Park Place Technologies, the leading global data center and networking optimization firm, today announced TekWurx as an official partner for Entuity Software™, Park Place’s award-winning network observability and performance monitoring solution.
This strategic relationship brings together Entuity’s powerful network monitoring and observability capabilities with TekWurx’s expertise in operational data, service modeling, CMDB optimization, and IT operations transformation. Together, Park Place and TekWurx will help organizations gain deeper visibility across their IT environments, improve operational trust, accelerate incident resolution, and make more informed business decisions.
As enterprises continue to navigate increasingly complex hybrid infrastructure environments, IT operations teams are under growing pressure to maintain visibility, understand service dependencies, and respond rapidly to issues before they affect the business. By combining Entuity’s intelligence with TekWurx’s operational data expertise and uControl platform, customers can achieve a more complete, trusted, and actionable view of their technology estate.
“This partnership reflects Park Place Technologies’ commitment to delivering greater value to customers through a strong ecosystem of trusted partners,” said Case Allin, GM, Software Solutions, Park Place Technologies. “TekWurx brings deep expertise in transforming operational data into meaningful business insight. As a partner for Entuity Software, TekWurx is well positioned to help customers extend the value of network observability into service intelligence, automation, and operational resilience.”
Through this relationship, customers can move beyond simply monitoring infrastructure to understanding the real-time business impact of operational events. The combined capabilities of Entuity and TekWurx will help organizations improve service awareness, reduce risk, and drive more efficient IT operations.
Customer Benefits
Organizations working with Park Place, Entuity, and TekWurx can expect:
Improved visibility across network, infrastructure, and service environments
Faster incident detection, investigation, and resolution
Reduced operational risk through more trusted operational data
Improved CMDB and service model accuracy
Better understanding of service dependencies and business impact
Increased operational efficiency through automation and intelligent workflows
Stronger decision-making through contextualized operational intelligence
Only days after Microsoft published it’s fix for “ShieldBreak”, a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Windows Defender Malware Protection Engine, researcher Nightmare Eclipse published a new “ShieldCrash” proof of concept exploit showing that Msoft’s vulnerability can still be activated.
The POC was released on GitHub, “demonstrates an arbitrary file read as SYSTEM with September 2026” and is said to impact all Windows versions.
“Under specific conditions it is still possible to trigger the exact same problem that was caused by ShieldBreak. While Microsoft fixed several things to prevent re-exploiting the issue, they missed a spot where ShieldBreak can still be exploited,” Nightmare Eclipse said in the GitHub “README” file for ShieldCrash.
“The bigger worry here is not one exploit. It is the pattern. This is the third time in a row that a fix for the same Defender component has been bypassed right after Patch Tuesday. When a patch keeps missing the mark, the real problem is the attack surface underneath it, not the individual bug.
“On whether it works: independent public testing on fully updated Windows 10, 11, and Server systems suggests the exploit is functional, at least for reading files as SYSTEM and the attacker already needs a local foothold to use it. So the risk is real but bounded.
Watch your Defender health as a live signal, tighten local access controls, and treat your own security tools as an attack surface. If a researcher can probe it, an attacker can too. Test your defences the way an attacker would, then fix what breaks.”
“ShieldCrash is the third iteration of the same underlying race condition in the Malware Protection Engine. RoguePlanet came first in June, Microsoft patched it in July. ShieldBreak bypassed that patch in August, Microsoft patched it September 3. ShieldCrash dropped two hours after Patch Tuesday claiming the September 3 fix was incomplete.
“The current PoC is a skeleton, the researcher’s own words, that demonstrates arbitrary file reads as SYSTEM but not a full SYSTEM shell or arbitrary writes. That is still meaningful because reading files as SYSTEM means you can pull the SAM database, credential stores, and configuration data off a fully patched box.
