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A 21-year-old using the alias “Snoopy” was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in hacking DraftKings accounts in the November 2022 cyberattack.
In December 2025, the man, Nathan Austad of Minnesota, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, admitting that he and co-conspirators compromised 60,000 DraftKings user accounts.
During the attack, the hackers added payment methods under their control to 1,600 accounts and stole $600,000.
DraftKings is a fantasy sports and sports betting platform where users can build teams of real-world athletes and compete for cash prizes based on their performance in actual sporting events.
In November 2022, DraftKings disclosed that hackers accessed customer accounts through credential stuffing attacks that exploited weak passwords or reused login credentials.
At the time, DraftKings reported that less than $300,000 had been stolen from affected customers. A month later, the company disclosed that 67,995 customer accounts had been compromised in the attack.
In May 2023, U.S. authorities charged Joseph Garrison for his role in the scheme, accusing him and his co-conspirators of selling access to hacked DraftKings accounts through online marketplaces such as the “Goat Shop.”
In January 2024, prosecutors charged additional suspects for the cyberattack, including Kamerin Stokes (“TheMFNPlug”) and Nathan Austad (“Snoopy”).
Austad reportedly operated his own shop where he sold access to stolen accounts and also used other platforms for the same purpose.
“AUSTAD directly controlled and profited from his own shop, which was named after the character Snoopy from the Peanuts comic strip,” the U.S. Department of Justice says.

The DoJ’s press release does not disclose the amount the hackers earned from selling access to the compromised accounts, but notes that Austad’s cryptocurrency accounts received approximately $465,000 in assets.
The U.S. DoJ also mentions direct messages that Austad sent to his co-conspirators, in which he openly admitted to perpetrating fraudulent activity and warned others to prepare.
Joseph Garrison received an 18-month imprisonment sentence in January 2024, while Kamerin Stokes received a 30-month sentence in April 2026.
In addition to the prison sentence, Austad received three years of supervised release and was ordered to pay $463,684 in forfeiture and $1,327,061 in restitution.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
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One order directs federal agencies to work with private companies and universities to deliver a quantum computer capable of supporting scientific research by 2028. The Department of Energy has been tasked with identifying the technical benchmarks that will define the system.
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Data governance is unglamorous work. It is also the reason most AI strategies stall before they scale.
Spending on models, platforms and use cases keeps growing. But the disciplines that make those investments effective – data quality, ownership and governance – often receive far less attention.
Part of the challenge is that data governance is neither “fun” nor “sexy.” It lacks the excitement of new technologies and the appeal of quick wins, so it is consistently deprioritized.
Yet as organizations scale their AI ambitions, governance is increasingly the factor that determines whether those efforts succeed or stall.
Head of Engineering Growth at Optima Partners.
The imbalance in attention is now starting to show. While AI adoption continues to grow, many organizations still struggle to move beyond pilot stages into enterprise-scale deployment. The gap between ambition and execution is widening, and weak data governance is often at the center of it.
The issue is not awareness. Most business leaders recognize that governance matters. The challenge is that governance demands structural decisions, cultural alignment and sustained discipline – the hard parts of the job. And, unlike a new platform or tool, its value often only becomes fully apparent when it is missing.
Weak governance rarely fails loudly at first. The problems accumulate.
Early AI initiatives often prioritize delivery, with dashboards, models and applications taking precedence over governance. Silos form, data definitions diverge and access controls become inconsistent. A common pattern: two teams – one in marketing, one in data science – train separate models against different definitions of the same metric.
Both definitions look correct in isolation. In production, the predictions conflict, neither team can explain why, and the investigation takes weeks longer than building either model did. Quality issues are patched rather than fixed, and new projects begin to rely on shaky assumptions.
As complexity grows over time, confidence in the data declines.
Data dictionaries and permission frameworks are not administrative overhead – they are what makes scalable AI possible. Building them early demands investment before visible returns but postponing that effort is far costlier.
