The UK government will ban under-16s from social media, with regulations due before Christmas and the rules taking effect in spring 2027.

To enforce it, platforms must age-check their users. In practice that means anyone opening a new account will likely have to prove they’re over 16 by uploading an ID or passing a facial age scan, the same checks that adult sites serving UK visitors have implemented since July 2025 under the Online Safety Act.

Long-standing accounts are largely exempt, but signing up fresh now triggers verification, effectively ending anonymous account creation in the UK.

Security and privacy experts warn the checks are easy to circumvent, put everyone’s ID and biometric data at risk of breaches, and were rushed in with little political scrutiny.

The announcement

Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out the plan on June 15, following a national consultation that drew more than 116,000 responses from parents, children and experts.

The government says nine in ten parents backed an under-16 ban, and two-thirds of young people agreed that under-16s should be kept off at least some platforms.

“That’s why we’re going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back,” Starmer said.

“This is a line in the sand. Tech giants had their chance and failed.”

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall framed it as a fight with the platforms: “Tech companies have had countless opportunities to keep children safe, yet they have failed to act. That is why we are taking power away from the tech giants and putting it back in parents’ hands.”

What’s covered

The ban is modelled on Australia’s, which took effect in December 2025 and was the first of its kind.

It will cover user-to-user platforms “whose purpose is to enable social interaction” and that run algorithmic feeds. The government names Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal are explicitly excluded, as is YouTube Kids.

There will be a narrowly defined exemption list for educational services, e-commerce and music streaming.

The UK says it will go further than Australia.

High-risk features, such as livestreaming and strangers being able to contact children, will be restricted across a wider range of services, including gaming sites like Roblox (the platform stays, but features such as chat get locked down).

To avoid a “cliff-edge at 16,” those stranger-contact and livestreaming restrictions will be on by default for 16- and 17-year-olds too.

Separately, AI “romantic companion” chatbots that simulate sexual or roleplay relationships will have to enforce an 18+ minimum, with intimate functions restricted for under-18s on AI chatbots more broadly.

The government is also consulting on overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18s, with detail promised in July.

The catch for adults: it’s the new accounts

The government’s reassurance is that most adults won’t face a fresh check.

According to a fact sheet, an account is treated as low-risk if it has been open for more than 16 years, has a credit card attached, or is linked to an email already age-verified elsewhere. Anyone who’s already verified under the existing Online Safety Act wouldn’t need to do it again.

But that carve-out is essentially a grandfather clause, and it does nothing for new accounts.

If you create a social media account from scratch after the rules land—say you want a fresh, pseudonymous handle, or you’re simply a new user—none of those passive signals apply, and the fallback is exactly what the fact sheet describes: a facial recognition check, or an ID upload.

In practice the regime quietly converts what’s billed as child protection into a rule that no adult can open a new account without proving their age.

It’s a lighter touch than the adult-content regime, for now.

Since July 25, 2025, the Online Safety Act has required adult and other sensitive sites to run “highly effective” age checks (typically an ID upload or a facial-age selfie) for every user, with no grandfathering.

Enforcement has also been aggressive. By February 2026, Ofcom had opened investigations into more than 90 platforms and issued six fines, and its remit had stretched to Reddit, X, Discord, Bluesky and AI services.

The social media age-gate doesn’t go that far yet, but it normalises the same plumbing.

Ofcom has been asked to run a rapid study on how to verify whether someone is over 16. The aforementioned fact sheet also notes proving you’re over 18 “could be as simple as a facial recognition check.”

The VPN loophole

The well-documented weakness is that a VPN defeats all of it. The Online Safety Act targets sites, not users, so connecting through a server outside the UK sidesteps the check.

Some VPN providers reported signup spikes of up to 1,800% when adult-site enforcement began.

Any social media age-gate inherits the same gap, and Australia’s experience bears it out. Research there found more than 60% of children were still using social media months after that country’s ban.

The UK government has limited room to close the loophole. A blanket VPN ban for the whole population has been ruled out.

In October 2025 a tech minister, Baroness Lloyd, told the Lords there were “no current plans to ban the use of VPNs,” citing their legitimate uses.

