Tech
Western cyber alliances risk fragmenting in new world order | Computer Weekly
The global cyber threat landscape was defined by fragmentation in 2025, driven in no small part by widening geopolitical fractures that threatened the 80-year-old rules-based international order that has kept the peace – at least in the global north – since the end of the Second World War, according to a report.
In a cyber threat report published last week, Recorded Future’s Insikt Group explored how the conduct of powerful nations – aptly demonstrated by the possibility of a unilateral US takeover of Greenland, threatening the integrity of the Nato alliance – is causing knock-on effects in the cyber world as long-standing security frameworks appear increasingly precarious.
Indeed, in some circumstances, legal ambiguity around US actions, particularly those taking place in the Caribbean and Venezuela, has in fact caused some of America’s core allies, including the UK, to restrict intelligence sharing. Recorded Future said that strained transatlantic relations were limiting coordinated responses to wider crises such as Russia’s four-year war on Ukraine, and that these geopolitical dynamics are directly shaping state behaviour in cyberspace.
Meanwhile, sustained law enforcement pressure led to some big wins last year in the form of disruptions and takedowns of cyber criminal infrastructure, along with arrests, but this is now resulting in a more decentralised, modular criminal ecosystem that, unfortunately, is also more resilient.
And on the technological front, this fragmentation was demonstrated by the growing split between China and the US as the two great powers vie for AI dominance.
“In 2025, Insikt Group tracked how cyber activity shifted from a primary focus on espionage toward increased use of cyber capabilities for signalling, coercion and disruption in both kinetic conflicts and grey-zone scenarios,” said the report’s authors.
“Securing access to identity systems, cloud environments and edge infrastructure emerged as a central feature of interstate competition, reflecting the growing strategic value of persistent digital access and pre-positioning.
“Disruption was equally visible in the information environment. Insikt Group observed hacktivist groups, patriotic volunteers and influence networks playing a growing role in conflicts involving Israel-Iran, India-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia, and Russia-Ukraine.
“These actors operated with varying degrees of state alignment, but consistently contributed to a threat landscape in which genuine intrusions, exaggerated claims and disinformation reinforced one another,” they said.
Speaking at the report’s launch at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany, Recorded Future chief security and intelligence officer Levi Gundert said: “Uncertainty is no longer episodic – it’s the operating environment.
“As geopolitical norms weaken, state objectives, criminal capability and private-sector technology are increasingly reinforcing one another, compressing warning timelines and expanding plausible deniability. AI is accelerating that dynamic, not through autonomous attacks, but by scaling deception and eroding trust inside decision-making processes.
“In 2026, cyber risk will be defined less by singular events and more by persistent, fragmented pressure that reshapes competition, escalation, and stability over time.”
Cyber ops a routine tool
Against these general dynamics, Recorded Future said cyber operations are now becoming established as a routine tool of geopolitical competition, alongside more traditional instruments such as sanctions, tariffs or asset seizures.
“The cumulative effect is an international system with higher tolerance for risk and fewer constraints on escalation. For governments and businesses alike, resilience rather than stability is now the baseline operating assumption,” the team said.
This year, the report said, state-sponsored cyber operations will coalesce around low-visibility access and reconnaissance operations as a precursor to outright conflict, said Recorded Future co-founder Christopher Ahlberg.
“Cyber operations are no longer preparation for conflict – they are part of conflict. What we’re seeing is that adversaries are logging in, not hacking in. This is a shift toward access, influence and leverage that can be activated at moments of political or military tension, often below the threshold of traditional response,” he said.
Russia, said Recorded Future, will move away from malware-driven campaigns towards credential-based intrusions and the abuse of legitimate services such as identity platforms. This approach allows hackers to escalate to outright disruption while maintaining plausible deniability for their paymasters, and making it harder for security teams to detect them.
Chinese actors, meanwhile, are likely to expand from data theft towards information operations bombarding their targets with large volumes of AI slop in a form of “flooding the zone”. According to Recorded Future’s analysts, Beijing already has established doctrines on AI-driven “psychographic targeting” with the intent of eroding its rivals’ resolve through bespoke, emotionally provocative operations that complement its underlying attacks.
The Iranians, the report predicted, will remain largely focused on regional influence operations, with continued use of hacktivist proxies. Despite recent internal upheaval, and the US’s response to this, more widespread disruptive operations are probably unlikely, although they should not necessarily be ruled out.
North Korea will remain an active and dangerous cyber actor, with its operations likely to continue targeting workforce infiltration to enable data theft and, critically, revenue generation going forward.
Finally, defenders should also be on the lookout for commercial spyware, which will remain a key enabler of state-backed cyber risk. Such tools – the most infamous example being Israel-based NSO’s Pegasus malware – also muddy the waters somewhat in that they are now widely used by many governments against their own people.
