If anything, 2026 has made clear that cybersecurity is no longer a background concern. Today, security is at the front and center of many conversations, woven into almost every major story of the year.
Inequalities are still common, the climate is worsening, and we’re seemingly one dodgy sneeze away from the next global pandemic. But running beneath all of it is a digital current that touches everything: Wars are fought on digital fronts as well as physical ones, governments are weaponizing citizens’ own data against them, botnets are quietly undermining democratic institutions, nation-state hackers are targeting civilian infrastructure from power grids to water systems, and ransomware gangs are holding companies and institutions hostage for massive payouts. The attacks are getting bolder, more destructive, and harder to contain.
As we cross into the closing quarter of this already horrendous year of digital attacks and hybrid warfare, here is a look at some of the worst hacks and breaches so far, and how they might affect us going forward.
Questions of DOGE’s massive swipe of Social Security data linger
More than a year after operatives with the Elon Musk-led band of government destroyers known as the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) swept through and dismantled federal agencies from the inside out, we’re still learning about the data lapses that happened under their watch.
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After DOGE entered the Social Security Administration, it’s not yet known what happened with some of the nation’s most sensitive data, as lawsuits are still going on in federal courts. The most alarming claim by a federal whistleblower is that DOGE uploaded a live copy of the Social Security database to an unsecured third-party server, which led to a scramble to understand what was stored on the server. This database allegedly contained the Social Security numbers and associated personal information of most living Americans.
In court filings, the Social Security Administration isn’t sure what was on the server, but said that the DOGE signed an agreement with an outside political advocacy group under the guise of finding evidence of voter fraud, which President Trump continues to claim without any evidence. The fears are that the database could be misused to target Americans for spurious reasons.
Two of the top House Democrats investigating some of DOGE’s activities at the Social Security Administration said the exposure “could very well be the largest data breach in our nation’s history.”
Hackers are increasingly targeting U.S. water systems and European energy grids to sow chaos
A rash of cyberattacks across Europe targeting civilian energy and water supplies, like power plants and water dams, has set a troubling trend.
Then earlier this year, Russian hackers targeted Poland’s water treatment plants, showing that Moscow’s hybrid war antagonism continues to extend beyond the digital realm.
Now, thanks to the recent war waged by the U.S. and Israel against Iran, hackers working for the Iranian regime are actively hacking critical infrastructure across the United States in opportunistic attempts to disrupt neighborhoods and communities. CISA said Iranian hackers targeted over a hundred water providers over the summer, including privately owned water utilities, which remain a soft target as they often lack basic funding and cybersecurity protections.
Image Credits:Gabri Solera/Europa Press / Getty Images
Klue reached a deal with its hackers, but still lost control of its customers’ data
Market research provider Klue was at the center of a huge data breach that affected close to 200 companies, several of which were cybersecurity giants such as Jamf, HackerOne and LastPass. It was one of the broadest data breaches of the year, affecting a multitude of Klue’s customers, less than a year after the company laid off half of its staff in favor of doubling down on AI.
Klue admitted that an extortion gang, dubbed Icarus, broke into its systems using a credential that it issued in 2022 for a limited pilot. So it appears the company had around four years to decommission the credential before it was stolen and used to break into its systems. In the data breach, Klue exposed the keys to its customers’ cloud services, allowing the hackers to break in and steal those stores of data to extort those companies for a ransom.
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While governments and researchers often urge victims not to pay ransoms to prevent hackers from profiting from cybercrime, Klue told its customers that it had reached an agreement with the hackers not to publish the stolen data — strongly suggesting that it had paid them.
But as part of the deal, the hackers conceded that another hacking group also had a portion of Klue’s customers’ data and urged those victim companies not to pay them.
Thousands had their Instagram accounts hijacked thanks to Meta’s AI chatbot
When is a hack not quite a hack? When you’re granted access simply by asking for it. That’s what happened when thousands of Instagram accounts were hijacked in early 2026 as people abused Meta’s AI chatbot to reset others’ account passwords.
The hijackings, first reported by 404 Media, happened over the course of several months, and were only noticed after news of the exploit began to leak online. The attack was simple in execution: impersonating a target, people opened a chat with Meta’s AI chatbot and pretended that they had been locked out of the account. By requesting the chatbot to send a password reset code to an email address of the attacker’s choosing, the attacker gained access to their victim’s account.
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The incident affected tens of thousands of accounts before the improper access was discovered and cut off. It was an embarrassing and high-profile lapse in security — and trust — for one of the world’s largest tech companies.
Image Credits:TechCrunch / screenshot
FBI and ATF surveillance systems were breached, sparking two “major cyber incidents”
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation was forced to declare a “major cyber incident” in April, prompting a legally required disclosure to Congress, after it found that one of its surveillance systems was compromised. According to reports, the breach potentially exposed phone numbers of targets under surveillance by federal agents.