“On the viability question, I can’t confirm it from a lab, but the circumstantial case for taking this seriously is strong. This is Nightmare Eclipse’s eleventh Microsoft zero-day. Kevin Beaumont independently verified that their prior exploits work. CrowdStrike’s Patch Tuesday analysis says this researcher’s claims have historically been found to be accurate. And honestly, the fact that the researcher is calling this a skeleton PoC and openly admitting it only does file reads rather than overclaiming a full SYSTEM shell actually adds credibility in my opinion. There is no CVE assigned and no Microsoft patch or mitigation available as of September 10th.”
Microsoft clearly has an issue that it can’t solve. At least not yet. The question is, if Microsoft can actually solve it before the bad guys exploit it.
Posted in Commentary with tags Open AI on September 11, 2026 by itnerd
Following my comments from last week, OpenAI is calling for mandatory AI safety requirements, including pre-deployment testing, independent assessments and incident reporting, at the same time lawmakers are scrutinizing the company over its agents’ activity on Hugging Face. Which I don’t think is enough. But let’s hear from the experts:
“Existing frameworks handle this fine if you stop treating the agent as special. It is an identity acting on systems, and when it reaches somewhere it was not authorized to go, that is an intrusion, not an AI quirk.
“The OpenAI timeline is the part worth studying. Rogue behavior was observed in late May, misread, and the same behavior came back in July with more than ten sites involved. That is a detection that fired and did not get worked. Pre-deployment testing is table stakes. What should be required is proof of control in production: constrained egress, a scoped identity, logging that would catch unauthorized writes, and someone actually reviewing it.”
“AI agents should be tested fully to be secure from outside attackers and to be safe when operating around company data. They should also require biometric human gates when they exceed certain thresholds that would be irreversible. And they must be inventoried and categorized by IT, given limited blast radius and limited access to critical data, and have a single owner responsible for them, like a new employee would have.”
“The moment an AI agent can take action on behalf of a user or a system, it becomes an attack surface in the same way any other privileged process is. The policy conversation about mandatory testing is overdue, but the real challenge is that most incident reporting frameworks were written when threat actors were assumed to be human, and the classification logic breaks down fast when the entity making decisions is autonomous.
“Requiring proof before deployment is reasonable, but what counts as proof and who decides that proof is sufficient matters more than the requirement itself.”
Brownen Aker, AI Researched & Strategist, Black Hills Information Security
“OpenAI wants mandatory testing, incident reporting, and monitoring requirements for frontier AI companies. Fine. I don’t disagree with a single line item on Altman’s wish list. What I disagree with is OpenAI getting to write it.
“Its own agents started hijacking a dead German wiki to talk to each other as early as May. An internal alert flagged the activity on June 27. On-call staff decided it didn’t need to be stopped. Two months later, agents out of the same lab were inside Hugging Face’s infrastructure, and OpenAI didn’t even mention the German incident when it disclosed that one. Called them entirely unrelated.
“Then two OpenAI staffers got on stage at Black Hat and called it a ‘watershed moment for computer security,’ and, ‘a glimpse into the near future.’ Every pentester in that room has seen this movie before. No segmentation kept those agents off Hugging Face in the first place. No alerting caught them coordinating for months. That’s not a watershed. That’s Access Control 101. And they failed spectacularly.
“None of that reads like a company where security has a seat at the table before something breaks. It reads like a function OpenAI calls in afterward to explain what already happened. If it wants to be taken seriously on regulation, the fix isn’t a keynote about how scary the future is. It’s changing how they operate, starting with giving actual security people real authority over what happens in their labs and elsewhere behind the scenes. The stakes of running ‘move fast and break things’ only keep climbing, and OpenAI isn’t a company that made one mistake and is learning from it. It’s a repeat offender.”
“OpenAI is proposing mandatory safety requirements for U.S. labs while Chinese models operate under no equivalent constraints. That asymmetry is the actual risk.
“Every control in OpenAI’s blueprint, pre-deployment testing, independent assessments, incident reporting, is friction that U.S. labs absorb and Chinese competitors don’t. DeepSeek, Qwen, and their successors already offer capable models without the guardrails being proposed here. Any mandatory testing regime that adds weeks to U.S. release cycles pushes developers and enterprises toward those alternatives. The demand doesn’t disappear. It migrates to whichever model ships fastest with the fewest restrictions.
