TheRegister

American outfit Varda Space Industries thinks it’s a little closer to operating factories in space after successfully landing its latest test craft. Varda won the USA’s first-ever license to first license fly uncrewed spacecraft that reenter the Earth's atmosphere. The company wants to do this so it can build small craft that include manufacturing facilities that create products it’s only possible to make in microgravity - mostly pharmaceuticals - and figures that the relatively cheap launch services offered by private launch companies will make orbital factories economically viable. Spacecraft are not cheap to build, and the cost rises if they include equipment to slow from orbital speeds before reaching Earth’s atmosphere. Crewed craft can be more expensive still. And humanity just doesn’t have a lot of capacity to schlep stuff home from space. In March, Varda therefore launched a capsule called the W-6 that it hoped would survive re-entry at hypersonic speeds, and do so using an autonomous navigation system “that uses onboard imagery to identify resident space objects, including stars and low Earth orbit satellites, to determine precise vehicle position.” The company reckons that represents “a critical step toward fully autonomous navigation for hypersonic and reentry vehicles.” The craft also carried one nose tile that included samples of advanced thermal protection materials, another two tiles equipped with sensors to record data NASA will use to learn about hypersonic re-entry and the materials that make it possible. Thermal performance matters because if you go to all the trouble of launching an orbiting factory if the product made in space gets cooked during re-entry. It all seems to have worked because the capsule touched down as planned on Monday. Varda hasn’t said much about the state of the W-6’s capsule and its interior when it landed but has celebrated the flight as “another demonstration that frequent, low-cost, reliable return is easily accessible.” The W-6 landed at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, whose operator Southern Launch celebrated the fact this is the fourth capsule to land in the patch of remote bushland it tends in the last twelve months. ®

PaaS platform Railway says Google temporarily suspended its account on Wednesday without cause, inducing a major outage. Railway automates code deployment by taking a GitHub repo and doing all the work needed to get it running from the cloud. It’s struggled to do that for the last few hours and the company’s status page tells the sad tale, starting with an update time-stamped May 19, 22:29 UTC that said the company is “investigating a widespread service disruption” that meant “Users may be experiencing errors including ‘no healthy upstream’, ‘unconditional drop overload’, login failures, and inability to access the dashboard.” Angelo Saraceno, a solutions engineer for Railway, told The Register the company noticed a problem at around 22:00 UTC. He said the company’s resources appeared to have been deleted and appeared not to exist. Google has since explained it suspended the account, making Railway’s resources invisible. “Our contacts at Google were confused, customers are irate,” he added. We are livid and still trying to get all the details Ironically, in 2024 Railway decided to shift much of its infrastructure into colocation services after Google “caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business.” Those problems resurfaced in 2025 after more trouble at Google Cloud that again impacted Railway’s services. But Railway kept its control plane in Google Cloud and still has a dependency on databases that run there. Those resources see it spend an eight-figure sum each year. Yet Saraceno said when this incident commenced, it took an hour for Google’s support team to engage. “We are livid and still trying to get all the details,” he said before advancing a theory that Railway somehow triggered an enforcement rule. Railway’s status page says that as of 22:43 UTC the company “escalated this directly with Google.” Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that escalation! Railway’s most recent status update, at the time of writing, is an 03:05 May 20 missive that states “More workloads are coming back online. Some users may still experience intermittent issues during the recovery. Non-enterprise deploys remain paused; enterprise deploys are unaffected.” The Register has contacted Google to ask if and why it blocked Railway’s account. You know the drill: We will update this story if we receive more than corporate platitudes. Cloud providers might rightly block a customer’s account over unpaid bills or inappropriate use – but usually do so after giving fair warning. Railway told us this incident came out of the blue. Google has form taking down customers without cause: In 2024 it infamously wiped out all rented infrastructure used by Australian pension fund UniSuper. Railway’s status page includes apologies to its customers, despite the problem being at Google’s end. “Our customers don’t care if it is Google,” Saraceno said. “We have to own our uptime.” ®

The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a “basic expectation” for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount. Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the job cuts yesterday, in a speech that saw her bemoan the fact that New Zealand’s government comprises 39 departments and ministries, and compared that to the 16 in Australia and 24 in the UK. She characterized the nation’s public service as “scared of AI, slow to move to the cloud” and said it operates a “complex and fragmented set of overlapping IT solutions.” “Our government is as frustrated as you are by the fragmentation and silos, the complexity, the status-quo thinking and the dangerously slow take up of digital and AI technologies,” she added. Aotearoa’s answer is to task its Chief Digital Officer “to embed AI deployment as a basic expectation for all public entities.” Minister Willis mentioned a “recent trial of an AI scribe tool in hospital emergency rooms which has reduced the amount of time clinicians have to spend on file notes and increased the time they spend with patients” as an example of the sort of thing she hopes to replicate. She said the planned overhaul will therefore “reduce the number of government departments, increase the use of AI and other digital tools, and deliver significant savings.” The government plans to cap departmental budgets and says that combined with redundancies it will save NZ$2.4 billion ($1.4 billion) over four years – less than one percent of all core government spending. Plenty of tech companies have made substantial redundancies that they justify as necessary to create an appropriate workforce for the age of AI, an explanation we’ve seen deployed to explain deep cuts at Cisco, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Meta, and Arctic Wolf. Few governments have done likewise, but one early high-profile effort – the Elon-Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” – hoped to use AI to improve government operations but left behind little evidence it had succeeded. New Zealand is blessed with many resources and extraordinary natural beauty, but has a modest tax base – yet residents expect a high level of government services. Minister Willis’s plan is therefore a very big bet on AI. ®

