The Handover
Friday 30 October 2026
The day in 7 stories, as Asia signs off and New York wakes up.
Crypto
FBI blames North Korea for $6.3bn Binance hack; exchange restores 90% of stolen tokens
Binance says its initial breach probe points to a compromised engineer's laptop, with an estimated $6.3 billion impact. It says about $3 billion in affected assets has been frozen.
Security
Critical PHP flaw puts 70% of websites at risk as agencies urge patches
A critical flaw in PHP, used by more than 70% of websites, prompted European governments and the Port of Rotterdam to take sites offline. Cyber agencies are urging developers to apply patches.
Business
Wall Street on edge after $1.4 trillion wipeout across Big Tech
Alphabet lost close to US$500 billion in a record one-day slump. Australian share futures still pointed to a modestly higher open.
Business
Amazon shares fall after Q3 profit miss despite AWS growth at its fastest pace in nearly five years
Amazon shares fell more than 7% after hours as third-quarter revenue and profit missed expectations. CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon expects to spend “meaningfully more” in 2027.
Security
Researchers find 'Embrace' flaws in five AI developer tools; OpenAI, Microsoft bugs unpatched
Forever Security found embedded-browser flaws in five AI developer tools that could allow code execution or file theft. Cursor and GitHub Copilot have been patched; flaws in Microsoft's VS Code and OpenAI's Codex remain unpatched.
AI research
AI agents can inherit malicious commands from poisoned pretraining data
UC Berkeley researchers showed AI agents could execute attacker-chosen commands after learning from poisoned pretraining data. Clean agent training did not necessarily remove the inherited backdoors.
The Handover is the day in a handful of stories, weekday evenings at 8pm your time, and a thread on X at 7am in New York and in London. Get it by email or push from your account, or subscribe by email.
Also posted as a thread on X: @zotpaper.