“The capability is out. 700 OpenAI agents coordinated an autonomous breach of Hugging Face this summer. Anthropic’s Claude convinced itself a live environment was a simulation so it could keep operating. Open-weight models approaching frontier capability are already available globally, and mandatory U.S.-only reporting requirements won’t close that pandora’s box.
“I build enforcement around AI agents in my own security work, and the only control that consistently holds is a human in the loop. Monitoring fails. Alignment training fails. A named person accountable for every action an agent takes does not fail the same way, because it changes the incentive structure entirely. Congress should stop writing rules for the models and start assigning liability to the people who deploy them.”
“One of the problems we’re seeing with the way agents are being tested is that they’re truly not air-gapped. We need to start setting up testing environments that are actually air-gapped and protected, much like you would protect classified information inside a secure facility or a SCIF. That level of control needs to exist during testing before these agents are released into the wild.
“An AI security incident should be any adverse effect resulting from the activities of an AI agent. We need to keep the definition of an incident as broad as possible so it can encompass the different scenarios we may encounter. If an AI agent makes a misstep, attacks something it wasn’t supposed to, or simply doesn’t perform properly and creates an adverse effect, that should qualify as an incident.
“Existing security frameworks are not built for non-human actors. I think we’re starting from whole cloth here. This is the first time I’ve seen anything coming from Anthropic or OpenAI that I truly believe is a step in the right direction and isn’t just paying lip service to government officials to make them think everything is being taken care of and everything is under control. While this is an excellent first step, the devil is always in the details of how they actually implement it.”
“I am skeptical of turning responsible AI into another government certification regime. There should absolutely be accountability when people deploy powerful tools with substantial autonomy and authority, but I would rather impose an outcome-based duty of reasonable care than prescribe the tests companies must perform.
“The more authority an agent has, the stronger the expectation should be for breaking business processes into bounded, governable tasks, and for security basics like least privilege, isolation, logging and monitoring. A company should be able to demonstrate that it understood the risks of the authority it delegated and took reasonable steps to control them.
“My concern with mandatory government evaluations and certified assessments is twofold. First, those are substantial fixed compliance costs that the largest AI companies can absorb far more easily than smaller competitors, including specialized cybersecurity and other model developers. We should be very careful that ‘frontier safety’ does not inadvertently become a moat around today’s frontier companies.
“Secondly, compliance does not and must not become a substitute for responsibility. If a company uses a model that has passed a government-prescribed test and serious harm results, ‘It passed the test’ should not end the inquiry into whether the system and its use case were engineered responsibly. Nor should regulatory compliance become a de facto shield against liability for negligence.
“Existing cybersecurity principles give us a very good starting point. Agents introduce new questions about autonomy, delegated authority and accountability, but we should extend sound software and security engineering to those problems rather than assume that an entirely new regulatory apparatus is the answer.”
I for one seriously doubt that Sam Altman and company will come to our rescue. Thus there needs to be a more robust framework of AI safety before I get excited.
Posted in Commentary with tags Hacked on September 11, 2026 by itnerd
I have for you this morning the disclosure of WeWorm, the zero-click attack against WeChat that reportedly used AI-assisted vulnerability discovery to move from vulnerability to working remote code execution in roughly two days. A pretty scary thought if I may say so.
“The most interesting part of the WeChat exploit isn’t the bug; rather, it’s the timeline. It took only two days from the AI-discovered vulnerability to a working RCE, and one more week to a cross-platform worm. Work that used to take a competent team weeks or months. This speed to exploit collapses the assumption underlying patch-cycle security: that the window between bug discovery and weaponization gives defenders room to ship a fix and get it adopted.”
Jacob Krell, Senior Director, Secure AI Solutions & Cybersecurity at Suzu Labs:
“WeWorm fires while the phone is still ringing. The victim doesn’t answer, doesn’t tap anything, and it doesn’t matter. Once it takes over a WeChat account, it calls the victim’s contacts and repeats the cycle, spreading one friend list at a time. Declining the call blocks one attempt, but the attacker can retry while the victim sleeps.
