses a Divisive Tahoe Design Choice

In macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple has removed many of the menu item icons that are so prevalent throughout macOS 26 Tahoe, as spotted by Nikita "Tonsky" Prokopov (via Daring Fireball). The developer shared before-and-after screenshots on Mastodon to evidence the reversal.

Menu item icons in macOS 26 (left) vs. macOS 27 (image: Nikita Prokopov)
Tahoe was the first version of macOS to place a small icon next to nearly every entry in the menu bar across Apple's apps, but the change drew swift criticism from designers and developers. Many of the icons are inconsistent and often difficult to understand on their own, with different Apple apps showing different icons for the same menu items.

The third-party developer pushback was strong enough that some even adopted open-source code provided by NetNewsWire's Brent Simmons to switch the icons off by default.

In Golden Gate though, they're gone – or only used where genuinely useful. Apple has also revised its Human Interface Guidelines to tell developers to use menu item icons "sparingly and with purpose," reserving them for common actions, file system locations, connected devices, and similar cases.

macOS 27 is currently in developer beta, with a public beta to arrive next month, followed by a general release in the fall.Related Roundups: macOS Tahoe, macOS Golden GateRelated Forum: macOS Tahoe
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These Are the Lowest Prices Ever on AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods Max 2

Yesterday we began tracking a new record low price on the AirPods Pro 3 on Amazon, and they're still available for $179.00 today, down from $249.00. This beats the previous Amazon low price by $20.

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.

$70 OFFAirPods Pro 3 for $179.00

Additionally, Amazon is also offering a best-ever price on the AirPods Max 2 this week. You can get all five colors for $499.00, down from $549.00, which beats the previous low price by about $10.

$50 OFFAirPods Max 2 for $499.00

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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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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Apple Introduces Major App Store Subscription Overhaul at WWDC 2026

Apple announced a sweeping set of new subscription tools for App Store developers at WWDC 2026, including cross-developer subscription bundles, group and enterprise purchasing options, retention tools, and a streamlined submission workflow.



Subscription Bundles and Suites

The main change is a new Bundle and Suite system that lets developers partner with each other to offer combined subscriptions spanning multiple apps for the first time. Previously, developers could only bundle subscriptions within their own catalog. With Bundles, subscribers can purchase access to multiple subscriptions in a single transaction rather than buying each individually.

Suites go a step further, offering a set of subscriptions that are not available standalone, purchasable as a single subscription. Apple says more details on how to request Bundle and Suite functionality will be available later this summer.

The move mirrors strategies common among streaming services. For example, Apple TV itself offers Peacock as an add-on for $2 per month, and subscription bundles are generally associated with stronger user retention than standalone plans.

Retention Messaging

Retention Messaging is a new tool that lets developers reach subscribers at the moment they choose to cancel. Developers can deliver custom messaging about a subscription's value alongside imagery and even attach a special offer, without adding friction to the cancellation flow.

Retention Messages can be configured in ‌App Store‌ Connect or via a new Retention Messaging API for more direct, real-time interaction with subscribers. The feature is coming this fall.

Group and Volume Purchasing

Apple is also introducing two new ways for developers to sell subscriptions beyond individual consumers. Group Purchases let a single subscriber buy multiple seats and invite others to join, with Apple handling the invitation flow. Each member joins from their own account, making it straightforward to manage who is in the group.

Volume Purchasing makes subscriptions available to enterprise and education buyers through Apple School Manager and Apple Business, fitting into existing device and identity management workflows.

Volume Purchasing is coming this fall and Group Purchases will arrive later this year.

12-Month Commitment Plans

Monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment, which offer a more affordable payment option for subscribers, are now available. Subscribers can view their completed and remaining payments in their Apple Account, and Apple will send email reminders ahead of renewal dates, with push notifications available for those who have opted in.

The payment type is available on iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, macOS Tahoe 26.4, tvOS 26.4, and visionOS 26.4 or later, everywhere except the United States and Singapore.

Streamlined Submission Workflow

There is also an overhauled in-app purchase submission workflow in ‌App Store‌ Connect. Developers can now group multiple in-app purchases, including subscriptions, into a single submission, or combine them with In-App Events, custom product pages, and product page optimization tests, with review status and App Review messages all visible in one centralized view.

Support for ‌App Store‌ Connect's web interface and the ‌App Store‌ Connect API is coming later this summer.Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tags: App Store, WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
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iOS 27 Improves FaceTime in Three Ways

iOS 27 includes three enhancements for FaceTime, with the most notable one being a dual camera feature on some newer iPhone models.


On the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air, a Dual Capture feature allows you to record video of yourself and what is in front of you at the same time. Starting with iOS 27, this feature is now supported in the FaceTime app on these devices, allowing you to show both your front and rear camera views on a video call.

9to5Mac tested the feature on the iOS 27 beta, as seen in the screenshot below. Tapping on the camera flip button in the bottom-left corner of the viewfinder automatically turns on Dual Capture mode and begins showing the rear camera view alongside the front camera view. You can turn off the front camera view at any time if you prefer to.


If the person on the other end of the call has an older iPhone, they can still view your dual camera feed as long as their device is running iOS 27.

The other two FaceTime improvements on iOS 27:Improved FaceTime quality on poor connections
Live Captions are now available in Traditional ChineseiOS 27 is currently available in developer beta, with a public beta to follow in July. The update is expected to be released widely in September.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: FaceTime
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ServiceNow fixes API issue after reports of suspicious tenant activity

ServiceNow is notifying customers after discovering and remediating a vulnerability that could have exposed data via an unauthenticated API endpoint on affected instances.
The issue emerged publicly after customers began discussing security notifications from ServiceNow and reports of suspicious activity linked to their environments.
According to the company’s advisory, the vulnerability was initially reported through ServiceNow’s bug bounty program in April, prompting an investigation and subsequent security updates. ServiceNow said hosted customers received a security update (KB3067321)  on June 5, while guidance (KB3067372) was issued for self-hosted deployments.
The flaw appears to have affected tenants running specific versions and configurations. Cory Michal, CISO at SaaS and AI security company AppOmni, said the issue involved “An unauthenticated, internet-facing ServiceNow API endpoint” that could be accessed without authentication when certain conditions were present.
“In practical terms, anyone who knew the endpoint URL and how to structure the request could access data from the affected ServiceNow tenant without authenticating first,” Michal said.
Because ServiceNow often stores IT service requests, employee information, and internal security data, unauthorized access to customer instances can pose significant risks to enterprises.
The advisory said that suspicious activity highlighted in security notifications sent to customers can, so far, be linked to security researchers investigating the vulnerability.
An API endpoint from a specific release was impacted
While ServiceNow’s advisory offered few technical details about the vulnerability itself, customers discussing the issue on Reddit have mentioned the affected endpoint as “/api/now/related_list_edit/create,” an API that could allegedly be queried without authentication under certain circumstances. The API shipped with “requires_authentication = false”.
The same discussions point to only ServiceNow’s Australia release being impacted, as ServiceNow reportedly told customers through private security notifications. This suggested that release-specific changes may have played a role in the exposure.
However, customers were far from convinced that the issue was confined to a single release. Several participants speculated that older releases with particular configurations may also have been vulnerable.
“Don’t assume you’re safe just because you’re on a different release,” one of them commented. Speaking of the impacted API, the user added, “That’s a config flag, not a release-specific code change. Worth pulling up your own instance’s Scripted REST API table and auditing any resources where that checkbox is unchecked, especially anything that hasn’t been touched since before 2022.”
Researchers, attackers, or both?
The important question surrounding the incident is whether the activity observed against affected ServiceNow environments was solely the work of security researchers or whether malicious actors may also have taken advantage of the flaw.
ServiceNow confirmed that unauthorized access could all be attributed to research attempts. “We have reason to believe the observed activity can be attributed to security researchers or customers conducting their own research,” the company said, adding a “however”. “Our investigation is ongoing, however, and subject to additional validation.”
Michal urged caution before assuming all observed activity was benign.
“The attribution question is less clear,” he said. “At least one system publicly associated with exploitation of this vulnerability appears to have targeted tenants of other SaaS platforms with similar unauthenticated-access weaknesses. So while researcher activity clearly occurred, I would be cautious about saying all observed activity was benign research until the investigation is complete.”
Customers urged to investigate, not just patch
While ServiceNow says fixes and mitigations are available, Michal warns that applying updates should be only the first step.
According to him, organizations should definitely verify that the June 5 security update has been applied or that recommended mitigations have been implemented for self-hosted deployments. Just as importantly, they should also examine historical logs for evidence of exploitation.
“Review ServiceNow access and transaction logs for known IoC, unauthenticated requests to the affected API endpoint, and unusual table or field queries, ideally covering at least the last 90 days,” he said. “If suspicious activity is found, determine which data was accessed and treat it as an incident investigation, not just a patching exercise.”
ServiceNow reassured customers that mitigations have been applied and that it continues to investigate the incident internally. “Based on our investigation to date, it appears that a subset of customer instances were queried successfully as part of this activity, and dedicated support cases have been created for impacted customers,” the company noted in its advisory.
Associated activities from confirmed researcher IP addresses were investigated for possible sharing, using, or retention of data. Involved researchers reportedly told ServiceNow “they queried tables and fields only for purposes of validating their finding and submitting bug bounty reports.”
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WWDC 2026 Keynote Marked a Major Departure From Previous Years

Apple's WWDC 2026 keynote broke from a longstanding format tradition, abandoning the platform-by-platform structure that has defined the annual developer conference for years in favor of a theme-driven presentation.


Previous WWDC keynotes were organized by operating system. Last year's event walked through iOS, watchOS, tvOS, macOS, visionOS, and iPadOS in sequence before closing with a developer-focused segment. This year, Apple scrapped that structure entirely, dividing the keynote into three broad themes instead: Platform improvements, trust and safety, and Apple Intelligence and Siri.

The change appears to reflect the degree of cross-platform integration Apple has achieved this cycle, which has been growing for years. When the same features land simultaneously across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, addressing each platform individually no longer makes obvious sense. While Apple has promoted tight ecosystem integration for years, 2026 seems to be the first year that integration is deep enough to make the old format feel arbitrary.

The restructuring was not the only departure from form. Apple devoted more than ten minutes of keynote time to child safety and screen time, an unusually prominent segment that could be seen as a direct response to growing regulatory pressure on tech companies. The new parental controls include mandatory child accounts for users under 13, granular app access permissions, and an Ask to Browse feature requiring children to request parental approval before visiting new websites in Safari.

The AI demonstrations in the keynote itself also felt markedly different from their initial look in 2024. Two years ago, Apple did not allow press or attendees to try the new Siri after the event, and The Information later reported that what Apple showed on stage was not a functional demo but an elaborate concept video. This year, the Siri AI demonstrations appeared to run in real time, with presenters visibly waiting for responses and navigating results as they came in.

Apple also held live, in-person hands-on demos for media after the keynote, a format that has not featured at WWDC for years, giving the event something of a pre-pandemic feel that stood in stark contrast to the slick, wholly pre-recorded presentations the conference has leaned on since 2020. Following the keynote, Apple held a post-keynote "Tech Talk" session with Craig Federighi, where members of the media could put questions to him directly in a more conversational setting.

The visual style of the keynote also differed noticeably from previous years. Apple appeared to move away from the heavily stabilized steadicam footage, with much of this year's presentation visibly shot handheld, giving the keynote a more natural look.

Did you prefer the format of this year's WWDC? Let us know in the comments. Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tag: WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
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Apple Maps to Get These 10 New Features in iOS 27

Apple Maps is getting a range of new features in iOS 27, headlined by an upgraded Flyover experience that uses AI to improve the realism and detail of its aerial imagery.


Flyover is a longstanding feature of ‌Apple Maps‌ and lets users explore more than 350 cities in 3D with detailed landmarks, roads, parks, and buildings. Apple described the enhanced Flyover in ‌iOS 27‌ as combining aerial imagery with AI models to produce sharper, more lifelike visuals of cities around the world. In its press release, Apple said the update will make details clearer, from the shapes of individual trees to the way light reflects off the glass of skyscrapers.

A new Local Lists feature is also coming to ‌Apple Maps‌ users in the U.S. The feature surfaces curated collections of nearby places based on what's trending locally, including dining spots and places to take kids. Apple says all insights are derived with privacy in mind and are never tied to individual users.

‌iOS 27‌ also expands the Suggested Places feature that arrived in iOS 26.5, allowing users to swipe through more recommendations rather than being limited to two. A Trending Restaurants section will appear in the search screen, and natural language search is expanding to cover routing specifics. A Parked Car widget is coming to the Smart Stack, making it easier to locate a parked vehicle, and Offline Maps is said to be getting update improvements, though Apple has not detailed exactly what those entail.

Existing features including Visited Places and Guides are expanding to more countries in ‌iOS 27‌. The Maps app icon has also been refreshed with a new, multi-layered Liquid Glass design.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Apple Maps
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Apple Fights Back Against Epic's Bid to Kill Supreme Court Appeal

Apple has filed a 12-page response to Epic Games' attempt to have its Supreme Court petition dismissed, arguing that Epic's own filing "confirms the need for review."


Epic filed a 35-page opposition on June 4, 2026, urging the Supreme Court to reject Apple's appeal. Apple's response takes aim at two central arguments Epic made in that filing.

On the question of anti-steering, Apple says Epic is mischaracterizing the scope of the injunction against it. According to Apple, the order only restricted specific anti-steering practices and did not address App Store commissions, making Epic's framing an attempt to rewrite the ruling rather than an accurate description of it.

The second dispute involves a 2025 Supreme Court precedent, "Trump v. CASA, Inc." Epic says Apple is wrongly claiming an exemption from it. Apple responds that the earlier ruling explicitly states CASA "has no bearing" on antitrust cases, which this is, making Epic's argument moot.

The filing is the latest exchange in a dispute dating back to 2020, when Epic deliberately triggered a conflict with Apple over ‌App Store‌ payment rules. Apple won the vast majority of the original case in 2021, but lost on anti-steering, with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordering Apple to allow developers to link to external payment options. Apple complied, but charged a 27% commission on link-out transactions, leading few developers to adopt it.

In April 2025, Gonzalez Rogers found Apple in willful violation and barred it from charging any commission on external links. The judge also accused Apple VP of finance Alex Roman of giving testimony "replete with misdirection and outright lies" about when Apple decided on the 27% fee, and referred both Roman and Apple to federal prosecutors for a potential criminal contempt investigation. Apple dropped link fees and appealed.

In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit agreed Apple had violated the injunction but sent the case back to district court to determine a reasonable commission rate. Apple petitioned the Supreme Court in May, questioning whether the contempt finding was proper and whether the injunction should apply to all developers nationwide rather than just Epic.

An attempt to pause fee proceedings during that process was later reversed after Epic challenged it. Fortnite also returned to the App Store worldwide in May, with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney declaring the start of the "final battle" of the dispute.

