The Register

'It freakin' worked' says Rob Joyce - and shows how relentless AI agents can find holes humans miss

RSAC 2026  The now-infamous Anthropic report about Chinese cyberspies abusing Claude AI to automate cyberattacks was a Rorschach test for the infosec community, according to former NSA cyber boss Rob Joyce.…

Washington content to be represented by actual empty chairs

RSA 2026  Back in the day (circa 2023) when cybercrime group Scattered Spider and its help-desk voice-phishing calls were a relatively new threat, the feds considered pulling the government's top cyber-threat hunters and their private-sector counterparts into one room to share information, in real time, about this loosely knit extortion ring that was terrorizing enterprises.…

Here's where you ought to spend your security billable hours budget this year

Strengthen your MFA policies, double-down on anti-phishing training, and for Jobs' sake, patch all your vulns right away. The past year of intelligence collected by Cisco's Talos threat hunters suggests that attackers are moving faster to exploit vulns, and fooling more staff than ever into giving up their credentials. …

Claims it can analyze millions of daily events with 98 percent accuracy

Google's Gemini AI agents are crawling the dark web, sifting through upward of 10 million posts a day to find a handful of threats relevant to a particular organization.…

Voice phishing is second most common initial access method across all IR probes, and top in cloud break-ins

Voice phishing surged last year to become the second most common method used by cybercriminals to gain initial access to their victims' IT estate – and the No. 1 tactic used when breaking into cloud environments.…

Trio-Tech International initially said hack wasn’t 'material,' but then stolen data was published

Trio-Tech International initially shrugged off a ransomware attack at a Singapore subsidiary as immaterial, only to reverse course days later after discovering stolen data had been disclosed.…

Infosec pros descend on San Francisco

kettle  When El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons joins infosec industry colleagues in San Francisco for RSAC 2026 this week, she's expecting agentic AI to be on everyone's lips - at least those who aren't busy gossiping about the lack of presence from any representatives of the US federal government.…

The era of reliability begins... right after this out-of-band patch

Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to resolve bugs introduced by a Windows patch just days after promising improved reliability.…

Ukraine's battlefield lessons show quantity and affordability now trump exquisite hardware

NATO is unprepared to deal with attacks by cheap, mass-produced drones and urgently needs layered, affordable air defense systems to counter the threat, taking a cue from the experience gained by Ukrainian forces over the past four years.…

PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more!

Infosec In Brief  Russian intelligence-affiliated parties are posing as customer support services on commercial messaging applications such as Signal to compromise accounts and conduct phishing attacks, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned last Friday.…

Rust security maintainers contend Nadim Kobeissi's vulnerability claims are too much

Since February, cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi has been trying to get code fixes applied to Rust cryptography libraries to address what he says are critical bugs. For his efforts, he's been dismissed, ignored, and banned from Rust security channels.…

Cams statistically more likely to ID Black people, says new research

A UK police force has suspended its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study revealed it was statistically more likely to identify Black people on a watchlist database.…

Millions of hijacked devices powered traffic floods targeting defense systems and beyond

The US government has moved to disrupt a cluster of IoT botnets behind some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded, including traffic bursts topping 30 terabits per second.…

Lack of clear criteria risks encouraging firms to lean on state support instead of worrying about insurance

The UK's cyber watchdog has warned that the government's £1.5 billion bailout of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) risks setting a troubling precedent for how Britain handles major cyber crises.…

Audit trails aplenty, but no price tag – and no clue how long your data sticks around

Opinion  Last week's UK government consultation on its plans for digital identity had quite a few things missing. It did not include a price estimate - something it said was due to decisions yet to be taken on the scheme's scope - or how long the government would keep "audit trail" records of ID checks.…

He would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for a meddling security team's fear of USB

On Call  Each Friday The Register offers a fresh installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support.…

Last time: Beijing-backed snoops and ransomware crims. Who's next?

Unknown baddies are abusing yet another critical Microsoft SharePoint bug to compromise victims' SharePoint servers, the US government warned.…

Chocolate Factory describes concession as an attempt to balance openess with safety

It turns out you won't be limited to Google-verified apps an developers on Android after all. In the face of sustained community dissatisfaction with its developer verification requirement, Google has given Android users an out.…

Iran-linked attackers wiped employees' devices using Intune

The US government has urged companies to better secure Microsoft Intune, an endpoint management tool that was abused in last week's cyberattack against med-tech firm Stryker.…

Where are you? What are you working on? Why are you doing that?

Identity access and management platform Okta announced the general availability of its Okta for AI Agents, which will give customers the ability to do three things: locate agents, see what they’re doing, and shut them down if need be.…