NIKSUN, Inc.

10/15/2026

CenterPoint Energy has disclosed that more than 1.06 million Texans were affected by a data breach involving sensitive personal information. According to the Texas Attorney General’s breach database, the compromised data includes names, addresses, Social Security information, and driver’s license numbers. CenterPoint first disclosed the incident in a September 14 SEC filing after becoming aware of an online post from a third party claiming to possess customer data, but the company did not initially reveal the number of affected individuals or the types of information involved.

CenterPoint said it is still assessing which customers require notification and said its electric and gas delivery operations were not affected. That distinction matters for a critical-infrastructure operator: a breach involving customer identity data is serious on its own, but investigators also need to establish with confidence whether the intrusion was limited to customer-facing or corporate systems and did not reach operational technology responsible for delivering electricity and natural gas.

For utilities, gaining a clear picture of the situation requires a unified security view across both IT and operational environments. A platform, such as NIKSUN, that correlates identity activity, customer databases, cloud and application logs, endpoint telemetry, network traffic, threat intelligence, and forensic data can help investigators determine exactly how attackers gained access, which records were touched or exfiltrated, and whether there was any path toward grid or gas-delivery systems. AI-driven analytics and agentic response can accelerate that investigation, contain compromised identities, identify abnormal data access, and continuously verify segmentation between business systems and critical infrastructure. That gives utilities something especially important after an incident like this: the ability to prove quickly not only what was exposed, but what was not.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/p/gnWZM8ZG

10/14/2026

Fox News experienced a possible outage this week with thousands of users reporting problems. Most complaints involved live channel streaming, indicating that viewers were having difficulty accessing real-time video rather than simply encountering isolated website issues. The available reporting did not identify the cause of the disruption or indicate how long the outage lasted.

For a live news organization, streaming availability is especially important because viewers often turn to the platform during breaking news, elections, market events, major political developments, and other time-sensitive moments. A failure in live delivery can affect not only audience experience but also advertising, subscriptions, affiliate relationships, and trust in the service. Because a live stream depends on many interconnected components — including authentication, content delivery networks, video encoders, origin servers, APIs, cloud infrastructure, DNS, and the underlying network — a disruption at any one layer can appear to the viewer as the same simple problem: the channel will not load.

That makes Fox News-style incidents a strong use case for an Agentic NOC powered by full-stack operational data in a lake like NIKSUN. Instead of separate teams checking CDN dashboards, application logs, cloud consoles, network tools, and streaming infrastructure independently, AI agents can continuously correlate the complete delivery path from the viewer’s device through authentication, APIs, CDN edges, video origin, cloud services, and network infrastructure. When streaming begins to degrade, the platform can automatically identify the affected regions and services, isolate the likely root cause, measure business impact, and recommend or initiate remediation. That turns observability into active operations — helping broadcasters restore live content faster and maintain availability when viewers need real-time access most.

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Fox News experienced a possible outage this week with thousands of users reporting problems. Most complaints involved live channel streaming, indicating that viewers were having difficulty accessing real-time video rather than simply encountering isolated website issues. The available reporting did....

10/13/2026

NIKSUN is proud to announce that it has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone AI SOC Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment.

Every SOC is about to hand real decisions to AI agents. What separates an agent a team can trust from one it can’t is the data underneath. An agent working across a dozen disconnected tools sees fragments; give it the authority to act, and it turns blind spots into mistakes at machine speed. NIKSUN has spent nearly 30 years building the opposite: one complete, correlated record of the network, so every AI answer can be checked against what actually happened.

According to the IDC MarketScape, “NIKSUN’s governance model rests on grounding every AI conclusion in the underlying correlated data and making that evidence retrievable on demand, rather than asking analysts to take an agent’s summary on faith.”

“Speed is now table stakes in security operations. The bottleneck has shifted from collecting data to correlating it, and an AI agent is only as trustworthy as the evidence it reasons over,” said Chris Kissel, Vice President, IDC Security & Trust. “Buyers want every conclusion traceable to the raw evidence, guardrails they can inspect, and automated proof that an action actually reduced risk, not just a report that it ran. AI thrives on one correlated view, not silos: network, endpoint, infrastructure, cloud, and application activity, including evidence from the wire that still holds when an attacker blinds an endpoint agent. Platforms built on that foundation will define the agentic SOC. The rest will be measured against them.”

