All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛡️ The 2026 Public Sector Threat Landscape report summarizes Mandiant’s 2025 incident investigations and highlights how adversaries now move at machine speed, notably the 22-second hand-off from initial access to ransomware. It argues public agencies must adopt continuous verification and machine-speed defenses. Google outlines three core capabilities—identity as the perimeter, agentic defense, and hardened infrastructure—and describes new AI agents in Google Security Operations and customer success stories.

🔒 Amazon Web Services has added OpenAI’s privacy-filter to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, offering a bidirectional token-classification model for PII detection and masking. The model is designed for fast, context-aware, tunable, high-throughput data sanitization workflows that can run on-premises. It detects PII spans like account numbers, addresses, emails, names, phones, URLs, dates, and secrets, labeling inputs in a single forward pass. Customers can deploy the model via the SageMaker Studio Models section or the SageMaker Python SDK.

🔍 AWS added Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B and Qwen3-Reranker-4B to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, enabling modular search and retrieval pipelines. The embedding model creates multimodal vectors from text, images, screenshots, and video across 30+ languages, while the reranker scores query–document pairs across 100+ languages. Customers can deploy these models via SageMaker Studio or the SageMaker Python SDK with a few clicks.

📰 Amazon Web Services has added gemma-4-E2B-it, a multimodal instruction-tuned foundation model from Google DeepMind, to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. The model supports text, image, audio inputs and text outputs with a built-in stepwise reasoning mode and broad capabilities including image and video understanding, OCR, function calling, and multilingual code assistance. Customers can deploy it from the SageMaker Studio Models section or via the SageMaker Python SDK for rapid integration into AWS AI workflows.

🔄 Amazon Redshift Serverless now preserves zero-ETL and Amazon S3 event integrations automatically when restoring a namespace from a snapshot or recovery point to the same serverless namespace. Previously, restores marked integrations as failed and required manual recreation, causing reconfiguration delays and potential ingestion gaps. With this improvement, integrations resume operating after restore completion, simplifying disaster recovery and testing workflows and reducing administrative overhead. This behavior applies only to restores within the same serverless namespace and is available in all regions where Redshift Serverless is offered.

🔒 AI has increased employee awareness of cyber risks, but understanding threats is not the same as being ready to respond. The 2025 Security Awareness and Training report shows high awareness but a clear readiness gap: only 40% of organizations say employees are highly prepared for AI-based threats. Fortinet advocates behavior-first, role-based training with short scenario-driven modules to help employees apply judgment, verify requests, protect data, and use AI tools safely.

🔒 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports custom AMIs for Slurm-orchestrated clusters, enabling deployment of pre-configured, security-hardened environments tailored to organizational needs. This reduces reliance on complex lifecycle scripts and improves startup times and consistency across nodes. Custom AMIs must be built from HyperPod's public base AMIs for compatibility and can be specified via the CreateCluster, UpdateCluster, or UpdateClusterSoftware APIs. The feature is available in all Regions where HyperPod is supported.

🛡️ This post announces a new AWS compliance implementation guide: HITRUST i1 Compliance on AWS: Customer Implementation Guidance with an Illustrative Healthcare Platform. The guidance helps healthcare organizations bridge requirements and practical implementation on AWS, covering 11 HITRUST i1 technical domains. It uses a realistic example platform deployed on AWS Landing Zone Accelerator to make control mapping concrete while noting scoping remains organization-specific.

🛡️ AI agents leverage LLMs for reasoning but require a robust harness—skills, tools, and live context—to be reliable in network security. Generic agents trained on broad data hallucinate and fail at scale because they lack production-hardened experience and up-to-date environmental visibility. Check Point emphasizes skills from 30 years of deployments, a real-time Network Knowledge Graph, and contextualized policies to keep agent actions auditable and trustworthy.

🛡️ AI agents are processing and acting on emails before humans, creating a new attack surface where malicious content can manipulate agent behavior. This phenomenon, called Email Agent Hijacking (EAH), embeds instructions in email content to influence how AI interprets, prioritizes, or responds. Traditional post-delivery controls are insufficient because agents act immediately; organizations need preventive protections for AI-consumed content and validation for AI-generated outputs.

