The Register

Cloud-native, 37 plugins ... an attacker's dream A brand-new Linux malware named VoidLink targets victims' cloud infrastructure with more than 30 plugins that allow attackers to perform a range of illicit activities, from silent reconnaissance and credential theft to lateral movement and container abuse....

Grid and generation capacity are not being added fast enough to support the scale of growth many forecasts assume A looming shortage of electrical power is set to constrain datacenter expansion, potentially leaving many industry growth forecasts looking overly optimistic....

Had it been around in 2020, it could have flagged tens of billions before payouts, PRAC tells Congress A fraud-detection AI model trained on COVID-19 loan data could have flagged potentially tens of billions of dollars in payments before they went out, reducing the feds' pay-and-chase cleanup, the US government's Pandemic Response Accountability Committee told Congress on Tuesday....

Three major GDPR violations, including a lack of basic security controls, lead to hefty dent in profits The French data protection regulator, CNIL, today issued a collective 42 million ($48.9 million) fine to two French telecom companies for GDPR violations stemming from a data breach....

Support expires for Windows Server 2008, and the codebase released to manufacturing in 2006 Microsoft has quietly maintained support for an OS that's nearly 18 years old, but its time has finally passed - the Windows Vista-powered Windows Server 2008 took its last breath this week....

New crooks on the block get crafty with blockchain to evade defenses Researchers at Group-IB say the DeadLock ransomware operation is using blockchain-based anti-detection methods to evade defenders' attempts to analyze their tradecraft....

Investment in datacenters to peak by 2029, place your bets please The AI-driven datacenter construction frenzy shows no signs of slowing, but neither do concerns that the whole edifice could collapse under the weight of its own hype and mounting investment demands....

Latest update focuses on hardware acceleration, security tightening, and a handful of quality-of-life tweaks The latest Firefox is here with some handy changes - most of which differ depending on what OS and type of CPU you run it on....

Attack enters second day with major disruption to healthcare provision Two hospitals in Belgium have cancelled surgeries and transferred critical patients to other facilities after shutting down servers following a cyberattack....

Travel biz tells customers to change passwords beyond its own services Eurail has confirmed customer information was stolen in a data breach, according to notification emails sent out this week....

U-turn leaves questions on costs, funding, and benefits unanswered The UK government has backed down from making digital ID mandatory for proof of a right to work in the country, adding to confusion over the scheme's cost and purpose....

Committee raises concerns over delays and loopholes in proposed law The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has criticized the UK government's handling of AI nudification tools, saying it is taking too long to ban apps, and that expedited legislation does not encompass multi-purpose platforms used to create nude images....

Component up 63% since September, more pricey memory coming to a supply chain near you Enterprise IT infrastructure buyers are bracing for hefty price hikes across servers, storage systems, and networking kit, driven by steep inflation in memory component costs that industry analysts warn will soon cascade through the supply chain....

Endesa says payment info stolen after alleged crook boasted of 1 TB-plus haul Spanish energy giant Endesa is warning customers about a data breach after a cybercrim claimed to have walked off with a vast cache of personal information allegedly tied to more than 20 million people....

When salty coastal air meets memory errors in one of Portugal's rail ticket machines Bork!Bork!Bork! It's back to the railways of Portugal for today's bork. Remember how we called Windows 2000 the unkillable cockroach of the IT world? Seems it's been upset by software peeking at memory where it shouldn't....

AI upstart also upscales its Labs to find the next frontier The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has an extra $1.5 million heading its way, after AI upstart Anthropic entered into a partnership aimed at improving security in the Python ecosystem....

One payload out of fifteen survived and sent home some useful data India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has commenced an investigation into the failure of a PSLV launcher....

America first, for sales and access to foundries The Trump administration will only allow exports of Nvidia and AMD GPUs to China if local buyers can get all the kit they want....

Chromium commit adds support for image decoder after the Big G ditched it a few years back Google has added support for the JPEG XL (JXL) image format to the open source Chromium code base, reversing a decision in 2022 to drop the technology....

First Patch Tuesday of 2026 goes big Microsoft and Uncle Sam have warned that a Windows bug disclosed today is already under attack....

Could be back to 2016 levels The rising cost of memory due to shortages is likely to persist into late 2027, driving higher device prices and lackluster configurations for PCs, tablets, and phones, IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani told The Register....

The open-source libraries were created by Salesforce, Nvidia, and Apple with a Swiss group Vulnerabilities in popular AI and ML Python libraries used in Hugging Face models with tens of millions of downloads allow remote attackers to hide malicious code in metadata. The code then executes automatically when a file containing the poisoned metadata is loaded....

Just be careful not to entrust the AI model with your sensitive data Anthropic on Monday announced the research preview of Claude Cowork, a tool for automating office work that comes with the now familiar recitation of machine learning risks....

Step 1: Ask for deposit. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Build Moon hotel empire Everest has been turned into a run-of-the-mill tourist attraction. Space tourism is over now that any celebrity can blast off into orbit. Next up: a hotel on the Moon, now taking reservations for only about six years from now, if you're willing to make a small deposit....

Great news for AMD and Nvidia, less so for cash-strapped consumers Memory makers just can't churn out their DRAM fast enough. On the heels of an AI-driven shortage, SK Hynix on Tuesday announced a new 19 trillion Korean won (about $13 billion) advanced packaging and test facility in South Korea that could offer some relief - just not for consumer products like laptops and phones....

