FortiMail Zero-Day Exploited, AWS Promises $1B to Data Center Towns

Full transcript

Alex: Good morning, and welcome to Daily Tech News for Friday, October second. I'm Alex.

Jordan: And I'm Jordan. We've got a packed Friday show — a critical Fortinet zero-day under active attack, Amazon's one-billion-dollar olive branch to data center towns, record Dell A I orders, Europe's supercomputer push, and Samsung's new smart glasses. Let's get into it.

Alex: Let's start with the scary one, because the network-edge zero-day streak is now officially a streak. Fortinet has disclosed a critical zero-day in FortiMail, its email security gateway, tracked as C V E twenty twenty-six one oh four two eight six.

Jordan: And the score is the worst kind of number: nine point eight out of ten. It lets an unauthenticated attacker write arbitrary files onto the appliance, just by sending crafted web requests. No login, no clicking. The flaw is a mix of path traversal and a null-byte handling bug, in the code that handles identity-based encryption.

Alex: That's the kicker — FortiMail is a security appliance. It's the thing you put in front of your email to keep the bad stuff out. And this flaw means the guard dog's kennel has no lock.

Jordan: Fortinet confirms active exploitation, and the U S Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added it to its known-exploited-vulnerabilities list, with a deadline of October fourth. That's Sunday.

Alex: And the messy part: fixes don't exist yet for three of the four affected versions. The patches — eight point oh two, seven point six seven, seven point four nine — haven't shipped. Fortinet is telling customers to disable identity-based encryption from the command line, or cut the management interface off from the internet entirely. They also published indicators of compromise so admins can check for prior hits.

Jordan: Fourth shoe in the same week, Alex. F five B I G hyphen I P, Citrix NetScaler, Cisco's S D hyphen W A N Manager, and now FortiMail. When the security appliances themselves become the attack vector, patching your defenses becomes a race against whoever finds the lock missing first.

Jordan: Speaking of data centers being the center of everything — Amazon is trying to buy some goodwill. A W S announced it's investing more than one billion dollars over the next five years in the U S communities where its data centers sit.

Alex: Very political as well as community-minded. Data centers have drawn real backlash over electricity demand, utility bills, and water use, and Amazon itself notes more than one hundred moratoriums on data centers are being considered around the country. With midterms in November, A W S chief executive Matt Garman is basically saying there's urgency because the U S is racing other countries on A I, and the countries that lead get to shape it.

Jordan: The money goes to education, job training, energy affordability, and water preservation in places with A W S projects — Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi. For scale, Amazon says it's invested two hundred seventy-six billion dollars in data centers since twenty eleven. So this is about a third of a percent of that.

Alex: Critics will pounce on the ratio, but there is a real commitment inside it: A W S says it'll be water-positive across its data centers by twenty thirty — returning more water than it uses — and claims it's seventy-five percent of the way there.

Jordan: It lands right as those House letters to Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle about data center nondisclosure agreements are still fresh. This reads like Amazon trying to get ahead of the backlash, not just doing the right thing quietly.

Alex: The compute gold rush is showing up in the earnings. Dell booked a record sixty point nine billion dollars in A I server orders in its fiscal second quarter, with A I server revenue up one hundred percent year over year, and it now targets sixty billion dollars in A I server sales for fiscal twenty twenty-seven.

Jordan: Sixty point nine billion in orders. If you want one number that says the A I buildout is not slowing down, that's the one. Quanta Services is sitting on a record fifty-three point four billion dollar backlog on data center work, and Penguin Solutions' memory revenue jumped one hundred eleven percent on agentic A I demand.

Alex: And across the Atlantic, Europe is building its own lane. Bull, the French state-owned supercomputer maker, reopened an expanded factory that doubles output — six racks a month to twelve, with room to hit twenty-four next year. Bull says it's won fifteen of the eighteen tenders from Euro H P C, the E U body co-funding Europe's supercomputer network, with seven billion euros committed through twenty twenty-seven.

Jordan: Including Bull's biggest contract ever — Finland's L U M I hyphen A I at three hundred eighty-eight million euros — while companies like O V H cloud try to train frontier A I models on Bull's JUPITER machine.

Alex: Two playbooks: U S hyperscalers scaling private A I data centers as fast as the grid allows, Europe using public money to guarantee compute sovereignty. Same direction — compute is the new oil, and everyone is drilling.

Jordan: Gadgets to close, because Samsung had a busy week. First, the Galaxy Buds On — Samsung's first clip-on earbuds. They sit around your ear instead of inside it, with twin speakers, audio-leakage reduction, and three microphones plus a voice pickup unit for calls. Nine and a half hours of battery, plus Gemini Live and head gestures so you can nod to take a call.

Alex: Open-ear is having a moment — runners and commuters love the situational awareness. But the bigger swing is the Galaxy Glasses, reportedly on sale in select markets next month with pricing announced in November. Snapdragon A R one Gen one chip, built-in camera, and Gemini A I answering questions based on what you're looking at. Nine hours of battery, and the case adds seven full charges.

Jordan: Samsung's entering a category Meta has basically owned with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Meta has the head start, but Samsung already has the phone in your pocket and the buds in your ear.

Alex: Apple isn't sitting still either — the Watch Series twelve and Watch Ultra four get Siri Recap and Live Rewind later this year. Details are thin, but the bet is clear: the watch becomes more of an A I companion, not just a fitness tracker.

Jordan: Throughline for the whole show, really: A I moving off the phone and onto your face, your ears, and your wrist. Ambient, and always there.

Alex: That's our show for Friday. October is starting loud.

Jordan: We'll be back Monday morning with the next Daily Tech News. Have a great weekend — and as always, patch your stuff, especially the security appliances.

Alex: See you Monday.