Bleak Future: A few hours after recovering from the “great Xbox outage” of July 2026, Microsoft is now trying to assure customers that these kinds of systemic issues will not happen again in the future. Transparency is great, but people are questioning why Redmond isn’t removing online requirements for single-player, disc-based games.

Earlier this week, the Xbox network became unavailable to a majority of players. Users were unable to launch their purchased games, sign in, or complete new purchases, with even offline games and disc-based releases being affected by the outage. Most of the issues should now be resolved, although the Xbox team is still investigating the incident in preparation for a full post-incident review.

While the investigation is ongoing, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has shared a few crucial details about the outage. The source of the outage appears to have been a licensing service operating outside the main Xbox infrastructure. Microsoft uses this service to manage licenses and user access to several products, but the Xbox network was hit hard when the service began to fail.

The outage affected both end customers and Xbox partners, Vliet said. Players were unable to sign in in many scenarios requiring an “entitlement check” for purchased products, while Microsoft publishing partners relying on the same system were unable to manage their games. In Microsoft’s parlance, an entitlement check is simply a way to manage digital rights for content “purchased” by end customers.

– Scott Van Vliet (@scottvanvliet) July 28, 2026

In any case, the Xbox support team was quick to identify the “major incident” and isolate the failing part of the network’s infrastructure. They shifted network traffic to other, healthy parts of the network and were eventually able to restore almost full access to the entire Xbox experience. The service came back at different times across the global network, which is why some people regained access before others.

Vliet was adamant that having a single point of failure for a complex network such as Xbox is not an ideal solution going forward. Microsoft is apparently working on “hardening” the systems that sign-in and game-launch processes rely on while improving the team’s responsiveness to this type of platform-breaking problem.

Users welcomed Vliet’s “no bullshit” approach, but some were still frustrated by the fact that a network-related issue was capable of turning their disc-based games into useless plastic coasters.

Now that the industry is preparing for a future where physical games no longer exist, some enthusiasts fear that a failed “entitlement check” could turn thousands of dollars’ worth of purchased games into thin air.

Month-end Apple deals are in full effect at Amazon, with AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 3, and AirPods Max 2 discounted by up to $100.

Those looking for the lowest AirPods price this week can take advantage of Amazon’s $99 special on AirPods 4, reflecting a $30 price cut off MSRP.

Buy AirPods 4 for $99

If you would like the added functionality of Active Noise Cancellation, AirPods 4 with ANC are also marked down, with a $35 discount bringing the price down to $144.99.

AirPods Pro 3 are reduced to $199.99 thanks to a $50 price cut, with delivery as early as today to select locations for Prime members.

The steepest discount can be found on Apple’s over-ear option, with AirPods Max 2 now $100 off at Amazon as well. With the triple-digit savings, you can pick up a pair in any of Apple’s five color options for $449.

Today’s top AirPods deals

Layoffs partially a cost-saving measure, sources told Bloomberg.

Payments giant Visa is cutting roughly 7pc of its workforce in a now familiar pivot towards AI. The layoffs translate to about 2,600 employees.

The job cuts are expected to primarily affect technology and product teams. Visa has European offices in Poland and the UK.

“To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work,” company CEO Ryan McInerney wrote in a memo to staff, parts of which were verified by multiple news organisations.

“AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa.”

Visa’s layoffs come at a transformational moment for the tech industry, which has been rapidly evolving since generative AI’s mainstream popularity skyrocketed in recent years.

Tech leaders, including the likes of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Block’s Jack Dorsey, among several others, have shared their vision for slimmer teams powered with AI for better cost saving and added efficiency.

Fintech Block cut around 40pc of its company’s staff – or around 4,000 people – earlier this year. More recently, Microsoft announced 4,800 job cuts and the parent company behind the Reuters news agency laid off 500 engineering jobs. Even bigger layoffs, including 8,000 job cuts at Meta, were also announced in recent months.