Left unchecked, governance gaps eventually land hard, resulting in delayed projects, compliance failures and decisions made on unreliable data. At that point, organizations are forced into reactive fixes – or even total rebuilds – that are far more expensive and disruptive than addressing governance from the start.
Regulators are placing increasing importance on accountability in how data is used. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has made it clear that organizations must be able to demonstrate control over data use, particularly as AI systems become more prevalent. Scotland’s new National AI Strategy also highlights that organizations must follow best practice in responsible AI governance aligned with OECD principles.
This has reinforced the perception that governance is primarily a compliance exercise – something important but not necessarily prioritized at the prototype stage. Effective governance is far more than that: it shapes how data flows through an organization, how decisions are made and how confidently teams can act. It defines accountability and sets the standards needed to maintain consistency at scale.
In that sense, governance is a design choice, and businesses need to make the right one to effectively scale their innovation ambitions.
Governance is not one-size-fits-all – nor it is purely a technical problem to be addressed through tools or platforms alone. In fact, the harder initial challenge is often a people and accountability one. Before designing a governance model, organizations need to define the who as much as the how. Who owns the data? Who is responsible for its quality and who decides how it should be used?
In many organizations, these responsibilities are unclear. Management is shared, and ownership is (often wrongly) assumed rather than defined. But it is only once those questions have been answered – in practice as well as on paper – that businesses can turn their attention to developing a governance model that fits their structure.
Some take a centralized approach to this, with control sitting in a single function. This can provide consistency and clarity, but the model may struggle to scale across complex organizations with diverse needs.
Others adopt a federated model, combining central standards with local ownership. This can be more flexible and scalable, but only if the business is committed to those shared standards and has defined clear roles and accountability. Without them, federated models risk furthering data fragmentation.
The key is alignment. Governance models should match how teams actually use data and AI, not how they’re assumed to operate.
A practical test: ask three different teams how they define a key business metric – revenue, active users, or customer churn. If the answers differ, the governance problem already exists. The operating model question is not how to prevent that divergence in future; it is who has the authority to resolve it now.
Governance is rarely the most visible part of an AI strategy. It’s detailed, structural work that often goes overlooked, but that is precisely why it matters.
For business leaders, the challenge is to move beyond acknowledging its importance and begin making early, deliberate decisions about how it is implemented. That means defining data ownership, aligning operating models and investing in the capabilities that support long-term success.
Technology choices are reversible. Data ownership decisions compound. The governance model you design – or neglect – in the next twelve months will shape what your AI strategy can actually deliver in three years.
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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Barron’s: Walmart is signing a long-term contract to buy nuclear power for the first time ever, a promising sign that the industry’s future is supported by more than just the AI data center boom. The retail giant agreed on Tuesday to buy power from a nuclear plant in Illinois owned by Constellation Energy for its operations in the area, including its stores and a high-tech warehouse in Illinois that stores and sorts perishable food.
Walmart will buy 176 megawatts of power from the plant over a 15-year period, or enough power to serve around 150,000 homes. The Walmart deal will allow Constellation to expand the capacity of the Illinois plant by 30 megawatts, a process known as an uprate, which can involve replacing older equipment and improving efficiency. Walmart, which has pledged to eliminate net carbon emissions from its U.S. operations by 2040, will also receive the environmental attributes associated with the nuclear energy, which generates electricity without carbon emissions. Further reading: Trump Admin Announces $17.5 Billion In Loans For 10 New Large Nuclear Reactors
The iPhone 18 Pro is still a few months away, however a new leak suggests one of its biggest upgrades may already be taking shape.
According to respected Weibo leaker Setsuna Digital, Apple’s 2026 flagship is expected to receive a major camera upgrade.
Supply chain information reportedly points to noticeable hardware changes inside the phone. In addition, the leak backs up several earlier rumours. These suggest Apple is preparing a more substantial camera overhaul for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that can could make the best camera phones around.
The biggest clue is the phone’s thickness. Recent dummy models have already suggested that Apple’s next Pro iPhones could be around 2mm thicker than their predecessors. Setsuna Digital now claims the camera system is the main reason why.
