Check Point to Embed OpenAI Frontier Cyber Capabilities into Check Point Security Products 

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

Check Point today announced the use of OpenAI’s frontier cyber capabilities into its customer-facing defenses. Through the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, open to only a select group of security vendors, Check Point can embed OpenAI models directly into the products, workflows, and managed services its customers rely on. 

It marks a meaningful shift, from using these models internally to embedding them directly inside the defenses that protect customers, carrying the safety controls, abuse-prevention standards, and scoped outputs that enterprise security demands. The aim is to sharpen threat prevention, faster remediation, and stronger security operations, delivered through the products and services customers already rely on. 

The threat landscape is being shaped by AI. Threat actors are using it to move faster, craft more convincing attacks, and find weaknesses at scale. Defenders need equivalent or stronger capabilities, delivered safely and within clear boundaries. The quality of the models powering defensive workflows has become a strategic variable, not a technical detail. 

Through this expanded partnership, Check Point is identifying the defensive security workflows and solutions where OpenAI’s trusted access for cyber models, paired with the right safeguards, can deliver measurable customer value.  

Check Point and OpenAI are working together to help define the standards for using trusted access frontier AI responsibly in security, building protections against misuse and the controls to catch and stop it. The rollout is deliberately gradual: it begins with carefully controlled defensive uses and widens only as those protections prove themselves. This disciplined approach reflects how Check Point brings AI into its platform across the board, with the rigor and responsibility enterprise security demands. 

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Claude Reports Major Outage Across Multiple Models 

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

You may have noticed that Claude AI has had an outage today. 9to5Google reports the following:

Anthropic says it is aware of an outage and has rolled out a fix as recent as 10:53 a.m. ET. The company’s server status website indicates an issue affecting multiple models occurred at 10:19 a.m. ET.

The status update doesn’t detail which models were affected, though attempts to get a response from Sonnet and Opus returned nothing. Those models seem to be the most commonly used, especially as Fable 5 was recently pulled from user access.

The current outage did, however, affect those models across all platforms except for Claude for Government. That includes claude.ai, Claude Console, Claude Code, and Claude API. The total outage time comes close to an hour and stands out as one of the largest outages to hit Anthropic within the past 60 days.

Commenting on this news is Jamie Beckland, Chief Product Officer at APIContext: 

“Ready or not, AI inference is now production infrastructure. Enterprises are no longer using these systems only for experiments or side projects. They are putting AI into customer support, coding workflows, analytics, operations and decision support. When an inference endpoint slows down, throws errors or goes unavailable, that can now break a real business process.

Enterprises must run AI with the same discipline they apply to payments, cloud, APIs and other critical services. That means continuously monitoring inference endpoints for latency, error rates, model availability, response quality and regional performance. It also means having a tested failover plan before the outage happens.

Applications with one model provider hardcoded create a single point of failure. A more resilient approach is to design AI systems with fallback models, backup providers, graceful degradation and clear routing rules. Not every task needs the same model. If the primary model is unavailable, some workloads can move to another frontier model, some can fall back to a smaller model, and some should pause rather than return a bad answer.

Six months ago, these tools were enterprise experiments. Now, AI resilience is part of operational resilience.”

If you rely on AI as part of your business, then you need to plan for downtime. Why? Downtime is part of the game and you need to be prepared for it or bad things will happen.

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TELUS named one of the world’s most sustainable companies

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

TELUS is grateful to have been recognized among the world’s sustainability leaders after being named to TIME Magazine’s World’s Most Sustainable Companies list and earning third place on Corporate Knights’ Best 50 Corporate Citizens ranking. The recognition reflects more than 25 years of integrating environmental stewardship, innovation and social purpose into the company’s core business strategy..

TIME Magazine and Corporate Knights evaluate thousands of companies across sustainable revenue, governance, emissions, innovation, transparency and social impact, making these among the world’s most respected sustainability benchmarks.

This recognition builds on TELUS’ exceptional track record of sustainability leadership, including earning inclusion in Newsweek’s World’s Greenest Companies, receiving a Schneider Electric Sustainability Impact Award for excellence in strategy, digitization, and decarbonization, and being listed on the Dow Jones Best-in-Class Indices for 25 consecutive years, a feat unmatched by any other North American telecommunications company, and inclusion in Corporate Knights’ Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations.