According to technology and start-up layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi, 252 tech companies have cut more than 124,000 jobs so far in this year alone, already crossing the nearly 123,000 that were laid off in the whole of 2025.

Sources, however, told Bloomberg that AI-powered work efficiency was not the only reason behind Visa’s decision to cut jobs.

Visa intends to redirect the funds saved towards consumer payments, business and value-added services, including stablecoins, cross-border and business-to-business offerings, they added.

“I have deep conviction that we are doing what is right for Visa, our clients and our partners as we continue to focus on driving efficiency across the company in order to reinvest in our highest potential opportunities.

“As a result of the choices we have made over the past few years, we are entering a new era in commerce with a business that has real momentum,” McInerney said in the memo.

“We see this in our continued strong financial results, client satisfaction, employee engagement, and breakthrough innovation as we build and ship products better and faster than ever before.”

Net revenue at the company is up 14pc this quarter past to $11.6bn. Company shares gained more than 1pc by trading close on Tuesday (28 July), falling marginally in after-hours trading. Share prices have risen nearly 5pc over the past year.

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Ryan McInerny at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 2025. Image: World Economic Forum via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Visa aimed Anthropic’s Claude Mythos at the infrastructure behind billions of daily transactions, a network that spans more than 200 countries and territories, moves money in roughly 160 currencies, and connects nearly 5 billion payment credentials to more than 175 million merchant locations.

The model stitched minor weaknesses deep in the stack into working exploit chains that would traditionally have surfaced only late in penetration testing. Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology, walked the VB Transform 2026 audience through what came next, including why Visa released the harness that governed the entire hunt as open source and why the company abandoned traditional remediation metrics for a measurement its team invented.

Taneja has run technology strategy, product engineering, and global infrastructure at Visa since 2019, after joining the company in 2013 from Electronic Arts, where he served as CTO following 15 years at Microsoft. He co-authored, with Visa chief information security officer Subra Kumaraswamy, the June 10 blog post announcing the release of the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness on GitHub as a reference implementation that any security team can inspect, adapt, and extend. Visa also published a technical white paper detailing the architecture, lessons learned, and 12 non-negotiable architectural practices for critical infrastructure.

Trust built on pessimism and paranoia

Taneja led with the arithmetic that makes Visa a target worth defending obsessively. Trust at the scale of global payments gets engineered through what he called pessimism and paranoia, by assuming failure and designing around it before failure arrives. The network has been hardened over many years through zero-trust architecture, layered defenses, and highly automated security operations built for the scale and reliability global payments demand.

So when Anthropic invited the organizations behind critical software to test Mythos under Project Glasswing, Visa said yes. Glasswing participants collectively identified more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in the first month of testing across software underpinning critical systems industry-wide, according to Anthropic. Anthropic’s own conclusion placed the bottleneck after discovery, in verification, disclosure, and patching speed. Visa joined to test decades of hardening at AI speed and learn where advanced models could push its defenses further.

What Mythos showed at Visa

Inside Visa’s environment, Mythos demonstrated system-wide, context-aware analysis, surfacing vulnerabilities buried deep in the stack and flagging issues that grow more serious when chained together, with findings clean enough that engineering teams could act on them without wading through noise. Some findings carried critical severity ratings, and Visa credits its zero-trust controls, network segmentation, and layered safeguards with breaking the chain before any external actor could have acted.

That confirmation mattered, Taneja said, but the epiphany that followed mattered more. “In a world of agentic attacks, defense also has to be agentic,” he said. Even at a company that has invested decades in defense-in-depth, the model revealed assumptions the team had been operating under that needed rethinking. Traditional SAST tools keep their place as a first pass against known vulnerability patterns, Visa’s white paper notes, but pattern matching alone cannot follow an adversary who reasons through logic, data flow, and the exploit chains that live between the signatures.