Anthropic is acquiring Stainless, a maker of software development tools that counts rivals OpenAI and Google as clients. The deal, reportedly for more than $300 million, demonstrates Anthropic's continued interest in exercising greater control over the AI technical stack and suggests that speculation about the commodification of models is on the mark. Frontier models will not be so strong that they serve as a moat or barrier to competition, but the tooling and workflow around those models should provide some cover. Anthropic has made several recent acquisitions that give it more say in the software that orchestrates model input, output, and tool calls. In December, it snarfed Bun, a JavaScript runtime, package manager, and test runner. Two months later, it bought Vercept, a company focused on AI-mediated computer usage. In April, it admitted healthcare AI startup Coefficient Bio into the fold. Enter Stainless. "Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers – the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API," Anthropic said in its announcement. "Stainless turns an API spec into SDKs across TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, and more." SDKs are sticky. Whoever ships the cleanest one wins the long tail of developer mindshare One of those hundreds of companies is OpenAI – its Python, Node, Java, Go, and Ruby clients are based on SDKs generated by Stainless. With Stainless now planning to shutter its platform on September 1, 2026, OpenAI and other industry customers will have to shoulder the burden of maintaining existing SDKs and find equivalent tools elsewhere. It should be noted that OpenAI in March agreed to acquire Python tool maker Astral, one of six such deals this year. So far, the Astral acquisition hasn't affected the ability of Anthropic or developers to use Astral's tooling. Jan Schmitz, who runs AI analytics biz BrightBean, described the Stainless acquisition as both offensive and defensive. "By acquiring the SDK infrastructure used across the industry, Anthropic gets visibility into how competitors evolve their APIs, even if only through generator usage patterns, and it gains the ability to set the pace on integration tooling," he said in a blog post. "The defensive read: If OpenAI or Google had bought Stainless first, the damage to Anthropic’s developer ecosystem would have been worse. SDKs are sticky. Whoever ships the cleanest one wins the long tail of developer mindshare." Schmitz also argues that Anthropic sees value in controlling the MCP standard that it proposed and promoted. "The pattern looks like this: Control the standard by giving it away, then control the implementation by owning the toolchain," he said, noting that Google followed that playbook with Kubernetes and then making GKE the leading managed version. ®

Google is warning some long-time G Suite Legacy users that they must start paying for Workspace subscriptions or lose access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and other core services, after the company flagged their accounts as "commercial use." A reader alerted The Register to what appears to be a new crackdown on long-standing G Suite Legacy accounts, with similar complaints now piling up on Reddit from users accused of violating Google’s non-commercial use policy, despite insisting they use the accounts only for family email and personal domains. Reports have been stacking up on Reddit’s r/gsuitelegacymigration subreddit from users who say their long-running personal G Suite Legacy accounts are suddenly being classified as “commercial use” accounts and pushed toward paid Google Workspace plans by May 2026. A lot of users have been through this before. Google spent part of 2022 trying to wind down free G Suite Legacy accounts, then changed course after users running family domains made enough noise. Now some of those same users are being told they have fallen outside Google’s rules after all. Emails seen by The Register warn users their accounts have been "identified as being used for commercial purposes" and say Google may start suspending Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Meet, and other Workspace services if they do not either win an appeal or begin paying for Workspace subscriptions. "Please upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription to continue using your services. Look out for a notification regarding the appeal process in Google Admin console or email," the email reads. "If you don’t take action during your 45-day appeal period, Google will begin suspending your Google Workspace core services, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet. As a result, you will lose access to these core services and data." In a statement to The Register, a Google Workspace spokesperson said: "G Suite legacy free edition is intended for personal non-commercial use. If users are identified as commercial users, we are enforcing our existing policy and helping them transition to a Google Workspace subscription. Anyone who believes their account has been identified as being used for commercial purposes in error can file an appeal." The trouble, according to users, is that the appeals system appears about as transparent as a brick. One Reddit user said their appeal was initially denied despite "none" of the account activity being commercial. After filing a GDPR subject access request asking Google to provide evidence of business use, the user said the company abruptly reversed course the following day and restored the account. Others say they were not so lucky. One UK-based user whose appeal failed accused Google of relying on vague "signals" data and effectively trapping users into accidentally linking personal accounts to business activity. Another said their family-only custom domain, used solely for relatives’ email accounts and with no commercial activity, was permanently classified as business use despite an appeal. Some users suspect the enforcement may be tied to custom domains that have at some point been associated with public business listings, websites, or Google Business profiles. Google has not explained what specifically triggers the bans. The move also lands days after Google quietly began testing a 5 GB storage cap for some users who decline to add phone numbers to their accounts, suggesting the company’s definition of "free" continues to come with increasingly creative terms and conditions. ®

Microsoft seized websites and took down hundreds of virtual machines running a cybercrime service that allegedly sold code-signing certificates to ransomware gangs, thus making their malware look like legitimate software – and allowing criminals to infect thousands of machines in the US, including at least 12 owned and operated by the Windows giant. The malware signing-as-a-service operation called Fox Tempest has been around since May 2025, and abuses Microsoft’s Artifact Signing code-signing service. This service allows developers to digitally sign their software applications, signaling to the Windows operating system and end-user that the software is authentic, and hasn’t been tampered with. Since May 2025, the Fox Tempest crew – referred to as John Doe 1 and 2 in court documents unsealed on Tuesday – used fake identities and impersonated real organizations, allowing them to create more than 580 fraudulent Microsoft accounts. They then used these accounts to abuse Microsoft’s Artifact Signing service and obtain real code-signing credentials, then sold the code-signing certificates to other criminals for thousands of dollars. According to Microsoft, Fox Tempest’s customers included a ransomware group Redmond tracks as Vanilla Tempest (aka Vice Spider, Vice Society, Rhysida), which allegedly used the certificates to digitally sign malware and make it appear legitimate to Windows and users. This also allowed the ransomware slingers “to more easily deploy the malware onto the computers of unsuspecting victims without their consent,” according to the court documents [PDF]. Malware included Windows backdoor Oyster, infostealers Lumma and Vidar, and Rhysida ransomware. Vanilla Tempest “unlawfully accessed victims’ computers and devices, exfiltrated and stole the personal and confidential information of victims, deployed ransomware designed to encrypt victims’ files and systems, and extorted victims by demanding payment in exchange for restoring access to, or suppressing, their data,” the civil complaint continues, adding that the criminal activity remains ongoing. In a subsequent blog post, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit attorney Steven Masada said the tech company's investigation “further linked Fox Tempest to various additional ransomware affiliates and families, including INC, Qilin, Akira, and others.” Between February and March, the Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), working with “a cooperating source,” anonymously bought and tested the code signing service from John Doe 2, aka SamCodeSign. “These test purchases allowed DCU investigators to observe first-hand how Fox Tempest Defendants operate the service, the information a purchaser is provided, and the instructions given by SamCodeSign to connect to the service and sign the test software created by Microsoft,” the court documents say. “Additionally, the test purchases allowed DCU to identify cryptocurrency wallets used by Fox Tempest Defendants.” During the first test purchase, the source filled out a Google Form asking them to select how quickly they needed the certificates. Standard costs $5,000, while priority runs $7,500 and expedited carries a hefty $9,500 price tag. SamCodeSign then sent a direct message to the source and requested the $7,500 payment to be sent to a bitcoin wallet, according to screenshots (translated from Russian) in the court documents. After the source paid up, SamCodeSign sent instructions on how to access the virtual machine and complete the code signing process. “Microsoft has identified thousands of customer machines, including more than a dozen machines owned and operated by Microsoft, in the United States that have been impacted by malware signed with certificates originating from the tenants created by Fox Tempest Defendants,” the complaint says. ®

