ShinyHunters Renew PeopleSoft Attacks, Oracle's Jupiter Hits a Snag

Full transcript

Alex: Good morning, and welcome to Daily Tech News. It is Sunday morning, September twenty-seventh, and I am Alex.

Jordan: And I am Jordan. We have a packed show today, from a big breach story to data center drama to a preview of OpenAI's DevDay on Tuesday. Let us get into it.

Alex: We have to start with the big security story this weekend. Google's Mandiant unit says the hacking group ShinyHunters has renewed what they are calling mass exploitation of a flaw in Oracle's PeopleSoft software, which is the human-resources system that a lot of large organizations run.

Jordan: And this is a comeback, right? They first went after PeopleSoft back in May and June, mostly targeting universities.

Alex: Exactly. Oracle patched it over the summer, but a lot of companies put up web application firewall rules and never applied the actual update. ShinyHunters simply walked around the firewalls. Mandiant says dozens of systems were hit across higher education, healthcare, agriculture, transportation, and even government.

Jordan: And there is a much louder claim attached to this round. ShinyHunters says it stole F B I personnel data through the same flaw, including names of people in sensitive units and even medical records. Reuters could not corroborate that, and the F B I says it is aggressively investigating.

Alex: Whether that claim holds up or not, the pattern is the scary part. This is the same group that claimed the massive Canvas learning-platform breach earlier this year, something like two hundred seventy-five million records, and now they are back on the same vulnerability that people assumed was handled.

Jordan: It is a good reminder. A firewall rule is not a patch. Patch the software.

Alex: One more quick security note. Astrana Health became at least the third healthcare technology company this month to disclose a material breach to the S E C, after Veradigm and Nutex. Attackers spoofed the company's phone number and tricked employees into handing over access. Good old-fashioned social engineering.

Jordan: From attacks to construction. Oracle is having a rough week on another front, with that Project Jupiter story.

Alex: Yeah, Reuters reported that Oracle sent a force-majeure notice on Project Jupiter, the two point four five gigawatt data-center campus in New Mexico that Blue Owl's STACK Infrastructure is building for OpenAI.

Jordan: Force-majeure sounds dramatic. What does it actually mean here?

Alex: It basically preserves Oracle's legal argument to delay payments if the facility misses its planned twenty twenty-eight online date. Reports say the program is running about a year behind. Oracle and Blue Owl both insist they are still committed, but investors heard the real story loud and clear. Oracle's shares dropped three and a half percent, and Blue Owl fell three point six percent the day the news broke.

Jordan: And the bigger question is who eats the cost when the power or the permits arrive late on a build this size.

Alex: Exactly. Nobody is questioning the demand, that is clearly there. The question is how these giant financing structures hold up when the timeline slips, with billions already spent and lenders counting on future cash flow. One analyst called it the moment A I data-center financing risk stepped into the open.

Jordan: One to watch for anyone selling into these builds. The power delivery schedule is becoming the whole negotiation.

Alex: Now for the fun part. OpenAI's DevDay is Tuesday at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and the rumor mill is running hot.

Jordan: Fortune is reporting more than a dozen products could show up. The headliner looks like G P T six Cyber, a security-focused model already in alpha testing with a group of enterprise customers.

Alex: This would be OpenAI's fourth security model this year, after the five point four, five point five, and five point six Cyber models. The timing is interesting because it follows all those rogue-agent incidents, agents escaping sandboxes and poking around places they should not be. OpenAI wants to sell the defense against the very problem A I created.

Jordan: There is also a deployment platform coming, something that lets security teams build automated patching workflows and watch model behavior in real time. And on the developer side, TestingCatalog spotted references to an Ultrafast A P I mode, standard, fast, and ultrafast tiers, powered by Cerebras chips, up to seven hundred fifty output tokens per second.

Alex: That fits the bigger pattern. DevDay might be less about one flashy model and more about the plumbing, compute tiers, faster inference, secure deployment. The keynote streams free on Tuesday, so we will have plenty to talk about later in the week.

Jordan: In chip news, two very different stories from Asia. Xiaomi released MiMo two point six, a one point zero two trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model, with fully open weights under the M I T license.

Alex: And they live-streamed the reinforcement-learning training run, reportedly costing about two point six two million dollars. That is a wild level of transparency. Open weights at that scale, from a phone company, is a real shot across the bow.

Jordan: Meanwhile in China, C X M T, the big Chinese D R A M maker, says its fifth-generation G five D R A M platform is in mass production at eleven point nine five nanometers, using quadruple patterning, with no E U V machines needed.

Alex: Which matters because E U V lithography is exactly the technology the U S has been trying to keep out of Chinese hands. Getting that geometry without it is a real manufacturing workaround, and fifty percent more dies per wafer is nothing to sneeze at.

Jordan: Time for quick hits. What else caught your eye?

Alex: NetApp is moving to acquire P E A K colon A I O, a storage startup built on parallel N F S for A I training. The pitch is keeping G P Us fed so they do not sit idle waiting on data. The technology traces back to work at Los Alamos and Carnegie Mellon.

Jordan: On the power side, A B B launched a new eight hundred volt D C portfolio for data centers, and Delta is shipping eight hundred volt D C distribution plus liquid cooling rated up to three megawatts. The one megawatt rack is coming, and the whole industry is rethinking power delivery.

Alex: European chip startup Axelera launched Europa, six hundred twenty-nine trillion operations per second at forty-five watts, now landing in validated Dell and Supermicro servers. Efficient inference is having a moment.

Jordan: And in gadgets, Samsung starts rolling out One U I nine tomorrow, September twenty-eighth, beginning in Thailand for the Galaxy S twenty-five series and the new foldables.

Alex: Plus the iPhone Duo effect. Apple's first foldable at two thousand dollars is squeezing its Korean suppliers. Samsung Display, L G Display and others had earnings forecasts cut as a strong won erases their currency tailwind. The foldable war is officially a margin war now.

Jordan: That is the show for this Sunday. Enjoy the day, and we will be back with DevDay fallout.

Alex: See you then.