Cybersecurity made clear, in your inbox

On 25 September the Académie Goncourt withdrew Thélyson Orélien's novel, four days after he was accused of having written it with an artificial intelligence. Since then, texts he signed and other people wrote have surfaced almost daily, from a 2010 poem lifted from a Zen monk to opinion pieces translated from the Philippine press. All of it could have been checked for sixteen years with a search engine and a local library, and not one of his publishers bothered.

On 15 September 2026, Amazon Web Services wrote that it could not restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in its Bahrain region. The three availability zones of that region were damaged by Iranian strikes, in March and then in April. Its own documentation states that those zones all sit within a hundred kilometres of one another.

On 11 September 2026, Revolut customers received a message titled « Urgent security update about your Revolut account ». In it, the bank explained that it had handed over their identity documents, their verification selfie and their entire transaction history to an address operating inside the domain of a government agency. I received that notification, took it for phishing, and deleted it.