The back-of-house AI system that Pizza Hut has mandated its restaurants to adopt has been so poorly received by some franchisees, that one is using the company for $100 million in losses tied to the technology. Put that in your crust and stuff it! Chaac Pizza Northeast, a franchisee with around 111 Pizza Hut locations in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania, filed a complaint in the Business Court of Texas earlier this month accusing the Hut of breaching its franchise agreement by mandating Chaac adopt restaurant management AI from Dragontail, a provider of AI-powered food delivery software. What was supposed to be a platform that would unify multiple kitchen systems under one AI-managed umbrella allegedly turned out to be a disaster for Chaac, which claims it was a leader among Pizza Hut franchises on metrics like delivery speed and rack time (i.e., the time between a pizza leaving the oven and leaving the store for delivery) prior to forced Dragontail adoption. Pizza Hut parent company Yum Brands purchased Dragontail in 2021. “With the intention to improve efficiency and service to the customer, Dragontail did the exact opposite; it caused significant delays and pummeled consumer satisfaction,” the lawsuit filing states. Chaac further alleged that Pizza Hut didn’t provide promised Dragontail support, and refused to allow Chaac to step back its use of the product, “causing cascading operational breakdowns and customer dissatisfaction.” Chaac admits it might be a bit of a special case, however, because of its particular business model: The company’s Pizza Hut locations don’t have a dining room, instead exclusively offering carry out and delivery services. Chaac also doesn’t employ its own drivers, instead relying on DoorDash to handle its deliveries. Before Dragontail’s implementation, staff at Chaac Pizza Huts had to input pickup requests into a DoorDash tablet, according to the lawsuit, which would handle getting the delivery order to a driver. Centralizing all of the order-to-delivery pipeline under one product meant that DoorDash gained visibility into the entire pizza making process. On one side that makes things more efficient, as the complaint explains. “This access allowed DoorDash to know when the pizzas went into the oven and were ready for pick-up, and when other pizza orders would be ready for pick-up,” the suit states - not bad if that means drivers aren’t sitting around waiting. In practice, however, that’s not what happened. Drivers were able to see whether additional orders would be up soon, meaning many of them would grab one order and simply wait 15 minutes for another, meaning the first order was invariably late and cold by the time it got to a customer. DoorDash drivers were also able to see any pre-paid tips on the order and whether an order was paid in cash. In many cases, drivers would decline tipless and cash orders. “These issues, arising out of DoorDash’s visibility, caused a disruption in orderly delivery and significantly slower delivery times,” the suit claimed, adding that the changes ultimately benefited DoorDash at Chaac’s expense. “The damage was not abstract,” the suit continued. “Chaac suffered lost revenue, lost profits, loss in enterprise value, business interruption, and erosion of goodwill and customer relationships” as a result of Dragontail adoption. According to the lawsuit, loss of business and enterprise value due to the forced adoption of kitchen management AI caused is in excess of $100 million, which Chaac is demanding as recompense. It’s not difficult to find examples online of Pizza Hut employees complaining about Dragontail. Multiple Reddit threads from inside the 2020-2024 implementation period contain examples of employees describing dissatisfaction with the software. Several commenters note, as Chaac did in its lawsuit, that Dragontail took control out of the hands of its kitchens and put it in the hands of AI. “Dragontail’s integration with kitchen workflow and aggregator dispatch predictably stripped Chaac’s managers of operational control, introduced delays, and invited stacking and other algorithmic behaviors that slowed production and delivery,” the lawsuit argues. Pizza Hut has been struggling in recent years, with Yum closing hundreds of locations so far this year in the midst of a turnaround effort that included initiatives like adding Dragontail to the struggling brand’s locations; the company didn’t respond to questions for this story. Whether this’ll be another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin or just a bump in the road will be up to a judge to decide. ®