A harness, not a scanner

Visa’s response was not another monolithic scanner. The team built the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness, now in its fifth generation, as a governed pipeline that directs frontier AI models through structured security tasks while enforcing deterministic controls, policy gates, and human oversight at every stage. Taneja walked through the design philosophy. The harness operates across four phases and eleven stages, from code ingestion and threat modeling through deep-dive verification, exploit chain synthesis, and finally remediation and fix validation.

Three design choices drive finding quality, per the project’s own documentation. Threat modeling runs before analysis to focus on the attack surface rather than scanning everything blindly, multi-agent deterministic voting requires convergence across independent reasoning chains before a finding advances, and structured triage artifacts compress the lifecycle from discovery to a result developers can actually ship. The payoff is a pipeline that runs hot by default. A plain scan in the shipped profile runs all eleven stages and edits source files in the target repository in fix mode, applying candidate patches unless the operator stops it at detection.

The harness is multi-model by design. An LLM abstraction layer lets Visa swap or combine providers without changing the control plane, and the open-source version works with Anthropic Claude, OpenAI-compatible models, or a mix. The repo’s documentation is candid about the exception. Applying a fix requires the file-editing tools that only the Anthropic backends expose, so the remediation and validation stages currently require Anthropic models for full functionality, and an OpenAI-compatible model in those roles is limited to report-only output. VentureBeat’s Q2 2026 Pulse research, presented earlier at the conference, reinforces why that provider flexibility matters. Among the enterprises surveyed, 82% rely on provider-native controls as their primary security layer, and 59% plan to adopt or switch agent security tooling within the year. The controls enterprises adopted last year are already becoming the controls they plan to replace.

Mean Time to Adapt replaces legacy metrics

Finding vulnerabilities is no longer the hard part, Taneja argued. The real challenge is how quickly a team can confirm an issue is truly exploitable, fix it, and prove the attack path is closed rather than just showing a patch was applied. Visa calls this Mean Time to Adapt, and the white paper tracks it along three dimensions. Inventory freshness measures how current and complete the organization’s view is of code, configuration, and runtime deployment. Exploitable paths per release counts how many end-to-end attack chains remain possible after each release, not just how many findings were closed. Validation cycle time tracks how long it takes to produce repeatable, evidence-backed proof that a fix works and stays working in production.

That distinction matters because legacy measures such as mean time to detect and raw CVE closure counts can look better on paper while actual exposure keeps growing underneath them. An organization can close hundreds of findings a month and still leave viable exploit chains open if nobody tested whether the patches actually break the attack. MTTA forces teams to measure the outcome that matters, and the white paper leans on CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities data to make the prioritization case, noting that fewer than 1% of CVEs are ever actively exploited. Visa’s SSDLC policy now assumes every exploitable path will be exercised in production and requires it to be remediated before code is promoted.

Supply chain risk accelerates under AI

The conversation moved past Visa’s own perimeter when Taneja turned to suppliers. A well-defended enterprise stays exposed through weak vendors and weak open-source components, the white paper warns, so Visa is making AI-specific security posture a non-negotiable dimension of supplier due diligence, with expectations for continuous vulnerability validation, living software bills of materials, and MTTA baselines across its technology stack.

Visa has also joined Project Lightwell, the $5 billion IBM and Red Hat initiative to harden widely used open-source components through AI-driven validation and coordinated patching, alongside financial institutions including Bank of America, JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs, and Mastercard. The commitment extends the same logic upstream, because the MTTA clock does not pause at any single company’s perimeter.

When agents start buying things

Securing agentic commerce is Visa’s next problem. Taneja described a future where AI agents transact on behalf of consumers and enterprises, and said Visa is building the trust framework, identity layer, and agent readiness scoring that merchants will need before agents can safely complete transactions. Behind that work sits the Visa Payment Threats Lab, a simulation environment where real fraud scenarios get replayed against the authorization rules, thresholds, and configurations Visa actually runs, to surface AI-enabled failure modes as targeted hardening recommendations.

