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At CES 2026, Razer is likely going to update its Blade series, but that’s what I’m least excited for. Here’s what I want to see.

The post Razer’s gaming laptops won’t be the star of the show at CES 2026 — here’s what will be appeared first on Digital Trends.

Standard Chartered has sharply reduced its famously bullish Bitcoin roadmap, cutting its 2026 price target in half and acknowledging that its previous near-term projections were too aggressive, even as it keeps an ultra-optimistic long-term view intact.

Standard Chartered Downgrades Bitcoin Price Predictions

In a note shared on X by VanEck head of research Matthew Sigel, Standard Chartered argues that Bitcoin’s traditional halving cycle has been overtaken by ETF-driven flows. The bank writes: “With the advent of ETF buying, we think the BTC halving cycle is no longer a relevant price driver. The logic in previous cycles (when US ETFs did not exist) – i.e., prices would peak about 18 months after each halving and decline thereafter – is no longer valid, in our view.”

The report adds that it will “take a break of the current all-time high ($ 126,000 on 6 October 2025) to prove that; we expect this to happen in H1-2026.”

Alongside that shift in framework, the bank re-profiled its multi-year Bitcoin targets. According to the figures shared by Sigel, Standard Chartered has lowered its 2025 forecast from $200,000 to $100,000, its 2026 target from $300,000 to $150,000, its 2027 projection from $400,000 to $225,000, its 2028 estimate from $500,000 to $300,000, and its 2029 prediction from $500,000 to $400,000 while keeping a $500,000 target for 2030.

Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s head of digital assets research, characterises the recent drawdown as painful but not structural. He describes the current phase as “a cold breeze,” explicitly rejecting the notion of a new crypto winter and noting that the magnitude of the pullback remains consistent with corrections seen in past bull cycles.

At the same time, he points out that weaker valuations for listed Bitcoin treasury companies have curtailed their ability to act as major marginal buyers, leaving spot ETFs as the primary driver of near-term gains.

Wall Street Giant Bernstein Agrees

The downgrade also lands in the context of a broader rethink on Wall Street. One day earlier, on December 8, Sigel shared a separate note from Bernstein that reached a similar conclusion about Bitcoin’s market structure.

Bernstein wrote that “the Bitcoin cycle has broken the 4-year pattern (cycle peaking every 4 years) and is now in an elongated bull-cycle with more sticky institutional buying offsetting any retail panic selling.”

Despite an approximately 30% correction, the firm notes that “we have seen less than 5% outflows via ETFs.” On that basis, Bernstein now moves its 2026 Bitcoin price target to $150,000, sees the cycle “potentially peaking in 2027E at $200,000,” and keeps its long-term 2033 target at roughly $1,000,000 per BTC.

Both Standard Chartered and Bernstein are converging on the same structural message: the halving alone no longer explains Bitcoin’s trajectory. ETF flows, institutional positioning and balance-sheet dynamics are now the core variables, even if their precise price targets and timelines diverge.

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $92,686.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says the crypto market is anchored to the wrong mental model. Speaking on the Empire podcast recorded 5 December and released on 8 December, he argued that the traditional “four-year Bitcoin cycle” has lost its explanatory power – and that 2026, which many expect to be a brutal post-halving down year, is far more likely to be an “up year” driven by institutional flows and regulatory tailwinds.

“2026 will not be a bad year, Jason,” Hougan told host Jason Yanowitz. “I think 2026 will be a good year […] I just don’t understand the logical reason why [the four-year cycle] would repeat again. It’s not like built into a mechanical clock. It was driven by specific factors and those factors no longer exist, so it won’t keep happening.”

He acknowledged that recent price action has unnerved investors, with Bitcoin giving back a “Vanguard pump” and selling off into a weekend on no obvious news. But he framed that as positioning and microstructure, not the start of a structural unwind.

“People in crypto over the last two months have learned to be nervous on weekends,” he said, pointing to thin weekend liquidity and Friday macro headlines. He noted that sentiment is depressed even though “the market is flat for the year,” adding: “We’re freaking out about a market that is flat for the year.”

Why The 4-Year Crypto Cycle Is Dead

Hougan broke down the four main explanations traditionally used to justify the Bitcoin cycle and argued each is now materially weaker.

First is the halving itself. “The halving cycle is just not that important,” he said. “It’s half as important as it was four years ago […] a fraction of, you know, a quarter as important as it was eight years ago, a sixteenth, etc. There’s just not that much supply being removed.” As issuance becomes a smaller fraction of total supply and ETF and derivatives flows grow, the mechanical supply shock carries less weight.

Second is the rate cycle. Prior “down years” such as 2018 and 2022 coincided with aggressive rate hikes. “Interest rates are going down,” he said. “So that thesis is just completely invalidated, right? It’s completely different.”

Third is the “blow-up” pattern – Mt. Gox, ICOs, FTX – that historically capped euphoric phases. Hougan allowed that balance-sheet stress in parts of the market is “the strongest case for the four-year cycle repeating,” but he does not expect forced liquidations on the scale of prior collapses. In his view, potential problem entities are more likely to “just not buy as much in the future” rather than being compelled sellers.

Fourth is simple randomness: three similar cycles do not make a law of nature. “Across those four, they’re all much weaker than they were in the past,” he summarised.

Why 2026 Is Poised To Be Better Than 2025

Against that, Hougan set what he sees as a once-in-a-generation shift in regulation and institutional behaviour. “You have a once-in-a-generation regulatory change from severe regulatory headwinds to strong regulatory tailwinds,” he said, and “more importantly, you have this institutional adoption narrative that’s going to overwhelm everything.”

In the last six months, he noted, major US wirehouses have “green-lit crypto exposure.” He singled out Bank of America: “They have $3.5 trillion in assets. One percent is $35 billion. Four percent is like $140 billion. That’s more than the total flows into Bitcoin ETFs so far.” He stressed it is not just one bank: “There are four wirehouses. They’re basically all on now […] the biggest advisory groups all managing many trillions of dollars.”

The catch is timing. Institutional allocations are slow and process-driven. “The average Bitwise client, I think, invests after eight meetings with us,” he said, and some of those are quarterly. That “eight-meeting” lag means the ETF era is still in its early innings; the full impact of platforms being switched on is more likely to manifest through 2026 than in a single explosive quarter.

Hougan also emphasised that advisers optimise for client retention, not absolute performance. “The one thing a financial adviser doesn’t want to do is have a meeting with their client where something is down 50% and their client fires them,” he said. That is why reduced volatility, cleaner regulation and mainstream narratives like “Bitcoin as digital gold” and “stablecoins and tokenization as new financial rails” matter so much.

On supply dynamics, he pushed back on two recurring fears: “OG whales dumping” and MicroStrategy as a forced seller. He argued that much of the apparent “selling” by long-term holders is actually upside being sold via covered calls. Whales come to Bitwise and similar firms, he said, saying: “I have a hundred million of Bitcoin […] can you write covered calls against this?” That “effectively introduces new supply into the market” without coins moving on-chain.

On MicroStrategy, he was categorical: “From a data perspective [it is] just strictly untrue that it will be forced to sell its Bitcoin.” The company has meaningful cash to service interest, no principal due until 2027, and manageable maturities relative to its Bitcoin holdings. He agreed with Jeff Dorman’s framing that MicroStrategy is no longer a major marginal buyer but also “not a forced seller.”

Too much pessimism on the timeline.

Brought on @Matt_Hougan to tell us why 2026 will be FAR better than 2025.

Tons of good nuggets in here related to institutions, financial advisors, cycles, and more.

Enjoy the optimism!pic.twitter.com/WZJb55yENF

— Yano (@JasonYanowitz) December 8, 2025

Looking ahead, Hougan expects investors to eventually reframe the current period not as a failed bull cycle but as a behavioural transition through a key level. “We might look back at 2025 at some point and say, ‘Huh, you know what? $100,000 was like a big behavioral cliff we had to get over. Took us like a year,’” he said.

For 2026 specifically, his message is clear: the old four-year pattern “won’t keep happening,” and the combination of regulatory clarity and institutional inflows sets up what he calls an “extraordinarily strong” backdrop rather than a programmed bust.

At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $3.06 trillion.

Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com

Despite its popularity and broad bipartisan support, right-to-repair provisions that would have given service members the ability to fix their own equipment in the field were stripped from the compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill after industry pushback. 