Exactly what’s changing remains unclear. Yet the leading theory is the addition of a variable aperture system. If accurate, it would give photographers greater control over depth of field and light intake. This change would bring the iPhone camera experience closer to dedicated cameras. It’s a feature that’s appeared on a handful of Android phones over the years, but Apple has yet to implement it on an iPhone.
There are also suggestions that Apple could pair the new hardware with an upgraded 48-megapixel sensor. However, it’s not yet known whether the company plans to increase the size of the current 1/1.28-inch main sensor.
The thicker chassis may bring benefits beyond photography too. Reports indicate Apple could use the additional space for a slightly larger battery. This could potentially improve endurance alongside the company’s expected 2nm A20 chipset. A more efficient processor combined with extra battery capacity would likely translate into longer battery life. This applies even if the design becomes marginally bulkier.
At this stage, none of the details have been officially confirmed. Apple is unlikely to discuss the iPhone 18 lineup for many months. However, the latest supply chain claims line up with previous reports. These reports point to a larger camera module and a thicker overall design.
If the leaks prove accurate, the iPhone 18 Pro could deliver one of the most meaningful camera upgrades Apple has made in years. Unlike many internal improvements, this is one that users may be able to spot the moment they pick up the phone.
OpenAI and Broadcom have unveiled Jalapeno, OpenAI’s first custom AI chip, designed primarily to handle inference for ChatGPT and other services. It’s a major step in OpenAI’s plan to “build the full stack behind its models and products,” says OpenAI. “By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access.” CNBC reports: The chip with Broadcom is an ASIC, which industry experts say is less flexible than Nvidia’s GPU, but is also less expensive and can be designed for specific AI tasks. OpenAI said that it designed the chip in nine months, and that it also crafted large parts of the computer system where it will be used.
The companies are calling the chip an “Intelligence Processor” and describe it as the first “AI accelerator” in a platform they’re building “to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people.” […] A physical sample of the new chip will be delivered to OpenAI on Wednesday. The companies said they’re aiming for initial deployment of the Jalapeno chips by the end of 2026, “expanding in the years ahead.”
Slate Auto says its stripped-down electric pickup will start at $24,950 before fees, with the base model’s estimated range increased from 150 to about 205 miles. The company has started taking preorders on Wednesday. “The aggressive pricing — half the average cost of a new car in the United States — puts Slate in position to capture a share of the lowest end of the new car market, which has few gas and fewer electric options these days,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: The price reveal comes more than a year after Slate Auto emerged from stealth. Since then, the company has been steadily detailing the extremely basic, transforming EV, which starts as a two-seater pickup truck, but can be modified into a five-seater SUV. The SUV version will start at $29,950, Slate said Wednesday. Slate has said the conversion can be done by professionals or by owners themselves. On Wednesday, it finally showed off some of the first of its “Slate University” how-to videos, which guide people through the steps for doing everything from the SUV conversion to adding headlight covers.
Everything else about the truck is bare, though it’s customizable. It has hand-crank windows, lacks an infotainment system, and all orders start with the same gray composite material, with no paint options, as Slate plans to let buyers order customizable wraps for the vehicle. That likely helps cut out a major cost center, as factory paint shops can run in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The company did not offer more details about the buying process. Slate has said it “won’t have traditional dealerships,” and plans to sell directly to customers, similar to other EV companies like Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid Motors.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected complex organic carbon in ancient Martian mudstones. The measurements were taken by the rover’s Sherloc instrument and the organic carbon that was identified was from the Bright Angel outcrop, “a dried-up river that carried water into the planet’s Jezero crater billions of years ago,” notes The Guardian. From the report: The form of carbon detected, known as macromolecular carbon or MMC, can originate from living organisms. Geological processes can also produce the material, meaning its detection does not amount to proof of past Martian life. Dr Ashley Murphy at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona said MMC can be found in different settings and types of rocks. “It may originate from biological sources such as fossilized organic matter found in microbial mats and coal,” she said, but could also form in reactions between rocks and water or arrive on impacting meteorites.
