InTech News #202637

  • September 6, 2026

Four things worth knowing from the week, and one worth doing something about.

Interesting

OpenAI ships GPT-6 “Astra”

OpenAI released its next flagship model this week, with a matching upgrade to ChatGPT and its coding tool Codex. It was the single most-discussed technology story of the week by a wide margin.

What this means for you: If your team already uses ChatGPT, the version they open on Monday will be noticeably more capable than the one they used last month. That is a good thing, but it is also the moment to check you have a written rule about what company information staff may and may not paste into it. Most businesses still do not.
Source: openai.com
Cyber security

Google patches a Chrome flaw already being exploited

Google has fixed CVE-2026-85046, a flaw in Chrome's JavaScript engine that attackers were actively using before the patch existed. It is the sixth Chrome vulnerability of 2026 found to be under attack in the wild. The fix is in Chrome 152.0.7977.82.

What this means for you: Chrome usually updates itself, but only after a restart, and plenty of people have not closed their browser in weeks. Ask your staff to go to Settings, then About Chrome, and restart when prompted. Edge, Brave and Opera are built on the same engine and take a few extra days to get the fix.
Microsoft world

Passkeys arrive properly across Windows and Microsoft 365

From mid-September Microsoft begins a worldwide rollout of synced passkey support in its Windows and Mac apps, along with Entra passkeys on Windows and broader FIDO2 security key support.

What this means for you: Passkeys replace the password and the code from your phone with your fingerprint, face or a hardware key. They are meaningfully harder to phish than an authenticator app, and this rollout is the point at which they become practical to deploy across a whole business rather than for a few enthusiasts. Worth a conversation at your next review.
Apple world

Your Apple Watch is about to lose Walkie-Talkie

watchOS 27 arrives later this month and removes three things. Walkie-Talkie is gone. The Digital Crown double-click that switched between recent apps is gone. And the full app launcher is no longer the default view, replaced by a grid of five suggested apps plus Siri.

What this means for you: Small, but worth a heads-up if anyone on your team actually uses Walkie-Talkie on site, because there is no replacement for it. More generally, this is the reminder that an OS update can quietly take away a feature your staff depend on. If a workflow rests on one, check the release notes before you let the update run.
Source: 9to5mac.com
Business Smarts

Your backup report says success. That is not the same as a restore.

A green tick on a backup report means data was copied. It does not mean it can be put back. The ACSC's own guidance on backing up Microsoft 365 is blunt about this: test the entire backup, not a subset or a spot check, because synchronisation problems and dependencies between systems are often unknown until a full restore is attempted.

It is also worth knowing what Microsoft 365 does and does not do for you. The recycle bin, version history and retention policies will get back a file someone deleted last week. They are not the same as a backup you can lean on after ransomware, after a departed staff member's mailbox is purged, or after a deletion nobody noticed for a year.

What this means for you: Put a restore test in the calendar this quarter and make it a real one: a file, a mailbox and a SharePoint or Teams site, restored to somewhere safe, and timed. The number you want out of it is how long it took, because that is your honest answer when someone asks how quickly the business could be trading again. If nobody can tell you the date of the last successful restore test, that is the finding.
Source: cyber.gov.au
InTech News is curated by the team at 1300 InTech.
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