IN THE NEWS

For the first time, investigators have traced spyware to its physical origin—revealing new types of duplicity

For the past few years, it’s escaped no one that levels of Internet and telephone fraud have skyrocketed. One in four adults worldwide lost money to scams last year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance NGO, while 13% encountered an attempted scam at least once a day. Globally, over $1 trillion is lost to online fraud annually in what the U.N. has dubbed a “scamdemic.”

Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case.

Craig Sanderson from Infoblox dives into the newly finalized NIST SP 800-81 as it marks a pivotal shift in DNS security, emphasizing resilience through modernized practices tailored for today’s distributed, cloud-driven, and threat-laden environments.

In the rural heartlands of China, farmers overfeed their pigs to keep them blissfully unaware of the blade and ensure harvest of the best quality meats. That logic has found an unsettling parallel online.

World Backup Day has quietly become one of the most revealing moments in enterprise technology. This has occurred not because of the reminders to “back up your data,” but because of what the people building the systems are now saying out loud. For years, backup lived in the background: a necessary, often underappreciated layer of IT hygiene.

Every year on March 31 — strategically placed the day before April Fool’s Day as a reminder that only fools skip their backups — the technology industry pauses to observe World Backup Day. First launched in 2011, World Backup Day highlights the importance of protecting data and keeping systems and computers secure.

Chinese-language online black markets have become one of the biggest drivers of cybercrime in history, processing tens of billions of dollars of illicit finance every year. Helping the trade in stolen data, money-laundering services, and even at times electrified shackles, these underground marketplaces have fueled scam operations and human trafficking around the world. Now, officials in the United Kingdom have dealt one $20 billion cryptocurrency marketplace a potentially punishing blow.

Artificial intelligence has become the defining force reshaping cybersecurity. As organisations across the Middle East and Africa accelerate digital transformation, expand cloud adoption, and integrate AI into business operations, the attack surface has grown dramatically. At the same time, adversaries are weaponising AI to automate reconnaissance, craft hyper‑realistic phishing campaigns, generate polymorphic malware, and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed.

The headquarters of the scam economy have always been elusive, shifting between countries, towns and cities like a shadow. Western Africa, once heralded as a hotbed for digital fraud operations, has now been superseded by Southeast Asia, where hundreds of major scam centres are scattered.