The Supreme Court has indicated it could decide whether to accept Apple's appeal as early as June, though a final ruling remains many months away regardless.Tags: Epic Games, Epic Games vs. Apple, United States
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Docker Hardened Images enhanced vulnerability scanning with Docker and Aikido

Aikido now scans Docker Hardened Images (DHI) with built-in VEX support. Vulnerabilities that Docker has verified as non-exploitable drop out of the queue automatically, so developers spend their time on findings that actually matter. This post walks through what changed, why it matters, and how users can benefit from the new integration.
Why teams are drowning in CVEs
Modern application teams drown in CVEs. And the volume is climbing fast. AI coding agents now generate and assemble software far faster than any team can review it, pulling in dependencies by the hundreds and spinning up new services on demand. Every base image they reach for is another stack of CVEs landing in someone’s queue. The faster code ships, the more it matters that it starts from a foundation that’s already minimal, already patched, and already vetted — which is exactly why hardened images matter more now than they ever have.
Docker Hardened Images addresses this problem at the source. DHI images are purpose-built, often distroless, and ship with only the software the workload needs. The attack surface is smaller by construction. Patches land faster than upstream in many cases.
A smaller attack surface only helps if your scanner can see it. Distroless images break tools that expect a package manager or a shell. Naive scanning produces false positives against components that are not actually present, or flags CVEs in code paths that cannot be reached. Teams end up triaging noise that the image author already knew was not a problem.
The new integration closes this gap. DHI publishes signed VEX attestations alongside each image. Aikido reads those attestations and applies them during triage. The CVEs Docker has already cleared get filtered out, with a clear reason attached.
Before you begin
You need three things to scan DHI with Aikido:
An active Aikido account. Access to Docker Hardened Images. A Docker Hub Personal Access Token with read-only scope. If your Docker Hub registry is already connected to Aikido, skip the next section. Connect Docker Hub to Aikido
In Aikido, go to Settings > Containers and click Connect Registry.
Select Docker Hub.
Enter your organization namespace, username, and Personal Access Token.
Aikido discovers your repositories and lists them for scanning.
Scan a Docker Hardened Image
Once the registry is connected, open the registry action menu and click Scan repos in registry. There is no extra configuration for DHI. Aikido detects hardened images automatically and applies the right data sources in the background.
Under the hood, the workflow follows the DHI technical spec:
Detection. Aikido identifies the DHI base image from the image reference and registry metadata. Cataloging. The scanner pulls the signed SPDX 2.3 SBOM published with the image. SBOMs are retrieved through OCI 1.1 referrer lookup against the registry, or from /opt/docker/sbom/ when present. Reading the vetted SBOM produces complete, accurate component data, where indexing a distroless filesystem would not. Matching. Components are matched by PURL against the Docker OSV feed and upstream advisory feeds. Applying VEX. Aikido overlays the OpenVEX statements Docker publishes for the image, and suppresses any finding marked as resolved by the attestation. How VEX status shows up
VEX status
What it means
Fixed
The vulnerability is patched in this image.
Not Affected
Docker has verified the CVE is a false positive or non-exploitable in context. Aikido suppresses these by default.
Under Investigation
Impact is still being assessed by Docker.
Affected
The vulnerability applies, and a fix is not yet available.
What you see in Aikido
Aikido keeps the UI focused on a single question: is this image vulnerable or not. When Docker’s VEX attestation indicates a CVE doesn’t require triage (for example, it’s been fixed or marked not affected), Aikido filters it out of the active queue automatically. You don’t have to triage it, tag it, or click through anything. Findings that remain in the queue are the ones that genuinely apply to the image, so your team spends time only on what matters.
Behind the scenes, Aikido still consumes the full OpenVEX statement (status, justification, image digest) for audit and compliance purposes. It just isn’t surfaced as a status drill-down in the UI, because in practice nobody triaging vulnerabilities wants to dig through VEX metadata.
What the result looks like
On a typical DHI workload, the active queue shrinks dramatically once VEX is applied. A scan that returns several hundred CVEs against a generic base image collapses to the handful of findings the image actually carries.
A concrete example: a CVE in a parser library shows up across most base images. Docker marks it not_affected in the DHI build because the vulnerable code path cannot be reached by an adversary. Aikido reads that statement, files the CVE under “VEX indicates not affected,” and your team never sees it in triage. The justification stays attached if an auditor asks.
For teams pursuing FedRAMP, SOC 2, or other compliance regimes, this matters twice. The findings list is honest. The exceptions are signed, attributable to the image publisher, and traceable back to a public attestation. You are not handing auditors a wall of red.
Recap
The integration is based on the following information provided by Docker Hardened Images:
Signed SBOMs give Aikido complete component data without trying to index a distroless filesystem. OpenVEX attestations carry Docker’s exploitability verdict, with justification, directly into the scanner. The outcome is a triage queue that reflects real exploitability in your image, not a flat dump of every CVE that ever touched an upstream package.If you have not started with hardened images yet, the Docker Hardened Images documentation is the place to begin.
Learn more about the integration:
On June 26th, Aikido is hosting a webinar for those interested in learning more about the integration. 
Register for Aikido x Docker: Less Noise, More Signal in Container Security
Resources
Review our Docker Hardened Images documentation. Set up Docker Hub registry on Aikido
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Human Oversight in the Autonomous SOC: What Stays Human and What Does Not

As security operations become more autonomous, the real question is not whether humans stay involved. It is where their involvement matters most. In this blog, we break down what should stay human in an autonomous SOC, what can move into agentic workflows, and how oversight needs to be designed so it is meaningful instead of symbolic.
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Deezer Launches AI Music Detector for Apple Music, Spotify, and More

French music platform Deezer has launched a free online tool that can detect AI-generated tracks in Apple Music playlists, as well as playlists created on other streaming platforms.

The tool works with 20 different platforms including Spotify, SoundCloud, and YouTube Music. To use it, visit Deezer's AI music detector site, select your streaming service, then grant Deezer permission to access it. The tool will import your playlists, scan them for AI content, and alert you of any suspicious-sounding tracks.

Apple in March rolled out a metadata system called Transparency Tags, which indicates when AI has been used in the creation of music hosted on the platform. The only problem is that the tags are optional, so Apple is basically asking artists and record labels to voluntarily label songs that were made using AI.

Deezer reports that it receives over 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day, with synthetic content now accounting for roughly 39% of all music delivered to the platform. Up to 85% of streams on AI-generated music were fraudulent in 2025, according to Deezer's data.Tags: Apple Music, Spotify
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These Older iPhones Will Need an Update to Keep Running WhatsApp

Some older iPhone models will need a software update to keep running WhatsApp from the end of November 2026, after Meta confirmed it is raising the app's minimum system requirements.


From November 30, WhatsApp will require iOS 15.5 or later, up from the current requirement of iOS 15.1.

The models affected are the iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE (1st generation), iPhone 7, and iPhone 7 Plus. iOS 15.8.8 is the last update these models can install, so owners just need to make sure their device is updated before the deadline.

To be clear, no iPhone is being dropped outright. Every model that can run iOS 15.1 can also be updated to 15.5, so a trip into Settings ➝ General ➝ Software Update will be all it takes to stay compatible.

Happily, the new requirements aren't as harsh as last year. In June 2025, WhatsApp cut off the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus entirely, since none of the devices could be updated past iOS 15.0. Affected users were left with web.whatsapp.com as their only option.

Meta says it reviews supported operating systems each year, dropping those with the fewest users and the ones least likely to carry current security updates. Anyone on an affected version will be notified inside WhatsApp and reminded to upgrade before support ends.Tag: WhatsApp
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What SRE teams need before they trust AI agents

The future of reliability will not be defined by whether site reliability engineering (SRE) teams use AI agents, but by the conditions under which they choose to trust them. In high-stakes systems, trust is never granted because a demo looks impressive; it is earned through observability, constraints, accountability and repeated evidence that the system helps more than it harms.
Right now, many teams are exploring AI for incident response, alert triage, root cause analysis and runbook automation because modern systems generate more context than humans can process quickly under pressure. That interest is justified. But the most mature SRE organizations understand something important: the real challenge is not building an agent that can act, it is building an operating model that people can trust in production.
Trust is operational, not emotional
SRE teams do not trust tools in the abstract. They trust behavior under stress. A platform earns credibility when it helps engineers make better decisions during noisy alerts, partial outages, failed deploys and ambiguous telemetry, not when it generates polished answers in ideal conditions .
That is why generic AI often falls short in production. It may be fluent, but fluency is not reliability. Live systems demand awareness of ownership, dependency maps, escalation paths, blast radius and policy boundaries, and without that context an AI agent can sound helpful while being operationally dangerous . For SRE teams, trust starts when the agent proves it understands the system it is operating around.
The trust ladder

Neel Shah
Teams do not move directly from experimentation to autonomy. They move up a ladder of trust, where each step is validated in production-like conditions before the next one is allowed.
The 1st requirement: Grounded observability
Before teams trust an AI agent, they need a telemetry foundation that the agent can actually reason over. If logs are incomplete, traces are missing, ownership is unclear and deployment metadata is scattered across tools, the agent will not become intelligent by magic. It will simply become confidently under-informed.
This is why observability is the real prerequisite for agentic SRE. The strongest AI SRE approaches are grounded in correlated metrics, logs, traces, changes and incident history so that recommendations are evidence-backed rather than speculative. An AI agent cannot create operational truth; it can only synthesize the truth your systems already expose.
In practice, that means teams need more than dashboards. They need clean service ownership, change tracking, incident timelines, runbooks and enough signal quality that an agent can distinguish a symptom from a cause. Without that groundwork, the AI layer becomes theatre
What grounded observability looks like
Neel Shah
Monitoring tells you that something is wrong, while observability helps explain why. AI becomes useful only when it sits on top of both layers, not instead of them.
The 2nd requirement: Clear guardrails
The fastest way to lose trust in AI is to give it authority before defining its boundaries. In operations, the question is not “Can the agent do this?” but “Under what conditions should it be allowed to do this, and who is accountable if it is wrong?”
This is where guardrails matter. Strong SRE teams want explicit permission models, approval gates, action allowlists, audit trails and rollback paths before an agent touches anything meaningful in production. That may sound restrictive, but it is exactly what makes adoption viable. Constraint is not the enemy of agentic systems; constraint is what makes them usable.
The most practical path is progressive autonomy. Let the agent start by summarizing incidents, correlating changes and suggesting next steps. Then move to read-only diagnostics. Only after consistent success should it be allowed to trigger low-risk automation, and even then, within tightly defined policies. Trust grows when the blast radius stays small.
Visual: Progressive autonomy model
StageAgent roleRisk levelHuman involvementStage 1Summarize alerts and incidentsLowHuman reviews output [cite:8]Stage 2Pull telemetry and correlate changesLow to mediumHuman approves decisions [cite:41][cite:52]Stage 3Recommend remediation actionsMediumHuman confirms action [cite:42][cite:43]Stage 4Execute pre-approved low-risk actionsMediumHuman supervises and can override [cite:44][cite:52]Stage 5Broad autonomous actionHighRarely acceptable without strict policy controls [cite:43][cite:54] The 3rd requirement: Human-in-the-loop design
SRE teams are not looking for an AI replacement. They are looking for leverage. The most credible operating model is not autonomous-by-default but supervised-by-design, where agents accelerate understanding and execution while humans retain judgment over risk, trade-offs and unusual conditions .
That distinction matters because incidents are rarely just technical events. They involve business impact, customer communication, cross-team coordination and decisions shaped by context that may not exist in telemetry alone . An agent can help identify a likely bad deploy, but it cannot fully own the decision about whether to roll back during a major customer launch without broader situational awareness.
Human-in-the-loop does not mean slowing everything down. It means designing different levels of oversight for different classes of action. Low-risk tasks such as drafting an incident summary or pulling related dashboards may be automatic. Restarting a background worker might require lightweight approval. Disabling a core production dependency should remain firmly human-controlled . Mature trust comes from matching autonomy to risk.
The 4th requirement: Explainability over magic
SRE teams will not trust an agent that gives answers without showing its work. In reliability engineering, a recommendation is only as useful as the evidence behind it. Engineers need to know which metrics changed, which deployment correlated with the issue, which logs support the hypothesis and how confident the system actually is.
This is one of the biggest lessons emerging from operational AI systems. Precision matters but trust also depends on whether humans can inspect the reasoning path, challenge it and understand uncertainty in familiar terms . The best agent experiences feel less like oracles and more like disciplined collaborators: they surface context, rank hypotheses and make clear what they know versus what they infer .
That is especially important because AI failure in SRE is rarely dramatic at first. It often starts as subtle overconfidence. The agent sounds convincing, the team moves faster and only later does it become clear that the recommendation was based on incomplete evidence. Explainability is what keeps speed from turning into hidden fragility.
The 5th requirement: Evaluation in real incidents
Trust cannot be built on benchmarks alone. SRE teams need evidence from scenarios that resemble their actual world: noisy alerts, incomplete data, conflicting symptoms, repeated incidents and multi-service failures . This is why post-incident evaluation is becoming one of the most important practices in AI-assisted operations.
Some of the most interesting approaches focus on replaying past incidents and measuring how the AI would have performed once the real outcome is already known . That creates a concrete way to score whether the agent identified the right signals, prioritized the right hypotheses or recommended safe and useful next steps. It also shifts the conversation from hype to measurable reliability impact.
For SRE leaders, this is a critical mindset change. Do not ask whether the agent is impressive. Ask whether it consistently shortens investigation time, reduces false escalation, improves documentation quality and avoids introducing new operational risk . Trust follows evidence, not enthusiasm.
The 6th requirement: Fit with existing workflows
One reason some AI initiatives fail inside engineering teams is that they force a new workflow instead of strengthening the one that already works. SRE teams already have paging tools, Slack channels, dashboards, escalation policies and runbooks. An AI agent earns trust faster when it respects those patterns rather than trying to replace them all at once.
This is where incremental adoption becomes strategic. If the agent can appear in the incident channel, pull context from observability tools, draft timelines and recommend actions inside the systems engineers already trust, the barrier to adoption drops sharply. The agent becomes part of the response loop rather than another platform demanding attention during an outage.
That compatibility matters culturally as much as technically. SRE is built on disciplined operational habits. Tools that complement those habits can gain traction. Tools that disrupt them without providing value usually get ignored after the first few frustrating incidents.
If you need a more detailed guide to keep points while evaluating AI SRE tools, then check this buyer’s guide by one of the senior leaders.
What trust looks like in practice
When an SRE team truly trusts an AI agent, several things are visible. The team does not treat it as a novelty. They treat it as a bounded operational partner. They know where it adds value, where it must ask for approval and where it should stay out of the way.
Trust also changes behavior. Engineers stop wasting the first 10 minutes of an incident assembling basic context because the agent already did that well. Incident channels become more structured because summaries, timelines and likely causes are surfaced early. Runbooks improve because teams start writing them in ways both humans and machines can execute or reference . In that environment, AI is not replacing rigor. It is reinforcing it.
Most importantly, trusted AI agents reduce toil without eroding accountability. The on-call engineer is still responsible. The incident commander is still responsible. The organization still owns the reliability posture. The agent simply helps the system operate with more speed and clarity.
The leadership shift behind all of this
This is why the conversation about AI agents in SRE is ultimately a leadership question, not just a tooling question. Teams do not need another shiny automation layer. They need a clear philosophy for how autonomy, human judgment, safety and reliability will work together.
The most forward-looking SRE leaders will not ask, “How quickly can we automate incident response?” They will ask, “What conditions must be true before our engineers feel safe delegating part of this workflow to a machine?” That is a much better question because it forces investment in the real foundations: observability, governance, evidence, workflow design and measurable trust.
AI agents may become standard in reliability engineering over the next few years, but standard does not mean automatic. The teams that benefit most will be the ones that treat trust as infrastructure. They will build it deliberately, test it relentlessly and expand autonomy only where the evidence justifies it.
Closing thought
Before SRE teams trust AI agents, they need more than a capable model. They need grounded telemetry, explicit guardrails, human-centered workflow design, explainable reasoning, rigorous evaluation and operational fit with the systems they already rely on. Only then does the promise of agentic SRE become credible.
That is the real frontier. Not autonomous operations for their own sake, but reliable collaboration between humans and intelligent systems. In the end, SRE teams will trust AI agents for the same reason they trust any production system: because it behaves predictably, shows its work, respects constraints and makes the organization more resilient when it matters most .
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China-linked recon botnet outpaces enterprise defenses

A botnet made up of compromised small office and Internet of Things devices has grown into a larger reconnaissance network capable of rapidly identifying vulnerable internet-facing systems after public vulnerability disclosures, researchers said.
The botnet, tracked by Lumen’s Black LotusLabs as JDY, now comprises more than 1,500 compromised small office and home office, or SOHO, and IoT devices, and is being used to “discover, fingerprint and continuously map exposed services at scale.”
Lumen said the activity is linked to Chinese nation-state-backed actors, including Volt Typhoon. The findings point to a growing challenge for enterprise security teams. Many enterprise edge systems remain outside traditional endpoint monitoring, giving adversaries room to move quickly from vulnerability disclosure to targeted reconnaissance.
Lumen added that JDY’s distributed infrastructure can also help operators evade geofencing and other IP-based defenses because the activity may appear to come from legitimate residential or small-business internet traffic.
JDY undermines several defensive assumptions that many enterprises still rely on, according to Sakshi Grover, senior research manager for IDC Asia Pacific Cybersecurity Services. 
Geofencing and IP reputation controls have limited value when used in isolation, Grover said, while static blocklists are structurally weak against botnets that continuously rotate compromised infrastructure. JDY also exposes a broader visibility gap around edge devices, which are often difficult for enterprises to monitor with the same rigor as endpoints and cloud workloads.
Reconnaissance moves closer to attack
Analysts said that CISOs should not dismiss JDY as just another botnet.
“The reported JDY activity shows a clear focus on discovering, fingerprinting, and continuously mapping exposed services at scale, including shortly after public vulnerability disclosures,” Grover said. “That points to a more industrialized model of pre-exploitation reconnaissance, where compromised edge devices are used not merely for disruption or commodity abuse, but to generate timely targeting intelligence for follow-on operations.”
That means the compromised SOHO and IoT devices may not be the final target. Instead, they provide the scanning layer used to identify exposed enterprise infrastructure, including routers, firewalls, VPNs, cameras, and other internet-facing systems.
Devashri Datta, a cybersecurity researcher, said CISOs should treat JDY as evidence of a shift in how reconnaissance is being operationalized.
“If JDY is sitting in your risk register under ‘routine botnet management’, your defensive playbook will fail before it starts,” Datta said. “JDY isn’t designed to DDoS anyone, steal credentials, or mine cryptocurrency. It is a centrally controlled, high-performance scanning engine.”
Patch timelines come under pressure
The scanning activity also raises questions about whether conventional vulnerability management timelines are still workable for perimeter systems exposed to the internet.
“Traditional SLA-driven patching is no longer defensible for perimeter devices,” Datta said.
The size of the botnet matters less than the speed of its targeting cycle, according to Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. “Fifteen hundred devices that find the right vulnerable systems within hours are worth more than a hundred thousand generating noise,” Gogia said. “Exploitation no longer begins when malicious code arrives. It begins when exposure is discovered.”
The concern is that JDY may already have collected much of the information attackers need before a new vulnerability is disclosed. Datta said the botnet’s reconnaissance can include IP addresses, port configurations, protocol information, service banners, TLS versions, certificate metadata, and associated domains.
That gives operators a head start when a critical flaw becomes public. Lumen said Black Lotus Labs observed a selective increase in scans of Fortinet equipment shortly after the disclosure of CVE-2026-35616, indicating the ability and intent to identify vulnerable devices before patches are widely applied.
For CISOs, Datta said, the response requires pre-approved playbooks for perimeter devices, including accelerated patching, access control list changes, temporary disabling of exposed features, and lockdown of management interfaces.
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Bypass Siri AI Waitlist on macOS 27 Golden Gate Beta: Here's How

If you installed the macOS 27 Golden Gate developer beta and have signed up to the Siri AI waitlist but are still waiting to be accepted, there's a Terminal command workaround that enables the new virtual assistant on your Mac immediately.


