A federal grand jury in California indicted 40-year-old Searzhudin Tamirlanovich Aktulaev, extradited from Cyprus in May 2025, over a phishing scheme that used 255 fake accounts to send malicious Excel attachments to roughly 80,000 freelancers on an unnamed job platform between 2016 and 2017. The attachments deployed TVRAT and DarkVNC malware, giving the defendant remote access to victims' machines and letting him steal e-commerce credentials and personal data for fraud.
A veteran executive coach with 25 years of experience reports a recurring pattern among leaders: traits that once fueled their rise can start to undercut their authority and influence when leaned on too heavily. The observation stems from direct coaching work aimed at building executive presence across many clients.
Microsoft will start rolling out updates that automatically turn on memory integrity and Virtualization-based Security on eligible Windows 11 devices, aiming to make the OS secure by default. The kernel-level protection blocks untrusted drivers and code but can reduce gaming frame rates, especially on older CPUs. Devices where users previously disabled the feature will not have it re-enabled automatically.
Shopify COO Jess Hertz says the company lets its engineering teams spend without limits on AI tools, a bet that's paying off as revenue climbs 34% even as headcount holds steady. Hertz frames this as part of Shopify's push to build the infrastructure that lets AI agents discover and purchase products on behalf of consumers, a shift away from the old model where big-budget brands dominated search rankings.
U.S. and European authorities, alongside CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations team, seized domains tied to the Sality botnet in the United States, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. CrowdStrike also ran a peer-to-peer sinkhole operation that cut off command channels and isolated infected machines from the botnet's controllers, attributed to a Russia-based group tracked as SALTY SPIDER.
WebFPGA has introduced a web-based development environment that lets users program FPGA devices directly from their browser after purchasing a compatible board. The project, which originated on Kickstarter, also offers a command-line option for Linux users and includes community-shared demo projects.
Researchers on the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led in part by Brown University scientists, detected a single particle interaction consistent with a WIMP dark matter candidate of at least 200 GeV/c2 mass. The signal reached only 2.6-sigma statistical significance, far below the 5-sigma threshold needed to claim discovery, but stood out because background noise in that region is unusually low.
Dell introduced the Dell 14S at IFA 2026, a student-focused laptop offered in four colors—beige, pink, blue, and green—with configurations starting at 8GB RAM and 256GB storage, scalable to 16GB RAM and up to 1TB SSD. Positioned below the XPS 13, it includes HDMI, a headphone jack, a 1080p webcam with Windows Hello, and up to 23 hours of claimed battery life, running on Intel Core 5 or Core 7 chips rather than newer Panther Lake processors.
SonicWall has warned that attackers are chaining two newly discovered vulnerabilities in its SMA1000 secure remote access appliances to execute code remotely. One flaw is a maximum-severity command injection issue in the WorkPlace interface caused by an SSRF weakness, while the second lets an authenticated admin run arbitrary OS commands via the Management Console. The bugs affect the SMA1000 6210, 7210, and 8200v models, with over 400 exposed devices currently visible online.
The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) has developed the True Rate of Unemployment, a metric built from Bureau of Labor Statistics data that counts people without full-time work, those earning below a living wage of roughly $26,000 a year, and those with no job at all. The measure aims to give a fuller picture of financial hardship than the official unemployment rate captures.
Under new owner Picea Robotics, iRobot unveiled its flagship Roomba Max 875 Combo ($1,199) and the Roomba Plus 678 Combo ($899) at IFA Berlin. The Max 875 introduces SealForce, a skirt system that seals against carpet to push airflow deeper, combined with a new vane-type motor rated at 20 liters per second and 35,000 Pa of suction, the highest iRobot has ever disclosed.
Eric Harshbarger, a mathematician at Auburn University, has finally solved a puzzle he began working on in 2012: designing a set of dice that lets five players roll simultaneously to decide turn order, with every player having an equal chance of winning and no possibility of a tie. The finished product, called the Go First Dice, took nearly 15 years to move from theoretical concept to a working physical set.