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As romance scams and fraught relationships proliferate, security teams must identify the risk they pose to the enterprise and take steps to prevent it. While cyber experts share tech advances they love, AWS pursues a sovereign cloud strategy and banks continue on an M&A track.
Caught Up in a Bad Romance: From Heartbreak to Enterprise Security Risk
We’ve all been there. Breaking up is hard to do. And we’ve all heard the stories about love gone wrong, vindictive exes and online romantic scams. While failed romances may break hearts, they can also expose enterprises to serious — and often overlooked — security risks. The threat that breakups and romance- or love-related scams pose to the enterprise is “a widely underestimated” security threat. Those scams, bad breakups, and revenge scenarios “sit at a dangerous intersection of personal life and corporate risk,”fertile ground for threat actors who don’t have to hack systems in the traditional sense but rather can social engineer vulnerable targets.
84% of Banks Have Completed anM&A Deal With an Eye on Modernization
Mergers and acquisitions have long been a reliable way for banks to grow and expand,but now financial institutions, especially community and regional banks stillreliant on legacy systems, are looking to M&A as a catalyst for modernization. M&A activity is still going strong and some banks are moving fast—84 percent of the executives surveyed have completed a deal and 54 percent expected to do so within the next 12 months, according to Beyond the Deal: How Regional Banks Can Turn Mergers into Modernization, a survey by TechStudio™, an EnergizeMarketing® company, in partnership with FIS®. Banks that don’t seize on the chance to modernize post-M&A potentially risk missing out on unlocking the value secreted inside existing tech stacks, data silos, and newly acquired assets and the opportunity to transform to better serve and appeal to customers. While legacy systems still have a lot of value to offer, a merger or acquisition can turn operational complexity into a platform for innovation, building the infrastructure that will underpin open banking, ensure scalability, andleverage fintech partnerships to position institutions for what comes next.That shift is incredibly important as community and regional banks face competitive headwinds from larger financial institutions and fintechs.
Amazon’sSovereign Cloud Is Less About Europe—and More About the Future of Power in Tech
Atfirst glance, the launch of Amazon’s European Sovereign Cloud appears to be a technical response to European regulations: data residency, customer-controlled encryption, EU-based governance, and infrastructure that is “physically and logically separate” from the rest of AWS. Underneath, it is something morestrategic. Amazon is testing whether sovereignty itself can be productized.When AWS CEO Matt Garman calls the launch “a big bet,” he is being unusually candid for a hyperscaler. Scale alone now no longer guarantees legitimacy.For years, Europe’s discomfort with U.S. cloud dominance has simmered without resolution. Regulators worried less about outages and more about jurisdiction: who can compel access to data, under which laws, and during which geopolitical moment. The sovereign cloud exists because trust in global platforms fractured along legal and political lines. Cloud adoption stalled where control blurred.The European Sovereign Cloud operates under a new parent company, locally controlled in the EU and run by EU citizens. It has no critical dependencies on non-EU infrastructure and can continue operating even if communications with the rest of the world are disrupted. Under extreme circumstances, EU-resident AWS employees would retain access to source code replicas to maintain services.
Meta Acquires Singapore-base AI Startup Manus to Scale UpAI Ambitions
Meta has acquired Singapore-based AI startup Manus, a startup that had positioned itself as the world’s first general-purpose AI agent for consumers and businesses, for $2 billion. Manus launched in March 2025, showcasing its ability to autonomously handle complex tasks like writing and deploying code, screening job candidates, and even managing stock portfolios. Within just half a year, the company had attracted millions of users and more than $100 million in recurring revenue, making it one of the fastest time-to-profit startups in the industry. The acquisition of Manus and others reflectMeta and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent pivot toward agentic AI and specialized hardware, which the company plans to integrate into platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Unlike today’s leading AI platforms, Manus’s agent can act on behalf of users across a broad range of tasks by stringing together tools and APIs to accomplish complex workflows. What makes Manus special is that it actually made a profit within such a short timeframe.
Tech Advances We Love to Love
Love is in the air. Not romantic love or proposals or marriages or online scams(though there’s plenty of that floating around as well). This Valentine’s Day,Tech-Channels asked cybersecurity professionals to spill the tea on what they really love—technology. Not every advance is something as life-altering as AI (or cloud or the internet before it). Some tech true loves are more subtle but every bit as important as the tech that sweeps you off your feet. Read on to see what tech our cyber experts choose as partners.
