'It freakin' worked' says Rob Joyce - and shows how relentless AI agents can find holes humans miss RSAC 2026 The now-infamous Anthropic report about Chinese cyberspies abusing Claude AI to automate cyberattacks was a Rorschach test for the infosec community, according to former NSA cyber boss Rob Joyce.

Washington content to be represented by actual empty chairs RSAC 2026 Back in the day (circa 2023) when cybercrime group Scattered Spider and its help-desk voice-phishing calls were a relatively new threat, the feds considered pulling the government's top cyber-threat hunters and their private-sector counterparts into one room to share information, in real time, about this loosely knit extortion ring that was terrorizing enterprises.

Voice phishing is second most common initial access method across all IR probes, and top in cloud break-ins RSAC 2026 Voice phishing surged last year to become the second most common method used by cybercriminals to gain initial access to their victims' IT estate and the No. 1 tactic used when breaking into cloud environments.

Zenity CTO demos 0-click AI agent exploits on stage at RSAC RSAC 2026 There's a very simple reason why just about every enterprise AI agent is vulnerable to zero-click attacks, according to Michael Bargury, CTO of AI security company Zenity.

US analytics firm handed access to sensitive intel, raising yet more questions about vendor lock-in US data miner Palantir has quietly landed inside the UK's financial watchdog, plugging into a trove of sensitive data as Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency .

Customers are 'excited' says one solution provider Snowflake is putting cash and kinetic energy behind the idea that AI works best in its platform.

Here's where you ought to spend your security billable hours budget this year Strengthen your MFA policies, double-down on anti-phishing training, and for Jobs' sake, patch all your vulns right away. The past year of intelligence collected by Cisco's Talos threat hunters suggests that attackers are moving faster to exploit vulns, and fooling more staff than ever into giving up their credentials.

More cores, higher clocks, lower prices Review It's a tough time to be a PC enthusiast. Between the memory crunch and the AI boom driving up prices on storage, DDR5, and GPUs, it's gotten prohibitively expensive to build a PC.

Digital twins of leaders may be plausible as novelty acts, but not really welcome Imagine that your boss is too busy to show up at that meeting you called so she sends a bot of herself instead. With a digital twin, even your company's CEO - the one who spends all his time on the corporate jet - could make an appearance at your powwow about the break room coffee machine. But would you want them there?

10GW server farm, 10GW of new generation, and $4.2bn grid upgrade. And someone else is paying for the uranium cleanup Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it.

Trio-Tech International initially said hack wasn't 'material,' but then stolen data was published Trio-Tech International initially shrugged off a ransomware attack at a Singapore subsidiary as immaterial, only to reverse course days later after discovering stolen data had been disclosed.

Expendable military drones are so 2025 The US Army just took receipt of what may be the coolest unmanned drone ever flown by the military: A full-sized Black Hawk helicopter.

Broader platform coverage lands, if developers can tolerate the rough edges AvaloniaUI has previewed MAUI support for Linux and WebAssembly browser applications platforms Microsoft's own cross-platform .NET framework lacks but low adoption and persistent bugs are likely to constrain uptake.

Claims it can analyze millions of daily events with 98 percent accuracy Google's Gemini AI agents are crawling the dark web, sifting through upward of 10 million posts a day to find a handful of threats relevant to a particular organization.

In space, no one can hear you being petty SpaceX has fired back at Amazon with a letter to the US telecoms regulator, after Amazon objected to its plans for orbiting datacenters.

Infosec pros descend on San Francisco kettle When El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons joins infosec industry colleagues in San Francisco for RSAC 2026 this week, she's expecting agentic AI to be on everyone's lips - at least those who aren't busy gossiping about the lack of presence from any representatives of the US federal government.

The era of reliability begins... right after this out-of-band patch Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to resolve bugs introduced by a Windows patch just days after promising improved reliability.

Draft Request for Proposals says you can move shuttle orbiter but you cannot break it NASA has issued a draft Request for Proposals to move a flown space vehicle, a step some lawmakers see as progress toward relocating Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian Museum in Virginia to Houston, Texas.

Ukraine's battlefield lessons show quantity and affordability now trump exquisite hardware NATO is unprepared to deal with attacks by cheap, mass- produced drones and urgently needs layered, affordable air defense systems to counter the threat, taking a cue from the experience gained by Ukrainian forces over the past four years.

Every month of 'careful consideration' is another month Redmond laughs all the way to the bank Here's the uncomfortable truth: every week the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) hesitates on its decision on the outcome of its public cloud services market investigation, the meter keeps running and taxpayers continue to foot the bill.

