Cybersecurity agencies in the U.S. and U.K. are warning about a custom malware called Firestarter persisting on Cisco Firepower and Secure Firewall devices running Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) or Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software.
The backdoor has been attributed to a threat actor that Cisco Talos tracks internally as UAT-4356, known for cyberespionage campaigns, including ArcaneDoor.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.K. National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) believe that the adversary obtained initial access by exploiting a missing authorization issue (CVE-2025-20333) and/or a buffer overflow bug (CVE-2025-20362).
In one incident at a federal civilian executive branch agency, CISA observed the threat actor first deploying the Line Viper malware, a user-mode shellcode loader, and then using Firestarter, which enables continued access even after patching.
“CISA has not confirmed the exact date of initial exploitation but assesses the compromise occurred in early September 2025, and before the agency implemented patches in accordance with ED 25-03,” the agency notes in an alert.
Line Viper is used to establish VPN sessions and access all configuration details, including administrative credentials, certificates, and private keys on compromised Firepower devices.
Next, the ELF binary for the Firestarter backdoor is deployed for persistence, allowing the threat actor to regain access when needed.
Once Firestarter nests on the devices, it maintains persistence across reboots, firmware updates, and security patches. Furthermore, the backdoor relaunches automatically if terminated.
Persistence is achieved by hooking into LINA, the core Cisco ASA process, and using signal handlers that trigger reinstallation routines.
A joint malware analysis report from the two cybersecurity agencies explains that Firestarter modifies the CSP_MOUNT_LIST boot/mount file to ensure execution on startup, stores a copy of itself in /opt/cisco/platform/logs/var/log/svc_samcore.log, and restores it to /usr/bin/lina_cs, where it runs in the background.
Cisco Talos also published its analysis of the malware, saying that the persistence mechanism is triggered when a process termination signal is received, also known as a graceful reboot.
The researchers noted in the Firestarter report that the backdoor used the commands below to set persistence for itself:
The implant’s core function is to act as a backdoor for remote access, while it can also execute attacker-provided shellcode.
This is done through a mechanism in which Firestarter hooks into LINA by modifying an XML handler and injecting shellcode into memory, creating a controlled execution path.
This shellcode is triggered by a specially crafted WebVPN request, which, after validating a hardcoded identifier, loads and executes attacker-supplied payloads directly in memory.
However, CISA did not provide any details on the specific payloads observed in attacks.
Cisco published a security advisory about Firestarter that contains mitigations and workarounds for removing the persistence mechanism, as well as indicators of compromise for discovering the Firestarter implant.
The vendor “strongly recommends reimaging and upgrading the device using the fixed releases,” which covers both compromised and non-compromised cases.
To determine a compromise, administrators should run the ‘show kernel process | include lina_cs’ command. For any resulting output, the device should be considered compromised.
If device re-imaging is not currently possible, Cisco says that a cold restart (disconnecting the device power) removes the malware. However, this alternative is not recommended as it carries the risk of database or disk corruption, leading to boot problems.
CISA has also shared two YARA rules that can detect the Firestarter backdoor when applied to a disk image or a core dump from a device.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
An imperfect outdoor speaker but one that achieves its main aim with gusto. The Brane X brings the bass to the party better than most outdoor speakers would even dream to.
Big bass for an outdoor speaker
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support
Strong build quality
Clear, natural, spacious sound
Battery depletes in off mode
Heavy for a ‘portable’ speaker
Lacks Tidal Connect / Google Cast support
Review Price:
£499
RAD woofer
Repel Attract Driver that summons big bass performance
Battery
12 hours on a single charge
Brane app
Customise the sound, group speakers together
The one area where outdoor speakers tend to struggle is bass. Without walls or indoor surfaces to reflect sounds off, the open expanse of a garden, bank or beach leads to a reduction in bass. That is an issue the Brane X looks to fix.
The Brane X is a portable speaker that comes with a built-in subwoofer. That’s right, not a passive woofer, but an actual subwoofer to thunder out the low frequencies.
There’s more to sound than just the big bass, and the Brane X looks to step into the territory of the Sonos Move 2 with support for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Has Brane succeeded with the X where other outdoor speakers have often struggled?
The Brane X is something of a brute, but a well-built one. It comes with a carry handle, which is a necessity as it weighs 3.5kg. That’s more than the Sony ULT Field 5 (3.3kg), the LG xboom XG8T (3kg) and the Devialet Mania (2.3kg). If those speakers are pushing against the notion of portable, the Brane X is banging its head against it.
But as I mentioned its well-built. It’s a curved, dense speaker, and it’s not actually that big for an outdoor speaker. The Marshall Kilburn III is about the same size, if not a bit bigger. There are a couple of LED lights on the front of the speaker to show battery life and the mode the speaker is in, but you’ll get a voice telling you all its vital statistics when the speaker wakes up anyway.
The density, solidity and heft of the Brane X make it a speaker to lug about. It only comes in a black finish which doesn’t exactly translate to a fun or colourful aesthetic for an outdoor speaker, but in a sense, the Brane X means business.
At IP57, it is fully water-resistant and can be dunked into water a metre deep for 30 minutes. Given the weight, though, I imagine it’ll go down like a ship’s anchor.
I don’t love the placement of the power button. It’s on the speaker’s rear side, which means having to shift the speaker about, and I’ve always been a bit confused about how long I need to touch it. It needs a nudge to turn off but a longer press to power up, and there’s a couple of seconds before it whirs into life where I think “have I actually pressed it?”.
There are little rubbery feet on the underside to prop the speaker up and offer some clearance to what I presume is the built-in subwoofer to do its thing. Around the back of the speaker are the auxiliary inputs, the aforementioned power button and DC power output.
On top are touch controls for Bluetooth, volume, playback and turning the mic on and off. All they need is a tap rather than a press to get going.