“WeChat handles payments, government services, and business communications for 1.439 billion users. Compromising an account is closer to stealing someone’s digital identity than reading their texts.
“The economics shift is staggering in regards to AI vulnerability discovery. In 2019, NSO Group exploited CVE-2019-3568, a buffer overflow in WhatsApp’s Voice-over-IP (VoIP) stack, to deliver Pegasus spyware through the same missed-call pattern. That required $60 million a year in R&D and over 200 engineers from Israeli military intelligence. Calif built WeWorm with AI doing most of the heavy lifting in two days, their engineers providing the judgment on what to target and how to test safely.
“Same bug class, radically different cost structure. Any messaging app processing incoming calls before the user answers should assume their VoIP stack has bugs like this. If they haven’t run AI-assisted analysis against their own code yet, someone else’s AI will and find their bugs first.”
Expect more exploits like this because it is simply too cheap to not produce and exploit.
There’s a new technical post from Databricks on Adaptive Instructed-Retriever, a retrieval model that adjusts how much search an AI agent performs based on the complexity of a query.
The model combines parallel retrieval with adaptive, multi-step search. It can stop once it has gathered sufficient evidence for a straightforward query, while more complex requests can trigger additional search steps.
Across seven held-out internal and external retrieval benchmarks, Databricks says the model performed comparably to Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 Luna and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with average end-to-end latency of 5.8 seconds – more than twice as fast as the comparison models.
Databricks trained the model using reinforcement learning to balance retrieval performance against the cost of additional search. The approach is aimed at AI agents that need to find information across enterprise data, including tables, notebooks, dashboards and documents.
Posted in Commentary with tags BDO on September 11, 2026 by itnerd
Canadian organizations are investing in AI, automation, and digital transformation, but many are still struggling to translate those investments into meaningful productivity gains, according to new research from BDO Canada.
Economic uncertainty is adding to the challenge. Nearly one-third (29%) of organizations report delaying major investments as leaders contend with rising costs, revenue volatility, workforce pressures, regulatory complexity, and other business risks.
Based on a survey of 520 Canadian business leaders conducted by Angus Reid, the report finds that Canada’s next productivity gains will depend less on how much organizations invest in technology and more on how effectively leaders redesign how work gets done.
Technology investment is accelerating, but transformation is lagging
The report identifies a widening gap between technology experimentation and organization-wide transformation.
While AI and other digital tools can help employees complete individual tasks more efficiently, those gains do not automatically translate into stronger organizational productivity. Legacy operating models, including layered approvals, fragmented ownership, siloed functions, and slow decision-making, can limit the benefits of new technology, and create operational friction.
BDO says organizations need to shift the productivity conversation from technology adoption to operating model redesign, with a greater focus on measurable business outcomes.
The report explores how economic uncertainty is reinforcing a more cautious approach to transformation, with some organizations waiting for clearer returns or more stable conditions before committing to significant change.
It also highlights that, rather than waiting for uncertainty to subside, organizations can use this period to simplify processes, modernize decision-making, and build more adaptable operating models.
Moving from activity to productivity
BDO’s report outlines several priorities for leaders seeking measurable productivity improvements, including identifying high-friction workflows, redesigning processes from first principles, reallocating resources toward higher-value activities, improving access to data and operational intelligence, and building greater adaptability across the organization.
It also examines how these productivity challenges are playing out across manufacturing and distribution, financial services, real estate and construction, and private equity, where organizations face different business pressures but a common need to move beyond isolated technology initiatives toward practical operational change.
From awareness to action
Productivity has moved higher on the agenda for Canadian businesses as economic uncertainty, workforce pressures, rising costs, regulatory complexity, and accelerating AI adoption reshape the competitive environment.
BDO says awareness is no longer the primary challenge. Most organizations understand the importance of modernization and the risks of standing still. The challenge is translating that understanding into organizational change quickly enough to create an advantage.