The House’s Data-as-a-Service Solutions for Weapon System Contracts provision, which would have required DoD to negotiate access to technical data and necessary software before signing a contract, was removed from the final text of the annual legislation released over the weekend. The Senate’s provision requiring contractors to provide the military with detailed repair and maintenance instructions was dropped from the bill as well.

Instead, the legislation requires the Defense Department to develop a digital system that would track and manage all technical data and verify whether contractors and subcontractors comply with contract requirements related to technical data. The compromise version of the bill also requires DoD to review all existing contracts to determine what contractors were required to deliver and what data DoD can access. 

“It’s almost completely meaningless relative to ‘right to repair.’ It only addresses cases in which the contractors have failed to deliver or make available the data that is already in their contracts. It doesn’t address in any way whether the contracts themselves are sufficient to support service members’ right to repair,” Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, told Federal News Network.

While this is not the first time Congress has stripped right-to-repair language from the National Defense Authorization Act, the 2026 defense policy bill is likely the most high-profile attempt to block the reform — this year, the proposal had gained momentum and wide support from the Trump administration, the House and Senate, and senior DoD leaders.  

But defense lobbyists pushed back against the reform during the conference process. The National Defense Industrial Association, for example, said these bipartisan efforts would “hamper innovation and DoD’s access to cutting-edge technologies by deterring companies from contracting with the DoD.” 

Eric Fanning, former secretary of the Army and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, said the right to repair provisions would “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely.”

“Given that we had support in the House and the Senate on a bipartisan basis, and we had the support of the Trump administration and the secretary of Defense, I don’t know how to interpret this, other than to say that industry prevailed in their influence over Congress, and the NDAA now reflects the interests of the business community instead of the American taxpayers and service members,” Williams said.

For years, the military has struggled with contract-imposed restrictions on repairing and maintaining its own equipment and weapons, forcing it to rely on original manufacturers to conduct necessary fixes in the field, which is costly and time-consuming. 

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, for example, has become an outspoken critic of large defense companies — he previously said that defense contractors have “conned the American people and the Pentagon and the Army.” Driscoll recently highlighted a Lockheed Martin Black Hawk helicopter part that costs the Army $47,000 to replace because the manufacturer refuses to fix a control knob the Army could make for $15.

 Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mt.) said in a statement they “support the Pentagon using the full extent of its existing authorities to insist on right to repair protections when it purchases equipment from contractors.” 

Williams said while this is the chance for the Pentagon to exercise its existing authorities, without legislation that enforces consistency, it’s very unlikely that contracting officers will be able to effectively implement right to repair across thousands of contracts. 

“I don’t want to let the Pentagon off the hook either. I believe that if Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made this a high priority, he could ensure that we acquire adequate data. But he would have to make sure that every contract officer on every contract was way more diligent than they have been up to this point,” Williams said.

For now, the right-to-repair effort is likely stalled until next year. Lawmakers will vote on the NDAA one more time before it is sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.  

“We will keep fighting for a common-sense, bipartisan law to address this unnecessary problem,” Warren and Sheehy said.

The post Congress quietly strips right-to-repair provisions from 2026 NDAA despite wide support first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

Here's what to expect from LG at CES 2026 including TVs, monitors and speakers.

The post We’ll soon discover 2026’s big TV trend thanks to LG’s CES announcements appeared first on Digital Trends.

As we close out 2025 and look ahead to 2026, nothing is as we might have expected even a year ago. AI has disrupted, and will continue to disrupt, every corner of modern life. In threat intelligence, SentinelLABS has not only recognized this shift but actively pivoted to meet it. At the same time, geopolitical alignments have grown increasingly unstable, with long-standing relationships now less certain than ever.

How will these new realities shape enterprises’ ability to anticipate and counter the cyber threats forming on the horizon? Predictions always carry the caveat that the future remains intractably unknowable, but even the unexpected emerges from trajectories already in motion.

In this post, SentinelLABS researchers and leaders share their perspectives on how the cyber threat landscape is evolving and what may lie ahead. Read on to explore how developments in global strategy, organized cybercrime, and of course, AI could impact us all in the coming year.

 

The Forgiving Internet is Over

The cybersecurity industry has been living on borrowed time, and AI is about to call in the debt.

The effects of cyberattacks are not always immediately visible: sometimes they go by entirely unnoticed. That encourages a fundamental cybernetics problem, as there isn’t an obvious causal link between the levers available to defenders and the constraining effects imposed on attackers.

That broken loop can create a corrosive perception that what we do doesn’t have meaningful effects, which has allowed our industry to backslide into lowest-investment, compliance-checkbox territory.

Meanwhile, the feedback delay entails that just as exploitation can go unnoticed for years, technical debt sits dormant, unnoticed for prolonged stretches.

We are moving to a future where being vulnerable and being hacked are not two separate steps. Today, organizations run edge appliances riddled with a bottomless supply of weaponizable vulnerabilities and n-days, and yet they often come away uncompromised simply because no one has gotten around to them yet.

Consider Cl0p’s MOVEit campaign: nearly 2,800 organizations compromised, 96 million individuals’ data exposed and the group was still processing victims more than a year after the initial breach. Cl0p explicitly stated they leaked names slowly to avoid overwhelming their own negotiation capacity. The attack itself was automated, executed over a holiday weekend, largely complete before the patch dropped, but extortion is human work. That capacity bottleneck —the gap between what automation can compromise and what humans can monetize— is about to disappear.

The internet’s forgiveness is a function of attacker capacity, and AI is a capacity multiplier. When autonomous agents can probe, validate, and exploit at machine speed, the gap between vulnerable and compromised collapses. Without a countervailing investment in AI-native defense, that asymmetry becomes the defining feature of the landscape.

Attackers will harness AI as a force multiplier long before defenders do. Scrappy resourcefulness, clear financial incentives, and freedom from procurement cycles guarantee it.

The alignment discourse is a distraction. Local models on consumer hardware, unconstrained foreign providers, and enterprise no-retention deployments attest to this. The moment capable computer-use models run locally, guardrails become irrelevant. Anthropic’s recent disclosure of Chinese operators using Claude Code for autonomous intrusions is instructive: one operator hitting thirty targets with minimal human intervention. By their own account, model hallucinations did more to slow the attackers down than any guardrails.

If defenders can thank AI for anything, it will be a fundamental reassignment of value, a revamping of capacity, and a necessary reimagining of what’s possible.

Feeble attempts to conjure tens of thousands of competent practitioners out of thin air have clearly floundered. Thankfully, getting more bodies isn’t the only way to increase capacity anymore. AI offers exactly that. It invites us to revisit implicit ROI calculations we abandoned long ago. We can now reconsider activities that required human intervention but were deemed too incremental and repetitive to be consequential: processing every document in a breach disclosure, pre-processing logs at scale, reverse engineering tangential codebases to better understand malicious code. These were not impossible tasks; they were tasks we decided not to attempt. That calculus has changed.

However, we must be clear-eyed about what we are adopting. These systems are non-deterministic. We are integrating a new form of evaluative power that is commoditized and cheap but also largely outside our control. Their outputs need to be wrangled into predictably acceptable parameters. The organizations that operationalize AI effectively will be those that learn to harness uncertainty within acceptable bounds rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.

What the market is missing (and desperately requires) are organizations that function as step-down transformers: converting raw frontier capability into security outcomes. Frontier labs are racing toward general capability while treating security as one of several potential markets. The result is a gap between what models can theoretically accomplish and what defenders can reliably deploy. Someone must bridge that gap with products and services that translate commoditized evaluative power into deployable autonomy.

This means investment in experimentation to redefine security problems in terms of what AI can make tractable, improve, or solve without waiting for archaic vendors to catch up. The threat actor(s) using Claude Code to maximize their operational capability didn’t stumble into competence. They iterated, tested, and created a harness for ready deployment with the human as far out of the loop as possible. Defenders will need equivalent rigor.