If you're still reading, since you're on the first macOS 27 developer beta, we're assuming you are running it on a test machine, and not on your primary Mac. We're also assuming you're comfortable with using the Terminal app. MacRumors cannot take responsibility for lost data. You should always have a backup.

With that said, early reports indicate the workaround is safe, and you won't need to reverse it once officially off the waitlist. Note that Siri AI is not available in the EU and China.

Here's how it's done.
Open Terminal on your Mac running the macOS 27 beta.
Input the following command at the prompt and press Enter: sudo defaults write "/Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/GenerativeModels.plist" "EnhancedSiriWaitlist" -dict-add Enabled -bool NO
Restart your Mac to apply the change.After restarting, you can try it out right away. In the dedicated Siri app, for example, you can have back-and-forth conversations with Siri in text or voice modes, and your conversation history is synced across your devices via iCloud.

Siri AI can draw on personal context understanding to search across messages, emails, photos, and more, and get things done across apps with even more system-wide app actions.

On Mac, ‌Siri‌ is now also integrated into Spotlight and available via right-click context menus on any file or window. Note that Siri AI is initially only available in English. Let us know how you get on in the comments.Tags: Siri, Siri AI
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Aged-domain acquisition: The tradecraft phishing operators are using to bypass your mail filter’s reputation score

I’ve spent the past two years working on incident response and threat intelligence, and the pattern I’m about to describe is one I keep seeing show up in cases that should have been caught at the email gateway. The kit families change. The lure templates change. The constant is that phishing-as-a-service operators are buying aged legitimate domains and redeploying them to steal credentials from enterprise and government targets.
The most recent incident I worked involved a Sneaky2FA deployment running on 117 origin servers in Kansas City, Missouri, split across two hosting providers. The operator has been on the same infrastructure for over two years and runs lures against a mix of UK and US government, energy companies and US healthcare SMBs. The aged-domain tradecraft I’m about to walk through is one way this operator stays inside enterprise environments that should be filtering them out. The certificate transparency logs tell the whole story, and they explain why the reputation classifier didn’t catch it.
How age-weighted reputation became the blind spot
Most enterprise mail filters from major vendors, including Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Proofpoint, Mimecast and Cisco Talos, factor domain age heavily into their classification decisions. A freshly registered .com triggers immediate reputation penalties. A domain with years of stable hosting, consistent certificate issuance and clean DNS history gets treated as low risk. The logic made sense ten years ago, when newly minted abuse domains dominated phishing infrastructure and aged domains usually meant established small businesses.
I work with several enterprise environments that pay for the most expensive tiers of email security and still see phishing lures land in users’ inboxes. When I trace those lures back to their parent domains, an increasing percentage show the same pattern. Long-stable cert history through some point in 2024 or 2025. A several-month gap with no new certs issued. Then certs start appearing again for subdomains that have nothing to do with the original brand. The reputation score on these domains is high. The infrastructure behind them is criminal. The filter doesn’t know the difference.
What aged-domain acquisition actually looks like
There are two reasonable ways for an operator to acquire an aged domain. They can drop-catch an expired registration, or they can hijack an active one through credential theft against the owner’s registrar account. Drop-catching is cheaper and lower-risk. Services like DropCatch, SnapNames and GoDaddy Auctions exist precisely to acquire domains the moment they expire, and a determined operator can pay $50 to $500 for a domain with a decade of clean history.
The domain I want to walk through is one I documented in detail during the Sneaky2FA case: digitalscrapbookingfreebies.com. The certificate transparency record shows the takeover in full. From 2016 through July 2025, the cert history reads like a normal small-business cPanel-hosted blog. cPanel Inc. issued ECC certs every 60 to 90 days for the standard cpanel., mail., webdisk. and webmail. subdomains. Let’s Encrypt R3 issued certs for the apex and www. every 90 days. The subjects stayed stable across nine years. Someone was running a hobby blog providing free scrapbooking assets to a small audience, and the cert pattern reflects that.
In April 2025, GoDaddy certs appear in the record. A new certificate authority showing up after eight uninterrupted years of cPanel-plus-Let’s-Encrypt is the first hard signal that something changed at the registrar or hosting level. By July 2025, the last legitimate-pattern cert will be issued. Then six months of silence, no new certs, no renewals. In December 2025, fresh Let’s Encrypt R13 certs surfaced for subdomains the original blog never had: beds, footboard, haushafin and locklear. By January 2026, another subdomain appeared: nativems-mfl09093004.digitalscrapbookingfreebies.com. That subdomain was the one I caught being actively used in phishing against a US state health agency.
The original owner of the scrapbooking blog is almost certainly a victim, too. They probably let the registration lapse, the operator drop-caught it and the domain entered criminal use under a privacy WHOIS that obscures the new ownership. Their nine years of reputation-building goodwill now serve as a credential-theft operation.
What made this case generalizable is that the same operator also runs a second-tier-2 lure domain acquired through fresh registration. The two strategies serve different targeting profiles. The operator uses fresh registrations when the subdomain itself can carry the credibility, like an SSO-themed subdomain mimicking a corporate authentication endpoint where the parent domain isn’t doing much work. The operator uses aged-domain acquisitions when the domain reputation itself has to do the work, when the lure is going through an enterprise mail filter that scores by age. The selection is contextual.
Why your reputation classifier won’t catch this
Reputation scoring assumes that domain history reflects domain ownership. When ownership transfers through drop-catch or hijack, that assumption breaks. The score doesn’t reset. The new operator inherits the trust without inheriting any of the work that built it. Most reputation systems also weigh the length of clean history more heavily than recent changes to ownership patterns, which makes the problem worse. A nine-year-old domain that changes hands quietly stays scored as a nine-year-old domain.
The signals that would actually catch the takeover (a CA issuer change, a six-month cert gap, a sudden wordlist of new subdomains that has nothing to do with the original brand) aren’t features in most age-weighted classifiers.
A better detection approach has to weigh hosting-pattern stability. A domain whose hosting infrastructure changes abruptly is more suspicious than a domain whose pattern continues uninterrupted, and the events you want to fire on are concrete: a new CA appearing after years of stable issuance, a gap in cert renewals followed by new issuance or a CDN change with no legitimate ownership reason. Most reputation systems don’t track any of this because the score is a single number rather than a stability metric.
Subdomain wordlist anomaly is the second axis. When a long-stable domain about scrapbooking suddenly issues certs for a subdomain named nativems-mfl09093004, the disconnect between the original brand and the new naming is detectable behaviorally, even when every other signal fails.
The third piece is certificate transparency monitoring. CT logs are public, queryable and updated within hours. I reconstructed the entire digitalscrapbookingfreebies.com takeover timeline from public CT data alone. No commercial threat feed was required. Security teams who subscribe to CT log feeds for their blocklist candidates can surface operator-deployed subdomains within hours of issuance, which is often well before they show up in any commercial threat feed.
If I were running enterprise email security tomorrow, the first thing I’d change is to stop treating domain age as a primary signal. Aged-domain acquisition is documented tradecraft now. Sekoia has surfaced it. Centripetal has surfaced it. My own research on this Sneaky2FA case adds another example. Any reputation system that weights age heavily has a known bypass, which means age should be one signal among several, not the dominant one.
The detection logic that does work is the one I described above: hosting-pattern stability, subdomain wordlist anomaly and CT log monitoring. A nine-year-old hobby blog suddenly hosting Microsoft-themed authentication pages is detectable behaviorally, even when domain age fails the analyst. Several CTI vendors are starting to surface this as a capability. Ask yours where they are on it and get a real answer, not a marketing one. CT log monitoring is cheap and surfaces operator infrastructure within hours of issuance, which is one of the higher leverage moves a small security team can make.
The operators figured out the blind spot. They’re going to keep buying aged domains for as long as those domains keep working. Closing the gap doesn’t take a new product line. It takes treating the signals we already collect with appropriate weight.
The full research from the Sneaky2FA case, including methodology, IOCs and the detection rules I wrote, is available on my GitHub.
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Frontier AI models offer sneak peak of seismic cyber shifts ahead

The advent of Claude Mythos combined with the release of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 have changed the threat model for CISOs.
The arrival of those frontier AI models — and the ones soon to follow — makes it much easier to discover and chain vulnerabilities at a speed and scale that will require most cyber departments to rethink their strategies and operations.
Experts polled by CSO on the impact of these capabilities say defenders should assume AI will make initial compromise more likely and that they should focus less on trying to patch everything perfectly and more on limiting blast radius through stronger identity controls, least privilege, and internal segmentation.
Wild frontier
Although access to Mythos remains restricted to a limited number of trusted partners, comparable AI-based vulnerability discovery platforms are in the works, and few experts think access to sufficiently capable AI models will be kept from attackers for long. Anthropic itself has now released to the public the “Mythos-class” Fable 5 AI model, with extra cybersecurity guardrails.
Noe Ramos, vice president of AI operations at Agiloft, says CISOs should operate on the assumption that attackers will get access to frontier AI-style capabilities within months if not sooner.
“Whether through jailbreaks, fine-tuned open-weight derivatives, or purpose-built black-hat versions, determined threat actors are resourceful and motivated,” says Ramos. “Frontier AI capabilities tend to diffuse faster than the security community expects and slower than the headlines suggest. Defenders should plan for the former.”
Rather than jailbreaking frontier models it is more likely that attackers will gain access to capable vulnerability discovery platforms by fine-tuning open-weight models on offensive security data and running them locally.
“We see people out there that are starting to work on replicating the results of Mythos with existing infrastructure and open source models that they don’t have to run through the clouds,” Martin Roesch, lead developer of the Snort intrusion detection system turned head of cloud at security startup Vectra AI, tells CSO.
“This kind of industrial-scale vulnerability discovery and potential exploit generation is not something that most of the world is really prepared for in terms of the downstream implications of the effects that it’ll have on the defendability of organizations,” Roesch concludes.
Will Barker, cybersecurity advisor at managed detection and response vendor Huntress, agrees that research is showing that AI-driven vulnerability discovery is no longer something only frontier models can do.
“Smaller open-weights models are already finding the same types of zero-days and exploit chains,” says Barker.
These findings imply that the model itself is not always the biggest differentiator.
“The real value comes from everything around it: how the work is orchestrated, how findings are validated, how noise is filtered, and how quickly humans can turn those findings into action,” Barker says.
Vulnerability discovery compressed
A junior security researcher with API access to a frontier model can find vulnerabilities without the reverse-engineering work that used to take an experienced team.
“Logic flaws are where this hits hardest,” says Nik Kale, principal engineer and member of the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI). “Traditional scanners never caught them well because the code isn’t broken, just strategically wrong. A frontier LLM reads a hardcoded trust assumption like it’s reading a paragraph. That’s the gap that opened, and it isn’t closing.”
Frontier AI has meaningfully compressed discovery time for well-understood vulnerability classes: SQL injection variants, common misconfigurations, things that pattern-match against known CVEs.
Raphael Peyret, a former product manager at Google turned startup advisor at SHA/RP, argues that the barrier to creating a reliable exploit from a vulnerability has been lowered rather than removed.
“In many cases, finding the weakness is no longer the bottleneck,” says Peyret. “But novel zero-days in hardened targets are a genuinely different problem, and that still takes human expertise.”
Matthew Bidwell, founder at Newzino.com, backs up this assessment. “The binding constraint for attackers has shifted from finding bugs to operationalizing them: turning a hypothetical flaw into a working exploit, chaining it against a real target, evading detection, [and] persisting,” he says.
The more meaningful shift in the vulnerability discovery landscape is economic rather than technical, according to several experts.
“Attackers are running roughly the same playbook they always ran,” Peyret notes. “What’s changed is the unit cost of running a credible campaign, and it’s dropped substantially.”
Other experts agreed that AI is turning vulnerability discovery from a scarce human craft into a scalable computational problem.
“Mythos-class systems compress reconnaissance, target triage, payload customization, and social engineering into minutes,” says Noah M. Kenney, founder and principal consultant at Digital 520. “Jailbreaks and black-hat forks will happen, but the bigger risk is legitimate enterprise AI being turned against the enterprise that deployed it.”
Attackers do not need Mythos itself; they need Mythos-like vulnerability discovery workflows, says Mudit Sinha, AI Lead at Lineaje.
“Mythos may be expensive and restricted today, but the gap is closing fast through frontier models, specialized cyber models, and black-hat harnesses around general-purpose AI,” he says.
Exploit pathways
The historical bottleneck in offensive cyber operations was finding novel weaknesses. AI-native cyber systems are automating code reasoning, attack-path identification, and variant analysis at machine speed, according to Kai CISO Alfredo Hickman.
“The constraint is shifting from ‘Can we find bugs?’ to ‘Can we reliably weaponize and scale them?’” he says.
Louis Leung, a software developer and co-founder at InFlow Inventory, believes attackers’ real challenge remains turning a discovered weakness into a stable, stealthy, repeatable capability that survives modern defensive controls and produces operational impact.
“The hard part is turning the bug into a stable working exploit that functions across real-world production environments, which come with modern defenses, monitoring, and patching solutions,” he says. “Attackers increasingly need to chain multiple weaknesses together in SaaS environments — like inventory and warehouse systems — more than they need to identify the first point of weakness.”
Still, frontier AI models are likely to accelerate the ability to chain those weaknesses together, said Jon Yeoh, chief scientific officer at the Cloud Security Alliance, at the recent CSO Cybersecurity Awards and Conference.
“We’re looking at taking like maybe three or four CVEs that were very low-level and chaining those to become something that’s high or critical,” he said. “That’s something we haven’t seen — just what the models themselves do with a simple prompt.”
Opening Pandora’s Box
Independent security experts were keen to avoid blaming Anthropic for opening a Pandora’s Box full of vulnerability discoveries, however.
“I do think Anthropic is trying to do the right thing by getting organizations involved early, letting them battle-test, harden, and build some understanding of what this looks like in the wild before it’s widely available,” says Melissa Bischoping, senior director of security and product design research at Tanium. “It’s not a perfect solution, but the spirit and intent are well-placed.”
Bischoping, a SANS Technology Institute board member, warns that there are concerns whether organizational change control can move fast enough to action what Mythos finds before Mythos is out in the wild.
“Agentic patch workflows are possible and can match pace with adversarial AI in a lot of cases, but [organizational] politics and change control don’t run at the speed of AI today,” says Bischoping.
Countermeasures
For defenders, the answer to the challenge posed by frontier AI models is faster vulnerability remediation.
“Security teams need to stop treating vulnerability discovery as the hard part and start fixing aggressively,” argues Lineaje’s Sinha. “Known CVEs are the easiest place to begin: prioritize, validate exploitability, patch, test, and verify continuously. The same frontier models that can detect vulnerabilities often have some capacity to remediate them, but they need a harness around them: asset context, SBOMs, exploitability validation, patch generation, CI/CD checks, sandboxed testing, and human approval for risky changes.”
AI Operations’ Ramos adds: “If AI surfaces vulnerabilities at a rate that outpaces human remediation, and Mythos suggests it will, then the strategic priority has to shift toward containment and resilience.”
“Assume breach. Shrink blast radius,” Ramos concludes.
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CSOonline

