Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

CISA’s new Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 26-04 marks one of the most important changes to federal vulnerability management in years. Rather than requiring agencies to patch every critical vulnerability on the same timetable, the directive prioritizes remediation based on risk, with patch deadlines ranging from three days for the highest-risk vulnerabilities to deferral for those posing minimal risk. It’s a welcome evolution, but it brings us to the starting blocks, not the finish line. Security teams have long known that severity alone doesn’t determine risk. A CVSS score says little about whether a vulnerability is reachable from the Internet, is…

BNY, one of the world’s largest custodian banks, is taking a major step toward blockchain-based financial infrastructure by moving fund ownership records onchain.The New York-based institution will launch a blockchain-based version of its transfer agency business, which manages fund ownership records and investor transactions, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.“We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records on-chain,” Carolyn Weinberg, BNY’s chief product and innovation officer, reportedly said.The move follows BNY’s broader digital asset expansion, including its European regulatory progress under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework,…

Droughts are complex phenomena, driven by a mix of natural and human causes.The Met Office expects the UK to experience drier summers on average in future as the world warms, though there has been no clear trend so far.But rising temperatures can play a more direct role by drawing extra moisture from the soil via evaporation.”A warmer atmosphere is thirstier for moisture and this can mean water in the soil, rivers and reservoirs are depleted more effectively, leading to more rapidly onsetting droughts, heatwaves and wildfires,” said Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading.But there are…

Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes against oil refineries, military bases, and logistical targets has brought the war home to Russians. The past week has seen at least a dozen attacks on the warehouses of Wildberries, an e-commerce retailer often described as the Russian Amazon. The opening salvo on the company’s flagship logistics facility near Moscow generated a smoke plume so enormous that it could be seen from space, blackening the skies over much of the metropolitan region. Other strikes set fire to Wildberries logistics hubs in St. Petersburg, Tver, and Simferopol in occupied Crimea. The company’s warehouses in Krasnodar, Tambov,…

France has ordered controversial Russian journalist Xenia Fedorova to leave the country, the interior ministry said Wednesday, after accusations that she was churning out Kremlin propaganda on French television and radio. Disinformation experts have raised the alarm about the influence of the former journalist for Russia’s state-run channel RT, as France heads for a presidential election next year. French newspaper Libération cited the expulsion order as accusing her of acting “as a conduit for disinformation campaigns orchestrated by the Russian authorities” with the aim of “destabilising public order” in France. Read moreFrom soft power to digital firepower: France steps up…

It feels like the UK has a prime minister again. Not the Maybot paralysed with indecision. Not the clown-like Boris Johnson who crumbled under the weight of his own narcissism. Not the ridiculous Liz Truss. Not the steamrollered Rishi Sunak for whom everything was impossible. Not the automaton-like Keir Starmer who was never entirely sure what he wanted to do.But a prime minister who is emotionally intelligent. Who understands the country and can connect with it. Who is prepared to expend political capital to get the things done that other politicians were too weak to go near. You can almost…

DoorDash is launching a new drone delivery program called DoorDash Air. The largest food delivery app in the US said that it has approval from the Federal Aviation Administration that clears the way for drone delivery in the near future.DoorDash said it has received a Part 135 air carrier certification from the FAA that enable it to delivery small packages via drone. Other companies to receive this designation include Alphabet’s Wing, Zipline, and Amazon.Previously, DoorDash worked with Alphabet’s drone delivery division Wing on a number of pilots in places like Dallas-Fort Worth, Virginia, and Australia. Now the company says it…

How did we get here? Freight logistics is quite a fragmented industry. From the production line all the way to consumers or customers, there are generally multiple parties in the mix to get goods from point A to point B. At a high level, transportation of goods does not seem overly complex. Maybe it’s a warehouse or the production facility; a truck shows up, loads the goods and transports them to the store. However, the reality is, complexity is quite high.  This includes inventory systems, brokers and their systems, bills of lading, payment systems, vehicle telematics and of course a…

Emirates, the Dubai-based flagship carrier, has launched Crypto.com Pay on its website and app, enabling eligible United Arab Emirates residents make flight bookings with cryptocurrencies, the airline said Tuesday.Mobile users are sent to the Crypto.com app to authorize payment from their wallet, while desktop customers scan a QR code at checkout, the companies said in an announcement. Emirates settles in UAE dirhams rather than holding crypto, with Crypto.com handling the conversion.The move “reflects the rapidly evolving preferences of a younger, digitally fluent generation who manage their money and plan their journeys primarily from their phones,” said Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ deputy…

On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing. The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The AI behemoth Anthropic, which developed Mythos, had given access to select organizations that make software used by regular people, companies and governments across the world. The goal was to find and fix the vulnerabilities before hackers and adversarial governments like China began using similar tools…