Tech Talks With Kinsoft

A breach at the heart of America's homeland-security apparatus - and a masterclass in why "unclassified" is not the same as "unimportant." The US Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that attackers broke into the Homeland Security Information Network, or HSIN - the platform it uses to share sensitive-but-unclassified information with thousands of federal, state, local and private-sector p...

A confronting Australian breach that puts schools squarely in the firing line. Reynella East College - a public preschool-to-Year-12 school in Adelaide's south with more than 1,900 students - took its computer systems offline for a week after a cyber security breach, and weeks later the ransomware group Interlock dumped what it claims is 610 gigabytes of stolen data on the dark web. It's Interlock...

Your Monday catch-up on the week that was in tech, with a security lens. This week: the AI giants pivot from selling software to selling people - Microsoft stands up a 2.5-billion-dollar "Frontier Company" to embed its own engineers inside your business, just two days after Amazon committed a billion to the same idea. Anthropic ships Claude Sonnet 5, a cheaper model built to run autonomous agents....

The Oracle PeopleSoft campaign we've been tracking just claimed a big-name victim. Nissan has disclosed that employee data across the Americas — potentially including bank details, Social Security and national ID numbers — was stolen when the extortion crew ShinyHunters exploited a critical PeopleSoft zero-day. We break down CVE-2026-35273, the two-week window when attackers were inside before a p...

An Australian ransomware story you can taste. Mackay Sugar — the country's second-largest raw sugar producer — was hit by the ransomware crew "The Gentlemen" right at the start of the North Queensland crushing season, forcing shutdowns at two of its three mills and leaving 1,300-plus cane-farming families with nowhere to send their harvest. We unpack how an attack on IT systems becomes a physical,...

Australian life-investment firm Generation Life has confirmed that some customers' personal information was caught up in a cyber attack it first disclosed back in April — an incident that came in through an external service provider and was later claimed by the Qilin ransomware group. We follow the long tail of a breach: how an April intrusion, a May leak-site listing and a late-June confirmation...

Your Monday catch-up, with a security lens. This week: Anthropic takes an extraordinary allegation to US lawmakers, accusing Alibaba's Qwen team of the largest-ever "distillation attack" on Claude. OpenAI and Broadcom unveil "Jalapeño," OpenAI's first custom AI chip. Qualcomm spends nearly $4 billion buying Modular to chip away at Nvidia's CUDA lock-in. And CISA orders an emergency patch of an act...

A single vulnerability in one shared platform cascaded across six Japanese internet providers, exposing up to 14.2 million email accounts. Telecoms giant KDDI has confirmed a breach of a shared email system used by KDDI, JCOM, NIFTY, BIGLOBE and others — an intrusion via a flaw in third-party software. We look at "shared-infrastructure blast radius": how concentration risk turns one weakness into...

The NSW Rural Fire Service — the world's largest volunteer fire service — has confirmed a cyber security incident, reported as Australia's first confirmed ransomware attack on a government agency in 2026. The entry point? A single compromised account and the remote-access system behind it. The ransomware crew "Nova" claims to have stolen 300 gigabytes of data — a figure the RFS has not confirmed....

Your Monday catch-up, with a security lens. This week: SpaceX makes the largest startup acquisition in history, buying AI-coding company Cursor for around $60 billion in stock — days after its own IPO. Washington uses export-control powers to force Anthropic to pull its most powerful models on national-security grounds. The Klue OAuth breach we flagged a fortnight ago balloons to nearly 200 compan...

A clean, cautionary supply-chain story from the US. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department disclosed that attackers breached the third-party vendor processing its hunting and fishing licences, exposing personal data — including driver's-licence and passport numbers — for more than three million people. No ransomware, no dramatic leak site; just a quiet vendor compromise leaking exactly the kind o...

An Australian ransomware story you can taste. Mackay Sugar — the country's second-largest raw sugar producer — was hit by the ransomware crew "The Gentlemen" right at the start of the North Queensland crushing season, forcing shutdowns at two of its three mills and leaving 1,300-plus cane-farming families with nowhere to send their harvest. We unpack how an attack on IT systems becomes a physical,...