The opportunity is real and sizable. Seizing it requires that security as a practice becomes AI-native. Organizations that treat AI as another line item will find themselves overwhelmed by an operational tempo they cannot match. Those who internalize it as a fundamental shift, on both sides of the adversarial line, have a chance to redefine the dynamics of the security space. The value generated in 2026 and beyond is entirely concentrated in filling that gap between frontier capability and operational deployment.
Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS), Senior Technical Fellow and VP of Intelligence and Security Research, SentinelLABS

 

Hemispheric Crossfire | US–Venezuela Cyber Operations Drag in the Big Three

As of late 2025, Venezuela has already shifted from a chronic crisis to a genuine flashpoint. U.S. carrier groups and expanded maritime operations in the Caribbean, public talk of “closing” Venezuelan airspace, and speculation about regime‑change scenarios have raised the temperature dramatically. Caracas, for its part, is signaling a willingness to fight a long guerrilla struggle and “anarchize” the environment if the U.S. moves militarily. At the same time, Venezuela has deepened its alignment with Russia, Iran, and China, explicitly seeking security guarantees, capital, and military assistance from all three.

In such an environment, a realistic 2026 development is the partial exposure of U.S. offensive cyber and information operations targeting Venezuela. This doesn’t mean Hollywood‑style leaks of every covert program; it looks more like a mosaic of glimpses: A social media platform announces a takedown of coordinated inauthentic networks seeding narratives aimed at Venezuelan military factions and diaspora communities; A contractor leak reveals tooling used to profile Venezuelan officers, union leaders, and local elites; A regional report connects seemingly independent media outlets and meme sources back to U.S.-linked funding and infrastructure, blurring the line between strategic communications and covert influence.

None of this is unprecedented. Great powers all play in this space, but the political salience of Venezuela today means the blowback will be sharper and more public than usual.

That exposure offers raw material for counter‑narratives and operations by Caracas’ backers. Russia is already running well‑funded Spanish‑language disinformation and propaganda campaigns across Latin America, often in coordination with partner state media, with a long‑standing focus on undermining U.S. standing in the region. Iran has used Venezuela as a beachhead for sanctions evasion, proxy networks, and anti‑U.S. activity, including leveraging IRGC and Hezbollah-linked structures to expand its reach in the hemisphere. China, meanwhile, is quietly consolidating intelligence collection capabilities via regional ground stations, telecom infrastructure, and proximity to key undersea cables, assets Western analysts already flag as potential platforms for surveillance of U.S. communications.

In 2026, we should expect to see cyber and information operations explicitly framed as “defending Venezuela from U.S. aggression”, but operationally aimed at the United States and its closest partners.

• Russian and Venezuela‑aligned influence networks will likely amplify any evidence of U.S. IO/espionage, real, exaggerated, or fabricated, into Spanish and English‑language campaigns targeting U.S. domestic audiences, Latin American publics, and the Venezuelan diaspora.
• Iranian‑linked actors can be expected to piggyback on the crisis to probe U.S. critical infrastructure and financial networks under an “Axis of Authoritarianism” narrative, using the Venezuela storyline to justify escalation in cyber operations they were running for other reasons anyway.
• Chinese‑linked capabilities are more likely to manifest as intensified collection and mapping, SIGINT on U.S. deployments, diplomatic traffic, and commercial flows, rather than loud influence campaigns, but that data will feed the same broader alignment.

For CTI teams, the prediction isn’t some “ big Venezuela cyber war,” it’s a convergence problem. A Venezuelan crisis becomes the pretext that ties together Russian, Iranian, Chinese, and local pro‑regime operators into loosely synchronized campaigns: hack‑and‑leak operations targeting U.S. policy debates; cross‑platform disinformation linking Venezuela to border, drugs, and migration narratives; the probing of U.S. energy, maritime, and telecom infrastructure under the cover of regional tension.

Expect to see Spanish‑language infrastructure and personas show up in incidents that ultimately impact U.S. and European networks and more clusters where attribution threads run through Caracas and Moscow/Tehran/Beijing at the same time. The organizations most likely to feel this first are those at the seam lines: energy, logistics, telecom, diaspora media, and NGOs with one foot in the U.S. and one in the region.
Tom Hegel, Distinguished Threat Researcher, SentinelLABS

 

China’s Fifteenth Five Year Plan

A new Five-Year Plan from the Chinese Communist Party means a new hit-list for China’s hackers.

After Xi came into power in 2013, he set about issuing development goals for science and technology in China not seen since the leadership of Mao Zedong. The most notable, Made in China 2025 was released two years later in 2015. After American opprobrium reached its peak in the first Trump administration, China slowly withdrew MIC2025 from the limelight. American attention to the strategy led to significant collection difficulties for the PRC as the US FBI and other government agencies prioritized defense of targeted technologies in the private sector and at US research institutions, like universities.

In 2021, the PRC released publicly only a vague outline of the Party’s Medium- to Long-Term Development Plan for Scientific and Technological Innovation, which set innovation goals for 2025, 2030, and 2035. Foreign attention to MIC2025 led the Party to mark the full content of the plan as “internal circulation only.”

The 15th Five-Year Plan promises to push some of those privately-held development goals into the spotlight. The PRC central government will release the official 15th FYP in 2025, and will delegate much of the details about achieving its objectives to government ministries. Ministries will release their more-detailed version of the 15th FYP in late 2025 or early 2026. Those documents create a political demand signal for provincial governments and bureaucracies to work towards realizing.

Contracted hackers looking to pilfer western technology and sell it to the highest bidder in China will consult those documents to identify the technologies their customers are likely to pay good money for. If your industry is on the list of targeted technologies, buckle up.
Dakota Cary, Senior Security Advisory Consultant

 

Organized Cybercrime | More Integrated, Streamlined & Aggressive

Commodities and Cartels

Ransomware and infostealers are now commodity features. We’ve blown past this milestone in the last couple of years. Consider ransomware and data exfiltration as givens in the event of any opportunistic breach. While the days of the ‘big brand’ extortion operations are waning, we are seeing more smaller, organized groups offering à la carte services, including ransomware, but ultimately, this is just another feature available in ‘run of the mill malware’.

The blending of infostealer and ransomware-style features into more swiss-army knife tools and services will attract a broader set of criminals, a natural evolution already underway, given the heavy reliance of modern attacks on the infostealer logs ecosystem.

This also overlaps with the trend towards more ‘Cartel-style’ operations or ‘alliances’ which consolidate disparate malicious services into more all-encompassing “MaaS” offerings.

Ransomware & Initial Access Brokers

As these cartels and service ecosystems solidify, the relationships that underpin initial access are tightening as well. Ransomware groups continue to work closely with IABs (Initial Access Brokers), with an increasing number of threat actors publicly and aggressively attempting to recruit ‘trusted’ IABs. Groups like Sicarii advertise special advantages to others willing to partner with them.

Additionally, we can expect to see IABs starting to offer more targeted bundles consisting of curated credential sets. For example, IABs will start offering ‘chains’ based on cumulative sets of related credentials (chain of VPN->O365->Cloud Console access for a target). There are some specializing in this now, but we expect this to become more mainstream as the infostealer log ecosystem, which feeds many IABs, continues to explode.

Increasing Attacks Will Offer Defenders Fewer IOCs and Artifacts

There are some interesting micro trends within these smaller, more obscure, operations. One such trend is the omission of ransom notes and other noisy filesystem artifacts, and threat actors moving towards more direct follow-ups via emails and phone calls to initiate communications.

We have seen groups like “Penguin Cartel’ operate in this way, and we expect adversaries to increasingly embrace these alternate methods of first notification in extortive attacks.

Businesses Will Keep Losing Data, Encryption Not Required

This operational “quieting” aligns with another growing trend: attackers no longer need to encrypt data to profit from it. This is far from new, but it is increasing. More crimeware actors eschew encryption entirely, opting to extort victims to prevent release of the exfiltrated data. Groups like Kairos and WorldLeaks are current examples of this model.

More Automation, More Upscaling

While the “AI-revolution” has yet to fully transform the downstream atomic artifacts of crimeware, cybercriminals are taking advantage of various automation options, using AI to augment and scale-up their output.

An increasing number of actors are leveraging AI agents, Telegram Bots and similar features both to automate discovery and sales of their product and C2 activities. This has long since been a practice in the traditional infostealer community, but we are seeing an uptick of this across the crimeware landscape.

Pressure Escalates Tactics

Threat actors are continuing to apply real-world violence (VaaS) to ensure their profitability. Naming-and-shaming via data leak sites will remain a permanent feature of the landscape, but we will see further pressure being applied to business clients, customers, family members and entities that are peripheral to the victim. One common manifestation of this is swatting groups being called upon to apply pressure to financial crime victims.