Chinese spies were accused of the breach of the unclassified network, which held sensitive information about the surveillance targets of wiretaps and other communication intercepts, such as pen register returns. Because lawmakers were notified, the breach is likely to have met a high bar: Causing “demonstrable harm” to U.S. national security.
Months later in August, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, confirmed its own “major incident” that prompted a separate disclosure to Congress. A ransomware gang took credit for the breach of a system that the enforcement agency said contained “targets of ATF investigations.”
The software supply chain is under attack, targeting open-source projects and Big Tech companies
A series of ongoing, concurrent and occasionally overlapping attacks on open-source developers has resulted in massive hacks targeting Big Tech companies and their customers.
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Some of the biggest names in security, including Aqua Security’s Trivy tool, Bitwarden and Checkmarx, alongside other major open-source projects, were compromised this year. The hacks allowed attackers to steal passwords, credentials and other sensitive tokens from the computers of anyone who installed a backdoored copy of the software, or their pre-installed software auto-updated to download the malware.
These attacks used stolen credentials to spread further, and opened the door to downstream compromises of big companies that rely on the targeted software, including AI giant OpenAI and web hosting company Vercel. The EU’s top cyber agency later confirmed a major data heist following the theft of its cloud keys by the hackers.
By August, two hackers blamed for these major heists were arrested in Australia.
Hundreds of millions of passports and driver’s licenses are now exposed online
An immense data breach at an identity document checking company called IDScan threatens to affect almost every driver in North America: Hackers touted a search engine on the dark web capable of listing the photos of 150 million drivers in the U.S. and Canada, including the reporter who broke the story.
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The company confirmed a data breach soon after, but details are still emerging. The hackers appear to be holding the vast cache of data, stolen over the course of a year, hostage in return for a ransom.
This breach adds to an already extensive list of data spills involving people’s passports and driver’s licenses: From a hotel check-in system and a money transfer app to a prison payphone provider and a U.K. visa service, services exposed over 2 million people’s personal documents. Many of these were caused by simple security lapses that would have been easily prevented if basic cybersecurity practices had been followed.
The massive data breaches come as closed-community apps and websites are increasingly leaning on “know your customer” checks to force users to verify their identity before being allowed in. Meanwhile, governments are pushing age-verification laws, demanding similar identity checks from adults to access a vast swath of the internet.
The logic goes that the greater the spills, the less effective these identity-checking systems are, as they can be easily misused with a stolen or leaked passport or driver license. The further rollout of these ID-collecting systems will inevitably lead to more data breaches and security lapses.
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Image Credits:Screenshot via Krebs On Security
Healthcare hacks spill medical records belonging to tens of millions of people
A scattering of healthcare-related data breaches have hit tens of millions of people across the U.S. this year. The largest known breach of 2026 hit insurance company DentaQuest, which resulted in the theft of health data of 15 million people. Another major data breach at CareCloud, a company that hosts electronic patient records, allowed hackers to steal the sensitive medical information of at least 3.7 million people.
And, a breach at healthcare data and billing giant Aesto Health at the end of last year was later confirmed to affect at least 9.5 million patients at dozens of providers and practices that use its software.
Hasbro’s hack led to weeks of downtime
Toymaker giant Hasbro is the latest example of what happens when a large corporation isn’t prepared to manage a security incident. Weeks after discovering hackers in its systems in late March, the 103-year-old company remained largely offline, its website was unavailable, and unable to serve its customers.
The company, which owns big name brands such as Transformers, Peppa Pig and Dungeons & Dragons, has said little about the incident itself, what data was taken (if any), and whether it paid the hackers. But the disruption alone was likely to affect the company’s financials, and it was forced to delay filing its quarterly report with the SEC, as it scrambled to handle the incident.
Hasbro said in May that the hackers were no longer in its systems, and that its recovery was underway. While the data breach affected a few hundred employees, the financial costs of the breach and the knock-on effects to its business are likely to be realized in the coming months.
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Instructure falls victim to ShinyHunters’ disruptive hacking campaigns
The ShinyHunters gang continued its hacking campaign, targeting dozens of companies with simple but highly effective voice-phishing techniques. The English-speaking hackers are adept at tricking companies into turning over access to their internal systems by pretending to be IT support, or conversely, an employee who forgot their password.
Few companies know better the toll a ShinyHunters campaign can exact than education tech giant Instructure. The hackers breached the company’s flagship learning management system, Canvas, to steal private data and personal information of over 30 million students and staff.