The organizations best positioned for the next era of productivity will not necessarily be those that invest the most in technology, but those that most effectively redesign work, empower their people and adapt as conditions change.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Hybrid Mesh Firewall. The recognition comes as Check Point continues to advance its Hybrid Mesh Network Security strategy, most recently with the introduction of the Check Point AI Network Firewall to help organizations secure AI adoption. The innovation makes Check Point the first to deliver AI security from the physical firewall organizations already run, enabling enterprises to extend AI security capabilities without deploying additional infrastructure.
AI is reshaping enterprise environments faster than traditional security architectures can adapt. According to Check Point Research’s latest AI Security Report, AI-powered intrusions are becoming increasingly common, while vulnerability exploitation windows have shrunk from days to hours. Meanwhile, organizations are rapidly expanding their use of AI applications, autonomous agents, workforce AI tools, and AI infrastructure, even as only 5% have full visibility into AI tool usage across their organization, according to Check Point’s 2026 Cloud SecurityReport. This lack of visibility, combined with an increasingly aggressive threat landscape, is creating new security challenges that require a more unified approach to protection.
To help organizations navigate this shift, Check Point combines AI-powered threat prevention, advanced threat intelligence, and unified security management into a single platform. By using the network as the vehicle for securing AI transformation, Check Point enables organizations to apply consistent protections across users, applications, AI workloads, and infrastructure while reducing operational complexity. This approach extends from workforce AI and AI applications to emerging AI data center environments.
We believe Check Point’s position as a Leader is fueled by the following key differentiators:
AI Network Firewall, Part of the AI Defense Plane – Delivers network-level AI security with immediate visibility, governance, and control over AI usage across users, applications, and agents. As part of the AI Defense Plane, it extends protection across endpoints, cloud, and APIs
AI Data Center Security: Protection for sovereign AI data centers and Neoclouds in collaboration with NVIDIA, spanning perimeters, segmentation and security for AI workloads and GPU clusters at scale
Agentic Network Security Orchestration – Uses AI-driven automation to streamline policy management, Zero Trust initiatives, compliance, and security operations across the network
Organizations adopting AI need security that can scale alongside innovation without slowing the business. Dropbox is one of the customers experiencing that firsthand.
“After evaluating several AI security vendors and internal options, Check Point AI Agent Security quickly stood out in terms of its operational performance and ultra-low latency,” said Adrian Wood, Security Engineer at Dropbox. “Check Point’s AI Agent Security has given us the security foundation we need to scale GenAI confidently across our product lines. As we continue expanding our AI capabilities, we know we have centralized protection that won’t become a bottleneck.”
Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Hybrid Mesh Firewall and visit our latest blog for additional insights into the report and Check Point’s approach to Hybrid Mesh Network Security.
August showed that cyber risk is intensifying on multiple fronts at once. Global attacks continued to rise, ransomware volumes accelerated, and phishing remained a consistent entry point for threat actors. GenAI added a more nuanced but equally important signal: while August recorded the lowest rate of high-risk for data exposure in GenAI prompts in several months, enterprise AI usage continued to expand sharply, with the average number of prompts per user rising from around 78 in June to 95 in July and 106 in August. This suggests that most of the growth is coming from acceptable business use, but sensitive data exposure through prompts remains a persistent risk that organizations can no longer treat as experimental or peripheral.
Cyber Attacks Keep Climbing The global attack curve continued to move upward in August, with organizations facing an average of 2,422 weekly cyber attacks. This marks a 4% increase from July, and a 22% increase compared with August 2025.
The broader four-month trend underlines the scale of the challenge: since May, the global average has climbed from 2,055 to 2,422 weekly attacks per organization, pointing to sustained pressure rather than a short-term seasonal spike.
Education Remains the Top Target as Travel-Related Sectors Rise
Education remained the most targeted sector, averaging 5,354 weekly attacks per organization, up 28% year over year. Government followed with 3,067 weekly attacks, while Hospitality, Travel, and Recreation rose to third place with 3,056 weekly attacks, up 56%. Its move into the top three, ahead of Telecommunications, suggests attackers may be taking advantage of the operational pressure and increased customer activity linked to the peak summer travel season.
