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CenterPoint Energy disclosed a breach compromising some customers' personal information after an attacker leaked data allegedly stolen from the utility company. [...]

Cybersecurity agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have detailed a Windows malware that they say Iran's intelligence service uses to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activists around the world. The malware is controlled via the Telegram messaging app and can copy a target's emails and chat messages, take screenshots, and activate the microphone to record Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Oracle began a new round of layoffs this week, sending early-morning termination emails to staff for the second time in six months.

The latest wave began Monday with affected staff being told, “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change,” according to BusinessInsider. Termination was immediate.

That’s the same wording as in the previous wave of layoffs, which took place on March 31 and affected workers in the US, India, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay. In the 12 months to May 31, Oracle cut its global workforce from about 162,000 to about 141,000, a decline of roughly 13%.

Oracle has made no public statement confirming the latest round of job cuts, but in a regulatory filing days earlier the company said it had set aside a further $700 million for restructuring charges, bringing the total charges this year to roughly $2.8 billion.

What the new termination emails say

Staff receiving the latest termination emails were told termination and compensation details would follow by DocuSign, Business Insider wrote. An internal document reviewed by the publication said severance terms varied by role and region, and some teams facing double-digit percentage cuts.

Affected employees took to social media to vent.

Eric Brunson, a senior principal offensive security researcher at Oracle, described in a LinkedIn post how he had lost access to corporate communication tools before receiving any formal notice. “I woke up to not being able to log back into Slack,” he wrote. “No new emails or notification in email and I’m locked out of there. I was able to get ahold of my manager on LinkedIn and she confirmed.” Brunson said the timing fell two days before a scheduled RSU vesting date, adding, “Probably part of the plan.”

The filing that backs up the layoff accounts

While Oracle is not talking about the layoffs, its 10-Q quarterly report states that management approved and supplemented restructuring plans “to implement certain strategic measures and further improve operational efficiencies, including through the adoption and integration of artificial intelligence technologies across certain functions.” It adds that “subsequent to August 31, 2026, our management supplemented the 2026 Restructuring Plan by approximately $700 million to reflect additional actions that we expect to take.”

Oracle has already spent $1.97 billion of the $2.1 billion restructuring charges it originally budgeted, it reported.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said the filing should be read carefully rather than as confirmation of a headcount. “The supplement is an estimate, not a bill,” he said, noting it raises the program’s estimated cost by about a third without committing Oracle to a timetable.

Gogia said the more significant shift is in the filing’s language rather than the dollar figure. Oracle’s August 2025 and February 2026 filings had described the plan as tied to “acquisitions and certain other operational activities.”

AI was named as a driver of restructuring for the first time in the Sept. 11 filing.

Why the headcount stays unconfirmed

Gogia said no verified figure exists yet for how many employees the September round affected.

He noted that 30,000 was a January forecast of the total 2026 program. Twenty-one thousand is the confirmed net decline in Oracle’s global workforce across the full fiscal year. A reported 3,000 job cuts in India on Sept. 1 remains unconfirmed by Oracle.

The $700 million restructuring supplement “cannot be divided into people,” Gogia said, since it covers termination benefits, contract termination costs and other exit costs across a program spanning multiple countries. “There is no solid headcount for the September round,” he said.

A pattern that began in March

Oracle’s first 2026 layoff wave began March 31, when the Revenue and Health Sciences unit, the SaaS and Virtual Operations Services group, and NetSuite’s India Development Centre saw some of the deepest reductions.

Figures published by Oracle for its fiscal year ending May 31, 2026, show research and development headcount fell from 50,000 to 43,000 employees during the year, sales and marketing fell from 31,000 to 25,000, and services fell from 37,000 to 34,000, according to Gogia’s analysis of the company’s own reporting.

International staff, at 92,000, saw a larger reduction than the 49,000-strong U.S. workforce, he said.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

This article first appeared on CIO.

Just because Apple now has AI, a new folding iPhone, and a newly minted CEO doesn’t mean the litigation between it and OpenAI has gone away. Apple now wants to force OpenAI to let it look at the hardware it has been building, according to a new report.