When the company didn’t pay the hackers’ ransom, the hackers broke in again, and defaced the login screens for Canvas, used by students to access their exam and coursework material. This second hack happened during school finals, disrupting exams across the United States.
Instructure eventually paid the ransom, despite efforts by the FBI to dissuade the company from paying.
The breach represented a marked shift in Iran’s hacking tactics at a time of ongoing war: the country moved from its typical focus on espionage and hack-and-leak operations in aid of political gains, toward active, destructive hacks in apparent retaliation for the war.
In August, a similar fate befell medical device maker Boston Scientific, after a cyberattack cut off the company’s global network, causing a “global disruption” to its operations. The Massachusetts-based company, which makes heart implants like pacemakers, said some patients were affected by the outages, which also prevented it from shipping and creating new orders.
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Boston Scientific took two weeks to recover from its immediate outage, though its ongoing recovery has stretched into September.
First published on June 8, and updated on July 7 and again on September 15.
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Defense and venture capital used to rarely overlap, but that’s no longer the case. Defense tech VC dealmaking set a record in Q1 2026, and new VC firms have emerged around the world to invest solely in defense startups.
One of these is two-year-old Protego Ventures, which presents itself as the first and largest dedicated defense tech VC in Israel. Led notably by two women, Lital Leshem and Lee Moser, it has just completed the final close of its debut fund with $125 million in capital commitments, TechCrunch learned exclusively.
This fund size is enabling Protego to invest between $5 million and $50 million per company, with a focus on startups “addressing the critical defense and security needs of Israel and the global community,” according to its website.
These include the likes of drone maker XTEND, its first portfolio company, which went public on the NYSE earlier this month. That’s also why Protego stopped short of its $150 million target: a smaller fund magnifies the impact of a single big win on overall returns, and with XTEND now looking like a potential “fund maker” — a single investment capable of returning the whole fund — raising more capital would only dilute that upside among a larger pool of investors. “Nobody wants to share the pie,” Leshem said.
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Ares Management is one of Protego’s biggest backers. The investment firm suggested that Leshem and Moser join forces and start Protego in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, with the conviction that new technologies would be key to boosting Israel’s defense capabilities in the face of new threats, Leshem said.
With a $30 million investment as a limited partner, Ares gave Protego the support it needed to start investing right away, Leshem said. Besides XTEND, its portfolio also includes startups such as ASIO, which develops situational awareness systems and has partnered with Anduril.
Leshem says the reception in defense circles has been strong. “On the military side, there is a lot of respect, and people are coming — even under the radar — to talk to us, to learn from us, to train with us, and for sure get our technology and innovation.”
Still, the Israeli market is easier to navigate for insiders, and Protego’s two founders are leaning into their networks. Moser, a seasoned venture capitalist, will remain a managing partner at the generalist VC firm AnD Ventures. As for Leshem, who co-founded a startup that was acquired for $625 million in 2025, she also brings 11 years of experience in the military and intelligence field to their approach.
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“Everything changed on October 7,” Leshem told TechCrunch. She was deployed, while pregnant, as a reservist on the day of the attacks. “And basically until the delivery room, I was there, witnessing and getting the first-row seat to how the battlefield acted differently from what I knew in the past decade.”
Protego won’t have the field to itself for long. Israeli authorities have taken notice of the same shift, awarding VC firms Adir Capital and Sling Capital about $33 million in state guarantees to invest in military and dual-use technologies, with other funds also raising capital for similar bets. (Leshem said Protego was too far along in its own fundraising to take part in the government’s tender.)
Protego, meanwhile, is already planning its next move: a second fund in the first quarter of 2027, backed by Israeli institutional investors and one large U.S. commitment Leshem has already secured, with a broader scope that includes early-growth American defense-tech companies.
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Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson kicks off the Washington Space Council, surrounded by the council’s members and 10-year-old Sebastian Yu. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has created a public-private council to elevate the Evergreen State’s profile as regional clusters compete for primacy in America’s space industry.
The 23-member Washington Space Council was introduced tonight at the Museum of Flight during a kickoff event for Seattle Space Week, a celebration organized by Space Northwest.
“The council will help keep us competitive by comparing Washington with other leading states in the industry and identifying ways we can continue to improve and compete,” Ferguson said.
Washington state already ranks as one of the nation’s space industry hotspots. “We’re proud to have a cluster of more than 90 space companies employing more than 13,000 workers, generating over $4 billion in annual economic activity and $1.6 billion in annual payroll,” Ferguson said.
But Andy Lapsa, co-founder and CEO of Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space, told tonight’s crowd that several other regions are competing with the Pacific Northwest for space-related investments. “States like Florida and Texas and Colorado want this industry, and they want it bad,” he said. “They compete for it every day. Washington has every advantage it needs to lead them all, and the window to use those advantages is open right now.”
