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Also: Cyber IPOs and the Investment Climate, the Urgency of AI Explainability
In this week's update, ISMG editors unpacked Trump's teased "grand cyber plan" amid budget cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, key business takeaways from RSAC Conference 2025 and why explainability in artificial intelligence is becoming critical to trust and security.

Government Officials Sound 'Wake Up' Alarms
A rash of cyber incidents felt by British businesses add up to a wake-up call that cybersecurity is an absolute priority, top government officials warned during an annual conference hosted by the National Cyber Security Centre. The NCSC unveiled cyber resilience measures timed for the conference.

Partners Use Bedrock, SageMaker for Threat Detection, Response, Vital to Innovation
AWS is enabling cybersecurity firms to enhance detection, triage and response capabilities by embedding generative AI into services like Bedrock and SageMaker, while reinforcing its position as a partner-centric cloud security leader, said Managing Director Rohan Karmarkar.

Pharmaceutical companies typically have more mature cyber programs than other healthcare factions, but these firms also face unique risks involving their large attack surfaces, complex manufacturing, supply chains and sensitive intellectual property, said Joshua Mullen of Booz Allen Hamilton.

Pixtral Models 60 Times More Likely to Generate Harmful Content Than Rivals
Publicly available artificial intelligence models made by Mistral produce child sexual abuse material and instructions for chemical weapons manufacturing at rates far exceeding those of competing systems, found researchers from Enkrypt AI.

Russian, Kazakh Hackers Charged in $46M Proxy Botnet Scheme
Federal prosecutors charged four hackers for running a proxy botnet that exploited infected routers, using domains like Anyproxy.net to resell U.S. network access globally - and generating over $46M before a coordinated international takedown, according to a Friday indictment.

Threat Outpaces Government's Ability to Keep Pace, Says Parliamentary Committee
Cyberthreats have evolved beyond the British government's ability to keep pace, warned a Parliamentary committee in a report highlighting lack of prioritization and a deficiency in civil service cyber skills. The country has felt a series of stinging cyberattacks over the last few years.

University of Texas CISO George Finney on Zero Trust Challenges and His New Book
Enterprises need to mature their zero trust models to recognize how trust is inherently built into artificial intelligence and how to proactively identify vulnerabilities. George Finney, CISO at University of Texas Systems, says security teams need to be trained to spot implicit trust across systems.

After Vendor Paid for Data-Deletion Promise, Criminals Extort Schools Directly
Students, gather round for the sad story of how PowerSchool got schooled by hackers, who stole data on students and teachers. After PowerSchool paid a ransom for a guarantee that the data would be deleted, the bad hackers failed to honor their promise.

Union Health System Among Many Cerner Legacy Data Clients Affected by Breach
An Indiana health system is among the first healthcare organizations notifying regulators and thousands of people affected by the Oracle hack in January. Attackers compromised legacy patient data hosted by Cerner servers that were set to migrate to Oracle's cloud environment.

CISOs Seek Real Value as Vendors Tout the Latest Batch of AI-Driven Solutions
As the conversation shifts from generative to agentic AI, it's clear that AI holds tremendous potential to ease zero trust fatigue, but only when guided by business context, quality data and human oversight. CISOs see AI as a "basket of opportunities but plenty of "vendor blind spots."

Srivatsan Replaces Prakash Panjwani, Who Led WatchGuard's Push Beyond the Network
The former chief operating officer of SentinelOne and chief strategy officer of Palo Alto Networks has been named interim leader of MSP security stalwart WatchGuard. WatchGuard tapped Vats Srivatsan to serve as interim CEO beginning Wednesday and tasked him with scaling its platform.

Also: Iberian Blackout, Delta Faces Lawsuit Linked to CrowdStrike Outage
Every week, ISMG rounds up cybersecurity incidents and breaches around the world. This week: Mirai Botnet Exploits Flaws in GeoVision, the Iberian blackout under investigation, dueling cybersecurity advisories from India and Pakistan, Delta must face a lawsuit linked to CrowdStrike outage.

Criminals Extort School Employees After Vendor Paid for Data-Deletion Promise
Students, gather round for the sad story of how PowerSchool got schooled not once, but twice. Surprise: attackers who received a ransom payment in return for a promise to delete data they stole from PowerSchool pertaining to students and teachers didn't actually delete the data.

Not Just Ransomware But Verbal Disclosure of Personal Data Common, Watchdog Finds
Two decades after California Senate Bill 1386 introduced the world to data breach notifications, organizations have collectively battened down their cybersecurity hatches and fixed the problem once and for all. Of course, I'm joking, with the results of recent data breach root cause report in hand.

Exposes Details of Victims, 'Aggressive' Negotiations, Cryptocurrency Addresses
One year to the day after an international law enforcement operation unmasked and indicted the leader of the notorious LockBit ransomware group, a hacker has sent the group another love letter.

Also: Mango Markets Hacker Sentenced in CSAM Case
This week, Trump's crypto wealth, Mango Markets hacker sentenced for CSAM, Solana's zero-day fix, French police rescued a crypto millionaire's father from kidnappers, stolen bitcoin frozen, US FTC sued IML and Kraken spotted a North Korean job applicant.