Hammer Weekly Update, week ending 25 January 2026

Week ending 25 January 2026 put attention on AI, networking, security and cloud in UK and EMEA. We’ve boiled it down to the few stories with practical impact - and concrete steps partners can take this week.

Pwn2Own Automotive 2026 uncovers 76 zero-days, pays out more than $1M

The Register (Security) reports: Pwn2Own Automotive 2026 uncovers 76 zero-days, pays out more than $1M. Also, cybercriminals get breached, Gemini spills the calendar beans, and more infosec in brief T'was a dark few days for automotive software systems last week… [1]

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.

UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings

The Register (Security) reports: UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings. Drone, satellite, and other data combined to monitor unwanted vessels The UK Home Office is spending up to £100 million on intelligence tech in part to tackle t… [2]

Latency to inspection points and PoP reach now shape experience as much as raw bandwidth; failover timing needs timing, not theory. Hammer can align SASE/SD-WAN SKUs to branch counts and lead times, and sequence rollouts to avoid link flap surprises.

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.

CISA won't attend infosec industry's biggest conference this year

The Register (Security) reports: CISA won't attend infosec industry's biggest conference this year. But ex-CISA boss and new RSAC CEO Jen Easterly will be there exclusive The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won't attend the annual RSA Confe… [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.

EC2 Auto Scaling Introduces New Mechanisms for Group Deletion Protection

AWS What’s New reports: EC2 Auto Scaling Introduces New Mechanisms for Group Deletion Protection. EC2 Auto Scaling is introducing a new policy condition key autoscaling. [4]

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.

AI-powered cyberattack kits are 'just a matter of time,' warns Google exec

The Register (Security) reports: AI-powered cyberattack kits are 'just a matter of time,' warns Google exec. Security chief says criminals are already automating workflows, with full end-to-end tools likely within years CISOs must prepare for "a really different world"… [5]

Controls must stand up to real phishing and ransomware drills, not just policy-recovery points and identity boundaries are the failure points.

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.