Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Ravie LakshmananSep 19, 2026Vulnerability / Identity Security SolarWinds has released security updates to address a high-severity flaw in Access Rights Manager (ARM) that, if successfully exploited, could lead to an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-28326, is rated 8.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. The issue affects all versions of Access Rights Manager 2026.2 and prior. “SolarWinds Access Rights Manager was reported to be affected by an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability,” SolarWinds said in an advisory released on September 17, 2026. “The issue stems from a hard-coded static key.” The company credited…

The Clarity Act would have cleared that up and also elevated the SEC’s sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to new authorities — most importantly full supervisory powers over the crypto commodity spot markets. Spot markets are where commodities trade directly, and since bitcoin and Ethereum’s ether were eventually determined to be commodities, it became clear the bulk of crypto trading happens in that space that’s absent a hands-on regulator (except in situations in which bad guys are manipulating the markets).This conflict is uniquely American, because the U.S.’ regulatory regime developed completely separate securities and derivatives agencies, unlike the…

Wildlife crimes are committed by a wide range of offenders, from local people who may stumble upon a salable animal to professional poachers and middlemen traffickers and all the way up to kingpins behind the trade that rule over international trafficking syndicates.The NGO Wildlife Crime Prevention Zambia investigated how and why people incarcerated for wildlife crimes in the country got involved in this black-market industry. They found that opportunity was the major driver.About one-third of the jailed respondents said or implied they would not be involved in poaching or wildlife trade when they were freed.Experts note that helping offenders…

Players wore black armbands during Everton’s home match against Ipswich Town on Saturday, as part of a tribute to three-year-old Noah Woods, whose body was found after he went missing in Suffolk this week.A photograph of the boy was shown on the big screen before the Premier League game in Liverpool and three minutes after kick-off both sets of supporters stood to applaud in memory of Noah.The toddler, who was non-verbal, partially deaf and had been undergoing an assessment for autism, became separated from a relative after visiting a playground in Brantham on Tuesday afternoon, Suffolk police said.About 1,300 members…

The Liberal Democrats’ leader, Sir Ed Davey, took aim at Nigel Farage and Elon Musk on the first day of his party’s annual conference, saying Lib Dems would not give up the fight to defeat “nasty populism” and Reform UK’s “£72m arsenal of hate and lies”.On stage at Brighton Centre, Davey called on the assembled delegates not to be deterred in the face of Reform’s hope “that the anger and the hatred and the lies will grind us down until eventually we just give up”.He also praised earlier speakers for showing “why we care and why we fight” and contrasted…

Top VPNs ComparedOther VPNs We’ve TestedSurfshark: I’ve used Surfshark personally for a few years, and I’d still be using it if Proton didn’t impress me so much. Surfshark is dead simple to use. It pops up and connects before swiftly getting out of my way so I can get on with my day. If you spring for a two-year plan, it’s cheap. You can score over two years for around $54 with the Starter plan.If you want to dig in deeper, you can. Surfshark is one of the most feature-rich VPNs I’ve used, sporting the basics like a double-hop connection…

OpenClaw is an open-source, MIT-licensed personal AI agent that you run on your own machines. Its Gateway connects models, tools, and chat channels such as Telegram, Slack, and Discord. The project has now shipped version 2026.9.5, announced on X. The release bundles 4,179 pull requests and 64 direct commits, with credits to 502 contributing accounts. The main change is Atomic Updates, which targets a long-running complaint: updates that break a working agent. Is it deployable? Yes, Version 2026.9.5 is the current latest tag on npm. It is self-hostable and needs Node 24.16+ or 26.1+. Why OpenClaw Updates Kept Breaking The…

Washington came surprisingly close this week to writing a dollar amount into one of its thorniest crypto ethics rule debates.Under the final Senate draft of the CLARITY Act, senior federal officials holding equity worth at least $15,000 in certain businesses that issue or sponsor digital assets would have had to sell that interest or place it into a qualified blind trust. Their spouses would have faced the same restriction, but their adult children wouldn’t.The bill failed to advance on Sept. 15, so none of this became law. But the language is revealing because CLARITY was primarily supposed to establish who…

Claims by current and former researchers that the tech will endanger humanity – with one suggesting there is a greater than 10% chance of it “killing all humans” – have raised alarm bells in recent weeks. Major AI companies have been racing to develop better systems, including creating what they call super intelligence – theoretical tech which is smarter than humans.AI titans Anthropic, OpenAI and Google – the tech companies behind Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively – have also disclosed instances of security breaches or incidents in which their chatbots were used for “malicious activity”.Anthropic head Dario Amodei recently called…

This article is the result of a collaboration with The Sunday Times. You can find their corresponding piece here.  Sign up here to receive Bellingcat’s biggest investigations by email as soon as they are published. Crime boss Christy Kinahan leads a $1.5 billion illicit network involved in drug trafficking, money laundering and arms smuggling from the cartel’s base in Dubai. Christy Kinahan, the Irish founder of the Kinahan Organised Crime Group who is being pursued by authorities around the world from his bolthole in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has had his residence permit cancelled. The visa was cancelled at…