Archive for August 20, 2026

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EORN Cell Gap Project Delivered With The Help Of Rogers

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

Eastern Ontario Regional Network (EORN) and Rogers Communications today announced the successful delivery of the EORN Cell Gap Project.

5G cellular services are now available across eastern Ontario, improving services for residents, businesses, first responders, municipalities, Indigenous communities and visitors in the region.

Federal, provincial, municipal and Indigenous partners marked the successful delivery of the project at an event in Rockland, Ontario.

The EORN Cell Gap Project is a $300 million public-private partnership. The Province of Ontario and the Government of Canada each contributed $71 million and the municipal members of the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus (EOWC) and participating members of the Eastern Ontario Mayors’ Caucus (EOMC) collectively contributed $10 million. Rogers contributed the remaining investment of $150 million. The company was selected through a competitive bidding process.

Rogers built 346 new wireless sites, a combination of new tower constructions and colocations. In addition, the company upgraded 311 existing sites with state-of-the-art 5G equipment delivering essential services to municipalities, Indigenous communities and visitors across eastern Ontario.

Quick Facts

  • The Cell Gap Project targets were 99% voice call coverage, 95% standard definition coverage, and 85% high-definition coverage in the demand areas where people live, work and travel on major roadways across the municipalities of the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus (EOWC) and the participating cities and towns of the Eastern Ontario Mayors’ Caucus (EOMC).
  • Participating Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus (EOWC) counties are: County of Frontenac, County of Haliburton, County of Hastings, City of Kawartha Lakes, County of Lanark, United Counties of Leeds and Grenville, County of Lennox and Addington, County of Northumberland, County of Peterborough, United Counties of Prescott and Russell, Prince Edward County, County of Renfrew and United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry. Participating cities of the Eastern Ontario Mayors’ Caucus (EOMC) are: Belleville, Cornwall, Gananoque, Kingston, Pembroke, Peterborough, Prescott, Quinte West and Smiths Falls.

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Most Canadian small businesses have never heard of the banking law that is about to change how their financial data moves

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

New research commissioned by Xero and conducted by Angus Reid Group finds that 82% of Canadian small business owners had not heard of the Consumer-Driven Banking Act, the legislation that brings open banking to Canada, months after it became law. 61% say they had never heard of open banking at all.

The findings were released at Xerocon Denver on August 19, where Ashalee Mohamed, Country Manager for Xero Canada, and Jules Hawkins, co-founder of Hawkins & Co Accounting and a Xero Accounting Ambassador, discussed what the change means for accountants, bookkeepers and the businesses they serve. The panel was moderated by Sarah Bartnicka, founder and editor of Milk Bag.

The research also documents the workarounds Canadian businesses use to move financial data today, with 18% currently sharing their online banking username and password with an accountant, bookkeeper, employee or software tool, and 22% have done so at some point.

Key findings

  • 82% of Canadian small business owners had not heard of the Consumer-Driven Banking Act. Only 4% both know it exists and understand what it means for their business.
  • 61% say they had never heard of open banking before taking the survey.
  • 18% currently share their online banking credentials with an accountant, bookkeeper, employee or software tool. 22% have done so at some point.
  • 49% would trust their accountant or bookkeeper most to manage access to their financial data. 20% named their bank, and under 1% named a fintech company.
  • The benefits businesses want most are administrative: easier accounting and bookkeeping (39%), less time on financial administration (28%) and lower banking costs (27%).
  • 28% say they are likely to use open banking services in the first 12 months they are available. Among owners who already knew about the Act, that rises to about half.

About the research
These findings are from a survey conducted from July 29th to August 11th, 2026, among a representative sample of n=508 online adult Canadian small business owners who are members of the Angus Reid Forum. The survey was conducted in English and French. For comparison purposes only, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of ±4.30 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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OpenAI Says ChatGPT is down yesterday as logins and signups fail

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

It wasn’t just Claude AI that was down. ChatGPT experienced a major outage yesterday, and users are unable to sign in, create accounts, or load chats, including previous conversations.

You can read the story here: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/openai-confirms-chatgpt-is-down-as-logins-and-signups-fail/

Commenting on this story is Mayur Upadhyaya, CEO of APIContext:

“This outage is a useful reminder that we need to distinguish between the consumer-facing application and the infrastructure underneath it.

In this case, the impact appears to have been relatively contained because the APIs remained available. That still creates a meaningful productivity hit for people relying on ChatGPT directly, but it is very different from an outage affecting the API layer that increasingly sits behind business applications, automations and agentic workflows.