With its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth streaming, the Brane X is an outdoor speaker that should offer more than just streaming tracks from a phone. Download the Brane app and that provides some means of customisation but not as much as I might have suspected for a speaker that costs this much.
There’s a five-band custom EQ option, you can change the LED brightness from Dim to High, and you can even edit the language for the voice announcements (sprechen sie Deutsch?) – though, strangely, you’ll get an announcement for successfully changing a setting when you’ve actually done nothing at all.
You can convert the Brane X into its Soundbar Mode via its AUX connection. It needs to be toggled on in the app. I didn’t use this feature mainly because I’m not sure of its worth.
It would add another string to the Brane’s bow but the size of the speaker is a genuine obstacle to putting it in front of a TV (unless it’s wall-mounted), and you’ll need an adapter to connect the AUX cable to your TV – so it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the added effort.
There’s voice assistant support through Alexa over Wi-Fi, which also makes this a smart speaker if you want. If you want to group multiple Brane speakers together, that’s also possible with up to eight speakers. You can sync them in stereo or go full party mode.
The Brane X supports Spotify Connect, Pandora, Prime Music, SiriusXM, Deezer and TuneIn music streaming services, though none of these are accessible through the app itself. Curiously, for a speaker that markets itself as a premium option, there’s no support for Tidal Connect or Qobuz Connect as far as I can tell. And the X does disappear from the list of options in Spotify Connect from time to time.
Exit the app and the speaker loses connection with it, which can get annoying after a while. That the app offers no playback controls feels like an odd omission for an app that is the centrepiece of the Brane X experience.
When you’re back in the app, you can customise the levels of bass from Low, Medium, and High. Low is more than good enough but if you want to bring the noise then the High setting will gladly accept your request.
It’s able to achieve this level of bass thanks to Brane’s Repel-Attract Driver, which it niftily calls RAD. It’s able (at least, Brane claims) to drop down to 27.1Hz.
A quick one on battery life. Brane says the X can reach up to 12 hours at a moderate volume, which, if it sounds vague, it’s probably because it is vague.
Over a Wi-Fi connection, I played it for an hour using my usual Spotify test playlist at 50% volume and it fell around 10%, which would suggest that you can get 10 hours from the speaker, and certainly more if you turned the volume down.
That said, 12 hours is still short of the Sonos Move 2 (24) or Marshall Kilburn III (30+).
If the speaker runs out of battery, which it’s likely to do as the battery depletes when it’s off, it can charge back to 100% in three hours flat.
What makes the Brane X so good as an outdoor speaker is that, despite having “all the bass”, it’s not all about the bass. The Brane X offers an accomplished sound.
Over a Wi-Fi connection, the Brane pipes through a lot of clarity, detail and just outright power, with bass so big I turned the volume down (it was already on the Low bass setting). It’s quite the thump produced from the speaker, but the strength and power of the lows are controlled – they never veer into the midrange and affect the clarity or tone of voices.
It might struggle to communicate sub-bass rumbles some of the time, but it’s quite comfortably the best bass performance I’ve heard from an outdoor speaker recently.
At first I thought that the soundstage wasn’t very wide with music congested in the middle, but it turns out that the Brane is just relaying tracks as they are. Play a track that is expansive and it and exists beyond the speaker’s width, which is not something that all speakers do. This isn’t a flat soundstage, as there’s depth to the sound, creating a layered effect with voices up front and instruments behind.
There’s a naturalistic tone to its performance, a neutrality that avoids sounding obviously warm or noticeably clinical. There’s dynamism but a slight, gentle uplift or downshift, with energy provided to tracks by the RAD configuration that emphasises the lows.
All these positives appear in Lake Street Drive’s Hypotheticals, where the speaker conveys good depth to the soundstage, a width that creates a spacious sound, with clear, weighty bass that’s controlled, and vocals that are clear and natural-sounding.
With GoGo Penguin’s Ascent, there’s clarity and detail with the highs, getting the right tone rather than sounding too smooth or crisp. With a more tricky track like Come Summer, it does a decent job of unearthing detail in what can come across as a rich but hazy-sounding recording. It’s a high-quality sound, but this is over Wi-Fi, where you’d expect that to be the case. What about its Bluetooth performance?
It’s very good. Even outdoors, free from the Wi-Fi, it delivers a punchy, spacious sound with good levels of detail and clarity. Pushing up through the levels of bass in an outdoor setting, it doesn’t overwhelm the midrange, providing a decent boost with each step up the bass ladder.
There are some tracks where there isn’t much difference in how the Brane X handles bass, so the High setting may not sound as powerful. With The Beatles’ Hey Jude, though, I hear the bass become more resonant and impactful at each level, though there are times when the Low setting is more than enough.
You don’t want to go full blast with this speaker, as at full volume it sounds compressed and lacking detail. But given at half volume it already sounds loud enough, I imagine you won’t need to go so loud.
Most outdoor speakers try their hand at bass and while they sound good, they’re often compromised. There’s no such worries with the Brane X in that department.
Despite a few interesting features, compared to a Sonos Move 2, the feature set is a little lacking, and the ecosystem not as convenient as what Sonos can offer.
The Brane X is not perfect, and if there’s another version in the offing, there are areas where it could be refined and bettered. But in terms of what it set out to – to bring the bass – it hits the bullseye.
Granted, outdoor speakers don’t always have the most features, but with its Wi-Fi support, it does feel as if Brane could have made more from its feature set. I’ve not been able to play any Tidal or Qobuz on this speaker, and given the premium price, it’s an odd black hole in terms of music sources. Yes, I could play those services over Bluetooth, but then they’d be lossy and compressed.
If it’s bass you’re after, then the Brane X brings it better than any outdoor speaker I’ve tested.
The Brane X was tested over four weeks and compared to similarly priced Bluetooth speakers.