US House backs bill to regulate remote access to export-controlled chips Chinese companies may be unable to import the best US GPUs, but they have found a workaround: renting access to that hardware via cloud services. Now, the US House of Representatives is moving to bring that loophole under the export-control law....

Forrester models slow, structural shift rather than sudden employment collapse AI-pocalypse AI and automation could wipe out 6.1 percent of jobs in the US by 2030 - equating to 10.4 million fewer positions that are held by humans today....

Big Tech warned expansion must come without higher household bills as Microsoft signals support President Trump says tech giants must pay their way when it comes to delivering increased power needed for datacenters, rather than the burden falling on US citizens, and it seems Microsoft is on board with that....

The Emperor Penguin has a go... just for fun Perhaps the most famous low-level systems programmer has tried "vibe coding" for himself - and he seems to be enjoying it....

33-year-old was under surveillance for some time before returning home from the UAE Dutch police believe they have arrested a man behind the AVCheck online platform - a service used by cybercrims that Operation Endgame shuttered in May....

Analysts say cheap energy and storage make sense for bit barns despite policy headwinds Despite the Trump administration's opposition to renewables, solar power will likely remain part of datacenter energy supply mix due to its low cost....

Git server flaw that attackers have been abusing for months has now caught the attention of US cyber cops CISA has ordered federal agencies to stop using Gogs or lock it down immediately after a high-severity vulnerability in the self-hosted Git service was added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog....

AuraInspector automates the most common abuses and generates fixes for customers Mandiant has released an open source tool to help Salesforce admins detect misconfigurations that could expose sensitive data....

Dutchman fails to convince judges his trial was unfair because cops read his encrypted chats A Dutch appeals court has kept a seven-year prison sentence in place for a man who hacked port IT systems with malware-stuffed USB sticks to help cocaine smugglers move containers, brushing off claims that police shouldn't have been reading his encrypted chats....

Yes, London property prices are high. But here's a picture of Boris Johnson Updated From the "there but for the grace of God" department comes a new website to find affordable housing in London containing data it shouldn't....

Europe's largest council delays Fusion reimplementation four years after go-live disaster Birmingham City Council has pushed back the relaunch of its troubled Oracle Fusion ERP system, saying staff need more time to adapt to the vendor's standard processes....

Project Nightfall aims to deliver a UK-built long-range strike capability at speed The British government is asking defense firms to rapidly produce a new ground-launched ballistic missile to aid Ukraine's fight against Russia - hardware that might also be adopted by UK's armed forces in future....

Turns out the voluntary pledge to restrict public sector tendering during Horizon scandal inquiry has loopholes Fujitsu has won a place on a UK government framework despite its commitment not to compete for new public sector contracts during the ongoing inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal....

Satya Nadella's call to accept and embrace desktop brainboxes faces skepticism Software developers have created a PowerShell script to remove AI features from Windows....

Tweaks its hardware to run multiple private cloud stacks, and shift between them Lenovo has a hunch that some of you are about to shift to a different hypervisor and has created hardware to make the move easier....

Government is fed up with bad actors using digi-cash to fund dodgy deeds India's government has updated the regulations it imposes on cryptocurrency services providers, as part of its efforts to combat fraud, money laundering, and terrorism....

In SEC filings, Fortinet and Palo Alto show shrinking product margins taking hold. PCs and datacenters aren't the only devices that need DRAM. The global memory shortage is roiling the cybersecurity market, with the cost of firewalls expected to balloon and hit both customers and vendors in the pocketbook in 2026, according to research analysts Wedbush....

Gang members 'systematically exploited children and young people,' cops say A 21-year-old Swedish man accused of being a key organizer of violence-as-a-service linked to the Foxtrot criminal network, which police say has recruited and exploited minors, has been arrested in Iraq....

No wonder he's going nuclear Meta has formed a new initiative called Meta Compute" to oversee the planning, deployment, and operations of its growing fleet of AI datacenters....

Just insert a disk and the TV starts playing three-year-old's favorite shows Smart TV UIs are hard enough for adults to navigate, let alone preschoolers. When his three-year-old couldn't learn to navigate with a remote, one Danish computer scientist did what any enterprising creator would do: He turned an old floppy disk drive into a kid-friendly content controller that starts streams based on what disk you insert....

Partnership between behemoths raises questions about OpenAI's place at the iTable It may finally be time to take AI on the iPhone siri-ously. Apple and Google on Monday announced a multi-year partnership that will see Apple Foundation Models standing on the shoulders of Google Gemini models, one that will return a small portion of the roughly $20 billion Google pays annually to be Apple's default search provider....

If penicillin was discovered on moldy bread, who's to say the next miracle drug won't be born from AI hallucinations Nvidia has teamed up with pharmaceutical heavyweight Eli Lilly to plow up to $1 billion into a research lab over the next five years to advance the development of foundation models for AI-assisted drug discovery....

High-margin infrastructure kit takes precedence, leaving laptops and desktops wanting Memory shortages will likely stunt PC shipments in 2026, as available supplies will not be able to meet demand thanks to memory makers chasing the lucrative AI infrastructure market instead....

Digital signage is great, until it isn't Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows activation is a tricky thing, particularly for digital signage that should be directing customers to in-store bargains but instead shows passersby that someone has yet to give Microsoft their pound of flesh....

Survey finds security checks nearly doubled in a year as leaders wise up The number of organizations that have implemented methods for identifying security risks in the AI tools they use has almost doubled in the space of a year....