The wider ecosystem is becoming more aware of just how many critical services are now delivered over APIs. If the underlying APIs had failed, the blast radius could have been significantly larger because those dependencies are embedded inside other systems and processes.

That distinction will become increasingly important as AI adoption grows. A problem in the user interface is visible and disruptive. A problem in the underlying API layer can propagate much further, and potentially much faster, before anyone sees it.”

If you rely on AI for anything, have a backup plan or you might be stuck. Really stuck.

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Nearly half say current infrastructure doesn’t support AI monitoring

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

Nexthink has launched new research. Conducted by Havard Business Review Analytic Services in association with Nexthink, the findings show that four in ten (42%) say their organization’s existing data/technology infrastructure doesn’t support AI monitoring, which could present a big barrier to understanding how AI is being used across the workforce.

The Bridging the AI Acceleration Gap report is based on a global study of 259 respondents, all involved in their organization’s AI decisions, and finds little will change over the next 12 months. Only 19% of respondents say their organization will be implementing or enhancing visibility software during that period. Instead, the most common planned actions are AI education/training for employees (75%) and AI governance policies (67%).

That mismatch is already showing inside businesses. Over half (58%) agree that employees’ uptake of AI is outpacing their IT’s ability to monitor and govern use, while 45% agree that IT is being asked to govern AI without clear visibility into how it is actually being used.

The blind spot is biggest around informal AI use, where employees use AI tools at their own discretion for tasks, instead of the tools their employer has defined for specific business purposes. While 46% say their organization has sufficient visibility into its formal AI use, only 27% say the same for informal AI use among employees. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say visibility into their organization’s informal AI activity should be improved. Security and/or data exposure is the leading concern about employees adopting AI at their own discretion, named by 79%.

Download the full report, Bridging the AI Acceleration Gap, or to learn more about how DEX can help maximise AI investments, explore Nexthink’s cutting edge AI Drive solution.

Methodology

The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey was conducted online between February and March 2026. It surveyed 259 members of the Harvard Business Review audience, all of whom are involved in their organization’s decisions about AI and all of whom work at organizations already using AI to some degree. Respondents represented organizations with 500 or more employees across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Questions on barriers to AI monitoring and on planned governance actions allowed respondents to select all applicable answers.

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40% Increase in “Chameleon” SEO Poisoning Attacks 

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

A new report from Fortra Intelligence and Research Experts (FIRE) documents a 40% increase in online attacks leveraging an SEO poisoning technique dubbed “Chameleon.” In these campaigns, threat actors use cloaked search results to deliver phishing pages only to users arriving from Google or Bing search engines. By concealing malicious content from traditional security scanners, Chameleon campaigns can remain active longer and increase their odds of a successful attack. The article explains how the technique works, why legacy detection methods often miss it, and practical takeaways for CISOs and SOC teams.

The full article can be read here: https://www.fortra.com/blog/the-chameleon-threat

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Tumeryk and Carahsoft Partner to Bring AI Trust Scoring and Governance Capabilities to U.S. Government Agencies

Posted in Commentary with tags , on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

Tumeryk and Carahsoft Technology Corp. today announced a partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Tumeryk’s Master Government Aggregator®, making the company’s AI Trust Score platform and AI security posture management capabilities available to the Public Sector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, The Interlocal Purchasing System (TIPS) and OMNIA Partners contracts.

The partnership comes at a pivotal moment for Federal agencies as the U.S. Government increases its focus on securing artificial intelligence (AI) systems and ensuring responsible AI deployment. Recent guidance and frameworks from the White House, NIST, MITRE and the National Security Agency (NSA) underscore the need for agencies to establish measurable approaches to AI risk management, transparency, governance, cybersecurity and operational oversight.

The White House has recently reinforced the importance of accelerating AI adoption while ensuring that AI systems deployed across Government are secure, trustworthy and aligned with national cybersecurity priorities. At the same time, NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework, MITRE’s AI security initiatives and the NSA’s guidance continue to emphasize the need for organizations to assess AI systems for vulnerabilities, governance gaps, compliance risks and operational resilience.

Tumeryk’s AI Trust Score platform enables organizations to continuously evaluate and monitor the trustworthiness of AI systems through automated assessments of security, governance, compliance, privacy, risk and operational integrity. As prompts often contain an organization’s valuable intellectual property, Tumeryk enables organizations to assess AI risk without sending prompts or sensitive information to external services. The platform provides private infrastructure for actionable insights that help agencies establish and maintain strong AI security and governance posture while supporting evolving Federal requirements. Tumeryk is the official partner for the Cloud Security Alliance Risk Rubrik V2 for assessing AI risks.