The mudstone rocks from the Bright Angel outcrop caused a stir in 2024 when the Perseverance rover discovered intriguing surface spots and nodules that resemble features produced by fossilized microbes on Earth. When the scientific details were published last year, Sean Duffy, the former acting head of Nasa, said: “This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars.” […] The discovery means Nasa rovers have now found organic-bearing mudstones more than 2,000 miles apart on Mars. The others were reported by the Curiosity rover which is exploring the planet’s Gale crater. It “indicates that the habitability of Mars, and the availability of organics, may have been widespread across the planet billions of years ago,” the authors write in Science Advances.
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Two years ago, Netflix dramatically let me down. As a massive anime fan, I tuned into the first season of their live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender remake and was horrifically disappointed within minutes. In fact, the most positive critique you could give it is that it was better than the live-action movies, which are widely considered to be garbage.
Why? The action was all there, but the heart of Aang’s story wasn’t. Spectacular VFX tried to cover up the hollow, mundane narrative underneath. In fact, to quote a fantastic jaw-dropping writer called Jasmine Valentine: “There’s little room to learn, with life-changing realizations made in a ridiculously short amount of time. If a tale can’t be paid its due diligence in a certain remit, should we even bother at all?”
In 2026, my excitement for Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 is non-existent. I’ve approached its seven-episode run with complete trepidation, honestly wondering if there is anything better that I could be covering this week. However — while a long way from being a masterpiece — the hit Netflix show has clearly been listening.
Now that all of the exhausting worldbuilding is out of the way (for the most part), fans can finally focus on the character relationships that they want to invest in. There’s a lot of tenderness and vulnerability on display, which is the most fulfilling part of our cast having grown up so much between seasons.
But there’s still something obvious that’s really bothering me… and it comes back to Netflix’s “cookie-cutter” mold that none of its programs can escape.
Read it and weep (for joy), kids — Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 actually has heart. If we’re being honest, nobody had to put any effort into achieving this, with the mere fact that the lore of the Four Nations is fully established meaning there’s now room for bigger, better things.
A mature Aang (Gordon Cormier) now straddles his inner struggles of legacy and constant imposter syndrome even more effectively, with the likes of Katara (Kiawentiio), Sokka (Ian Ousley), and Suki (Maria Zhang) now all settled into their selves, wants and needs.
If anything, Zuko (Dallas Liu) is going through it the most. After deserting his family and retreating into hiding at the end of season 1, we’ve got a lot more sympathy with him this time around as he grapples with his supposed destiny of capturing Aang for the Fire Nation’s glory. Unlike Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim), he’s no longer a villain, but a victim.
The standout character of season 2 is easily Toph (Miya Cech), who has finally been introduced after not appearing in season 2. Coming from a complicated family background that routinely dismisses her Earthbending, she comes into her own sassy self after teaming up with Aang to teach him the next element.
Collectively, the team is now firing on all cylinders, and it’s nothing short of a joy to watch. Now we understand who they are and what the bigger picture looks like; intimacy, fun, and genuinely satisfying friendships are now flourishing. The jokes land, the serious moments stab you in the heart, and whimsy is flying around like Appa the sky bison.
Everything else in Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 feels like more of the same — and that’s a huge problem when it comes to the visuals. Broadly speaking, the Four Nations are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and the detail that the creative team has packed into the landscapes is nothing short of impressive.
The immediate VFX, such as the bending that our characters use, leave a lot to be desired. It’s obviously not a usual thing for people to have fire and water shooting out of their hands, so we’re suspending a great deal of belief anyway… but being in the moment doesn’t help when seeing it happen looks so fake.
This lumps season 2 into the same visually poor category as The Witcher, which is another comparison I made during season 1’s debut. Cover the faces of the actors, stick them in the woods for a combat scene, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell the shows apart. Netflix is determined to make all of its genre programs look exactly like one another, and I’m baffled as to why.