Additionally, threat actors will continue to leverage regulatory and compliance laws to apply pressure and time leak announcements around critical events such as earnings calls or M&A negotiations.
Jim Walter, Senior Threat Researcher, SentinelLABS

 

Living Off Apple’s Land | Latent Powers and Stolen Trust

Last year, we noted how threat actors were making hay abusing AppleScript’s spoof-friendly ability to create password dialog boxes to gain elevated privileges, but as many unfortunate victims have been finding out this year, that’s far from all AppleScript is good for.

ClickFix is the new social-engineering kid-on-the-block for every stripe of threat actor from nation state APTs to opportunistic cryptowallet-stealing cybercriminals. Dropping a simple two-line AppleScript that opens an innocuous webpage, perhaps a support portal for some legit technology, with up to 10000 blank lines ending with a few malicious lines of code is a ridiculously simple but effective method of social engineering.

2026 will see the continuation of both techniques. However, as old as Python and as powerful as PowerShell, AppleScript has a lot more juice left in it from a threat actor point of view.

We are just beginning to see the first signs of adversaries making use of AppleScript’s Objective-C (AS-ObjC) bridge — a wonderful technology that brings the power of Apple’s Foundation and AppKit frameworks, including NSWorkspace, to simple AppleScripts. In the past, we’ve seen AS-ObjC’s newer cousin JXA (JavaScript for Automation) gain traction in red-teaming tools like Apfell; it’s a small conceptual leap from there to the (arguably) easier world of AppleScript Objective-C.

That opens up a whole new world of in-memory scripting power that otherwise usually requires a compiled binary and readily-detectable file writes. Will we see threat actors lean into this old, built-in, not-widely known, yet incredibly powerful way of programming Mac computers? If you’re a threat actor, it’s a Living-off-the-Land technology dream come true. If you’re a defender, it’d be smart to start thinking about what that looks like from a telemetry point-of-view in 2026. And while we’re on the topic of powerful, Apple Framework-enhanced scripting languages, Swift scripting is a thing worth keeping in mind, too.

On macOS, ClickFix was a necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention response to Apple’s plugging of the Gatekeeper workaround. However, you don’t need a bypass to Apple’s increasingly strict code signing and notarization rules if your malware is signed with a valid developer ID.

Illicit trade in verified Apple Developer accounts is something we’ve seen increase in the latter half of 2025, and it’s only a matter of time before we see these abused by more malware authors. Temporary they may be, as Apple is quick to nix such accounts once identified, but even a short-lived campaign can do a lot of damage against the right targets.

The lesson for defenders is not to treat validly code signed executables as some kind of exception to detection rules. Signed code tells a defender little more than that it passed Apple’s automated checks and that the code has a name attached to it. In the case of malware, that’s almost certainly not the name of a threat actor.
Phil Stokes, macOS Research Engineer, SentinelLABS

 

The AI Reckoning | Consolidation, Censorship, and Economic Fallout

Specialized Models Will Belong to Those Who Can Make Them

Over the next few years, we’ll watch a huge number of AI companies simply disappear.

The generic “copilot for X” and “AI workspace” products that dominated pitch decks in 2023–2024 will be reborn as bloodless, checkbox features inside Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other large platforms. The quality will be worse than the specialized startups they replace, but that won’t matter because they’ll be easy to buy on an enterprise contract, come bundled with existing tools, and be turned on with a toggle in an admin console.

The result will look like a mass extinction. Valuations will implode and the easy money will evaporate. The tech influencer class on X will still push the “996 grindset mentality” even as the few humbled survivors of the crash pivot from “owning the category” to cutting costs and delivering durable value to a smaller, demanding set of customers.

But this is also exactly the environment in which truly specialized organizations start to matter. These smaller entrants will sit in narrow, high-stakes domains: cybersecurity, law, finance, industrial control, biotech…

In those areas, the winners will be teams that have quietly built a repeatable data and training pipeline, have access to proprietary datasets, and can deploy smaller models that are integrated into specific workflows, regulations, and hardware.

Advances in training efficiency, data curation, and model compression will be among the most valuable pieces of this puzzle, and they will increasingly move out of public view. Labs will publish less, national-security programs will classify more, and a handful of specialized shops will jealously guard their pipelines.

The Bubble Pops in a Poisoned Reality

AI is unpopular as an idea. For most consumers it means glitchy chatbots, over-eager automation at work, auto-generated spam, and marketing departments screaming about “AI-powered” everything. The underlying capabilities are real, but the experience is mostly annoyance, precarity, and a strong sense that someone else is getting rich off a thing that is happening to you, not for you.

On top of that resentment, we’ve layered a classic asset bubble. Capital has flooded into anything AI: driving valuations, headcount, and infrastructure spending far beyond what current use-cases justify. In the last year, large tech companies have fired workers while bragging about “AI efficiencies,” even when they’re mostly just undoing years of over-hiring.

The important prediction isn’t “a bubble exists”; it’s how people will react when it finally hits the wall. Within the next year we should expect a dot-com–scale drawdown in AI equity and private valuations: a broad repricing of pure-play “AI companies,” at least one of today’s marquee AI darlings valued at less than a third of its peak, and a long tail of late-stage startups ruthlessly zeroed-out. The hyperscalers will survive because AI is one line item inside a much larger machine; most everyone else will discover that they built a feature, not a business.

The crash will happen in a reality already saturated with synthetic content. In the scramble to justify their spend, organizations are using models to flood every channel with low-cost output: SEO sludge, autogenerated news, endless pitches, synthetic “user reviews,” fake engagement. Previously trusted sites and platforms are already quietly tilting from human-written to machine-written material because the unit economics are irresistible. The problem is they are using last decade’s metrics: what is the actual economic value of Daily Active Users when the content they are consuming is slop that nobody can monopolize?

As the synthetic layer of our online experience deepens, models are trained and retrained on their own exhaust and on rival models’ curated “knowledge bases”, wiki-like sites and reference corpora that are themselves partially or wholly machine-written. Systems start to treat these partisan or synthetic compilations as “ground truth” simply because they look like structured authority.

The targeted threat of “model poisoning” becomes the inescapable threat of “reality poisoning” and the line between what actually happened and what the machine inferred as plausible will vanish.

This increasingly synthetic environment directly undermines the business case that justified the bubble in the first place. Search gets worse, watered down, and commoditized. Feeds become vacuum sealed bubbles where nothing breaks containment. Analytics get noisier and less reliable. Conversion rates slip as users learn to distrust what they see on screens. Enterprises that bought AI to “supercharge knowledge work” find that their internal knowledge bases are now clogged with plausible nonsense that’s harder and harder to audit. The marginal ROI on yet another AI integration rapidly decays.

So when the capital tide goes out, the public story will be simple and hostile. “AI took my job and ruined the internet.” The actual big picture may be composed of macro economics, overcapacity, and misallocated capital, but the emotional truth will be that AI made jobs less secure, the information environment less trustworthy, and the daily experience of technology spammy and brittle.

In the aftermath, the models will remain, the infrastructure will remain, and the incumbents will survive by using them where they produce actual value. What won’t survive will be broad-based cultural, political, and financial enthusiasm.

In the next year, we will end up with powerful systems embedded deep in a few dominant platforms, operating in a permanently contaminated data environment, surrounded by a public that no longer believes the marketing and cannot trust the outputs.

Dual-Use Will Eat Alignment and Turn Into Regional Censorship

AI and LLM development are on track to become core pillars of national defense. Questions about “U.S. vs. China vs. everyone else” will move out of policy think-tanks and into mainstream geopolitics. Behind closed doors, frontier systems will be evaluated less as “products” and more as strategic infrastructure: tools that can rewrite the balance of cyber offense, intelligence gathering, and information operations both at home and abroad.

In this world, statements of “public model alignment” will become less important. The loud, visible debates about fairness, bias, and “responsible AI” will continue, but the most consequential work on offensive AI capabilities will move into secure facilities, export-controlled supply chains, and gray markets. The question will shift from “Is this system aligned with human values?” to “Is this system aligned with our national interests?”

Because AI systems are inherently dual-use, offensive capabilities and control affordances will be developed in parallel. The same model that politely refuses to discuss certain topics in a consumer chat interface will have close cousins tuned for intrusion discovery, vulnerability triage, targeted influence, and automated exploitation. Many of those capabilities will originate in state-backed programs, but they won’t stay there. They’ll diffuse into law enforcement, domestic security services, and private contractors, where they will be applied to civilian populations as instruments of soft control and, when desired, hard power.

