TechCentral

Ampath says the claim that 80 million patient records were stolen in a cyberattack on the pathology group refers to database entries, not 80 million people. In a statement on Wednesday, Ampath said the figure “should not be interpreted as 80 million individual patients” because it appears to refer to database records or entries rather than unique individuals. The statement does not deny that information was affected; it takes issue with how the number has been read.

eMedia CEO Khalik Sherrif eMedia CEO Khalik Sherrif has rejected reports that more than half of eNCA’s staff are set to lose their jobs, saying the 171 employees caught up in the news channel’s restructuring are everyone the law requires to be included in the process, not the number who will be retrenched. “It was never that 171 people are going to lose their jobs. That was never the case. It is much less than that,” Sherrif told TechCentral.

The number of ransomware attacks on South African organisations recorded by Microsoft rose from seven to 17 in the year to June. That was the third-steepest percentage rise among the 12 countries the company singles out in its latest global threat assessment. The Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2026, published this week, covers the period from July 2025 to June 2026.

iOCO CEO Rhys Summerton iOCO will not pay a dividend for as long as Rhys Summerton is at the helm of the company, the IT services group’s CEO said on Wednesday. Instead, he plans to spend a sizeable chunk of the R650-million he expects iOCO to bring in over the next year on acquisitions and further share buybacks that could cut its share count by up to a fifth.

Google has released its new flagship AI model, Gemini 4 Argon, to developers and businesses worldwide, seeking to regain ground against rivals OpenAI and Anthropic after months of delays and a leadership shake-up at its DeepMind lab. The model excels at “deep work” on complex, multi-step tasks in coding, finance, law, cybersecurity and science, Google said.

Every security team is being asked about its AI strategy. Fewer are being asked a simpler question: do you know what’s in your environment? Boards want to know how fast you can find the blast radius of an incident and recover from it. You can’t answer that with data you don’t trust. It’s a theme our CEO, Joe Diamond, has been talking about in recent interviews: AI is only as good as the ground truth underneath it.

iOCO grew profit by 39% to R357-million in the year to 31 July 2026, but net cash from its operating activities fell 44% to R239-million, as a large release of cash from customers in the previous year was not repeated. The figures, in audited annual financial statements published on Tuesday, fall within the ranges the former EOH Holdings flagged in a trading statement last month. Headline earnings per share rose 43% to 57c.

Apple on Tuesday began showing off a new round of smart-home products, including an iPad-like device called the HomeView, which is meant to hang on walls or sit on tabletops and will showcase its Siri virtual assistant, upgraded with AI. The HomeView, which costs from US$299 and ships next month, is Apple’s latest entry into a highly competitive market for connected-home devices.

Icasa left R333.7-million of its 2025/2026 budget unspent, including almost its entire capital budget, even as it told parliament that a lack of money is the main thing stopping it from buying the tools it needs to police operators. The communications regulator spent just 0.5% of its capital expenditure budget, leaving R130.5-million unused, and left a further R203.2-million of its operating budget unspent.

The opening question at the Cloud On Demand and Microsoft business breakfast at Bryanston Country Club on 17 September 2026 – “Who could tell your board today, with confidence, exactly where your data sits?” – exposed a telling gap. Executives from organisations ranging from banks to non-governmental organisations understood data’s importance but were less certain about its exact location.