Tech
This Backpack From Topo Designs Will Happily Tag Along to Europe, Down a Dusty Trail, or to Starbucks
As we get out of the house, the gear-obsessed WIRED Reviews team is writing about our favorite bags and EDCs. Today, reviewer Martin Cizmar raves about his Topo Designs backpack. You can also check out other Bag Check stories where WIRED writers share their carryall of choice.
Topo Designs may just make the best bags in the world. The Denver-based gorpcore brand sells gear that looks cool, lasts forever, and has every feature a sensible person desires in a bag without making the product feel overbuilt. If I ever win the lottery, I won’t tell anyone, but there will be signs—like me hauling groceries from Trader Joe’s in two Mountain Gear bags. (I currently use blue polypropylene Ikea bags and shop at Aldi.)
In March, I took a spring break trip to Ireland and Scotland with a carry-on-sized roller bag and the Topo Designs Rover Trail pack as my personal item. I am frequently testing new bags, and I didn’t think much about the decision to commit to the Rover for a week. I quickly learned that you get to know a bag pretty well when you take it on seven flights and stay at eight different hotels in 10 days. By the time I landed back home, I was fully convinced the Rover is the best backpack I have ever used.
Like the six or seven other models of Topo Designs bags I’ve tested—and maybe more extensively than any of the others—the Rover manages to artfully incorporate all the thoughtful little features I appreciated in other backpacks without even a hint of showiness.
At the top of the bag, there’s a zipped compartment that flips open to reveal the rucksack-style opening, which closes with a drawstring. This is where I like to put my keys, any important paperwork I may have on me, and sometimes my wallet. Typically, I find myself double- and triple-checking the zipper to make sure nothing is falling out. No need with the Rover, because inside that zipped compartment, there’s also a clip for keys and an additional zipped mesh sleeve. This feature lets you double-bag anything you don’t want to risk falling out—in my case, passports for myself and my daughter. When I got through the TSA line at the airport, I clipped in my car keys for the week, zipped the passports into the mesh sleeve, and never worried about losing either.
Photograph: Martin Cizmar
Aerodynamic drag is a major “barrier” in high-speed airplanes, automobiles, and bullet trains. This is because a design with less aerodynamic drag allows the aircraft to move at higher speeds with less energy.
When an aircraft or car body moves at high speed, a thin layer of air called the “boundary layer” is formed on its surface. This boundary layer has two states: laminar flow, in which air flows in an orderly fashion, and turbulent flow, which involves turbulence.
The longer the air stays in the laminar flow state with low friction, the smaller the air resistance becomes, but as the air speed increases, it transitions to turbulent flow. The key to reducing aerodynamic drag is how to delay this transition to turbulence.
For more than 80 years, the principle of “the surface of an object must be smooth” has been the basic premise of aeronautical engineering throughout the world in order to suppress the transition to turbulence and reduce aerodynamic drag. This premise was based on the results of a 1940 study by Ichiro Tani, a Japanese aerodynamicist who quantitatively demonstrated the relationship between “surface roughness” (an indicator of the state of the machined surface) and turbulent transition, arguing that surface roughness, which was unavoidable with the manufacturing technology of the time, prevented laminar flow from being realized.
However, in 1989 Tani reinterpreted the experimental data on rough-surface pipes obtained by fluid engineer Johann Nikulase in the 1930s, bringing a new perspective that “roughness may not necessarily only promote turbulent transition and increase fluid resistance.” Inheriting this idea, a research group led by Yasuaki Kohama of Tohoku University experimentally demonstrated in the 1990s that fibrous rough surfaces, which have fine fibrous irregularities on their surface, have the effect of delaying transition under certain conditions.
The same Tohoku University research team recently announced a discovery that significantly advances this trend. Aiko Yakino, associate professor at Tohoku University’s Institute of Fluid Science, and her research group were the first in the world to demonstrate that aerodynamic drag can be reduced by up to 43.6 percent simply by applying distributed micro-roughness (DMR), a surface roughness so fine and irregular that it cannot be distinguished by the naked eye.
This technology is fundamentally different from the “rivulet (shark skin) process,” which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts.
Precise Measurement in a Wind Tunnel Without Support Bars
A key factor in this achievement was the use of a different wind tunnel experiment method than before. Conventional wind tunnel experiments had structural limitations: the support rods and wires essential for supporting the model disrupted the airflow, negating the minute changes in air resistance caused by micro-scale roughness.
The world’s largest 1-meter magnetic support balance system (1m-MSBS), owned by the Institute of Fluid Science, Tohoku University, has fundamentally solved this problem. This device can levitate a streamlined model approximately 1.07 m in length inside a wind tunnel without contact using electromagnetic force. Because it does not use any support rods or other means, it completely eliminates interference with the airflow around the model.