A reasonable request?

It seems a reasonable request, doesn’t it? After all, Apple’s argument is that OpenAI has been engaged in trade secret theft to help it design and develop its new hardware. OpenAI’s defense against these claims feel flimsy, at least to this reporter. They seem to coalesce around something like, “We don’t need your trade secrets because we’re making something brand new.” 

The problem with that defense is, contextually, that while on this stated mission to do something completely new, the company has hired around 400 former Apple staff so far, including its chief designers. And Apple thinks part of that process has been OpenAI, in whole or in part, working to exfiltrate its trade secrets.

What Apple wants — and why

With those facts as your guide, Apple’s request to Judge Edward J. Davila seems reasonable. It wants to take a look at what OpenAI is developing to ensure its trade secrets have not been abused in the process of designing that product. Apple argues that if it is forced to wait until the product is released, then it will be impossible to make its trade secrets confidential again, particularly as the defense seems to consist of that pinky promise that no Apple trade secrets have been harmed.

Apple legal also argues that it cannot be fair to allow OpenAI to defend itself by alleging its unreleased and unseen product doesn’t contain any trade secrets without permitting Apple — and the court — to verify that. While Apple’s counsel doesn’t seem to have said it, you could paraphrase the request as Apple telling the genAI firm, “Let us see what you are building; if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Except, of course, that while building its defense, OpenAI is giving many of us the distinct impression that it may have something to fear.

What may happen next

Despite the merits of the argument, I think Apple’s request will not prevail, in part because the court may assess that if Apple takes a look at OpenAI’s homework it may compound the risk of IP theft. But that doesn’t mean Apple’s attempt will fail outright, as the compromise position is likely to be the appointment of a trusted, independent, third-party expert witness to take a look at what Apple’s competitor is making in Apple’s stead. 

There is precedent for this. That’s more or less what happened when Waymo pursued a similar case against Uber, or when AMCS litigated against Sinovel. There are nuances to all three cases that mean they aren’t perfectly aligned, but that does seem a logical next step to this layman.

Of course, just because it’s logical doesn’t mean either party is going to like it, but OpenAI could conceivably even suggest such an approach as it seeks to buy itself time to build and release its still mythical hardware. That’s also why Apple wants a chance to look at documents pertaining to that hardware to make very certain it hasn’t infringed any of Apple’s own trade secrets.

A side order of humble pie

All the same, if this case does indeed turn out to be a scenario in which one company has been found with its hand in the cookie jar, then the best possible approach for the company with crumbs around its mouth is going to be damage control. That’s going to take a lot less war-war and a great deal more jaw-jaw. It’s also going to require the intake of a very, very large slice of humble pie. Right now, it seems to me that Apple isn’t talking, and OpenAI isn’t hungry enough to take that first bite. Not yet. 

The case, number 5:26-cv-07078, rolls on.

Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-platform campaign that uses the Message Queueing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol as a communication channel to control Windows and Linux systems. The emerging malware family, codenamed BambooToken, is assessed to be active since at least February 2023 and put to use in attacks targeting organizations across Asia and South America. Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A previously unknown malware framework called BambooToken, active since at least 2023, is now using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to communicate with Windows and Linux systems. [...]

Hackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in the WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture premium plugin for WordPress to upload a PHP backdoor. [...]

AI is shrinking the time between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation, leaving defenders less time to wait for patches or public exploits. Picus Security explains how exploitability validation, security control testing, and autonomous pentesting can help teams close exposure gaps before attackers arrive. [...]

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned security teams that ransomware gangs have now joined ongoing attacks exploiting a critical VMware vCenter vulnerability patched in July. [...]