Frontier AI models offer sneak peak of seismic cyber shifts ahead

The advent of Claude Mythos combined with the release of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 have changed the threat model for CISOs.
The arrival of those frontier AI models — and the ones soon to follow — makes it much easier to discover and chain vulnerabilities at a speed and scale that will require most cyber departments to rethink their strategies and operations.
Experts polled by CSO on the impact of these capabilities say defenders should assume AI will make initial compromise more likely and that they should focus less on trying to patch everything perfectly and more on limiting blast radius through stronger identity controls, least privilege, and internal segmentation.
Wild frontier
Although access to Mythos remains restricted to a limited number of trusted partners, comparable AI-based vulnerability discovery platforms are in the works, and few experts think access to sufficiently capable AI models will be kept from attackers for long. Anthropic itself has now released to the public the “Mythos-class” Fable 5 AI model, with extra cybersecurity guardrails.
Noe Ramos, vice president of AI operations at Agiloft, says CISOs should operate on the assumption that attackers will get access to frontier AI-style capabilities within months if not sooner.
“Whether through jailbreaks, fine-tuned open-weight derivatives, or purpose-built black-hat versions, determined threat actors are resourceful and motivated,” says Ramos. “Frontier AI capabilities tend to diffuse faster than the security community expects and slower than the headlines suggest. Defenders should plan for the former.”
Rather than jailbreaking frontier models it is more likely that attackers will gain access to capable vulnerability discovery platforms by fine-tuning open-weight models on offensive security data and running them locally.
“We see people out there that are starting to work on replicating the results of Mythos with existing infrastructure and open source models that they don’t have to run through the clouds,” Martin Roesch, lead developer of the Snort intrusion detection system turned head of cloud at AI-driven security company Vectra AI, tells CSO.
“This kind of industrial-scale vulnerability discovery and potential exploit generation is not something that most of the world is really prepared for in terms of the downstream implications of the effects that it’ll have on the defendability of organizations,” Roesch concludes.
Will Barker, cybersecurity advisor at managed detection and response vendor Huntress, agrees that research is showing that AI-driven vulnerability discovery is no longer something only frontier models can do.
“Smaller open-weights models are already finding the same types of zero-days and exploit chains,” says Barker.
These findings imply that the model itself is not always the biggest differentiator.
“The real value comes from everything around it: how the work is orchestrated, how findings are validated, how noise is filtered, and how quickly humans can turn those findings into action,” Barker says.
Vulnerability discovery compressed
A junior security researcher with API access to a frontier model can find vulnerabilities without the reverse-engineering work that used to take an experienced team.
“Logic flaws are where this hits hardest,” says Nik Kale, principal engineer and member of the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI). “Traditional scanners never caught them well because the code isn’t broken, just strategically wrong. A frontier LLM reads a hardcoded trust assumption like it’s reading a paragraph. That’s the gap that opened, and it isn’t closing.”
Frontier AI has meaningfully compressed discovery time for well-understood vulnerability classes: SQL injection variants, common misconfigurations, things that pattern-match against known CVEs.
Raphael Peyret, a former product manager at Google turned startup advisor at SHA/RP, argues that the barrier to creating a reliable exploit from a vulnerability has been lowered rather than removed.
“In many cases, finding the weakness is no longer the bottleneck,” says Peyret. “But novel zero-days in hardened targets are a genuinely different problem, and that still takes human expertise.”
Matthew Bidwell, founder at Newzino.com, backs up this assessment. “The binding constraint for attackers has shifted from finding bugs to operationalizing them: turning a hypothetical flaw into a working exploit, chaining it against a real target, evading detection, [and] persisting,” he says.
The more meaningful shift in the vulnerability discovery landscape is economic rather than technical, according to several experts.
“Attackers are running roughly the same playbook they always ran,” Peyret notes. “What’s changed is the unit cost of running a credible campaign, and it’s dropped substantially.”
Other experts agreed that AI is turning vulnerability discovery from a scarce human craft into a scalable computational problem.
“Mythos-class systems compress reconnaissance, target triage, payload customization, and social engineering into minutes,” says Noah M. Kenney, founder and principal consultant at Digital 520. “Jailbreaks and black-hat forks will happen, but the bigger risk is legitimate enterprise AI being turned against the enterprise that deployed it.”
Attackers do not need Mythos itself; they need Mythos-like vulnerability discovery workflows, says Mudit Sinha, AI Lead at Lineaje.
“Mythos may be expensive and restricted today, but the gap is closing fast through frontier models, specialized cyber models, and black-hat harnesses around general-purpose AI,” he says.
Exploit pathways
The historical bottleneck in offensive cyber operations was finding novel weaknesses. AI-native cyber systems are automating code reasoning, attack-path identification, and variant analysis at machine speed, according to Kai CISO Alfredo Hickman.
“The constraint is shifting from ‘Can we find bugs?’ to ‘Can we reliably weaponize and scale them?’” he says.
Louis Leung, a software developer and co-founder at InFlow Inventory, believes attackers’ real challenge remains turning a discovered weakness into a stable, stealthy, repeatable capability that survives modern defensive controls and produces operational impact.
“The hard part is turning the bug into a stable working exploit that functions across real-world production environments, which come with modern defenses, monitoring, and patching solutions,” he says. “Attackers increasingly need to chain multiple weaknesses together in SaaS environments — like inventory and warehouse systems — more than they need to identify the first point of weakness.”
Still, frontier AI models are likely to accelerate the ability to chain those weaknesses together, said Jon Yeoh, chief scientific officer at the Cloud Security Alliance, at the recent CSO Cybersecurity Awards and Conference.
“We’re looking at taking like maybe three or four CVEs that were very low-level and chaining those to become something that’s high or critical,” he said. “That’s something we haven’t seen — just what the models themselves do with a simple prompt.”
Opening Pandora’s Box
Independent security experts were keen to avoid blaming Anthropic for opening a Pandora’s Box full of vulnerability discoveries, however.
“I do think Anthropic is trying to do the right thing by getting organizations involved early, letting them battle-test, harden, and build some understanding of what this looks like in the wild before it’s widely available,” says Melissa Bischoping, head of threat research and intelligence at Tanium. “It’s not a perfect solution, but the spirit and intent are well-placed.”
Bischoping, a SANS Technology Institute board member, warns that there are concerns whether organizational change control can move fast enough to action what Mythos finds before Mythos is out in the wild.
“Agentic patch workflows are possible and can match pace with adversarial AI in a lot of cases, but [organizational] politics and change control don’t run at the speed of AI today,” says Bischoping.
Countermeasures
For defenders, the answer to the challenge posed by frontier AI models is faster vulnerability remediation.
“Security teams need to stop treating vulnerability discovery as the hard part and start fixing aggressively,” argues Lineaje’s Sinha. “Known CVEs are the easiest place to begin: prioritize, validate exploitability, patch, test, and verify continuously. The same frontier models that can detect vulnerabilities often have some capacity to remediate them, but they need a harness around them: asset context, SBOMs, exploitability validation, patch generation, CI/CD checks, sandboxed testing, and human approval for risky changes.”
AI Operations’ Ramos adds: “If AI surfaces vulnerabilities at a rate that outpaces human remediation, and Mythos suggests it will, then the strategic priority has to shift toward containment and resilience.”
“Assume breach. Shrink blast radius,” Ramos concludes.
View the full article
CSOonline

Mastering Continuous Feedback Loops in DevOps Pipelines

Introduction
In the world of software engineering, we often talk about speed. We talk about CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and the race to production. However, speed without direction is dangerous. If you are shipping code quickly but failing to understand the impact of that code, you are not doing DevOps; you are simply creating problems faster. This is where feedback loops become the most important component of your engineering culture.
Software teams cannot improve without knowing how their systems behave in the real world. When you push a commit, your work does not end there. In fact, it is just beginning. Understanding the performance, stability, and security of your application once it is live is the only way to ensure reliability. DevOps depends on quick, continuous feedback cycles to bridge the gap between development and operations.
For those looking to deepen their practical knowledge, resources like DevOpsSchool offer comprehensive training on how these feedback mechanisms integrate into real-world workflows. By mastering these loops, teams improve reliability, shorten the mean time to recovery, and foster a culture of shared responsibility. This guide explores why feedback loops are the heartbeat of successful DevOps and how you can implement them effectively.
What Are Feedback Loops in DevOps?
At its core, a feedback loop in DevOps is a mechanism that captures data from a system and feeds it back to the creators, maintainers, and operators. It is the process of learning from what you have built.
Think of it like driving a car. When you steer, you receive immediate feedback from the road through the steering wheel. If the car pulls to the left, you correct your steering to the right. You do not wait until you hit a guardrail to realize you were off-course.
In DevOps, the “car” is your application, and the “road” is the production environment. Feedback loops are your steering system. They are the automated checks, the logs, the metrics, and the alerts that tell you if your application is healthy, secure, and performant. Without these loops, you are driving blind, guessing at whether your code changes are helping or hurting your users.
Why Feedback Loops Matter in DevOps
In a traditional waterfall model, feedback usually arrived weeks or months after development—often from customers complaining about bugs. This is far too late. DevOps flips this model by bringing feedback as close to the developer as possible.
Faster Problem Detection
If a developer breaks a feature and finds out five minutes later, they can fix it immediately because the context is fresh in their mind. If they find out three weeks later, they have to spend hours re-learning their own code. Feedback loops ensure that issues are caught when they are cheap and easy to fix.
Better Collaboration
Feedback loops break down silos. When developers, operations, and QA engineers all look at the same dashboard or the same error report, they stop pointing fingers. They start solving problems together.
Faster Fixes
When a production outage occurs, you do not want to hunt through five different servers to find a log file. A well-designed feedback loop tells you exactly what failed, where it failed, and why it failed, allowing for rapid recovery.
Better Customer Experience
Customers do not care about your release cadence. They care about uptime and functionality. Feedback loops ensure that you catch performance regressions before your customers do, keeping the user experience seamless.
Types of Feedback Loops in DevOps
Feedback is not a single entity; it exists at every stage of the software development lifecycle.
Feedback TypePurposeDeveloper FeedbackNotifies developers of linting errors, unit test failures, or build issues immediately upon commit.CI/CD FeedbackAlerts the team if an automated deployment fails or if integration tests do not pass in the staging environment.Monitoring FeedbackProvides real-time data on CPU, memory, latency, and error rates in production.Customer FeedbackCaptures direct user reports, support tickets, and usage patterns to inform product direction.Security FeedbackScans code and infrastructure for vulnerabilities, alerting teams to compliance issues or threats before exploitation. How Feedback Loops Work in DevOps
The workflow of a feedback loop is a continuous cycle of observation and response. It follows a predictable pattern:
Code Changes: A developer commits code. Automated Testing: The CI pipeline runs. If tests fail, the developer receives instant feedback. This is the first loop. Deployment: If tests pass, the code is deployed to an environment. Monitoring: Once live, observability tools track the application’s behavior. Data Analysis: Metrics, logs, and traces are collected. If an anomaly is detected, an alert is triggered. Response: The team reviews the alert, performs a root cause analysis, and pushes a fix, starting the loop over. For example, consider a payment processing service. If a developer deploys a change that increases transaction latency by 200 milliseconds, the monitoring tool detects the deviation from the baseline. It sends an alert. The developer sees the specific trace showing the slow database query, fixes the query, and pushes an update. The loop is closed.
Role of Feedback in CI/CD Pipelines
The CI/CD pipeline is the primary engine of DevOps, and feedback is its fuel. If you remove feedback, you are essentially “shipping and praying.”
Build Failures
A build process should fail fast. If your dependencies are broken or your code does not compile, you should know within seconds. This is the shortest feedback loop in the chain.
Test Failures
Unit and integration tests are your safety net. If a test fails during the CI process, the pipeline should stop immediately. This prevents bad code from ever reaching the deployment stage.
Deployment Monitoring
Deployment is not the end of the process. You must monitor the health of the application immediately after the code hits production. Did the deployment cause a spike in 500-level errors? If yes, the pipeline should ideally trigger an automated rollback.
Monitoring and Observability in Feedback Loops
Monitoring and observability are often used interchangeably, but they serve distinct roles in your feedback strategy. Monitoring tells you that something is wrong (the “what”). Observability tells you why it is wrong (the “why”).
Logs
Logs are the narrative of your application. They record events as they happen. Effective feedback requires structured logging so that you can search and filter for specific error types across thousands of microservices.
Metrics
Metrics are the numerical data points—CPU usage, request rates, error counts. They are excellent for setting thresholds. If your error rate crosses 1%, you need an alert.
Alerts and Dashboards
Alerts are the “active” part of feedback. Dashboards are the “passive” part. You need both. Dashboards allow you to see trends over time, while alerts cut through the noise to tell you what needs immediate attention.
Example: An e-commerce site experiences a spike in traffic during a sale. Your dashboard shows that while traffic is high, the checkout service latency remains low. This is a “good” feedback signal. However, if the payment gateway service metrics show an increase in connection timeouts, that is a feedback signal requiring intervention.
Real-World Example: Team Without Feedback Loops
Imagine “Team A,” an organization that treats feedback as an afterthought.
They push code to production on Friday afternoons. They do not have automated testing, and their monitoring is limited to a server status light that stays green unless the entire box crashes.
When a customer complains that they cannot log in, the support team creates a ticket. Three hours later, a developer picks it up. They spend an hour trying to reproduce the issue because they have no logs to look at. They spend another two hours guessing which recent code change caused the problem. Finally, they roll back the entire system, causing three hours of downtime and significant revenue loss.
This team is trapped in a cycle of reactive firefighting. They are not improving; they are merely surviving.
Real-World Example: Team Using Effective Feedback Loops
Now, consider “Team B.” They have invested in a comprehensive feedback loop system.
They push code multiple times a day. Their CI/CD pipeline runs a suite of automated tests. If a developer introduces a bug that breaks the login flow, the pipeline fails, and the developer is notified in the Slack channel within five minutes.
Even if a bug slips through to production, their observability stack catches it immediately. The system triggers an alert because the error rate for the login service spiked. The developer opens their dashboard, sees the exact line of code causing the exception, and applies a patch within 15 minutes. The customer never even notices the issue.
Team B is faster, more reliable, and—critically—less stressed.
Benefits of Feedback Loops in DevOps
BenefitImpactFaster Issue DetectionBugs are caught in development or staging, not by angry customers.Better Software QualityContinuous testing ensures that new features do not break existing functionality.Reduced DowntimeFast detection leads to fast recovery, maintaining high availability.Improved CollaborationShared data creates a “single source of truth” between teams.Faster InnovationDevelopers spend less time fixing old bugs and more time building new features. Common Mistakes Teams Make
Even with good intentions, many organizations fail to implement feedback loops correctly.
Ignoring Monitoring Data: You have the dashboards, but nobody checks them until something breaks. Monitoring should be part of the daily routine. Slow Response to Alerts: If an alert fires, someone needs to address it. If you ignore alerts, they eventually become background noise. Too Many Alerts (Alert Fatigue): If your team receives 100 alerts a day, they will stop paying attention. Feedback must be actionable and high-signal. Lack of Collaboration: One team manages the dashboard, but another team writes the code. Feedback must be transparent and shared across all stakeholders. Measuring the Wrong Things: Tracking “server up-time” is useless if your application is throwing errors for every user. Track business-critical metrics like transaction success rates. Best Practices for Strong Feedback Loops
To build a culture of continuous improvement, follow this checklist:
Automate Monitoring: Do not rely on manual checks. Configure your system to alert you the moment a threshold is crossed. Review Incidents Regularly: After every outage, conduct a “blameless post-mortem.” What feedback did we miss? How can we catch this earlier next time? Share Feedback Across Teams: Create transparency. Developers should see production logs, and SREs should see development deployment pipelines. Reduce Alert Noise: Fine-tune your alerts. Only alert on conditions that require immediate human intervention. Measure Improvements: Track your metrics over time. Are you seeing fewer errors this month than last month? Use data to prove the value of your efforts. Role of DevOpsSchool in Learning DevOps Feedback Systems
Understanding these feedback loops requires a mix of theoretical knowledge and hands-on practice. It is not enough to read about them; you have to build them. Platforms like DevOpsSchool emphasize this practical approach.
By focusing on real-world DevOps workflow understanding, such platforms help learners connect the dots between CI/CD pipeline configuration and production monitoring. Whether you are a student or an IT professional, gaining exposure to these feedback mechanisms is essential for career growth. Understanding how to integrate various tools—from monitoring agents to automated testing frameworks—is a core competency that separates effective engineers from the rest.
Career Importance of Understanding Feedback Loops
The job market for DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is highly competitive. Employers are not looking for people who can just run commands. They are looking for engineers who understand systems thinking.
DevOps Engineer: You are responsible for the CI/CD pipeline, which is the primary source of early feedback. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE): You own the production feedback loops. Your success depends on your ability to use logs, metrics, and traces to keep the system running. Cloud Engineer: You must understand how cloud-native tools provide feedback on resource utilization and costs. Platform Engineer: You build the internal developer platforms that provide feedback to other developers, making their lives easier. Automation Engineer: You write the scripts that automate the detection and remediation of issues, closing the feedback loop programmatically. In all these roles, the ability to interpret feedback and turn it into actionable improvements is what drives career advancement.
Industries Using DevOps Feedback Systems
Feedback loops are not limited to tech startups. They are critical in any industry that relies on software.
SaaS Companies: They rely on rapid feature releases and high uptime. Feedback loops are their lifeblood. Banking & Finance: Here, compliance and security are paramount. Feedback loops ensure that security vulnerabilities are detected and patched in real-time. Healthcare: Systems must be highly reliable. Feedback loops monitor critical patient data platforms to ensure 100% availability. E-Commerce: During peak events, systems must scale. Feedback loops allow teams to monitor performance and adjust capacity dynamically. Telecom: Managing massive networks requires real-time feedback to handle traffic spikes and hardware failures. Future of Feedback Loops in DevOps
The future of feedback is moving toward automation and intelligence.
AI-Powered Observability: AI models will soon be able to identify “normal” behavior patterns and automatically detect anomalies that humans might miss. Predictive Monitoring: Instead of telling you what happened, systems will predict what is going to happen. “This service will run out of memory in 2 hours based on current trends.” Automated Remediation: The ultimate feedback loop is one that fixes itself. If a service becomes unresponsive, the system will restart it, scale it, or rollback the last change without human intervention. Smarter Feedback Systems: Systems will begin to correlate data from disparate sources, telling you that “The spike in errors is related to the database migration that happened 30 minutes ago.” FAQs
1. What are feedback loops in DevOps?
Feedback loops are processes that capture data from your software’s performance and behavior and return that information to the development and operations teams to guide improvement.
2. Why are feedback loops important?
They allow teams to detect issues early, reduce downtime, improve software quality, and ensure that the team is always learning and iterating.
3. What tools support feedback loops?
Tools include CI/CD platforms like Jenkins or GitLab CI, monitoring tools like Prometheus, and observability platforms like ELK Stack or Datadog.
4. How does CI/CD use feedback?
CI/CD uses feedback to determine if a code change is safe. If tests fail or builds crash, the pipeline provides immediate feedback to the developer.
5. What is observability?
Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system by examining its output (logs, metrics, and traces).
6. Can small teams use feedback loops?
Yes. Even a team of two can benefit from simple automated testing and basic server monitoring. It is about the culture of checking data, not the complexity of the tools.
7. Do feedback loops reduce downtime?
Absolutely. By detecting errors faster, you can resolve them before they impact users, or roll back quickly if a deployment goes wrong.
8. Are feedback loops hard to implement?
They require effort to set up initially, but they pay for themselves by saving time on troubleshooting and reducing manual toil.
9. How do I start creating a feedback loop?
Start with CI/CD. Automate your testing. If you do not have that, start with monitoring your production logs. Pick one area and improve it.
10. What is the difference between monitoring and feedback?
Monitoring is the collection of data; feedback is the action you take based on that data.
11. Does DevOps require specific tools?
No, DevOps is a methodology. You can build feedback loops with open-source tools or proprietary platforms depending on your needs.
12. How often should we review feedback?
Constantly. Your dashboards should be part of your daily workflow, not just checked when things go wrong.
13. What is alert fatigue?
Alert fatigue occurs when a team is bombarded with so many non-critical alerts that they start ignoring all of them, leading to missed critical issues.
14. How do I improve my feedback loops?
Regularly conduct post-mortems after incidents to identify where your feedback failed you.
15. Can AI help with feedback loops?
Yes, modern observability platforms use AI to filter out noise and identify meaningful patterns in your data.
Final Thoughts
DevOps is not a destination; it is a journey of continuous improvement. The most successful engineering teams are those that embrace the reality that things will break. They do not aim for perfection; they aim for faster learning.
Feedback loops are the tools that allow you to learn. When you treat every failure as a data point, you stop fearing bugs and start viewing them as opportunities to strengthen your systems. Whether you are setting up your first automated test or configuring complex observability for a microservices architecture, remember that the goal is always the same: make the system more resilient, make the process more efficient, and make the team more informed.
Small, incremental improvements—driven by the data you collect from your feedback loops—will compound over time, leading to significant, long-term stability and reliability.
View the full article
reporter

