All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Microsoft announced new AI-native security capabilities across Defender, Entra, Purview, and Intune to help organizations secure AI environments, accelerate SecOps, and protect data and identities. Highlights include Project Perception, expanded Defender protections like prompt injection blocking, tenant governance and passkey defaults in Entra, Purview network-level DLP for shadow AI apps, and Intune Suite inclusion in Microsoft 365 E5 to strengthen endpoint management.

🔒 Google Cloud announced preview support for Identity and Access Management (IAM) group authentication in AlloyDB, extending an identity-driven, passwordless access model to enterprise database workloads. The feature aligns AlloyDB with Cloud SQL by enabling group-based access controls to reduce individual account sprawl, simplify on- and off-boarding, and improve auditing. It also helps secure AI agents by ensuring actions map to user identities and limiting privilege escalation.

🔧 AWS Transit Gateway now supports Policy-Based Routing (PBR), allowing forwarding decisions based on packet attributes such as source and destination IPs, ports, and protocol instead of destination alone. PBR reduces the need for complex multi-VPC architectures and extra routing hops by enabling administrators to attach policy tables to Transit Gateway attachments and define ordered rule sets. Rules classify traffic and direct matches to specified route tables using first-match-wins logic, supporting traffic steering, inspection, and environment isolation. PBR is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Transit Gateway is offered and can be configured via the Console, CLI, or SDK with no additional charge beyond standard Transit Gateway fees.

🚀 Amazon MSK Express brokers can now continuously materialize Apache Kafka topics as Apache Iceberg streaming tables on Amazon S3, reducing ingestion and downstream query costs versus self-managed deployments. The capability provides intelligent inline compaction to avoid the small-file problem, built-in coordination for concurrent writers, and supports up to 10 GB/s throughput to Iceberg on S3. Customers can enable the feature via the MSK console, APIs, or MCP server; it is available in all Regions that offer MSK Express brokers.

🚀 Amazon MSK Express brokers now deliver Apache Kafka data directly to Amazon S3 general purpose buckets, providing a fully managed, auto-scaling capability for high-throughput data delivery. This feature handles scaling, retries, and backpressure for mission-critical workloads and can reduce ingestion and delivery costs by up to 60% versus self-managed connectors. MSK Express supports throughput up to 10 GB/s to S3 and eliminates the need to provision additional broker egress throughput, simplifying operations and lowering infrastructure costs.

🔒 Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant outline recent trends in large-scale open source supply chain compromises observed in 2025–2026 and provide practical mitigation and hardening recommendations. The post highlights actor techniques such as repository compromise, malicious package injection, and abuse of CI/CD triggers, and emphasizes increased risk from AI-enabled workflows. It recommends inventories, SBOMs/ABOMs, SDLC threat modeling, active risk monitoring, and configuration controls to reduce exposure.

🛠️ cdnjs, a major open-source CDN for JavaScript and CSS, now runs entirely on the Cloudflare Developer Platform. The migration centralized file content in R2, moved metadata to KV, and rebuilt the publishing pipeline with Workflows, Queues, Containers, and Durable Objects. The change improved observability, simplified architecture, and introduced multi-region mirrors with DigitalOcean Spaces as a live fallback.

🔒 Check Point announces the industry’s first AI Network Firewall, extending its AI Defense Plane to the enterprise network. The firewall inspects prompts, file uploads, model calls, and agent actions in real time to detect intent, prevent data exfiltration, and block prompt injection. It discovers and governs sanctioned and shadow AI tools and agents while protecting AI applications across hybrid environments.

🎙️ Amy revisits past guests in a special Black Hat edition of Humans of Talos, exploring the varied career paths that led them to threat intelligence. From forensic labs and newsrooms to kitchen lines, the episode highlights personal stories and lessons that shape the field. Attendees can meet the team at Cisco and Splunk booth 2633 during Black Hat to discuss research and incident response and pick up the latest Snorty.

🔒 The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has urged device manufacturers to make forensic evidence collection easier after compromises. Chris A, NCSC technical director, warned that firewalls, VPN gateways and other network devices are increasingly targeted, and stressed that built-in telemetry, logging, memory and data-at-rest collection, and software transparency are crucial. He dispelled myths that observability aids attackers or is too difficult, and called on vendors and buyers to prioritize these capabilities.

