Walmart Is Betting on MrBeast and Holiday Films To Fuel Its Streaming Business
Vizio’s WatchFree+ has more than 45,000 movies and shows. https://www.adweek.com/commerce/walmart-is-betting-on-mrbeast-and-holiday-films-to-fuel-its-streaming-business/
Georgia Power, Alabama Power Data Breach Hits 400,000 Accounts
Southern Company is notifying roughly 400,000 customers that their utility account information was accessed by an unauthorized third party through its online customer portal.
The Atlanta-based energy holding company serves more than 9 million customers through electric utilities in three states and natural gas distribution businesses in four. Its electric subsidiaries are Georgia Power, Alabama Power and Mississippi Power.
Roughly 300,000 of the affected accounts belong to Georgia Power customers. According to Southern Company, the incident also impacted roughly 100,000 of Alabama Power’s 1.6 million accounts.
Mississippi Power is named as affected in the company’s public notice, but no figure has been released for its customers.
“An unauthorized third party accessed certain, limited information about the accounts of approximately 400K customers. Upon detection, we took immediate steps to stop the activity and have engaged law enforcement,” the company said in a statement sent to the media.
Southern Company’s public notice specifies the type of data involved. “Based on our investigation to date, the limited customer account information that the unauthorized party gained access to includes the customer’s name, mailing address, phone number, email, or the last 4 digits of their Social Security Number, and other basic account details,” the notice reads.
The utility says the attacker did not access bank account numbers, payment card numbers or driver’s license numbers.
Southern Company has not said when the intrusion took place or how the attacker gained access to the portal.
Impacted customers are being notified by mail and email and offered a year of free credit monitoring.
Related: ASOS Confirms Cyberattack, Data Breach
Related: Advantest Discloses Data Breach Months After Ransomware Attack
Related: 8.8 Million Impacted by Data Breach at Denmark’s Central Person Register
Related: Personal Information for Over 1 Million People Stolen in a Cyberattack on Arizona’s Court System
https://www.securityweek.com/georgia-power-alabama-power-data-breach-hits-400000-accounts/
Qilin Ransomware Suspect Arrested in Japan, Extradited to Germany
An alleged member of the Qilin ransomware group was arrested in Japan and subsequently extradited to Germany.
The suspect, a 28-year-old Russian national, was detained in Osaka in May and was reportedly handed over to the German authorities on October 2.
Believed to be a core member of the ransomware gang, the individual was wanted in Germany for hacking into a logistics company in September 2024, encrypting data on its systems, and extorting it of over $160,000 in cryptocurrency.
Also known as Agenda, Qilin has been active since August 2022 and has become one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations, hitting hundreds of organizations worldwide and causing millions of dollars in damages.
In 2024, the group was blamed for hacking into pathology lab services provider Synnovis and causing disruptions at multiple London hospitals run by the National Health Service.
Last year, Qilin claimed responsibility for hacking beer giant Asahi Group. The incident caused operational disruptions and resulted in the personal information of roughly 2 million people being compromised.
Throughout 2025, the group listed 400 victims on its Tor-based leak site, including Lee Enterprises and pharma company Inotiv.
In June this year, Qilin was exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in Check Point VPN and firewall products, tracked as CVE-2026-50751.
In August, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confirmed it had fallen victim to a cyberattack after Qilin added it to its leak site.
Related: FBI Arrests ‘Most Wanted’ Developer of Ploutus ATM Malware
Related: Alleged ShinyHunters Leader Arrested in Jordan
Related: In Rare Move, Alleged Iranian State Hacker Extradited to US
Related: Police Shut Down KillSec Ransomware, Identify Alleged Teen Leader
https://www.securityweek.com/qilin-ransomware-suspect-arrested-in-japan-extradited-to-germany/
Hadrian Raises $40 Million to Expand Autonomous Offensive Security Platform
Attackers use AI to locate and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed; Hadrian offers an agentic offensive security platform that allows defenders to operate at the same speed.
Amsterdam-based Hadrian has raised an additional $40 million in a Series B round, to bring its total funding to $65 million. The new funding was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures.
This new capital will be used to fund expansion across EMEA and the US, and deepen investment in the firm’s engineering and research teams.
Hadrian provides an AI native offensive security platform offering discovery (via Atlas), validation (via Nova), prioritization and remediation. The firm was founded in 2021 by former ethical hackers Rogier Fischer (CEO) and Olivier Beg (chief hacking officer), together with entrepreneur Maurice Clin (head of business development). It develops AI-driven offensive security technology designed to continuously discover, validate, and prioritize externally exposed cyber risks, combining continuous exposure management and agentic penetration testing.