🔍 Precursor is a client-side, session-scoped verification system from Cloudflare that continuously collects behavioral signals via a lightweight injected script to distinguish humans from bots across an entire user journey. It complements Turnstile as part of Enterprise Bot Management, feeding session-level signals into edge evaluators and existing bot-scoring and challenge systems. Designed with privacy in mind, Precursor captures minimal interaction metadata (timing, rhythms, movement patterns) rather than content and provides session-based analytics in Security Analytics. It is rolling out now and will be free until GA.

🛡️ Kaspersky explains a new capability to detect AI-generated business email compromise (BEC) messages by identifying both BEC-specific phrases and linguistic patterns typical of machine-generated text. The company notes that cybercriminals increasingly use large language models to craft persuasive phishing and BEC campaigns, and this detection works across eight languages. The feature is integrated into Kaspersky Secure Mail Gateway and available with the KSMS Plus license after the KSMG 3.1 update.

📰 Meta filed a patent for an AI system that listens to users' voices throughout the day, timestamps emotional readings, and links them to context like location and device usage. The application, published July 2, 2026, describes devices from phones to smart glasses transcribing speech and tagging segments with emotional labels, and optionally combining biometrics and eye-tracking. A related set of claims describes a mood-aware fitness coach that adjusts guidance based on inferred emotional state. The filing is a claim on the idea rather than an announced product, and raises regulatory and privacy questions.

🔔 Amazon EC2 R8in, R8ib, R8idn, and R8idb instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland). Powered by custom sixth‑generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors exclusive to AWS and the latest sixth‑generation AWS Nitro cards, these instances provide up to 43% better compute per vCPU versus R6i predecessors. They offer leading network and EBS bandwidth, support EFA on large sizes, and are offered via Savings Plans, On‑Demand, and Spot.

🛠️ Amazon EMR on EKS now integrates an Apache Spark troubleshooting agent that provides automated root cause analysis and PySpark recommendations through natural language, simplifying diagnosis of job failures. The agent inspects Spark History Server data, executor logs, and cluster configs to detect issues like memory errors, data skew, resource contention, and connectivity problems. Accessible via a "Troubleshoot with AI" option in the EMR on EKS console and via MCP with compatible AI coding agents, the feature is read-only, IAM-authenticated, logged in CloudTrail, and available in Regions with SageMaker Unified Studio.

📍Amazon Location Service announced enhancements to its Places APIs, giving developers finer control over address formatting, multilingual place names, travel-optimized POI search, and drive-through data. Changes affect Geocode, ReverseGeocode, GetPlace, Suggest, Autocomplete, SearchNearby, and SearchText APIs. New parameters include AddressNamesMode, AddressNamesVariant, AddressTranslations, and TravelMode, plus a DriveThrough attribute and Parsing.AdditionalInfo in Geocode responses.

🛡️ Today Google Cloud announced that on July 10 the U.K. Treasury designated Google Cloud EMEA as a critical third party (CTP) to the U.K. financial sector. The designation acknowledges the systemic impact of services used by U.K. firms and places Google Cloud EMEA under direct oversight by the Bank of England, PRA, and FCA. Google Cloud commits to constructive engagement with regulators and to help customers meet operational resilience and third‑party risk requirements.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports AMI-based configuration for Slurm clusters that use continuous provisioning, enabling nodes to be provisioned with required software and settings without managing lifecycle scripts in S3. AMI-based configuration installs components like Docker, Enroot, and Pyxis and applies Slurm accounting, SSH key management, and log rotation as nodes are added. To enable it, omit the LifeCycleConfig block via the API or select "None" under Lifecycle scripts in Custom setup in the console; an optional extension script can be provided via OnInitComplete and SourceS3Uri. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where SageMaker HyperPod is offered, and custom lifecycle scripts remain supported for advanced use cases.

🔐 Amazon Web Services EMEA Sarl (AWS) has been designated a critical third party (CTP) to the UK financial sector under the CTP regime that came into force on January 1, 2025. The regime gives the Bank of England, PRA, and FCA powers to set requirements and exercise direct oversight over designated providers. AWS will self-assess its designated Systemic Third-Party Services (STPS) against the criteria and engage with regulators while supporting customers’ operational resilience.

🛡️ Amazon EKS Auto Mode now integrates with Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) to provide zonal shift and autoshift support for clusters using EKS Auto Mode. This feature automatically protects compute during an ARC-initiated zonal shift by stopping new capacity provisioning and preventing voluntary disruptions in the impaired zone. Enable ARC zonal shift on your cluster to use this capability, which is available in all Regions where EKS Auto Mode is offered.