That logic will leak out into the consumer layer as regionalized safety controls. As these technologies scale, they will increasingly mirror existing patterns of information control. Providers will ship different rule-sets and behaviors by jurisdiction, the way streaming platforms already fragment their catalogs country by country. Providers will claim that this represents “localization” efforts — where differences in language and cultural references are updated for the target population. What they are really localizing is the range of thinkable thoughts within a language model.

Whatever their marketing stance on “neutrality” or aversion to particular ideological labels, major providers will have very strong incentives to align their models with local statutes, regulatory guidance, and informal political red lines. If a given government can threaten licenses, data-center permits, key executives, or revenue streams, the “alignment layer” becomes one more lever for the powerful. Governments will jump at the opportunity to tweak refusal patterns, soften the model’s treatment of this history, or remove guidance that might make protests more effective.

Over time, legislators, regulators, authoritarian regimes, and litigators will get a much sharper sense of where these levers sit inside these systems: how content filters work, what knobs exist for toxicity, radicalization, and persuasion, or how model-delivered advice translates into real-world actions. The volume and specificity of legal and policy demands on these knobs will expand accordingly.

Engineering teams at these companies will spend less time debating abstract philosophical framings and more time implementing tightly scoped, jurisdiction-specific constraints designed by lawyers and national security officials.

The result will be a stratified ecosystem:

• Public, region-locked models that are heavily constrained will become the systems most people will interact with day to day.
• Institutional and security-grade models, derived from the same or larger bases but deployed inside governments, defense contractors, and domestic security agencies, will be used to profile, predict and shape human behavior at scale.
• Informal and illicit models will be leaked, stolen, or quietly licensed and recirculate similar capabilities into criminal markets and non-state actors.

In all three layers, “alignment” will be eaten by dual-use. The systems will be “aligned” to institutional goals, not to a shared, global notion of human flourishing. The public will experience this as an explosion of region-specific censorship and weirdly divergent realities between models that reflect different value systems.

In short, the coming wave of LLM censorship by major U.S. and allied companies is the civilian-facing expression of a deeper shift. Once AI is framed first as a strategic asset and only secondarily as a consumer product, dual-use incentives dominate. Alignment becomes a branch of national security and regulatory compliance, and the map of model behavior starts to trace the borders of political power rather than the contours of an egalitarian reality.
Gabriel Bernadett-Shapiro, Distinguished AI Research Scientist, SentinelLABS

 

Zero or No Trust | Interconnected Services Lead to Increasingly Devastating Intrusions

Zero Trust Architecture networks have been increasingly ubiquitous over the last five years, with the pandemic driving many organizations to rapidly adopt and implement related technologies to support the sudden uptick in remote work. Threat actors were slower to adapt through 2020-2022, as there were plenty of targets who had not jumped on the ZTA bandwagon. Early adopters targeting these environments made headlines by compromising often tech-forward organizations, a far cry from the companies typically in the news for huge ransomware attacks against legacy networks.

In 2025, there were several campaigns where actors targeted highly interconnected environments by focusing on identity providers. The ShinyHunters campaign abusing OAuth relationships in certain Salesforce user environments is a notable example: granting OAuth access to the Data Loader app enabled the attackers to access the victim environment and exfiltrate data using a Salesforce tool intended to do exactly that. Similarly, in August 2025 attackers abused the Salesloft Drift application to hijack OAuth rights to harvest cloud service and SaaS credentials from the targeted environment.

There is huge potential for actors who identify improperly configured or abandoned OAuth-enabled applications. This was demonstrated in 2024 when Midnight Blizzard struck gold by discovering a legacy application in Microsoft’s test environment that enabled high-privileged access to corporate environments. For several years, skilled cloud attackers have been working on tools that map both resources and OAuth relationships in target environments.

While gaining access to such a high value environment as a major cloud service and operating system provider may not be feasible for most actors, increases in automated scanning and data evaluation will only make finding new, well-connected targets easier.

Based on the increased prevalence of Zero Trust environments, an increased attacker focus and understanding of SaaS identity providers, and the rise in sophistication of tools used to identify relationships between identities and assets in organizations’ environments, we believe there is a significant risk for attacks that misuse the new forms of “trust” used to authenticate applications within environments.

A potential evolution we may see in 2026 is tooling that not only targets one SaaS application and its downstream connections, but likely has some degree of automation or evaluation through agentic AI analysis to continue performing more phases of intrusion based on findings from the previous phase.
Alex Delamotte, Senior Threat Researcher, SentinelLABS

 

AI-Driven Threats | Blurred Attribution and the DPRK Wildcard

The use of AI by adversaries will likely manifest in two ways outside of the ongoing discourse. The vast majority of attackers’ use of AI to date has been around driving greater efficiency and automating existing parts of their intrusion lifecycle. The intelligence assessments to date tend to skew towards technical improvements and capabilities.

If we look back on past assessments of emerging technologies — and let’s be honest, AI is without a doubt an emerging technology — two unexpected things tend to happen.

First, threat actors’ use of new technologies almost inevitably blurs existing assessment lines, typically around tradecraft and attribution. If we apply this to AI, the most likely upcoming shift will be lower-level/smaller groups gaining access to capabilities that were previously used to define government-affiliated programs. In particular, AI’s ability to provide language capabilities will bring low-level cybercriminals into the realm of government programs with full linguistic capabilities. This was an incredibly important capability distinction that is likely to end in the coming year solely because of AI.

The second likely outcome will be an almost inevitable surprise from DPRK’s AI use. DPRK cyber activities have previously caught intelligence organizations off-guard multiple times. Examples range from destructive attacks geared towards stopping a movie release through the current IT workers situation.

Additionally, AI has proven highly useful and effective to DPRK efforts, again the IT workers are a great example. When we pair these realities with the vast amount of illicit revenue generated by DPRK’s efforts at stealing cryptocurrency, we see an interesting situation emerging.

We have a cyber effort known to produce surprises, actively leveraging AI in a large and also previously unforeseen manner, and producing large amounts of revenue for the regime through cyber actions, both cryptocurrency theft and IT workers payments.

There is a high likelihood some level of these illicit gains will be reinvested into the DPRK cyber programs to increase their scope, scale, and impact–programs that are already actively pushing the bounds of AI use. While we do not have an expected outcome specifically, the likelihood of an unexpected, large, AI-driven surprise from DPRK is something we should be mindful of and prepared to tackle on the defensive side.

Steve Stone, SVP, Threat Discovery & Response

 

Looking Ahead & Protection Now

Moving ahead demands strong, decisive leadership based on confident security choices and the courage to evolve. For all those committed to a safer and more resilient future, SentinelOne is ready to help secure every aspect of your business. Contact us to learn more about cybersecurity built for what’s next.

A compromise version of the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, released late Sunday, includes several key civilian personnel reforms that could change how the Defense Department hires and manages its civilian workforce.

Most notably, the draft text includes a provision that would allow the Defense Department to promote employees based on skills and qualifications without requiring them to satisfy minimum time-in-grade requirements before being eligible for promotion.

Ron Sanders, a former career human capital leader in government, said the provision is emblematic of the long-running debate to allow DoD to secede from the rest of the federal civil service due to the nature of its mission.

“It is a big deal, and it underscores a bigger issue … You should be able to promote people, regardless of time served, if they can do the job — promote them,” Ron Sanders, a former career human capital leader in government, told Federal News Network. “There have been numerous attempts to carve out more flexibilities for the DoD civilian workforce than the rest of the civil service had.”

“I’m of the mind, and I’m not alone in this, that the federal civil service should be broken up. It should be glued together by a series of standards and principles — there are some cross cutting government-wide principles that should always remain in effect. But DoD has a different mission than the intel community, and it has a different mission than FBI and the law enforcement and other aspects of Homeland Security. Trying to treat all of that as one-size-fits-all is problematic. And I think you’re seeing a continuation of the debate that DoD is different,” he added. 

The time-in-grade requirement is antiquated anyway, Sanders argued, and should be revisited for the rest of the federal civil service.

The bill would also allow the Defense Department to use skill-based assessments to determine whether applicants are qualified for open positions.