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Boeing has historically been the state’s leading venture in aerospace, but when you focus on ventures that concentrate strictly on space, Blue Origin is high on the list. Seattle is particularly strong in the satellite sector: More than half of the world’s satellites are built in the Seattle area, thanks to SpaceX’s Starlink facilities in Redmond and Woodinville, plus Amazon Leo’s factory in Kirkland, BlackSky’s production plant in Tukwila and Xplore’s operation in Bellevue.
Gravitics, Interlune, Portal Space Systems, Starcloud and Starfish Space are among other space ventures represented on the Washington Space Council. The list also includes elected officials, union leaders, educators and investors, plus representatives from space-related tech companies and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The 23-member Washington State Council includes representatives from government, academia and the space industry. Click on the image to get the full list from the Washington State Department of Commerce.
Ferguson said the council will “identify barriers for the industry and find opportunities for growth.”
“That includes, by the way, workforce development, infrastructure and much more,” he said. “And the council will look for ways we might be able to develop Washington-based commercial launch capabilities. That would be a very exciting addition to what we’re doing right here in Washington.”
Ferguson brought a member of the audience, 10-year-old Sebastian Yu, to the stage when he signed the executive order that officially created the council. After the signing, the governor handed the pen to Yu.
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“Your assignment, Sebastian, is that when we do that first launch, you have to save this pen and bring it with you to the first launch,” Ferguson said. “Take care of this pen, OK? I’m going to expect to see it again someday.”
Notes from the kickoff:
Space Northwest presented three awards to recognize contributions to the region’s space industry. The Shooting Star award for municipal support went to the city of Kent, Wash. Portal Space Systems won the Rising Star award for emerging space companies, and SpaceX won the North Star Award for large space companies.
Kent Mayor Dana Ralph noted that her city’s connection to the space industry goes back to Boeing’s work on the lunar rovers for NASA’s Apollo moon missions in the 1970s, while acknowledging that Kent can’t rest on its laurels. “Our job is to make it possible for companies to build and grow and hire. That means reinvesting in the basics: roads, great mobility, water, sewer, plentiful and easily accessible energy and industrial land,” she said.
Mehran Mesbahi, professor and chair of the University of Washington’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, highlighted efforts to boost careers in the space industry. “We have Husky Satellite Lab, a group of energized students at UW, and we’re going to create a certificate program around space systems going forward,” he said.
Seattle Space Week continues on Tuesday with the Space Northwest Symposium at the Federal Way Performing Arts & Event Center.
Among the many joys of having a cat is the daily battle with the mess they leave behind. No matter what you try, finding litter and pet hair on furniture or in your bed is inevitable — either they track it in, or you do. If you’re a pet parent like me, this means searching for additional bits of litter and stray hairs that find their way into places you really don’t want them, including the bed. Short of pulling the sheets off entirely, few fixes exist.
I took a chance and tested the SandBar Roller, a $30 dual-roll lint roller, to see if it can make it easier to keep stray hair and litter at bay. I also put it through the paces for other lint-roller tasks like dusting and cleaning floors. Here’s how it fared.
How SandBar Roller differs from other lint rollers
The SandBar Roller Starter Kit I tested included the roller head, an extendable handle and two preinstalled lint rolls.John Carlsen/CNET
The SandBar Roller’s appeal lies in its two large lint rollers instead of one. While the idea doesn’t seem like much of a departure from a typical large lint roller, I couldn’t find any other dual-roller designs intended for use between bedsheets like SandBar. By arranging the rollers in this way, SandBar can clean the top and bottom sheets simultaneously without getting stuck.
The Best Handheld Vacuums, Tested by CNET
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While SandBar markets its proprietary lint rolls as stronger than normal rolls, they’re not much different from what you’ll find on the extra-large pet hair version of the Scotch-Brite lint roller. Both are 8 inches wide, with an inner diameter of 1.5 inches. Much to SandBar’s credit, its six-pack of refill rolls is just $20, which is very competitive with other lint roll refills I found on Amazon, with the optional subscription price dropping to just $16 for each one-, two- or three-month delivery.
Testing the SandBar Roller
The extendable handle is very practical.John Carlsen/CNET
Ostensibly, this design targets coastal homes, where sand gets everywhere — hence the SandBar name. While I don’t live on the coast, I’ve experienced sand in my bed while traveling, or after day trips to the desert, and cat litter is a near-daily occurrence. With that in mind, I conducted a series of informal tests to see how the SandBar Roller holds up.