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and doting parent company Alphabet, opened its Google I/O developer conference with a celebration of token and capital expenditures. Tokens are the basic data exchange unit of AI models and Google has vastly increased its token processing to accommodate internal and external demand for AI inference. Two years ago, Pichai said, Google handled 9.7 trillion tokens per month. Last year, it was 480 trillion per month. Currently, the Chocolate Factory handles 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month. "Now some out there might call this tokenmaxxing and there's probably some truth to it," said Pichai. "I still think it tells an important story about our products and how others are building as well, especially our developers." Pichai said over 8.5 million developers are building applications using Google's Gemini model family monthly, using about 19 billion tokens per minute in API calls. And over the past 12 months, more than 375 customers have consumed more than 1 trillion tokens each – an indication there's some demand for AI among businesses. That token processing is possible because of the vast capital expenditures Google has made in datacenters and compute capacity, and TPU hardware. "Supporting all of this at scale for our users while also serving enterprises and developers around the world requires massive investments in infrastructure," said Pichai. "And we've been investing for today and for the future. In 2022, we were spending $31 billion annually in capex. This year, we expect that number to be about six times that, approximately 180 to 190 billion dollars." Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, took a turn on stage to provide an update on Google's progress toward AGI – artificial general intelligence – that ill-defined point when AI models perform some set of tasks as well as a human. Gemini Omni, Hassabis suggested, is a step in that direction. It can, he said, "create anything from any input," meaning digital stuff as opposed to atomic replication. "It combines Gemini's intelligence with the best of our generative media models for a new level of world understanding, multimodality and editing," he explained. Gemini Omni combines video, image, and interactive simulation capabilities of models like Veo, Nano Banana, and Genie with physics modeling, so projects accurately depict object interactions involving kinetic energy and gravity. The first model in that family, Gemini Omni Flash, is now available. Pichai returned to announce an expansion of SynthID, Google's AI watermarking technology. Google, he said, will support C2PA content credentials verification across its products, to help people distinguish between content created by AI and by a camera, and to tell whether it has been edited with Google Photos. "We are expanding both SynthID and content credentials verification to Search and Chrome," said Pichai. "You can simply circle to search or right-click in Chrome and ask, 'was this generated with AI?' and you'll get a clear response along with other helpful context." To help make this technology more broadly useful, Google said OpenAI, Kakao and ElevenLabs have decided to adopt SynthID. Pichai went on to announce the next generation of its Gemini model family, Gemini 3.5 Flash. "When compared to 3.1 Pro, Flash is better across the board, in almost all benchmarks," he said, adding that the model has made "huge progress in coding," one of the more remunerative use cases for AI models presently. One of the major selling points of Gemini 3.5 Flash is that it offers comparable performance to other frontier models, but much faster. The model manages about 289 tokens per second, about 4x more than other frontier models, Google claims. Those using Google's coding harness Antigravity can look forward to even greater speed gains. "We've optimized Flash to be not just four times, but 12 times faster in Antigravity," said DeepMind engineer Varun Mohan, adding that the 2.0 release of Antigravity is out now. The other major selling point is price. "Top companies in Google Cloud are processing about 1 trillion tokens a day," said Pichai. "If they shifted 80% of their workloads from other frontier models to 3.5 Flash, they'd save over $1 billion annually." Gemini 3.5 Flash is also making its presence known in the Google Gemini app and in Search through its integration with Gemini Spark, an agent service. "It's your personal AI agent that helps you navigate your digital life, taking action on your behalf and under your direction," Pichai explained. "It runs on dedicated virtual machines on Google Cloud. And it's 24/7." Based on Gemini 3.5 Flash, with an assist from the Antigravity harness, Spark can perform long-running tasks in the background, presumably without incurring a huge token bill. Spark will be able to connect to other tools – Google apps initially like Gmail and Chat, then third-party tools via MCP. Chrome integration, which will enable agentic browsing, is planned for later this summer. Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs, Gemini and AI Studio, described how he used Spark to arrange a block party, emailing neighbors, recording their responses in a spreadsheet, and creating a slide deck. This is rolling out now to trusted testers and to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US next week. Spark's arrival coincides with a new $100/month Ultra plan tier and the deflation of the top Ultra tier from $250/month to $200/month. Pichai offered up one of his timeworn phrases – "It's still the early days when it comes to making agents easy to use, super secure, and truly helpful" – to gloss over the security and privacy implications of AI agents acting on user data and applications without supervision. Then he handed off to Liz Reid, VP of Search, who proceeded to detail further AI incursions into Google's Search service. Gemini 3.5 Flash, she said, has become the default model for AI Mode. And the Search box itself has been redesigned to surface AI-based suggestions and to facilitate inputs from modalities other than text, such as images, files, videos, and Chrome tabs. The biggest change is Search Agents, which like Gemini Spark will be accessible from Search and will run while you're away from the keyboard. "You can set information agents to work for you 24/7 in the background," said Reid. "They can find you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, and help you take action. You can spin up multiple agents in search simultaneously to get updated and make progress on all those things that matter to you." Google is also taking a page from Anthropic by offering code-based interactive widgets or mini-apps on demand. Search users will be able to create dynamic layouts, charts, graphs, and the like through the integration of Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity in a containerized environment. This generative UI capability is rolling out this summer. Expect Google's token expenditures to continue to grow, along with pressure to purchase subscriptions to pay for the agentic labor. ®

Firefox version 151 is out of beta and trickling out to users, with handy additions, just in case you were thinking of jumping ship from Windows 11 to Linux. Mozilla has officially released Firefox 151, although automatic updates are not yet happening at the time we write this. Its profit-making subsidiary MZLA has also released Thunderbird 151, although its new-feature list has less cool new shiny. The Firefox product announcement trumpets a “fresh new look and feel” for the New Tab page. As we’ve already lightly customized ours, we didn’t see that, but you know how it is – this is the sort of thing marketing folks can understand and sound excited about. Apparently you can customize its wallpaper and add a “Recent Activity” feed, if that’s what you want. (We’ve just added a few more rows of shortcuts to recent pages.) A more useful function, especially if you don’t trust Firefox Sync and you’re thinking of changing to a new OS, is improved handling of Firefox Backup, the built-in tools for backing up and restoring your profile (or profiles, plural, for the truly hardcore). The page in the last link hasn’t changed in the last three weeks, and it still says, “Note: Firefox Backup is currently only available to users on Windows 10 and 11. This feature may be extended to other platforms in future versions of Firefox.” Well, now it has: the release notes say it works on Linux now. We’ve also seen reports that it is now on macOS too, but not on our iMac (This could be because we’ve been using Firefox Sync since the late lamented Xmarks shut down). A key addition is that a profile backed up on one OS can now be restored on a different OS, which sounds like a significant improvement to us. This includes extensions and themes. Last time around, we shared the news that the PDF editor could split multipage PDFs into chunks, including saving out individual pages. In this version, it can now merge multiple PDFs into one, which also sounds handy. It’s the sort of feature we rarely need, but when we do, we really need it. Suffice to say that with recent Firefox versions, we no longer need a standalone PDF viewer. As well as over 30 security fixes and the usual developer changes, this release fixes some more visible bugs: multi-monitor handling has been improved, as has macOS integration. For instance, it can now handle links pasted from iOS using Apple’s Universal Clipboard feature, and dropdown menus on web pages use the native Apple menu style. Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection has been further – er – enhanced, and now conceals more info about you – and much more on macOS. Thunderbird 151 is nigh upon us The closest thing to a universal cross-platform messaging client that the 21st century has to offer us so far has been updated, too. Thunderbird 151 is rolling out, although we haven’t been offered the update yet. The release notes' What’s New section only has three bullet points, and one of those is for the not-yet-public Thundermail service, part of Thunderbird Pro. However, it’s easier to adjust authorization settings for automatically-created accounts, Microsoft Exchange handling has been slightly tweaked, and you can sort tasks by different criteria. Since our task list is about three pages long and never seems to get any shorter, that sounds quite handy. ®

