IT, AI & Telecommunications

Global – October 25, 2026 -- Agentic intrusions tripled in the second half of 2026 compared with the first half, according to CrowdStrike data, as threat actors hand hacking decisions and command execution to AI agents.

CrowdStrike's report, published on Wednesday, documents four threat actors. Two used sophisticated AI harnesses, the software that connects a large language model to external resources. Two used simpler setups. The firm said the main constraint on scaling such campaigns is "token budgets," not engineering complexity.

Spanish- and English-speaking actor breaches at least 15 Argentine healthcare organizations

The actor used a penetration-testing harness built on the open-source PentestGPT framework, modified with extra hacking scripts. One Anthropic Claude Code agent acted as supervisor and assigned tasks to a second agent. CrowdStrike observed the activity between mid-May and mid-August.

Global – October 25, 2026 -- Cloudflare provides free cyber security protection to more than 2,900 vulnerable Internet properties through Project Galileo, its program for human rights, civil society, journalism and democracy organizations targeted by DDoS and other cyber attacks.

Cloudflare launched Project Galileo in 2014 after attacks on vulnerable targets

Founded in 2014, the program was a response to devastating cyber attacks against humanitarian organizations, civil society groups and human rights defenders. Cloudflare notes that these organizations often face powerful, entrenched opponents while operating on limited budgets.

Journalists, social activists and minority groups flooded with malicious traffic risk being knocked offline.

Europe – October 25, 2026 -- Orange Quantum Systems has secured €1.5M in pre-seed funding from QDNL Participations and the Cottonwood Technology Fund to build a full-scale system for automated qubit testing, a step the startup says is needed before quantum computers can scale.

Manual testing limits state-of-the-art labs to roughly 5-qubit chips

Testing quantum chips currently takes days and is too slow for industrial-scale production, according to the company. Co-founder and R&D Director Adriaan Rol says state-of-the-art labs can test chips of about 5 qubits. The process involves cooling a chip in a dilution refrigerator for several days, tuning it up, measuring the quantities of interest and warming it up for a day. Testing therefore takes weeks, and only a few chips per year may be tested.

Sydney – October 25, 2026 -- Diraq, a University of New South Wales (UNSW) spin-out that builds quantum computers from modified standard transistors, expects chips with thousands of qubits as early as 2028 and universal fault-tolerant machines in the 2030s, according to founder and CEO Andrew Dzurak.

Diraq adds $15M Series A-2 extension to $20M initial round

Diraq raised a $20M Series A in 2022, led by Allectus Capital. This spring it announced a Series A-2 extension led by Quantonation, which brought in an additional $15M. The company spun out of UNSW in May 2022 and opened a company lab on the university campus a few weeks ago, keeping it close to ongoing research.

Orlando – October 25, 2026 -- Enterprise AI adoption is continuing in 2026 despite mounting security, accountability and control concerns, CIOs attending Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo told CIO Dive. In financial services, three-quarters of leaders reported using the technology this year, up from less than one-third in 2024.

Several CIOs compared AI's impact to the dot-com era and the arrival of cloud: it enables business reinvention but brings security and social risks. Gartner analysts said in the keynote that most tech executives are weighing those risks against AI's measurable and unquantifiable value.

Capital One Software executive calls non-adoption an 'extinction event'

Prashant Prahlad, SVP of product at Capital One Software, said skipping AI is not an option for enterprises. "If you don't get on board, it's going to be an extinction event," he said.

San Francisco – October 25, 2026 -- Cloudflare will accept private network interconnect (PNI) requests only from networks that exchange more than 10 Gbps of peak traffic with it in a single location, according to its peering policy dated October 25, 2026.

Cloudflare applies an open peering policy across 335 cities

AS13335 runs a global anycast network spanning more than 335 cities in over 125 countries. Cloudflare will peer with networks that share a presence in mutual locations, and it may grant exceptions to the policy.

All peers must run 24x7 NOCs and secure BGP sessions

Every peer must keep a complete, current PeeringDB entry listing accurate peering locations, IPv4 and IPv6 prefix limits and contact details. Cloudflare uses the record for automated provisioning and network notifications. Peers must also operate a 24x7 Network Operations Center that responds to peering issues.

Global – October 25, 2026 -- Cloudflare is pitching Workers AI as a serverless inference platform that bills only for usage, at $0.011 per thousand neurons, and runs 50+ models across 200+ cities.

Cloudflare targets idle GPU spend with usage-based billing

Cloudflare argues that inference demand is spiky, unlike training. It cites average GPU utilization of only 20-40%, with one-third of organizations below 15%. Workers AI removes hardware commitments, GPU management and capacity planning, so customers pay only for inference they run.

The pricing page lists 10,000 neurons per day alongside the $0.011 per thousand neurons rate.

Platform exposes Kimi K2.6, GLM 4.7 Flash, GPT-OSS-120B and Llama 4 Scout through one API

The catalog includes:

Global – October 25, 2026 -- Cloudflare's Learning Center covers 16 topic areas, from DDoS attacks and DNS to AI, SASE and domain registration, according to the resource index.

Security guides cover DDoS, bots, email and web applications

The DDoS guide describes a network of computers working in tandem to overflow an access point and block legitimate users from a service. The bots guide separates helpful automated applications from malicious ones that can harm sites and applications.

The web application security guide calls for a holistic approach to mitigating attacks. The email security guide covers preventing email-based cyber attacks, protecting accounts from takeover and securing message contents. The SSL guide describes the protocol, known today as TLS, as an encryption protocol running on top of HTTP to protect communication between servers and clients.

Global – October 25, 2026 -- Cloudflare is offering small and midsize business agencies and hosting partners discounted plans with no revenue commitments through its Self-Serve Agency Program.

Program bundles multi-tenant dashboard and centralized billing

The program lets agencies and hosting partners manage their clients' self-serve accounts from a multi-tenant dashboard. Billing is centralized, and participants get discounted plans.

Only domains in the Agency Tenant Account earn the discount

Applicants must register a new user with a blank Cloudflare account. Existing accounts with paid products cannot be converted, and neither can users with access to multiple accounts.

Vienna, Va. – October 25, 2026 -- Permuta Technologies has published a white paper arguing that token- and consumption-based AI pricing can turn AI from a predictable line item into a variable operating cost for government agencies.

The paper, titled "You Can't Consume Your Way Out of AI Cost Opacity," is the second in the company's series of white papers on AI and government. It examines how the shift in AI pricing models affects government acquisition, budgeting and long-term contract control.

Palantir case study identifies five contract risks for agencies

Using Palantir as a case study, the paper says tokenization mechanics can create budget unpredictability and reduced cost transparency. It also lists ceiling pressure, source-selection complexity and lock-in risk. These risks grow as AI becomes embedded in mission workflows, according to the paper.