Daily Brief
2026-10-24
Top Story
Morgan Stanley is blocking outside AI agents from its platforms, and JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are restricting them, after banks detected agents operating inside customer accounts
Generally this access came from customers handing an AI agent their own bank login, which already breaks most banks' rule that a human logs in.
Chrome is expected to stop trusting a root certificate from eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority, on October 27th, cutting off about 30,800 certificates, 99.9% of them issued through US higher education's InCommon service
Anyone holding one of those certificates has to install a replacement from another certificate hierarchy in the Chrome root store before Chrome users stop being able to reach their site.
Two flaws in the web programming language PHP, which put every installation serving web requests at risk, drew an exploitation attempt four days before they were disclosed
Amazon Threat Intelligence saw an exploitation attempt against its honeypot network, decoy servers set up to attract attackers, on October 17th, four days before disclosure, and says the flaws are now being broadly exploited.
Attackers swapped the download files on five already-published releases of cloud company OVHcloud's command-line tool for what the company says was a build that steals stored credentials, live for up to 94 minutes
Only installs or updates made inside that window by a method that checks no file hash, the fingerprint that confirms a file is unchanged, were exposed, and OVHcloud tells anyone affected to rotate every stored credential on the machine.
United States
A Vietnamese-flagged tanker due at the US port of Norfolk on November 2nd is reportedly carrying 109,000 barrels of Russian diesel for a facility tied to US military operations
The ship, the PVT Azura, left St Petersburg on October 15th, and gCaptain, a maritime news site, says the precise discharge location and intended use of its cargo have not been independently confirmed.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the US regulator of national banks, issued a final rule putting the US stablecoin law into effect for the issuers it supervises, effective January 18th, 2027
The rule covers stablecoins, which are crypto tokens meant to hold a steady value, and sets the terms issuers must meet. The requirements cover reserves, redemption, custody and risk management, among others, and apply to national banks, federal savings associations, federal branches, foreign issuers and nonbank federal issuers.
Around the World
Argentina declared five Latin American criminal and guerrilla groups terrorist organizations, among them Mexico's Sinaloa cartel
The groups go onto RePET, Argentina's public terrorism registry, which Anadolu, Turkey's state news agency, reports gives agencies expanded powers to freeze assets and disrupt cross-border financing.
The Democratic Republic of Congo's tax chief called businesses' refusal to use the new state-linked electronic invoice a tax rebellion and threatened fines and closures
On spot checks on October 22nd, Director-General of Taxes Barnabe Mwakadi Muamba found non-compliance at eight supermarkets and at hotels.
PwC says a third-party vendor hosting its employee training records had a security incident, a day after the Everest extortion group claimed to hold 590 gigabytes of data
PwC says the affected site does not store client data, sensitive personal data or financial information, and that its own network and operations are unaffected.
Pakistan's cooking-gas imports from Iran have halted at the Gabd-Rimdan border crossing, traders say, and a 12-kilo cylinder has gone from 4,500 to 7,000 rupees in days
Pakistan imports about 7,000 tons of liquefied petroleum gas a day from Iran, per the Pakistan LPG Association, and a former Gwadar chamber president says more than 4,000 tons a day of that crosses at Gabd-Rimdan alone.
Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man, bought a 25% stake in Kenya Pipeline Company, and the Financial Times reports he plans $1.5 billion to expand its pipeline network
Semafor, a US news site, says the stake is part of a plan to own a distribution chain of regional tank farms and pipelines linking his refineries to markets across Africa.
Germany released more of its strategic oil reserve and temporarily cut the oil stocks it must legally hold from 90 days to 82
The release follows a G7 demand in early October that stocks actually be freed.
Iran has drawn up plans to attack Gulf subsea cables if the US and Israel strike again, two anonymous senior Iranian security officials told Reuters
One said Iran would try to block repairs so outages last longer, and that if Iran is attacked there would be no red line.
Brazil's new customer-service decree allows AI only if the consumer can speak to a person, and caps phone waits at 20 seconds
The decree takes effect on November 2nd and guarantees human service from 8am to 8pm every day, with cancellation available immediately at any stage.
The UK opened a twelve-week consultation on rewriting the law protecting undersea cables and pipelines, whose main damage offense still dates from 1885
The White Paper, Critical Undersea Infrastructure Security and Resilience, proposes new criminal penalties, security and resilience duties on subsea telecoms providers, a national security power to compel industry action and a regulatory framework for subsea sensing.