Tracks were used to test bass, midrange and treble performance, while a battery drain was carried out, and the Bluetooth connection tested over long distances.
| Brane X Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £449 |
| USA RRP | $449 |
| Manufacturer | – |
| IP rating | IP57 |
| Battery Hours | 12 |
| Size (Dimensions) | 237 x 177 x 155 MM |
| Weight | 3.5 KG |
| Release Date | 2024 |
| Driver (s) | Two 2.5-inch mid-range, two 19mm tweeters, one high excusion RAD subwoofer |
| Ports | Aux input |
| Audio (Power output) | 200 W |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth |
| Colours | Black |
| Frequency Range | – Hz |
| Speaker Type | Portable Speaker |
Amidst all the other chaos and damage RFK Jr. is doing in his current role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we noted a few weeks back that he was also seemingly having a hard time finding someone to fill the opening for CDC Director. That opening, created when Kennedy fired Susan Monarez after only a few weeks on the job back in August of last year (!!!), has been vacant this entire time, with only temporary stand-ins filling the gap.
And then something truly remarkable happened. The Trump administration announced it was nominating Dr. Erica Schwartz for the position. And the notable thing about Schwartz is that… she’s a perfectly qualified, reasonable pick for the role. Many took this as yet another sign that the White House had begun attempting to rein in Kennedy so that his particular brand of nonsense didn’t get the GOP killed in the midterms. The nomination was so bizarrely reasonable that public health policy wonks immediately worried aloud that this couldn’t possibly work under Kennedy.
Outside public health experts have praised her nomination, highlighting her qualifications. But, they’re also wary of how an evidence-based health official will be able to function amid Kennedy’s anti-vaccine efforts and interference from the many like-minded allies he has installed at the CDC.
“As a well-trained and credentialed physician and former Deputy Surgeon General, Erica Schwartz possesses the medical background and public health knowledge to understand that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must be guided by evidence-based science,” Georges Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement. “She will need to use sound managerial and negotiation skills to navigate the rebuilding of our nation’s public health system.”
Jerome Adams, who served as Trump’s surgeon general in his first administration, posted on social media that Schwartz is a “battle-tested leader with decades of distinguished public service,” and that he was “cautiously optimistic” of her selection. As the leader of the CDC, “she’ll excel,” he said, with the caveat, “if [she’s] allowed to follow the science without political interference.”
Unfortunately for anyone optimistic that this would force Kennedy to return to sanity in public health policy, his recent appearance before Congress indicates that he’s not interested in complying. In those hearings, Kennedy was asked several questions about whether he would stop screwing with vaccine policy to bend it to his personal whims, and whether he would support the work of and listen to Schwartz if confirmed as CDC Director.
In a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Kennedy refused to commit to supporting evidence-based vaccine policy from the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, he refused to say that he wouldn’t interfere with the agency’s recommendations.
Kennedy’s response Tuesday suggested Schwartz could face an equally short tenure. His answer came amid an exchange with Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Ruiz asked Kennedy: “If Dr. Schwartz is confirmed, will you commit on the record today to implement whatever vaccine guidance she issues without interference?”
Kennedy replied without hesitation: “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”
There is danger in this for Kennedy. This administration, and particularly its mad king leader, do not like having their power challenged. There is a reason that Schwartz was tapped for this role and sure as hell isn’t because the Trump team thinks all is well at HHS. Or, at least, it knows they have a problem with public perception of the work that Kennedy is doing there. To have the administration offer up the rare sane nomination, only to have Kennedy state before Congress that he’s not committed to taking her seriously, is a public slap in the face to Trump. And one that will be memorialized in congressional hearing notes.
In other words, this nomination of Schwartz is a no-lose situation for the American public, in my view. Either she’ll be allowed to do her work in a competent way, which is great for a country suffering through a measles outbreak, or she won’t and the Trump administration will have to do something about it. Firing her would, I would guess, amount to Kennedy firing himself.
Now we wait to see which route this goes.
Filed Under: cdc, donald trump, erica schwartz, health & human services, rfk jr., vaccines
The U.S. military works to keep vehicles and aircraft operational and ready to go at all times. It’s the only way to ensure that each branch of the armed forces has what it needs in order to properly carry out missions, both in peacetime and during war. This also applies to U.S. Navy vessels, including the USS New Jersey, which was returned to active service in early April 2026. Belonging to the advanced nuclear-powered Virginia-class, this submarine recently completed its Post-Shakedown Availability (PSA) at Newport News Shipbuilding.
PSA is a scheduled shipyard maintenance period and without it, any issues the New Jersey had would likely not be identified and addressed until much later. In this case, the PSA also consisted of upgrading the New Jersey’s combat systems and electronics. Once the work was done, the fast-attack sub underwent sea trials to ensure full operational capability. At that point, the New Jersey, which shares its name with the most decorated U.S. battleship, was returned to the Navy. Thanks to its upgrades, the vessel should strengthen the Navy’s attack submarine fleet.
The USS New Jersey was originally delivered to the Navy in April 2024. It was built as part of the long-standing agreement between Newport News Shipbuilding and General Dynamics Electric Boat. It was the 11th Virginia-class boat delivered by Newport News Shipbuilding and the 23rd built under that partnership. Designed to support a modern crew structure, the New Jersey’s production included the efforts of thousands of shipbuilders and suppliers.
The USS New Jersey was commissioned by the Navy on September 14, 2024, marking the submarine’s official entry into active service. The New Jersey operates under Submarine Squadron 8, a force that maintains and keeps vessels ready for global undersea missions. With a crew of about 135, the submarine was introduced as a highly advanced and fully integrated platform. It was designed to carry out a wide range of operations including anti-submarine and anti-ship warfare, strike missions, and more.
As a Virginia-class submarine, the New Jersey is built with complex systems that can process data, support tactical awareness, and enable command decisions during operations. Perhaps more advanced than the Seawolf-class, Virginia-class subs can launch a variety of weapons, including cruise missiles, torpedoes, and unmanned vehicles. But not only does the New Jersey engage in warfare, it can also gather intelligence, perform surveillance, and reconnaissance. This is what makes the Virginia-class one of the most flexible classes of vessels in the U.S. Navy’s fleet.
