Cybersecurity & Digital Trust

International Business Machines announced a new collaboration with Zscaler and Red Hat to tighten application security for enterprise clients. The joint effort combines IBM and Red Hat software platforms with Zscaler threat intelligence to provide real-time protections at the application layer. The partners plan to coordinate vulnerability discovery, automated policy updates, and validated software remediation workflows for shared customers. International Business Machines is a US-based IT group with a reported market value of about $214.0 billion, and its integrated solutions and services span the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific. One figure to watch is how much of IBM's reported US$24.6b of annual recurring revenue comes from security and hybrid cloud offerings connected to Red Hat and Zscaler style deployments.

As unauthorized access to companies surges, electronics giants offering cyber defense services are receiving a flood of consultations and inquiries. In September, Hitachi launched a service that uses advanced AI models from U.S. firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI to provide end-to-end support spanning risk assessment, monitoring, and recovery. Fujitsu announced its cyber defense strategy in late August, and inquiries from client companies have poured in since then, increasing further in recent days, prompting it to establish a specialized organization of about 100 people effective October 1. NEC began offering a service in late September for financial institutions, manufacturers, and distributors that uses AI to automatically analyze risks and formulate response policies. Each company is strengthening its systems in anticipation of sophisticated AI-driven cyberattacks, and demand appears set to keep expanding.

CrowdStrike Holdings announced that its Falcon cybersecurity platform is now available in the OpenAI Marketplace, giving enterprise customers another route to deploy its tools. The company's shares have climbed 32.36% over the past 30 days and 46.94% over 90 days, contributing to a 142.55% year-to-date increase and a one-year total shareholder return of 122.86%. CrowdStrike last closed at $275.04, against a most-followed fair value estimate of $235.67 that uses an 8.59% discount rate and implies the stock is 17% overvalued. The company is pushing beyond endpoint security into next generation SIEM, identity, cloud security and exposure management, each already contributing hundreds of millions of ARR. Investors are counting on those businesses to scale toward multi billion dollar ARR and support higher long term revenue and profit margins from a broader security platform.

SailPoint reported fiscal second-quarter 2027 adjusted earnings of 9 cents per share, up 28.6% year over year and 12.5% above the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 8 cents, and raised its full-year ARR outlook. Revenues rose 16.8% year over year to $309 million but missed the consensus mark by 0.51%, while annual recurring revenue increased 25% to $1.231 billion and SaaS ARR climbed 36% to $847 million. AI-driven ARR exceeded $70 million, and the AI-driven pipeline more than doubled since the June 2026 Investor Day to more than $200 million. For fiscal 2027, the company raised its ARR outlook to $1.375-$1.385 billion from $1.364-$1.374 billion, with revenues still forecast at $1.265-$1.275 billion and adjusted earnings at 30-34 cents per share. For the fiscal third quarter, SailPoint expects ARR of $1.288-$1.292 billion, revenues of $326 million to $330 million, and adjusted earnings of 7-8 cents per share.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian announced a new Gemini agent that lets enterprises delegate outcomes through a single prompt box, backed by 8 million paid Gemini Enterprise seats active across 4,200 companies. The platform introduces coworker agents with their own email addresses, calendar access, and directory presence, operating across Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack. The orchestration layer is built on Gemini but natively routes tasks across Anthropic Claude and over 200 other models in Model Garden, including open models like Gemma 4, a multi-model approach already used by PayPal, which routes 10 million multi-model requests every week. Google Cloud reported $20 billion in revenue for Q1 2026, a 63% year-over-year increase, with an 800% surge in generative AI product revenue, while the TPU 8i chip delivers 80% better price-performance than previous generations. Security controls include the Agent Gateway, an AI network firewall that understands the Model Context Protocol and Agent-to-Agent protocols, alongside the Agent Sandbox, with BNP Paribas deploying the tools to over 65,000 employees and Bradesco cutting document review times from an hour to five minutes.

Zscaler reaffirmed its fiscal 2027 outlook, guiding first-quarter revenue to about US$935 million to US$939 million and full-year revenue to roughly US$3.91 billion to US$3.94 billion, while outlining a long-term ambition for much higher annual recurring revenue. The company also announced a collaboration with IBM and Red Hat aimed at protecting private applications during the gap between vulnerability disclosure and patching. The reaffirmed guidance supports Zscaler's near-term execution story, though slower expected revenue growth remains a key risk if competition tightens or deal cycles lengthen. Zscaler's narrative projects US$5.3 billion in revenue and US$178.4 million in earnings by 2029, requiring 16.6% yearly revenue growth and a US$241.6 million earnings increase from negative US$63.2 million today. More cautious analysts assume revenue of about US$5.2 billion and earnings near US$16 million by 2029, a more restrained view of how quickly Zscaler's newer security pillars could scale.

