The Register

Washington content to be represented by actual empty chairs

RSAC 2026  Back in the day (circa 2023) when cybercrime group Scattered Spider and its help-desk voice-phishing calls were a relatively new threat, the feds considered pulling the government's top cyber-threat hunters and their private-sector counterparts into one room to share information, in real time, about this loosely knit extortion ring that was terrorizing enterprises.…

Voice phishing is second most common initial access method across all IR probes, and top in cloud break-ins

RSAC 2026  Voice phishing surged last year to become the second most common method used by cybercriminals to gain initial access to their victims' IT estate – and the No. 1 tactic used when breaking into cloud environments.…

Zenity CTO demos 0-click AI agent exploits on stage at RSAC

RSAC 2026  There's a very simple reason why just about every enterprise AI agent is vulnerable to zero-click attacks, according to Michael Bargury, CTO of AI security company Zenity.…

US analytics firm handed access to sensitive intel, raising yet more questions about vendor lock-in

US data miner Palantir has quietly landed inside the UK's financial watchdog, plugging into a trove of sensitive data as Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency.…

Customers are 'excited' says one solution provider

Snowflake is putting cash and kinetic energy behind the idea that AI works best in its platform.…

Here's where you ought to spend your security billable hours budget this year

Strengthen your MFA policies, double-down on anti-phishing training, and for Jobs' sake, patch all your vulns right away. The past year of intelligence collected by Cisco's Talos threat hunters suggests that attackers are moving faster to exploit vulns, and fooling more staff than ever into giving up their credentials. …

More cores, higher clocks, lower prices

Review  It's a tough time to be a PC enthusiast. Between the memory crunch and the AI boom driving up prices on storage, DDR5, and GPUs, it's gotten prohibitively expensive to build a PC.…

Digital twins of leaders may be plausible as novelty acts, but not really welcome

Imagine that your boss is too busy to show up at that meeting you called so she sends a bot of herself instead. With a digital twin, even your company's CEO - the one who spends all his time on the corporate jet - could make an appearance at your powwow about the break room coffee machine. But would you want them there?…

10GW server farm, 10GW of new generation, and $4.2bn grid upgrade. And someone else is paying for the uranium cleanup

Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it.…

Trio-Tech International initially said hack wasn't 'material,' but then stolen data was published

Trio-Tech International initially shrugged off a ransomware attack at a Singapore subsidiary as immaterial, only to reverse course days later after discovering stolen data had been disclosed.…

Expendable military drones are so 2025

The US Army just took receipt of what may be the coolest unmanned drone ever flown by the military: A full-sized Black Hawk helicopter. …

In space, no one can hear you being petty

SpaceX has fired back at Amazon with a letter to the US telecoms regulator, after Amazon objected to its plans for orbiting datacenters.…

Infosec pros descend on San Francisco

kettle  When El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons joins infosec industry colleagues in San Francisco for RSAC 2026 this week, she's expecting agentic AI to be on everyone's lips - at least those who aren't busy gossiping about the lack of presence from any representatives of the US federal government.…

The era of reliability begins... right after this out-of-band patch

Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to resolve bugs introduced by a Windows patch just days after promising improved reliability.…

Draft Request for Proposals says you can move shuttle orbiter but you cannot break it

NASA has issued a draft Request for Proposals to move a flown space vehicle, a step some lawmakers see as progress toward relocating Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian Museum in Virginia to Houston, Texas.…

The operating system of the universe isn’t going to debug itself

feature  CERN is nothing like today's agentic AI jockeys, who mostly rely on pre-set weights and generic TPUs and GPUs to generate their slop. CERN burns custom nanosecond-speed AI into the silicon itself just to eliminate excess data.…

Ukraine's battlefield lessons show quantity and affordability now trump exquisite hardware

NATO is unprepared to deal with attacks by cheap, mass-produced drones and urgently needs layered, affordable air defense systems to counter the threat, taking a cue from the experience gained by Ukrainian forces over the past four years.…

Like his promise to get a million robocabs on the road, this doesn't add up

Elon Musk has put Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI in harness to build a chip fabrication outfit called "Terafab" capable of producing a terawatt's worth of computing power each year, then send most of it into space.…

Your instinctive revulsion is spot on. Follow your nose

Opinion  Science is at its best when it makes manifest radical ideas that change our worldview. This is the flag all sane people salute, under which we march to war. Yet in our hearts, we know that the very tastiest science is that which confirms our prejudices and validates what we've known all along. Cornell University has just served up a plate of the finest yet. Tuck in.…

National Audit Office warns government has little idea of how to respond in the event of a major solar storm

The UK's National Audit Office (NAO) has warned the country is underprepared for a severe space weather event.…