Then there’s the ultimate ending, which we already know without including spoilers. Much like other long-running anime series like One Piece (with its Netflix adaptation also guilty of this), we’ve known about the final endgame from its first five minutes. Here, it’s for Aang to learn his bending skills, become all-powerful, and defeat Lord Ozai and the Fire Nation.
With a third series already confirmed, this is being drawn out for as long as humanly possible. It was obvious that none of the above was going to be achieved by the time season 2 wrapped up, so we’ve made little substantial progress from when Aang’s goal was first introduced.
For me, the constant theme of “Oh no! Danger is on the horizon, and the Fire Nation must be stopped” is going to wear thin quickly. I’d really like to see season 3 mix things up, but I’m guessing that it won’t.
Did I enjoy seeing Aang and the gang in 2026 more than in 2024? Absolutely. Has it renewed my interest in seeing them again at the end of 2027 (season 3’s assumed release window)? Far from it.
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New details have been revealed on how hackers exploited a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-20245 in zero-day attacks to create rogue root accounts on targeted devices.
The CVE-2026-20245 vulnerability is a high-severity command injection flaw in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (vManage), Controller (vSmart), and Validator (vBond) that allows authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands as root by uploading a crafted file.
Cisco said the vulnerability stemmed from insufficient validation of user-supplied input and could be exploited by authenticated attackers with local access to affected devices.
When Cisco disclosed the flaw earlier this month, the company warned that it had been exploited in a limited number of attacks but did not provide any details.
Cisco only stated that successful exploitation allowed attackers to gain root privileges and that some incidents involved unauthorized configuration changes being pushed to edge devices.
The company released security updates and urged customers to upgrade to fixed software versions, stating that no workarounds were available.
In a report published today, Mandiant revealed that CVE-2026-20245 was exploited as a privilege-escalation vulnerability after attackers had already gained access to targeted SD-WAN devices.
According to the researchers, the intrusion began with unauthorized SD-WAN peering connections observed on a service provider’s infrastructure.
Beginning in March 2026, the threat actor established new rogue peer connections and authenticated to affected SD-WAN Manager devices using the vmanage-admin account.
Mandiant believes the rogue peering may have been created by exploiting previously disclosed Cisco SD-WAN authentication bypass zero-days, CVE-2026-20127 and CVE-2026-20182, though the exact method remains unclear.
After gaining access, the attackers changed the default admin account password, logged in to the SD-WAN Manager web interface, and extracted configuration information for edge devices, controllers, and SD-WAN templates.
Mandiant says the attackers subsequently restored the admin account to its original password after completing their activity, likely to reduce detection.
The researchers say the attackers then exploited CVE-2026-20245 through a tenant-upload feature in the SD-WAN command-line interface by uploading a malicious CSV file named “evil_tenant.csv.”
“CVE-2026-20245, a vulnerability reported to Cisco by Mandiant, exists in the command-line interface (CLI) of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controllers that could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root by supplying a crafted file to the affected system,” explains Mandiant.
Mandiant says the malicious payload first created backups of system configuration files, including /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, before creating a new account named “troot” with root-level privileges.
The attackers then used the Linux “su” command to switch from the compromised administrative account to the newly created root account, giving them full control over the device.
Mandiant says the attackers heavily relied on anti-forensic tactics to evade detection.
This includes backing up configuration files before modifying them and then restoring them after exploitation. They also cleaned up traces of exploitation by deleting the malicious CSV payload, removing temporary files created during the attack, and erasing evidence of the rogue root account.
The researchers also observed the execution of a validation script to confirm that all traces of the compromise had been removed from the device.
Mandiant says some rogue peering activity observed in March 2026 occurred on systems that were not vulnerable to any of the previously disclosed authentication-bypass flaws.
Cisco told the researchers that the breach did not involve CVE-2026-20182 and said it was possible the attackers used certificates stolen during a previous compromise to regain access to devices.
Mandiant has published indicators of compromise, attacker IP addresses, and guidance to help organizations determine whether they were compromised.
Organizations should collect diagnostic data from SD-WAN devices, check for signs of unauthorized peering connections, and upgrade to the latest software releases if they have not already done so.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
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