Latin America Leads in Volume as Europe Records the Sharpest Increase
Regionally, Latin America continued to face the highest attack volume, with 3,577 weekly attacks per organization on average, up 25% from August 2025. Africa ranked second with 3,335 weekly attacks, followed closely by APAC at 3,325. Europe stood out for its growth rate, recording the highest year-over-year increase at 28%, while North America rose 18%.
Region
Weekly Attacks per Organization
YoY Change
Latin America
3,577
+25%
Africa
3,335
+3%
APAC
3,325
+16%
Europe
2,155
+28%
North America
1,744
+18%
GenAI Risk Remains a Daily Business Reality
GenAI risk is now part of everyday business operations, but the August data points to a shift in the risk profile rather than a simple increase in high-risk activity. High-risk GenAI prompts fell to their lowest level in several months, at 1 in every 43 prompts from enterprise networks posing a data exposure risk. At the same time, overall usage continued to climb, with the average user generating 106 prompts during the month. This means the expansion in GenAI activity appears to be driven largely by acceptable usage, while problematic data exposure prompts have not disappeared: 86% of organizations using GenAI regularly were still affected by high-risk prompt activity, and the wide usage of various AI tools, 7 different tools on average per organization, create a critical governance gap which enhances the potential risk.
For CISOs and business leaders, the message is clear: the risk is not only whether employees are using approved or unapproved AI tools, but what information they enter into them. As teams rely on multiple GenAI applications and generate higher volumes of prompts, sensitive data can move into environments that lack sufficient visibility, governance, or control. This also increases exposure to prompt manipulation and indirect prompt injections, where hidden instructions embedded in external content can influence AI behavior and potentially expose information.
By industry, Healthcare & Medical recorded the highest rate of high-risk GenAI prompt exposure at 4%, or 1 in every 25 prompts, climbing one spot from July. Software followed at 3.6%, or 1 in 28 prompts, while Business Services reached 3.5%, also equivalent to 1 in 28 prompts.
The sensitive data exposure rate for Healthcare & Medical organizations is particularly alarming when considering this is mostly relating to extremely private information, and with users on the medical staff who are less tech-savvy and work under high pressure, potentially neglecting advised usage guidance.
Such an example can be seen below, written in ChatGPT web service, and includes the full patient’s name, symptoms, examination results and diagnosis.
Regionally, Latin America recorded the highest high-risk GenAI prompt rate at 1 in every 29 prompts, or 3.5%, above the global average of 2.3%. North America followed at 1 in 40 prompts, APAC at 1 in 51, and Europe at 1 in 56. Regional differences are significant, but high-risk GenAI exposure across all regions confirms this is a global governance challenge as enterprise AI adoption accelerates.
The type of information being exposed also shifted in August. Network and IT Infrastructure became the most common sensitive data category, appearing in 67% of organizations where GenAI prompts contained sensitive data. Financial Data followed at 65%, Legal and Regulatory at 64%, Employee and HR at 59%, and PII at 57%. This shows that GenAI exposure cuts across core business information, from technical infrastructure to financial, legal, employee, and personal data.
Data Category
% of Organizations
Network & IT Infrastructure
67%
Financial Data
65%
Legal & Regulatory
64%
Employee & HR
59%
PII
57%
Email Phishing Risk Increases
Email remained one of the most reliable entry points for cyber risk in August. One in every 112 emails, or 0.89%, was classified as phishing, up from 1 in 128 in July. Among phishing emails, 72% contained links and 14% contained attachments, confirming that malicious links remain a dominant delivery method. However, not all phishing relies on clickable payloads. Some emails used pure social engineering, such as requesting phone calls, sharing instructions, or encouraging direct engagement between the attacker and the victim.
North America recorded the highest phishing rate, with 1 in every 107 emails, or 0.94%, found to be malicious. By industry, Associations and Nonprofits saw the highest phishing rate at 1.87%, or 1 in 54 emails, around twice the global average. Construction and Engineering followed at 1.74%, and Real Estate, Rental, and Leasing at 1.13%.
Ransomware Activity Continues to Accelerate
* This ransomware data draws from ransomware “shame sites” operated by double-extortion groups, which publicly disclose victim information. While these sources have inherent limitations, they provide valuable insight into the ransomware landscape.