“If you sum it all up, DoD would basically have its own civilian personnel system, separate and apart from the rest of the federal civil service. I think we’ve gone to the other extreme, and we’ve been living there for decades now, and that is a one-size-fits-all mentality. What’s good for the SEC is good for DoD, and that’s just not true anymore,” Sanders said. 

In addition, if enacted into law, DoD would be able to share certificates of top candidates for various roles across the department. Certificates would remain valid for at least a year, and they are subject to agency-specific qualification checks.

This particular provision is not new, Sanders said. “If you have the applicant’s permission, sharing certificates, to me, is not a big deal, and it should have been done years and years and years ago, if it hasn’t been.”

Congress is also tightening the department’s ability to make workforce cuts by adding new analysis requirements, reporting mandates and restrictions on conducting reductions-in-force.

If passed, the bill would prohibit DoD from reducing its workforce levels or realigning functions if such changes involve more than 50 employees and occur outside the normal programming process, including ad hoc, immediate or unprogrammed workforce changes. The Defense secretary is also required to notify Congress about planned workforce reductions.

“I think it is part of a larger trend, and that is a growing realization that civilian personnel in DoD are important and they should be managed. If something affects 50 or more employees or some small number like that, that’s micromanaging,” Sanders said. “I don’t think that was in intent on the part of Congress to actually worry about 50 employees. I think it was just a failure to fully comprehend the full scope of the DoD civilian workforce, which is just plain huge.”

Lawmakers are also seeking to centralize and elevate civilian personnel management within each military service by placing it under senior uniformed leaders. If the measure passes, senior leaders who manage military manpower would also oversee the department’s civilian workforce.

“I think at least part of the reasoning is the necessity of having what I would argue are redundant staffs at the military department headquarters and at the major command level. There’s a pendulum here, and it goes back and forth. But at the end of the day, somebody really does need to take a hard look at the staffs that have emerged and decide whether they’re redundant and whether they could be centralized,” Sanders said. 

Cyber workforce

The legislation also expands which positions DoD can hire using special cyber authorities, as well as significantly increases the maximum pay DoD can offer for cyber talent.

Under current law, Cyber Excepted Services hiring authorities apply to U.S. Cyber Command, as well as certain cybersecurity and IT operations roles across the services. The 2026 defense policy bill could expand it to positions held in combatant commands, defense agencies, and field activities supporting CYBERCOM. DoD would also expand Cyber Excepted Services to 500 more cyber roles that don’t neatly fit into existing categories but are still vital and hard-to-fill jobs

The legislation would also give the defense secretary greater pay flexibility for cyber talent, allowing DoD to offer up to 150% of the maximum basic pay authorized for Executive Schedule Level I roles.

“Neither Homeland Security nor DoD has taken full advantage of the authorities that Congress gave them literally decades ago. In DoD case, I think the mandate, and I read this as a mandate, to put more people under CES is generally a good thing. It just again underscores whether DoD should be treated differently or whether you need a separate set of personnel flexibilities for all cyber ninjas at DoD,” Sanders said. 

Worker protections stripped

Meanwhile, the American Federation of Government Employees — the nation’s largest federal employee union — is urging Congress to vote against the House rule for the 2026 defense policy bill.

AFGE says negotiators removed a bipartisan House provision that would have restored collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of Defense Department civilian employees. The union says removing that language means that the legislation fails to protect basic rights of workers who maintain ships, aircraft and support service members. The union is calling on lawmakers to reject the procedural rule and restore the worker protections before the NDAA moves forward.

“If lawmakers are serious about supporting our military, they must send this bill back to conference, fix it, restore these protections, and then pass an NDAA worthy of the men and women who defend this nation every day,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

The post Compromise NDAA would let DoD promote civilians faster, increase cyber pay first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Staff Sgt. Tracy Smith

Here are five major takeaways from MJBizCon 2025 as heard by our editorial team.

Marijuana flower power at the heart of industry success – and other MJBizCon takeaways is a post from: MJBizDaily: Financial, Legal & Cannabusiness news for cannabis entrepreneurs

If you’re a longtime reader, you probably know that our newsroom selects 10 breakthroughs every year that we think will define the future. This group exercise is mostly fun and always engrossing, but at times it can also be quite difficult. 

We collectively pitch dozens of ideas, and the editors meticulously review and debate the merits of each. We agonize over which ones might make the broadest impact, whether one is too similar to something we’ve featured in the past, and how confident we are that a recent advance will actually translate into long-term success. There is plenty of lively discussion along the way.  

The 2026 list will come out on January 12—so stay tuned. In the meantime, I wanted to share some of the technologies from this year’s reject pile, as a window into our decision-making process. 

These four technologies won’t be on our 2026 list of breakthroughs, but all were closely considered, and we think they’re worth knowing about. 

Male contraceptives 

There are several new treatments in the pipeline for men who are sexually active and wish to prevent pregnancy—potentially providing them with an alternative to condoms or vasectomies. 

Two of those treatments are now being tested in clinical trials by a company called Contraline. One is a gel that men would rub on their shoulder or upper arm once a day to suppress sperm production, and the other is a device designed to block sperm during ejaculation. (Kevin Eisenfrats, Contraline’s CEO, was recently named to our Innovators Under 35 list). A once-a-day pill is also in early-stage trials with the firm YourChoice Therapeutics. 

Though it’s exciting to see this progress, it will still take several years for any of these treatments to make their way through clinical trials—assuming all goes well.

World models 

World models have become the hot new thing in AI in recent months. Though they’re difficult to define, these models are generally trained on videos or spatial data and aim to produce 3D virtual worlds from simple prompts. They reflect fundamental principles, like gravity, that govern our actual world. The results could be used in game design or to make robots more capable by helping them understand their physical surroundings. 

Despite some disagreements on exactly what constitutes a world model, the idea is certainly gaining momentum. Renowned AI researchers including Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li have launched companies to develop them, and Li’s startup World Labs released its first version last month. And Google made a huge splash with the release of its Genie 3 world model earlier this year. 

Though these models are shaping up to be an exciting new frontier for AI in the year ahead, it seemed premature to deem them a breakthrough. But definitely watch this space. 

Proof of personhood 

Thanks to AI, it’s getting harder to know who and what is real online. It’s now possible to make hyperrealistic digital avatars of yourself or someone you know based on very little training data, using equipment many people have at home. And AI agents are being set loose across the internet to take action on people’s behalf. 

All of this is creating more interest in what are known as personhood credentials, which could offer a way to verify that you are, in fact, a real human when you do something important online. 

For example, we’ve reported on efforts by OpenAI, Microsoft, Harvard, and MIT to create a digital token that would serve this purpose. To get it, you’d first go to a government office or other organization and show identification. Then it’d be installed on your device and whenever you wanted to, say, log into your bank account, cryptographic protocols would verify that the token was authentic—confirming that you are the person you claim to be. 

Whether or not this particular approach catches on, many of us in the newsroom agree that the future internet will need something along these lines. Right now, though, many competing identity verification projects are in various stages of development. One is World ID by Sam Altman’s startup Tools for Humanity, which uses a twist on biometrics. 

If these efforts reach critical mass—or if one emerges as the clear winner, perhaps by becoming a universal standard or being integrated into a major platform—we’ll know it’s time to revisit the idea.  

The world’s oldest baby

In July, senior reporter Jessica Hamzelou broke the news of a record-setting baby. The infant developed from an embryo that had been sitting in storage for more than 30 years, earning him the bizarre honorific of “oldest baby.” 

This odd new record was made possible in part by advances in IVF, including safer methods of thawing frozen embryos. But perhaps the greater enabler has been the rise of “embryo adoption” agencies that pair donors with hopeful parents. People who work with these agencies are sometimes more willing to make use of decades-old embryos. 

This practice could help find a home for some of the millions of leftover embryos that remain frozen in storage banks today. But since this recent achievement was brought about by changing norms as much as by any sudden technological improvements, this record didn’t quite meet our definition of a breakthrough—though it’s impressive nonetheless.

At CES 2026, Lenovo going all-in on AI (like every other company), but it’s hiding all the fun goodies in the back, and I’m excited about what might be coming.

The post Lenovo’s CES 2026 is hiding the fun stuff behind AI — here’s what I’m excited about appeared first on Digital Trends.

