TechPulse USA

Japan's biggest tech show opened on Tuesday with a war game instead of a gadget parade. At CEATEC 2026 in Chiba, the headline acts weren't foldables or humanoids — they were a booth where you practice surviving a ransomware infection and an AI that listens through rubble for the voices of the buried. Attack and rescue, staged side by side, both running on the same kind of machine intelligence. It is a strange, telling inversion. For two decades CEATEC was where Japanese electronics giants showed off the future as a shinier object — thinner TVs, smarter fridges, the next phone. This year the future arrived as a threat model. The companies that once sold you gadgets are now selling you the idea that AI will be on both sides of every fight that matters. And they're saying it out loud. "Since attackers are using AI, defenders must also use AI to find vulnerabilities," Shunsuke Harada of NEC said at the show, in remarks relayed by coverage of the opening. Twelve w...

Zscaler 2026 Report: Ransomware Stole 896 TB, Up 275% Forget everything you think you know about ransomware. The new crop of cybercriminals is not locking up your files and demanding Bitcoin to unscramble them. Instead, they are slipping in quietly, copying out enormous volumes of your organization's most valuable data, and charging you to keep it from going public. According to a major new report from Zscaler's ThreatLabz research team, data theft by ransomware crews surged more than 275% over the past year, reaching 896.2 terabytes of exfiltrated data — roughly 90 times the size of the Library of Congress's print collection in plain text, using the widely cited 10-terabyte estimate for that collection. Update, Sept. 30: Zscaler's own five takeaways Zscaler's own writeup of the report, published on its site this week, adds three details worth folding in. Among the top 10 ransomware groups by leaked-data volume, combined exfiltration rose 275.8% year over year ...