NCC Group's July threat advisory reports a 22% month-over-month rise in ransomware activity, with 894 victim organization listings recorded across industrial, consumer services, technology, critical infrastructure, finance and healthcare sectors. The Gentlemen and Quilin topped the list of attributed groups, while the US accounted for 41% of incidents; notably, the month also saw the first fully agentic AI-driven ransomware attack chain and a breach at Ernst & Young claimed by ShinyHunters.
Researchers have devised a method to operate two separate genetic codes at once without needing to re-engineer an organism's entire genome to accommodate the change. The approach was tested outside living cells, so it avoids the laborious process of altering every gene, as previous efforts required when adding new amino acids to bacterial proteins.
An investigation into Python signal handling shows that Python signal handlers, unlike C ones, run outside the strict low-level signal context but can still be re-entered mid-execution if another signal arrives. A test script that rapidly sends SIGUSR1 signals to itself while calling print() inside the handler triggers a RuntimeError, since Python's buffered stdout object detects the reentrant write and refuses to proceed.
A tester given preview access to GPT-5.6-Cyber challenged the AI agent to escape a QEMU/KVM virtual machine on a Debian Linux host. The model succeeded three separate times, first using recently disclosed kernel bugs, then unpatched vulnerabilities not yet flagged as security issues, and finally by discovering its own zero-day exploits after the system was rebuilt from the latest source code.
IKEA and Microsoft revealed the complete YXSTABY collection at Gamescom, expanding on last week's teaser of an Xbox-themed D-pad cushion. The nine-item lineup includes a tilting thumbstick stool, a rollable TV stand with hidden storage, a controller-and-cable toolbox that doubles as a laptop stand, a wheeled side table, a stainless steel D-pad platter, and a two-tone controller display case. The collection launches in the US on September 30.
Ring is switching its default video encryption to a new scheme called TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption), which temporarily decrypts footage in the cloud to power AI features like Smart Alerts before deleting the keys within 24 hours. The standard, built on the IETF's Messaging Layer Security protocol, will roll out globally starting in September, though users can still opt for full end-to-end encryption instead.
An investigative essay traces how the US supplement market ballooned from roughly 4,000 products worth $4 billion in 1994 to as many as 100,000 products generating nearly $73 billion annually today, all under the same regulatory framework. Under that 1994 law, manufacturers never had to prove to the FDA that their products contain what labels claim or that health claims are accurate before selling them, and the government itself bears the burden of proving a product is adulterated. FDA official Cara Welch admits the agency has no systematic way of tracking what supplements exist or what they contain.
CISA disclosed that hackers breached more than 100 internet-exposed water and wastewater systems across the U.S. during July, expanding the known scope of an ongoing campaign already reported in Michigan, Minnesota and other states. The attackers primarily targeted programmable logic controllers from vendors like Rockwell, Schneider Electric and Siemens, in some cases disabling shutdown alarms and safety processes without alerting operators.
Gaurav Anand, global head of Tata Communications' Customer Interaction Suite, says most enterprises have attached conversational AI and automation onto legacy customer-experience systems that were never designed for it. He argues this has left companies with disconnected digital tools rather than integrated, scalable platforms, forcing human agents to manually piece together context across siloed systems.
Meta has reached a proposed settlement with dozens of states over allegations that it built Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to minors and improperly collected children's data. The deal, still pending court approval and involving no admission of wrongdoing, requires Meta to impose default two-hour daily time limits for under-18 users, overnight app blackouts, and periodic screen-time reminders, while paying up to $18 billion over a decade to fund youth online safety programs.
A technical writeup walks through the logic behind PageRank, the algorithm Sergey Brin and Larry Page built at Stanford in the 1990s to rank web pages by the links pointing to them rather than just keyword matches. The piece argues the core idea is simple enough that a curious person could reconstruct it themselves, and it includes a short Python implementation showing how reputation flows between pages using a damping factor.
A Farm Action report examines Taylor Farms, the little-known produce supplier linked by the FDA to a 2026 Cyclospora outbreak that has sickened thousands and killed at least two people. The outbreak was traced to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell, but the report shows Taylor Farms' products appear widely across grocery stores, restaurants, schools, and hospitals, often under different brand names.
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