Snippings

Cybersecurity company NordVPN found that complete Australian identity packages—bundling financial, streaming, and social media accounts—sell for about $200 on the dark web, nearly six times the US rate. This price gap is linked to the scarcity of Australian data compared to the oversupply of American records from years of breaches. The first quarter of 2026 saw 1.1 million Australian accounts leaked, with individual data points like payment cards fetching $10 and digital passport scans averaging $32.

Having just got back from Australia, where I was involved in numerous conversations about digital identity, cybersecurity and fraud, the issue of data breaches

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The European Central Bank (ECB) signed agreements with three European standard-setting bodies to build the digital euro on open, non-proprietary infrastructure, directly challenging the dominance of Visa and Mastercard across the eurozone.

The deals with the European Card Payment Cooperation (ECPC), nexo standards, and the Berlin Group give the digital euro a free, shared technical foundation that any European payment provider can adopt without paying global card scheme fees.

From: ECB Picks Open European Standards for Digital Euro, Sidelining Visa and Mastercard.

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Ghalia C., 32, has been detained since June 30, 2025, facing charges of complicity in violence against a public official and criminal conspiracy. Investigators examining her workstation at the Bobigny tax office uncovered searches specifically targeting cryptocurrency specialists and investors, whose personal data she allegedly sold to criminals for physical attacks and extortion.

Authorities traced her activity through the tax administration’s Mira software, which she exploited to access sensitive financial information. Police found cash deposits and Western Union transfers in her bank accounts, indicating payment for transmitting confidential data to an anonymous client.

From: French Tax Official Sold Cryptocurrency Investor Data to Criminal Networks – IMI Daily.

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The “AI owns the checkout” model died in production. The “merchant owns the checkout, agents handle discovery and orchestration” model — UCP’s design — is what actually converts.

From: Feed | LinkedIn.

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Sullivan & Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court that a major filing it made in a high-profile case contained multiple “hallucinations” made by AI software.

Andrew Dietderich, the head of S&C’s restructuring practice, apologised in a letter to New York federal judge Martin Glenn on Saturday for mistakes that included misquoting the US bankruptcy code and citing cases incorrectly in a court filing made on April 9.

“We deeply regret that this has occurred,” he said in the letter.

Dietderich said the firm’s policies on the use of AI had not been followed when the document was prepared, and it was considering whether it needed to make “further enhancements” to its internal training and review processes.

From: Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
BankThink The AI prompt that could wipe out banks’ net interest income
By Michael Abbott
Published February 03, 2026, 8:58 a.m. EST
4 Min Read
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It won’t be long before bank customers can ask an AI agent to optimize their returns on idle cash. When it happens, banks’ net interest income is going to come under direct threat, warns Michael Abbott, of Accenture.Adobe Stock
When JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon speaks, the industry listens. His comments on competition at this year’s World Economic Forum were telling.

Fintechs aren’t letting up: “They’re coming at you, some to pick a sliver of the business, some to take your whole business.”

AI could restructure customer access and product delivery. “Agents … may lead to us winning and losing big areas.”

Banks could face significant losses if they fail to adapt. “If you put your head in the sand, you will lose.”

The future of competition for banks will be fierce in 2026. However, I believe a new class of competitors will emerge that attack banking from the outside-in and target the balance sheet.

The last 25 years of fintech disruption have seen fintechs attempt to mimic banks and compete for the same services. They’ve seen limited gains: After 25 years of digital not a single neobank has cracked the global top 200 banks by assets.

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With the emergence of AI engines, we see a very different competitive landscape emerging, with tech companies that attack both sides of the balance sheet but never touch banking itself. They will be infinitely more disruptive than fintechs already operating within the system.

It won’t be long before customers can ask their favorite GPT engine this simple question: “Help me optimize the return for my idle cash.” That one prompt takes direct aim at deposit beta in the U.S banking system.

Many customers in the U.S. are ready for it: Seventy-one percent say they would use an “everywhere” AI financial assistant that helps manage all their banking relationships, and 55% would trust a generative AI platform to own that experience, according to Accenture’s recent Future of Banking Experience survey.

Even a relatively small shift in pricing could lead to a 5% drop in lending margin and 15% drop in deposit margin, putting around 22% of U.S. banking pretax income at risk, according to Accenture Research.

From: The AI prompt that could wipe out banks’ net interest income | American Banker.

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Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., highlighted the fragmentation of identity standards across jurisdictions and the operational challenges that fragmentation creates for financial institutions. In a setting increasingly shaped by automated agents and machine-driven transactions, he observed, banks must be able to determine “who is the legally traceable human behind this agent that has just contacted my agent.

From: Treasury Chief Says Smarter AML Starts With Better Identity.

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A test of IATA’s face biometrics-based digital identity for air travel for a journey beginning with Japan Airlines (JAL) at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport was the first to involve a flight transfer and different digital wallets.
The airline shared details of the trial, for which it worked with Tokyo International Air Terminal Corporation (TIAT). The trial tested IATA’s proof-of-concept (PoC) for Contactless Travel at Scale, which aims to enable fully contactless, biometric‑enabled international travel through its One ID initiative. Hong Kong International Airport, London’s Heathrow Airport and British Airways also participated in the trial.
The service was tested by travelers taking off from Tokyo Haneda Airport and transferring in Hong Kong for a flight to the UK.

From: IATA digital ID trial shows interoperability across countries, wallets and biometrics | Biometric Update.

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Two new papers possibly bring Q-Day closer, and perhaps show that the 2035 target for the switch-over to quantum-robust cryptography is perhaps under review. Each of the papers outlines attacks on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and which is commonly used for digital signatures (ECDSA and EdDSA) and key exchange (ECDH). This includes its application in blockchain, TLS sessions, SSH, and many other secure protocols.

From: Classical Public Key Methods Are Crumbling Under The Threat of Quantum Computers? | by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE | ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice | Apr, 2026 | Medium.

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Hours after Anthropic said it was investigating a report that users had gained unauthorized access to its ballyhooed Mythos model, OpenAI accidentally made a slate of its own unreleased models available on its Codex app.

Anthropic has gone to great lengths in recent weeks to stress that Mythos is capable of devastating cyberattacks, and that it was only making the model available to a select few companies and government agencies as a result.

Even so, a group of unauthorized users had been accessing Mythos without Anthropic’s permission and sharing their findings in a Discord channel, Bloomberg reported Tuesday

From: New Security Breaches at Anthropic and OpenAI Proved Mark Zuckerberg Right — The Information.

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