The New Jersey also stands out because it’s built to support an integrated crew, carrying both men and women onboard. In fact, it’s the first sub of its class with that capability, and is part of the U.S. Navy’s more modern approach to submarine design. In addition to its design features, the New Jersey measures 377 feet long, has a 34-foot beam, and can reach speeds over 25 knots, or just under 29 miles per hour.
In short: The US government’s 9.9% stake in Intel, acquired for $8.9 billion last August by converting CHIPS Act grants and Secure Enclave funds into equity at $20.47/share, is now worth approximately $36 billion after Intel’s stock surged 20%+ on a massive Q1 earnings beat. The $26.5 billion unrealised gain is one of the most profitable government investments in American industrial history, but it was accidental: Trump opposed the CHIPS Act’s conditions and converted the grants to equity as fiscal discipline, not industrial strategy. No exit plan has been articulated.
The United States government owns approximately 433 million shares of Intel, acquired last August for $8.9 billion at $20.47 per share. After Intel’s stock surged more than 20% on Wednesday following a first-quarter earnings beat that nobody on Wall Street had modelled, that stake is worth roughly $36 billion. The unrealised gain is $26.5 billion, a 300% return in eight months. It is, by any measure, one of the most profitable government investments in American industrial history. It is also one that almost nobody in Washington intended to make.
The story of how the federal government ended up holding a 9.9% stake in America’s most important chipmaker is a story about political opportunism producing an accidentally excellent outcome. The CHIPS and Science Act, signed in 2022, allocated $52 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Intel was awarded the largest share: $8.5 billion in grants plus $11 billion in loans. When the Trump administration took office, it opposed the programme’s conditions, which included project labour agreements, union crew requirements for plant construction, restrictions on stock buybacks for five years, and a commitment by Intel to invest $100 billion of its own capital. Rather than disburse the remaining grants, the administration converted $5.7 billion in unpaid CHIPS Act funds and $3.2 billion from the Secure Enclave defence programme into a direct equity stake. The original conditions were stripped. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it handing “billions of dollars to Intel, with no meaningful strings attached.”
Trump had previously called the CHIPS Act “a terrible deal” and advocated for its repeal. The equity conversion was framed not as industrial strategy but as fiscal discipline: if the government was going to spend taxpayer money on a chipmaker, it should at least own a piece of the company. The structure includes a five-year warrant for an additional 5% of Intel shares at $20, exercisable only if Intel sells majority control of its foundry business, a poison pill designed to keep domestic chip manufacturing under American ownership. The government holds no board seat and has agreed to vote its shares in alignment with Intel’s board, making it a passive investor with no direct management influence.
What has changed is not the government’s involvement but Intel’s trajectory. Intel beat earnings expectations for six straight quarters under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who replaced the ousted Pat Gelsinger in March 2025. First-quarter revenue was $13.6 billion, 10% above the consensus estimate. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.29, twenty-nine times the $0.01 analysts had expected. Data centre and AI revenue hit $5.1 billion, up 22% year over year. The company guided second-quarter revenue of $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion, roughly $1 billion above expectations. Intel’s stock is up more than 80% year to date, after rising 84% in 2025. The government bought near the bottom of a cycle that has since reversed dramatically.
Gelsinger was forced out in December 2024 after Intel’s stock had fallen 60% under his leadership, the company posted a $16.6 billion loss, halted its dividend, and announced 15,000 layoffs. Lip-Bu Tan, the former Cadence Design Systems chief executive and a former Intel board member, inherited a company in crisis and has delivered a turnaround that Time magazine recognised by naming him to its 100 most influential people list. He cut more than 20,000 additional jobs, refocused the company on its 18A chipmaking process, and secured partnerships that had seemed implausible a year earlier.
Intel 18A, the process node that integrates RibbonFET gate-all-around transistors and PowerVia backside power delivery, reached high-volume manufacturing in January 2026. Yields exceed 60% and are improving at roughly 7% per month, with industry-standard levels expected by 2027. Microsoft is using Intel Foundry to produce custom AI accelerators. Amazon is commissioning custom Xeon chips and an AI fabric chip. Musk’s teams contacted major chip equipment suppliers for the $25 billion Terafab AI chip plant, which Intel was named as the foundry partner for, arguably the single largest catalyst for the stock’s surge. Nvidia, despite pausing its own 18A testing over yield concerns, invested $5 billion in Intel common stock, a vote of confidence in the company if not yet in the process node.
The national security case for domestic chip manufacturing has only strengthened since the CHIPS Act was written. Semiconductor supply chains face acute raw material shortages because of the Middle East conflict, with South Korea’s chip industry scrambling for naphtha derivatives essential to photoresist coatings and wafer processing. China-Taiwan tensions remain the industry’s existential risk: if China disrupts TSMC’s fabs, the United States would lose access to the foundry that produces approximately 64% of the world’s advanced chips. Chinese foundries are racing to expand chip capacity, with Nexchip filing for a Hong Kong listing to fund a $5.1 billion new fab, demonstrating that Beijing’s investment in semiconductor self-sufficiency has not slowed despite American export controls.
The Secure Enclave programme, which provided $3.2 billion of the government’s investment, exists specifically to give the US military a domestic source for classified chip production. Intel is building two fabs in Ohio at a cost of $28 billion and two more in Arizona at $32 billion, though the Ohio facilities have been delayed to 2030 or 2031, years behind the original schedule. Intel’s share of the global foundry market remains below 5%, against TSMC’s 64% and Samsung’s 12%. The government’s bet is that Intel can close that gap. The $26.5 billion return to date is a function of the market’s increasing willingness to believe the same thing.
