Cybersecurity

Zurich – October 13, 2026 -- Approximately 30% of monitored organizations experienced at least one fake IT support impersonation attempt through Microsoft Teams in the first half of 2026, according to Ontinue's 1H 2026 Threat Intelligence Report. The managed detection and response (MXDR) provider says attackers are gaining scale by exploiting trusted identities, collaboration platforms, software supply chains and routine business workflows rather than by building more sophisticated malware.

The findings draw on incident investigations, threat intelligence research and telemetry from Ontinue's Advanced Threat Operations team.

Dallas – October 12, 2026 -- Japan recorded more publicly disclosed cybersecurity incidents in the first nine months of 2026 than in all of 2025, according to TrendAITM Forward-Looking Threat Research data. TrendAITM, the enterprise business unit of Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704), issued a threat advisory for Japanese organizations after a senior ruling-party lawmaker declared that "cyberspace is in a state of emergency."

September incidents rise 37% from July to 86

September alone saw 86 incidents, about 18% more than August and 37% more than July. Masaaki Taira, who chairs the Liberal Democratic Party's National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters, made the emergency statement. The headquarters met on Oct. 9 and called on the government to strengthen public-private cooperation.

Falls Church – October 12, 2026 -- General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) has won the $1.3 billion Enterprise Network Operations and Cybersecurity Support (ENOCS) contract to run enterprise IT and cybersecurity services for the Army National Guard and other federal partners.

GSA awards contract with one base year and six option years

The General Services Administration (GSA) Assisted Acquisition Services issued the award. It has a one-year base period followed by six one-year option periods. GDIT is a business unit of General Dynamics (NYSE:GD).

GDIT to operate and defend classified and unclassified Guard networks

Under the contract, GDIT will help the Guard and its federal partners upgrade and build enterprise IT environments. The scope covers:

Vancouver – October 12, 2026 -- Anthropic committed $250 million across two new initiatives in the past two weeks, while OpenAI rolled out GPT-6 to every ChatGPT user. Most announcements from the two private AI developers targeted large organizations and government customers.

Anthropic launches cheaper Haiku 5.5 and funds two programs worth $250 million

Anthropic introduced Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, calling it "the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we've ever released." The company said the model costs about 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5. It is available on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Santa Clara – October 12, 2026 -- HCLTech has signed a Global Premier Partnership with Anthropic and will set up a dedicated Anthropic Business Unit with a Center of Excellence (CoE) to speed enterprise deployments of Claude, with a focus on safety, cybersecurity and governance in Agentic AI.

HCLTech's new unit will offer sandbox environments for Claude deployments

The unit will build Agentic AI solutions and provide secure sandbox environments for enterprise Claude deployments through FDEs. HCLTech's services teams will also build industry solutions and offerings powered by Claude, Cowork and Claude Code.

HCLTech will help clients adopt AI-native engineering practices, train their workforces and build the organizational capabilities needed to run Agentic AI safely at scale.

NEW YORK – October 12, 2026 -- Driven Tech, Inc. has been named a 2026 Triple Crown Award winner by CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, after placing on three CRN rankings in the same year. The AI and cloud-native platform systems integrator also reported a combined Net Promoter Score of 92.7 and a Customer Satisfaction score of 93.4.

Three CRN lists qualify Driven for the Triple Crown

The award goes to solution providers that appear on all three of CRN's annual lists in a single year.

• The Solution Provider 500 ranks the largest IT solution providers in North America by revenue.
• The Fast Growth 150 spotlights the fastest-growing solution providers.
• The Tech Elite 250 recognizes companies that hold the highest-level certifications from leading technology vendors.

Driven's placement on all three covers scale, growth rate and vendor-certified technical depth.

Global – October 12, 2026 -- Incidents involving fake CAPTCHA lures rose 563% in 2025, according to the CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report, as adversaries including STARDUST CHOLLIMA and VOODOO BEAR adopted the social engineering technique known as ClickFix.

ClickFix turns the victim into the execution mechanism

The attack shows a fake error, CAPTCHA or system message and tells the user to copy a command into the Windows Run dialog, PowerShell or Terminal. In some variants, malicious JavaScript places the command on the clipboard directly.

The pasted command can launch PowerShell, VBScript or another legitimate interpreter to fetch further payloads. CrowdStrike observations show follow-on activity including malware deployment, credential theft, persistence, command and control, and data theft.

United States – October 12, 2026 -- CrowdStrike's Falcon Next-Gen SIEM has been added to CISA's SIEM-as-a-service (SIEMaaS) technology stack, giving eligible federal agencies a path to modernize security operations without using their own program funding.

DEFEND F mechanism acquires SKUs on behalf of agencies

The offering runs through the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Dynamic and Evolving Federal Enterprise Network Defense (DEFEND) Group F shared service. It is delivered via CGI Federal's CDM DEFEND F SIEMaaS service. Eligibility is limited to federal civilian agencies that participate in CISA's Persistent Access Capability program and already use CrowdStrike endpoint detection and response (EDR) modules.

CISA has described SIEMaaS as "the Rosetta Stone" for visibility.

Global – October 12, 2026 -- CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Modern Endpoint Security for Enterprises Vendor Assessment, and is using the recognition to push its Falcon platform into protection for AI agents on the endpoint.

CrowdStrike frames AI agents as a new source of endpoint activity

The company says humans, applications, and AI agents now work side by side on endpoints, executing commands, accessing data, using identities, working through browsers, invoking tools, and introducing software. CrowdStrike calls this the "agentic endpoint," where humans, AI agents, and AI-enabled adversaries converge.

South Korea – October 12, 2026 -- CrowdStrike Intelligence has linked a late-September to early-October 2026 campaign against South Korean financial organizations, which resulted in exfiltrated data, to attacker servers that exposed Claude Code session histories, ARTEX configuration files and Claude memory files.

The actor used ARTEX, a recently released open-source agentic penetration testing tool developed in China, alongside large language models (LLMs). CrowdStrike assesses with moderate confidence that the actor is a Chinese speaker and financially motivated, based on the tool choice and Chinese-language prompts. The activity has not been attributed to a named adversary.