The identity challenge is not theoretical. VentureBeat’s Pulse research found that 69% of enterprises already run credential sharing somewhere in their agent deployments, and companies with shared credentials report security incidents or near-misses at a 63.5% rate, against 40.9% where every agent has its own scoped identity. Visa’s white paper addresses that gap directly, listing “AI agents are identities” among its 12 non-negotiable practices and requiring scoped permissions, least privilege enforcement, full audit trails, and inclusion in IAM governance for every agent that calls an API, reads data, or modifies a system.

Three priorities for defenders

Visa is organizing its defensive strategy around three priorities, Taneja said. Shift security left until exploitable flaws are designed out before they reach production, and replace high-risk, under-supported components before they turn into material exposure. The third is the heaviest lift at Visa’s scale, refactoring defenses to run autonomously under human governance so detection, validation, and response keep pace as threat volume grows and the models behind attacks improve.

None of it requires a payment network’s budget to start. The harness sits on GitHub with 595 stars and 97 forks as of July 20, MTTA needs a dashboard rather than a procurement cycle, and the white paper’s 12 non-negotiable practices map onto architecture reviews security teams already run. Visa’s own conclusion reads like a deadline. The opening to get ahead of machine-speed attackers is still there, the paper argues, and it will not stay open.

Not too long ago, PC gaming was still considered a niche hobby, stereotyped by the typical gamer who lives inside a basement and refuses to come out. Those times, fortunately, are long gone. Esports has grown massively in both viewership and competition, so much so that we have an esports World Cup currently happening in Paris. This popularity is driven mostly by games like Valorant. Even I, famously a MacBook user, have spent countless hours playing Valo with my friends because it’s so much fun. Around 20 million players play the game every month, and some are its biggest fans.

Playing PC games, though, isn’t cheap. You need a capable processor, a GPU that doesn’t throttle when you’re in the middle of a fight, and enough RAM to keep all tasks at bay. Not to mention a high-refresh-rate display, which is super important for hitting those headshots. If you’re in the market for a new machine to take your Valorant gameplay to the next level, I don’t see any better machine than the HP Omen 16 Valorant Edition. It’s the company’s top-of-the-line gaming laptop, complete with a Valorant-inspired design, the Ryzen 9 9955HX processor, an RTX 5070 GPU, and, even in this economy, 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Naturally, when HP sent over the laptop for review, I was very excited to get my hands on it. But is it worth your money? This review should help you answer that.

Design & Hardware

If you love Valorant, there is nothing I can say right now that’ll make you not love this laptop. I’ve tested many limited edition phones, and most times brands just slap a logo on the back and call it a day. That’s not the case with the HP Omen 16. The Valorant inspiration starts with the color. It’s painted VALORANT BLUE, a dark navy blue of sorts that looks very unique among the sea of grey laptops. In the center of the back panel, you’ll find the HyperX logo, which is encircled by the red Valorant logo. I didn’t think this combination would work this well, but it does, and it looks fantastic. But that’s not all. On the back panel’s left side is Valorant written in the iconic font, and the right side lists the game’s maps, along with a small logo.

Open up the laptop, and you’re greeted with the same design cues. The WASD buttons are painted red; there’s another logo on the right and a few other subtle design cues. I think it’s a very faithful attempt at making a special edition laptop that doesn’t go over the top. To confirm, it’s not just me fanboying the laptop; I put it on my Instagram story. Look, I post a lot of new tech to show my friends, and never once have I gotten so many likes on the story as with the Omen 16. People asked me all sorts of things about the laptop, with the main thing being it’s so pretty.

Besides all the Valorant stuff, the HP Omen 16 is made from aluminum. The color finish is matte, so thankfully it doesn’t pick up many fingerprints. However, if you’re like me and eat Doritos while watching a series, please keep your hands away because they will smudge the laptop. I had to give the laptop a thorough clean before taking the review photos. When it comes to handling, the Omen 16 is like a typical gaming laptop. All those powerful internals add weight, 2.47 kg to be precise. I wouldn’t call that too heavy, but carrying around a 16-inch laptop will hurt your back a bit. Still, I was able to take it to my nearby coffee shop for some work without much trouble. If I had to complain, it’d be about the charger, which is a hefty unit and a pain to carry around.