GitHub to Disable npm Install Scripts by Default to Stop Supply Chain Attacks

GitHub has announced what it said are "breaking changes" coming to npm version 12, one of which turns off install scripts by default to combat software supply chain threats. The changes aim to combat attack techniques that abuse the "npm install" command to trigger the execution of malicious code using npm lifecycle hooks. "Npm install" is used to download and install all the necessaryView the full article
Hacker News

Apple Shares Massive List of Over 250 Changes Across iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, and More

During its WWDC 2026 keynote on Monday, Apple briefly showed a slide with hundreds of new features and enhancements coming across iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27. All of the software updates are currently available as developer betas, and they are expected to be released to all users in September.


We already highlighted some of the key new features from the slide, and now we have shared a categorized list of all of the more than 250 changes shown.

iPhone & iOS 27 & iPadOS 27


Switch between two iPhone devices with the same phone number
More seamless transitions between Wi-Fi and cellular networks
Live Activities in Dynamic Island in landscape
Enhanced power efficiency for Safari in iOS
Faster Voice Control response in iOS
Extra-large widgets in iOS
Streamlined setup for Touch Accommodations in iOS and iPadOS
Live Activity for Precision Finding with Friends
Smoother scrolling in App Library
Smoother unlocking on iPhone
Undo and redo Home Screen edits in iPadOS
Extra-large widgets in Today View in iPadOS
Faster window closing in iPadOS
Faster browsing and transfers in Files in iPadOS
Faster menu bar access in iPadOS
iPhone app resizing in iPadOS
Apple News+ audio support in iPadOS
Faster window switching in iPadOS
Optional persistent menu bar on iPad
App names in iPad status bar
Dual camera in FaceTime
Faster Lock Screen switching
Lock Screen consistently stays awake while scrolling notifications
More power-efficient Personal Hotspot on N1 devices
Expanded touch support in Sidecar
Independent alarm volumes
Smoother camera switching when zooming in video
Smoother paging between Home Screen pages
Smoother scrolling in Control Center and Control Gallery
Easier-to-reach Camera experience
More accurate photo orientation
Faster and more reliable NFC reading
Quick Start with a recovery contact
Pairing and handoff improvements for Made for iPhone hearing devices
Faster entry and exit from Assistive Access and Guided Access modes
Proactive car key setup


macOS 27


More relevant Spotlight search suggestions
Faster shortcuts and actions indexing in Spotlight
Drawing in Notes in macOS
Updated video podcasts experience in macOS
Enhanced power efficiency for Safari in macOS
Edge-to-edge sidebars
Colorful sidebar icons
Updated menu bar icons
Uniform toolbars
Consistent corner radii
Faster user account creation in macOS
Ethernet status in menu bar in macOS
Improved RDMA over Thunderbolt
Support for Mac mirroring in 5K resolution
More high-resolution and high-refresh-rate display modes for external displays
Swipe down to refresh in macOS
Smoother scrolling in Safari in macOS
App resizing in iPhone Mirroring
DRM video support in iPhone Mirroring
Drawing in Freeform in macOS
Smoother animations in Mission Control and Spaces
Show Borders for macOS accessibility
HDR for macOS system UI


Apple TV & tvOS 27


Faster AirPlay connections to Apple TV
Smart downloads on Apple TV
AppleCare coverage details in Settings in tvOS
More responsive Control Center in tvOS
Redesigned Podcasts app for tvOS
Larger text sizes in tvOS
Smoother animations and app launches in tvOS


Apple Watch & watchOS 27


Better battery efficiency on Apple Watch
More accurate step tracking on Apple Watch
More efficient water detection on Apple Watch
Improved Wi-Fi connectivity in watchOS
Apple Wallet guest keys in watchOS
Consolidated Find My app in watchOS
Faster app extension launch in watchOS
Tap gesture on Apple Watch
Faster media playback in watchOS
Dynamic app grid in watchOS
Maps Parked Car widget in Smart Stack
Redesigned settings in the Apple Watch app
Support for time zone changes in Sleep
View card balance in Wallet in watchOS
Transit cards and IDs in Smart Stack in watchOS
New Smart Stack suggestions in watchOS


Vision Pro & visionOS 27


Use your panoramas for Environments in visionOS
Extra-small widget option in visionOS
New windows with curvature in visionOS
Improved Control Center in visionOS
Look and tap to view and respond to notifications in visionOS
Spatial scene support for panoramas in visionOS
Faster boot and connect to Wi-Fi in visionOS
Widget for Mac Virtual Display in visionOS
Multiple tab views in Safari in visionOS


Home & HomePod


Faster AirPlay connections to HomePod
Improved connectivity for Thread home accessories
Faster smart home accessory updates
Faster HomeKit accessory pairing
More reliable HomeKit camera storage


CarPlay


Audio scrubbing on CarPlay's Now Playing screen
Improved navigation heading and GPS accuracy in CarPlay
Improved wireless CarPlay reliability
Audio MiniPlayer in CarPlay


Photos


Filter photos and videos in Shared Albums
Add keywords to photos and videos in Photos
Album organization improvements in Photos
Customize slideshows in Photos
Captured by Me collection in Photos
Save any slideshow as a video in Photos
Choose a specific pet in Photo Shuffle
Search for photos and videos using additional metadata
Search returns more pleasing photos of people and pets in Photos
Option to prioritize syncing to iCloud Photos
Easier to save photos from Shared Albums
Option to include photos of yourself in Photo Shuffle
Faster rendering of Collections tab in Photos
Selection view in Photos
Identity Documents collection in Photos
Faster loading of new captures in Photos
Save a video frame as a photo
Star rings in Photos
Full-resolution photos and videos in iCloud Shared Albums
Additional participant permissions in Shared Albums
Expire your Shared Albums
Recent activity in Shared Albums
React with any emoji in Shared Albums
Participate in iCloud Shared Albums from Android and Windows
Easier to invite others in Shared Albums


Messages


Drawing app in Messages
Find offloaded media in Messages
Failed messages automatically retry sending in Messages
Continuous sending of photos, videos, and texts in Messages
Consolidated notifications for multiple Tapbacks in Messages
Thumbnails displayed for offloaded media in Messages
Search for conversations in Messages by phone number or a contact's nickname
Faster to add recent camera captures in Messages
Improved Messages syncing across devices


Apple Music & Podcasts


Improved reliability of Apple Music streaming
New AutoMix transitions
Refreshed album pages in Apple Music
Faster Now Playing view loading in Music
Refreshed artist pages in Apple Music
Search within shows in Podcasts
AirPods Custom EQ
Faster Apple Music playback start


Mail


Improved Top Results in Mail
Faster message loading in Mail
More reliable search indexing in Mail
Improved list formatting in Mail
Improved unread badge accuracy in Mail


Maps


More accurate Visited Places in Maps
Guides in Maps available in more places
Enhanced Flyover in Maps
Offline Maps update improvements
Natural language search for routing in Maps


Health & Fitness & Journal


Sort by completed Fitness+ workouts
Faster data updates in the Health app
Perimenopause and menopause support in the Health app
Perimenopause and menopause symptom logging in the Health app
Increased attachment limits in Journal
More accurate route maps in the Fitness app after workouts
iCloud sync status for Journal entries
Improved distance accuracy during treadmill workouts
Synced step count in the Health and Fitness apps
Faster workout start in the Workout app
Time stamps for Journal entries
Fitness+ workouts for perimenopause and menopause
More intuitive journaling streaks
GymKit on iPhone and AirPods Pro 3


Notes


Section links in Notes
Stylized notes from third-party Calendar accounts
Copy and paste as Markdown in Notes
Divider lines in Notes


Shortcuts


Else if support in Shortcuts
Group conversation support in Shortcuts
Expanded Get What's on Screen capabilities in Shortcuts
Store data in Shortcuts
Redesigned Shortcuts editor
Screenshot and notification automations in Shortcuts


Freeform


Faster board previews in Freeform
More reliable right-to-left text editing in Freeform
Smoother Freeform board performance
Dark Mode adaptive canvas in Freeform
Collaborative folders in Freeform


Safari


Faster start page content loading in Safari
Faster web application performance in Safari
Smoother animations and graphics in Safari
Faster handling of JavaScript in Safari
Smoother start page resizing in Safari


Apple Wallet & Apple Pay


Easier card selection and payment management with Apple Pay
Wallet order tracking support in Australia and Canada


Find My


More flexible sharing options in Find My
Find My UI enhancements


Home


Support for 4K camera recordings in the Home app
View streams from compatible cameras simultaneously in the Home app


Calendar


Modify multiple Calendar events
Streamlined Calendar event details
Smoother Calendar scrolling


Accessibility


Easier reading and editing of PDFs using VoiceOver
Improved PlayStation Access controller support
Streamlined Assistive Access setup


System & Performance & Miscellaneous


Updated Liquid Glass
Customize Liquid Glass
Faster app launches
Web audio no longer interrupts system audio
Faster PDF saving
Faster AirDrop transfers
Faster AirDrop recipient discovery
Improved Bluetooth power management
Improved FaceTime quality on poor connections
Faster network file browsing
Support for media sharing from third-party apps
More document formats in Preview
More efficient emergency alert monitoring
More consistent window positioning persistence across external displays
Improved game controller settings
Improved battery insights
Improved navigation in Game Overlay
Improved performance in Apple News
All options displayed in Camera settings
Password help accessible from the Lock Screen
Camera uses less power in Low Power Mode
Faster Camera launch in Low Power Mode
Richer iCloud collaboration link previews
Access requests for items shared via iCloud
Faster Text Recognition in photos and documents
Updated app icons
Optimized CPU scheduler
Autosize and reset columns
Faster to open full-screen view from Photos widget
Faster access to shared content on iCloud.com
Smoother animations in News and Stocks articles
More easily accessible share link for iCloud collaboration
More distinct active windows
Real-time updates for widgets when app is open
Faster Rapid Return to Service
Updated hourly and 10-day views in Weather
Faster to start uploading to iCloud Photos
Option-click to secondary sort
Content-based recipient suggestions for sharing photos and links
Faster loading of emoji and sticker keyboards
Smoother scrolling in the widget gallery
Easier to access recovery codes for Apple Accounts


Languages & Regional


New UI language for English (Canada) and English (Philippines)
New keyboard layout for Slovenian and Estonian
Automatic punctuation when typing on multilingual keyboards
Natural language time formats for Chinese and Hindi
Call Recording transcriptions support for Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese
New keyboards for languages including Afrikaans, Basque, Baybayin, English (Philippines), Galician, Guarani, Luxembourgish, Xhosa, and Zulu
New keyboards for Indigenous languages, including Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, Kiowa, and Tsuu'tina
Faster multilingual text processing for handwriting in multiple languages
Chāizì typing
Smart language and keyboard configuration suggestions
QuickPath and typing suggestions for Vietnamese VNI keyboard
Multilingual grammar checking
Holiday-aware alarms in China
Punctuation suggestions as you type in Chinese
Alternate calendars for India to support the current time zone while traveling
Grocery List in Reminders language expansion
Improved conversion from phonetic scripts like Pinyin and Kana when typing in Simplified Chinese and Japanese
Live Voicemail transcription for English (Singapore) and Japanese
Visited Places in Maps available in more markets
Scribble support for Hindi and Marathi with Apple Pencil
On-screen context for more relevant typing suggestions for Chinese and Japanese
Expanded language support for auto-categorization in Reminders
FaceTime Live Captions for Traditional Chinese
Related Roundups: iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate
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CISA tells agencies to patch smarter, not harder — foreshadowing broader industry practice