Your instinctive revulsion is spot on. Follow your nose Opinion Science is at its best when it makes manifest radical ideas that change our worldview. This is the flag all sane people salute, under which we march to war. Yet in our hearts, we know that the very tastiest science is that which confirms our prejudices and validates what we've known all along. Cornell University has just served up a plate of the finest yet. Tuck in.

First came the facepalm, then the faceplant, then the loss of face Who, Me? Monday is upon us, but before you use the new week to explore opportunity and adventure, The Register presents a new installment of Who, Me? It's our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of flops, failures, and foul-ups.

Like his promise to get a million robocabs on the road, this doesnt add up Elon Musk has put Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI in harness to build a chip fabrication outfit called Terafab capable of producing a terawatts worth of computing power each year, then send most of it into space.

'Doze boss admits quality is down, promises smaller memory footprint and fixes for many well-known issues Microsoft has acknowledged that it needs to improve the quality of Windows 11 and outlined its plan to get the job done.

PLUS: Singtels triple outage; 17,000 counterfeit hard drives seized; Tech wages shift across Asia; And more! Asia In Brief Australias government on Monday announced a set of datacenter expectations to guide would-be bit barn builders who contemplate breaking ground down under.

PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more! Infosec In Brief Russian intelligence- affiliated parties are posing as customer support services on commercial messaging applications such as Signal to compromise accounts and conduct phishing attacks, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned last Friday.

The operating system of the universe isnt going to debug itself feature CERN is nothing like today's agentic AI jockeys, who mostly rely on pre-set weights and generic TPUs and GPUs to generate their slop. CERN burns custom nanosecond-speed AI into the silicon itself just to eliminate excess data.

Decades of data suggest people who stick to a couple of brews fare better in terms of gray matter A decades-long study suggests that your daily caffeine fix might be doing more than jolting you through morning meetings it could also be quietly helping your brain hold it together.

Free Software Foundation Europe says it was asked for supporters' passwords; Nexi insists it only wanted test credentials to check cancellation flows The Free Software Foundation Europe says its electronic-payments provider Nexi Group unexpectedly "cancelled" its account cutting the charity off from around 450 donors.

Rust security maintainers contend Nadim Kobeissi's vulnerability claims are too much Since February, cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi has been trying to get code fixes applied to Rust cryptography libraries to address what he says are critical bugs. For his efforts, he's been dismissed, ignored, and banned from Rust security channels.

The market is contracting Right product, wrong time? Amazon is reported to be developing a new smartphone, its first since 2014, and, according to industry tracker IDC, it will face entrenched competition with better products and a market that is expected to contract by double digits.

Just the team, not the tech Salesforce's Agentforce team is getting an infusion of new talent by hiring the team behind Clockwise, a calendar scheduling app, but the app itself isn't sticking around.

Meanwhile, WINE and OpenGL tweaks speed Windows apps on 64-bit hosts Whatever OS you run, you have a better chance to run non-native apps. Running Linux virtualized on Windows is set to speed up slightly, and so is running Windows apps on top of 64-bit Linux and macOS.

SpaceX's still-not-quite-orbital rocket tapped as lunar taxi. Musk's minicab anyone? NASA is reportedly considering using SpaceX's Starship to transport the Orion capsule to the Moon, with some sources calling it a done deal.

OneDrive, Office, Teams Free users greeted with phantom 'no internet' errors, restart may help if you're lucky Microsoft has broken account sign-ins in Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 with a recent update, causing error messages in apps like OneDrive and Office.

Cams statistically more likely to ID Black people, says new research A UK police force has suspended its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study revealed it was statistically more likely to identify Black people on a watchlist database.

Millions of hijacked devices powered traffic floods targeting defense systems and beyond The US government has moved to disrupt a cluster of IoT botnets behind some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded, including traffic bursts topping 30 terabits per second.

Lack of clear criteria risks encouraging firms to lean on state support instead of worrying about insurance The UK's cyber watchdog has warned that the government's 1.5 billion bailout of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) risks setting a troubling precedent for how Britain handles major cyber crises.

Indictment claims dummy servers and bogus docs used to slip past US export controls A co-founder of Supermicro is among three people charged with diverting servers fitted with Nvidia GPUs worth $2.5 billion to Chinese customers in violation of US export controls.

Government looks for sovereign tech as NHS deal nears break clause The UK government has promised a different approach to tech procurement following the award of controversial contracts to Palantir.