Driven by its leadership in social capitalism, TELUS has made significant progress on its commitments to ambitious science-based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and is continuing to implement sustainable practices across its business including:

  • The achievement of its 2030 climate target of 46% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions five years ahead of schedule
  • Launching its Climate Transition Framework to map its journey to net zero by 2040
  • Avoiding more than 1.4 million tonnes of CO₂e emissions through customer use of TELUS-enabled digital solutions
  • Continuing the expansion of digital health, smart energy, IoT, and precision agriculture technologies
  • Facilitating the ongoing retirement of copper infrastructure in favor of more energy-efficient fibre networks
  • 96% of its electricity – globally – comes from renewable or low-emitting sources
  • 26 million trees planted with our customers and partners, supporting ecosystem restoration across over 16,000 hectares of land
  • 18 million devices diverted from landfills and the launch of a new reuse and recycle program

Sustainable business practices continue to strengthen TELUS’ operational resilience, improve network efficiency, reduce emissions and create long-term value for customers, communities and shareholders.

To learn more about TELUS’ commitment to social capitalism and sustainability, visit telus.com/sustainability.

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Peer Software Launches Latest Version of PeerGFS with Major Performance Gains and Enhanced Edge Data Management

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

Peer Software today announced PeerGFS v6.4, the latest version of its Global File Service platform. The new release delivers significant advancements in performance, scalability and operational flexibility for organizations managing large-scale environments and globally distributed file infrastructure.

Today’s enterprises, particularly in the semiconductor, healthcare and life sciences, AI/ML and other data-intensive industries, are facing exponential growth in data driven events and increasingly complex application workloads. As a result, organizations are distributing workloads across multiple locations, dynamically pursuing available compute resources, and leveraging cloud elasticity to scale capacity on demand.

PeerGFS v6.4 is purpose-built to meet this challenge, enabling seamless data orchestration and synchronization across on-premises and cloud infrastructure, so teams can move faster and operate at hyperscale without sacrificing cost efficiency or productivity.

PeerGFS v6.4 delivers broad performance advancements for real-time file synchronization and scheduled replication for large data sets, including:

  • Greatly improved performance for both scheduled scan and real-time replication for SMB and NFS workloads
  • Enhanced resilience for large file transfer resumption on connectivity breaks across distributed sites
  • Upgraded auditing of configuration and management activity
  • Improved performance, reliability, and manageability of edge data management in distributed and bandwidth-constrained environments.

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Active exploitation of Gravity SMTP flaw exposes hidden WordPress risk

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

Attackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability in the Gravity SMTP WordPress plugin that can expose sensitive system information, including API keys, OAuth tokens, plugin inventories, and server configuration details without authentication. While the flaw does not directly enable remote code execution, it highlights a persistent security challenge in the WordPress ecosystem: information disclosure vulnerabilities are often underestimated until attackers use the exposed data for reconnaissance, credential theft, and follow-on attacks.

You can get an overview here: CVE-2026-4020: Gravity SMTP WordPress Plugin Exploited

Gidi Cohen, CEO & Co-founder, Bonfy.AI had this comment

“The active exploitation of the Gravity SMTP vulnerability (CVE‑2026‑4020) to steal API keys, secrets, and full system details from WordPress sites shows how even minor plugins now sit on the front line of enterprise data exposure. An unauthenticated REST endpoint returning configuration data, plugin inventories, and third‑party email credentials gives attackers both the ability to impersonate a brand and high‑quality reconnaissance for chaining additional exploits.

Updating to version 2.1.5 and rotating exposed keys is critical, but this incident reflects a broader problem: a growing web of plugins, SaaS connectors, and AI‑enabled services moving sensitive content with limited content‑level governance. Modern data security strategies increasingly need to treat every outbound channel as a high‑risk path requiring consistent, contextual, content‑aware controls and to provide unified visibility into how unstructured data moves across websites, SaaS apps, collaboration tools, and AI systems.”