Security teams’ patching practices have come under intense pressure over the past year, as active exploitation is up, time-to-exploit windows are accelerating, and vulnerabilities have become attackers’ top initial access vector of choice.
Last year, organizations fully remediated only 26% of the vulnerabilities that attackers were actively exploiting in the wild — down from 38% the year before, according to Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report. The median time to close those known dangerous gaps stretched to 43 days, while attackers have trimmed their side of the equation to days, sometimes hours.
That’s the backdrop against which the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued Binding Operational Directive 26-04. The directive reflects growing recognition that patching based primarily on severity scores is no longer sufficient in an AI-driven environment where defenders face more vulnerabilities than they can realistically remediate at once.
During a media briefing announcing the directive, Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, described the initiative as the culmination of more than a decade of lessons learned from federal vulnerability management programs, adversary activity, and the agency’s growing understanding of AI’s impact on cyber operations.
“Prioritizing IT and security operations attention on the most at-risk assets is particularly important now given advancements in artificial intelligence, which allow threat actors to find and exploit vulnerabilities in these assets,” Butera said. “Defenders cannot afford to take weeks to patch systems that can be autonomously exploited en masse.”
In a companion blog post, Butera and Jonathan Spring, CISA’s senior technical advisor, argue that defenders are struggling to keep pace with a rapidly growing volume of vulnerabilities. AI is assisting researchers and adversaries in identifying flaws in software, vastly increasing the pace at which new vulnerabilities are discovered and forcing organizations to rethink how they prioritize remediation efforts.
Butera and Spring argue that defenders need greater clarity and speed when deciding what to patch. Their prescription: patch smarter, not harder.
Beyond CVSS: Why severity scores are no longer enough
The directive builds on CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities program, which already identifies vulnerabilities actively being abused by attackers. But BOD 26-04 goes further by introducing a decision framework that considers four key factors: whether the vulnerable system is publicly exposed to the internet, whether the vulnerability is listed in the KEV catalog, whether an attacker can automate exploitation, and how much control an attacker would gain after exploitation.
During the briefing, Butera said those four characteristics — public exposure, known exploitation, exploit automation, and post-exploitation impact — represent the conditions most closely associated with meaningful risk to federal systems. Vulnerabilities exhibiting three or more of those attributes must be patched within three days, while lower-risk vulnerabilities can be addressed on longer timelines or, in some cases, deferred until the next major system upgrade.
The change reflects a broader shift in how security practitioners think about vulnerability management. For years, organizations have relied heavily on severity scores such as CVSS to determine patching priorities. But those scores often fail to predict whether attackers will actually exploit a flaw.
“The directive used to be based on just severity score, which we as an industry have come to find is not a good predictor of exploitation,” Sasha Romanosky, a senior cybersecurity policy researcher at RAND, tells CSO. “This BoD looks to be updated to account for both impact and exploitation, which I think is the right approach.”
Jerry Gamblin, FIRST EPSS SIG member and founder of RogoLabs, is even more enthusiastic about the BoD. “BOD 26-04 is a massive step in the right direction and validates what data-driven teams already know: Patching every CVSS High or Critical is mathematically impossible,” he tells CSO. “By formalizing the use of the KEV catalog alongside advanced predictive data like EPSS, CISA is helping drive the industry toward practical, risk-based operational maturity.”
The operational burden of continuous risk assessment
Perhaps the most notable operational change is that remediation timelines become dynamic. A vulnerability’s required response time can change as circumstances change, with internet-facing and actively exploited vulnerabilities receiving the highest priority.
During the briefing, Butera said that this flexibility is one of the directive’s greatest strengths. In an analysis of one federal civilian agency, CISA found that only about 1% of vulnerability instances required remediation within three days, while more than 60% could be deferred until the next system update.
That finding highlights the agency’s central argument: Vulnerability management has become a prioritization problem as much as a patching problem.
“We really believe we should be able to free up some time to patch the most urgent vulnerabilities faster while allowing for more regular patch cycles for some of the lower-risk vulnerabilities,” Butera said.
Rather than forcing agencies to expend resources remediating thousands of vulnerabilities of varying importance, the framework concentrates attention on the small subset of flaws most likely to result in compromise.
What the directive gets right — and what it leaves out
Romanosky notes, however, that the directive’s treatment of impact is relatively narrow, focusing largely on whether exploitation grants an attacker partial or complete control of a system.
“What about integrity impacts that change data, or completely deny access to a system, such as a DDoS attack on DNS or wiping out a database?” he says. “Those impacts would also seem important.”
Still, he acknowledges that if policymakers must simplify risk decisions across the federal government, prioritizing vulnerabilities that provide adversaries control over systems is a reasonable place to start.
The directive also places significant emphasis on internet-facing systems, which could raise questions about risks deeper inside enterprise networks. Butera and Spring address that point directly in their blog post, arguing that CISA does not typically observe threat actors compromising core networks through software vulnerabilities alone. Instead, attackers frequently rely on valid credentials, misconfigurations, and other “living off the land” techniques.
KEV is useful — but is it enough?
Cybersecurity professionals outside government should pay close attention because federal vulnerability management often foreshadows broader industry practice. The directive formalizes ideas that many security leaders have advocated for years: CVSS scores alone are insufficient; asset context matters; internet exposure matters; active exploitation matters most.
Michael Roytman, co-founder and CTO of Empirical Security, views the directive as a milestone in that evolution.
“The federal government finally retired the ‘patch everything on the list’ mandate and replaced it with risk-based prioritization,” Roytman tells CSO. “Eleven years ago, prioritizing by exploitation probability was a heresy we had to defend in conference hallways. Today, it’s a binding federal directive.”
But he also argues that the framework’s reliance on the KEV catalog highlights one of its limitations.
“KEV lists are binary and retroactive,” Roytman says. “When AI compresses the gap between patch and exploit to hours, waiting for the KEV entry means you find out you were wrong from the incident report.”
Romanosky raises a similar concern, describing KEV as a valuable but inherently backward-looking source of information. “KEV is a great program for DHS and the public, but it is, at best, evidence of past exploitation,” he says.
Both experts suggested that predictive signals deserve a larger role in future vulnerability prioritization efforts. Romanosky points specifically to the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), which estimates the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited in the future.
“The concern, of course, is that vulnerabilities age, and so what may have been exploited last year or last month may no longer be used in active exploitation today,” Romanosky says. “So EPSS would provide a better signal.”
Roytman takes the argument a step further. Drawing on research conducted alongside Verizon’s DBIR team, he said that recency matters enormously when assessing exploitation risk.
According to Roytman, 82% of KEV entries involve vulnerabilities whose exploitation was first reported more than a year ago. “Twelve months of inactivity means the chance of exploitation falls from 99% on the first day down to 5%,” he says.
He also argues that KEV captures only a fraction of observed exploitation activity. “The KEV list covers only about 8% of observed exploitation,” Roytman said. “We’re tracking 17,800 CVEs compared to CISA’s 1,600.”
How AI could force another rethink of vulnerability management
Butera and Spring argue that artificial intelligence is already accelerating vulnerability discovery and increasing pressure on defenders. BOD 26-04 is intended to help agencies automate and scale vulnerability management while focusing scarce resources on the risks that matter most.
But the directive’s four-factor framework was built on the vulnerability landscape as it exists today — and AI may render that landscape unrecognizable relatively quickly.
Romanosky points to a structural gap in the current model: because the framework relies heavily on CVE identifiers, defenders may encounter newly discovered flaws that require urgent attention before they’ve been formally cataloged. “As more vulnerabilities are discovered quicker with AI tools, we might expect a whole set of new vulnerabilities that haven’t yet been assigned CVE IDs that need to be patched super quick,” he says.
That’s not a hypothetical concern. The CVE assignment process — run by MITRE and a network of numbering authorities — was built for a slower discovery cadence. It can take days or weeks for a vulnerability to receive an identifier, go through NVD analysis, and appear in tools that practitioners actually use. If AI compresses the window between discovery and exploitation to hours, that pipeline becomes a liability.
Roytman sees the directive’s four-factor model as a starting point rather than an endpoint — one calibrated to average federal risk rather than the specific conditions of any individual organization. “The risk in CISA’s table is the average risk across the federal enterprise,” he said. “The risk in an enterprise environment is a different number that depends on controls, telemetry, prevalence, and ultimately a local model specific to that enterprise.”
Romanosky agrees that another revision may be inevitable. “I might expect another revised BOD — or some other directive — to account for what may be a new continuous stream of vulnerabilities,” he says.
In that sense, BOD 26-04 may be less a destination than a waypoint: the federal government’s best current answer to a problem that AI is guaranteed to make harder.
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Ivanti patches critical Sentry flaws that lead to full device takeover

IT software provider Ivanti fixed two vulnerabilities in Ivanti Sentry, a secure mobile gateway appliance formerly called MobileIron Sentry. The flaws could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to gain complete control of deployments.
One of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-10523, credited to researcher Bryan Lam, allows attackers to bypass authentication and create arbitrary administrative accounts on appliances. The flaw is rated with a severity of 9.9 out of 10 on the CVSS scale.
The second flaw, CVE-2026-10520, is a command injection issue that can lead to remote code execution with root privileges on the underlying OS. Because the vulnerability can be exploited remotely without authentication, it is rated with the maximum CVSS severity score of 10.
Ivanti Sentry is an in-line gateway that manages, encrypts, and secures traffic between mobile devices and back-end enterprise servers such as Microsoft Exchange. It works together with Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) to enforce access restrictions and device verification. As such, the appliance is typically deployed at the enterprise network edge and is accessible from the internet.
Both vulnerabilities were reported privately through Ivanti’s responsible disclosure program, and the company is not aware of public exploitation at this time. But attackers, including state-sponsored cyberespionage groups, have exploited vulnerabilities in Ivanti products and network-edge appliances many times in the past.
Furthermore, researchers from security firm watchTowr have posted a detailed analysis of CVE-2026-10520 and the exploit is trivial to execute. The researchers released a Python script that enables organizations to test whether their deployments are vulnerable.
Ivanti Sentry customers are advised to upgrade their deployments to versions 10.5.2, 10.6.2, or 10.7.1 as soon as possible.
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Hands-On With iOS 27's Siri AI

The smarter, more capable version of Siri is finally here, available in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate. The updates are limited to developers right now, but there's a lot to look forward to this fall.

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Personal Context is a ‌Siri‌ capability that distinguishes ‌Siri‌ AI from other chatbots like Claude and OpenAI. ‌Siri‌ has access to the data on your iPhone, from emails and messages to photos and files. ‌Siri‌ can find anything you're looking for. Apple rebuilt its search index for ‌Siri‌ AI, and it's more comprehensive for a better search experience.

‌Siri‌ can see what's on your screen with onscreen awareness, and answer questions about what you're looking at. If there's an image on Instagram and you want to know where it was taken, you can just ask ‌Siri‌ where it was taken and get a response. Visual Intelligence is now part of the Camera app, and ‌Siri‌ can answer questions about anything you take a picture of.

Like other chatbots, ‌Siri‌ can search the web and access general world knowledge, so it can provide responses to any questions you might have. It can evaluate documents, solve math problems, craft recipes, walk you through DIY tasks, help you plan a party, and more.

‌Siri‌ can take action in and across apps, getting detailed maps directions with multiple stops, editing and sharing photos, or writing an email from scratch in your own writing style. It can do multiple tasks that are included in the same request.

‌Siri‌ is located in the iPhone's Dynamic Island, and there's a glassy new ‌Siri‌ bubble with bright colors that pops up when ‌Siri‌ is activated. You can use Hey ‌Siri‌ or hold down the side button, but ‌Siri‌ also comes up with a swipe down from the top center of the display. Responses show up in that same area, and if you swipe on a response, you can get more information and ask follow-up questions.

Apple also created a full ‌Siri‌ app where you can revisit past conversations and start a new conversation. The ‌Siri‌ app syncs across devices, so you can start a conversation on your iPhone and wrap it up on your Mac. ‌Siri‌ AI is available in ‌iOS 27‌, iPadOS 27, ‌macOS Golden Gate‌, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27, plus it works on AirPods and CarPlay.

‌Siri‌ AI has the same device requirements as Apple Intelligence, so you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later to use it. ‌Siri‌ AI is available in beta right now, and Apple is still refining. ‌iOS 27‌ is limited to developers, with a public beta set to come out in July. ‌iOS 27‌ with ‌Siri‌ AI will launch in September.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Siri
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iOS 27 Introduces New 'Tap to Share' Feature, But Not Available in EU

iOS 27 has a new "Tap to Share" feature that lets merchants use their iPhone to connect to a customer's device with an NFC tap for the purpose of data exchange. This is useful for small business owners, vendors at local markets, and so forth.


Tap to Share is an extension of the existing Tap to Pay on iPhone feature, which lets merchants accept contactless payments on an iPhone, with no point-of-sale hardware required. The latter feature allows customers to pay by simply tapping their iPhone or Apple Watch, contactless credit card or debit card, or other contactless payment option on the merchant's iPhone. Payment is securely completed using NFC, like Apple Pay.

During an active Tap to Pay on iPhone session, iOS 27 users can now share contact details for membership sign-up, provide a shipping address or email for receipts, add or share Apple Wallet passes, view their cart, and pay with Apple Pay.

Tap to Share requires an iPhone 12 or newer, and the feature is not currently available in the European Economic Area (EEA), which consists of all of the countries in the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. Apple did not explain why the feature is not immediately launching in the EEA or provide a timeframe for future availability there.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: European Union
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Sonos Summer Sale Takes Up to 25% Off Speakers, Headphones, and More

Sonos this week kicked off a new summer sale, with big discounts aimed at dads and anyone else shopping ahead of Father's Day. This sale includes deals on Sonos smart speakers, sound bars, subwoofers, and more.

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

One highlight of the event is the Sonos Arc Ultra Soundbar at the record low price of $899, down from $1,099, which is being matched at Amazon. For a cheaper soundbar, you can get the second generation Beam for $369, down from $499.

UP TO 25% OFFSonos Summer Sale

Additionally, the new Sonos sale has a few bundle deals, which combine a few different home audio devices at one discounted price. This includes the 2 Room Set with Era 100 for $378 ($60 off), Premium Entertainment Set with Arc Ultra for $1,658 ($340 off), and more.

Arc Ultra Soundbar - $899, down from $1,099
Beam (Gen 2) Soundbar - $369, down from $499
Roam 2 Speaker - $134, down from $179
Ace Headphones - $299, down from $399
Era 100 Speaker - $189, down from $219
Era 300 Speaker - $379, down from $479
Sub Mini - $399, down from $499
Sub 4 - $759, down from $899

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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The MacRumors Show: Siri AI, Apple Intelligence in Apps, and More at WWDC 2026

On this week's special episode of The MacRumors Show, we talk through all of the major announcements Apple unveiled at WWDC 2026, including Siri AI, new Apple Intelligence features in apps, and system-wide performance and design improvements.

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Apple framed the keynote around three areas: platform improvements, Trust and Safety, and a sweeping overhaul of ‌Apple Intelligence‌ and ‌Siri‌. Developer betas of all six operating systems are available now, with a public beta expected in July and a general release in September.

Liquid Glass received a series of improvements in response to user feedback, with Apple reworking the foundations of how the translucent design language is constructed to deliver more uniform refraction and improved contrast. A new system-wide opacity slider lets users dial transparency anywhere from completely clear to fully tinted. App icons also gain sharper definition with additional layering. macOS Golden Gate receives the same Liquid Glass refinements with particular attention to the transparency and shadow issues most pronounced on the Mac.

A significant chunk of the keynote was devoted to performance improvements across all platforms. iPhone and iPad apps launch up to 30% faster, new photos appear in iCloud Photos up to 70% faster after capture, AirDropped photos transfer up to 80% faster, and file transfers in Files are up to 50% faster. A redesigned CPU scheduler reportedly makes older iPhones feel more meaningfully responsive, and iOS 27 supports every iPhone compatible with iOS 26, going back to the iPhone 11.

The search index has been rearchitected to be more stable and comprehensive, with new content indexed almost immediately and a new ranking system in Mail to surface more relevant results. iCloud Shared Albums also gain support for contributions from Android and Windows users.

Apple announced an expanded set of parental controls and Screen Time tools, giving parents more granular ability to monitor and approve what children are doing on-device and within apps, with changes the company said are grounded in expert research.

The centerpiece of the keynote was Siri AI, a ground-up rebuild of Apple's personal assistant built on new Foundation Models co-developed with Google using Gemini technologies. Apple described the result as a profoundly more capable assistant supporting natural back-and-forth conversation, personal context understanding across all on-device content, onscreen awareness, image understanding, and broad world knowledge via web access.

‌Siri‌ now has a dedicated app for browsing and continuing conversations, which sync across devices via ‌iCloud‌. On the iPhone, ‌Siri‌ is embedded in the Dynamic Island and on the Mac it lives inside Spotlight. A new customizable voice model is available at setup. ‌Siri‌ AI extends to CarPlay and AirPods as well.

Visual Intelligence has been folded into a dedicated ‌Siri‌ mode in the Camera app, with new capabilities including nutritional information from a photo of food and bill-splitting from a receipt snap. ‌Siri‌ can now write anywhere text input is available, generate first drafts from natural language descriptions, give feedback on existing writing, and ‌Apple Intelligence‌ adds automatic proofreading system-wide.

Apple said ‌Siri‌ AI uses on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with cloud processing running on Apple's servers using Google's infrastructure, but handled such that data remains inaccessible to Apple or third parties. ‌Siri‌ AI is free, with some features such as image generation carrying daily usage limits and expanded access available through most ‌iCloud‌+ plans.

Users must join a waitlist to access the new ‌Siri‌. ‌Siri‌ AI will not be available in the EU or China at launch and launches in English only.

Safari gains tab grouping, with ‌Apple Intelligence‌ analyzing pages and organizing open tabs without manual intervention, and a new webpage monitoring feature that notifies users when a page is updated. Safari will also let users describe what they want a browser extension to do in natural language, with ‌Apple Intelligence‌ generating one accordingly, and can automatically change compromised passwords, updating them in the Passwords app.

Shortcuts gains natural language creation, so users can describe a workflow and have ‌Apple Intelligence‌ build it automatically. Messages and Mail both gain contextual one-tap suggestions for actions such as creating a reminder or inserting a photo. Calendar adds natural language event creation and can automatically update recurring events when their pattern changes.
 
Photos gains an improved Clean Up tool with more realistic infill, a new Extend tool that adds breathing room around images or straightens a crooked horizon without cropping, and Reframe, which uses on-device spatial models to adjust perspective. Image Playground is updated with a new generative model capable of photorealistic output, support for editing existing photos, and the ability to circle specific areas for targeted changes.
 