📰 The criminal complaint against Peter Stokes, an alleged Scattered Spider member, revealed the role of Microsoft’s Global Device Identifier (GDID) in correlating a Windows installation with ngrok signup activity and other telemetry. Experts stress GDID was one piece of a broader chain that included provider logs, IP history, and timestamps. The indictment raised privacy concerns about how persistent device identifiers are collected, retained, and disclosed to investigators.

🔔 AWS Directory Service now lets you upgrade an AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition directly via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or API. The upgrade preserves trust relationships, application integrations, and group policies without requiring DNS changes or workload re-joins. Standard supports up to 5,000 objects while Enterprise supports up to 500,000 objects for larger deployments. This capability is available in all Regions where AWS Directory Service is offered.

🟦 You can now run OpenSearch 3.7 on Amazon OpenSearch Service, which brings vector search performance gains, improved search relevance, and enhanced Query Insights. The release adds 1-bit scalar quantization for Faiss and Lucene to compress vectors, doc values retrieval for faster vector access without reindexing, and new Search Relevance Workbench metrics and CSV judgments. Query Insights gains automated recommendations, a finished-queries cache, and S3 export for top queries. OpenSearch 3.7 is available in all regions where the service is offered.

🔔 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports Instance Refresh as a CloudFormation update policy. When you set the new AutoScalingInstanceRefresh update policy and change properties that require replacement, CloudFormation will automatically trigger an Instance Refresh. The integration includes features such as replace root volume for in-place updates, launch-before-terminate, alarm-based monitoring, and checkpoints with bake time for controlled rollouts. Rollback is managed through CloudFormation stack rollback, and the capability is available in all AWS Regions at no additional cost.

⚙️ Amazon Redshift Data API adds long polling to return SQL results without repeated polling, a ListSessions call to enumerate active sessions, and flexible BatchExecuteStatement options including AUTO_COMMIT and shared parameters. These features reduce API chatter, improve session visibility, and let batch statements run independently or reuse parameters. The capabilities are generally available for Provisioned and Serverless Redshift in supported AWS commercial and GovCloud Regions.

🔐 AWS Glue's REST API connector now supports VPC connections, filter pushdown, and partitioning to improve secure, efficient ingestion from REST endpoints. With VPC support you can reach private subnets, VPNs, or AWS PrivateLink without exposing traffic publicly. Filter pushdown converts query predicates into API-native parameters to reduce transferred data, and partition support enables parallel reads across Spark workers for faster ingestion. These features are available in all AWS commercial regions.

🛠️ This deep dive shows how to build a production-ready agent using the Agents CLI and Gemini Enterprise. It walks developers through six stages—Setup, Build, Deploy, Govern, Evaluate, and Publish—using an Industry Watch agent that reconciles press coverage with SEC filings. The tutorial emphasizes deterministic tools, managed runtime, memory, identity controls, and automated evaluations to prevent hallucination and ensure grounded, auditable results.

🧭 Today at Next Tokyo, Google Cloud announced enhancements to its borderless Lakehouse built on Apache Iceberg, enabling cross-cloud, zero-copy analytics and federated catalogs. The platform lets Gemini Enterprise and conversational agents query and act on live data across on-prem, AWS, Azure, and major SaaS systems without heavy ETL. New features include catalog federation (preview), Cross-Cloud Interconnects with predictable pricing, intelligent caching, and integration with Knowledge Catalog for unified governance and context.

🔒 Organizations moving beyond AI experimentation must combine intelligence with trust to secure innovation. Security should be an enabler that protects data, governs AI, and builds resilience by asking the right questions about risks, controls, and outcomes. Teams need systems thinking, layered defenses, and human oversight to validate AI outputs and make decisions under uncertainty.

🤖 Looker introduces Agentic Workflows in preview to automate metric monitoring and root-cause analysis using intelligent background agents. Users can create continuous monitoring routines via the Conversational Analytics chat by prompting the agent to watch metrics and set thresholds. When a threshold is crossed, the agent runs Key Driver Analysis to identify drivers of the change and delivers a diagnostic summary to Slack or email. Administrators retain centralized oversight while business users can manage their own monitors.