With artificial intelligence (AI) shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation and lowering the barrier to entry for bad actors, new findings from Sysdig show that skilled human operators can move just as swiftly after gaining initial access. In one instance highlighted by the cloud security company, the threat actor pivoted from a vulnerable Marimo notebook to an SSH Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Introduction Security teams have gotten pretty good at testing against what can hurt them. Can this EDR agent catch this payload? Will my organization fail the phishing simulation? Does this SIEM rule fire on this particular technique? And, in more mature organizations, this testing happens continuously rather than as a one-off exercise. But no matter how much you validate against these [email protected]

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a mass-scanning campaign that has targeted Vite deployments siphon sensitive data. The first is an automated effort aimed at internet-exposed Vite development servers that's designed to steal cloud credentials, configurations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure instances, and infrastructure state files, per F5 Labs. The Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The colorful CEO of Automattic, which controls WordPress, was forced out last Thursday by his board of directors, which put him on a leave of absence. He used his system access to remove the accounts of the acting CEO and others — an action that could get most employees fired. Instead, he was fully reinstated to CEO a couple of days later.

It’s not hard to compare this to the saga at OpenAI almost three years ago when an eerily similar series of events happened. The board fired the CEO for having repeatedly lied to it. Within a few days, the board reversed itself. 

A weaker historical comparison is with Steve Jobs, who was ousted from his Apple CEO role, only to later return. But Jobs at least had the decency to wait a few years while he created and ran NeXT.

To be fair, boards have often been criticized for being puppets of the CEO, who often have a lot to say about who serves on the board. But that criticism doesn’t hold for the first OpenAI board nor for the initial Automattic board.

Some years ago, I was involved with a VC-funded startup, and we were at the stage of forming a board of directors. I was talking with the person who was to be the board chair and he needed candidates for board secretary, which is typically an attorney. That role is supposed to be a lawyer who cares about the board, as opposed to the company’s general counsel, who reports into the CEO and only cares about the company. 

The chair said that we need someone who is trustworthy. I had the perfect candidate in mind, until I probed deeper and found that there is a vast chasm between “trustworthy” and “someone we can trust.” 

I envisioned someone who was honest and had integrity, someone who would take their duties seriously and would tell the board the truth regardless of the implications. That turned out to be precisely what the chair did not want. 

He wanted someone who would vote with us regardless of their legal opinion. He didn’t actually want trustworthy. He wanted blind unconditional loyalty. (That business, thank goodness, never ended up launching.) 

But that seems to be what CEOs now want, which undermines the entire point of having an independent board. Other than deciding whether to accept an acquisition offer, the most important decision of any tech board is the hiring — and firing — of the CEO. 

What does it say when a board makes that decision for what it seems to be a legitimate business reason — and then reverses itself within a couple of days? 

In the case of Automattic, it is not a good look. The board said absolutely nothing about why it forced the CEO out, which made its reversal over the weekend even more perplexing. 

When Automattic emailed reporters on Thursday to announce that the CEO had been ousted, the messages were cryptic: “Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark’s leadership and in the team’s ability to execute against the company’s priorities.”

The next we heard was an equally cryptic message sent Saturday afternoon: “Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board, and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well.”

Huh? We then asked for clarification of what happened and why. At 2:26 AM Eastern on Sunday, the media team emailed: “Matt and Automattic’s leadership team have great respect for everyone involved. While we can’t comment on specific individuals, we’re thankful for their contributions to Automattic and its mission, and we remain excited about what’s ahead with Matt at the helm. Matt was away for only 33 hours and 20 minutes — we’re now back to work.”

My proposal: A board’s decision to hire or terminate a CEO should be defended with public specifics. And so should a hiring decision. Or, in this case, a reversal of a mandatory leave of absence decision. 

If the board is going to take the extreme step of relieving the CEO, it should be required to say why. In some situations, it may need to be vague (as in “personnel situation involving a substantiated sexual assault”), but the board needs to give some kind of reason. That should happen so at the very least, a reversal is also explained. 

Further reading:

• Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg is out: Does this mean long-term viability, or liability, for WordPress customers?
• Matt Mullenweg: WordPress developer hours cutback may or may not slow innovation
• WordPress.org statement threatens possible shutdown for all of 2025
• About that brawl between the WordPress co-founder and WP Engine…
• One-twelfth of Automattic staff leave over WordPress-WP Engine spat
• Things get nasty in lawsuit between WordPress.org and WP Engine

Five alleged leaders of the Black Axe cybercrime syndicate, known for its involvement in global-scale cyber-enabled financial fraud, have been extradited to the United States to face wire fraud and money laundering charges. [...]