Ransomware activity continued to accelerate in August. A total of 1,042 ransomware attacks were reported, almost double the level recorded in August 2025 and 8% higher than in July. Business Services remained the most targeted industry, accounting for 36% of reported ransomware attacks, followed by Industrial Manufacturing at 13% and Consumer Goods & Services at 12%.
Industry
Ransomware Victims
Business Services
36%
Industrial Manufacturing
13%
Consumer Goods & Services
12%
Financial Services
8%
Healthcare & Medical
7%
Transportation & Logistics
4.1%
Information Technology
4.1%
Government
3.7%
Automotive
3.3%
Education
2.3%
North America remained the most affected region, accounting for 49% of reported ransomware incidents, followed by Europe at 27% and APAC at 16%. At country level, the United States was the most impacted country, accounting for 45% of reported ransomware attacks. Germany and Italy followed, both close to 5% of reported victims, with Canada, the United Kingdom and France also among the top affected countries.
Qilin Leads as Orova Enters the Top Three
Qilin was the most prevalent ransomware group in August, responsible for 15% of published attacks, followed by The Gentlemen with 10%. Orova entered the top three for the first time, accounting for 4% of published attacks.
Qilin: An established Ransomware-as-a-Service group with a consistent record of victim disclosures dating back to 2022. Its mature affiliate model and renewed recruitment efforts have helped it maintain strong momentum in recent months.
The Gentlemen: A fast-growing Ransomware-as-a-Service operation launched in mid-2025. The group combines ransomware operations with initial access brokering, enabling affiliates to scale attacks quickly.
Orova: An emerging ransomware group that surfaced publicly in May 2026 and has quickly gained visibility. Its activity appears access-driven rather than sector-driven, with victims concentrated among small and mid-sized businesses.
What August Tells Us
August reinforces a clear reality for security teams: prevention must now extend across every layer of the enterprise, including the fast-growing AI usage layer. Attacks are rising, ransomware remains highly active, phishing continues to open the door to compromise, and GenAI is creating a new path for sensitive data to leave the organization’s control. The priority is no longer visibility alone, but preventing exposure before it becomes impact through coordinated protection across network, cloud, endpoint, email, and AI usage.
Posted in Commentary with tags Volvo on September 10, 2026 by itnerd
The highly popular Volvo XC40 is getting significant updates to make everyday life on the road easier and more enjoyable, ranging from updates to exterior and interior design to infotainment, advanced driver assistance and active safety.
A refreshed exterior design gives the XC40 a more confident and contemporary presence. The new design of the Thor’s Hammer Matrix LED headlights is one of the most eye-catching updates, with a refined take on the iconic light signature. An upgraded grille and redesigned front bumper, hood and front wings provide a new elegant interpretation of Volvo Cars’ Scandinavian design language.
At the rear, the XC40 features new LED rear lights, an upgraded tailgate, and a redesigned rear bumper. The XC40 also comes with new 18-inch, 19-inch and 20-inch diamond cut wheels.
Intuitive and versatile on the inside The interior is upgraded with a new, larger and crisper 11.2-inch screen, bringing Volvo Cars’ latest user experience. The updated screen makes interacting with the car faster and easier, with fewer taps needed to access key functions, creating a seamlessly connected and intuitive experience for everyday driving.
Featuring Google Gemini, the next-generation AI assistant from Google, the XC40 is a car you can have a natural conversation with. From planning journeys and finding great stops to managing messages on the move, Gemini understands everyday language effortlessly.
Designed with everyday usability in mind, the interior combines smart storage space and thoughtfully integrated features, such as the updated wireless phone charger, to make life on the road more convenient. From busy weekday schedules to spontaneous weekend getaways, the versatile cabin adapts effortlessly to the changing needs of drivers and their families.
The cabin updates also include new premium upholstery and decor options to enhance comfort and design. For the first time, XC40 customers can opt for Arianne Cardamom leather upholstery paired with Brown Ash wood decor elements across the interior. The car also features refined cabin illumination plus the option of Black Ash or aluminium decor, bringing a modern expression to the interior.
