Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Enterprise defenses are tuned to catch the attacks that make noise. This year’s data shows attackers winning by making none. According to Picus Labs’ new Blue Report 2026, which measured more than 338 million real attack simulations across actual client production environments in the first half of 2026, defenses are having one of their strongest years yet. Average prevention effectiveness climbed from 62% to 69%, matching its 2024 peak, and logging reached a four-year high of 58%. The good news: The recovery is real. The bad news: It’s taking place almost exclusively at the perimeter. The report’s sharper finding is…

Unlike denials (as received by Wise and Bunq) a return doesn’t come with a detailed explanation. The company didn’t publicly disclose the development when it happened, as it had with the submission of its application. And Zerohash hadn’t voluntarily withdrawn the filing, as was its option.A spokesperson for the OCC didn’t immediately respond to questions about the application, and spokespeople for Morgan Stanley declined to comment.Just a month before returning Zerohash’s effort, the regulator issued an explanation for how it makes such decisions, including its new approach to returning applications without registering a decision. The OCC will return a filing,…

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) can reduce movement problems caused by Parkinson’s disease, and new research is providing a clearer picture of why the treatment works. Scientists have found that its benefits appear to depend on stimulating a specific brain network that communicates primarily through a relatively fast beta rhythm (20 to 35 Hz). The findings come from an interdisciplinary group of neuroscientists and clinicians at the University Hospitals of Cologne and Düsseldorf, Harvard Medical School and Charité Berlin. Published in the journal Brain, the study, ‘The Deep Brain Stimulation Response Network in Parkinson’s Disease Operates in the High Beta Band’,…

Transnational repression has moved from the margins of human rights reporting to the center of Western security debates. According to new data released by Freedom House, 54 governments, more than a quarter of the world’s states, reached across borders to silence exiles and diaspora communities from 2014 to 2025, committing at least 1,375 direct, physical incidents in more than 100 host countries. Western democracies are finally taking the threat seriously. Governments are adopting formal definitions, have set up interagency working groups, and are opening reporting and support channels for victims. In 2025, the G-7 leaders issued a joint statement on…

President Trump’s Air Force One subterfuge was a stunning episode of official deception.But it pales in comparison to the secrecy surrounding President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose activity is shrouded in so much mystery that journalists have tried to track it by assessing the wilting of his office plants.That is the method some reporters resorted to this year as they worked to ascertain whether the Russian leader’s televised meetings took place when the Kremlin said they did. The apparent reversal of the leaf decay seen in Mr. Putin’s plants suggested that the meetings actually took place in a different…

About 100 family, friends and colleagues of Ann Widdecombe have attended a funeral service for the former Conservative minister, who was killed in her home in Devon last month.Politicians and broadcasters were among the mourners at Buckfast Abbey in Buckfastleigh, a Catholic abbey in Devon where Widdecombe regularly worshipped and which she described as her “safe haven”.A 90-minute requiem mass – where prayers are offered for the soul of the dead – was held for the former MP and Reform UK spokesperson.Before the service, police officers and sniffer dogs could be seen searching the grounds.Widdecombe died on 8 July, aged…

White House officials are almost certain to revise the Trump administration’s new artificial intelligence guidelines and expand its oversight of AI models, according to people familiar with the matter.The White House announced this month that it had developed an AI framework, where the most powerful models created by US labs would be tested for safety by the federal government before they could be released publicly. The administration has not made the framework public, and reportedly has no plans to do so.The AI framework currently deals only with so-called closed models developed by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI. But the…

Attempts to exploit a critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-71362) in Adobe’s Commerce and Magento e-commerce platforms have been detected, potentially allowing attackers to hijack customer accounts. The flaw is described as an incorrect authorization vulnerability that could be leveraged to “gain elevated access to sensitive resources” without authentication and is one of the seven issues that Adobe addressed in a security update yesterday. Although the software vendor states in the advisory that it is not aware of exploits in the wild for any of the fixed flaws, eCommerce security company Sansec says that its Shield web application firewall (WAF) is already blocking…

Just a day after real-time flight tracking website FlightAware filed a lawsuit against prediction markets platform Kalshi over use of its name and data, the flight data company gave notice of voluntary dismissal of the case. In a Tuesday filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, attorneys for FlightAware said that they had voluntarily dismissed the case against Kalshi. The flight tracking company had filed the lawsuit a day earlier, claiming that Kalshi had used its “data and name to run gambling markets on flight cancellations.”While the immediate turnaround could suggest a closed-door settlement, neither…

Women are about twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s disease as men. But women who take estrogen as hormone therapy after menopause have fewer telltale neurological signs of Alzheimer’s disease after death than women who don’t, scientists report August 12 in Neurology. Previous studies of menopausal hormone therapy have produced conflicting results. Some have suggested that estrogen could protect against dementia, while others show no benefit or even potential harm, especially when hormone therapy begins after age 65. A caveat is that many these studies have relied on measures of cognitive decline or blood tests, which are more ambiguous than…