In Case You Missed It:  Kraken Raises $800 Million, Files for IPO, AI Fails Within Enterprises, WH Loosens Restrictions on AI Chip Sales to China But Goes After Resellers

Last week, the White House gave the go-ahead for Nvidia to sell high-powered AI chips to China but the Justice Department cracked down on resellers, extracting a guilty plea from Alan Hao Hsu and Hao Global, while cybercriminals are becoming a lot more polished and sophisticated in the tactics and techniques to evade detection.

The 95% Illusion: Why Generative AI Is Failing Inside Enterprises and What That Failure Really

Generative AI has dominated boardroom agendas, but the latest data from MIT’s NANDA initiative offers a sobering truth: 95 percent of corporate pilots aren’t delivering measurable business impact. A gap is widening between companies experimenting with AI and those translating it into profit, according to the GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 report, based on interviews with 150 leaders, surveys from 350 employees, and analysis of 300 public deployments. MIT also found that over half of AI budgets flow into sales and marketing tools, even though the highest ROI comes from automating procurement, finance, and operational workflows. Back-office AI doesn’t make headlines, but it quietly eliminates outsourcing costs and speeds up processes that drive profitability.

Kraken Files for $800 Million Funding Round and Files for IPO

Just a day after Kraken, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that it had been valued at $20 billion after raising $800 million in fresh funding, the company announced it had confidentially filed for a US initial public offering (IPO), aiming to go public by the first quarter of 2026. The latest financing round was led by several institutional investors, including $200 contributed by Citadel Securities. Kraken’s success story is just one in a series of major investments in the crypto industry, following strong debuts for other exchanges like Gemini and Bullish and stablecoin issuers like Circle. The improved politically and regulatorily favorable climate in the US is undoubtedly what’s driving the push, which follows the enactment of the crypto-friendly GENIUS Act earlier in 2025.

White House Loosens Restrictions on AI Chip Sales to China But Goes Hard on Questionable Resellers

The White House is sending mixed signals when it comes to the sale of high-performance computer chips needed to power AI systems, recently loosening restrictions on sales to China but stepping of prosecutions of businesses and individuals who do the same. Just last week, Chinese American citizen Alan Hao Hsu and his company Hao Global pleaded guilty to diverting AI chips to Chinese companies. Cyberscoop estimates that the businessman and his company have moved more than 7,000 NVIDIA H100 and H200 Tensor Core GPUs.

Cybercriminals Have Upped Social Engineering Tactics

Cybercriminals are becoming a lot more polished and sophisticated in the tactics and techniques to evade detection, according to a quarterly report from the HP Threat Research Team. For example, bad actors in Colombia are emailing legal warnings that send targets to a fake government website. From there a Scalable Vector Graphics file uses an auto scroll animation to victims create a one-time password—and then, surprise, malware is loaded onto their systems. Other tactics detailed in the report are the use of fake Adobe-branded PDF that takes users to a fake site to update PDF reader software and hosting malicious payload on Discord servers so that malicious payloads can bypass the Windows 11 Memory Integrity feature to install the Phantom Stealer info-stealer.

Attackers Keep on Exploiting Zero-Day in Git Service Gogs

Bad actors have been busy since December 1 exploiting a zero day in Gogs, the self-hosted Git service. A Shodan scan revealed more than 1,400 exposed servers—half of which were public-facing on the internet, according to a report from Wiz researchers. A fix is in the works but the exploitation of CVE-2025-8110, a symlink bypass of CVE-2024-55947, which was previously patched. The vulnerability allows authenticated users to overwrite files outside the confines of the repository. And can lead to remote code execution (RCE).

.