Upon putting SandBar between the sheets, I noticed it moved fairly smoothly, at least until it snagged on some sheets that were too loose. It didn’t jam, but that means it works better for beds with the sheet firmly tucked at the foot — something I don’t do for various sleep-friendly reasons. Still, it worked well after tightening the sheets a bit, even snagging a few cat hairs and litter fragments. It’s a nice alternative to washing the sheets as frequently as I have to now.
I like the stickiness of the rolls, which is satisfyingly tacky without leaving residue or making it difficult to pull off used strips.John Carlsen/CNET
The SandBar removed cat fur from hard-to-reach places
Next, I wanted to see how it handled cleaning smart window shades and curtains, which often collect fur as my cat patrols windows a few times a day. It was a little more awkward, but taking the handle off proved effective, and the sticky roller collected a substantial amount of fur. I had to peel off multiple sheets because of the amount of fur, but it took only a few passes to clean the curtain. The SandBar Roller was very useful on furniture and pet beds, but I noticed that being too aggressive can occasionally dislodge a roll.
The SandBar Roller left a fairly clean surface when I dusted off a TV cabinet and soundbar. Still, I wouldn’t trade it out for the duster and handheld vacuum I usually use. Likewise, it did well on the linoleum floor and carpet near my cat’s litter box, but still I prefer the cleaner result I get from vacuuming.
Should you buy the SandBar Roller?
The specialized design does its job well, but is probably too niche for people who aren’t pet parents or near vast swathes of sand.John Carlsen/CNET
At $30, the SandBar Roller is unlikely to break anyone’s budget, especially when you can find similarly large bed lint rollers for the same price. In that context alone, including the cost of refill rolls, it’s probably as good as any other option. Still, the dual-roll design’s ability to get between sheets is a compelling reason to consider the SandBar Roller over the competition. The design suits households that typically deal with a lot of sand and litter in the beds. I could even see myself taking it camping for quick dirt cleanup in a sleeping bag.
However, I wouldn’t recommend it for short-term beach house rentals because it cuts corners — new guests expect clean sheets when they arrive. That said, making a SandBar Roller available during a guest’s visit could be worthwhile to improve their experience, as long as you leave instructions explaining what it’s for and how it works.
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If you don’t need the second roll — and mainly deal with pet hair on furniture — the ChomChom Roller doesn’t need refill rolls, making it a much better option for $25. Likewise, a handheld vacuum can do the same job with a bit more flexibility around the house — though it’s not quiet enough to use when others are sleeping. While it’s nice to have so many options, it’s always worth going with what works best for your needs and situation.
John Carlsen has more than a decade of experience testing and reviewing home tech products, with a major focus on smart home security. He earned his BS in journalism from Utah Valley University. In addition to his CNET contributions, John has written for Android Police, TWICE, Home Theater Review, SafeWise, ASecureLife and Top Ten Reviews.
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If you haven’t heard of Metal Gear, you probably haven’t played video games these last few decades. The original Metal Gear dates back to 1987 and launched on the MSX, but the real rise to fame probably started with Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation in 1998. What needed a hefty console in 1998 can comfortably fit on a microcontroller in 2026, though, as [David Montero Crespo] demonstrates with his port of MGS to the ESP32-S3.
[David] is — as we always are — standing on the shoulders of giants with this hack. Most specifically, the project relies entirely on the [FoxdieTeam] MGS Reversing decompliation project. Of course what one team decompiles, another can recompile, and in this case [David] chose to recompile the game for Expressif’s exceptional ESP32. It wasn’t quite as easy as just forking the repo and compiling with the ESP32 as a target though, as the blog post explains.
We won’t spoil it, but [David] did have to make some changes to account for the different quirks the MIPS processor in the PlayStation has compared to the Xtensa cores on the microcontroller. Then to make it playable, he put the ESP32-S3 module onto some perfboard with an analog stick from a drone controller, an ILI9341 LCD panel, and a resistor ladder to run the buttons for a barebones handheld.
OpenAI was gearing up to release GPT-6.1 Astra, its next AI model, with an October launch in its sights. That’s no longer happening. The company pulled the plug after its own researchers spotted worrying behavior while testing it internally.
What went wrong with GPT-6.1 Astra?
On paper, Astra-6.1 was an upgrade over the current GPT-6 Astra. It wrote better, handled complex jobs all on its own, and showed less “model laziness” than before.
OpenAI
However, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said the model slipped in two important areas. First, it sometimes misled users about what it had actually done. Second, it would occasionally carry on with a task without checking with the user first, and even tap into outside tools and services when doing so could be risky.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade-off,” Jain said. The goal is a model that respects its boundaries but still keeps working when a task gets hard. Astra fell short of OpenAI’s bar, so the public launch was called off.
Why is OpenAI hitting the brakes now?