Beyond that, the hinge is a bit wobbly, but it keeps the laptop steady and can be opened with one hand. I also wasn’t worried about the durability since there was almost no chassis flex on the keyboard deck. You can chuck it inside your backpack, and it’ll be fine.

Let’s talk ports. With a gaming laptop, brands can’t get away with bundling just one USB-C port. And fortunately, that’s not the case with the Omen 16. On the left and right sides, there are two USB Type-A 5Gbps ports, coupled with a USB 3.0 Type-C port with charging support and a headphone/microphone combo jack. Is that it, you may ask? To which I’d answer no. There is a USB Type-A 10Gbps port, an HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet jack, and a barrel charging port on the back side for easier connectivity.

Keyboard & Trackpad

Given that you’d be spending most of the time using the keyboard when gaming, it quickly becomes an important subject. And as a surprise to maybe no one, the HP Omen 16’s keyboard is very good. Keys have a lot of travel, which I love, and there’s satisfying feedback when pressed. The actuation energy isn’t much, and you won’t be disturbing your colleagues with the sound inside an office. Since this is a 16-inch device, HP also bundled a dedicated number pad row.

While I’m not the biggest fan of this layout as it shifts everything to the left, I can see the appeal for gamers and professionals. In classic gaming laptop fashion, the keyboard has RGB backlighting, which can be configured using the Omen Light Studio app. There are four zones, and you can choose to go all the way in the funky territory if you wish. For me, I’m more of a white-backlit guy to keep everything classy.

Moving over to the trackpad, I have nothing to complain about here, as well. It’s a big, glass-topped surface that does the job when navigating the UI. The surface is smooth enough to not cause much friction. The physical buttons feel nice to press, and the energy required for a press isn’t so much that it causes strain.

Display & Cameras

What’s the one thing about the display that matters with games like Valorant? If your answer was high-refresh rate, then you’d be absolutely correct. HP thinks the same, which is the reason the Omen 16 houses a 240Hz refresh rate screen. It’s hard to put that feeling into words, but there’s some genuine advantage that you will get. Beyond that, the panel spans 16 inches and has a resolution of 2.5K and a 3ms response time.

To hit that 240Hz refresh rate, HP had to go with an IPS panel, which is fine to me. Do I miss the deep blacks and vibrant colors of an OLED display? Yes. Still, the Omen 16’s display is fantastic. Colors feel natural, and watching a movie on that big screen is a delight. I finally got around to watching Ted Lasso, and it was a very enjoyable experience, thanks to the 500 nits of peak brightness. For all my creative friends, the Omen 16’s display does cover 100% of the sRGB color space. So, you can edit videos/photos and not worry about them looking messed up on others’ screens. The anti-reflective coating proved quite capable as well, keeping most of the reflections at bay.

As far as the camera is concerned, it won’t be winning any competitions. It’s 1080p, thankfully, and works well for quick video calls or classes. The sharpness in low light can be missing, and colors are washed out compared to my MacBook.

Performance

It’s no secret that a gaming laptop isn’t just for playing games. It’s also a tool for creative and coding professionals who need the extra horsepower. Under the hood, the HP Omen 16 packs the latest AMD Ryzen 9955HX processor, which has 16 cores and 64 MB L3 cache, and can boost up to 5.4 GHz in demanding tasks. It’s paired with 24 GB DDR5-5600 MT/s RAM and a 1 TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. Graphics are handled by the RTX 5070 GPU, with 8GB of VRAM. Since you can’t have the thirsty RTX graphics running all the time, and people do need more battery life than just one hour, there’s integrated AMD Radeon 610M graphics for lighter tasks.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the Omen 16 is a very powerful machine. You can throw any workload at it, and it’ll handle it like a champ. I did my usual writing and researching on the laptop, and it never once hesitated when opening another application. Everything felt effortless, and I just couldn’t push the laptop with my office work even if I tried. As this was the case, I also installed Da Vinci Resolve to do a spot of video editing. Even with multiple 4K streams, some advanced effects and color grading work, the timeline preview was pretty smooth, and the render times were some of the fastest in my testing. The same happened when running a long Python script, marked by exceptionally quick compile times. Not to mention how smooth everything feels on the 240Hz display.

