TechInformed

Microsoft has listed 974 vulnerabilities with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers in its latest security release, including two Windows privilege-escalation flaws it said are already being exploited. Those 974 CVEs do not represent 974 separate updates. The release comes as Microsoft moves AI-assisted vulnerability discovery into its engineering workflows and the CVE Program reports a sharp increase in published vulnerability records.

Ask Heath Mullins where AI is taking cybersecurity and he’ll reference two movies: “Wall-E” and “The Terminator.” Wherever on that spectrum we end up, he argues that the organizations that survive AI-speed attacks will be the ones that got the basics right. Mullins has spent nearly 28 years in cybersecurity, starting out in electronics technology, working his way through troubleshooting and then as a network specialist with Verizon. From there, he went to support federal agencies as a vendor.

Microsoft has disclosed a campaign in which attackers impersonate internal IT staff on Microsoft Teams and persuade employees to grant remote access. From that user-approved session, the attackers can move toward high-value identity systems, including domain controllers and certificate authorities. The attack starts from a separate Teams tenant.

As governments accelerate AI adoption, the debate around sovereign AI has shifted from where technology is built to who ultimately controls it. The recent launch of the Sovereign AI Power Index reflects this growing focus on national AI capability, resilience and governance. While the Index measures compute, models and data centres, these metrics do not tell the whole story. Sovereignty is a property of governance, not simply an inventory of infrastructure.

Ramp, a corporate spend management company, found the median monthly AI spend among the top 1% of adopters was $7,401 per employee, compared with $12 for the median adopter. The roughly 620-fold gap appears in its “Summer 2026 Business Spending Report,” which also adds spending-per-employee measures to the company’s AI Index. The quarterly report analyzes billions of aggregated, anonymized transactions from more than 70,000 businesses using Ramp Bill Pay and corporate cards.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI and cyber agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. are advising service providers to treat outage communications as part of incident response alongside technical remediation. Their guidance, “Communicating Under Pressure: Best Practices for Service Providers,” calls for communications plans with predefined incident thresholds, approval paths and target audiences.

Gartner has found that just 22% of organizations have successfully scaled AI across multiple business units or adopted an AI-first approach, according to its latest survey. Even so, 85% of functional leaders said they planned to increase AI spending in 2026. The survey covered 1,303 respondents at organizations with at least $50 million in annual revenue in fiscal 2025. Functional leaders said they devoted an average of 12% of their budgets to AI last year.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), an IT research and consulting firm, found 65% of respondents reported an AI agent had acted outside its intended scope or authorized access, according to its Agents Without Guardrails report. According to the report, 29% reported measurable organizational impact and 36% reported a near miss caught before material impact. Still, just over a third reported no known out-of-scope action, while 1% were unsure whether one had occurred.

Before she became chief technology officer at Tanium, Kaur was assigned to a medical unit in the military with an inspection looming. Every computer had to be patched and inventoried, which meant people walking the wards with clipboards and stopping nurses to check that their machines were configured correctly. “These people are just trying to do their rounds,” she recalls.

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