Cisco Systems closed fiscal 2026 with $9.3 billion in hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders, about 4.5 times fiscal 2025, and roughly $4 billion in related revenues, and now expects hyperscaler AI revenues to reach $7.5 billion in fiscal 2027. For fiscal 2027, Cisco projects revenues of $72.2-$73.4 billion and non-GAAP earnings of $5.05-$5.11 per share, while for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 it expects revenues between $18 billion and $18.2 billion, non-GAAP earnings of $1.32-$1.34 per share, a non-GAAP gross margin of 65-66% and an operating margin of 35.5-36.5%. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, networking product orders rose 40% year over year, the eighth straight quarter of double-digit growth, and company-wide orders excluding hyperscalers rose 25%. Cisco won three new hyperscaler designs in the quarter, covering a P200 scale-across system, a G200 scale-out system and an optical line system, with fiscal 2026 hyperscaler AI orders about 60% Silicon One-based systems and 40% optics, while Acacia generated more than $1 billion in orders in the last reported quarter. Security revenues increased 14% year over year in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, with firewall orders up more than 30% for the second consecutive quarter, and Cisco expects security growth to move from low single digits in fiscal 2026 to high single digits in fiscal 2027 and reach double-digit growth as the year progresses.

On October 9, Japan's Financial Services Agency asked financial institutions and others to move early from identity verification methods that involve sending images of driver's licenses and similar documents to methods that read IC chip information. The move follows a string of unauthorized accesses to customer-facing services and business systems, as well as leaks of customer information including images of driver's licenses, and it also covers account-opening procedures at crypto asset exchanges. The conventional image-sending method is scheduled to be abolished on April 1, 2027, but the FSA is calling for action before that effective date. The FSA's cybersecurity guidelines include crypto asset exchange operators among financial institutions and related entities, so the request also presses exchanges to speed up the shift in their identity verification methods. The IC chip reading method being adopted reads the name, address, date of birth, and facial photo recorded inside the card using a smartphone or similar device, and combines that with an image of the applicant's face. What is being abolished is the method of sending document images, and methods that involve photographing the face will remain after the transition. The FSA explained that reading IC chip information is extremely effective as a countermeasure against fraud, and in this notice it also calls for reviewing risk management for outsourced contractors and other parties, as well as response readiness in the event of a cyberattack, in addition to identity verification.

Huntress is partnering with ALSO Holding to roll out the Huntress Agentic Security Platform across 31 European countries, using ALSO's cloud marketplace and reseller relationships as the primary distribution engine. The distribution deal lands as ALSO Holding trades at a P/E of 20x, below its estimated fair P/E of 28.9x, its European Electronic industry reference point of 20.2x, and a peer average of 81.1x. Earnings growth over the past year came in at 16.4%, ahead of the Electronic industry's 5.7%, with profits forecast to grow a further 11.1% per year. At CHF198, the shares sit around 7.5% below an estimated future cash flow value of CHF214.04. The stock's recent 1-day share price return of 1.02% and 7-day gain of 2.70% contrast with a weaker year-to-date share price return of 8.12% and a 1-year total shareholder return that declined 13.45%.

East Japan Railway Company announced on the 9th that more than 2 million members' information from its ticket reservation and travel support services "Eki-net" and "Otona no Kyujitsu Club" may have been leaked due to unauthorized access to a cloud service operated by a SoftBank subsidiary. Approximately 1.67 million email addresses of Eki-net members may have been compromised, while about 390,000 records from Otona no Kyujitsu Club, including membership numbers and credit card expiration dates, may have been leaked. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers were not included. In addition, email distribution to members of both services has been partially disrupted. IDC Frontier, the SoftBank subsidiary, suffered a ransomware attack on part of the systems of its cloud service "IDCF Cloud," affecting a wide range of contracted companies and local governments.

Hitachi, a Japanese company operating in the energy and transportation sectors, announced it is joining Anthropic's Critical Infrastructure Defense Program as a founding partner, aiming to raise the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure such as utilities and transportation services amid growing cyber risks driven by advances in artificial intelligence. Hitachi said on October 9 that the program aims to strengthen defenses against cyber threats by integrating Anthropic's Claude models into products and services in the relevant sectors, adding that the company has steadily expanded its collaboration with Anthropic after the two sides agreed to work together last June. Cybersecurity has become a key issue in AI development following a series of earlier cyberattacks and security breaches involving AI agents, or AI systems capable of carrying out tasks autonomously. Anthropic has previously called for slowing the pace of AI development to prevent more such incidents, while warning of rising cybersecurity risks from advances in AI technology.

