IT Essentials: The ghost in the machine

A haunted house of nasty surprises is waiting to ambush the unsuspecting

One spectre looms large over the tech industry this spooky season.

Climate change, at least in southern England, has put a stop to the idea of chilly autumn nights; nights where we draw in close around a bonfire, hunching over a steaming drink and glancing at the encroaching darkness behind us.

It’s now more common during Q3 results season to hunch over a glowing monitor and watch the encroaching darkness in front of us, as stock prices bounce around with no relation to reality.

Take the latest news about Nvidia, the world’s first $5 trillion company. Its stock is now trading at 35 times revenue, supported almost wholly by AI chip sales. As ThreatLocker CEO Danny Jenkins told Stuart Sumner this week, Nvidia would need to increase chip shipments to more than 10 times their current level to match that valuation – clearly a bonkers idea.

Well, the stock market has never been a rational place; it’s driven by hype and vibes as much as reality. And nothing today approaches the level of hype as that surrounding generative and agentic AI.

We’ve written before about the AI bubble and the circular investing supporting the market (Microsoft owns a lot of OpenAI, which buys Microsoft tech, etc). The scariest prospect this Halloween is that bubble popping. With just five tech firms representing an outsize proportion of the Nasdaq, a bursting bubble could, as Penny Horwood observed, detonate a bomb underneath the US – and thus global – economy.

Spirits and ghouls and boogeymen

One spectre does not a haunted house make, but don't worry: there are plenty more monsters waiting in the wings.

AI browsers are one such ghoul, feasting on your data to give an optimised online experience – or so the developers would have you believe.

But far from the next iteration of browsing, these tools create a massive security hole. Every agentic AI browser on the market today – Opera’s Neon, Perplexity’s Comet, OpenAI’s Atlas – has already been exploited, often through jailbreaking or prompt injection. In a browser merging the control and data planes, that’s a worrying concept.

Agentic browsers need more development before they’re safe to be rolled out to the masses, so make sure you protect yourself and your data if you experiment with them today.

And finally, like a zombie, Tata Consultancy Services continues to lurch from crisis to crisis.

It was back in May that TCS was first linked to the cyberattacks that battered UK retail in the spring. The most notable victim of that crime spree, Marks & Spencer, this week severed helpdesk ties with the Indian outsourcing giant.

As well as M&S, Jaguar Land Rover is a notable TCS customer (in fact wholly owned by TCS’ parent company), as is the Co-op. All have suffered incidents this year, begging the question: how much reputational damage can the company take before it slumps to the floor?

TCS is massive, but even the most resilient body can’t be reanimated forever.

Deepfakes have loomed over the security sector for years, and now companies are moving to counter the threat. Samara Lynn examined some of the tools available today.

Geospatial data is hot property, and it goes far beyond cartography. John Leonard sat down with Tim Chilton of Ordnance Survey to find out more.

And Stuart Sumner talked with the CEOs of ThreatLocker and Ingram Micro at our sister brand CRN's XChange Best of Breed conference to ask them about their work, their plans and whether AI really is a bubble.