“We founded NIKSUN in 1997 to help organizations Know the Unknown: record everything, so the unknown has nowhere to hide,” said Dr. Parag Pruthi, Founder & CEO of NIKSUN. “Agentic AI gives that mission a new scale. For decades, that record gave human analysts the truth; now it gives AI agents the truth. An AI that can’t show its work is just guessing out loud, and no CISO should let a guess touch a production network. With Olympus, our AI agent, Maya, answers in seconds, shows you the packets, flows, logs, and telemetry behind the answer, acts within the guardrails you set, and proves the fix worked.”

Olympus records not only host activity, but also the network itself, so an attacker can’t hide by blinding an endpoint agent. The IDC MarketScape describes one deployment: “A regional healthcare provider running its entire IT and security function with two people had no dedicated security platform watching its patient portal beyond a firewall and an annual pe*******on test; once deployed, NIKSUN’s Maya AI agent identified an active Log4Shell exploitation and data exfiltration in progress that the provider had no other means of detecting, then moved to contain it across host, network, and firewall before more records left the environment.”

Read the complimentary IDC MarketScape excerpt featuring NIKSUN: http://niksun.com/ai-soc

10/12/2026

A cyber-attack has disrupted supermarket operations across parts of Europe, reportedly affecting refrigeration systems, deliveries, websites, loyalty programs, and electronic shelf pricing. In France, retailers including Intermarché, Leclerc, and Coopérative U were reported to have problems with Danfoss refrigeration controls, with some systems allegedly forced into continuous defrost cycles at temperatures of 50°C instead of their normal limited defrost schedule. In the Netherlands, Albert Heijn, Etos, and Gall amp; Gall also experienced disruptions tied to a cybersecurity incident, including website shutdowns, delivery problems, and electronic shelf-label failures. It remains unclear whether the incidents in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium are part of the same attack.

The incident is especially significant because it shows how a cyber-attack can move beyond stolen data or unavailable websites and directly affect physical operations. Refrigeration is essential to food safety and inventory preservation, while electronic pricing, loyalty systems, and delivery platforms are core parts of modern retail operations. Early reports cited losses approaching €300,000, with the potential for costs to reach millions if refrigerated inventory is spoiled or stores are forced to suspend operations. Coopérative U described the attack on refrigeration infrastructure as extremely serious and unprecedented.

For retailers, this is exactly why cybersecurity and operational monitoring cannot remain separate disciplines. An attack that manipulates refrigeration controllers while simultaneously disrupting pricing, websites, or deliveries crosses IT, network, application, IoT, and physical infrastructure boundaries. A unified SOC/NOC platform, such as NIKSUN, can correlate security alerts with device telemetry, SNMP data, network traffic, application performance, controller behavior, temperature changes, and business-service dependencies so operators immediately see both the attack and its real-world consequence. AI and agentic operations can then detect anomalous control commands, identify affected stores and equipment, isolate compromised systems, prioritize refrigeration and food-safety risks, and verify recovery. The result is not just faster cyber response, but continuous operational resilience across the entire retail environment.

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A cyber-attack has disrupted supermarket operations across parts of Europe, reportedly affecting refrigeration systems, deliveries, websites, loyalty programs, and electronic shelf pricing. In France, retailers including Intermarché, Leclerc, and Coopérative U were reported to have problems with D...

10/09/2026

Sheppard Mullin is facing a proposed class action after an August 31 data security incident exposed sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. The 1,200-attorney U.S. law firm said the incident involved a number of documents. According to the firm, an attorney was targeted in a social engineering event, and affected clients and individuals have already been notified.

The lawsuit, filed by a former employee, alleges that Sheppard Mullin failed to provide adequate cybersecurity training and maintain reasonable safeguards. The plaintiff is seeking class certification for more than 1,000 individuals and damages exceeding $5 million. The incident comes amid a broader series of cyber-attacks affecting major law firms, underscoring how attractive the legal sector has become to attackers because firms routinely handle sensitive personal information, corporate records, litigation materials, and other high-value data.

For law firms, this is a reminder that a serious data breach does not always begin with malware or a compromised network perimeter. One successful social engineering attack against a trusted attorney can provide enough access to expose highly sensitive documents while traditional infrastructure remains untouched. A unified security platform like NIKSUN can correlate identity activity, email behavior, endpoint telemetry, cloud and SaaS access, document activity, data movement, and network evidence so teams can immediately see when a legitimate user begins behaving abnormally. AI-driven analytics and agentic response can then identify risky access, disable compromised credentials, contain affected accounts, preserve forensic evidence, and determine exactly which documents were viewed or transferred. That kind of identity-to-data visibility is increasingly critical for law firms, where protecting trust means proving not only that the network was secure, but precisely what an attacker could and could not reach.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/p/ghrRA8zb

10/08/2026

Switzerland’s federal pension fund Publica has disclosed a data leak after an external software provider suffered a cyber-attack in late September. Publica, which manages pensions for Swiss federal employees and affiliated organizations, said information connected to the fund was exposed through the third-party provider rather than through a direct attack on Publica itself. The organization and Swiss authorities are still investigating exactly what data was affected, and the software company involved has not been publicly identified.