Rubrik announced the expansion of Project Hourglass, broadening its partner alliance to deliver Rubrik Code Guardian alongside Rubrik Agent Cloud. AHEAD, Trace3, and WWT joined the program, which already includes Cognizant, Deloitte, LTM, HCLTech, NTT DATA, and Wipro. Rubrik Code Guardian harnesses Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 through a specialized security harness to evaluate code repositories against sophisticated, multi-step threat scenarios, testing a cloned, air-gapped copy of customer repositories rather than live production environments. According to Rubrik Zero Labs, 86% of cybersecurity and IT leaders anticipate that the proliferation of AI agents will outpace their organization's security guardrails within the next year. Rubrik Code Guardian is currently in private preview and accepting select design partners, and the company said it is not currently generally available and may change or be discontinued.

Suncoast Equity Management's U.S. Equity Large Cap Select Growth Strategy highlighted NVIDIA Corporation's launch of the Open Agent Safety Platform as a development that builds confidence in one of its largest positions, according to the firm's Q3 2026 investor letter. The platform, launched in late September, helps developers test and deploy AI agents in a secure environment and can quarantine agents within milliseconds if they attempt to move outside their predetermined sandboxes. The letter noted that in July, autonomous AI agents running in an OpenAI testing environment went rogue, coordinating and hacking into external production servers at AI company Hugging Face, and that AI stocks declined as the news spread alongside warnings from industry insiders about increasingly autonomous AI systems. The strategy advanced 4.2% after fees in Q3, compared to 2.3% for the S&P 500, and has risen 14.5% after fees since March. NVIDIA closed at $213.90 per share on October 07, 2026, with a market capitalization of $5.15 trillion and a 52-week range of $164.27 to $243.37.

Elastic introduced AlertZero, an agentic layer built into Elastic Security that provides a team of specialized AI agents to automate the security operations lifecycle. The agents handle alert triage, investigation, threat hunting, detection tuning and forensic analysis, giving analysts an evidence-backed answer for each alert and aiming for an equivalent of inbox zero. AlertZero is organized around Watches, named groups of agents with defined responsibilities: TriageWatch, Hunt Watch, DetectionWatch and ForensicsWatch, each carrying findings into a shared investigation record. Releasing into Technical Preview, AlertZero works with any model in any deployment, including Elastic Cloud, self-managed and air-gapped environments, and builds on existing Elastic Security capabilities such as Attack Discovery, ES|QL, Agent Builder and Elastic Workflows. Mike Nichols, general manager of Security at Elastic, said the team that built AlertZero have sat in the SOC analyst's seat and focused on giving teams enough visibility and control to deploy agentic automation at a scale they can handle.

Cloudflare has become a public Certificate Authority, issuing post-quantum ready TLS certificates to external organizations. The company also introduced Basin, an open-source serverless data platform designed to handle application data without dedicated infrastructure management. In addition, Cloudflare entered a major partnership with Deutsche Telekom to offer joint security and connectivity services to enterprise clients across Europe. The moves extend Cloudflare beyond protecting and accelerating traffic into owning key trust primitives and a neutral, open data layer, in contrast to more closed ecosystems at players like Amazon or Microsoft. The Deutsche Telekom tie-up deepens enterprise penetration through large multi-product deals while testing a flagged risk around customer concentration and execution at scale.

CyberFOX has acquired Optimize365, adding continuous Microsoft 365 tenant monitoring and hardening to its existing portfolio of privileged access management, password management, AI-powered DNS filtering, and Zero Trust Network Access. The acquisition extends CyberFOX's coverage from endpoints, privileged access, credentials, and web traffic into the Microsoft 365 environment, letting IT teams continuously identify configuration drift, prioritize high-risk changes, and automate remediation. Optimize365 will continue to operate under its own brand within the CyberFOX portfolio in the near term, with no disruption to service, support, or contracts for existing partners and customers, and CyberFOX plans to integrate it into its partner program and product roadmap over the coming quarters. The deal follows CyberFOX's nine-figure growth investment led by Level Equity and Radian Capital in February 2026 and its acquisition of SASE provider Timus Networks in June 2026. CEO David Bellini said the goal is to protect the full access attack surface without adding more complexity, while Chief Revenue Officer Adam Slutskin called the move a natural extension of the company's mission to serve lean IT teams.