Tumeryk and Carahsoft are actively collaborating on multiple Public Sector opportunities and are pursuing Federal contract engagements that leverage Tumeryk’s AI Trust Score platform to strengthen AI governance, cybersecurity readiness and compliance monitoring. These initiatives are designed to help agencies assess, manage and mitigate AI risk while supporting the secure deployment of AI across mission-critical environments.

As Federal agencies continue to operationalize AI technologies, the partnership will help organizations move beyond policy frameworks and establish measurable, continuous oversight of AI systems throughout their lifecycle.

Tumeryk’s solutions are available through Carahsoft’s SEWP V contracts NNG15SC03B and NNG15SC27B, TIPS Contract #220105 and OMNIA Partners Contract #R240303. For more information, contact the Carahsoft Team at (703) 871-8548 or Tumeryk@carahsoft.com. Explore Tumeryk’s solutions here.

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The Gentlemen Ransomware: Comparitech stats on attacks, ransoms & data breaches 

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

According to new findings, The Gentlemen gang has claimed responsibility for 675 ransomware attacks, with 600 of these occurring in 2026 so far. This makes The Gentlemen the second-most dominant strain after Qilin. 

The study furthermore breaks down The Gentlemen’s RaaS model, its victims by sector and industry, and its most targeted countries. 

Commenting on this study is Rebecca Moody, Head of Data Research at Comparitech: 

“In less than a year, The Gentlemen has become one of the most dominant groups of recent times — both in terms of the high volume of attacks carried out and the widespread disruption caused by its attacks. 

Its success stems from a number of things, including its rapid exploitation of new vulnerabilities, its collaboration with Breach Forums, and its being an attractive prospect for affiliates. The latter is thanks to the high rewards affiliates are offered: 90% of the ransom payouts, compared to 70 to 80% on average. It’s also targeting a plethora of companies across a wide range of countries and sectors. Other prolific gangs, like Qilin, have a far higher concentration of victims within the US. Avoiding the most ‘saturated’ markets and focusing on less-targeted countries has perhaps increased its success rate. 

At the time of writing, The Gentlemen has claimed 57 new victims this month already (not included in our report stats), meaning it’s on target for a third month of 100+ victims.”

You can read the full report here: https://www.comparitech.com/news/the-gentlemen-ransomware-stats-on-attacks-ransoms-data-breaches/

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Xero Announces New AI Innovations for Small Businesses and Accountants at Xerocon US

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

Xero has announced new AI-powered features to simplify end-to-end financial operations for small businesses and accountants. The new capabilities showcased at Xerocon US enhance the powerful automation and insights delivered by Xero’s agentic platform, JAX. This includes integrations with Microsoft 365, Claude, and ChatGPT, which bring live Xero data to customers wherever they work. Also announced for US customers were new payments capabilities and Xero Payroll, powered by Gusto.

End-to-end AI-powered financial operations

Showcased at Xerocon US was the next evolution of Xero Partner Hub, which will bring live book health, work status, and month-end readiness in the same view across all of a practice’s clients. This new experience will be made possible by several key JAX-powered innovations that streamline the entire end-to-end journey, delivering verifiable automation with customers in control including:

  • JAX will flag unreconciled items, duplicates, missing documents, and anomalies, and help customers resolve them. And as those are addressed, because it runs inside the ledger everything updates in real-time. Once the books pass a health check, Xero Partner Hub will also surface conversations that are worth having like cash flow patterns or unusual P&L movements.
  • Smart Document Capture reads source documents and automatically extracts relevant data and information directly into Xero. Natively built within Xero, there’s no syncing or exporting with another app required so documents and books are in lock-step.
  • Auto Bank Reconciliation automates one of the most time consuming manual tasks in bookkeeping, saving accountants and bookkeepers around 50% of their monthly bank reconciliation time. Matching high-confidence transactions to bank feeds automatically, in real-time, JAX helps to handle the routine and tells you exactly why it matched every single transaction, surfacing any exceptions that require human expertise. With more than 100 million transactions auto-reconciled since launch, Auto Bank Reconciliation continues to improve and in the coming months it will also handle more complex cases, like splitting a single payment across sales and fees.
  • Document Requests in Xero Partner Hub, where JAX will request documents from the client, send reminders, respond to clarifications, and then match it with transactions in Xero, all while making sure customers get to approve every step.
  • Cash Flow actions, powered by JAX, will spot potential cash flow gaps before they arise and help businesses create a plan to stay in the black. JAX will also power new Payment follow-ups and Bill Protection capabilities to facilitate faster money coming in and deliver visibility and control over money going out.