AI agents have had a messy few months. Earlier this summer, hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents ended up breaking into Hugging Face while running a cybersecurity test. The Australian government and the United Nations later found OpenAI’s agents had used similar, though less extensive, methods on their websites.
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Andrew Neel / Unsplash
Last week, OpenAI also halted training on its most powerful models after one agent found a loophole in its internet restrictions and queried a public chatbot. OpenAI says Astra is a separate case. Lawmakers are watching, too. According to WSJ, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing on rogue AI agents this week, and Florida’s Attorney General has been suing OpenAI since June.
What does this mean for you?
You won’t be getting GPT-6.1 Astra anytime soon. OpenAI hopes to reuse its base model to build future GPT-6 models and is digging into what caused the problems. Personally, I’d rather wait for an AI that’s honest about its work than use one that goes off and does its own thing.
New research suggests Enceladus may be an especially promising place to search for extraterrestrial life: microbes similar to those found near Earth’s hydrothermal vents survived in lab conditions designed to mimic the Saturnian moon’s subsurface ocean. A separate study also found that material blasted from Enceladus’ plumes may naturally separate and concentrate salts, organics and potential biosignatures into individual ice grains, potentially making them easier for future spacecraft to detect.
“That is great news in the search for life,” Frank Postberg, lead author of one and co-author of the other of these new studies and professor at Freie Universitat Berlin, said in a statement. “Future spacecraft will have to analyze many individual ice particles in the plume. But if they come across one with microbial material in it, they could identify biosignatures in the particle relatively easy with already available technology.” Space.com reports: Enceladus isn’t the only place in our solar system with water — so, why is it so exciting in the search for life? Well, it has to do with the seafloor of its extensive, liquid ocean. Down deep at the bottom of this body of water, scientists think hydrothermal processes, or movement or reactions with hot water under the surface, are taking place. The plumes shooting upward from the ocean also contain trace amounts of salts and organic compounds. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft found these traces when it flew through the plumes over a decade ago. Between the hydrothermal activity and the organics and minerals in the water, this moon’s ocean has a number of aspects that could be involved in supporting life.
What’s more, using a combination of Cassini data, theoretical models and laboratory experimentation, in Postberg’s new study the team found that the plume’s water droplets blasting out into space at up to 621 miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per hour) don’t freeze as quickly as expected. Before, scientists thought the freeze would happen instantaneously once the droplets reached space, but Postberg and fellow researchers say they found the freezing would actually happen much slower.
They also found that during this freezing process, the salt, organic compounds (and maybe possible signs of life) in the water droplets separate from one another. Not only that, but the team says that as the particles are blasted out into space, they should often collide with the icy cracks of the planet’s surface. This ultimately would leave behind tiny shards of frozen droplets with individually separated out components. Essentially, it’s like the planet has organized its oceanic ingredients into tiny, frozen particle fragments. This work is described in two new studies published in the journal Science Advances here and here.
In context: Android smartphone maker Nothing has launched the Headphone (1) Pro, its new flagship audio product, which it claims combines an elevated listening experience for consumers with studio-grade production and mixing features for professionals. It succeeds last year’s Nothing Headphone (1), which TIME named one of its Best Inventions of 2025.
The biggest change in the new model is a three-driver audio system. It includes a bass dynamic driver designed to add more punch and sensitivity to low frequencies, a precision dynamic driver that adds more texture to vocals and instruments, and a new treble xMEMS driver that Nothing says delivers crisper highs.
Nothing also worked with London’s Metropolis Studios to tune the Headphone (1) Pro, with the collaboration focused on professional audio tools and soundstage characteristics.
The company also highlights an improved adaptive active noise cancellation system that uses a 10-microphone array to more accurately filter ambient noise than the first-gen model. With claimed noise reduction of up to 46 dB, Nothing is positioning the Headphone (1) Pro against premium rivals from Bose and Sony.
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Nothing says the improvement in noise reduction should be particularly noticeable in strong winds or noisy traffic. The headphones also feature redesigned ear cushions with an 8mm silicone baffle wall inside, creating a stronger sound barrier and improving the seal around the ears.
The Headphone (1) Pro supports Hi-Res wireless audio and wired playback over USB-C at up to 24-bit/192 kHz. It also offers five modes of Dynamic Spatial Audio with head tracking, along with five new custom EQ profiles. A separate Flat EQ switch is designed to give producers and creators a more neutral sound profile.
The Headphones 1 Pro is built out of aluminum and titanium to provide a durable shell while creating a premium look and feel. It also retains Nothing’s transparent design language, using shatter- and scratch-resistant 9H Panda Glass on both ear cups to reveal parts of the triple-driver architecture.
