A blog of practical IT insights for businesses brought to you by TechOptima Solutions
Duane Barnes, president of Raleigh, N.C.-based solution provider and Cox company RapidScale, said that supply chain challenges have customers looking to get more out of what they already have. “That’s been ongoing now for a year and a half,” Barnes said. “And it’s only getting worse.” RapidScale has leaned on its financial operations practice, moving customers to the cloud, even upgrading to new vendor products that offer better cost performance where appropriate.
FINOPS | INFRASTRUCTURE | BUDGET | BUSINESS | SUPPLY CHAIN
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IBM’s surprise letter about a quarterly underperformance spoke to some trends solution providers have been seeing over the past year or two and some trends that partners are defying. Chris Bogan, vice president of sales at Houston-based IBM solution provider Mark III Systems, told CRN that the majority of his company’s IBM business is hardware and despite the results Mark III still expects “a banner year” in that business.
IBM | INFRASTRUCTURE | FINOPS | BUDGET | BUSINESS
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IBM’s enterprise-grade open-source technology vendor Red Hat looks like a silver lining for the difficult quarter, with growth for the division accelerating to 11 percent during the quarter. Paul Ponzeka, chief technology officer of New York-based Abacus, told CRN that Abacus picked Red Hat as its hypervisor partner of choice despite having no partnership with the vendor a year ago.
REDHAT | GROWTH | BUDGET | VMWARE
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"We discovered nation state hackers had compromised the network of an Australian critical infrastructure provider. ASIO assessed the hackers were preparing for sabotage. They weren’t planting ‘digital dynamite’ as such; they were mapping out the network and maintaining access so they could cripple it at a time of their choosing."
SECURITY | AUSTRALIA | INFRASTRUCTURE | HACKING
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Since CISA has seen hackers actively exploiting the three flaws in Ubiquity’s UniFi OS, last Wednesday, CISA gave all federal agencies 3 days to apply the available security updates or recommended mitigations. Three Ubiquiti flaws have been added to CISA’s KEV – Known Exploited Vulnerabilities database.
SECURITY | UNIFI | UBIQUITI | CISA | PATCHING
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CISA issued a directive Friday, giving federal agencies until Sunday night to patch. The story behind this one is a high-severity SSRF (server-side request forgery) vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20230, which was discovered in Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager Server.
SECURITY | CISCO | CISA | PATCHING
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"We are introducing Patch the Planet, a Daybreak initiative built with Trail of Bits to help maintainers strengthen the critical open-source software the world relies on. We’re pairing AI-assisted security research using our most cyber-capable models with expert human review to not only identify vulnerabilities, but help patch them."
SECURITY | AI | OPENAI | PATCHING
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Microsoft once again extended the Windows 10 ESU program for another year, until October 12th of 2027. Everyone using Windows 10 gets to keep using the Windows they love on the machines they already have. And what’s even better is that the continuation of the ESU program means that Windows 10 can be the recipient of the results of Microsoft’s still unnamed “Codename MDASH” system.
SECURITY | WINDOWS 10 | PATCHING
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Small and midsize businesses need to be constantly on guard as malicious actors continue to exploit outdated network architectures and weak access controls. Traditional perimeter-based security is no longer sufficient in a world of remote work and cloud applications. SMBs must now act to reduce their attack surface, harden their network and modernize their strategy with zero-trust principles.
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Assume You Will Be Hacked. AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
SECURITY | AI | CYBERATTACK
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Mozilla used Mythos to fix more than 400 bugs in the Firefox web browser in April, roughly 20 times more than it fixes in a typical month. Anthropic has itself used Claude Mythos Preview to find thousands of bugs in open-source-software packages—many of which went undetected for years or decades—that undergird much of the internet.
SECURITY | AI | CLAUDE | MYTHOS
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We’ve just been writing software in a totally slapdash and insecure way for decades now. With some small, high-stakes exceptions—such as software used on the International Space Station or nuclear submarines—code is written and deployed without much rigorous testing. If a bug is reported, it gets patched.
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When the courseware Canvas was hacked last month, upending classrooms in thousands of schools and universities worldwide, AI likely played a role—and the criminal group responsible, a notorious hacking ring called ShinyHunters, is known for using AI in all sorts of scams. Just weeks later, Google cybersecurity researchers reported that ShinyHunters had hacked into an Oracle HR system and may have stolen data from more than 100 organizations.
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The Arch Linux Repository (AUR) was found to have been compromised with more than 400 instances of Linux rootkit and infostealer malware. The infostealer targets credentials and access tokens. Last Thursday, the site “ioctl.fail” posted their analysis of the infiltration campaign. This sample was recovered from a supply-chain compromise involving an Arch User Repository (AUR) package build flow.
SECURITY | ARCHLINUX | MALWARE | SUPPLY CHAIN
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Last Friday afternoon, at the request of the U.S. government’s nonspecified concerns for national security, Anthropic shut down all access to their two most advanced models: Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
SECURITY | AI | MYTHOS | FABLE
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Yet another unpatched Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager flaw is being actively exploited.
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Anthropic’s year-long analysis of malicious Claude accounts shows rising sophistication.
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University of Toronto / Vector Institute researchers built a lab prototype adaptive AI worm.
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Weil Gotshal & Manges paid $20 million to Silent Ransom Group after client data theft from cloud storage.
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Unauthenticated remote code execution via eval() in WordPress Everest Forms Pro “Complex Calculation” feature.
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Teens use cheap “WeedHack” Minecraft-mod malware to spy on and attack peers.
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Startup companies have limited budgets. Here are the areas where cutting corners is counterproductive. Startups often face pressure to move fast, but neglecting IT best practices early on can lead to long-term issues; for example, misconfigured devices can result in time-consuming fixes later. Likewise, haphazardly managed licensing can lead to overlapping or underutilized software purchases.
INFRASTRUCTURE | BUSINESS | STARTUP
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Small businesses moving to the cloud need clear, practical guidance on security responsibilities, risks and best practices. The article clarifies five common myths about cloud security for small business IT teams, covering provider responsibilities, compliance, identity management and encryption.
SECURITY | CLOUD | LEADERS | SMB | BUSINESS
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