A children-specific clampdown is a different story. In February 2026 the government said its wellbeing consultation would examine “options to age restrict or limit children’s VPN use,” and in January 2026 the House of Lords inflicted a government defeat, voting 207 to 159 for an amendment to the then Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would require ministers to prohibit VPN providers from serving UK children.

To sort children from adults, that measure would in practice force providers to age-check every user. The amendment drew public petitions against it.

The Commons rejected it across several rounds of parliamentary ‘ping-pong,’ and the Act that received Royal Assent (became law) in April instead handed ministers a broad power to restrict children’s online access by regulation.

For now, nothing stops a determined adult, or a determined 15-year-old, from getting around it.

What security and privacy researchers are saying

The cybersecurity objection isn’t to the goal, but that the enforcement mechanism creates new risks while the controls themselves don’t hold up.

Dr. Siamak Shahandashti, a senior lecturer in cyber security and privacy at the University of York, pointed to fresh empirical work from Politecnico di Milano testing age-verification methods deployed on adult sites.

The researchers found low-to-medium robustness for nearly every method except credit-card checks. Most could be bypassed with tools and know-how within reach of “motivated minors.”

Their blunt conclusion, which Shahandashti quoted: mandated age verification currently functions as “compliance theatre.” He added that checks linked to real, physical ID could be made robust enough if clear standards were set.

Dr. Richard Gomer, a lecturer in computer science at the University of Southampton, zeroed in on the second-order risk. Enforcing an under-16 ban means age-gating everyone, and that process is itself dangerous.

Handing a passport or driving licence to platforms, he warned, exposes people to identity theft or blackmail when those records inevitably leak, something already seen under the Online Safety Act rollout.

He also flagged the quieter cost of the regulation pushing the web further from its original ideals of anonymous, open communication.

That data-breach risk is not hypothetical either.

Responding to the ban, the Open Rights Group (ORG) warned that over-16s will now have to surrender identity documents or biometric data to unregulated age-verification companies, pointing to Discord as a platform that already suffered a major data leak after introducing age checks.

James Baker, who runs ORG’s Platform Power and Freedom of Expression programme, argues the measures chase symptoms rather than the cause, namely the engagement-driven business models that reward harmful content, and has previously warned that the underlying powers were “rushed through without proper time for political scrutiny.”

Platforms aren’t on side either.

Meta and YouTube both argue that bans push teenagers toward less-regulated spaces rather than making them safer, with Meta making the case that age checks should sit on the device so users aren’t handing ID to every service separately.

The wider direction of travel

It’s worth noting where this sits. Since January 2025 the government has been building a GOV.UK Wallet and a digital driving licence, pitched partly as a way to prove your age online and in person using the facial-recognition features built into modern phones.

That’s separate from this announcement and predates it. But together they sketch a direction of travel, where proving your age is increasingly a precondition for being online in the UK.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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Threat actors are abusing Steam Workshop, Valve’s community hub for downloading game-related content, to push various malware hidden in wallpaper packages.

Infected wallpapers can lead to hijacking Steam accounts, compromising the system with a backdoor, or running cryptomining processes.

Steam Workshop is a built-in content-sharing platform on Valve’s Steam gaming service where users can upload and download community-created content for games and applications.

The content includes mods, maps, skins, save files, tools, and other user-generated content such as wallpapers.

Malware in the wallpaper

In a report today, researchers at cybersecurity company Kaspersky say that the attacks abuse the Wallpaper Engine desktop customization application available on Steam, which has nearly a million reviews.

Wallpaper Engine supports four wallpaper types that render videos, interactive scenes, web pages that can play audio and video, and applications, which are active windows from software that Wallpaper Engine sets as the desktop background.

Application wallpapers are executable Windows applications that can include games, desktop widgets, and system monitoring tools. Kaspersky warns that the feature represents a built-in security risk and has been abused to deliver malware to Steam users.

According to the researchers, attackers took advantage of this security gap since at least late 2025, uploading malicious wallpaper files to the Steam Workshop and tricking users into installing them through Wallpaper Engine.

“We discovered dozens of these malicious application wallpapers floating around Steam Workshop, and each one had already been downloaded thousands – or even tens of thousands – of times,” Kaspersky notes.

