IN THE NEWS

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 Western Africa, once heralded as a hotbed for digital fraud operations, has now been superseded by Southeast Asia, where hundreds of major scam centres are scattered.

New research from Infoblox Threat Intel and Confiant reveals that cybercriminals are abusing Keitaro, a widely used ad tracker, to hide (“cloak”) scams and malware behind ordinary web traffic; with many posing specifically as AI investment opportunities.

NIST’s refreshed DNS security guidance is now the benchmark for companies — and Infoblox helped write the blueprint.

As AI agents sweep the tech scene, organizations are clamoring to weave them into their workflows—and rightfully so. Those who get left behind in the race to adopt AI technology are on a fast track to losing their edge to competitors or even becoming obsolete. However, the task of agentifying business processes is much easier said than done, particularly when it comes to agentifying IT.

Authorities seized infrastructure powering four botnets that hijacked a combined three million devices and launched more than 300,000 DDoS attacks collectively, the Justice Department said Thursday.