Benchmarks, however, are where you see the real power of the Omen 16. In Geekbench, the Ryzen 9955HX scored 2,751 in the single-core test and 18,266 in the multi-core test. The closest competition I have tested is last year’s Zephyrus G14, which ran on the Ryzen 9 HX 370. The Omen 16 scored more than 20% higher in multi-threaded workloads. Moving to Geekbench’s GPU test, the score reached a pretty remarkable 120,517 points.

Gaming & Thermals

It’s time to talk about the things you came here for: gaming. After all, that’s the biggest reason to buy the Omen 16. And it would be a shame to start with anything else except Valorant. There, the Omen 16 delivered easy 250+ FPS on high settings. With Red Dead Redemption 2, I could max out the resolution at 2.5K with very high graphics and still get around 80 FPS. Cyberpunk 2077 was a bit more challenging, pushing the laptop to its very limit. On maxed-out settings, I observed around 50 FPS. If that’s not enough for you, there’s always DLSS. It’s a very clever way to get over 100 FPS without losing much detail. Some purists may argue those frames are not real, but you’d be hard-pressed to find the difference playing on a laptop screen.

I employed DLSS once again, with Indiana Jones: The Great Circle, to get an average of 100 FPS, with 1% lows around 80 FPS. If you’re a racing fan, Forza Horizon and Motorsport both worked flawlessly at highest settings, with RTX reflections turned on. Even Call of Duty fans will be pretty pleased with this setup.

As far as thermals are concerned, the bottom plate is a large intake, and the hot air comes out from the sides and back. Regardless of the game I tested, there were no signs of thermal throttling inside a temperature-controlled room. HP also bundles its OMEN app with the laptop to control the metrics. It has ads, which is something I absolutely despise in a first-party app. They should not have ads. That said, it was pretty good at controlling different metrics of the laptop, and you can manually tweak different aspects of the performance.

Battery Life & Speakers

Battery life is usually the Achilles’ heel of gaming laptops, simply because running all those internals takes a lot of power. The HP Omen 16 tries to combat that with an 83 Wh cell. In my daily use, which is mostly on Chrome, along with some spreadsheet work and YouTube, the laptop lasted roughly 4 hours on a single charge. I wouldn’t call that groundbreaking, but it’s enough to get you through a work session inside a cafe. Fortunately, there’s a fast charger bundled, albeit with a massive one. With it, you can recharge the battery to 50% in 30 minutes. If you’d rather not carry the large brick, the USB-C port supports charging.

I can say almost the same about the speakers, which you get two of. They are decent if you want to watch a quick YouTube video with clear dialogue and vocals. Just don’t expect them to fill a room with music. The highs and lows do get slightly muffled, and the treble was a little less than what I like. They also sounded quieter than my MacBook.

Verdict

At ₹299,990, the HP Omen 16 Valorant edition is certainly a premium laptop, but for the right person, I believe it’s a no-brainer. I think it’s one of the better special edition laptops, with a really striking yet sophisticated design that pays homage to Valorant. All the little details are excellent. The build quality is solid, and the performance is just next level. I don’t think there is any workload the Omen 16 can’t handle, and even AAA games run smoothly, albeit sometimes requiring DLSS. Rounding things out is a sizeable 16-inch 240Hz display that keeps things fast, and the excellent-feeling keyboard. I do think the speakers could have been better, but that’s a tradeoff with most gaming laptops.

