Hammer Weekly Update, week ending 21 December 2025

Written by Hammer | Dec 22, 2025 8:24:13 AM

Week ending 21 December 2025 put attention on cloud, AI, security and networking in UK and EMEA. We’ve boiled it down to the few stories with practical impact - and concrete steps partners can take this week.

Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard

The Register (Security) reports: Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard. PLUS: Texas sues alleged TV spies; The Cloud is full of holes; Hospital leaked its own data; And more Infosec In Brief Google will soon end its “Dark Web Report… [1]

Guardrails around identity, network and spend need to ship with the platform-landing zones and budgets should be codified, not manual. Hammer can package a baseline landing zone with budget alerts and ownership mapping so teams can deploy it the same way every time.

Codify a landing zone (identity, network, logging) and deploy to all accounts.
Enable budget alerts/anomaly detection and assign owners.
Right-size or schedule off non-prod instances before month-end.

Will Quantum Computing Kill Bitcoin?

Computer Weekly reports: Will Quantum Computing Kill Bitcoin?. Claims that Quantum Computing will destroy Bitcoin may be exaggerated, but Bitcoin will need to adapt. [2]

Expect pressure on rack density, GPU power budgets and memory bandwidth; design choices affect UPS/PDU loading and cooling headroom. Hammer can source AI servers and pre-stage delivery to match cooling upgrades, and translate model sizing into an orderable BOM.

Model peak rack draw; confirm UPS/PDU headroom for target density.
Benchmark NVMe throughput against expected inference concurrency.
Lock delivery dates for AI servers to align with cooling changes.

WatchGuard sounds alarm as critical Firebox flaw comes under active attack

The Register (Security) reports: WatchGuard sounds alarm as critical Firebox flaw comes under active attack. Newly disclosed vulnerability already being abused, users urged to lock down exposed firewalls WatchGuard is in emergency patch mode after confirming that a cri… [3]

Controls must stand up to real phishing and ransomware drills, not just policy-recovery points and identity boundaries are the failure points. Hammer can bundle Microsoft 365 backup and a managed SOC handover into a repeatable rollout plan with timelines.

Run a restore test from an immutable backup set and record RTO.
Map MFA and conditional access coverage for high-risk apps.
Stage a 30-minute phishing drill and time the run-book.

Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports SOCI indexing for faster container startup times

AWS What’s New reports: Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports SOCI indexing for faster container startup times. Today, AWS announces SOCI (Seekable Open Container Initiative) indexing support for Amazon SageMaker Studio… [4]

Latency to inspection points and PoP reach now shape experience as much as raw bandwidth; failover timing needs timing, not theory.

Measure user latency to the nearest SASE PoP and capture variance.
Pilot split-tunnel policies for collaboration apps; record packet loss.
Time branch failover under controlled link flap.

Amazon RDS enhances observability for snapshot exports to Amazon S3

AWS What’s New reports: Amazon RDS enhances observability for snapshot exports to Amazon S3. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now offers enhanced observability for your snapshot exports to Amazon S3… [5]

Guardrails around identity, network and spend need to ship with the platform-landing zones and budgets should be codified, not manual.

Codify a landing zone (identity, network, logging) and deploy to all accounts.
Enable budget alerts/anomaly detection and assign owners.
Right-size or schedule off non-prod instances before month-end.

References

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