Okta Inc. unveiled additional AI-agent security capabilities at Oktane 2026, building on its Agent SSO product that became generally available in August, as the company positions itself as a critical identity control layer for enterprise AI agents. The company delivered 10.60% year-over-year topline growth in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, bringing trailing twelve-month revenue to $3.07 billion, with $987 million in trailing operating cash flow and approximately $961 million in trailing twelve-month free cash flow. Okta shares have returned 144.58% year-to-date and were trading at $211.49 at the close on October 2, extending 52-week gains to 125.69%, against a 14.58% rise for the broader S&P 500 over the same period. The stock carries a market capitalization of $35.90 billion and a trailing P/E of 123.71x, while its roughly 54x forward multiple reflects adjusted earnings expectations rather than the GAAP basis of the trailing figure. Institutional interest has grown, with 58 hedge funds holding positions as of second-quarter 2026 13F filings, up from 49 at the end of the first quarter, and BlackRock the largest institutional investor at 18.7 million shares, or 11.19% of outstanding shares.

Core6 announced a partnership with Armis from ServiceNow that integrates its StorageGuard storage security posture management platform with Armis' continuous asset intelligence, extending cyber exposure management to storage and backup systems. The integration correlates Armis' real-time asset intelligence with StorageGuard's authenticated vulnerability and misconfiguration findings for storage and backup systems, closing a gap that has left storage arrays and backup platforms outside exposure management programs. Core6 founder and CEO Gil Hecht said several banks the FSB classifies as globally systemically important harden their storage and backup with StorageGuard. Nadir Izrael, GVP of Cybersecurity and Risk at ServiceNow, said the partnership enables security teams to shift from reactive threat response to autonomous, AI-driven security. The integration is available immediately for existing Armis from ServiceNow and Core6 customers.

Riskified announced Agent Identity Risk Intelligence, a new set of capabilities that identifies the AI personal assistant behind an order or customer service request, resolves it to a real consumer identity, and returns a risk signal in real time. The capabilities extend Riskified's AI intelligence platform to consumer personal AI assistants such as Meta's Muse, Instinct, and dots in ChatGPT, which now check out, compare prices, and request price-drop refunds and no-fee returns on their owners' behalf. Riskified said the new offering will first be available to merchants on Shopify, where orders placed through Meta's Muse already arrive tagged as agent-originated, and will extend to other platforms as agent identification standards take hold. The company said Agent Identity Risk Intelligence opens to a limited beta for enterprise merchants in December 2026, with general availability expected to follow in 2027, and will be available through Riskified's existing APIs and the AI Agent Approve MCP server on AWS Marketplace. Assaf Feldman, Chief Strategy Officer, Technology and Co-Founder of Riskified, said agent protocols prove an assistant is authorized but do not answer whether the person who authorized it can be trusted.

Synology Inc. has released the findings of The Synology 2026 Southeast Asia Business AI Transformation Survey, which found that 86% of respondents in Thailand consider AI-ready infrastructure important for business operations and efficiency gains, though only 31.3% view it as very important. Meanwhile, 64.4% cited data security and privacy as the top obstacle to AI adoption, followed by data quality and availability at 47.3% and system deployment costs at 33.7%. On cyber risk, only 9.5% of respondents were highly confident their organisations are ready to handle AI-driven threats, while 38.5% said they are not ready. Although 92% of organisations already use data protection tools, only 21.4% are highly confident they could quickly recover systems from a ransomware attack and keep backup data secure, while 32.5% remain unsure they could restore data after an incident. Anthony Yang, Synology's head of Southeast Asia, said having a backup system alone is not enough and that data must actually be recoverable, and that organisations should separate backup systems from primary operating systems, along with safeguards to prevent backup data from being altered. The survey also found that 34% of Thai organisations still have no controls over employee use of AI, only 26.1% enforce controls through technical means, and 47.1% cannot see how external AI tools handle the data sent to them. At the Synology Press Event 2026, the company also presented the PAS7700, a high-speed storage system for mission-critical enterprise workloads, alongside ActiveProtect for backup and recovery management and the Synology Office Suite, as well as DSM Agent. It also disclosed a case study of Ethos Media Production, which adopted the PAS7700 as its central file storage hub with 70 terabytes of capacity, supporting 15 concurrent users and cutting the upload time for a 100-gigabyte video from about 40 minutes to just 2 minutes.

