GPF Joins Forces with 3 Partners to Strengthen Online Fraud Protection for 1.2 Million Members

Japan's National Police Agency announced on September 18 that a person believed to be a North Korean IT worker applied in May 2025 for an engineer position at the domestic cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer. The applicant attached a résumé to the recruitment form under someone else's identity and applied directly rather than through an intermediary, but the company noticed suspicious behavior and responded, so no hiring or damage resulted. According to the National Police Agency, the applicant accessed the recruitment form using multiple VPN services, listed a Gmail address as contact information, and stated in the résumé a broad range of skills in programming languages, blockchain, and cloud services, along with graduation from a European university and work experience in cities in Europe and Asia. In an online interview, the applicant said they were from Malaysia and living in Finland, but refused to relocate to Japan or work on-site, or said they would agree only if it were six months out, insisted on being paid in cryptocurrency, frequently checked another monitor during the interview, and at times another person's voice could be heard from behind. The National Police Agency and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation believe that the cyberattack group WaterPlum's activities and some of the foreign-currency earning operations by North Korean IT workers are centrally linked to the Workers' Party of Korea's Bureau 313, and the IP addresses used by the group's attackers, the North Korean IT workers, and the applicant to bitFlyer matched.

Microsoft has told federal buyers that a new top government tier of its productivity suite, plus a companion agent-management product, will be available for Government Community Cloud customers to purchase on October 1, with individual capabilities lighting up in phases as each workload clears its required government security accreditation. The new suite layers Copilot, identity and security tooling, and agent-governance controls on top of the prior government tier, with the headline addition being Agent 365, which Microsoft has framed on the commercial side as providing security operations, financial operations, and observability and manageability of token spending across business processes. Microsoft has not disclosed per-seat pricing for the new tier or paid conversion rates from earlier no-cost federal Copilot deployments, leaving any government revenue forecast impossible, and the stock closed at $497.12, down 2.74% over the past year. On the commercial side, net paid seats more than doubled sequentially to over 30 million Copilot seats, while full-year capital expenditures hit $115.95 billion and free cash flow fell 23.19% in the quarter. Analysts carry an average price target of $572.92 with 38 Buy and 14 Strong Buy ratings, and the variable that decides the bull and bear cases is what Microsoft discloses in coming quarters about paid government seat counts and workload authorization progress rather than the October launch itself.

Cloudbrink introduced OnGuard technology that extends a single Cloudbrink security and connectivity policy across users, devices and machines, taking aim at complex multi-product enterprise security stacks. The expanded platform gives enterprises an alternative to deploying and managing separate Cisco products for secure access, internet security, AI security and remote connectivity, consolidating ZTNA, Internet Security, Secure Web Gateway and AI security into one offering. OnGuard allows policy enforcement to begin when a device itself comes online, even before a user logs in, and to continue independently of the user session, with features including instant OnGuard availability, admin authorization, admin session termination, centralized visibility and selective policy control. CEO Prakash Mana said a single Cloudbrink platform can eliminate a significant portion of the Cisco secure-access stack, arguing that Umbrella, AnyConnect, Secure Access and AI Defense still force enterprises to manage multiple technologies, policies and operating models. The expansion builds on existing deployments, including at one U.S. insurance company where Cloudbrink replaced an environment that included Cisco AnyConnect and Fortinet, moving 300 employees on the first day and more than 600 during the first week, after which remote-connectivity support calls "pretty much disappeared," according to its VP of IT.