August 17, 2026

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It’s Monday! It’s back-to-school season, and it’s not just the kids who need new supplies. You deserve a high-end notebook…and maybe a cable tester, multi-bit screwdriver, more power banks, and a headlamp. See what you can sneak into your company’s cart!

In today’s edition:

🔒 Pay what?

📄 Well documented

🤖 State of play

—Billy Hurley, Eoin Higgins

CYBERSECURITY

That’ll cost ya

Credit: Patrick Fussell

As if having your data compromised, exfiltrated, and ransomed wasn’t bad enough, the price of handling a breach is rising, too.

IBM’s annual Cost of a Data Breach report saw an increase of 12% year over year in incident expense, due to what a company researcher described as a bigger “blast radius” per breach, higher remediation pricetags, and AI-based automation that makes attacks cheap for cybercriminals and pricy for defenders.

Here are two standout stats from a report, which studied just over 600 companies that suffered a data compromise between March 2025 and February 2026:

The global average breach reached a record $4.99 million. Main factors, according to the report, included “detection” and “lost business.”
More than one in four organizations experienced an AI-generated malicious attack—a 56% increase year over year.

Patrick Fussell, global head of adversary simulation at threat-intel and research team IBM X-Force, divided the AI-powered tactics into those that can be seen—deepfakes, AI-crafted malware—and the hidden ones, like AI “sitting sidesaddle with an attacker,” a kind of cybercrime assistant.

This is the “new reality,” Fussell told us.—BH

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IT STRATEGY

Frequent flyer

Morning Brew Inc., Photo: John Bates

John Bates is from England, but his career has taken an international path.

The tech executive is currently CEO at Doxis, a German-based AI document visibility company that he said operates in the “document intelligence space, which is really document management or enterprise content management 2.0 for the AI era.”

His decades-long career includes stints at companies across the US and Europe. He told IT Brew that things just worked out that way, in part because of the communication skills on the continent—Bates doesn’t speak German, but that isn’t an impediment when staff is generally multilingual.

“Initially you might think, ‘Well, this is not the right person to do this,’” Bates said. “But one should never rule out, in Europe, the tremendous language skills that people have.”

His love for tech began with a Commodore PET computer.—EH

WORD OF THE WEEK

Attack surface: Also referred to as the “threat surface,” attack surface refers to the different ways and points by which attackers can access systems. Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

Locked AI

AI is everywhere—and despite warnings around capacity and a potential bubble, the industry appears to be continuing to grow.

But how do actual IT pros feel about AI? At this year’s Ai4 conference, we asked around, on the floor and one on one. What we heard was optimism marked by caution from industry vets.

Kevin Tran, a demo engineer for Notion, told IT Brew that people at the conference, much like Notion customers, are thinking about how to automate more efficiently and deploy AI agents. For someone looking to make it all make sense, he added, it’s a matter of consolidation and locking in solutions in one place, along with better governance.

“We’re trying to glue it all together for AI to work,” Tran said. “The trend I’m seeing and trying to solve with customers is the main issue of our fragmented brain by having everything in one system rather than trying to have AI be this Band-Aid solution to poor governance.”

Word on the street.—EH

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: Under 60 seconds. That’s how long UC San Diego researchers say it would take for someone to install a device that hacks a Boeing 737’s flight computers. (UCSD, Wired)

Quote: “The firewall never went down. It just stopped mattering.”—Barak Sternberg, co-founder and CEO of Tenet Security, on a discovered “GhostJacking” tactic that corrupts agents via firewall logs (Dark Reading)

Read: Want to keep your pages from being scraped by pesky AI crawlers? There’s a font for that. (Ars Technica)

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Written by Billy Hurley and Eoin Higgins

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