Atlas continuously maps the organization’s external attack surface and uses AI agents to validate which exposures are exploitable. Nova provides on-demand agentic pentesting.
The purpose is to resolve the imbalance in manual pentesting and adversarial probing caused by the increased use of AI by attackers. “Attackers now move at machine speed, but many security teams are years behind, with data showing that 87% of organizations still run manual pentests,” says Hadrian. Manual pentesting struggles to separate importance from noise when only 0.47% of vulnerability scanner findings are genuinely exploitable. That means 99.5% of the alerts teams focus on need no action.
“Everyone can see that AI is changing the threat landscape. It might also hold the answer, but most people are focused on automating the wrong bits,” says Fischer. “We have been working with LLMs since before they went mainstream, and we know that AI can work much faster than any human offensive security team. So, we built a platform that emulates hackers’ attack paths, helping our customers to understand their key risks and prioritize their security resources appropriately.”
By using AI to automate and improve the process, Hadrian claims its customers have seen 10 times greater visibility into critical risks, five times improved ROI over manual pentests, and an 80% faster time to resolution. “Humans set the mission and make the decisions that matter, while AI does the work in between, providing the coverage, repetition and speed that no team can sustain around the clock,” says Hadrian.
Built by former hackers, Hadrian understands how hackers attack. Its agentic system will probe for exploitable pathways with the same machine speed harnessed by today’s AI-assisted attackers. It provides always-on discovery, validation and mobilization of an organization’s most critical cyber risks, autonomously verifying remediation.
Related: A Security Raises $37 Million for Autonomous Offensive Security Platform
Related: Autonomous Offensive Security Firm XBOW Raises $35 Million
Related: Escape Raises $18 Million to Automate Pentesting
Related: Tenzai Raises $75 Million in Seed Funding to Build AI-Powered Pentesting Platform
https://www.securityweek.com/hadrian-raises-40-million-to-expand-autonomous-offensive-security-platform/
Advantest Discloses Data Breach Months After Ransomware Attack
Japanese chip testing giant Advantest is informing individuals that hackers stole personal information in the ransomware attack disclosed in February 2026.
Advantest, which makes automatic test equipment for chipmakers such as Intel and Samsung, said in February that hackers had breached its network and deployed ransomware.
At the time, it was still working to determine whether any sensitive information had been exfiltrated.
In data breach notifications sent out now, the company said the attackers stole personally identifiable information, including names, dates of birth, contact information, SSNs, passport and driver’s license numbers, and medical and financial information.
“We have no information suggesting that your PII has been disclosed publicly or otherwise misused,” Advantest said. “However, this incident may have placed you at increased risk of identity theft or fraud.”
The company has not disclosed how many individuals were impacted by the data breach, but its filing with the California Attorney General’s Office indicates that more than 500 California residents are affected.
Notifications submitted to attorneys general in Massachusetts and Vermont list 14 and 8 affected residents, respectively.
No known ransomware group appears to have taken credit for an attack on Advantest.
Related: ASOS Confirms Cyberattack, Data Breach
Related: Personal Information for Over 1 Million People Stolen in a Cyberattack on Arizona’s Court System
Related: 8.8 Million Impacted by Data Breach at Denmark’s Central Person Register
Related: 250,000 Impacted by Data Breaches at New Jersey, Texas Healthcare Firms
https://www.securityweek.com/advantest-discloses-data-breach-months-after-ransomware-attack/
Brandweek 2026: Why Brand and Performance Should Stop Fighting ft. Nick Fairbairn of Chime
Brand or performance? That’s the wrong question for marketers to ask, according to Nick Fairbairn.
Live from the Marketing Vanguard stage at Brandweek 2026 in Atlanta, Jenny Rooney sits down with Chime SVP of Growth Nick Fairbairn to unpack why brand lift and direct-response accountability belong in the same system.
They also discuss why buying an AI tool does not amount to AI transformation, and why scrappy creative may do more brand-building work than marketers want to admit.
Nick also gets into TV’s messy shift from linear to streaming, executive conversations around brand investment and why creators should perhaps be a part of every channel.
What you’ll learn:
- Why AI adoption needs active leadership instead of waiting for teams to figure it out themselves
- Why buying another AI tool rarely changes how a marketing organization actually works
- How Nick measures TV with the rigor of a performance channel
- Why brand lift and direct-response accountability should sit in the same conversation
- How data can turn a defensive budget discussion into a stronger case for brand investment
- Why lower-production testimonial creative can still move brand equity and consideration
- Why Nick thinks creators should eventually become part of every marketing channel
- This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Brandweek 2026 and presented in partnership with Tatari.
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About our guest:
Nick Fairbairn is senior vice president of growth at Chime, where he leads a broad growth organization spanning paid media, organic growth, go-to-market, lifecycle, product, engineering and onboarding.