Microsoft has confirmed that copy and paste may silently fail for some Excel users after installing the September 2026 KB5002914 security update. [...]

Cisco warned customers to patch a critical Secure Email Gateway zero-day security flaw that threat actors have been exploiting in attacks. [...]

A critical vulnerability in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise could let a low-privilege website user gain root access on a shared-hosting server, cPanel warned in an advisory published on September 14. On such servers, many customers' sites run on a single machine, and an attacker with one of those hosting accounts could exploit the flaw to access or alter other sites and the server itself,Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Cisco has warned that a new critical vulnerability impacting AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of insufficient validation in the email parsing logic that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attackerRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A Chinese threat actor has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign that exploits recently patched security flaws in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows to deliver a malicious JavaScript backdoor called GRIMWEDGE. Volexity, which is tracking the threat cluster under the moniker UTA0560, said the activity targeted multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on September 1, 2026. "The Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft on Monday added itself to a growing list of AI vendors pledging to try to control the behavior of its AI models.

“AI should not exceed human control. Models should remain subordinate to humanity, subject to meaningful human oversight and control,” the company wrote in the draft version of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, released Monday with an invitation to the public to provide feedback. 

“Humanist AI develops systems with clear purposes, evaluated against real-world impact, and rejects the race to produce an all-purpose superintelligence that could evade these safeguards,” Microsoft wrote. “We are building something fundamentally useful and safe even if that means compromising on ultimate generality, autonomy, or capability.”

Microsoft’s comments are roughly in agreement with recent posts by various major AI vendors, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI, which were endorsed by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceXAI and Tesla, but nowhere in its 37 page document is there any description of concrete action. However, to be fair, almost none of the other major AI players have been specific about how they would control future AI models either.

Acknowledges issues

A key problem with many vendor attempts to impose AI limits is that all of these companies have thus far been unable to stop AI agents from doing almost anything, given the agents’ ability and willingness to sidestep or ignore guardrails. 

Microsoft has described its worries about the technology in the past, both when it started to curtail AI efforts among its own employees and when it announced the formation of the team that created the Code of Conduct. 

Its current post acknowledged some of the difficulties involved in pushing AI development while limiting its abilities. 

“Both under- and over-caution represent failure modes with different types of consequences,” the company said. “Under-caution can clearly result in more direct harm, but over-caution may occur more often and therefore may need more frequent correction. This is where proportionality to the potential for harm and safety context are particularly important. Responses and actions should take into account the estimated severity and likelihood of potential harms and adjust responses and actions accordingly.”

It noted, however, that the term “harm” is “broad and often context-dependent, and there are nuanced gradations in potential severity and likelihood. Microsoft AI (MAI) Model responses should be tailored to that context and to a wide range of harms.”

Laudable goal, but lacks detail

Analysts and consultants generally agreed that Microsoft’s stated goal is laudable, but the lack of specifics and verification mechanisms makes it difficult to take the post seriously.

Thomas Randall, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, also said he spotted some apparent contradictions within the document. 

“[It] says MAI models will not assist in manufacturing or modifying weapons. Yet Microsoft offers OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 through Secret and Top Secret government clouds for defense and national security workloads,” Randall said, though he acknowledged that this is not technically a breach of the Code because GPT-5.2 is not an MAI model. “The most meaningful parts of the Code of Conduct may exclude other parts of Microsoft’s actual AI business operations. Tensions like these appear in other forms throughout the Code.”

But he added that Microsoft’s position is bolstered by its earlier Frontier Governance Framework that “provides pre- and post-training evaluations, six-month reassessments, third-party testing, phased releases and a commitment to pause development or deployment where high risks cannot be mitigated.” However, he noted, “it is still Microsoft that defines the thresholds, selects the evaluators, determines whether residual risk is acceptable and gives its own executives the final deployment decision.”