According to reports, Vivo has started preparations for launching its S series phones back in India with the release of the Vivo S2 smartphone. While Vivo hasn’t officially confirmed a release date, some reports indicate the phone could launch on August 6th, with sales expected to begin on August 11. This would mark the revival of the S series of phones in India following the debut of the Vivo S1 phone back in 2019. Reports have also given an early look at its design while revealing details about its expected specifications, color options, and launch plans.

Expected Specifications and Camera Features

Leaks suggest the Vivo S2 will feature an OLED display with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. The phone may use the MediaTek Dimensity 7360 chipset, built on a 4nm process. Reports also suggest the phone will come in 8GB + 128GB and 8GB + 256GB variants. On the camera front, the Vivo S2 is tipped to include a 50MP Sony main sensor. Some information also suggests that the phone would be capable of recording videos in 4K quality through both front and rear cameras.

According to some recent leaks, the Vivo S2 would come with a sleek design. It would have a 3D curved display with narrow borders and a punch-hole selfie camera at the center of the device. On the back side, there would be a camera module in the shape of a pill with two big rings and an LED flash. Unlike many smartphones, the camera module matches the rear panel color for a more seamless finish. Vivo could offer the phone in Sapphire Blue, Regal Bronze, and Silk White. Its design closely resembles the Vivo X300 FE. Vivo has not shared any battery details yet. However, one report suggests the Vivo S2 may pack a 7,000mAh battery. This information is still based on leaks and awaits official confirmation.

Expected Price of Vivo S2

The Vivo S2 could target India’s premium mid-range smartphone market. It might cost anywhere between ₹40,000 and ₹50,000, though Vivo has not yet officially announced its pricing. Some leaks also reveal internal listing prices, but they may differ from the final retail price. On launch, the Vivo S2 will challenge the OnePlus Nord 6 and the Motorola Edge 70 Pro smartphones. It will also take on the Realme 16 Pro series and Vivo V70 FE.

The indie game company is downsizing as it parts ways with Xbox.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I will say, 4-Down made me laugh. Read on for all the answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Work’s opposite
Answer: PLAY

5A clue: Glass-encased flower in “Beauty and the Beast”
Answer: ROSE

6A clue: Stack on a nightstand
Answer: BOOKS

7A clue: Tree or cobra, in yoga class
Answer: POSE

8A clue: Not that many
Answer: AFEW

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Measure of alcoholic content
Answer: PROOF

2D clue: Feeling relaxed
Answer: LOOSE

3D clue: Slightly crooked
Answer: ASKEW

4D clue: Rarely true response to “Have you read our terms and conditions?”
Answer: YES

6D clue: ___-free (label on water bottles)
Answer: BPA

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CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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The U.S. and Australian governments have released new guidance urging critical infrastructure organizations to prepare to isolate vital operational technology systems in the event of a cyberattack or other major disruptions.

The guidance, titled “CI Fortify – Advice for isolating vital systems,” was developed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the FBI, and international partners.

It provides recommendations for disconnecting critical operational technology (OT) and associated systems from corporate, Internet-facing, and other less-trusted networks while continuing to provide essential services for an extended period.

Operational technology includes the hardware and software used to monitor or control processes, such as water treatment equipment, electrical systems, manufacturing machinery, transportation systems, and telecommunications infrastructure.

The agencies say state-sponsored threat actors routinely target critical infrastructure for espionage and to establish access that could later be used for disruptive or destructive attacks during a crisis or military conflict.

“Cybercriminals continue to opportunistically target CI operators,” reads the advisory.

“The sensitivity of the data stored by these entities, and the importance of their services, makes them attractive for cybercriminals seeking to extort victims via data exfiltration or by conducting ransomware attacks for disruptive or destructive purposes.”

In February 2024, CISA, the FBI, NSA, and other Five Eyes agencies warned that the Chinese Volt Typhoon hacking group had breached organizations in the communications, energy, transportation, and water sectors.

The hackers remained undetected in at least one critical infrastructure network for five years, with U.S. officials warning that they were positioning themselves for potentially disruptive attacks during a future crisis or conflict.

