The Treasury reported that net interest payments on federal debt reached 19.5% of net receipts in fiscal year 2026, the highest level since at least 1940. This figure exceeds national defense spending and reflects a larger outstanding debt stock rather than higher interest rates, which averaged 3.518% in September 2026. With $17.507 trillion of marketable…
The U.S. Coast Guard issued Navigation and Vessel Inspection Circular 02-26 to help entities comply with the 2025 maritime cyber rule. Regulated operators must designate a cybersecurity officer, assess risks, and submit a plan by July 16, 2027. The circular provides a risk-filtering method based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework…
The Rhode Island General Assembly announced that the Revenue & Caseload Estimating Conference will run from October 27 to November 10, 2026. State Budget Officer Joseph Codega Jr., House Fiscal Advisor Sharon Reynolds Ferland, and Senate Fiscal Advisor Stephen Whitney will lead the process to reach consensus on revenue and expense estimates. The schedule includes…
The Department of the Treasury reported that total US federal debt outstanding reached $40.44 trillion on October 20. This figure represents an increase of $327.4 billion from the previous month and a rise of $2.46 trillion compared to the same date last year. Debt held by the public accounted for $32.57 trillion, while intragovernmental holdings…
A federal judge in New York ruled that the Office of Personnel Management broke privacy laws by giving DOGE agents access to employee records. Judge Denise Cote stated that OPM provided no credible reason for sharing personally identifiable information with the group. The decision supports federal workers who argued the access violated the Privacy Act…
The NCSC has urged UK organisations to urgently address two critical vulnerabilities in PHP. These flaws, identified as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, could allow attackers to execute remote code on web servers. The issues stem from memory corruption caused by out-of-memory conditions and stale internal state. All versions of PHP are affected, so organisations are advised…
The PHP project released emergency patches for two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 scale. CISA stated it was not aware of any exploitation, though researchers observed active reconnaissance across internet-facing systems. The flaws, dubbed php2shell, affect versions from 5 onward and were discovered using AI tools by Calif and…
Microsoft researchers attributed a recent supply-chain attack on ConnectWise customers to a China-state aligned threat actor known as Storm-0940. The group used an agentic AI penetration testing framework called ARTEX to automate attacks against hundreds of organizations globally. Storm-0940 conducted a password-spraying campaign that resulted in over 151,000 failed logon attempts before compromising ConnectWise Cloud…
CISA advises organizations to urgently address two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, identified as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. These flaws, referred to as php2shell, enable unauthenticated remote code execution on any PHP installation handling web requests. The specific versions required to fix these issues are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. Although exploitation has not yet been…
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) will hold a meeting of its Investor Advisory Group (IAG) on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 9:15 a.m. ET. The meeting is open to the public and will take place at the PCAOB’s headquarters (1666 K Street NW, Washington, DC).