A new year is right around the corner, and that means the countdown to CES 2026 has begun. CES is the most important time of the year for tech news — and that includes automotive tech. As automakers have sought to appear more like tech companies and integrate more software-based features into their vehicles, CES […]

The post I’m not expecting huge car news at CES 2026, but that’s exactly what you should want appeared first on Digital Trends.

The clock is ticking, but great gifts are still within reach. This year’s Last-Minute Gift Guide rounds up smart tools, flavor essentials, Steven’s newest gear picks, and even the ultimate experience gift: Barbecue University. If you need something useful, memorable, and ready to go, you’ll find it here.

Explore the top tech conferences to attend in 2026. Discover key dates, locations, and must-see events in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, IT, and emerging tech.

The post Top Tech Conferences to Attend in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Explore the top tech conferences to attend in 2026. Discover key dates, locations, and must-see events in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, IT, and emerging tech.

The post Top Tech Conferences to Attend in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Whenever there is the possibility of a government shutdown, FedChoice Federal Credit Union immediately jumps into action and starts planning direct support for federal employees.

The Lanham, Maryland–based financial institution, which serves more than 25,000 members and manages $447 million in assets, processed assistance for hundreds of federal workers after the shutdown began. The FedChoice strategy focused on addressing the full impact of the crisis: the mind, body, wallet and health of their members.

Between Oct. 1 and Nov. 5, FedChoice welcomed over 400 new members seeking financial support and allowed nearly 350 members to skip consumer loan payments, preserving nearly $150,000 in immediate cash flow for affected households. This $2.4 million in direct financial aid was critical when at least 670,000 federal employees were furloughed, while roughly 2 million continued working without pay, FedChoice President and CEO Brett Noll said.

Addressing the shutdown’s full economic impact

FedChoice wants consumers to know the shutdown affects everyone. Experts estimate the economic impact of this shutdown ranged from $7 billion to $16 billion per week of lost U.S. revenue. The drastic slowdown affects every American because there is less money fueling the economy, creating an anchor on access to lending and competitive rates.

“We know that our federal workers aren’t back on their feet and doing fine just because congress voted to end the shutdown,” Noll said. “We remain committed to helping federal employees return to financial normalcy as quickly as possible. Regardless of there being a shutdown or not, we exist to improve the financial well-being of our members, most of whom are federal employees.”

FedChoice has designed products and services to directly address these issues head on and advance its mission to serve. FedChoice’s FedAssist Program is tailored to put money into federal workers’ pockets at competitive market rates to help them move into their first or next home, purchase or refinance cars and trucks, and more, said Christine Wright, vice president of marketing at FedChoice. The program even offers support like skip-a-pay loan options.

“What is a travel inconvenience for Americans across the country is devastating to our family of federal workers,” Wright pointed out. “The people who are impacted aren’t just a headline on the news. One of our members visiting a branch said, ‘Look, I’m trying to figure out if I need to go to food banks? I’m worried about the gas in my car.’ And he just started hugging people and thanking us. These are the times we see how impactful credit unions can be.”

Providing for needs beyond financial well-being

Since the shutdown started, FedChoice’s efforts have gone far beyond offering traditional financial services, recognizing that health encompasses more than just insurance coverage. It also includes food security, mental well-being and physical resilience, said Alexis Jones, founder and CEO of Transcend Clinical Services.

In early November, the credit union organized a food truck event at its headquarters, serving free meals to federal employees while also connecting them with mental health professionals from Transcend Clinical Services and certified financial planners.

The emotional and financial toll of a shutdown is significant. It’s critical for anyone affected to protect their well-being through resilience.

FedChoice offered three suggestions:

• Control the controllables: Focus on your routines, mindset and responses — what you can control, not what you can’t.
• Get outside and move your body: Stepping outside and moving can reset your nervous system and reduce anxiety.
• Be intentional about what you allow in: Protect your peace by choosing inputs that nourish your spirit over noise.

“You may not be able to control the storm, but you can always control how you care for yourself in it,” Jones said.

If you are a federal employee in need of support or want to explore the credit union difference, visit the FedChoice website, contact FedChoice by phone or stop by one of its local branches.

“Every day, we offer federal workers a fresh outlook on a brighter vision for tomorrow that supports their mind, body, wallet and health,” Noll said.

Discover more articles and videos now on our 2026 Open Season Exchange event page.

The post 2026 Open Season Exchange: FedChoice on a financial and well-being reset post the government shutdown first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Getty Images/Mohamad Faizal Bin Ramli

Participants in both the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs may have more incentive than usual to take advantage of Open Season, as premium costs continue to surge in yet another year of double-digit percentage increases.

For 2026, FEHB premiums are rising by an average of 12.3% for enrollees, while those in PSHB will see their premium costs rise by an average of 11.3%. It comes after premiums increased by about 13.5% and 11.1% for FEHB and PSHB respectively in 2025.

Shane Stevens, associate director of healthcare and insurance at the Office of Personnel Management, acknowledged what he said was a “frustrating environment” for insurance enrollees who are facing continually rising premium costs.

“Health care costs have become somewhat unsustainable,” Stevens said during Federal News Network’s 2026 Open Season Exchange. “I’ve watched employees have to get second jobs to get insurance and cover it. I’ve watched where they’ve reduced the amount of coverage in order to afford it. In some cases, they’ve gone completely without insurance.”

Combating federal health insurance premium cost increases

To try to combat rising premiums costs, Stevens said OPM’s strategy will revolve around reducing “fraud, waste and abuse” in the government’s insurance programs.

“We have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers, to our plan participants, the retirees, the current federal workers. Yet we have very little insight into what we’re actually spending this coming year,” he said. “We’re working very hard to try and get all of this information, all of this data, to be able to make good decisions, which will help us to detect fraud, waste, abuse and overpayments.”

OPM is also on a one-year deadline to implement recently added requirements from the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. One provision of the reconciliation bill, called the FEHB Protection Act, requires OPM to create a system for verifying the eligibility of FEHB enrollees. The bill also directs OPM to include eligibility audits in any fraud risk assessments of the program.

The push in Congress came after the Government Accountability Office in 2022 found that OPM may be spending up to $1 billion annually on ineligible FEHB enrollees. Removing ineligible members, however, would reduce costs to the government but not necessarily lower premiums for beneficiaries directly.

“If we get the data and the information we need, I’m convinced that we could save approximately 7% to 8% per year,” Stevens estimated.

Addressing staff needs, other challenges within OPM

OPM’s insurance programs are facing other major challenges as well. The platform for the PSHB program in particular is at risk of an operational failure, according to OPM’s inspector general office. An OIG report over the summer found that staffing shortages at OPM this year, coupled with funding issues, may negatively impact enrollees’ experience or ability to change enrollments during Open Season.

On top of that, GAO recently reported that the staffing shortages at OPM are hindering the agency’s ability to address risks of fraud in the FEHB program.

When asked how OPM has responded to the watchdog’s concerns, “We do believe our staff can work effectively through everything,” Stevens said, adding, “In the short run, we’ve improved our systems and our processes to where we’re not concerned about delays or challenges.”

Stevens added that he plans to roll out more artificial intelligence tools for participants to use in the enrollment process for future years of Open Season.

Emulating the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda

In addition to addressing fraud and saving costs, Stevens also described his goal of shifting the government’s insurance programs toward what he described as a “well care model,” as opposed to what he describes currently as a “sick care model.”

“We want to move more toward a holistic approach and something to where we’re not doing a pharmaceutical-first type of intervention, or where we have faith-based behavioral health care to where they can give true solutions,” he said.

“If we get healthier and we start making better health decisions, then we’re going to be able to reduce the costs, the premiums,” Stevens added.

It’s not yet entirely clear what OPM may change in the FEHB or PSHB programs based on the big-picture priorities Stevens outlined during the interview.

But for 2026, OPM already made one distinct change: Carriers were required to end coverage of all gender-affirming care, in line with an executive order from President Donald Trump earlier this year.

Enrollees who are mid-treatment for gender-affirming care can still continue receiving coverage, according to OPM’s new requirements, but the definition of “mid-treatment” is determined individually by each health carrier. Federal health plan experts have recommended that those impacted by OPM’s change check their carrier’s plan brochure for more details.

Going forward though, Stevens also expressed interest in reconsidering coverage of GLP-1 medications, a class of drugs that are prescribed to treat diabetes and obesity.