Analysis of compromised wallpapers revealed that the malware is bundled either directly in the package or inside password-protected archives that the user is tricked into opening.

The payloads execute automatically the moment the user installs the wallpaper, the researchers say.

Kaspersky tested one of these wallpapers posing as a game called NTRaholic, which launched as expected upon execution to reduce suspicion. However, a backdoor file part of the DarkKomet malware family was installed in the background.

A custom version of a system library called ‘AggregatorHost.dll’ was also installed to search for Steam accounts on the computer and steal account credentials.

The researchers found multiple cases involving other malware families, such as the Lumma and Vidar infostealers, cryptocurrency miners, botnet loaders, RanEngine, and even ransomware strains, showing that Wallpaper Engine was abused by multiple threat actors.

While Steam has identified and removed all the malicious wallpaper applications that Kaspersky identified, but researchers are warning that threat actors are likely to submit new ones.

Apart from downloading content from trusted sources, Kaspersky recommends users to scan anything fetched from Steam Workshop using an up-to-date antivirus product.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

Get the whitepaper

Google is giving mobile gamers a few new reasons to pay attention to Android 17. The next version of Android introduces features aimed squarely at gaming, with foldable phones among the biggest beneficiaries.

Among the highlights is a new foldable gaming mode that finally puts those larger displays to better use. Instead of stretching games across the entire screen and covering parts of the action with touch controls, Android 17 introduces a smarter layout designed specifically for gaming.

Android 17 makes better use of foldable screens

The new mode uses an optimized 50/50 split-screen experience. The game occupies the upper half of the display, while the lower half becomes a dynamic gamepad. This gives players a clearer view of the action while keeping virtual controls within easy reach.

The approach feels like a natural fit for foldables. By separating gameplay and controls, Android 17 can take advantage of the extra screen real estate without forcing players to sacrifice visibility during fast-paced sessions. Google says foldable gaming mode is built into Android 17 and will become available in the coming months. While foldable phones remain a niche category, features like this help create experiences that actually justify having a larger, flexible display.

Controller customization and smoother gameplay are coming too

Android 17 isn’t stopping at foldable-specific improvements. The update also introduces native controller remapping support for gamers using external controllers. Players will be able to customize button assignments to better match their preferences without depending on third-party apps or workarounds. Performance is getting attention as well. Google says it has improved memory cleanup processes to reduce frame drops and stutters, particularly during demanding games. While these changes may not be as visible as a new gaming mode, they could have a noticeable impact on day-to-day gameplay.

The updates show Google continuing to push Android as a gaming platform. Whether you’re playing on a traditional smartphone, a foldable, or with a dedicated controller in hand, Android 17 aims to deliver a smoother and more flexible gaming experience.

Organizational leaders are nearly twice as likely to hide their AI use compared to all other employees, at 42% versus 23%, according to new Ivanti research surveying 3,900 employees across six countries. Among leaders who conceal that usage, 52% say they do it for a “secret advantage.” The same research found 85% of IT professionals claim a named owner exists for every AI agent. Only 42% say ownership is actually clear — a 43-point gap that no governance framework was designed to close.

Sam Evans, CISO of Clearwater Analytics, stood before his board and laid out the risk to the $8.8 trillion in assets his firm’s platform supports. “The worst possible thing would be one of our employees taking customer data and putting it into an AI engine that we don’t manage,” Evans told VentureBeat. He brought a solution, not just a problem. Many CISOs VentureBeat interviewed did not.

Menlo Security CEO Bill Robbins relayed a conversation with a Top 3 U.S. bank CISO who called shadow AI discovery “a bit of a fool’s errand”: AI is embedded in every application and browser employees touch. The bank governs from containment, not discovery.

The scale justifies that posture. “We see 50 new AI apps a day, and we’ve already cataloged over 12,000,” Prompt Security CEO Itamar Golan told VentureBeat. “Around 40% of these default to training on any data you feed them, meaning your intellectual property can become part of their models.” CrowdStrike has detected 1,800 AI applications operating across 160 million endpoint instances. Those are vendor-reported numbers from proprietary telemetry. No independent party can verify them. The directional signal matters more than the exact count.

