What Is a CTF? A Capture-the-Flag (CTF) exercise is a hands-on competition or training format where individuals or teams solve security challenges to locate hidden pieces of data — called “flags.” These flags are typically short text strings or files concealed within intentionally designed, vulnerable environments. Think of it as a digital scavenger hunt where…
The release of Snowflake Cortex AI Gateway at Black Hat 2026 marks a transition in how enterprises manage autonomous systems. By integrating the technology from its May 2026 acquisition of Natoma, Snowflake is positioning itself not merely as a data warehouse, but as the connective tissue for the agentic stack. This move signals that the…
A non-human identity (NHI) is any digital credential that authenticates and authorizes a machine or software system rather than a human user. NHIs include service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, automated scripts, and AI agents.
High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a specialized, 3D-stacked computer memory architecture designed to provide massive data throughput by placing memory chips directly alongside a processor—such as a GPU—on a shared silicon base. Unlike traditional memory that sits further away on a circuit board, HBM uses vertical, high-speed connections to feed data to the processor at significantly…
Open-weights models are artificial intelligence systems where the trained parameters—the internal mathematical values known as weights and biases that allow the model to process information—are publicly released for download. By providing these files, developers allow users to run, fine-tune, and deploy the model on their own local hardware or private servers, rather than relying solely…
Model distillation (also called knowledge distillation) is a machine learning technique in which a smaller “student” model is trained to replicate the behavior and reasoning of a larger, pre-trained “teacher” model. By learning from the teacher’s detailed outputs rather than simple right-or-wrong labels, the student captures much of the teacher’s capabilities while becoming significantly faster,…
SWE-bench is the standard benchmark for evaluating large language models and autonomous coding agents on real-world software engineering tasks. Given a complete codebase and a natural-language issue (a bug report or feature request sourced from GitHub), an agent must generate a code patch that resolves the issue and passes the repository’s automated test suite. Introduced…
Okta has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security, a cloud-native identity security platform that detects and mitigates threats across human, non-human, and AI agent identities in multi-cloud environments. The deal, valued at roughly $200 million in an almost all-cash transaction per TechCrunch sources, is one of Okta’s largest acquisitions since the $6.5 billion…
A maximum-severity vulnerability in Ruflo, an open-source AI agent orchestration platform with more than 67,000 GitHub stars, allowed unauthenticated attackers to gain full remote code execution — and then poison the platform’s persistent AI memory in a way that a software patch alone cannot undo. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-59726 (CVSS 10.0) and codenamed RufRoot…
If you want to see how a company manages a $184.6 billion liability, watch the buffer, not the profit. Tether’s latest BDO Italia attestation for Q2 2026 reveals that its stablecoin excess reserves have been sliced in half, dropping from $8.23 billion in Q1 to $4.11 billion by June 30. It is a curious arithmetic:…