Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

This year’s State of Ransomware survey showed financial services and insurance providers handing over less money to attackers than it did a year ago. Median ransom demands fell by two-thirds and median payments continued a three-year slide. The recovery story was less positive. The sector took a week longer to recover than last year, and its typical recovery bill is double the median across all sectors.

October was a busy month for AI and security, with the story that got the most attention being PHP2Shell. On 20th October the PHP security team announced an out-of-cycle release for two critical remote code execution flaws in the PHP interpreter (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619), affecting every version of PHP, from 5.4 through 8.5.

Threat intelligence is one of the few corners of UK cyber security where demand for experienced people is holding firm. Below are 10 threat intelligence and cyber intelligence roles open in the UK right now, along with the latest numbers on where the market is heading.

Keeper Security, the leading zero-trust and zero-knowledge identity security platform, today announces Self-Managed Keeper, a new self-hosted deployment option that brings Keeper’s core Privileged Access Management (PAM) capabilities to environments where external cloud connectivity is restricted, unavailable or prohibited.

AI Agents now act on the web for millions of people. To a Site, an Agent can take many forms. It may be indistinguishable from a human user carrying out a task, or it might look like one visitor carrying many Users. This removes the ability for the Site to recognize, serve, and hold accountable the user or users behind the Agent, and causes the Site to face the costs when something goes wrong.

Mend.io now has verified defender access at both Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program and OpenAI Daybreak Blue. Here is what that changes for our security research.

October’s central risk was speed. Attackers exploited systems before the fixes existed, and AI agents ran intrusions in hours, not weeks. Below is the month in visuals. Every figure comes from Foresiet’s Global Threat Intelligence Report: October 2026, which separates confirmed facts from criminal claims.

For Charity Fraud Awareness Week (2-6 November), The Cyber Helpline teamed up with the Fraud Advisory Panel to create a practical helpsheet on protecting your devices and accounts. Whatever devices you use and however you connect, there are simple steps you can take to protect your accounts and devices and stay safe online.

TL;DR: A full backup copies all data in a single self-contained set for the fastest restore, while a differential captures everything that changed since the last full backup, cutting daily backup time and storage but requiring two sets to recover. The differential backup vs. full backup choice comes down to data size, change rate, and RTO/RPO targets.

There’s a simple way to know when technology has been truly transformative. It’s when your work would fall apart if you took it away. Think about electricity, the internet, personal computers — we’re pathetically helpless when they break, and we’d struggle to redesign work without them. Very few teams have reached this point with AI. Software engineers are the exception — AI has radically changed how they build and ship software.