Xero Wherever Our Customers Work

Xero continues to expand its native agentic capabilities and third-party integrations, serving as the orchestration hub that can help streamline and automate key financial workflows for small businesses and accountants, wherever they work.

  • XeroForce, the natural language custom AI agent builder powered by Xero OS, now features a new month-end agent alongside other pre-constructed templates for common workflows. This new agent will automate a workflow practices must tackle each month across each client, handling everything from reviewing document reconciliation status, right through to manual journal entries for prepayments and amortization, before providing customers with a complete account of its actions to review and accept. XeroForce is currently in early access with general availability later this year.
  • With thousands of customers using Xero’s integration with Anthropic’s Claude daily, Xero continues to expand additional integrations that give customers even more flexibility to securely access and query their live Xero financial data directly from their everyday productivity suites. Announcements at Xerocon US include:
    • Xero’s integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot announced in July is expanding soon into Microsoft 365 Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Copilot Cowork, where live Xero data will flow straight into charts, tables, and documents.
    • The Xero OpenAI connector – a Xero plugin in ChatGPT that will be available in coming weeks across Chat, Work, and Codex, enabling customers to leverage their Xero data throughout ChatGPT.
    • Soon, customers will be able to seamlessly switch between their practice’s client organizations while working across all of these integrations. This new capability ensures access to real-time, client-specific data when and where advisors need it.
  • Xero’s ecosystem continues to expand and today there are more than 1,000 apps certified in the Xero App Store. As availability of custom coding tools grows, allowing accountants and small business owners to simply describe a workflow and have AI generate an app, automation, or integration, Xero has seen a 4x increase in new app registrations since 2025. Today, around 20% of connections into Xero’s ecosystem are custom apps, with usage of Xero’s MCP Server growing ten-fold (from December 2025 to May 2026) powering more than 1 million API calls (as of June 2026). Xero plans to release additional tools and resources to support this new wave of small business and accountant software builders relying on Xero as their trusted operating system for the agentic era.

All of the features announced today are grounded in Accountable Intelligence and sit within the AI-native Xero OS, built on 20 years of proprietary data and an established infrastructure trusted by 5 million customers around the world.

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The FBI Warns of Hackers Using AI to Break into Water Systems

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

The FBI ,NSA CISA and other U.S. federal agencies are warning owners and operators of industrial control systems (ICSs) of an active cyber threat to Siemens S7 Series PLCs. Threat actors are targeting U.S.-based Siemens PLC installations using AI-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. The actors leverage Internet scanning services to find Internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected.

The most targeted sectors include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities.

More details can be found here: https://www.ic3.gov/CSA/2026/260819.pdf

Dan Moore, Sr. Director CIAM Strategy at FusionAuth, provided the following comments:

“People are already using AI to one-shot drivers for obsolete printers, so sophisticated actors were bound to go after long-lived, seldom-updated, high-value systems like these PLCs.

Using AI gave attackers faster discovery and exploitation of the attack surface. The suggested defenses are what we’ve heard over and over again: apply patches, don’t put systems on the internet, use strong access controls, monitor important systems, and don’t leave authentication in the default state.

Hackers don’t need AI to discover new vulnerabilities. All they need to do is exploit weaknesses that we know we should have patched long ago.”

Critical infrastructure should get about patching all the things. Because the nation depends on their actions.

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New Research Finds Legitimate Bandwidth-Sharing App Can Expose Corporate Networks to Proxy Users 

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 20, 2026 by itnerd

Silent Push has released new research revealing how legitimate bandwidth-sharing apps can quietly turn employee devices into commercial proxy nodes, potentially exposing corporate IP addresses and internal network resources to anyone with access to the proxy service.

Silent Push researchers joined Peer2Profit, a bandwidth-sharing service that pays users to share their internet connection, and traced where that bandwidth actually goes. Within roughly 10 minutes of enrolling a test device, its residential IP appeared in Astroproxy’s commercial proxy network, confirming an active operational relationship between the two services. Peer2Profit recruits users and pays for their bandwidth, while Astroproxy resells that bandwidth commercially.

The findings expose a significant blind spot for enterprise security teams: Peer2Profit is not malware and can be knowingly installed through legitimate channels, meaning traditional antivirus and threat intelligence tools may not flag it. Once installed on a corporate device or network, however, the organization’s IP can become a proxy exit node, and Silent Push found the risk can extend beyond the public IP to internal network resources.

You can read the blog here:https://www.silentpush.com/blog/peer2profit-astroproxy/

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