The last time the US government held a comparable stake in a major corporation was during the auto bailout of 2008 and 2009, when it acquired 60.8% of the restructured General Motors under the Troubled Asset Relief Programme. The government exited fully by 2013, taking a net loss of approximately $12.1 billion. The Intel investment differs in two critical ways: it was not a crisis rescue, and it is sitting on an enormous gain. Those differences create a problem that the GM bailout never did. No one in Washington has articulated a plan for what to do with a $36 billion stake in a company that produces chips for AI data centres, military systems, and consumer electronics.
The Council on Foreign Relations has tracked the Intel holding as part of a broader Trump administration pattern of building a “strategic portfolio” of investments in national security-related companies spanning semiconductors, minerals, and nuclear energy. The Cato Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute have raised concerns about the precedent of government ownership of private companies, with the latter comparing it to Peronist industrial policy. The Chicago Policy Review argued it was “common sense, not socialism.” The irony is that the ideological debate is being conducted against the backdrop of a $26.5 billion gain that makes the investment impossible to criticise on financial terms, whatever one thinks of the principle.
Analysts remain split. Of 30 covering Intel, 11 rate it a buy, 24 a hold, and 5 a sell. The consensus price target of approximately $47 sits well below where the stock is now trading, suggesting that either analysts are lagging the turnaround or the market has priced in more optimism than the fundamentals warrant. The government, as a passive shareholder with no exit timeline, no board seat, and no stated disposition strategy, is along for the ride. It converted a political dispute over labour conditions into the most profitable public investment since TARP, and it did so by accident. The question is whether that accident produces a policy framework, a disorderly exit, or something that nobody in Washington has thought of yet, because the chips programme was designed to build fabs, not to generate venture-capital returns for the US Treasury.
Microsoft introduced Copilot’s agent mode in 2025, promising customers new “intelligent” ways to streamline document creation while large language models handle much of the work. The feature is now generally available across at least three applications in the Microsoft 365 suite, reflecting Microsoft’s broader push to embed AI more deeply…
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In short: X-Energy raised $1.02 billion in the largest nuclear IPO on record, pricing at $23 (21% above range) on the Nasdaq, with shares surging 31% on opening to imply a $12 billion market cap. The offering was 15x oversubscribed. The same company failed to close a $1 billion SPAC in 2023. The difference is AI-driven data centre power demand: Amazon committed to 5 GW by 2039, Dow Chemical and Centrica signed on, and the SMR offtake pipeline doubled to 45 GW in 18 months.
In October 2023, X-Energy and Ares Acquisition Corporation mutually terminated a SPAC merger that had valued the nuclear reactor developer at $1.05 billion. The deal collapsed because public market conditions were, in the company’s words, “persistently volatile.” Ares liquidated. X-Energy went back to raising private capital. On Thursday, eighteen months later, X-Energy began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker XE after pricing an upsized initial public offering at $23 per share, 21% above the top of its marketed range. It raised $1.02 billion, the largest nuclear public offering on record. The IPO was 15 times oversubscribed. One-third of institutional orders received zero allocation. Shares opened at $30.11, a 31% pop, and traded as high as $31.33 during the session. The implied market capitalisation exceeded $12 billion. What changed between the failed SPAC and the oversubscribed IPO was not the reactor. The Xe-100 existed in 2023. What changed was that the world discovered it needed the power.
The Xe-100 is a Generation IV high-temperature gas-cooled reactor using a pebble-bed design. Each unit produces 80 megawatts of electrical power, cooled by helium gas, fuelled by proprietary TRISO-X particles, tri-structural isotropic coated uranium enriched to below 20%. The fuel is encased in spheres of ceramic and carbon designed not to melt under any postulated condition, retaining more than 99.99% of fission products. The reactor requires no large water supply, no active safety systems, and no emergency diesel generators to prevent fuel damage. It can ramp from 40% to full power in 12 minutes, a load-following capability that makes it suited to pairing with the variable demand profiles of data centres. The design uses four operator-controlled variables. A conventional nuclear plant uses hundreds.
X-Energy’s TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, received a 40-year special nuclear material licence from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the first new fuel fabrication licence in approximately 50 years and the first for a Category II facility. The construction permit application for X-Energy’s flagship project, a four-unit Xe-100 plant at Dow Chemical’s Seadrift operations site in Texas, was accepted by the NRC in May 2025, with an 18-month review timeline. The Department of Energy selected X-Energy alongside Bill Gates’s TerraPower for its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Programme in 2020, committing approximately $1.2 billion to the Xe-100 and TRISO fuel development. The technology has been in development for over a decade. The capital to commercialise it arrived only when the customers did.
Amazon led X-Energy’s $500 million Series C-1 funding round in October 2024 and signed a binding agreement to purchase up to five gigawatts of nuclear power from the company by 2039. The first project under that agreement is the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, a four-unit 320-megawatt installation in Washington state developed with the public utility Energy Northwest, expandable to 12 units and 960 megawatts. Amazon’s nuclear strategy extends beyond X-Energy: it acquired Talen Energy’s data centre campus adjacent to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania for $650 million and secured a 1,920-megawatt power purchase agreement through 2042. It is exploring a 300-megawatt SMR project with Dominion Energy in Virginia. Amazon needs reliable, carbon-free baseload power for AI data centres that renewables cannot provide around the clock, and rising energy costs are threatening cloud infrastructure globally as geopolitical instability reshapes the economics of electricity.
Dow Chemical’s Seadrift project will replace ageing fossil fuel infrastructure with four Xe-100 units supplying both electricity and industrial steam, with Fluor as engineering partner. Centrica signed a six-gigawatt joint development agreement for the United Kingdom’s first advanced reactor fleet. X-Energy’s total customer pipeline exceeds 11 gigawatts, equivalent to roughly 144 Xe-100 units. The IEA reported this week that AI data centre electricity consumption will triple by 2030 and that the pipeline of conditional offtake agreements between data centre operators and SMR projects has nearly doubled from 25 gigawatts at the end of 2024 to 45 gigawatts today. AI companies are racing to secure data centre capacity, with Mistral alone raising $830 million to build a single 44-megawatt facility near Paris. The power to run those facilities is the constraint. Nuclear is the only carbon-free source that runs at full output regardless of weather, time of day, or season.