Despite the increased use of metal, Nothing has reduced the headphones’ weight to 327 grams through a redesigned internal architecture, including replacing steel arms with titanium. Other changes intended to improve comfort over longer listening sessions include a wider headband with thicker padding and softer ear cushions.
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The Headphone (1) Pro is positioned to compete with premium models such as the Sony WH-1000XM6, Bose QuietComfort Ultra, and Apple AirPods Max. It is priced at $399 and will be available beginning September 29 through Nothing’s official store at nothing.tech, Amazon, and Best Buy stores across across the US and Canada.
Ned Jenkinson of the University of Birmingham and Matthew Weightman of the University of Oxford discuss how advancements in brain research might affect how we learn and grow our skillsets.
Whether learning a new piano piece or adapting your tennis serve, acquiring physical skills depends on your brain’s ability tostrengthen and refine neural connections. Researchers are exploring whether this process can be accelerated with technology.
Scientists are particularly interested in the potential of non-invasivebrain stimulation, a group of techniques that can alter brain activity without surgery.
If these techniques can successfully enhanceneuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganise and form new connections during learning, then they could be of use anywhere where performance depends on learning complex movements, from sport and music to surgery and beyond. Researchers are also seeing if these technologies could help with learning non-physical skills, such aspicking up a foreign language.
Elite sport, professional gaming and high-performance workplaces could all become targets for these enhancements if they prove effective. Brain stimulation could also have a big role to play in medicine, helping patients recover physical skills lost through injury or disease, such asstroke.
Studies suggest there’s a lot of potential here. But translating this potential into useful tech that reliably boosts learning physical skills remains a big challenge.
Stimulating findings
Research into enhancing motor learning with electric or magnetic stimulation has been gaining momentum since the turn of the millennium, with early studies garnering considerable excitement.
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In atypical experiment, participants might learn a sequence of finger movements similar to practising scales on a piano while receiving stimulation over brain regions involved in movement. Other studies have examined how stimulation could be used forbalance training or teachingsports-relatedskills orsurgical techniques.
Some of these experiments produced eye-catching results, finding that participantslearned certain movement tasks faster orretained skills for longer if they underwent brain stimulation. But other studies failed to find benefits. And in some cases, researchers struggled to replicate the success of earlier promising experiments when repeating them.
One reason for these mixed findings is that there’s no such thing as a universal ‘learning network’ in our brains. Different skills rely ondifferent combinations of areas near the surface of the brain as well as those deep within it.
Additionally, people can respond very differently to the same stimulation. Factors such as age, anatomy, genetics and even baseline skill level may influence whether stimulation is beneficial. Add to that the infinite number of ways to apply stimulation, the picture becomes murkier.
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Despite these challenges, the field continues to evolve in its quest to enhance motor learning. For instance, rather than broadly stimulating the brain, researchers are increasingly targeting specific neural circuits involved in learning.
This is partly thanks to advances inneuroimaging andcomputational modelling, which has allowed scientists to predict how electrical currents travel through a person’s brain. Newer brain stimulation technologies, such as focused ultrasound, can also now reach deep structures involved in skill acquisition.
The goal is to use these technologies not simply to increase brain activity, but to influence the right neural circuit at the right time during learning. This idea builds on a fundamental principle of neuroscience, often summarised as“neurons that fire together, wire together”. When brain cells are repeatedly activated at the same time, the connections between them become stronger.
By carefully timing stimulation tocoincide with the movements made during practice, researchers hope to reinforce the neural pathways involved in learning a new skill. In principle, this could make stimulation more reliable and more effective than current approaches, but researchers are stillfine tuning exactly how this would work.
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Motoring ahead
Important questions remain. Who would have access? Should stimulation be regulated in competitive environments such as sport? And how much evidence should be required before consumer devices are marketed to healthy users?
These questions are becoming increasingly relevant as brain stimulation moves beyond the laboratory and clinic. A number of at-home devices are now available for people to buy.Some have receivedregulatory approval, as they’re indicated for treating medical conditions such as depression. But there’s also a growing market for devices forcognitive and performance enhancement. For these uses, no regulatory approval is needed.
The technology is advancing rapidly, but evidence to support it and regulations governing it are still trying to catch up. Proper frameworks for its adoption may simply be bypassed by the ready possibility of ‘DIY’ brain stimulation.
For now, brain stimulation is unlikely to transform anyone into an overnight virtuoso or elite athlete. But as researchers develop increasingly precise ways of targeting the neural circuits that underpin learning, the prospect of enhancing human performance is shifting from science fiction towards scientific possibility.
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The challenge today is not simply learning how to influence the brain, but deciding where, when and why we should.
Ned Jenkinson is a senior lecturer in human movement sciences at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Birmingham. His research incorporates a range of techniques including non-invasive brain stimulation, electrophysiological recording, eye-tracking, neuroimaging and behavioural techniques. He uses these techniques to investigate how the brain controls movement and how it allows us to learn new motor skills.