“We want to look at utilizing these as a tool for weight loss or for treatment of diabetes,” Stevens said. “However, we don’t want it to be viewed as the end-all be-all of, ‘this is going to save me.’”

Currently, OPM requires all carriers to cover at least one type of GLP-1 for enrollees, prescribed for weight loss. It’s a requirement that health care experts have said is a positive development and ahead of the curve compared with the private sector.

But Stevens said he wants to encourage physical exercise and nutrition over GLP-1s, through the government’s insurance programs. That type of change, he said, may also lead to some cost savings.

“I want to try and move away from that, move more to incentivizing providers to have good health outcomes for their patients versus prescribed medications,” he said.

Stevens’ approach for what he sees for the future of FEHB and PSHB mirrors goals of the Trump administration’s larger push toward the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

Stevens, for instance, discussed what he views as a “broken” health care system that focuses on prescriptions first — emulating a sentiment that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed and that has influenced some of the Trump administration’s major health initiatives.

RFK’s MAHA report from May outlined contentious views on vaccines, the nation’s food supply, pesticides and prescription drugs. The HHS report, parts of which have received strong criticism, additionally includes increased scrutiny of childhood vaccines and “fear-based” views on farming chemicals, while also blaming ultra-processed foods for unhealthy Americans.

“We truly have a secretary of health that’s fighting for the real overall well-being of health. We have a president that truly cares about it, and then we have a lot of appointees that are trying to make a big difference,” Stevens said. “It’s a massive shift in the paradigm of how we look at health care — really looking at outcomes versus prescriptions and a lot of the things that have made us an unhealthy population.”

Encouraging Open Season action

In the immediate term, Stevens encouraged participants in FEHB and PSHB over the next several weeks to take advantage of Open Season. Participants have until the enrollment window closes on Dec. 10 to spend time looking at plan brochures and comparing various insurance options that are available to them.

The push to take action during Open Season comes as relatively few insurance enrollees end up selecting a different plan each year.

“Change is tough, change is scary, and a lot of times I think people would just rather stick with their current plan and do the same, regardless of how much it could cost them more,” Stevens said. “It will surprise a lot of people in seeing that if they were to shift over to a different type of plan that they could save a substantial amount of money.”

For measuring this year’s Open Season success, Stevens said he will be looking for any potential shifts in the statistic that just 5% of enrollees change their plans each year.

“We encourage everybody to take the time — I’m talking maybe an hour of your time — to jump in and look at the different tools that we’ve created and make sure that you’re picking the plan that’s best for you,” he said. “We’ll take all of that in and see what we can do to improve our systems and processes to make it even better next year.”

Discover more articles and videos now on our 2026 Open Season Exchange event page.

The post 2026 Open Season Exchange: OPM’s Shane Stevens on big-picture plans for FEHB, PSHB first appeared on Federal News Network.

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It’s commonly cited that just about 5% of participants in the Federal Employees Health Benefits program change their plan during Open Season each year — so it may not be surprising to learn that many FEHB participants who take advantage of Open Season also tend to wait until the last minute to do so.

But during Federal News Network’s 2026 Open Season Exchange, Holly Schumann, principal deputy associate director for health care and insurance at the Office of Personnel Management, urged participants to get started on their research sooner rather than later.

“We do typically see a big surge of traffic on the last few days of Open Season, but I really encourage folks to take action earlier,” Schumann said. “Take the time to study all of the information. And that’s much easier to do if you’re not waiting until the last minute and feeling pressure to make a decision.”

Tips on how to research federal health insurance options

Schumann also gave some advice for where participants can get started on their studying. She recommended going first to OPM’s website. There, participants can find a plan comparison tool, as well as deeply detailed plan information across all health insurance carriers.

The plan brochures from FEHB carriers — as well as those in the Postal Service Health Benefits program — cover benefits changes for 2026, details on Medicare for each plan option, what the premium rates will look like beginning in January and much more.

“We don’t want anybody to be caught surprised by a change in their plan that they weren’t aware of,” Schumann said. “If you have a specific health care need, I really encourage you to take the time find the link on our website, download the brochure and take a few minutes to leaf through it.”

Beyond FEHB and PSHB information, enrollees can also see more details on OPM’s website about the Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance Program, as well as FSAFEDS — the government’s program for flexible spending accounts. FSAFEDS allows current federal employees each year to set aside pre-tax dollars to go toward eligible out-of-pocket medical expenses.

Schumann strongly encouraged participants to consider enrolling in an FSA, to help save on out-of-pocket costs.

“It allows you to save essentially 20% or 30% on what you would pay for those things, when you consider the tax savings,” Schumann explained. “There is a ‘use or lose’ rule with a flexible spending account generally, but there are mechanisms where, on the health care side for example, you can roll over any excess funds up to a certain limit — assuming you enroll in a flexible spending account the next year.”

While benefits inevitably change year-to-year in FEHB and PSHB, there are also a handful of coverage updates coming from carriers in FEDVIP as well, Schumann said. That makes it all the more prudent for participants to take a look at what’s out there this Open Season.

“Among dental plans, there are some who are offering additional enhanced benefits for additional cleanings during pregnancy, for example,” she said. “On the vision side, there are some plans that are offering additional benefits for folks with diabetes, since we know that they require some enhanced vision services. Folks who might be interested in those benefits should take the time to look at OPM’s website and find out more information about those.”

OPM’s year-round work on health insurance

Although Open Season is the most public-facing time of year for OPM’s health insurance office, the work for the agency truly takes place year-round when it comes to the government’s various insurance programs.

Throughout the year, OPM issues call letters to collaborate with carriers on any changes to benefits or coverage for the following plan year, as well as to discuss priorities on premium rates and costs within the insurance programs.

The premiums are, in part, driven by costs of care from prior years, while also incorporating predictions of what health care costs will look like in the year ahead, Schumann explained. Based on the estimations, OPM’s actuarial team then negotiates the rates with carriers to reach the final values.

“Really what we’re seeking to do is to find the right balance of comprehensive medical coverage with affordability — we’re always trying to strike that balance,” she said.

In the weeks leading up to Open Season’s start date, OPM works to update all information on its website — including the plan comparison tool, as well as all carriers’ health plan brochures for the following plan year.

“We can add information, if needed, to make sure that people get what they need to make informed decisions,” Schumann said. “We also monitor the web traffic to our site to see where people are coming from and what information sources they are most interested in, so that we can adapt during Open Season.”

Then once Open Season ends, OPM works closely with FEHB and PSHB carriers to make sure any participants who changed plans during the open enrollment period are able to get their new insurance cards and all the information they need, ahead of the actual start of the new plan year in January.

Medicare Part D — and the final word

During Open Season, Schumann also stressed the importance of considering some key differences within Medicare Part D and how that will operate for participants depending on whether they are in the FEHB or the PSHB program.

“Many FEHB plans, though not all, provide a Part D prescription drug plan that works in conjunction with their plan. And if you’re eligible and Medicare-enrolled, you’ll be opted into that plan,” Schumann said. “But you can opt out, and you will still have coverage under the underlying FEHB plan, if you choose not to enroll in Part D.”

But for Medicare-eligible PSHB participants, there is an important caveat: PSHB enrollees can only access prescription drug coverage through the program if they have Medicare Part D.

All Medicare-eligible participants will be automatically enrolled, but there is no underlying prescription drug coverage for PSHB participants if they choose to opt out of Part D.

“Every PSHB plan offers a Part D plan that works in conjunction with the PSHB plan,” Schumann said. “Enrollees still have the option to go out on the retail market, if they prefer to choose a different plan than the one offered by their carrier, and purchase a Part D plan. But they just need to know that they have to have Part D if they want to have any sort of prescription drug coverage at all” through PSHB.

Ultimately, Schumann doubled down on her recommendation for studying up and getting an early start on Open Season to ensure participants find the best plan option for them.

“I know it can be daunting to make your way through all of this information about all of the benefit choices available to you, but it’s really time well spent to make sure that you get the coverage that’s right for you and for your family,” she said. “We welcome the opportunity to serve you, and we always welcome feedback on how we can make things better in the future. So take the time, make those decisions carefully, and we’ll look forward to a successful Open Season.”

Discover more articles and videos now on our 2026 Open Season Exchange event page.

The post 2026 Open Season Exchange: OPM’s Holly Schumann on getting a head start this Open Season first appeared on Federal News Network.

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