Vusal Shahbazzade, Lead Edge Deployment Engineer, Polygraf AI follows with this:

“What’s interesting about CVE-2026-4020 is not a severity score (5.3 is medium), but it gives to an attacker. It includes a REST endpoint that that authenticates nobody and returns the site’s full system report (PHP version, server paths, active plugins, database details, configured API keys). It’s not the medium level problem in practice, because that data opens many other doors – everything shown in clean JSON, no skill required to read it. On top of it 17 million blocked attempts are people building a map.

This bug lives in a shared configuration library bundled into the plugin, an endpoint that registered itself as public without anyone explicitly deciding it should be. It’s a convenience feature in a dependency exposed one by default, and it inherited the trust of the plugin it shipped inside. Teams would beed to audit every endpoint a dependency registers, rather than assuming they’re safe, otherwise low-CVSS bugs will keep doing high-CVSS damage.”

If I were you, either update this plugin to version 2.1.5 or discontinue its use. Either way, you’ll be doing yourself a favour.

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CData Launches Connect AI Developer Edition, Python SDK, and CLI

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

CData Software today launched three products for developers building AI applications on enterprise data: Connect AI Developer Edition (free), the CData Connect AI Python SDK (open source), and CData CLI.

The releases give developers direct, governed access to enterprise systems, Salesforce, Snowflake, NetSuite, Microsoft 365, Workday, and hundreds of others, through the interfaces they already use: SQL, Python, the command line, and MCP.

Most enterprise AI projects stall at the data layer, not because the models are wrong, but because getting governed, reliable access to production systems requires IT involvement at every step. Connect AI is what IT deploys so developers don’t have to ask for permission each time. Business teams get AI workflows. Developers get a stable data interface. IT gets visibility and control over every query.

Connect AI Developer Edition

Connect AI exposes enterprise APIs as a consistent, queryable data layer with standardized schema, read/write support, and automatic handling of authentication, rate limits, versioning, and pagination. Developers write queries. The platform handles the rest.

The free Developer Edition includes the full enterprise feature set: MCP server support, per-user authentication passthrough, query logging with user-level attribution, and a management MCP server. It works out of the box with any MCP-capable coding assistant, client, or framework, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and LangChain, among others.

Connect AI also ships with Toolkits, which let teams package governed data access into a single MCP Server URL scoped to specific use cases, so agents get exactly what they need and nothing more.

Connect AI Python SDK

The Python SDK provides DB-API-compliant access to Connect AI, so developers can pull governed enterprise data into existing Python workflows without changing how they write code. It works with pandas, SQLAlchemy, cursor-based queries, and any other DB-API-compatible tool.

The SDK is open source and available now.

CData CLI

CData CLI is a command-line interface for CData’s JDBC, ODBC, Python, and ADO.NET connectors, designed to speed up development and testing for analytics pipelines, BI integrations, and ETL workflows. It’s built for how developers work today: CLI-native tooling that coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor can use directly to scaffold connectivity without digging through documentation. The initial release supports JDBC, with support for ADO.NET, Python, and ODBC coming in future releases.

All three products are available today at cdata.com/developers.

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Probook Raises $40M from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia to Scale the AI Operating System for Home Services

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

Probook, the AI Operating System for home service businesses, today announced $40 million in funding. The investment comprises a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a $6 million Seed round led by Sequoia Capital. Sequoia also participated in the Series A.

Home service operators spent the last three years buying AI. A voice agent. A chat widget. A follow-up tool. Each one owned a slice of the customer, and none of them talked to each other. Every vendor built for the top of the funnel, where leads come in — and ignored dispatch, the brain of every home service business, where customer experience is made or broken. Operators ended up with a stack of point solutions and a piecemeal customer experience.

Probook built dispatch first. Intake, data cleaning, customer messaging, and outbound came next, only possible because everything shares one context layer. Every customer stays on one text thread, with one number, from the first touch through the front door. Every inbound lead is answered with perfect information. Every booking is cleaned before assignment. Humans manage exceptions. Techs sell more. Shops run more jobs. Operators add points to their EBITDA and, for the first time, run a connected customer experience.

George Eliadis spent a summer inside TR Miller, a $40M HVAC, plumbing, and electrical shop in Illinois that became Probook’s first customer. There, he saw the same problems at scale.