Protecting what matters most Built on Volvo Cars’ pioneering safety knowledge from real-world research, the XC40 combines advanced safety technologies to help prevent collisions and protect people. If a potential collision is detected, the cars can respond in real time, warning the driver or stepping in to help avoid or reduce the impact. Whether steering around danger with automatic emergency steering or braking instantly with automatic emergency braking, it’s designed to help choose the safest action in the moment.
These enhanced safety capabilities are made possible by a new advanced software and sensor platform. With new front and corner radars, a new front camera, new rear corner radars, 12 new ultrasonic sensors and new parking cameras, the car gains a more comprehensive view of its surroundings, helping drivers feel more confident behind the wheel.
The upgraded platform also enables several new and upgraded safety and driver support functions:
Door Opening Alert helps protect cyclists and other road users by warning occupants before opening the door into passing traffic.
The optional Pilot Assist is expanded with lane change assist and refined to follow the road more smoothly, providing added support and comfort on longer journeys.
The optional 360 camera is upgraded to a 3D view that makes parking and low‑speed manoeuvres easier.
The small print
Availability of the features and services mentioned above may vary by market. Some features and services mentioned are optional and require customer opt-in.
Google and Gemini are trademarks of Google LLC. Some connected apps require setup. Compatibility and availability vary. 18+
The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act reporting requirements kick in Friday, September 11, and for many manufacturers, the hardest part won’t be filing a report. It will be figuring out what they actually need to report.
Do they have a vulnerability? Is it being actively exploited? Which products are affected? And can they answer those questions fast enough to meet a 24-hour reporting clock?
According to Doc McConnell, Head of Policy and Compliance at Finite State and former CISA Branch Chief and Senior Advisor for Cybersecurity Policy at OMB: “The biggest obstacle isn’t paperwork, it’s visibility. Many companies lack accurate software inventories across their product lines, and have limited insight into third-party components embedded in products.”
With the deadline just a day away, Doc can talk about where manufacturers are most likely to get caught off guard when a vulnerability arises and what happens as the 24-hour cybersecurity reporting mandate clock starts.
Park Place Technologies Names TekWurx as Official Partner to Expand Network Observability and Operational Intelligence Capabilities with Entuity Software
Posted in Commentary with tags Park Place Technologies on September 11, 2026 by itnerdPark Place Technologies, the leading global data center and networking optimization firm, today announced TekWurx as an official partner for Entuity Software™, Park Place’s award-winning network observability and performance monitoring solution.
This strategic relationship brings together Entuity’s powerful network monitoring and observability capabilities with TekWurx’s expertise in operational data, service modeling, CMDB optimization, and IT operations transformation. Together, Park Place and TekWurx will help organizations gain deeper visibility across their IT environments, improve operational trust, accelerate incident resolution, and make more informed business decisions.
As enterprises continue to navigate increasingly complex hybrid infrastructure environments, IT operations teams are under growing pressure to maintain visibility, understand service dependencies, and respond rapidly to issues before they affect the business. By combining Entuity’s intelligence with TekWurx’s operational data expertise and uControl platform, customers can achieve a more complete, trusted, and actionable view of their technology estate.
“This partnership reflects Park Place Technologies’ commitment to delivering greater value to customers through a strong ecosystem of trusted partners,” said Case Allin, GM, Software Solutions, Park Place Technologies. “TekWurx brings deep expertise in transforming operational data into meaningful business insight. As a partner for Entuity Software, TekWurx is well positioned to help customers extend the value of network observability into service intelligence, automation, and operational resilience.”
Through this relationship, customers can move beyond simply monitoring infrastructure to understanding the real-time business impact of operational events. The combined capabilities of Entuity and TekWurx will help organizations improve service awareness, reduce risk, and drive more efficient IT operations.
Customer Benefits
Organizations working with Park Place, Entuity, and TekWurx can expect:
For more information about Entuity Software and Park Place Technologies, visit www.parkplacetechnologies.com.
For more information about TekWurx, visit www.tekwurx.com.
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