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) left open a GitHub repository named “Private-CISA” containing plain-text passwords, private keys, tokens, and secrets – with obvious file names like “external-secret-repo-creds.yaml” and “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” – for six months. GitGuardian researcher Guillaume Valadon, fresh off a recent talk on Kubernetes secret leaks, found the public repository on May 14, and told The Register that he “quickly understood that the leak was bad and that time was running out. A national agency having 844 MB of production infrastructure material in a public GitHub repository for six months is as serious as a secrets leak gets.” Valadon, who previously spent nine years at France’s CISA equivalent, ANSSI, told us the leak included tokens for CISA's internal JFrog Artifactory, Azure registry keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes manifests, ArgoCD application files, Terraform infrastructure code, GitHub personal access tokens, and Entra ID SAML certificates. GitGuardian reported the leaky repository to CISA on May 14, and the agency took it down a day later. A CISA spokesperson told The Register that it was aware of the report and is investigating. "Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident.” It’s not a good look for the nation’s infosec agency, which hasn’t had a permanent boss since Trump took office, is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets cuts on top of deep cuts to staff and funding last year, and has suffered its share of embarrassing security snafus in the interim. In a Tuesday blog, Valadon said he initially thought the repo “was a hoax, given how suspicious the directory names (Backup-April-2026/, All Backups/, LZ-Artifactory/, Kubernetes-Important-Yaml-Files/, ENTRA ID - SAML Certificates/ ...), file names (external-secret-repo-creds.yaml, CAWS GitHub Token.txt, Important AWS Tokens.txt, AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv, Kube-Config.txt ...), and their contents (private keys, personal and professional GitHub tokens, AWS secrets, ...) seemed too good to be true,” Valadon wrote. It wasn’t a hoax – “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the reported exposure and is continuing to investigate the situation,” but it was a “catalogue of unsafe practices,” he added, containing passwords stored in plain text, backups committed to Git, and an “explicit” how-to guide for disabling GitHub's secret scanning. After initially reporting the leak through the CERT/CC portal, and only receiving an auto-acknowledgement as of the morning of May 15 – a Friday – Valadon alerted security journalist Brian Krebs about the publicly exposed secrets, which seemed to speed up CISA’s processes. By 6 pm EST that night, the feds took down the repository. Valadon told The Reg he gives CISA credit for quickly deleting the repository. “Most of our responsible disclosures take much longer, and many are never fixed,” he said. “Managing to take the repository offline in a day is impressive work.” He doesn’t know if any other parties with less altruistic intentions found the secrets first, although the fact that the repository was never forked (based on public GitHub events) would seem to indicate that it wasn’t widely circulated on the dark web. “The only ones that can answer definitively is GitHub,” Valadon said. GitHub did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiry. GitGuardian isn’t aware of any of the exposed credentials being abused by unauthorized individuals “Each category of secret in the repository unlocks a specific attack path,” Valadon said. “Stacked together, they cover the full range: from destructive attacks and ransomware extortion to quiet, long-term persistence inside CISA's build and deployment pipeline. That last scenario worried me the most, and it's why I escalated through every channel we had until the repository was taken offline.” Plus, the committer used both a CISA-issued contractor email and a personal Yahoo email across the same commits, and created the repository using a personal GitHub account. “That mixed-identity pattern is one of the hardest surfaces for security teams to cover, and it's where the worst leaks happen,” Valadon said.®

You know about shadow IT. Get ready for the shadow AI surge. Employees using unauthorized personal accounts to access GenAI tools are emerging as a growing insider-risk concern for organizations, new research shows. That means workers who have access to sensitive material could be plugging it into their AI platform of choice more frequently, leaving their organization none the wiser. Of the 45 percent of all professionals using AI in the workplace regularly, 67 percent of those were accessing the platforms using personal accounts that were not authorized by their IT teams, data from Verizon’s annual data breach investigations report (DBIR) [PDF] showed. Verizon said that the proportion of users accessing AI through personal accounts now represents a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions detected across this year’s dataset of more than 22,000 breaches globally. We’re not just talking about the Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok, but also various vibe coding platforms, AI agents, and other external chatbots that could have access to an organization’s data in some form. Verizon reported that 28 percent of data loss prevention policy violations involved employees entering source code into an AI tool, potentially exposing an organization’s intellectual property. In descending order of prevalence, staff were tossing images, structured data, documents, and PDFs into GenAI platforms as well. In 3.2 percent of cases, workers were uploading proprietary research and technical documentation. This should concern even the most bullish AI adopters, given the volume of potentially sensitive corporate data employees are feeding into unauthorized third-party AI services each day. Verizon said admins should be doing everything they can to prevent users from blindly trusting technology that is putting an increasing number of systems between this potentially sensitive data and the model itself, including by securing all enterprise asset configurations, and ensuring accounts and their permissions are tightly managed. The prevalence of shadow AI has given rise to new thinking around the matter, including by evolving the idea of software bill of materials (SBOMs) to AI-BOMs. You may have come across these already. Cisco open-sourced its AI-BOM earlier this year, for example, and more recently introduced a tool to track AI model provenance. Ian Swanson, VP of AI security products at Palo Alto Networks, told us the other week that AI-BOMs can also play an impactful role in helping incident responders deduce how cyberattacks play out in cases where the attackers use an organization’s own AI against it. AI-BOMs give defenders an idea of what any given AI system’s configurations were at a given time, allowing them to more easily see what changed and when. "If you had understanding of state and understanding of state changes, then you would be able to go back to an AI bill of materials and say: 'What system prompt was used within the ingredients to create the AI application?' And then see it's changed from a prior state to a new state. So we should probably check this and see if there's anything bad that's happening here," Swanson said. "And in that case, you'd be able to catch it." Bugs, bugs, bugs Away from the growing issue of shadow AI, Verizon said the exploitation of software vulnerabilities is once again the leading cause of security breaches, overtaking credential abuse, which is down 13 percent on last year’s results. Organizations’ patching habits aren’t doing much to help the cause here. The percentage of critical vulnerabilities from CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog that were fully remediated was down from 38 to 26 percent in 2025, for example. Verizon also said that the median time to full vulnerability resolution rose by nearly two weeks, from 32 days in 2024 to 43 days last year. That said, defenders have had their work cut out for them, with the number of critical vulnerabilities needing remediation increasing by 50 percent on average. Elsewhere, ransomware featured in nearly half of all breaches covered in the report. Forty-eight percent of them, to be exact, up slightly from 44 percent in the previous year’s dataset. Some bright news to end on, however: Verizon continues to see a downward trend in ransom payments being made – 69 percent of victims refused to pay, while the median ransom payment fell from $150,000 to $139,875. ®