Your Monday catch-up on the week that was in tech, with a security lens. This week: Apple finally reveals its overhauled, AI-powered Siri at WWDC 2026 — running partly on Google's Gemini models. The AI infrastructure land grab heats up as Alphabet rents out its new TPUs in a $5B Blackstone joint venture and Microsoft ships its Maia 200 accelerator. Anthropic's Claude posts eye-watering growth and...

In a major global incident, the Everest ransomware group claimed sportswear giant Under Armour as a victim in late 2025, alleging access to around 343GB of data — and in January 2026 a dataset containing roughly 72 million customer email addresses (about 72.7 million accounts) was published on a hacking forum. In this episode of Tech Talks with Kinsoft, we cover the data involved — names, email ad...

Sydney home builder Champion Homes has confirmed a cyber incident after the DragonForce ransomware group claimed responsibility for an attack that saw roughly 44GB of company data stolen and leaked to the dark web. In this episode of Tech Talks with Kinsoft, we unpack what happened: the data taken — including employee payroll records, customer quotes, and tender and legal documents — how DragonFor...

Your Monday catch-up, with a security lens. This week: GitHub Copilot switches to token-based billing and developers revolt over surprise bills, Microsoft shows off a cheaper homegrown coding model at Build, and SoftBank commits up to €75B to AI data centres in France — Europe's biggest such bet. On the breach desk: an OAuth attack on sales-intelligence firm Klue cascades into Salesforce data thef...

Charter Communications (Spectrum) confirmed in late May 2026 that it had suffered a data breach after ShinyHunters claimed to have stolen customer records; roughly 4.9 million accounts had personal details exposed (the group claimed far more from Charter's Salesforce). ShinyHunters says it used a vishing call on 1 April 2026 to trick a Charter employee into surrendering Microsoft Entra access, the...

In April 2026, the DragonForce ransomware group claimed it breached Gelatissimo, the Australian artisanal gelato franchise, and listed the company on its dark web leak site. In this episode of Tech Talks with Kinsoft, we cover what the group alleges it took — around 352GB of data, with sample screenshots showing employee payroll details, partial tax file numbers, and a visa application containing...

Your Monday catch-up, with a security lens. This week: Anthropic is reportedly closing a $30B round at a $900B-plus valuation and projecting its first-ever quarterly operating profit — even as SpaceX filings reveal eye-watering compute bills. The politics heat up as President Trump abruptly cancels an AI executive order. A worrying safety finding shows researchers stripping the guardrails off majo...

On 14 April 2026, Carnival Corporation detected unauthorised activity after a bad actor used social engineering to compromise an employee account. In this episode of Tech Talks with Kinsoft, we cover the global breach that affected roughly 5,995,277 individuals — almost 6 million — the categories of data potentially involved, the timeline through to the company's customer notifications and dedicat...

VSP Solutions, a NSW distributor of video-security hardware (Hikvision, Axis and similar), became aware of an incident on 13 May 2026; the Stormous group listed it on 23 May claiming 40 GB+ including financial backups, email archives, staff folders and customer and client databases. VSP's position is that the affected data was historical and related-business and that current operations were unaffe...

Your Monday catch-up, with a security lens. This week: Google goes all-in on agents at I/O 2026 with Gemini 3.5 and a new any-input video model, Gemini Omni. Three rival coding agents launch in three days as the price of frontier coding power keeps falling. SpaceX's S-1 lifts the lid on xAI's finances, and Anthropic teams up with the Gates Foundation on a $200M global-development push. On security...

In early January 2026, fiber-broadband provider Brightspeed opened a cybersecurity investigation after a group calling itself Crimson Collective claimed via Telegram (4 January) to have stolen data on more than 1 million customers, sharing screenshots and small samples as purported proof. The claimed data included account master records — names, emails, phone numbers, billing and service addresses...

In May 2026, Tasmanian hospitality group Goodstone Group — which runs hotels, restaurants, bars and bottleshops across northern Tasmania — confirmed it was responding to a cyber incident after the CMD Organization ransomware group listed it on a dark web leak site. In this episode of Tech Talks with Kinsoft, we cover the sensitive material the attackers published as proof, including employee passp...

Your Monday catch-up on the week that was, with a security lens. This week: researchers document the first known case of attackers using AI to develop a working zero-day exploit. OpenAI launches a $4B Deployment Company and buys consultancy Tomoro to get AI into enterprises faster, while SoftBank pours money into AI data centres and batteries. On the breach desk: ShinyHunters complete what's now c...