Yakino and his team precisely measured the total drag coefficient on smooth and DMR-coated surfaces over a wide range of Reynolds numbers (ratio of inertial to viscous forces acting on the fluid) (Re = 0.35 x 10⁶ to 3.6 x 10⁶).
Shopping for a Dyson vacuum is an experience. There are many models to navigate and serious price tags on most of them. As someone who tests vacuums for a living, I have to admit that a Dyson blows most other vacuums away. There are a few cheaper models I’ll still grab (check out my full guide to cordless and robot vacuums for more recommendations), but if you’re dreaming of a Dyson, this weekend is a great time to buy.
Several Dyson models I love are on sale for the long weekend. This weekend’s sale includes Dyson’s newest robot vacuum and the PencilVac that I can’t stop using, and my overall favorites like the V15 Detect and Gen5Detect, and more models our team has loved using. Read on to find out every on-sale Dyson I’d buy this weekend.
Best Dyson Vacuums on Sale for Memorial Day
The Best Dyson for the Price
If you’re looking for the best features for the best price, I already recommend the Dyson V15 Detect when it’s not on sale, making this an even better time to buy. You’ll get both a Fluffy Optic cleaner head and a Digital Motorbar cleaner head to use for hard floors, carpet, or rugs, trigger control, and details about the particles you suck up while you vacuum. It’s lightweight and easy to use anywhere in the house, and the hour-long battery life should be plenty for a whole-home clean.
A More Powerful Dyson
Dyson’s more powerful stick vacuum is the Gen5Detect, which is a great option if you have pets since it has a faster motor with more suction power than the V15 Detect to suck up more pet hair (it’s our top vacuum for pet hair for a reason) and has a HEPA filter to keep allergens contained inside of the vacuum instead of being released back into the air. It also comes with a true power button, so you don’t have to hold onto the trigger button the entire time to use it. Similar to the V15 Detect, it comes with both a Digital Motorbar cleaner head and a Fluffy Optic cleaner head to use on carpet and hard floors, respectively. You’ll also get two more attachments, plus a built-in dusting and crevice tool (it’s nice not to have to wonder where this attachment is!) It’s an expensive vacuum, but well worth the investment when it’s on sale.
If You Only Have Hard Floors
I shouldn’t like the PencilVac so much, but I find myself reaching for it often, and I think it’s plenty worth its abilities when it’s on sale. Part of what makes it so easy to grab compared to my other stick vacuums is how easy it is to store and keep charged with the freestanding charging base, letting it stand wherever I like in my home as long as there’s an outlet nearby. The PencilVac has two versions, the Fluffy and Fluffycones, with the latter having a design that has fluffy cone-shaped rollers to best collect debris. It is limited to only hard floors and has a short battery life, but I love how maneuverable and lightweight this vacuum is. It’s usually a high price tag for its abilities, and even on sale, it’s not what I would call cheap, but it’s a great, quick daily vacuum.
Dyson’s Latest Robot Vac
Dyson’s newest robot vacuum, the Spot+Scrub Ai, is its first that doubles as both a vacuum and a mop. It has a large base station that reminds me of Dyson’s vacuums, since the dry debris canister is clear and rounded like the ones you’d see attached to a Dyson stick vacuum or one of its upright models. It does a good job mopping and vacuuming, and can learn multiple floors, and the navigation has improved since the older Dyson 306 Vis Nav. Still, it’s not perfect navigation, since the camera sits below the top of the vacuum and doesn’t always see low-profile furniture that it’ll bump into. If you don’t have a ton of low furniture (or tons of IKEA pieces, as I do), this vacuum could be just perfect for you.
A Stick Vac and Mop
Dyson
V15s Detect Submarine
If you want a vacuum that doubles as a mop, look no further than this variation of the V15 Detect that’s also on sale for the holiday weekend. The V15s Detect Submarine comes with the Submarine wet roller head that transforms it from a regular Dyson vacuum (that still comes with both the Fluffy optic cleaner head and Digital motorbar cleaner head for you to use on hard floors and carpet) into a wet roller mop. You can’t buy a regular V15 Detect and add this attachment on; this V15s is made to work with this Submarine head. You’ll fill the small reservoir on the roller head with water and can start mopping away, but you will have to rinse the mop head afterwards by hand, which is a little gross.
A Handheld-Only Dyson
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Photograph: Brenda Stolyar
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If you’re not looking to spend a ton but want a Dyson that’s super portable and great for stairs, cars, and even boats, the Dyson Car+Boat is made for that. It’s in the name, after all. This handheld-only vacuum packs solid power and has a great battery life for a handheld vacuum. It uses a trigger-style control like the V15 Detect, which I actually find ideal for cleaning compact spaces like stairs and cars so that you’re not fumbling to switch it off as you move around the car or to the next set of stairs. It’s an affordable way to get into the Dyson ecosystem, especially since it’s on sale.
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