His career started in media buying, including television and radio, before he moved into agency entrepreneurship and then brand-side marketing. Along the way, he’s worked at ProFlowers, helped build acquisition at Dollar Shave Club during the DTC era, led startup growth and later joined Chime to build its product marketing capabilities before moving into his current growth role.
Episode highlights:
[08:49] Buying an AI Tool Is Not Transformation — Nick is candid about getting AI wrong. He says he has made the mistake of buying tools out of the box and assuming they would work, only to discover that software alone changes very little. Real transformation takes use-case testing, product understanding, intentional workflow design and people willing to change how they work. The purchase is the easy part. Adoption is the actual job.
[09:15] Treat TV Like a Performance Channel — Nick has treated television with performance-style accountability for years. That means looking at traffic spikes, enrollment and real-time signals rather than stopping at awareness. At Dollar Shave Club, he used a full-funnel model to make the case for a Super Bowl investment: map the unaware audience, estimate movement into consideration, then capture that demand through direct response. His point: brand investment does not have to mean abandoning measurement.
[14:22] Scrappy Creative Can Still Build Brand — Nick’s Brandweek 2026 hot take: marketers may be overestimating how much polish is required to build brand equity. Chime has seen testimonial-style creative move consideration and brand-love measures alongside (and sometimes better than) more cinematic work. His argument is not that premium creative is dead, rather that production value should not be confused with brand impact.
[15:15] Creators Should Become Part of Every Channel — Nick sees creator marketing evolving beyond its own budget line or channel. The bigger shift, in his view, is weaving creator-led thinking across the broader media and creative mix. Top-down brand storytelling will still matter, but the balance is changing. His provocative shorthand: creators should eventually account for a significant share of every channel, rather than being treated as a separate tactic sitting off to the side.
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/brandweek-2026-why-brand-and-performance-should-stop-fighting-ft-nick-fairbairn-of-chime/
Disney+ Gets Into Big Game, Will Stream Super Bowl 61
Disney+ is becoming an MVP for the House of Mouse.
CEO Josh D’Amaro already noted that he wants Disney+ to be the digital centerpiece of the company, and the platform took another step towards that on Wednesday, with the company announcing that Disney+ will stream Super Bowl 61.
With the news, Disney+ joins ESPN and ABC in broadcasting the upcoming Super Bowl. It’s the first time Disney/ABC has had the game in two decades.
ESPN’s Super Bowl broadcast is available on Disney+ in both English and Spanish. Additionally, Disney+ will stream ESPN’s Super Bowl in more than 55 international markets, and ESPN’s linear platforms will air in more than 130 countries and territories.
Besides the Super Bowl, two Monday Night Football games airing on ESPN and ABC will also be available on Disney+ in the fall as a lead-up to the Big Game, the company said. That will include the Dallas Cowboys at Philadelphia Eagles on Monday, Oct. 26.
Disney previously announced it was seeing unprecedented demand for the Big Game from advertisers, with inventory selling out in August. The company said it had 58 brands across 34 distinct categories, including financial services, candy, personal care, and software.
According to a source familiar with Disney’s Super Bowl deals, in-game national advertisers will be pass-through on all digital endpoints, including Disney+. There are also additional in-game opportunities that are exclusive to streaming platforms, including Fubo, ESPN Unlimited, Hulu Live, and Disney+.
ADWEEK previously reported that media buyers said Disney was seeking as much as $12 million for a 30-second national Super Bowl spot.
CTV is crowded—want to learn how brand fundamentals cut through the noise? Enroll in The ADWEEK MiniMBA in Marketing and build a strategy designed to last. Sign up here.
https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/disney-gets-into-big-game-will-stream-super-bowl-61/
Chrome 155 Update Patches 247 Vulnerabilities
Four critical-severity use-after-free defects were fixed in Chromecast, Browser, Navigation, and Track.
The post Chrome 155 Update Patches 247 Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.
https://www.securityweek.com/chrome-155-update-patches-247-vulnerabilities/
Anthropic Introduces 3-Tier Cyber Verification Program for AI Access
Anthropic is integrating the CVP and Project Glasswing into a single offering, with three levels of access to its most capable AI models.
The post Anthropic Introduces 3-Tier Cyber Verification Program for AI Access appeared first on SecurityWeek.
https://www.securityweek.com/anthropic-introduces-3-tier-cyber-verification-program-for-ai-access/
ASOS Confirms Cyberattack, Data Breach
Hackers compromised a third-party communication platform and sent rogue notifications to ASOS users.
The post ASOS Confirms Cyberattack, Data Breach appeared first on SecurityWeek.
https://www.securityweek.com/asos-confirms-cyberattack-data-breach/