X-Energy is the third advanced nuclear company to reach the public markets, after NuScale Power and Oklo. NuScale holds the only NRC design certification for a small modular reactor in the United States but has struggled commercially after the cancellation of its flagship project with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems. Its stock has been volatile. Oklo, backed by Sam Altman, trades at a market capitalisation of approximately $8.9 billion on revenues that remain minimal, with its stock up 248% over six months on the strength of the AI-nuclear narrative and its Aurora microreactor design. Kairos Power, backed by Google, secured the first NRC construction permit for a Generation IV reactor in December 2023 for its Hermes test facility but remains private. TerraPower, Gates’s venture, is building its Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor with ARDP funding alongside X-Energy but has not announced IPO plans.
X-Energy’s $12 billion market capitalisation on its first day of trading reflects neither its current revenue, approximately $163 million, nor its reactor’s commercial readiness, which is still years from first power. It reflects the market’s assessment that nuclear is no longer a regulatory burden to be tolerated but a strategic asset to be owned. Massive private capital is flowing into nuclear energy across both fission and fusion, with Proxima Fusion seeking two billion euros for a fusion test facility in Germany and record funding pouring into nuclear energy startups across Europe. The World Economic Forum published an article this month titled “This energy crisis is ushering in a global nuclear renaissance,” citing the Strait of Hormuz disruption and AI power demand as twin catalysts. The 15-times oversubscription of X-Energy’s IPO is consistent with that thesis. Whether the thesis is correct is a different question.
The Xe-100 has not produced a watt of commercial electricity. The Seadrift construction permit is under NRC review. The Energy Northwest project is in early development. The Centrica agreement is a framework, not a signed power purchase contract. X-Energy’s TRISO-X fuel facility has a licence but is not yet producing fuel at commercial scale. The company’s $1.02 billion in IPO proceeds and approximately $1.8 billion raised privately will fund development through the next phase, but advanced nuclear projects routinely experience delays and cost overruns that dwarf initial estimates. NuScale’s history is instructive: it received NRC design certification in 2023, lost its anchor customer in the same year, and has spent the time since searching for a replacement. Regulatory approval does not guarantee commercial viability. It only guarantees that the regulatory question has been answered.
The gap between X-Energy’s market valuation and its commercial reality is not unique to nuclear. It is the same gap that exists across the AI infrastructure supply chain, from Nvidia’s forward-looking multiples to CoreWeave’s debt-funded expansion to alternative approaches to powering AI infrastructure that include data centres in orbit. The market is pricing the future demand for AI compute as a near certainty and the supply of energy to run that compute as the binding constraint. X-Energy sits on the supply side of that constraint with a reactor design that has government backing, a fuel licence that took 50 years to issue to anyone, an 11-gigawatt customer pipeline anchored by Amazon, and a share price that assumes all of it will work. The failed SPAC valued the company at $1 billion when nobody needed the power. The IPO valued it at $12 billion because everybody does. The reactor has not changed. The bet is that the need will not change either.
The flagship smartphone race has become a little too polite, especially when it comes to mobile photography. There was a time when the conversation revolved around megapixel counts, sensor count, and wild zoom numbers. But over the last few years, that energy has cooled.
The biggest brands no longer behave like they are trying to shock the market. Companies like Apple and Samsung now focus more on refining image processing and fine-tuning the formula than on pushing camera hardware into genuinely outrageous territory.
Then a phone like the Oppo Find X9 Ultra shows up and reminds you what old-school flagship ambitions used to look like.
And yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds. There are not one, but two 200MP cameras here. The phone packs a 200MP main camera, a 200MP 3x telephoto, a 50MP 10x optical telephoto, and a 50MP ultrawide, all wrapped in Hasselblad branding and a camera-first design that only adds to the whole overkill appeal.
The Oppo Find X9 Ultra lands as unapologetically excessive in a market that has become increasingly careful. This is the first phone to bring back a 10x optical zoom since the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. And the best part is that you are not sacrificing shorter zoom performance either, because Oppo also throws in a massive 200MP 3x telephoto. This is one of the most aggressive hardware plays we have seen in smartphone photography in years.
Apple and Samsung still make reliable camera phones. Their flagships are built around consistency, broad appeal, and careful decision-making. Oppo’s phone feels like it was built by people who simply wanted more. More character, more hardware, and more of a reason to get excited. The Hasselblad tuning, the special filters, and the overall shooting experience all push it closer to the feel of using an actual camera instead of just another polished flagship phone.
Add in the accessories, and the phone just becomes absurdly cool. Oppo built an entire Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit around the idea that this phone should behave like a real camera. With the Oppo Hasselblad 300mm Explorer Teleconverter attachment, the 3x telephoto turns into a 300mm equivalent focal length, which works out to roughly 13x optical zoom.
Would I like every flagship phone to come with this kind of camera ambition? Absolutely. Is that realistic? Probably not. And honestly, it does not need to be.
Oppo clearly built this for enthusiasts. But after using the Find X9 Pro, one thing that really stood out to me about these camera-first phones is the experience they create. It starts with one quick shot, and before long, you are taking pictures of everything around you. You start noticing light differently. You start framing ordinary things like they matter more.
And the brand understands this.
Oppo acts like smartphone photography has room for obsession. Room for niche advantages. Room for a phone that goes harder on zoom, harder on sensor size, and harder on sheer camera bravado than the mainstream brands are willing to attempt.
It definitely won’t click with everyone, but the magic is there if you’re willing to try. The Find X9 Ultra feels ambitious, a little unreasonable, and fully committed to the idea that flagship photography should still feel like a race.
