The Register

Shady, China-based company, all the apps needed for a fully automated attack - sounds totally legit Villager, a new penetration-testing tool linked to a suspicious China-based company and described by researchers as "Cobalt Strike's AI successor," has been downloaded about 10,000 times since its release in July....

Benchmark bonanza shows big wins across JSON, compression, JIT, and more The first release candidate of .NET 10 is out, complete with a "go-live" license, meaning that Microsoft supports production use. The company has also detailed performance improvements in this long-term support release, translating to real-world savings for users....

The technology isn't the hard part, says enterprise business services SVP, it's managing people At Walmart, "everybody's using AI every day across the enterprise," according to David Glick, senior vice president of the retail behemoth's enterprise business services....

FastNetMon says 1.5 Gpps deluge from hijacked routers, IoT kit nearly drowned scrubbing shop A DDoS mitigation provider was given a taste of the poison it tries to prevent, after being smacked by one of the largest packet-rate attacks ever recorded - a 1.5 billion packets per second (1.5 Gpps) flood that briefly threatened to knock it off the internet....

Slicing Windows 11 to the bone while Microsoft piles on the features How low can Windows 11 go? Storage-wise, it can take up less than 3 GB, as demonstrated by some impressive engineering from the same individual behind the Nano11 "diet" build....

AMD Zen hardware and Intel Coffee Lake affected If you thought the world was done with side-channel CPU attacks, think again. ETH Zurich has identified yet another Spectre-based transient execution vulnerability that affects AMD Zen CPUs and Intel Coffee Lake processors by breaking virtualization boundaries....

That won't even warm the plasma America's Department of Energy (DOE) has earmarked $134million in funding for two programs aimed at securing US leadership in emerging fusion technologies. The move comes amid renewed interest in nuclear power sparked by surging datacenter energy demands....

Ron Wyden urges FTC to probe failure to secure Windows after attackers used Kerberoasting to cripple Ascension Microsoft is back in the firing line after US Senator Ron Wyden accused Redmond of shipping "dangerous, insecure software" that helped cybercrooks cripple one of America's largest hospital networks....

Graph database fave also punts for transactional workloads Neo4j has introduced "property sharding" which, according to one analyst, will help overcome its earlier struggles with scalability, while also allowing transactional workloads on the same system....

$50 standalone bots now bundled in $30 package Microsoft is re-badging its Sales, Service, and Finance Copilots and slashing what it charges for them....

Over 600 security boffins say planned surveillance crosses the line Europe, long seen as a bastion of privacy and digital rights, will debate this week whether to enforce surveillance on citizens' devices....

Major UK player cagey on specifics but latest attack follows string blamed on 'third party' suppliers One of the UK's largest rail operators, LNER, is the latest organization to spill user data via a third-party data breach....

Academics and OSA stakeholders say watchdog needs to amend how controversial legislation is enforced Industry experts expressed both concern and sympathy for Ofcom, the Brit regulator that is overseeing the Online Safety Act, as questions mount over the effectiveness of the controversial legislation....

Battery powered now, fuel-cells tomorrow - all packed in a shipping box Following a series of trials, defense biz BAE Systems says it is readying an autonomous military submarine for the end of next year....

Not yet gone and not yet forgotten, but on their way Microsoft has added a raft of web components to its list of deprecated features, including legacy Edge developer tools and hosted web apps....

Admins can't stop checking their portals, survey finds A new survey confirms what many IT pros already know: downtime doesn't exist, with dashboards and alerts intruding on their free time....

Rust coreutils, TPM encryption, and GNOME 49 line up for October debut The Quokka is a small, furry, and perpetually smiling marsupial from Australia. It's very cute - and now it's freezing....

CedarDB pushed to the limit in improbable gaming experiment The world has moved on from making Doom run on increasingly ridiculous devices. Now it's all about porting it to the most inappropriate of languages. Cue DOOMQL, a version of the shooter written in pure SQL....

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out the reasons why NASA has barred Chinese nationals from accessing its premises and assets, even those who hold visas that permit them to reside in the USA....

Ovoid-themed in-memory malware offers a menu for mayhem EggStreme' framework looks like the sort of thing Beijing would find handy in its ongoing territorial beefs Infosec outfit Bitdefender says it's spotted a strain of in-memory malware that looks like the work of Chinese advanced persistent threat groups that wanted to achieve persistent access at a military company" in the Philippines....

Gartner says migrations remain a risky multi-year nightmare, but selective re-platforming can pay off More than a third of workloads currently running under VMware will run on another platform by 2028, with its own trusted hosting partners pushing some customers to make the move....

Tick tock Sam, just fifteen months before your first bill is due OpenAI will pay Oracle $300 billion over the course of five years to fuel Sam Altman's AI ambitions by providing five gigawatts of compute capacity....

Patch, turn on MFA, and restrict access to trusted networks...or else Affiliates of the Akira ransomware gang are again exploiting a critical SonicWall vulnerability abused last summer, after a suspected zero-day flaw actually turned out to be related to a year-old bug....

We went through two hours of Senate hearings so you didn't have to Video As the Trump administration pushes to loosen federal rules on AI, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has introduced legislation to give AI developers a two-year waiver from certain regulations, renewable for up to a decade....

Using GPUs to design better bit barns for GPUs? It's the circle of AI With the rush to capitalize on the gen AI boom, datacenters have never been hotter. But before signing that multi-billion dollar purchase order on GPUs, Cadence Systems suggests using a few of them to simulate whether that fancy new bit barn of yours can actually handle the heat....