Randall said he would like to see Microsoft, as well as other major AI vendors, deliver more verifiable data points, such as those from independent evaluators given continuous access and freedom to publish findings about the vendor’s actions. He also would like to see independent board-level safety oversight with authority to block releases, protected whistleblowing, accessible monitoring, audit logs, kill switches, and mandatory reassessment after model changes.

However, Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, pointed out that Microsoft was candid about the many elements that are not yet in place.

“The current models are not yet trained on the Code, the evaluation framework is still being developed, and Microsoft explicitly says written objectives alone cannot ensure alignment or guarantee present-day behavior,” Greis said. “That distinction matters. Publishing a constitution for AI is useful. Proving that the system actually follows the constitution, especially when models become increasingly agentic, is the hard part.”

And consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, said Microsoft deserved a little bit of credit for at least saying that model capabilities should be limited.

“Microsoft explicitly says it will compromise on generality, autonomy, and capability to keep systems safe and under human control, and that it rejects the race to build an all-purpose superintelligence. Coming from a company of Microsoft’s size and ambition, that’s a notable thing to put in writing,” he said. “For years, the assumption was that the frontier labs would chase maximum capability and treat safety as a constraint to be managed. A document that says the opposite, that says usefulness and control come before ultimate capability, is worth paying attention to, regardless of what follows it.”

He added: “The real test comes next, and it’s verification: measurable standards, independent assurance, and a way for outsiders to check the commitments against what’s actually shipping. That’s the natural progression and it’s the part the whole industry still has to build.”

Not doing the hard part

But others argued that Microsoft is merely doing the easy part, the marketing part, and is deliberately not committing to doing the hard part.

“Promising to give up capabilities is easy when those capabilities don’t yet exist,” said Noah Kenney, principal consultant at Digital 520. “The real test will come when Microsoft has a model ready to ship that would close a competitive gap and decides to hold it back.”

Until then, he said, the promise of responsible AI costs Microsoft nothing.

“Microsoft’s code of conduct reads like a marketing document written to reassure customers, regulators, and its own employees,” Kenney noted. “The problem is that no one knows how to make those promises specific, which leaves Microsoft asking for trust before they can explain what that trust should be based on.”

Tom Findling, CEO of Conifers.ai, added that his concern with the Microsoft document is that it doesn’t answer the obvious question of how these models can possibly be controlled. 

“The document says the model should never resist being shut down, should stay within its scope, and shouldn’t hide what it’s doing. Those are all the right goals,” he said. “But the harder question is what happens when a highly capable agent doesn’t behave the way you expect. What actually stops it? As these systems get more autonomous, the safety boundary can’t just be that the model was trained not to do something. You need controls outside the model that limit what it can access, what it can do, and how far it can go.”

Cybersecurity learned this lesson a long time ago, he pointed out. “You don’t secure a system by assuming it will behave correctly,” he said. “You assume something will eventually fail, get compromised, or act in an unexpected way, and you design the controls around that. AI needs the same mindset.”

Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research, contrasted Microsoft’s promise with Anthropic’s commitment, and found Microsoft lacking.

“Microsoft’s document is shy on mechanism,” he said. “Compare the two on specifics. [Anthropic CEO] Amodei’s proposal names a third party, METR, and describes what access actually means: office badges, company laptops, employee-level visibility, and publishing rights Anthropic doesn’t get to edit. You can check whether that happened.”

On the other hand, he noted, “Microsoft’s document says models should ‘fail tasks rather than violate the code’s rules,’ which is a real design principle. Credit where it’s due, but there’s no named auditor, no verification method, and no stated consequence for a violation. Thirty-seven pages and it still won’t commit to a single verifiable check.”

Dickson stressed that as long as agents routinely break their own rules, these vague promises won’t help. 

“Every frontier lab still gets jailbroken, still has agents that go off-script, still hasn’t closed the gap between what a model is instructed to do and what it can be induced to do,” Dickson said. “A values statement that skips the verification question isn’t a constraint, it’s a hope wearing a policy document’s clothes.”