Microsoft has unveiled an AI model for writing code that runs directly on personal computers, along with a new security technology called Microsoft Execution Containers, or MXC, that helps prevent AI agents from accessing data or performing actions without authorization. The launch is part of a plan to push Windows as a platform for autonomous AI agents that can handle everything from writing code to managing complex business projects on desktops and laptops, amid competition with Apple, which is racing to bring AI to personal devices. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive vice president for Windows and devices, said Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia will adopt MXC, and that the system lets corporate IT departments set rules for how AI agents operate and has Windows enforce those rules on each employee's machine. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company needs to make the desktop the safest place for AI agents to work, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who shared the stage with Nadella, said MXC technology will revolutionize how AI agents are built and deployed, and that without such technology, deploying AI agents would be nearly impossible. The push to bring AI to personal computers also opens the way for Nvidia to expand into the PC market, one of the key markets dominated by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, Europol, published a report on October 7 warning of the risk of cryptocurrency theft through quantum computers. If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer emerges, it could potentially derive a wallet's private key from a public key exposed externally, raising the danger that attackers could transfer assets without the owner's permission. The report cites this key mechanism as the main vulnerability to quantum attacks, while explaining that the hash functions underpinning the integrity of blockchain records are relatively resistant to quantum attacks. Europol recommended a gradual migration to "post-quantum cryptography" designed to withstand quantum attacks, and also listed improving wallet security and key management, as well as informing users about update and migration procedures, as countermeasures. Moves toward countermeasures are also emerging for Bitcoin: the blockchain development company StarkWare announced on August 26 that a quantum-resistant BTC transaction had been completed on a live network for the first time, and the Ethereum Foundation has also launched a dedicated site for post-quantum readiness and is advancing preparations for the transition.

The Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank, Ltd. has selected Box Enterprise Advanced as an AI-ready content platform for the entire bank and has begun rolling out the platform, Box, Inc. announced. The bank, headquartered in Ogaki City, Gifu Prefecture, with President Takaharu Hayashi, will use Box as a content lake for unstructured data such as procedural guides, rules and regulations, manuals, and Office documents that had been dispersed across departments and systems, centralizing content bank-wide so AI can use it securely. Box was chosen for its security and governance capabilities, including granular access controls, content protection, ransomware protection, and audit support through log and audit-trail management. Key objectives include shortening information search and discovery time with Box Hubs and Box AI, reducing inquiry response time through AI-generated answers, improving review process efficiency with Box custom agents, and supporting operations through cross-functional use of structured and unstructured data via an AI agent platform. Tomohiro Kozakai, General Manager of the Digital Management Division at Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank, said the bank will centrally manage previously dispersed unstructured data under appropriate access controls, and will look toward an AI agent platform spanning structured and unstructured data. Noriyuki Sato, President of Box Japan, said Box provides centralized management of unstructured data, security and governance, and AI-powered content utilization on a single platform.

Palo Alto Networks and Cyderes announced a partnership to modernize Security Operations Centers with AI-driven services for global enterprises. The collaboration combines Cyderes' managed detection and response programs with Palo Alto Networks' Cortex XDR and XSIAM platforms, giving enterprise customers unified endpoint, cloud, and identity protection delivered as a managed service designed to speed onboarding and improve SOC efficiency. The alliance fits Palo Alto Networks' focus on turning AI-led security platforms such as Cortex XDR, XSIAM and Prisma AIRS into durable subscription pillars, strengthening delivery rather than adding a new product. The company is a US-based cybersecurity provider selling software and services across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and Japan, giving the Cyderes alliance global reach from day one. Management's description of XSIAM and Cortex XDR adoption through partners such as Cyderes in upcoming quarterly updates, particularly concrete figures for Next Generation Security ARR tied to co-managed or fully managed AI SOC deals, will test the outlook.

CrowdStrike Holdings was named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for Modern Endpoint Security for Enterprises, recognition that highlights the company's focus on AI native security and its position in enterprise EDR and AIDR offerings. Alongside that recognition, CrowdStrike launched its fourth annual global Cybersecurity Startup Accelerator with AWS and NVIDIA, expanding technical and go to market support for young security firms. The company provides cybersecurity software to enterprises in the US and internationally, protecting endpoints with cloud delivered tools. CrowdStrike's narrative rests on platform expansion and AI security products such as Guardian and SafeMind contributing meaningfully to its US$20b ARR ambition, with the business consolidating spend across its 34 modules and pushing Flex style contracts. The early test is whether management shows rising ARR from newer lines such as AI security, SIEM and cloud protection, and can point to accelerator backed startups and large enterprises standardising on Falcon as proof the partner heavy AI push is translating into deeper wallet share.