Airbus has inaugurated new supercomputing infrastructure from Bull to help the firm develop future aircraft, but is being coy about revealing how powerful the overall system is. The European aerospace giant had already taken delivery of the hardware, spread across two sites – at Toulouse in December last year and Hamburg in April this year – but today (Tuesday) marks the official inauguration of the system, with 3x the performance of its previous supercomputer. That’s according to Bull, the high-performance compute biz the French state acquired from Atos a few months ago, as Airbus declined to put forward a spokesperson to answer our questions. The new system is based on a modular design, where kit was pre-assembled inside containers before being shipped to the Airbus sites. It is based on the firm’s BullSequana XH3000 rack infrastructure with a mix of compute blades configured with AMD’s Genoa and Turin versions of the Epyc processors, plus Nvidia GPU blades. Also part of the hardware manifest is IBM Spectrum Scale storage using Storage Scale System appliances from the firm, and the interconnect used is Nvidia’s InfiniBand NDR (Next Data Rate), supporting 400 Gbps per port. However, Bull wouldn’t tell us exactly how much of all this infrastructure it has delivered, as Airbus regards this as confidential information. What it did say is that the supercomputer is being supplied and supported on a “HPC-as-a-service” model, whereby Airbus is paying close to €100 million ($116 million) over five years for an all-inclusive deal. Bull is understood to have won this contract from HPE, which was the previous supplier to Airbus. “So Airbus was a long standing customer of HPE for around 24 years, and they were initiating a procurement to replace their existing system in order to get something like three times more performance of their existing systems, so they did a procurement, which is a classical HPC procurement, and we won on the price-performance agreement,” Bull’s head of HPC, AI and Quantum Computing Bruno Lecointe told The Register. While the hardware is located at two sites, Lecointe says they are connected to function as a single supercomputer, although workloads are not currently split across sites but run on one or the other, with a batch scheduler choosing which is the best based on the available resources. Airbus needed a more powerful supercomputer as it is expecting to use it for “digital twins,” whereby the helicopters and other aircraft it is developing will not only be designed using the system, but the entire airframe will also be simulated on the computer as well. One of the tools it is likely to be using is the CODA computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, jointly developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the French Aerospace Lab (ONERA), and Airbus itself. Lecointe hinted that Bull is also working with Airbus on some quantum and AI algorithms to meet its compute requirements, but this is “highly confidential.” The inauguration of this fully operational, multi-site supercomputing infrastructure comes just 14 months after contract signature, Lecointe boasted. The heat generated by the system will also be reused to supply neighboring buildings on the Airbus site. ®

If you use Drupal, get ready to patch without delay. The org behind the popular open source content management system is warning of a highly critical vulnerability in Drupal core that is serious enough for it to tell users ahead of Wednesday’s patch release to set aside time to install the fix immediately. The Drupal Security Team’s Monday PSA announcing the imminent patch for Drupal core doesn’t include any specifics, with the PSA noting that Drupal isn’t willing to share additional information until the announcement is made alongside the patch release. That, says Drupal, will happen at some point between 1700 and 2100 UTC on Wednesday, May 20. To reiterate, this vulnerability is found in Drupal core, the bare-bones version of Drupal designed for developers, and not Drupal CMS, the preconfigured version for those who want Drupal but don’t have coding skills. Drupal noted that sites using Drupal Steward, its paid web application firewall service, are protected against known attack vectors, though it still recommends Steward customers update their core instances in case additional exploit methods emerge. “The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for core updates at that time because exploits might be developed within hours or days,” the advisory warns. Drupal also recommends users update to the latest supported release prior to Wednesday’s patch “so that you can address any other upgrade issues before the security window." While it won’t get specific on the nature of the vulnerability, Drupal did share its severity score based on NIST’s standard scoring methodology, and it’s not good: The bug scored 20 out of a max of 25 on that scale, as defined by Drupal’s own documentation. More specifically, it’s trivially easy to leverage, doesn’t require any privilege level to exploit, could make all non-public data on an affected site accessible to the attacker, and could allow an attacker to modify or delete whatever they wanted. The only two things preventing it from scoring a perfect 25/25 are the fact that a known exploit doesn’t exist yet and that it doesn’t affect all configurations, only those using “uncommon module configurations.” Drupal noted that security releases will be published on Wednesday for all currently supported core branches (11.3.x, 11.2.x, 10.6.x, and 10.5.x), as well as unsupported Drupal 11.1.x and 10.4.x branches for sites that have not yet upgraded from older 10.x and 11.x releases. Drupal users on 8.9 and 9.5 are also getting patches “given the potential severity of this issue,” though the advisory warns 8.9 and 9.5 users will need to install those updates manually, which “might introduce other bugs or regressions,” leading Drupal to recommend a full upgrade to a supported core branch. “Drupal 8 and 9 include numerous other, previously disclosed, security vulnerabilities that will not be addressed by either Drupal Steward or the best-effort patch files,” the advisory said. Drupal 7 users are safe. Given the fact that not all Drupal core environments will be affected, the advisory recommends all Drupal core users set aside time on Wednesday to determine whether they’re part of the vulnerable class, and take action immediately if so. Drupal’s security team didn’t respond to questions for this story. ®

Gartner has warned that SAP users adopting its AI agents could face spiraling costs as the vendor moves to a new commercial model. Last week, the German ERP giant announced plans for its Autonomous Enterprise, including an AI platform for building and governing a suite of agents that do business work. With the new platform comes a new commercial model in which SAP no longer charges according to how many users are authorized to access the platform, but by the value agents offer by completing "actions." SAP has confirmed to The Register that AI Unit purchases are estimated based on the expected number of "agent actions for an autonomous domain." The company promised to introduce "Autonomous Domain Blueprints" that would help estimate costs in so-called "T‑shirt size guidance" indicative of the customer's scale of deployment. However, a recent paper from Gartner warns: "Depending on how SAP defines an 'action,' the number of events incurring fees risks quickly spiraling upwards. This would lead to unexpectedly increased costs, especially if SAP continues to charge higher unit prices for AI Units used in excess of the customer’s contractual commitment, or if AI agents consume a digital access license. Moreover, the value a customer derives from an executed action might not match how SAP has priced that action." Victoria Rowan, Gartner senior principal analyst, is lead author of the report, "First Take: SAP Moves to Higher-Value-Based AI Pricing, but Potential Cautions Remain." The research outfit has promised to update its analysis as SAP publishes more details about its pricing model. It is also waiting for a response to a fact review from the company. SAP provides ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that help run some of the world's largest companies, including Walmart and VW Group. Over the past five years, it has been trying to get customers to move to the cloud and off legacy software. More recently, it has made a big push for AI adoption. In its research, Gartner said users need to take care in how they cost AI adoption with SAP, which provides AI Units as a commercial metric. "The AI Units customers purchase are converted to the license metric of the particular SAP Premium AI services they consume. SAP's contracts give SAP the ability to alter the conversion factors, meaning SAP could end up charging more during the term and at the point of contractual renewal," the paper says. An SAP spokesperson said conversion rates were intended to reflect the usage of the applicable AI features. "Any changes to conversion rates would only take effect upon renewal for existing customers, as further described in the applicable AI Units order form." Gartner also pointed out that there was a lack of "clear definitions of how the customer-built agents' work will be measured." While this remains the case, "it will be difficult to predict and control runtime costs." The SAP spokesperson said the runtime metrics for Joule Studio – SAP's agent builder platform – had not yet been disclosed. Announcing SAP's Business AI platform last week, CEO Christian Klein promised customers could unlock new sources of revenue and make "meaningful cost savings." Gartner advises users thinking about adopting SAP's AI platform to review their existing contracts to check whether they have price-protection clauses for their SAP Cloud applications, such as S/4HANA. They should also get a baseline for the conversion of AI Units by obtaining a copy of the current SAP AI Services List from the SAP Trust Center and reviewing the current conversion factors. ®