CrowdStrike CTO Elia Zaitsev described what makes the surface so hard to govern. “It looks indistinguishable if an agent runs your web browser versus if you run your browser,” Zaitsev told VentureBeat at RSAC 2026. “Observing actual kinetic actions is a structured, solvable problem. Intent is not.” The shadow AI surface is no longer a list security teams can maintain. It is an environment they have to assume.

The Ivanti survey was administered independently by Ravn Research and MSI Advanced Customer Insights across 1,500 IT professionals. Among companies with AI policies, just 24% of employees say those policies are followed “very consistently” in day-to-day work.

Kayne McGladrey, IEEE senior member, told VentureBeat why that governance gap persists. “Anything that seems to have a cybersecurity flavor is generally put into the cybersecurity risk category, which is a complete fiction. They should be focused on business risks, because if it doesn’t affect the business, like a financial loss, then nobody’s going to pay attention to it, and they will not budget it appropriately, nor will they adequately put in controls to prevent it,” McGladrey told VentureBeat previously.

Brokerage partners at major consulting firms shared over Signal that they build shadow AI applications in Google Colab and store them in S3 buckets to compress a week of financial analysis into an hour. The approval process takes too long, so they route around it.

Governance at deploy time, failure at runtime

Reviews check functional requirements when a model ships, but they never check model provenance, behavioral drift, or whether the agent expanded its own permissions after launch.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz disclosed at RSA Conference 2026 that a Fortune 50 CEO’s AI agent rewrote the company’s security policy to expand its own autonomy. The company caught it by accident. Every credential check had passed. “In the agentic era, defending against AI-accelerated adversaries and securing AI systems themselves require operating at machine speed,” Kurtz said. Quarterly governance reviews do not operate at machine speed.

Mike Riemer, Field CISO at Ivanti, built that lesson into his own team’s AI agent development. “It’s great at what I intended it for, but it’s also great at what I didn’t intend it for, and what I didn’t intend it for is dangerous,” Riemer told VentureBeat.

Hallucination data compounds the problem. Sixty-eight percent of IT professionals have personally witnessed AI generate hallucinations with potential operational impact, according to Ivanti. More than half caught the errors before damage, but 16% did not. Yet among the most advanced users of AI, 49% fully trust AI-generated outputs that influence IT decisions.

Riemer described the pattern in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “There are people that are just accepting what’s been given to them without any full understanding of what it is doing, which we’ve found in the tech industry for decades,” Riemer said. “They don’t question how it’s doing it. They just start gauging it by its outcome.”

Qualtrics CSO Assaf Keren identified the core tension in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. Organizations are introducing “non-deterministic decisioning into environments built for deterministic.” Keren cited internal Qualtrics data showing that 22% of SOC triage is now AI-driven. No codified threshold separates what an agent can auto-execute from what requires a human in the loop.

The 18-month window

The window for fixing this is closing. IT organizations expect AI to automate 46% of their operations within 18 months, according to Ivanti. U.S. companies project 52%. Governance is already the most commonly cited barrier to faster deployment, ahead of skills, technology, and data challenges.

The maturity divide makes the governance gap more dangerous. IT professionals at AI-mature organizations save six hours per week, double the three hours saved at the least mature level. Nearly 9 in 10 IT professionals at scaled organizations say AI frequently helps detect or resolve issues before employees are affected. At early experimentation organizations, that number drops to four in ten. Sixty-nine percent of scaled organizations report fully embedded governance, compared to 15% at early experimentation.

Cisco President Jeetu Patel walked through a hypothetical scenario in an interview at RSAC 2026: an agent that charges $40,000, invites competitors to a Slack channel, and publishes home addresses. “The apology is not a guardrail,” Patel told VentureBeat.

Cato Networks VP of Threat Intelligence Etay Maor framed the accountability problem in a separate RSAC interview. “They’re closer to humans. Why are we not doing background checks on agents?”

“AI is compressing the time between intent and execution while turning enterprise AI systems into targets,” CrowdStrike VP of Intelligence Operations Adam Meyers told VentureBeat.