Probook deploys with customers in person, configures the platform alongside their front-line teams, and stays on the hook for the outcomes it sells.

Probook serves customers across hundreds of locations nationwide, from independently owned shops to private equity-backed platforms. Notable customers include TurnPoint Services,  Master Trades Group, Del-Air, Peterman Brothers, and Sila Services.

Summers Plumbing, Heating & Cooling, with 14 locations and 260 technicians on the platform, booked 2,542 jobs in its first month on Probook with zero human intervention.

Del-Air, an 8-location operation in Florida, runs Probook across the stack. “We chose Probook 

over other AI vendors because they know dispatch. They’re also part of our front-line CSR,” noted Rick Rogers, CEO.

Konstantine Buhler, Partner at Sequoia Capital, added: “Most founders building for the trades have never worked in them. George has. Pair that with the team’s outlier technical depth, and you see why we backed Probook at Seed and why we’re doubling down now.”

Probook will use the capital to scale its go-to-market team against surging demand, and grow engineering and customer success to deliver on it.

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Dragos Introduces EmberAI

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

Dragos today announced the release of EmberAI, an OT-native AI built on the Dragos Intelligence Fabric, the world’s largest OT cybersecurity data set. EmberAI gives every analyst immediate access to Dragos OT-specific intelligence gained from over a decade of OT actions, activity and knowledge.

Putting historical and real-time intel in the hands of every security analyst, EmberAI enables teams to gain detailed visibility into assets, vulnerabilities, and network activity across their OT environment. They can prioritize threats by operational impact and act on findings specific to their environment. EmberAI empowers every analyst, regardless of experience, to move from alert to informed action faster, and make defensible decisions grounded in real adversary data.

Threat activity against critical infrastructure is accelerating. Concurrently, the OT cybersecurity skills gap to address these complex tactics and techniques is widening. Existing tools prioritize visibility over understanding, and general-purpose AI lacks the operational context to distinguish a critical exposure from background noise or to prioritize threats by their actual impact on operations. In OT, any delayed or incorrect decision can have direct consequences to operational safety, resilience, and control.

Organizations responsible for securing extended operational technology (xOT) environments, including power grids, manufacturing plants, water systems, pipelines, and data center environments, need AI that is built on the right intelligence and grounded in operational reality. EmberAI empowers analysts across the full range of experience—from IT practitioners and plant engineers operating in OT environments to seasoned OT professionals—to gain the situational visibility and awareness, intelligence and actionality of an OT expert to prioritize what matters operationally, and act effectively on findings that threaten safe operations.

The Dragos Intelligence Fabric is built on over five petabytes of daily OT telemetry, 10-plus years of adversary tracking across named OT threat groups, proprietary OT vulnerability research as a CVE Numbering Authority, asset and protocol research spanning more than 600 OT protocols, and frontline incident response experience from critical infrastructure environments. The Dragos Intelligence Fabric continuously learns as new intelligence surfaces, field insights accumulate, and threat groups adopt new behaviors.

This foundation enables EmberAI to operate on a principle that distinguishes it from generic AI: OT specific intelligence applied in context. EmberAI is central to Dragos’s xOT security strategy—the company’s architecture for securing Extended Operational Technology, the full environment of systems influencing critical operational processes. As xOT integrations expand the Intelligence Fabric with new data sources, EmberAI’s intelligence and capabilities will grow with it.

How It Works

  • Intelligence-Driven Query Engine: Analysts ask questions in plain language and receive precise, OT-contextual answers grounded in the Dragos Intelligence Fabric. This eliminates the need to manually pivot across disconnected tools or correlate data from multiple sources.
  • Contextual Correlation Across the Environment: EmberAI connects assets, vulnerabilities, threat intelligence, and network activity into a unified, real-time understanding. Decisions are based on full operational context, not isolated or irrelevant technical signals.
  • Adversary-Informed Guidance: Detections and alerts are mapped to known OT threat groups, observed attack patterns, and real behaviors drawn from the Dragos Intelligence Fabric. Analysts understand not just what is happening, but what it means for their environment and what to do from a prioritization approach.
  • Workflow Acceleration and Automation Support: From alert triage to incident summaries and reporting, EmberAI reduces hours of friction laden and often error prone manual work. Analysts spend less time gathering data and more time making informed decisions.
  • Expert-Built OT Skills: Dragos analysts are building and validating a rich library of guided, repeatable workflows. Encoding the same expertise they apply during proactive services, investigations, and incident response, this library will be available soon.
  • Continuous Learning Through the Intelligence Fabric: As new intelligence and field insights surface, Dragos Intelligence Fabric evolves—and EmberAI becomes more efficient and effective.
    Design Principles