'We do believe that this was likely the creation of a cybercrime group,' threat hunter tells The Reg ChillyHell, a modular macOS backdoor believed to be long dormant, has likely been infecting computers for years while flying under the radar, according to security researchers who spotted a malware sample uploaded to VirusTotal in May....

The usual cadre of scientists who disproved previous findings are stumped If you were ever wondering where you'd be when NASA announced peer-reviewed evidence hinting at extraterrestrial life - long dead, if it existed at all - look around, because this is it....

Nearly 100 requirements laid down by 10 separate oversight and advisory groups leave agencies tangled in red tape The US government wants AI in every corner of government, but the unstoppable force of new tech is running into the immovable object of bureaucracy - a growing mass of AI rules....

Classes moved to VBA, but upgrading and testing is unavoidable With the end of Windows 10 looming, Microsoft has reminded hard-pressed admins that other critical technologies are on the endangered list, notably VBScript....

Systems offline as specialists continue to comb through wreckage Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) says "some data" was affected after the luxury car maker suffered a digital break-in early last week....

New look for Visual Studio but the core still runs on the old .Net Framework Microsoft has released a preview of Visual Studio 2026, the first major version update since 2021, promising deeper AI integration and a new look and feel....

Arbitrarily inflated lock-in-tastic fees curbed as movement charges must be cost-linked Updated Most of the provisions of the EU Data Act will officially come into force from the end of this week, requiring cloud providers to make it easier for customers to move their data, but some of the big players are keener than others....

With extinction event predicted, Big Red's four-year forecasts will have to meet reality Comment An industry adage has it that Oracle's calculator only has a plus button, which is reassuring for investors....

Why strap pricey, power-hungry HBM to a job that doesn't benefit from the bandwidth? Analysis Nvidia on Tuesday unveiled the Rubin CPX, a GPU designed specifically to accelerate extremely long-context AI workflows like those seen in code assistants such as Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, while simultaneously cutting back on pricey and power-hungry high-bandwidth memory (HBM)....

Prosecutors claim Ukrainian ran LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim ops - $11M bounty on his head A Ukrainian national faces serious federal charges and an $11 million bounty after allegedly orchestrating ransomware operations that caused an estimated $18 billion in damages across hundreds of organizations worldwide....

Department dangles 160K salary for CDIO to wrangle legacy systems, failed projects, and 1.8B budget The UK Home Office - a government department with a rich track record of failing IT projects - is on the hunt for a chief digital and innovation officer (CDIO) with an advertised salary not far off from the prime minister's....

One parent expressed concern for their child's safety A clumsy data breach has affected hundreds of children at a Birmingham secondary school....

Meeting with former UK prime minister and his chief advisor withheld from official records, according to leaked documents Former British prime minister Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings met with Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir, in 2019, months before the US spy-tech company landed a key role in the UK's COVID-19 response, according to papers seen by The Guardian....

It's the season of FOSS fruitfulness as juicy goodness falls from the branch The Northern hemisphere is moving into autumn and FOSS vendors are falling over themselves in their efforts to get new versions out for the season....

Are you sure you know who has access to your systems? Feature Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is the latest UK household name to fall victim to a major cyberattack. IT systems across multiple sites have been offline for over a week after what the company described as a "severe disruption."...

Government wants to assess would-be immigrants' language skills remotely Plans for an 816 million system to test the English skills of UK visa applicants have stalled, with the Home Office pushing procurement back at least five months after repeated consultations with suppliers....

Management software stumbles at start of term, leaving staff unable to track attendance or reach parents UK school management information system (MIS) provider Bromcom has had a bad start to the academic year after its Azure-based service left staff struggling to track student attendance, let alone access contact details for parents and guardians....

Four-tier core design debuts amid NPU debate Arm has lifted the lid on its latest mobile platform, comprising new CPU and GPU designs plus rearchitected interconnect and memory management logic, all optimized with a coming wave of AI-enabled smartphones in mind....

If you can find the T&Cs, which are often hidden, you may spot hidden costs and nasties galore Vendors' licenses for AI software and services are in a state of pandemonium," according to Gartner VP analyst Jo Liversidge....

ERP giant patches flaw that allows total takeover of NetWeaver, Microsoft has nothing under attack for once September's Patch Tuesday won't require Microsoft users to rapidly repair rancid software, but SAP users need to move fast to address extremely dangerous bugs....

Big Red's profits are flat, but its order book is phat Larry Ellison moved a lot closer to being the world's richest man on Tuesday after Oracle saw a huge leap in its stock price, the largest single day's improvement in decades, thanks to a pipeline stuffed full of big deals....

We're making billions on AI, how about you? Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says the Chocolate Factory's rental computing business has $106 billion of unfulfilled contracts, and he expects Google Cloud will be able to realize about half of that in revenue within two years....

Miscreants cost victims time rather than money During the two-hour window on Monday in which hijacked npm versions were available for download, malware-laced packages reached one in 10 cloud environments, according to Wiz researchers. But crypto-craving crims did little more than annoy defenders....

iPhone 17 Air shows company lightening up Apple on Tuesday showed off its iPhone 17 lineup at a media event dubbed, "Awe Dropping," favoring timeworn self-adulation over a more literal pun like "Four Play."...

Now if only someone would remember to apply those rules inside the DoD It's about to get a lot harder for private companies that are lax on cybersecurity to get a contract with the Pentagon, as the Defense Department has finalized a rule requiring contractor compliance with its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program....