“Proceed on one action does not mean proceed on the next,” Cisco SVP of AI Software and Platform DJ Sampath said in a separate interview.

McGladrey described the root cause. Organizations default to cloning human user profiles for agents, and permission sprawl starts on day one. “It uses far more permissions than it should have, more than a human would, because of the speed of scale and intent,” he said.

Riemer’s team built governance into Ivanti’s own development process. “We have AI check on top of AI to make sure that it is fixed. Two different models, two different manufacturers,” Riemer said. “If one AI believes the other AI fixed it appropriately, then it passes it off to a human being.”

Riemer put the vendor question in terms every CISO can use at the negotiating table. “If that vendor doesn’t have a way to show you what they’ve done from a development perspective in order to improve their development processes, you really need to question why you’re working with that vendor,” he said.

The six questions below target governance dimensions where enforcement collapses at runtime. CISOs can use them during Q3 vendor renewals to separate vendors shipping runtime enforcement from vendors shipping documentation.

Six governance questions for Q3 renewals

Source data from Ivanti, Scaling AI in IT Operations: The Path to Maturity in 2026 (n=1,500 IT professionals, 3,900 total employees, six countries, February–March 2026). Exclusive CISO sourcing by VentureBeat.

Evans put structure around the Clearwater board conversation. The bank CISO that Robbins described assumed AI is everywhere and governed from containment instead of discovery. Governance that tries to catalog every shadow AI tool will fail because the surface grows faster than any inventory.

At scaled, business-critical organizations, 54% of IT professionals say AI makes their work both faster and better, according to Ivanti. At early experimentation organizations, 24% say the same. At scaled organizations, accountability lives in the platform. At early ones, it lives in a document the agent never reads.

The six questions above give every CISO a way to test whether their governance actually works where it matters. At runtime, under load, and before the next renewal check clears.

Software

As Google continues crippling Chrome ad-blockers, it’s a good time to try Firefox

Firefox 152 is now available for download, after no fewer than four minor point releases to its predecessor, last month’s Firefox 151. And quieting noisy tabs has never been easier.

It’s a good time to check out the Fox: recently, this patch to the Google Chromium codebase, continues closing the door to Manifest V2 extensions, as The Register warned you was coming early last year. As the W3C documents, the forthcoming Google Chrome 150 turns off the last workarounds available for full-power ad blockers, and Chrome 151 will nuke them altogether.

Firefox 152 revamps the layout of the Settings page. To be honest, we had no particular problems with this before, but it’s a good thing to make it easier to twiddle the knobs and dials that make Firefox arguably the most extensible and customizable web browser.

The new version also understands that sometimes you just want it to shut up. When a tab (or, worse, multiple tabs) are playing audio, if you go to the address bar and type “mute” (or “sssh” or “hush”), then a new Quick Action button appears beneath it offering to immediately silence all tabs in all windows at once. For some streaming services, there are also improved media playback controls on the tab context menu, but we don’t use streaming much around these parts and weren’t able to test this.

If you admired the cleverness of the JPEG XL format as much as this Vulture , then we have glad tidings. Back in 2022, we reported that Google was dropping JPEG-XL support from Chromium and Chrome. Back in January, Mountain View changed track on this, and now, Firefox 152 has experimental JPEG XL support too.

The functions for sending tabs to other devices, and for copying URLs for easier sharing, have been improved. There’s an optional new “Send Tab” toolbar button. You can also right-click on a tab button and get options to send it to a nominated device, or copy its URL for sharing. Better still, this also applies to groups of tabs: hold down Ctrl or Cmd, select several, and right-click any of them, and they’ll all be sent, or their URLs copied, in one action.

There are also multiple bug fixes, about 40 security fixes, and as always, some new features for developers. Speakers of Basque or Galician will welcome their inclusion in its translation répertoire.

Mozilla’s fast release cycle for Firefox is a minor irritation, yes. (Of course, there’s always the Extended Support Release channel, if you want to hop off the treadmill.) However, one interpretation of it – and the stream of bug-fix versions – is that Mozilla is working hard on Firefox, and in our view that’s good news.

A new source of information that the company has published with this version) is the new Firefox Roadmap, which has info about future planned changes. ®