Microsoft has rolled out another round of Surface for Business laptops starting at $1,499 and featuring Intel's latest mobile processors. The new Surface Pro for Business (12th Edition) and Surface Laptop for Business (8th Edition) refreshes, announced on Tuesday, are built around Intel’s latest Core Ultra Series 3 processors and Microsoft’s increasingly relentless Copilot+ PC push. Redmond HQ'd Microsoft is pitching the machines as enterprise-grade AI workhorses capable of running local AI models and Windows “AI experiences” without constantly leaning on the cloud. At the top end, the new 13-inch Surface Pro can be configured with up to 64 GB of RAM, 1 TB of removable SSD storage, optional OLED panels, and 5G connectivity. Microsoft says the onboard NPU can deliver up to 50 TOPS of AI processing performance for local Copilot features, image generation, transcription, and video enhancements. The new Surface Pro does not radically reinvent anything, sticking with the same kickstand-and-detachable-keyboard design Microsoft has been shipping for years. However, the company says the 13-inch PixelSense Flow display now supports HDR, adaptive color, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and up to 600 nits of brightness. The Surface Laptop line now comes in 13-inch, 13.8-inch, and 15-inch configurations, with Microsoft heavily emphasizing battery life, AI-assisted video calls, and hybrid work features. The devices include WiFi 7 support, multiple USB-C ports, haptic touchpads, and optional anti-glare privacy displays, designed to make shoulder-surfing slightly harder for the stranger sitting next to you on the train. Under the hood, the new Surface Laptops can be configured with Intel Core Ultra X7 processors, which Microsoft claims deliver up to 35 percent better graphics performance than Apple’s MacBook Air with M5 silicon and more than 90 percent faster performance than the older Surface Laptop 5. Those figures, naturally, come from Microsoft’s own testing. None of this comes particularly cheap. The new Surface Pro for Business starts at $1,949.99, while maxed-out configurations climb north of $3,000 – and that’s before you buy the keyboard add-on. Surface Laptop for Business systems are a bit less expensive, with the 13-inch model going for $1,499 and a model with 8 GB of RAM due out later this year for just $1,299. That lands barely a month after Microsoft quietly raised Surface pricing amid ongoing memory shortages and broader component cost pressures. Some Surface models jumped by several hundred pounds overnight as RAM pricing continued to spiral upward, driven by AI infrastructure demand outpacing memory supply across the industry. So far, the AI PC era appears to involve rather a lot of expensive laptops and considerably less evidence that customers were asking for them. ®

The Amalgamated Union of Influencers, Trendsetters, Microbloggers, and other professional brand ambassadors is up in arms, and threatening an industry-wide strike (please note: this is not in any strict or meaningful sense true). Elon Musk is tightening the ties that bind, in bad news for enthusiastic social media personalities on X who aren't monetizing successfully enough to pay for it yet. On the site's help page, punitive restrictions on non-paid users are laid out. The current technical limits for accounts now are: Direct Messages (daily): The limit is 500 messages sent per day. Posts: 50 original posts and 200 replies per day for unverified accounts. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Changes to account email: 4 per hour. Following (daily): The technical follow limit is 400 per day. Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. Following (account-based): Once an account is following 5,000 other accounts, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. We know, and we sympathize. How could anyone cope with being limited to just 50 tweets and 200 replies a day? All the same, some of the Twitterati are not happy. If you are interested in moving up to a premium account, hilariously, at the time of writing the Premium sign-up page compares the benefits of Basic, Premium, and Premium+ accounts with this vivid and enticing description: In case of problems, the help page suggests checking the Status page, which, as the icing on the cake, currently appears to be down: And yes, we checked. Perhaps the site is simply deluged by legions of Digital Storytellers and Tastemakers who are desperately trying to pay to extend their reach. Meanwhile, other social networks remain available. Bluesky has been open to all comers for a couple of years now. Former CEO Jay Graber, who now serves as Chief Innovation Officer, has some enticing rhetoric, such as this post from October: Be warned, though, she does have a strong position against strikes: If Bluesky sounds just a tad corporate, then we suggest the Fediverse, best known through its most famous implementation and site, Mastodon. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a guide on how to join. ®

An npm account compromise infected 314 npm packages with malware, including size-sensor, echarts-for-react, timeago.js, and packages scoped to @antv, in a 22-minute burst of activity in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The most popular impacted package is size-sensor, downloaded 4.2 million times per month, followed by echarts-for-react (3.8 million), @antv/scale (2.2 million) and timeago.js (1.15 million). The compromised account, i@hust.cc, belongs to a developer based in Hangzhou, China. Security researcher Nicholas Carlini reported the malware on GitHub, and the the hust.cc account closed the issues and marked them as "fixed" within an hour. This means the malware report on this and other repositories is hidden unless a developer looks for closed issues. Some malicious package versions have been deprecated on npm with the message "this version was published in error, please use the latest version instead," while others have been removed. Security biz SafeDep reported on the malware and analyzed the payload, which uses the same structure as that used to compromise SAP packages three weeks ago. The malware reads environment variables and scans files to find credentials for GitHub, npm, cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Docker, Stripe, and more. The code also attempts to escape container boundaries. Stolen secrets are exfiltrated to a new GitHub repository. The malware injects settings files into other local projects on a developer machine, for execution by Claude Code or Codex, and further abuses GitHub as a C2 (command-and-control) backdoor via malicious repositories and Python code that downloads and executes content from them. According to SafeDep, "the attacker automated the entire wave using a stolen token." Developers who have installed compromised package versions are advised to rotate all credentials accessible from the build environment, check for unauthorized GitHub repositories, and remove malicious systemd services on Linux. Maintainers and package publishers are at greatest risk as they may find further malicious packages published via their own credentials. This attack comes shortly after another Shai-Hulud incident reported yesterday, and more can be expected. Although other package repositories such as PyPI and RubyGems have also seen malware published to them, npm remains the biggest target and, for now, appears to be the worst affected. npm, owned by Microsoft subsidiary GitHub, has said little about the current wave. In September last year, a post outlining a plan for a more secure npm supply chain was intended to "address a surge in package registry attacks," during what now looks like the early phase of Shai-Hulud, but the actions taken so far have not prevented further incidents. The Register asked GitHub to comment.®

