ISLAMABAD: The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) has summoned former prime minister Imran Khan’s sister Noreen Niazi for an inquiry next week, accusing her of disseminating “false, offensive and inflammatory” content against state institutions on social media. 

The notice was issued by the NCCIA on Saturday after a video clip of Noreen Niazi, Khan’s sister, was widely shared on social media in which she alleged that the May 2025 military confrontation between India and Pakistan was a “drama,” adding that Indian Prime Minister Modi could have “fixed” Pakistan’s armed forces within minutes but stopped short of doing so. 

She claimed the war was staged to improve Pakistani armed forces’ image, adding that the objective behind the military confrontation was to secure Pakistan’s recognition of Israel, and that that Israel was involved in the developments. She said Washington is also pushing to get Pakistan to recognize Israel, pointing out that this was why US President Donald Trump frequently praises Pakistan’s leadership. 

“You have been found to have disseminated false, offensive and inflammatory social media content to defame state institutions and spread fake narratives,” the NCCIA’s notice to Niazi said. 

The agency directed Niazi to appear before its office in Islamabad’s G-13/3 office on Monday in relation to the inquiry.

“In case of non-compliance, it will be assumed that you have nothing to present or state in your defense,” the notice said, adding that non-compliance was punishable under Section 174 of the Pakistan Penal Code. 

The development takes place as tensions between Khan and the Pakistani military persist since 2022, when the former was ousted from the prime minister’s office via a parliamentary vote. 

Khan claimed the Pakistani military had colluded with his political rivals to remove him from power at Washington’s behest, a charge the military has rejected. The former prime minister has been incarcerated at Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail since August 2023 in connection with a series of cases that he and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party say are politically motivated.

Since his imprisonment, Khan has faced multiple convictions and ongoing legal proceedings that authorities say follow due process, while his party describes them as efforts to sideline him from politics.
 

Key Takeaways:

• The 2024 CrowdStrike outage (July 19, 2024) that crashed ~8.5 million Windows machines worldwide demonstrates real-world catastrophic risk: a single defective update from one trusted vendor caused global disruption without any attacker or malicious AI.
• Popular AI doomsday scenarios (worldwide shutdown, grid takeover, rogue nuclear launch) are overstated; they confuse computational capability with real-world authority and permissions, which are gated by human decisions, credentials, and physical systems.
• The real danger lies in eroding human oversight: we are automating critical systems while reducing manual fallback competence. Defense requires human-approval gates, clear inventories of automation permissions, and maintained manual procedures — the unglamorous discipline of limiting what machines are allowed to touch.

This Sunday marks two years since the morning the modern world stuttered. At nine minutes past four Coordinated Universal Time on July 19, 2024, a routine software update from a single security company began crashing Windows machines, roughly 8.5 million of them. Flights were grounded, emergency rooms went to paper, broadcasters went dark, and the federal government issued alerts as the disruption spread. There was no attacker and no malevolent intelligence. There was a defective file, pushed automatically to millions of computers configured to trust whatever that one company sent them.

That morning explains more about catastrophic risk in the age of AI than any disaster movie. The anniversary is a good moment to say so. Our public imagination is stuck on three scenarios that are vivid, terrifying, and mechanically wrong: an artificial intelligence that switches off every device on earth, one that escapes into the power grid, and one that seizes the nuclear arsenal and launches on its own.

All three rest on the same confusion. They mistake what a system can compute for what it is permitted to touch. An AI model can generate plans, code, and persuasion, but turning any of that into action in the physical world requires a chain of intermediaries: interfaces, credentials, integrations, and standing permissions that people decided to grant. The scarce resource that converts capability into consequence is not intelligence but authority.

Hold that key and the myths deflate one by one. There is no universal off-switch to press, because the world’s devices do not share one. The power grid moves energy, not instructions; electricity cannot carry a stowaway. And the nuclear scenario collides with the documented architecture of nuclear command: the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review commits to a human in the loop for all actions critical to informing and executing the President’s nuclear employment decisions, and launch runs through procedures, people, and physical authentication that no model can talk its way past.

The nuclear domain does hold a real lesson, just not the cinematic one. In September 1983, a Soviet early-warning system reported American missiles inbound. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, judged his own instruments more likely to be wrong than the United States to be attacking, and he was right. The danger was never a machine that decides to launch. The danger is humans who trust a confident machine that is wrong. What saved the world that night was a person still willing and able to doubt the screen.

The incident record since then confirms the pattern. When attackers cut power to roughly 225,000 Ukrainians in 2015, operators restored it within hours by switching to manual operations, driving to substations and throwing breakers by hand. When ransomware hit Colonial Pipeline in 2021, it reached the billing systems; the company itself shut the pipeline as a precaution. The CrowdStrike outage ended the same way, with humans at millions of keyboards rebooting machines and deleting one file. Real failures are bounded, they travel through doors we built, and every recovery has run through people who could still operate things manually.