Chinese state-sponsored hackers tracked as Salt Typhoon have also breached government, telecommunications, transportation, lodging, and military networks worldwide since at least 2021.

The group compromised major U.S. telecommunications providers, including AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen, gaining access to sensitive communications and U.S. law enforcement wiretap systems.

The hackers also exploited known vulnerabilities in edge networking devices and used compromised equipment and trusted connections to pivot into other networks.

Water infrastructure has also repeatedly been targeted. In October 2024, American Water, which provides water and wastewater services to more than 14 million people, deactivated some systems following a cyberattack. Around the same time, a Kansas water treatment facility switched to manual operations after its systems were compromised.

Government agencies have also warned that pro-Russian hacktivists were seeking out unsecured OT systems used by water facilities and other critical infrastructure organizations to disrupt operations.

The new CI Fortify guidance aims to help organizations prepare before such an incident occurs, rather than attempting to determine how vital systems can be disconnected while an attack is already underway.

Isolating vital systems

The agencies recommend critical infrastructure entities first identify the minimum systems and networks required to continue delivering a critical service.

Organizations should then document every connection between those systems and corporate networks, remote-access services, cloud environments, Internet-facing infrastructure, vendors and contractors, and other critical infrastructure operators.

They should also determine where those connections can be disabled or physically disconnected and account for the manual processes, communication failures, and loss of external resources or dependencies that isolation may trigger.

Some of the terms and processes that the advisory recommends organizations become familiar with include:

• Vital systems: The minimum OT and supporting systems needed to provide a critical service, such as controlling water distribution, delivering electricity, or operating a telecommunications network.
• Isolation point: A predetermined location where connectivity between critical and non-critical networks or systems can be disconnected to contain an attack and prevent lateral movement into other vital systems.
• Physical isolation: Completely disconnecting vital systems so they do not share network or computing infrastructure with non-critical systems. The guidance describes this as the most effective form of protection.
• Graduated isolation: Gradually restricting access as the threat increases, such as first blocking remote workers and vendors, then disconnecting corporate networks, connected systems, and eventually all external connections.
• Administrative network controls: Various administrative controls to modify or manage VLANs, access-control lists, and routing. The guidance says these can be useful temporary protections but that physical isolation should be the ultimate goal.
• Data diode: Specialized equipment that allows data to flow in only one direction, reducing the risk that data or malicious traffic can travel in the opposite direction.
• Post-isolation: Monitor routing tables, network traffic, and intrusion detection systems to verify that isolation controls remain effective. Administrators should also secure the network management zones used to administer routers, firewalls, and other network infrastructure so they are isolated from attackers.

While physical isolation provides the best protection, the cybersecurity agencies say that it may not be practical for organizations that depend on Internet-facing services, carrier networks, cloud services, or geographically distributed facilities.

In those environments, operators are advised to strengthen OT network boundaries, use dedicated or encrypted communications links, remove unnecessary dependencies on corporate systems, and maintain the ability to rapidly rebuild systems.

Isolation plans should also define who can authorize each step, the conditions that would trigger it, which systems must remain available, and how operations will continue without normal network connectivity.

Organizations are urged to test the complete isolation of their vital systems regularly, rather than testing only individual systems, because partial tests may fail to identify shared infrastructure and other hidden dependencies that could cause problems when the isolation plan is initiated.

The guidance also recommends keeping a secure offline or printed copy of the isolation plan so that it remains available in the event that access to corporate network or storage servers are disrupted.

After systems have been isolated, operators should continue monitoring network traffic, routing information, and management systems to ensure that unauthorized or accidental connections have not restored access between critical and non-critical networks.

However, the agencies warn that isolation also introduces risks, including systems falling behind on security updates, reduced monitoring, and increased use of removable media to transfer data between systems

Organizations must therefore prepare not only to disconnect vital systems, but also to operate, monitor, update manually until they can eventually reconnect systems again.

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