The incident highlights the growing cybersecurity exposure created by software vendors and other trusted third parties. Pension administrators hold highly sensitive information and depend on external providers to support critical business processes, meaning an attacker may be able to reach valuable data without ever breaching the pension fund’s primary environment. Publica said Switzerland’s Attorney General has opened an investigation.

For financial and government organizations, third-party security has to extend beyond periodically assessing whether a vendor is compliant. A unified security platform such as NIKSUN can continuously understand which providers connect to the organization, what systems and data they can reach, how identities are being used, and whether activity suddenly deviates from normal behavior. By correlating vendor access, identity telemetry, application and API activity, data movement, network behavior, threat intelligence, and forensic evidence in one place, AI and security teams can identify unusual access or exfiltration even when it originates through a trusted partner. That turns vendor risk from a questionnaire-based exercise into continuous visibility — helping organizations detect a supplier compromise sooner, determine exactly what information was exposed, and prevent one external provider from becoming an invisible path into highly sensitive financial data.

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Switzerland’s federal pension fund Publica has disclosed a data leak after an external software provider suffered a cyber-attack in late September. Publica, which manages pensions for Swiss federal employees and affiliated organizations, said information connected to the fund was exposed through t...

10/06/2026

ASOS users across the UK received an unusual push notification that appeared to come directly from the retailer’s own app, claiming that hackers had “fully compromised” a Snowflake environment and threatening to leak data unless the company engaged with them. The message was addressed to ASOS’s data protection officer and IT team but was delivered publicly to customers, and included a link to a newly created Telegram channel operated by a group calling itself Xuanye Group. ASOS had not confirmed the claims at the time of the report, so it remains unclear whether Snowflake was actually compromised, what data may have been accessed, or how broadly the attackers penetrated the company’s systems.

What makes the incident especially concerning is that sending a push notification to ASOS customers would likely require access to infrastructure beyond a data warehouse alone. Notification systems, application backends, cloud credentials, API keys, and administrative accounts are typically separate from Snowflake. If both the Snowflake claim and the customer notification access prove genuine, the attackers may have obtained credentials or privileges that opened multiple parts of ASOS’s environment. That would turn the incident from a possible cloud-data breach into a broader identity and access compromise spanning customer-facing systems.

For retailers operating across cloud, SaaS, mobile apps, identity platforms, and customer databases, this is exactly why security teams need one correlated view of the entire environment. A unified security platform, such as NIKSUN, can power security teams to follow the chain from credential use and Snowflake queries to API calls, administrative activity, notification-service access, application changes, and outbound data transfers. AI-driven analytics can identify when the same identity begins behaving abnormally across multiple systems, while forensic visibility can show whether attackers simply accessed data or actually gained control of customer-facing infrastructure. That kind of cross-layer visibility helps teams determine the true blast radius quickly, revoke compromised credentials, contain affected services, verify whether data was exfiltrated, and prevent attackers from using trusted applications themselves as part of the extortion campaign.

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ASOS users across the UK received an unusual push notification that appeared to come directly from the retailer’s own app, claiming that hackers had “fully compromised” a Snowflake environment and threatening to leak data unless the company engaged with them. The message was addressed to ASOS....

10/05/2026

Denmark has disclosed a major breach of its national population registry that exposed personal information belonging to roughly 8.8 million people. The compromised data includes names, addresses, and CPR numbers (Denmark’s equivalent of Social Security identifiers) and covers current residents as well as some people who have died or emigrated. Importantly, attackers did not directly compromise the central CPR system. Instead, they reportedly abused a Danish company’s legitimate access to the registry to extract the information.

The incident illustrates why trusted access can be just as dangerous as an external intrusion. A third party with legitimate permissions may already be inside the security perimeter, meaning traditional defenses can see valid credentials and authorized connections even while millions of records are being extracted. The exposed combination of names, addresses, and national identification numbers also creates a powerful foundation for phishing, impersonation, social engineering, and identity fraud. Danish officials are therefore warning residents not to trust callers or messages simply because they already know accurate personal information about them.