Which points at the quiet danger the myths obscure: we are automating away exactly that layer. Each year there are fewer operators who can run the grid, the pipeline, the hospital, or the trading floor by hand, and manual competence is the thing that has saved us every single time.

So the defense against the AI catastrophe is duller than the movies and entirely available. Put human-approval gates on consequential automated actions. Inventory what your automation is actually permitted to touch, because that inventory, not the model’s IQ, is your real risk surface. And treat manual fallback as critical infrastructure: document it, staff it, and drill it, the way we once drilled fire escapes.

The machine is not going to wake up. But somewhere right now, someone is granting an automated system standing permission to act on infrastructure that people depend on, without a gate, without an inventory, and without a fallback. Two years after the morning the world stuttered, what deserves marking is not our fear of smarter machines but the unglamorous discipline of deciding what they may touch.

About Burak Oktenli

Burak Oktenli holds an MBA and a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University. His research addresses the governance of authority in autonomous and AI-enabled systems, and his writing has appeared at the Modern War Institute at West Point, RUSI, RealClearDefense, RealClearMarkets, and Geopolitical Monitor.

View all posts by Burak Oktenli →

ATLANTA — Fairlife, a dairy company owned by Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, was the target of a ransomware event on Thursday, the company announced.

According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, The Coca-Cola Company identified unauthorized access to some of fairlife’s systems, including production-related systems.

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Coca-Cola says product quality and safety have not been impacted, but they are temporarily suspending production of fairlife products in the U.S. Canadian production has not been affected.

The company is still investigation and assessing the impact of the ransomware incident. Coca-Cola has notified law enforcement.

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An academic at the Australian National University has accused it of a “hysterical” response to students using AI to cheat, as tertiary institutions rush to shore up the credibility of assessments.

But a colleague warned Australia is in danger of “shipping our national intellectual capability” to companies in California and China if educational rigour is not restored.

The Canberra institution is among the universities trying to counter the widespread use of AI amid concerns students are using the technology to cheat, or not adequately learning.

The 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index found 78.9% of secondary and tertiary students were using generative AI.

ANU has released a consultation paper to academic and teaching staff with three options, including classifying assessments as “secure” – completely free from the risk of AI cheating – or “insecure”. Another option would require students to declare in which stages of an assessment AI was used.

One ANU academic told Guardian Australia they supported the university’s moves, but said the process across the sector had so far been “panicked”.

“Everyone is adjusting in a panicked way, which is aggravated by a lack of resources to support teaching,” they said. “It makes the shift to secure assessment really complicated.”

Another ANU academic was critical of the university, and said it was not adequately consulting on the changes, warning they could unwind some of the progress in making assessments more inclusive for students with a disability or caring responsibilities.

“This is not an earnest consultation, this is a reactionary response, perhaps one would argue a hysterical response,” they said. “We are at a point of panic now. That panic has resulted in proposals that could see inclusion go backwards.”

The academic said their faculty had already issued draft guidelines ahead of the second semester, pushing for greater on-campus assessment.

“Teaching begins in less than two weeks … we’re being asked to do more at very short notice, with an utter lack of training.”

A spokesperson for ANU said the university had issued interim guidelines but no changes had been finalised for semester two. It said further consultation would commence in August which would include “students, staff, the ANU accessibility team and experts in inclusive design”.

“To support Semester 2, the working group has issued interim guidance informed by preliminary feedback from the academic colleges. The guidance does not prescribe particular assessment types or require a shift to in-person assessment,” the spokesperson said.

“Students who require reasonable adjustments to participate fully in learning and assessment will continue to receive them.”

ANU law professor Will Bateman who leads research projects on the regulation of AI, said combating the infiltration of AI use in universities across Australia was critical to stop intellectual capability being shifted overseas.

“If we don’t address the erosion of the norms and rigour in our education created by AI, we are just shipping our national intellectual capability to companies in California and China,” he said.

Bateman said securing assessments did not mean all assessments would be in person, but that technology should be better equipped to respond to AI use.

“Responding to AI doesn’t automatically mean sending students back to exam halls en masse, but we need serious investment in fully secure devices to ensure that students are actually learning the material we teach and to assure people outside the university that the degrees we issue are meaningful.”

The University of Queensland began implementing new policies to “secure” its assessments earlier this year, but drew criticism for scheduling in-person oral assessments during night hours and over the weekend.

The deputy vice-chancellor of education, Kris Ryan, told Guardian Australia his university had begun considering responses to AI use in 2023, but said it takes time for the work to be implemented, which was being done now.

“There has been a shift by some academics across the university to put on more traditional exams as part of their secure assessment strategy,” he said.

“We owe it to the community at large that we can say, hand on heart, that our graduates have the capabilities that we value.”