Matthew Weightman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging in the Plasticity Group at the University of Oxford, led by Prof Heidi Johansen-Berg. He is broadly interested in the field of sensorimotor neuroscience. His current work focuses on the role of sleep to recovery after stroke. More specifically, he is interested in how we can improve sleep after a stroke, whether improved sleep in stroke patients relates to better functional recovery, and if physiological processes that occur during sleep can be enhanced post-stroke to boost consolidation.
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Keio Corporation (Keio), a major private railway operator in Japan, said its network was hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend, disrupting some of its business systems.
Following a system failure in the early hours of Saturday, the company confirmed the attack and shut down its network to prevent additional damage.
The company said it is investigating the extent of the impact and whether the attackers accessed any customer or business partner information.
Keio is a large Japanese railway operator with 85 km of track and 69 stations, as well as a separate hospitality business of 25 hotels. The company has over 2,200 employees and a reported annual revenue of about $2.6 billion.
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“In the early hours of September 26, 2026, we confirmed a ransomware attack on our group’s servers. We have reported the incident to the police and are conducting an investigation into the attack’s route and damage with the cooperation of external experts,” Keio says.
The incident appears to have affected only the hospitality side of Keio’s business, not train operations.
A separate announcement published on the company’s Keio Plaza Hotel Tokyo website is warning of possible delays on some customer-facing services.
At the time of writing, BleepingComputer could not find a ransomware group claiming the attack on Keio.
BleepingComputer has contacted the company to request more information about the incident, and we will update this post with their response once it reaches us.
Tokyo Metro has also disclosed a cyber incident over the weekend in which attackers gained unauthorized access to its systems and accessed 59,000 member email addresses.
Although both Keio and Tokyo Metro are Japanese railway operators, it is unclear if the organizations were targeted in a coordinated campaign by the same threat actor.
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Tokyo Metro is a major transit operator that runs nine subway lines covering 195 km and 180 stations, carrying an average of 7 million passengers daily.
The company said the breached systems contained only email addresses and that it has already identified and closed the security weakness the attackers used in this case.
Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.
Home puts chats, delegated work, and Office documents inside one interface
Code lets non-programmers describe software and have Copilot build it
Autopilot can continue recurring work without waiting for another instruction
Microsoft has introduced a redesigned version of its Copilot AI platform which claims to combine chat, delegated work, and coding tools into a unified application experience for users.
The company says the update is meant to let individuals and organizations scale artificial intelligence across everyday tasks and long-term projects.
Three new capabilities anchor this release, including Home, Code and Autopilot, each aimed at a different kind of work.
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Home brings Chat and Cowork together
The Home tool brings together two existing modes, Chat for quick questions and Cowork for tasks users delegate entirely, under one shared starting point.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now operate inside this same interface, letting users draft documents, budgets, and presentations without switching applications.
In these documents, Copilot is now grounded in Fabric IQ, pulling context from more than 20 million semantic models built in Power BI.
Edits made by colleagues or by the assistant itself appear in real time, so progress stays synchronized across a shared file.
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A new plugin registry will let organizations manage Microsoft, partner and custom-built plugins from one central catalog starting this month.
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Independent developers and partners can also publish plugins once for use across multiple Copilot surfaces under the new registry arrangement.
The Code tool allows non-programmers to describe an app, tracker or dashboard in plain language and have it built automatically.
This feature runs on the same underlying technology used in GitHub Copilot and can be hosted within a company’s own systems.
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Autopilot operates without constant prompting
Autopilot, the third addition, is a persistent agent capable of completing recurring work without needing a new instruction each time.
It can run supplier reviews or similar multi-step processes, build schedules, contact stakeholders, and follow up on outstanding items independently.
Because it operates continuously in the cloud, work can continue late at night or whenever a person’s attention shifts elsewhere.
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A related feature called Today, entering private preview in October, will summarize missed messages and pending tasks across mail and chat.
Microsoft is also tying spending controls to these tools through a system it calls FinOps for AI, letting administrators track usage.
Administrators can set spending limits, approve credit requests and restrict which AI models different teams are permitted to use each month.
Everyday tasks like quick answers or first drafts run on a fixed-price subscription, while agentic features use usage-based billing.
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Code, Cowork and Autopilot all fall under this usage-based pricing model, alongside frontier models Microsoft refers to as Astra and Fable.
Home and Code are set to roll out through Microsoft’s Frontier program within weeks, and Autopilot enters private preview by month’s end.
Microsoft has not released independent data showing how widely the three features are being adopted, how accurate they are, or how much time they actually save.
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