This weekend’s watchlist has two psychological thrillers that will mess with your head in completely different ways, and one animated series that has no business being this good.
Whether you are in the mood for small-town dread, generational trauma wrapped in Southern Gothic atmosphere, or a Big Pharma conspiracy told through some of the most distinctive animation on television right now, there is something here for you. All three are on HBO Max, criminally underrated, and at least one of them will stick with you long after the credits roll.
We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.
Based on Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, this is eight episodes of psychological tension that never lets up. Amy Adams plays a troubled journalist who returns to her suffocating hometown to cover the murders of two young girls, only to find herself unraveling alongside the investigation.
What makes Sharp Objects special is that it is less of a murder mystery and more a study of inherited trauma, toxic motherhood, and the damage small towns do to the people who grow up in them. Patricia Clarkson is quietly terrifying as Adora. The ending hit me like a freight train. Stick through the final credits of the last episode, seriously!
You can watch Sharp Objects on HBO Max.
It looks like a crime drama on the surface, but The Outsider has a much stranger agenda. A young boy is found murdered in a small Georgia town, and the evidence overwhelmingly points to one man. However, that same man has an airtight alibi and that central impossibility becomes the hook that drives the whole show.
The character, Ralph Anderson, played by Ben Mendelsohn, is excellent as the detective unwilling to accept what he is seeing. But it is Cynthia Erivo as investigator Holly Gibney who completely steals the show. She walks in around episode 3, and the whole series changes gear. Fair warning, the pace is deliberate and the finale is divisive. But if you enjoy atmospheric slow burns with great performances, this one is worth your time.
You can watch The Outsider on HBO Max.
It is an animated TV series, and a lot of people have slept on it, but I highly recommend it. Two former high school friends discover a mushroom that can cure every known disease, and immediately find themselves hunted by Big Pharma, the DEA, and international corporations determined to bury it.
I know it sounds absurd, and it kind of is, but the show handles its conspiracy thriller premise with real wit and surprising emotional depth. Co-created by the team behind Scavengers Reign and produced by Greg Daniels of The Office fame, it holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The animation style is distinctive and takes an episode to get used to, but once it clicks, you will not want to stop.
You can watch Common Side Effects on HBO Max.
During Operation Lunar Peek in November 2024, attackers gained unauthenticated remote admin access — and eventual root — across more than 13,000 exposed Palo Alto Networks management interfaces. Palo Alto Networks scored CVE-2024-0012 at 9.3 and CVE-2024-9474 at 6.9 under CVSS v4.0. NVD scored the same pair 9.8 and 7.2 under CVSS v3.1. Two scoring systems. Two different answers for the same vulnerabilities. The 6.9 fell below patch thresholds. Admin access appeared required. The 9.3 sat queued for maintenance. Segmentation would hold.
“Adversaries circumvent [severity ratings] by chaining vulnerabilities together,” Adam Meyers, SVP of Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview on April 22, 2026. On the triage logic that missed the chain: “They just had amnesia from 30 seconds before.”
Both CVEs sit on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Neither score flagged the kill chain. The triage logic that consumed those scores treated each CVE as an isolated event, and so did the SLA dashboards and the board reports those dashboards feed.
CVSS did exactly what it was designed to do. Score one vulnerability at a time. The problem is that adversaries do not attack one vulnerability at a time.
“CVSS base scores are theoretical measures of severity that ignore real-world context,” wrote Peter Chronis, former CISO of Paramount and a security leader with Fortune 100 experience. By moving beyond CVSS-first prioritization at Paramount, Chronis reported reducing actionable critical and high-risk vulnerabilities by 90%. Chris Gibson, executive director of FIRST, the organization that maintains CVSS, has been equally direct: using CVSS base scores alone for prioritization is “the least apt and accurate” method, Gibson told The Register. FIRST’s own EPSS and CISA’s SSVC decision model address part of this gap by adding exploitation probability and decision-tree logic.
In 2025, 48,185 CVEs were disclosed, a 20.6% year-over-year increase. Jerry Gamblin, principal engineer at Cisco Threat Detection and Response, projects 70,135 for 2026. The infrastructure behind the scores is buckling under that weight. NIST announced on April 15 that CVE submissions have grown 263% since 2020, and the NVD will now prioritize enrichment for KEV and federal critical software only.
1. Chained CVEs that look safe until they aren’t
The Palo Alto pair from Operation Lunar Peek is the textbook. CVE-2024-0012 bypassed authentication. CVE-2024-9474 escalated privileges. Scored separately under both CVSS v4.0 and v3.1, the escalation flaw filtered below most enterprise patch thresholds because admin access appeared required. The authentication bypass upstream eliminated that prerequisite entirely. Neither score communicated the compound effect.
Meyers described the operational psychology: teams assessed each CVE independently, deprioritized the lower score, and queued the higher one for maintenance.
2. Nation-state adversaries who weaponize patches within days
The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report documented a 42% year-over-year increase in vulnerabilities exploited as zero-days before public disclosure. Average breakout time across observed intrusions: 29 minutes. Fastest observed breakout: 27 seconds. China-nexus adversaries weaponized newly patched vulnerabilities within two to six days of disclosure.
“Before it was Patch Tuesday once a month. Now it’s patch every day, all the time. That’s what this new world looks like,” said Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike. A KEV addition treated as a routine queue item on Tuesday becomes an active exploitation window by Thursday.
3. Stockpiled CVEs that nation-state actors hold for years
Salt Typhoon accessed senior U.S. political figures’ communications during the presidential transition by chaining CVE-2023-20198 with CVE-2023-20273 on internet-facing Cisco devices, a privilege escalation pair patched in October 2023 and still unapplied more than a year later. Compromised credentials provided a parallel entry vector. The patches existed. Neither was applied.
