A research tool called ALOHA could receive a welcoming “hello!” from resource-strapped companies that need sophisticated cybersecurity tests.

Designed by researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), this agentic system emulates cyberattacks like ransomware-style recon and lateral movement.

PNNL data scientist Loc Truong and cybersecurity researcher Kris Willis see the simulator providing organizations with capabilities that have often belonged to teams with bigger budgets and more specialized expertise.

“I envision that any team—from big organization to small—can find it useful, but particularly small,” Truong said.

How it works. ALOHA (Agentic LLMs for Offensive Heuristic Automation) allows teams to test their system against a tuned list of company-impacting vulnerabilities.

Takeaways from our demo of the tool.—BH

The Crypto ISAC is starting off its new year with a bang.

In January, the central information sharing hub for the digital currency industry announced an expanded “integration” with Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, that would allow it to share real-time threat intelligence with its Crypto ISAC community members.

Chain reaction. Justine Bone, executive director of the Crypto ISAC, told IT Brew that the expanded relationship with Coinbase, one of the ISAC’s founding members, will offer community members highly confidential, vetted data that they can incorporate into their defensive profiles (e.g., crypto wallet addresses have been found in illicit transactions).

“That means, with confidence, the recipients of this data, which are other member companies, can act on it, so it becomes actionable at scale in that automated way at the pace that we need to move at,” Bone said.

What the next few years look like for this ISAC.—BM

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life, and Western Digital, which just debuted its new name of WD, is feeling good.

That was the main takeaway from WD’s 2026 Innovation Day event in New York City, where executives detailed how the more than half-century-old hard disk drive (HHD) manufacturer is evolving to meet the future demands of AI. CEO Irving Tan said WD is transforming into “a data center company that’s at the heart of AI.”

The only way is up. Tan sees several growth opportunities for WD in the AI era, including the monetization of AI inferencing, the actual act of prompting a model to make a decision based on information it already has.

“Every query that you put in, every prompt, that history has to be stored. That’s going to not only generate significant amounts of data, it’s going to also generate [a] significant amount of storage,” Tan said. Other tech leaders are trying to cash in on inferencing; for example, former Oracle CEO Safra Catz told stakeholders on a 2025 earnings call that the company was “aggressively pursuing” the inferencing market.

But wait, there’s more…—BM

When two companies combine, their tech stacks don’t always cooperate. IT leaders share practical advice—from auditing tools to securing admin access—on keeping systems running smoothly post-merger.