The analyst remains in control at every step. Every recommendation EmberAI surfaces is transparent and auditable, enabling defensible workflows. Customer data never leaves the customer’s environment. EmberAI operates inside the Dragos Platform deployment the organization already controls. These design choices reflect a foundational “human in the loop” principle about OT: the person responsible for protecting an environment must own the final decision.EmberAI is generally available today inside the Dragos Platform.

More information is available at dragos.com/emberai.

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Today Is International Women in Engineering Day #EngineeringIntelligence

Posted in Commentary on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

On June 23, the Women’s Engineering Society’s International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) will mark its 13th year, once again shining a spotlight on the achievements and contributions of women engineers worldwide. The 2026 theme, #EngineeringIntelligence, highlights the innovation, expertise, and impact women bring to the engineering profession.

Estelle Azemard, CEO, Leaseweb Canada, and Chrissay Brinkmann, Sales Support & Technical Delivery, Leaseweb USA had this to say:

Estelle Azemard, CEO, Leaseweb Canada

“It’s interesting. If you go back a few decades, engineering was often viewed as a fairly straightforward discipline. You were building a bridge. Designing a system. Solving a technical problem specifically. As a society, today, engineering sits at the center of almost every major conversation. AI. Sustainability. Healthcare. Transportation. Energy. Digital infrastructure. Engineers are helping shape what the future looks like, in many important ways.

That’s just one of the reasons International Women in Engineering Day is important. The challenges we’re facing are not getting less complicated, they’re growing. And when problems get more challenging, different perspectives become incredibly valuable. The industry talks a lot about talent shortages. And, rightly so. We do indeed need more engineers. We need more innovators. We need more people willing to tackle difficult problems, in new ways. Creating opportunities for more women to enter and thrive in engineering isn’t simply good for representation. It’s good for engineering. Because the future is going to belong to the organizations that can bring together and deploy the best ideas, regardless of where they come from.”

Chrissay Brinkmann, Sales Support & Technical Delivery, Leaseweb USA

“The fact that the work is never really finished, is one thing I’ve always found fascinating about engineering. Every time you solve one problem… technology advances, expectations change, and suddenly there’s a new problem waiting for you. You’re constantly learning, adapting, and figuring things out – that’s part of what makes the field so rewarding. 

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AI-assisted hacking operation exposed records linked to Canadian hospitality software firm 

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 23, 2026 by itnerd

Cybernews researchers uncovered an exposed server belonging to a threat actor that contained documentation of attacks against accommodation-sector companies, source code, hacking tool configurations, and stolen booking data.

Key findings:

  • Researchers found at least 50 penetration test reports targeting accommodation companies.
  • Researchers say the hacker bypassed LLM guardrails by disguising malicious intent as penetration testing.
  • The attacker used HexStrike AI, an open-source tool that integrates large language models (LLMs), together with Anthropic’s Claude.
  • The exposed server contained stolen booking-related data, including guests’ personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, emails and phone numbers.
  • Researchers observed 2.1 million unique email addresses in exported files, which most likely correlated to the number of exposed individuals.
  • The attacker took the server out of public view during the investigation, but the Cybernews team managed to identify at least 4 affected companies, including a Canadian one.

The leaked data included records from IGMS, a Canadian company that specializes in Property Management Software (PMS) development. Extracted data included host phone numbers, check-in and check-out dates, host emails, property address, and, in some cases, WiFi passwords. Researchers observed 1,400 records from IGMS.

The researchers warn that stolen reservation data can be used in highly convincing phishing campaigns, especially when attackers know guests’ names, travel dates, and reservation details.

For more information, here’s the full research: https://cybernews.com/security/claude-ai-exploited-breach-hotel-booking-platforms

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