Church Cyberattacks Expose Member Data, Plus 3 Stories
Church cyberattacks expose member data in South Korea
Church cyberattacks in South Korea may have exposed deeply personal member records at two of the country’s biggest churches. The AI angle is real enough to be interesting without turning this into another story about an autonomous “AI hacker.”
Reuters reports that Yoido Full Gospel Church’s initial analysis indicates data connected to as many as 850,000 members may have been compromised. The exposed information includes names and dates of birth, with a smaller number of records containing national identification details, addresses, and phone numbers. SBS News separately reports that material found on an attacker-controlled server included almost 96,000 more recent Yoido records and donation histories stretching from 1993 through 2019. SaRang Church is investigating its own compromise; Oasis Security says a flaw in its membership system could have exposed data linked to nearly 89,600 registered accounts.
Those figures are describing different slices of the investigations, so I’m not going to add them together and announce a magical “one million victims” number. That would look tidy and prove less than the headline implies.
The AI evidence is similarly worth keeping in proportion. Oasis says attack records included references to “sub-agents” and unusually extensive, standardized handoff reports that appear to have been generated with AI assistance. SBS says investigators found hundreds of those reports. That supports the idea that an attacker used AI tooling to organize or accelerate the intrusion. It does not tell us which model was used, prove that an AI acted independently, or somehow make the very ordinary software vulnerability that let the attacker in disappear.
Technology is rarely just about the technology
Some of the most important technology stories aren’t product launches at all. They’re about health, privacy, education, law, accessibility, work, and what happens when technology reaches ordinary people. Browse more Raymond Tec News for the stories worth understanding without the hype.
The human consequence is more important. Churches and other nonprofits can hold names, addresses, phone numbers, national IDs, family information, and years of donation history without thinking of themselves as custodians of a high-value identity database. Attackers do not care what the organization’s tax status is.
If you’re a member of either church, pay attention to official notifications and be particularly suspicious of messages that know real details about the church, staff, or your giving history. If you run a nonprofit, this is a good time to ask the boring questions: Who can reach the membership system? How quickly do security updates get installed? How much old personal data really needs to remain online? And would your logs tell you what happened if somebody got in last month?
A database does not become less valuable to criminals because the organization that owns it is nonprofit.
Atlassian patches a critical file-read flaw across eight products
Atlassian has patched a critical flaw across eight self-hosted Data Center and Server products, including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye.
CVE-2026-21589 is an arbitrary-file-access vulnerability rated 9.3 under CVSS 4.0. An attacker does not need an account. If the attacker already knows the exact name and path of a file inside the affected application’s web root, the vulnerable server can return it.
That last sentence matters. This is not “browse every file on the server at will.” The flaw does not let an attacker list directories and discover filenames. But configuration files, application artifacts, and other predictable files can still contain exactly the kind of secrets an attacker wants, and every version of the eight affected self-hosted products is vulnerable before the fixed releases.
Atlassian Cloud is already patched. Self-hosted customers are not.
Atlassian has fixed releases for every affected product, and its advice is straightforward: upgrade as soon as possible. If that cannot happen immediately, remove the instance from the public internet and apply the company’s temporary WAF or server-level mitigation. watchTowr also recommends reviewing access logs for suspicious path-traversal requests.
There is no reported exploitation in the wild as of this morning, which is good news. It is not a reason to put this in next month’s patch window. Internet-facing Jira and Confluence servers have enough useful internal information on them without volunteering an unauthenticated file-read bug as an additional feature.
Technical discovery & auditing
The public page doesn’t tell you much about the machinery behind it. Raymond Tec audits inherited and long-running projects to uncover the plugins, integrations, data, dependencies, and old decisions that determine what the next change will really involve.
FICO is cutting 15% of its workforce as AI becomes part of the restructuring
FICO is cutting about 15% of its workforce as part of a restructuring that explicitly includes “AI-driven product development.” Based on the company’s last reported workforce of 3,811 people, Reuters estimates that could mean roughly 570 jobs.
This is one of those stories where “AI eliminated 570 jobs” is cleaner than the facts. It is also not what FICO said.
In an SEC filing, Fair Isaac says it is reducing organizational layers, simplifying its operating structure, optimizing processes and tools, and integrating AI-driven product development. The company expects about $27 million in pretax restructuring charges and says the plan should be substantially complete by the end of its third fiscal quarter of 2027.
At the same time, FICO is dealing with a business problem that has nothing to do with how well a chatbot writes code. Federal housing regulators have opened mortgage underwriting to VantageScore, a competing credit score developed by Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, and Reuters says FICO shares are down about 58% this year amid the regulatory pressure.
So, yes, AI is part of the restructuring. But competitive pressure, a changing mortgage-scoring market, and ordinary cost cutting are in the room too.
That distinction matters because “jobs are changing because of AI” and “this particular person was replaced by AI” are not interchangeable claims. We are going to be seeing a lot more corporate announcements that blend automation, flattening management, slower growth, and competitive pressure into one restructuring. The useful question is what work actually disappears afterward, what gets automated, and what simply gets redistributed to fewer people.
Business IT goes well beyond the website
Your business also depends on workstations, cloud accounts, browsers, Wi-Fi, remote access, collaboration tools, and all the other technology that quietly becomes infrastructure. Raymond Tec works across that whole stack, whether the problem lives on a server, on a desk, or somewhere in between.
Google is paying to add 890 MW of nuclear power to PJM
Google and Constellation Energy have signed one of the largest power deals yet tied to the data-center boom: 3,590 megawatts across the PJM grid, including 890 megawatts of new nuclear capacity created by upgrading existing reactors.
The nuclear piece is a 20-year agreement supporting more than $4.3 billion in Constellation investment at 11 reactor units in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. These are not new reactors. They are uprates: upgrades to turbines, steam generators, controls, and other plant systems that let existing reactors produce more electricity. Google says the first added capacity should arrive in 2028 and the full 890 megawatts should be online before the end of 2032.
There is also a separate 15-year agreement covering another 2,700 megawatts from Constellation’s existing PJM fleet. That power is not all nuclear.
Why does this matter if you do not own a data center? Because PJM serves roughly 67 million people across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, and the fight over who pays for data-center growth is already landing on ordinary electric bills. Reuters notes that PJM capacity prices have risen more than elevenfold since 2024 as the grid struggles with rapidly growing demand.
Google and Constellation say the nuclear uprates are privately funded and structured so other ratepayers do not bear the cost of those projects. That is an important claim, and the “bring your own power” idea is a much better starting point than simply asking everybody else to subsidize another hyperscale load.
It is also not the same thing as saying data centers have no effect on regional electricity prices. They very obviously do. The question is whether deals like this add enough real generation, quickly enough, to make the next wave of computing growth less painful for everybody sharing the same grid.
That is the part I care about. AI infrastructure is finally becoming inseparable from energy policy, because the cloud still has to plug into something.
Still in a reading mood? The Raymond Tec News archive covers security, AI, small-business technology, policy, and the places technology collides with ordinary life — without requiring a computer-science degree to get through it.
Sources / Further Reading
- Reuters: South Korean megachurches probe suspected AI-linked cyberattacks
- SBS News: Two megachurches hit in suspected hack
- Atlassian: CVE-2026-21589 advisory
- watchTowr: CVE-2026-21589 FAQ
- FICO: October 6, 2026 Form 8-K
- Reuters: FICO cuts workforce by 15%
- Google: Why we’re backing America’s existing nuclear plants
- Constellation: Google nuclear agreement
- Reuters: Google enters 3.6-GW power deal with Constellation
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