UQ classes assessments as secure or “open”. Ryan said secure assessments could include some AI use, but the university would require students to show “critical appraisal of how AI comes up with the answer”.

Ryan said he understood concerns that changes to exam structures could lead to some students being left behind, but he said the university was working with staff and students to accommodate those needs.

The University of Melbourne is also moving towards a process of “secure” assessments, with deputy vice-chancellor of education, Prof Gregor Kennedy, saying his institution was looking at more oral assessments as part of its AI response.

“The university is transforming its assessment approach to embed secure assessment types,” Kennedy said.

“This evolution involves more secure assessments, including interactive oral exams that can be tailored to different disciplines and student needs.”

Barney Glover, the new head of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission – an independent body tasked with overseeing key university reforms – said he was seeing more universities reintroduce oral exams to better test students, but warned universities would “need to be really responsible” in how they use or stop AI being used.

Despite the “challenges” posed by AI, Australia’s “world-class tertiary education system will adapt”, he said.

As enterprises rush to adopt AI agents, cybersecurity companies face a new challenge: making sure those agents have reliable information before allowing them to make security decisions.

Israeli startup Beacon Security is targeting that problem with a platform designed to give security teams and AI agents a unified view of an organization’s data, threats and vulnerabilities. The company announced a $13 million seed funding round led by Notable Capital, with participation from Holly Ventures, AlphaDrive Ventures, SVCI, Jefferies Family Office and more than 60 cybersecurity executives and founders.

Beacon said its annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew by more than 300% in the first half of 2026, as organizations in financial services, healthcare, technology and other regulated industries adopt AI-driven security workflows.

The company’s platform connects data from existing security tools, normalizes and enriches it, and provides the context needed for AI agents to perform tasks such as threat detection, investigations, security posture monitoring and analysis of unauthorized AI usage.

“Every CISO knows the real bottleneck isn’t detection; it’s trust in your own data. That problem doesn’t go away when you add agents; it gets less forgiving,” said Oren Yunger, Managing Partner at Notable Capital.

Founded in 2024 by Gal Tal-Hochberg, Or Mattatia and Iddo Israely, Beacon combines expertise from enterprise software, cybersecurity and intelligence backgrounds. Tal-Hochberg previously co-founded HiredScore, which was acquired by Workday for $520 million.

“The acceleration of AI agents in the enterprise is creating a distinct need for a context layer that cyber defenders can rely on,” said Tal-Hochberg, Beacon’s CEO and co-founder.

The funding will support the company’s expansion as organizations rethink security architectures for an era where AI is becoming both a tool for defenders and a new attack vector.

Under the e-Zero FIR mechanism, cyber financial fraud complaints involving a financial loss of more than Rs 1 lakh reported through the 1930 Helpline are automatically integrated with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS) for registration of an e-Zero FIR.

Integration of the 1930 Helpline with CCTNS eliminates duplicate data entry, enables faster case registration and seamless jurisdictional transfer, and supports timely investigation, fraud freezing, digital evidence preservation, and improved fund recovery during the critical Golden Hour, police said.

The e-Zero FIR is electronically transferred to the jurisdictional Cyber Crime Police Station for investigation and later converted into a regular FIR based on their jurisdiction.

TUCSON, Ariz. – In what could be the longest fugitive pursuit in Arizona history has come to a close after a child sex predator was finally sentenced after more than 32 years on the run, and his capture happened near a Ukrainian war zone. 

The backstory:

Back in 1992, Daniel Brewster was convicted in Tucson of multiple charges, including sexual conduct with a minor and molestation. Brewster’s wife happened to run a daycare, and it was there that he preyed upon several toddlers. 

The Victim’s Story:

One of his victims, Angela Dunson, is telling her story for the first time.

“It talked about stuff that I’ve never talked about, even I do believe I didn’t talk about it back in the 90s. You know, about him locking me in his house and me having to, like, actually try to figure out how to get out, right? Because I was not strong enough to unlock the deadbolt. I wasn’t tall enough to open the door. So the only thing I could do was break the window. Nobody knows that happened except for me and him,” Dunson said.

Dig deeper:

The FBI put him on the most wanted list in 1995, and even an appearance on America’s Most Wanted didn’t do enough to catch him. Authorities believe Brewster went around the world to evade capture, first going to Mexico, then New Zealand, Australia and Canada. 

Finally, last year, cyber detectives in Ukraine traced him to a small village near Kyiv. 

What they’re saying:

Angela Dunson was just a small child when Brewster abused her. Now a mother, she finally got to have the last word.

“There’s going to be a lot of healing in this whole process because it has brought up so much stuff, and all of my kids were in that court hearing, and my whole family, I had the whole courtroom full of family,” Dunson said.

What we don’t know:

 It is still unclear how Brewster was able to slip away from authorities for so long. 

What’s next:

A judge sentenced Brewster to serve 247 years in prison.