The Home app now aggregates notifications to reduce noise, and uses ‌Apple Intelligence‌ to generate summaries of recorded footage, linking content from multiple cameras together. Maps Flyover has been overhauled with significantly more detail, combining aerial imagery with vision intelligence models.

CarPlay gains new features including video app support, AirPods gain custom EQ settings, Apple Vision Pro gains the ability to turn panorama photos into spatial scenes, and the Health app adds perimenopause and menopause tracking. watchOS 27 brings a dynamic app grid, new gesture controls, and a ‌Siri‌ app to the Apple Watch.

Developer betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 are available now, with a public beta to follow in July. All of the updates are expected to release to the public in September alongside the new iPhone lineup. The MacRumors Show has its own YouTube channel, so make sure you're subscribed to keep up with new episodes and clips.

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You can also listen to ‌The MacRumors Show‌ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or other podcast apps. You can also copy our RSS feed directly into your player.



If you haven't already listened to the previous episode of The MacRumors Show, catch up to hear our discussion about all of the major rumors surrounding Apple's announcements at WWDC 2026.

Subscribe to ‌The MacRumors Show‌ for new episodes every week, where we discuss some of the topical news breaking here on MacRumors, often joined by interesting guests such as Kayci Lacob, Kevin Nether, John Gruber, Mark Gurman, Jon Prosser, Luke Miani, Matthew Cassinelli, Brian Tong, Quinn Nelson, Jared Nelson, Eli Hodapp, Mike Bell, Sara Dietschy, iJustine, Jon Rettinger, Andru Edwards, Arnold Kim, Ben Sullins, Marcus Kane, Christopher Lawley, Frank McShan, David Lewis, Tyler Stalman, Sam Kohl, Federico Viticci, Thomas Frank, Jonathan Morrison, Ross Young, Ian Zelbo, and Rene Ritchie.

‌The MacRumors Show‌ is on X @MacRumorsShow, so be sure to give us a follow to keep up with the podcast. You can also email us at [email protected] or head over to The MacRumors Show forum thread. Remember to rate and review the podcast, and let us know what subjects and guests you would like to see in the future.Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tags: Apple Intelligence, Siri, The MacRumors Show, WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
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Here's How Liquid Glass Is Changing in iOS 27

Apple this week detailed a broad set of improvements to Liquid Glass, the translucent design language it introduced last year, spanning readability, personalization, sidebar behavior, and app icons.


Announced at the WWDC 2026 keynote and elaborated on further at the Platforms State of the Union, the changes address feedback that followed last year's rollout by making adjustments to the underlying foundations of how Liquid Glass is constructed.

At the core of the updates is a tuning of how the material handles content behind it. Apple has adjusted Liquid Glass so it more effectively diffuses complex content, improving readability throughout the system. To add greater depth and visual separation, Apple has also introduced a darkened edge around Liquid Glass elements, along with brighter specular highlights.

The headline change for users is a new transparency slider in Settings, which allows the look of Liquid Glass to be adjusted anywhere from ultra clear to fully tinted. The control goes considerably further than a binary toggle, giving users granular control over how much the glass effect appears across the system.

Apps already using Liquid Glass will gain many of these improvements automatically when running on iOS 27, without needing to be recompiled. Liquid Glass also adapts to accessibility settings such as Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast.

Apple has also addressed behavior when content scrolls under floating bars. A uniform toolbar now appears across the top in these situations, keeping text legible while improving contrast. The effect is applied automatically for standard toolbars and can be further adjusted using the existing scroll edge effect APIs.

Icon rendering has been updated substantially. Apple says icons will now appear sharper and more defined, with new refraction features that can be selectively applied for added character. On macOS and iPadOS, developers also now have access to an API to surface icons for key app actions in menus, which are hidden by default.

Icon Composer, Apple's dedicated tool for designing app icons, has been updated to support building icons from multiple layers of Liquid Glass. New annotation features allow developers to add refraction or dial in content effects, while an interactive preview shows how a designed icon will look on earlier operating system releases.

Apple has also made a number of changes specific to macOS 27 Golden Gate, including further sidebar refinements and window corner radius updates. For a full breakdown of how Liquid Glass is evolving on the Mac, see our dedicated article.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Liquid Glass
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macOS 27 Hints at 'MacBook Ultra' in Three Ways

Apple this week unveiled macOS 27 Golden Gate, and the upcoming software update hints at the rumored "MacBook Ultra" in at least three ways.


"MacBook Ultra" is the rumored name for a new high-end model above the MacBook Pro. The laptop is rumored to feature an OLED display, touch-screen capabilities, a Dynamic Island, a thinner design, and M6 Pro and M6 Max chips.

macOS 27 includes a trio of hints about touch-screen support and a Dynamic Island in particular.

First, the update adds direct touch input to Sidecar, the feature that allows you to use an iPad as a second display for a Mac. This enhancement allows users to tap and interact with macOS elements with a finger on their iPad. This strongly hints at Apple preparing to bring touch-screen support to macOS after years of resisting.


Second, macOS 27 adds iPhone-like pull-to-refresh support to the Mac. This allows you to swipe down on the trackpad to refresh the page or visible content in apps such as Safari, Mail, News, Podcasts, and Calendar. Apple may have finally expanded this functionality to the Mac in preparation for a "MacBook Ultra" with a touch screen.


Third, the new "Search or Ask" feature powered by the revamped version of Siri is built into Spotlight on macOS 27, resulting in a dark, pill-shaped interface that would be very fitting for a MacBook screen with a Dynamic Island.

On the MacBook Ultra, the "Search or Ask" interface would likely be positioned higher so that it surrounds the Dynamic Island when visible.


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

Apple reportedly plans to launch the "MacBook Ultra" in early 2027.Related Roundup: macOS Golden GateTag: MacBook Ultra
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June Patch Tuesday marks a ‘new normal’ with over 200 CVEs, 32 rated ‘critical’

June’s Patch Tuesday security updates have arrived, with SAP fixing four critical vulnerabilities and Microsoft addressing over 200 CVEs. Microsoft’s to-do list includes fixes for three zero days, 32 patches rated as ‘critical’, and a batch of other high-risk vulnerabilities that need urgent assessment. There’s also one older flaw under exploit, and some patches affecting enterprise products for which Microsoft says exploitation is likely. Adobe, too, fixed critical vulnerabilities in enterprise software.
Vulnerability surge
It’s a record haul for Patch Tuesday CVEs — and that’s not counting the other exploited vulnerabilities Microsoft has patched out-of-band since its May update.
Microsoft recently told customers it expects the number of vulnerabilities in monthly updates to continue rising, influenced by the growing use of AI tools. As a May post by the Microsoft Security Response Center put it: “As larger releases settle in as a norm, the way we deliver and decide on updates remains consistent. Patch Tuesday continues as our predictable rhythm for on-premises software,” Going forward, customers should brace themselves for more out-of-band updates, it added.
According to Nirwan Dogra, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft Security, May and June 2026 represent a new norm that will challenge traditional, slower test-and-deploy patching.
“The 200+ CVE count isn’t an anomaly. It’s the new baseline. AI-assisted vulnerability discovery (fuzzing, static analysis, variant hunting) is compressing the timeline between ‘a bug exists’ and ‘bug is found’ dramatically,” he said via email.
Ominously, according to Dogra, AI tools used were also resulting in more flaws being uncovered in components previous seen as too complex for manual audit such as hypervisor code and Kerberos. He recommended that organizations move towards risk-based vulnerability prioritization, automated patching pipelines, and a focus on the flaws that were likely to be exploited.
Dustin Childs, Head of Threat Awareness for TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) agreed: “We are heading into a high-stakes summer for cybersecurity. June’s record-shattering drop of 210 Microsoft vulnerabilities is a stark warning that AI is supercharging flaw discovery at an uncontrollable scale,” he said.
Microsoft’s high-priority fixes
Three vulnerabilities are rated as zero days because they have been publicly disclosed. Two are connected to adversarial disclosures affecting Windows by the researcher Nightmare Eclipse which have attracted a lot of attention: CVE-2026-45586 (CTFMON) and CVE-2026-50507 (BitLocker bypass). The third is CVE-2026-49160, a CVSS 7.8-rated denial of service zero day vulnerability in the Windows HTTP Protocol Stack used by various Windows services.
Security teams should also note the patch for CVE-2026-42897, an Exchange Server flaw under active exploitation originally disclosed in May. This was originally addressed using workarounds but has now been patched.
The list of 15 vulnerabilities where exploitation is said to be “more likely” is headlined by CVE-2026-47291, a dangerous CVSS 9.8-rated kernel-level RCE flaw in http.sys that attackers could use to target multiple important enterprise applications, for IIS, WinRM, or Windows Admin Center.
Also worth paying attention to are a series of ‘high’ rated Hyper-V VM escape flaws, CVE-2026-47652, CVE-2026-45641, and CVE-2026-45607. Anyone running on-premises networks will also be interested in CVE-2026-47288, an RCE affecting the Active Directory Kerberos core, and CVE-2026-45648, a CVSS 8.8 affecting Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).
Four critical SAP vulnerabilities
SAP’s Security Patch Day haul for June comprises 15 patches across a range of core enterprise products including, prominently, NetWeaver, Commerce Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, and the Business Objects Business Intelligence Platform.
Four of these are rated ‘critical’, the most eye-catching of which is CVE-2026-27671, a CVSS 9.8 memory corruption vulnerability in Application Server ABAP and ABAP Platform. The problem here, said Jonathan Stross, SAP security analyst at security company Pathlock, is that it “requires no authentication and can affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability at the same time. A successful exploit can undermine the trustworthiness of the entire ABAP instance and everything connected to it.”
“This is one of the most serious notes in the batch because the attack requires no authentication and can affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability at the same time. A successful exploit can undermine the trustworthiness of the entire ABAP instance and everything connected to it.
Not far behind it is CVE-2026-44748, a CVSS 9.9 XML Signature Wrapping in SAML Authentication vulnerability in the SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP and ABAP Platform. This allows authenticated attacker with low-level user privileges to capture a signed SAML message and modify and submit an XML payload with a forged identity data.
The final critical-rated flaws are CVE-2026-22732, a CVSS 9.1 Spring Security weakness within SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Data Hub, and CVE-2026-40128, a CVSS 9.0 directory traversal vulnerability in the Application Server Java (Web Container).
This month’s update also patches two vulnerabilities marked ‘high’, the CVSS 7.4 CVE-2026-29145, addressing multiple weaknesses in Apache Tomcat within SAP Commerce Cloud, and CVE-2026-44751, a missing authorization check affecting Application Server ABAP of SAP NetWeaver and ABAP Platform.
Adobe patches enterprise vulnerabilities
Adobe’s June update addresses 123 vulnerabilities across Reader, ColdFusion, Experience Manager Forms, InDesign, InCopy, Substance 3D Sampler, Content Credentials SDK, Dreamweaver, Format Plugins, and Adobe Campaign Classic.
Of note are the two CVSS 10-rated CVEs (APSB26-66) in the Adobe Campaign Classic enterprise marketing platform, the seven mostly ‘critical’ or ‘high’-rated CVEs affecting ColdFusion (APSB26-64), and a total of 20 CVEs affecting Reader (APSB26-63). It’s also a busy month for InDesign, which features 12 vulnerabilities (APSB26-58), and Experience Manager which features three (APSB26-57).
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Amazon's Early Prime Day Deals Expand With New Sales on Desktop NAS and More

We started tracking early Prime Day deals last week, and today Amazon expanded its selection of items on sale ahead of Prime Day, which will begin on June 23. New deals include UGREEN's best desktop NAS systems, the Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar at a record low price, and more.

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.

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.

$39 OFFAnker Prime 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station for $109.99

The Prime 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station features Qi2.2 support, which lets a compatible MagSafe ‌iPhone‌ charge at up to 25W. It's the same speed as Apple's ‌MagSafe‌ charger, and it is 10W faster than the standard Qi2 ‌MagSafe‌ chargers. You can also simultaneously charge an Apple Watch and AirPods with 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.

UGREEN

2-Bay Desktop NASync - $186.99, down from $219.99
2-Bay Desktop NAS - $369.99, down from $439.99
4-Bay Desktop NAS - $619.99, down from $729.99
4-Bay Desktop NAS Pro - $679.99, 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 - $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 MagGo Power Bank 10,000 mAh - $69.99, down from $79.99
Anker Prime Power Bank 20,100 mAh - $149.99, down from $179.99
Anker SOLIX C300 Power Station with Lantern - $169.99, down from $249.00
Anker Prime Power Bank 26,250 mAh - $199.99, down from $229.99
Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2 Portable Power Station - $449.99, down from $799.00
Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 Portable Power Station - $449.00, 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.



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Related Roundup: Apple Deals
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Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.
A graphic created and shared by The Gentlemen ransomware group administrator Hastalamuerte on Breachforums in May 2026. Credit: ke-la.com.
Experts at the security firm Check Point Software have been closely covering exploits of The Gentlemen, a so-called “ransomware-as-a-service” (RaaS) offering that pays affiliates handsomely to help spread the group’s malware.
“A 90/10 affiliate revenue split — compared to the industry standard 80/20 — is accelerating the group’s growth by attracting experienced operators from competing programs,” the researchers wrote in April.
Check Point found The Gentlemen are the second most active ransomware group by victim count so far this year, claiming at least 332 published victims since the group’s inception in mid-2025 and more than 240 in 2026 alone.
According to Check Point, the group targets Internet-facing devices (VPNs, firewalls) as their entry point, and once inside moves quickly to encrypt entire networks within hours.
Check Point says the administrator and primary operator of the ransomware group uses the nickname Zeta88 on the Russian-language cybercrime forums, and that this individual was previously known under the moniker Hastalamuerte. Check Point noted that a breach of the group’s backend infrastructure made it clear that Hastalamuerte/Zeta88 is the person who assembles the locker and RaaS panel, manages payments, and is essentially the administrator of the entire program who receives 10 percent of all ransoms.
WHO IS HASTALAMUERTE?
The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows that the user Hastalamuerte is a Russian and English speaking person who registered on almost a dozen cybercrime forums between 2019 and the present day, including Exploit, Breachforums, Ramp_V2, BHF, Raidforums, and Nulled.
Intel 471 reveals that Hastalamuerte registered on Breachforums in January 2025 from an Internet address in Izhevsk, the capital city in western Russia’s Udmurt Republic. Likewise, the user Zeta88 signed up at the English-language cybercrime forum Breached in August 2022 from a different Internet address in Izhevsk.
Intel 471 finds Hastalamuerte registered on Raidforums in 2020 using the email address [email protected] (1488 is a common combination of two numeric symbols associated with white supremacy). A lookup on this address at the open source intelligence service Epieos shows it is connected to an account at Apple and to a phone number ending in 04.
Epieos says that Protonmail address is also linked to a GitHub account under the username SantaMuerte. That account is marked private, but a history of this user’s activity shows they are watching and developing a number of malware tools and exploits.
In April 2020, Hastalamuerte said on the crime forum Nulled that they could be contacted at the Telegram instant messenger name @hastalamuerte18, and the threat intelligence company Flashpoint finds this username is assigned the unique Telegram ID number 30907522 [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog].
The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reports that Hastalamuerte’s Telegram ID is connected to another username — “bu4vs” — and to the Russian phone number 79127650004. Pivoting on this phone number in Constella fetches multiple records from hacked Russian government databases showing it is assigned to one Alexander Andreevich Yapaev, a 36-year-old from Izhevsk.
Constella reveals that phone number was used to create an account at the Russian social media platform Pikabu under the name “4apai18,” and shows Mr. Yapaev has signed up at a number of websites using the common surname Ivanov, or else “Chapaev” (the numeral 4 is often used as shorthand for a “ch” sound in Russian).
A search in Intel 471 for cybercrime forum members with the nickname SantaMeurte unearths an account by the same name created in 2020 on the Russian hacking forum Codeby. Intel 471 shows this user originally registered on Codeby with the not-so-subtle nickname Alexandr 4apaev.
Constella finds Mr. Yapaev regularly used the email address [email protected]. Meanwhile, Epieos shows this address is connected to a LinkedIn account for Alexander Yapaev, who lists himself as the head of B2B marketing at the company Uralenergo Udmurtia, one of Russia’s largest suppliers of electrotechnical and lighting products.
Mr. Yapaev did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Nearly every time we publish one of these Breadcrumbs stories, readers are curious to know why it seems like so many cybercriminals from Russia apparently do little to hide their real life identities. The truth is that — Russian or not — most didn’t exactly set out to be arch criminals, but instead got drawn into the scene gradually over several years as their skills broadened and sharpened.
Another important dynamic is that the Russian government generally either co-opts or ignores cybercriminal activity within its border so long as the hackers do not steal from or attack Russian businesses and citizens. As a result, successful cybercriminals in Russia are usually insulated from prosecution and arrest by foreign law enforcement agencies provided they occasionally pay off the right people and do not travel abroad. And cybercriminals who intend to strictly adhere to those unwritten rules may (at least initially) be less concerned about covering their tracks online.
But the simplest explanation is that cybercriminals of all nationalities tend to make a number of basic operational security mistakes early in their careers, when they are less savvy and have far less to lose by their carelessness. A review of Hastalamuerte’s early posts on the crime forums (circa 2019-2020) shows a relatively unsophisticated and low-skilled hacker still trying to learn the ropes and earn a positive reputation on these communities.
For example, in June 2020 Hastalamuerte’s Telegram account joined a multi-month training program (@pntst) to learn how to use popular penetration testing tools, and their candid posts to this hacker training camp show Hastalamuerte struggling to use these tools effectively. A Google-translated record of Hastalmuerte’s posts to @pntst is here.
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Apple Seemingly Discontinuing Vision Pro Travel Case Around the World

Apple appears to be quietly discontinuing the Vision Pro Travel Case in international markets, with the $199 accessory removed from storefronts across much of the world.