For systems holding an entire country’s identity data, security needs to understand not only who is authorized to connect, but whether that authorized access is behaving normally. A unified security platform, such as NIKSUN, can continuously correlate identity permissions, third-party connections, application and API activity, database queries, record-access volumes, network behavior, and outbound data movement to establish what “normal” looks like and immediately flag deviations. AI and behavioral analytics could identify a supposedly legitimate partner suddenly querying millions of records, accessing unusual datasets, or transferring information at abnormal rates — even when the credentials themselves are valid. That turns third-party access from a static trust decision into something continuously verified, giving operators the visibility to detect mass extraction while it is happening rather than discovering later that legitimate access became the attack path.

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Denmark has disclosed a major breach of its national population registry that exposed personal information belonging to roughly 8.8 million people. The compromised data includes names, addresses, and CPR numbers (Denmark’s equivalent of Social Security identifiers) and covers current residents as ...

10/02/2026

Arizona’s court system is investigating a cyber-attack that may have exposed sensitive information belonging to more than 1.3 million people. Officials said the incident began after a court employee clicked a malicious link. Potentially compromised data includes names, case numbers, and Social Security numbers associated with the state’s FARE court-debt collection program, along with more than 150,000 confidential Foster Care Review Board reports containing sensitive child-welfare information dating back to 2010.

The sensitivity goes well beyond ordinary identity theft. Court systems hold information about protective orders, dependency cases, foster children, debt obligations, and people seeking assistance during potentially dangerous personal situations. Even when Social Security numbers are absent, names, addresses, case relationships, and confidential family information can create risks of harassment, fraud, stalking, and targeted social engineering. Court officials say they have no evidence the stolen information has been shared, but they are still determining which records were actually copied and which individuals were affected.

That distinction highlights an important security problem: containing an attacker in two hours is valuable, but it is not the same as immediately knowing what happened during those two hours. A unified security and forensic platform, like NIKSUN, can preserve the entire sequence — from the phishing click and compromised identity to application access, file activity, database queries, network sessions, and outbound transfers so investigators can answer in minutes which records were opened, copied, or exfiltrated. By bringing together SIEM, NDR, EDR, XDR, email security, identity telemetry, threat intelligence, packet capture, NetFlow/IPFIX, and long-term forensics, courts can move from “potentially affected” to evidence-backed scope much faster. For systems containing child-welfare and protective-order information, that speed is not just an IT benefit; it directly affects how quickly vulnerable people can be warned and protected.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/p/gJYztTr5

10/01/2026

Microsoft Azure suffered a multi-region network outage that disrupted hybrid-cloud connectivity across 19 regions worldwide, including Japan West, West US, North Europe, UK South, Southeast Asia, Australia East, and others. The incident primarily affected ExpressRoute Gateway and VPN Gateway, with additional impact to Azure Firewall management operations, Application Gateway, Web Application Firewall, and Azure VMware Solution. Customers experienced degraded or interrupted connectivity, management failures, and gateway loading issues for roughly six hours.

The disruption appears related to a recent change in its regional gateway management service that interacted badly with unrelated infrastructure OS maintenance. The resulting load prevented the service from scaling as expected, affecting the connectivity layer that links enterprise data centers and on-premises infrastructure to Azure. The incident is particularly important for enterprises because ExpressRoute and VPN Gateway often sit directly in the path of mission-critical hybrid-cloud applications; when that connectivity layer fails, healthy servers and applications on both sides can suddenly become unreachable.

For enterprises, incidents like this show why hybrid-cloud monitoring has to understand dependencies rather than simply report that “Azure is down.” A unified full-stack platform, such as NIKSUN, can map an application from the user transaction through the local network, WAN, firewall, ExpressRoute or VPN tunnel, Azure gateway, VMware environment, cloud workload, and backend service, while correlating packets, flows, SNMP infrastructure health, cloud telemetry, application performance, and synthetic transactions. That makes it possible to determine quickly whether an outage is caused by an enterprise router, ISP path, VPN configuration, Azure regional gateway, cloud management plane, or application itself. Instead of separate network, cloud, and application teams spending hours proving their layer is healthy, everyone works from the same dependency map and evidence base — reducing MTTR and preserving business continuity when a cloud provider’s own maintenance causes the failure.

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Microsoft Azure suffered a multi-region network outage that disrupted hybrid-cloud connectivity across 19 regions worldwide, including Japan West, West US, North Europe, UK South, Southeast Asia, Australia East, and others. The incident primarily affected ExpressRoute Gateway and VPN Gateway, with a...