VMware is still able to keep some corporate customers onside - it has signed a five-year agreement with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) for its Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud platform. According to Broadcom, LSEG has used VMware across parts of its infrastructure for more than a decade, and the latest purchase centers on deploying VCF to support the stock exchange operator's private cloud. Broadcom will also provide professional services to roll out VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 across the organization's IT estate as part of the contract. The Register asked how much this new agreement is worth, but LSEG declined to disclose figures. This is a pertinent question, as many customers of VMware's cloud and virtualization software complain that licensing costs have risen significantly since Broadcom paid $61 billion to buy VMware at the end of 2023 and scrapped perpetual licenses in favor of long-term subscription bundles. In fact, analyst biz Gartner has suggested that for some VMware customers, moving workloads to an IBM mainframe could prove a cheaper option than adopting Broadcom's new licenses. As The Register reported recently, half of VMware users are looking to reduce their use of the virtualization pioneer's products by 2028, as many are not happy with Broadcom's recent strategy of only selling a complete private cloud suite in the form of VCF 9. Previously, companies were able to pick and choose parts of the software stack that suited them. LSEG also declined to reveal its rationale for sticking with VMware, beyond the details disclosed in the announcement. "Extending our use of VMware Cloud Foundation supports an engineered private cloud for our operations, while giving us the flexibility to support new services and workloads as our technology needs evolve," said Andrew Knight, LSEG CIO for Infrastructure and Cloud. The stock exchange operator said the initiative complements its existing cloud partnerships. These include a multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the preferred cloud provider for its Markets, Risk Intelligence, and FTSE Russell divisions, and an earlier long-term agreement with Microsoft to jointly develop new products and services for its data and analytics business. ®

Transport for London (TfL) has published full details of its Revenue Collection Services contract, awarded to Spanish defense and tech group Indra Sistemas in January, revealing the deal could be worth nearly twice what was initially announced. The contract hands Indra responsibility for operating, maintaining, and developing almost all public transport ticketing across western Europe's largest city. This spans paper tickets, Oyster smartcards, and contactless smartphone payments. It covers 8,500 buses, 1,000 stations, 4,000 third-party retailers, and seven visitor centers, running for seven years with options to extend by up to five more. A contract award notice published on May 14 puts the maximum possible value at £1.964 billion excluding VAT, significantly more than the £587.6 million TfL cited when it first announced the award, which it said could rise above £987 million. A TfL spokesperson clarified that the January figures cover agreed work over the initial seven-year term, while the notice reflects the ceiling value if all extensions and variations are exercised, each of which would need to be negotiated separately. The contract's most significant technical change is a shift to an account-based ticketing model for Oyster. Rather than storing balances and tickets on the card itself, data would instead be held in a back-office system, paving the way for virtual Oyster cards on smartphones, though TfL says proof-of-concept and development work must come first. TfL also plans to introduce unique identifiers for payment accounts, which it says will allow passengers to link mobile devices with payment cards and use them interchangeably. This would be a notable improvement on the current system, where price caps – the maximum a passenger pays over a given period – only apply when the same Oyster card, payment card, or device is used consistently. The contract additionally covers new equipment for stations, buses, and revenue inspection staff, and may extend to Oyster and contactless payments on national rail services, as well as commercial use of ticketing data. Indra takes over from US firm Cubic Transportation Systems, which has run TfL's Oyster system since its launch in 2003 and contactless card payments since their introduction on London buses in 2012. Some Cubic staff are expected to transfer with the contract. In 2016, TfL licensed the contactless system to Cubic for £15 million, allowing the technology to be adapted for other cities worldwide. TfL's director of technology strategy and revenue, Shashi Verma, paid tribute to the outgoing operator, saying: "I want to thank everyone at Cubic Transportation Systems for their work and innovation in delivering, maintaining, and improving the Oyster and contactless system over the past decades. The hard work and innovation by Cubic helped make the system as instantly recognizable and successful as it is." The contract gives Indra access to one of the largest urban transport datasets in the world. TfL holds extensive personal data on millions of London residents and visitors, a fact thrown into sharp relief in September 2024, when a cyberattack exposed the records of up to seven million customers after hackers breached its internal systems. ®

Data allegedly belonging to CTT, the operator of Portugal’s national postal service, has leaked online, affecting hundreds of thousands of individuals. According to HaveIBeenPwned, which ingested the data, a little more than 468,000 unique email addresses were included in the vast data dump, along with full names, phone numbers, and parcel tracking codes that could be used to identify different locations along a package’s journey. In 2026, many people now assume that their basic personal data has been included in a data breach or two, and that it can be bought online. However, when data breaches include details such as parcel tracking codes alongside basic personal information – the type that isn’t typically part of every breach – it can provide cybercriminals with crucial information to conduct convincing phishing campaigns. Fake parcel emails and SMS messages become all the more convincing if the attacker behind them can persuade the target that they possess information only the spoofed organization could hold. The stolen data was leaked on April 27, according to cybercrime forum watchers, by a hacker calling themselves “Boogeyman.” HaveIBeenPwned confirmed the breach on Tuesday, putting the scale significantly below what Boogeyman had claimed weeks earlier. While the data types matched, the crook alleged over one million customer records were exposed, more than double the 468k+ verified by HaveIBeenPwned. In addition, the criminal claimed to have stolen technical data regarding the company’s 24/7 postal lockers provided by its Locky brand. Supposedly included among these were locker configurations, private IPs, machine types, locker IDs, and backend versions. HaveIBeenPwned only summarised the consumer-related data, not the technical side of it, and The Register neither downloaded nor examined the raw data. To date, CTT has not publicly acknowledged the alleged cyberattack that led to the data breach. The Register approached the company for a statement but it did not immediately respond. ®