MacRumors can confirm that the Apple Vision Pro Travel Case is no longer listed on Apple's online storefronts around the world, including the UK, Japan, Germany, France, Ireland, and Hong Kong. The Apple Vision Pro accessories page in these countries no longer list the Travel Case at all, and the product web pages that once contained it have been completely removed, which would indicate discontinuation with no plans to revive the product, at least in these countries.

In China and Australia, the listings remain live and visible but the product is grayed out and unavailable to purchase. The case continues to be sold as usual in the U.S., Canada, and the UAE. It is unclear when the changes were made, but they appear to have taken place recently.

The Belkin Travel Bag for Apple Vision Pro remains available for customers in international markets as an alternative. Apple has not announced any changes to the original product's availability.

The move comes as Apple appears to have scaled back its Vision Pro ambitions. The headset's October 2025 M5 refresh reportedly failed to revive meaningful consumer interest, with the $3,499 price tag remaining unchanged despite the chip upgrade. Apple is believed to have sold around 600,000 Vision Pro units in total, and sources have noted an unusually high rate of returns compared to any other recent Apple product.

Following the M5 model's weak reception, the Vision Pro team was reportedly disbanded and its members redistributed across other projects. Vision Products Group chief Mike Rockwell has been leading Apple's Siri team since March 2025. Plans for a cheaper, lighter "Vision Air" were reportedly scrapped in October 2025, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that if a new headset does eventually materialize, he would not expect it for "around two more years at least," given that the bulk of Apple's mixed-reality hardware talent have been moved to other projects.

Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported this month that incoming Apple CEO John Ternus signed off on canceling both a second Vision Pro and the Vision Air, with Apple's focus now shifted to smart glasses. Kuo says two products remain in development: AI-equipped glasses to rival Meta's Ray-Bans, expected in 2027, and a display-equipped set of AR glasses unlikely to arrive before 2029. Gurman separately indicated that a slimmer, cheaper Vision Pro remains a possibility in the long term, but is unlikely to arrive before late 2028 or 2029 at the earliest.

Whether it signals a complete discontinuation or simply a quiet inventory wind-down, it is difficult to not see the apparent phasing out of the Vision Pro Travel Case as part of the device's uncertain future.

Thanks, Ben!Related Roundup: Apple Vision ProBuyer's Guide: Vision Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: Apple Vision Pro
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iOS 27 Adds Six New Features to Apple Wallet on Your iPhone

The upcoming iOS 27 update that Apple unveiled this week includes many new features and enhancements for Apple's Wallet app on the iPhone.


Below, we have outlined six additions to the Apple Wallet app on iOS 27.

New Features

Enhanced Passes

iOS 26 introduced enhanced Apple Wallet boarding passes, and iOS 27 will gradually expand this improved experience to all other types of passes in the app, including for loyalty, rewards, membership, and gift cards.


The newer passes have an elevated design with more detailed background images, and there are tiles below them that provide relevant information.

Apple has introduced a new macOS app called Pass Designer for creating and previewing passes.


Pass Designer is available in beta on macOS 27.

Enhanced Hotel Keys

iOS 27 supports enhanced Apple Wallet digital keys at participating hotels and resorts. 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 hotel brands or locations that will be offering these upgraded keys.

Create Passes

You can now create custom passes in Apple Wallet by scanning physical cards, like loyalty or membership cards.


With the new Siri mode in the Camera app, you can simply point your iPhone at any physical card with a barcode and save it to Apple Wallet. Once added, passes are ready to present as a barcode or QR code right from the iPhone.

New Barcode Types

Apple Wallet passes can display four new barcode types: EAN-13, Code 39, Codabar, and ITF.

Split Bills With Apple Cash

In the U.S. only, iOS 27 allows you to split bills with a new feature powered by Apple Cash and Apple Intelligence. This capability is available in the Apple Wallet and Messages apps, or by using the new Siri mode in the Camera app.


"When users point their iPhone at a receipt using Siri mode, it can surface the relevant action to split a bill with Apple Cash and identify the items on the receipt," said Apple. "As users select their items, their total payment is calculated, including their share of tax and tip, so they can pay back exactly what they owe with Apple Cash."

Wallet Order Tracking in More Countries

Starting with iOS 27, Apple Wallet's order tracking feature is available in Australia and Canada. The feature was limited to the U.S. and the U.K. previously.

Learn More

Apple shared a WWDC 2026 video outlining new features coming to the Wallet app this year, and it has a page on its developer website with more details.


iOS 27 Availability

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.
How to Install the iOS 27 Beta
iOS 27 is compatible with the iPhone 11 series and newer.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Apple Wallet
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iOS 27 Brings These Five New Features to Your iPhone Lock Screen

Apple unveiled iOS 27 at WWDC this week, and while the headline-grabbing Siri overhaul has received the most attention, the Lock Screen has picked up several refinements that you may have missed.


Some are brand-new additions, while others are tweaks to features Apple introduced in iOS 26, but together they give you more control over how your Lock Screen looks and behaves.

Here are five to try if you plan to install the public beta next month, or when iOS 27 becomes generally available in the fall.

Extend Your Wallpaper


A new wallpaper extension feature in iOS 27 uses Apple Intelligence to automatically expand a photo beyond its original boundaries so it fills the entire Lock Screen more naturally. If a photo is cropped too tightly, doesn't match your iPhone's aspect ratio, or it leaves empty space when positioned on the Lock Screen, iOS 27 can generate additional image content around the edges with the "Extend" option. It will analyze the existing image and create matching background details that blend with the original photo, so there's no need for aggressive cropping. The Extend option can also be found in the Photos app.

Make the Clock Tiny


A new compact clock mode is available as a new Lock Screen layout option in iOS 27. Found in the top-right corner of the Font & Color panel, the option moves the time from its traditional large, centered position to a much smaller format alongside the date and widgets at the top of the screen. It's a nice option to have if you like a cleaner Lock Screen look that shows off your wallpaper more fully, and it's the complete opposite effect introduced in iOS 26 that stretches the clock down the screen.

Generate Wallpapers With AI


iOS 27 also expands Image Playground with support for AI-generated Lock Screen wallpapers. You can create custom backgrounds using text descriptions, and the app will generate entirely new images tailored to your preferred style, subject matter, or aesthetic, allowing you to set it directly as your Lock Screen wallpaper.

Change Liquid Glass Opacity


In iOS 27, Apple added a full Liquid Glass slider under Settings ➝ Appearance ➝ Liquid Glass. It changes the translucency of Liquid Glass elements, and you can choose a clear version of Liquid Glass that allows some of the background to show through, select a more opaque, tinted version that improves the legibility of text, or choose something in between. Granted, it's more of a system-wide customization feature than a Lock Screen-exclusive feature, but it directly impacts the look of your clock setup, buttons, widgets, and notifications.

New Siri Interface


To go with Apple's tentpole "Siri AI" chatbot-style overhaul, iOS 27 introduces a redesigned Siri experience. Instead of the glowing light effect that previously traced the edges of the display, a swirling Siri orb now expands and animates within the Dynamic Island. Siri requests and responses are also now presented in a more compact interface surrounding the Dynamic Island, so interactions should feel more focused rather than completely taking over your Lock Screen.Related Roundup: iOS 27
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AirPods Pro 3 Hit New Low Price of $179

Walmart today has the AirPods Pro 3 available for $179.00, down from $249.00. This is a new all-time low price on the AirPods Pro 3, and it's a deal that we're only tracking at Walmart as of writing.

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.

$70 OFFAirPods Pro 3 for $179.00

This deal beats the current Amazon discount by about $20, although Amazon does typically follow suit and match all-time low prices from other retailers so there is a chance we'll see this deal on Amazon soon. If it appears, we'll update this article.

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 Is the Last to Support Intel Apps via Rosetta 2

macOS 27 Golden Gate is the final version of macOS to feature full Rosetta 2 support, meaning the translation layer that keeps Intel-built apps running on Apple silicon Macs is set to disappear entirely with next year's major macOS release.


Golden Gate is the first macOS release limited to Apple silicon Macs and marks the end of the road for Intel-based hardware, but the implications reach Apple silicon owners too.

Rosetta 2 is the dynamic binary translator Apple introduced alongside the M1 chip in late 2020. It currently allows Intel-compiled apps to continue running on Apple silicon without modification. Apple first confirmed this timeline at its Platforms State of the Union during WWDC 2025:



With macOS 27 Golden Gate now in beta testing, that commitment has reached its final stage. Apple silicon Mac owners running Intel-only apps have one macOS release left before those apps stop working.

Apple began warning users ahead of the cutoff. With macOS 26.4 and 26.5, a system alert surfaces whenever a user launches an Intel-only app, flagging that support will end in a future macOS release. The notifications are designed to give both end users and developers time to find or build native Apple silicon alternatives before the deadline arrives.

Most widely used apps have been updated with native Apple silicon support in the six years since the transition was announced in 2020. Developers and organizations still dependent on Intel-only software, however, will need to find replacements or push for updated builds before macOS 28 ships, or simply remain on macOS 27.

Golden Gate also automatically uninstalls Rosetta 2 if you had it installed in macOS 26 Tahoe, so those who need to continue using it will have to reinstall the feature.

macOS 27 Golden Gate is currently in beta for developers, with a public beta coming next month and launch expected in September.Related Roundup: macOS Golden GateTags: Intel, Rosetta
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Craig Federighi Explains Why Apple Pivoted to a Siri Chatbot App

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi has explained why the company launched a standalone Siri app in iOS 27, after previously characterizing a dedicated chatbot as contrary to its Apple Intelligence strategy.


The new ‌Siri‌ app, announced at WWDC earlier this week, gives users a centralized place to manage and revisit their conversations with ‌Siri‌ AI. Federighi addressed the apparent about-face during a post-keynote discussion for the media at Apple Park this week, responding directly to a question about Apple's prior public stance.

Following WWDC 2025, Federighi and senior vice president of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak went on a media tour in which they described Apple's approach as weaving ‌Siri‌ into the user's existing workflow rather than offering "a bolt-on chatbot on the side."

Federighi this week said the decision came down to a practical user need to return to and continue past ‌Siri‌ conversations. Apple determined that a home screen app was the most natural affordance on its platform for that purpose, and framed the ‌Siri‌ app as an extension of the system experience rather than a standalone product:



The ‌iOS 27‌ developer beta is available now, though access to the new ‌Siri‌ requires joining a waitlist in Settings, with a public beta expected in July.Tags: Craig Federighi, Siri, Siri AI, Siri Chatbot, WWDC 2026
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Microsoft feud escalates as researcher drops new Windows zero-day

The long-running feud between Microsoft and security researcher Nightmare Eclipse has entered a new chapter.
Eclipse, who has spent the past several months publicly releasing unpatched Windows vulnerabilities while sparring with Microsoft over vulnerability disclosure practices, has published exploit code for a new zero-day flaw dubbed RoguePlanet.
The researcher said their exploit uses a race condition problem affecting Microsoft Defender, giving attackers less than a hundred percent odds at success, which can potentially allow SYSTEM-level privilege on even freshly updated Windows.
As before, the exploit arrives just after Microsoft issued its June 2026 Tuesday patches, where the company issued fixes for over 200 security flaws, including 32 critical ones. “The timing is a giveaway, MiniPlasma was released on May 13, 2026—exactly one day after Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday cycle, ensuring defenders have no official vendor patch for weeks,” Agnidipta Sarkar, chief evangelist at ColorTokens, had said about Eclipse’s previous “MiniPlasma” disclosure.
The exploit was dropped in a new GitHub repository, “MSNightmare,” surely a pointed reference to Microsoft, after GitHub (owned by Microsoft) removed Eclipse’s original repositories recently. Several earlier Eclipse disclosures were reportedly incorporated into real-world attacks shortly after exploit code became available, prompting warnings from Microsoft and multiple security vendors.
The bug allows code execution through SYSTEM access
In a June 9 blog post titled “RoguePlanet, a quick history,” Eclipse wrote of an initial iteration of the Windows Defender bug. While technical details remain scarce, the blog did mention that it has to do with getting a victim to open a “.vhd(x) on a remote SMB server.”
Doing that, the writeup explained, would result in “Defender overwriting its own files and obviously the end outcome was an RCE.” A rough interpretation of the description is that the bug allows executing malicious metadata from a specially crafted virtual hard disk (.vhd) image stored on a remote Server Message Block (SMB) server.
Eclipse’s PoC exploit ultimately spawns a SYSTEM shell, allowing arbitrary code to be executed by a potential attacker.
A mid-May patch to Defender reportedly sealed the initial attack path detailed by Eclipse, making “junction attacks useless,” which had them re-write RoguePlanet to work around the fix. The current version of the exploit allegedly works against Windows 11 (official channel + Canary) and Windows 10 with the June 2026 patch installed.
The PoC code, however, gave out against Windows Server installations since standard users “Cannot mount an ISO image”. While Eclipse was “too drained” to redesign an exploit for this exception, they are certain an exploit is possible.
The feud behind the flaws
Microsoft recently removed Eclipse’s GitHub accounts and also disabled their Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) access. Following the ban, GitLab also suspended the researcher’s secondary mirrors.
In a May 27 blog post, Microsoft criticized the lack of coordinated vulnerability disclosure and threatened legal action, stating that the public disclosures aided attackers and involved a digital crimes unit coordinating with law enforcement.
“The vulnerabilities known as RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma were not responsibly disclosed,” the company wrote on Eclipse-disclosed bugs. “Uncoordinated disclosures that put proof-of-concept code for unpatched vulnerabilities into the hands of bad actors are never justifiable and have real-world consequences.”
Cybersecurity analyst Kevin Beamount called Microsoft’s response a “dumpster fire of their own making.” Writing of a previous researcher going by the name “SandboxEscaper,” who similarly disclosed Microsoft bugs and published exploit codes, Beaumont pointed to Microsoft’s precedent for hiring such researchers in 2019.
“I’m making the point that Microsoft has very publicly hired somebody for doing the same thing Microsoft’s latest blog alleges is criminal behaviour,” Beaumont said.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to CSO’s request for a comment.
Eclipse announced its return on GitHub on June 9. “Yes, it’s GitHub again, Microsoft forgot that even if they banned my GitLab and GitHub accounts, they cannot unwrite my code. Once it’s public, you can’t remove it.”
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Apple Removes Walkie-Talkie From Apple Watch in watchOS 27 Beta

Apple has quietly removed the Walkie-Talkie app from Apple Watch in the first developer beta of watchOS 27, with the app vanishing from both the app list and Control Center.


Walkie-Talkie launched with watchOS 5 in 2018 and allowed Apple Watch users to send push-to-talk voice messages to one another over Wi-Fi or cellular using FaceTime infrastructure. Unlike traditional walkie-talkies, it worked over any distance, making it a novel way to communicate without picking up an iPhone. Despite the promise of the feature at launch, however, Apple gave it very little attention in the years that followed, with no meaningful updates across eight major watchOS releases.

Shortly after its debut, Apple was forced to temporarily disable Walkie-Talkie following the discovery of a security vulnerability that could allow a user to listen through another person's microphone without their knowledge. Apple resolved the issue with a watchOS 5.3 update, but the episode did little to build lasting enthusiasm for the feature.

The app's removal has not been officially confirmed by Apple, but users running the first watchOS 27 beta observe that the app is nowhere to be found, with no option to reinstall it.

watchOS 27 is still in very early beta testing and there remains a slim possibility Apple could reintroduce the app before the software reaches a public release later this year. Given how little attention the feature has received over the years, however, its removal looks more like a quiet retirement than an accidental omission.

A public beta of watchOS 27 is set to arrive next month, followed by launch in the fall, likely alongside new Apple Watch models.Related Roundups: Apple Watch 11, watchOS 26Tag: Walkie-TalkieBuyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)Related Forum: Apple Watch
This article, "Apple Removes Walkie-Talkie From Apple Watch in watchOS 27 Beta" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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