The Register

Feds say gift card splurges tied suspect to multimillion-dollar ransomware crew

Thalha Jubair, one of the two UK teens arrested on Tuesday and accused of being members of the notorious Scattered Spider cybercrime gang, allegedly played a role in bilking more than 100 organizations out of at least $115 million in ransom payments. Cops nabbed him after following a number of clues, including gift cards purchased from a cryptocurrency wallet on the same server that also held wallets receiving extortion payments.…

Optus was unaware network changes caused a problem, and ignored some customer complaints

Australian telco Optus says its staff may not have followed established processes when a firewall upgrade they conducted resulted in customers not being able to call emergency services for 14 hours – a period during which it is thought three of the carrier’s customers died after trying to seek help, according to the company's CEO.…

Revenge on managers who slow things down is a drink best served with floating fungus

Who, Me?  The world of work can sometimes drive IT pros to drink, leaving them more likely to make the sort of mistakes that The Register celebrates each week in Who, Me? It’s our reader-contributed column in which you share stories of making a mess at work, and cleaning up afterwards to the best of your ability.…

The Register looks forward to learning more about a possible Dell hyperscale sovereign social SaaS platform

Dell CEO Michael Dell is part of the consortium that intends to acquire TikTok’s US operations, according to US president Donald Trump.…

‘Cyber-attack’ on ticketing outfit Collins and cable cuts at Dallas ground hundreds of flights

Technology problems hit the commercial aviation industry hard over the weekend, leading to hundreds of cancelled flights and myriad delays on both sides of the Atlantic.…

PLUS: India ponders tax breaks for datacenters; Samsung plans hiring spree; Taliban bans fiber internet; and more

Asia In Brief  Huawei last week revealed that China’s Zhejiang University used its Ascend 1000 accelerators to create a version of DeepSeek’s R1 model that improves on the original by producing fewer responses that China’s government would rather avoid.…

PLUS: Luxury brands under fire; FBI warns crims are spoofing it again; ICE buys phone cracking software

Infosec in brief  Online criminals prefer to deal in digital assets, but a side effect of a ransomware attack has seen a French museum robbed of $705,000 in physical gold nuggets.…

From pain-free shutdowns to crap-free search, these tweaks will improve your experience

hands on  Windows 11 has a number of puzzling or annoying UI changes from Windows 10 that power users might wish to change. But you can't make these tweaks from the Settings menu or even the legacy Control Panel. To make these changes, you’ll need to edit the Registry.…

And also force them to improve resilience

SaaS vendors are increasing prices faster than both inflation and the typical growth rate of corporate IT budgets, but Gartner VP analyst Jo Liversidge thinks that canny buyers can reduce their bills by anticipating price hikes and planning to negotiate hard.…

Arrangement follows big tech tie-ins claiming to offer £31B investment

The UK has struck a defense deal with US spy-tech biz Palantir, which the government says will unlock £1.5 billion ($2 billion) of investment in Britain.…

With new electricity sources for AI datacenters, the company will have some juice left over

AI model training and serving require vast quantities of power, but not necessarily all at once. With the first of several gigawatt-scale datacenters due to come online next year, Meta is looking at ways to offload excess energy capacity by selling it on the wholesale market.…

Could this bot-prevention technique now be obsolete?

ChatGPT can be tricked via cleverly worded prompts to violate its own policies and solve CAPTCHA puzzles, potentially making this human-proving security mechanism obsolete, researchers say.…

Training costs detailed in R1 training report don't include 2.79 million GPU hours that laid its foundation

Chinese AI darling DeepSeek's now infamous R1 research report was published in the Journal Nature this week, alongside new information on the compute resources required to train the model. Unfortunately, some people got the wrong idea about just how expensive it was to create.…

Unnamed org compromised with two malware sets

An unknown attacker has abused a couple of flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) and deployed two sets of malware against an unnamed organization, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.…

Latest marketing blitz for a solution seeking a problem... and a killer app

Comment  Microsoft suspects that a "transformative shift" is being driven in personal and enterprise computing by its Copilot+ PCs and an expanding Windows on Arm ecosystem.…

It's also spinning twice as fast than thought, making a tricky rendezvous even trickier

Japan's Hayabusa2 probe faces a tougher mission after new measurements revealed its target asteroid is nearly three times smaller and spinning about twice as fast as originally estimated.…

Outside experts say the vulnerability has probably already been exploited

Budding ransomware crooks have another shot at exploiting Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT product now that a new 10/10 severity vulnerability needs patching.…

Judge rules there’s no quick fix for 1,700+ axed grants, leaving labs scrambling for cash while the lawsuit plays out

A US court has cleared the way for the National Science Foundation to press ahead with the cancellation of more than 1,700 research grants worth upwards of $1 billion. …

Until Microsoft lobbed it into a virtual volcano

A security researcher claims to have found a flaw that could have handed him the keys to almost every Entra ID tenant worldwide.…

Leo XIV voices concerns about AI taking jobs – and not just his own

Pope Leo XIV has crucified the idea of creating an AI version which would've allowed Catholics around the world to have a virtual audience with him – without the need for a trip to Vatican City.…