Sixty-seven percent of vulnerabilities exploited by China-nexus adversaries in 2025 were remote code execution flaws providing immediate system access, according to the CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report. CVSS does not degrade priority based on how long a CVE has gone unpatched. No board metric tracks aging KEV exposure.
That silence is the vulnerability.
4. Identity gaps that never enter the scoring system
A 2023 help desk social engineering call against a major enterprise produced more than $100 million in losses. No CVE was assigned. No CVSS score existed. No patch pipeline entry was created. The vulnerability was a human process gap in identity verification, sitting entirely outside the scoring system’s aperture.
“A pro needs a zero day if all you have to do is call the help desk and say I forgot my password,” Meyers said.
Agentic AI systems now carry their own identity credentials, API tokens, and permission scopes, operating outside traditional vulnerability management governance. Merritt Baer, CSO at Enkrypt AI, has argued on record that identity-surface controls are vulnerability equivalents belonging in the same reporting pipeline as software CVEs. In most organizations, help desk authentication gaps and agentic AI credential inventories live in a separate governance silo. In practice, nobody’s governance.
5. AI-accelerated discovery that breaks pipeline capacity
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview demonstrated autonomous vulnerability discovery, finding a 27-year-old signed integer overflow in OpenBSD’s TCP SACK implementation across roughly 1,000 scaffold runs at a total compute cost under $20,000. Meyers offered a thought-experiment projection in the exclusive interview with VentureBeat: if frontier AI drives a 10x volume increase, the result is approximately 480,000 CVEs annually. Pipelines built for 48,000 break at 70,000 and collapse at 480,000. NVD enrichment is already gone for non-KEV submissions.
“If the adversary is now able to find vulnerabilities faster than the defenders or the business, that’s a huge problem, because those vulnerabilities become exploits,” said Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike on Thursday launched Project QuiltWorks, a remediation coalition with Accenture, EY, IBM Cybersecurity Services, Kroll, and OpenAI formed to address the vulnerability volume that frontier AI models are now generating in production code. When five major firms build a coalition around a pipeline problem, no single organization’s patch workflow can keep pace.
The five failure classes above map to five specific actions.
Run a chain-dependency audit on every KEV CVE in the environment this month. Flag any co-resident CVE scored 5.0 or above, the threshold where privilege escalation and lateral movement capabilities typically appear in CVSS vectors. Any pair chaining authentication bypass to privilege escalation gets triaged as critical regardless of individual scores.
Compress KEV-to-patch SLAs to 72 hours for internet-facing systems. The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report breakout data, 29-minute average and 27-second fastest, makes weekly patch windows indefensible in a board presentation.
Build a monthly KEV aging report for the board. Every unpatched KEV CVE, days since disclosure, days since patch availability, and owner. Salt Typhoon exploited a Cisco CVE patched 14 months earlier because no escalation path existed for aging exposure.
Add identity-surface controls to the vulnerability reporting pipeline. Help desk authentication gaps and agentic AI credential inventories belong in the same SLA framework as software CVEs. If they sit in a separate governance silo, they sit in nobody’s governance.
Stress-test pipeline capacity at 1.5x and 10x current CVE volume. Gamblin projects 70,135 for 2026. Meyers’s thought-experiment projection: frontier AI could push annual volume past 480,000. Present the capacity gap to the CFO before the next budget cycle, not after the breach that proves the gap existed.
Apple has recently announced that Tim Cook, its current CEO who has overseen the launch of plenty of new hardware and software, is moving to a new role as Executive Chairman.
John Ternus, Cook’s direct report, has been announced as Apple’s new CEO and will start his new role from September 1st 2026 – presumably in time for the annual iPhone hardware launch which usually takes place in September, and could reveal the iPhone Fold.
But who is John Ternus and what has his career looked like?
We explain everything we know about John Ternus, from his career with Apple to being mentored by Tim Cook himself.
We’ll start with a refresher on Ternus’ mentor. Tim Cook has been Apple’s CEO since 2011, although he has worked at the company since 1998. During his 15 years as CEO, Cook has not only overseen the launch of the likes of Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Vision Pro, but also new services including Apple Pay, Apple TV and Apple Music too.
According to Apple, Cook has grown the brand from a market capitalisation of approximately $350 billion to an eye-watering $4 trillion, while yearly revenue has “nearly quadrupled” and reached over $416 billion in fiscal year 2025. In addition, Apple has grown by more than 100,000 team members and increased its active installed base to more than 2.5 billion devices in the past 15 years.
In a community letter, Cook explained that he won’t be leaving Apple altogether, and instead will be transitioning into a new role as Apple’s Executive Chairman.
After working at Apple since 2001, John Ternus has been named as the company’s next CEO and will officially start the new role from September 2026.
Hailed by Tim Cook as being the “perfect person for the job”, Ternus joined Apple’s Product Design team back in 2001 and rose up the ranks to become VP of Hardware Engineering in 2013. In 2021, Ternus then became Senior VP of Hardware Engineering and directly reports to Tim Cook.
Prior to his tenure at Apple, Ternus worked as a Mechanical Engineer at Virtual Research Systems, following graduating with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
Ternus’ background in hardware and product design is noteworthy, as it suggests that Apple isn’t putting all its eggs into software and, specifically, AI. That makes sense, given that it’s Apple’s hardware that’s made headlines, and not necessarily the likes of Apple Intelligence or Siri.
According to Apple, Ternus was “instrumental” in introducing the iPad and AirPods, and oversaw many generations of iPhone, Apple Watch and Mac.
Apple especially praised Ternus’ work on Mac, and stated that he helped the category become more popular globally than “at any time in its 40-year history”.
In addition, Ternus introduced new techniques to keep devices reliable and durable too, while focusing on materials and hardware designs that reduces products’ carbon footprint. This includes creating new, recycled aluminium, 3D printing titanium for the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and better repairability that have increased the lifespans of several Apple products.
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