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The Scam Alert That Never Loads A relative of mine clicked a Google ad last month looking for antivirus software. What loaded instead was a full-screen page mimicking a Windows security alert, complete with a fake scan bar and a countdown timer telling her to call a number immediately. No download.

Old Math, New Problem Researchers demonstrated a way to forge 1024-bit RSA signatures in September 2026 without factoring the underlying keys. That's a meaningful break from how cryptographers assumed RSA would fail. Not through brute-force factoring getting faster, but through a shortcut nobody built defenses against because nobody expected the attack to come from that angle.

The Old Org Chart Is Dead Weight Is your marketing department still built for 2019? A CMO, a copywriter, an SEO specialist, a designer, a media buyer—eight to twelve people, each holding one piece of the puzzle, each waiting on the other to move. That structure made sense when every task required a dedicated human.

Two Kinds of AI Risk Are you assuming AI is only a threat to your marketing strategy? Microsoft just shut down infrastructure for EvilTokens, an AI-assisted platform that had compromised 12,000 Microsoft accounts across 10,000 organizations before it got taken offline on September 22, 2026. That story matters for two reasons.

The Spy Story Google Told Instead of Summarizing Google Threat Intelligence dropped a story in mid-September that read like a spy novel. A Mandiant analyst had gone undercover inside TeamPCP, a supply-chain hacking group, starting back in March 2026. Months of embedded work, real risk, a genuine narrative arc — and Google published it as an actual write-up, not a database entry.

A Spy Inside the Hackers Google Threat Intelligence spent months undercover inside a hacking crew called TeamPCP. Researchers built a fake persona, earned trust inside the group, and surfaced what they found at LABScon on September 18, 2026. The point of mentioning it here has nothing to do with malware.

The Recommendation Gap Ranking number one on Google Maps for "plumber near me" used to mean something. Now it might mean almost nothing when a customer asks ChatGPT the same question instead. BrightLocal's September 2026 study on AI local search visibility found the gap is not small.

When Your Data Feed Gets Cut A nonprofit that tracks meteors for a living got knocked offline by a cyberattack this year, and the damage went beyond a few hours of downtime. Its data pipeline, the feed that fed astronomers, news outlets, and citizen scientists real-time information, got severed. Once that pipeline broke, the organization stopped showing up anywhere that mattered.

When The Data Goes Dark A nonprofit that tracks meteors for astronomers got knocked offline by a cyberattack this year. Not a huge story. It barely made the news outside of a few science blogs.

The Slop Problem And The Selectivity Problem Three bots named Timmy, Ren, and Jackie are currently flooding Mastodon, Bluesky, and X with what Ars Technica described this September as slop-infused spam, all in service of promoting something called the iLands platform. This is the noisy side of AI and social media right now. Volume, repetition, agents posting around the clock to make a human-AI social system look alive.