THE DAILY BRIEF

Intel shares jumped 23.6% on Friday, marking their strongest single day since October 1987, as investors responded to signs of renewed competitive strength driven by AI chip demand. The stock is up 124% year-to-date.

► Intel's resurgence breaks its years-long manufacturing and market-share decline, potentially reshaping the AI chip landscape beyond Nvidia's dominance.

A Federal Reserve study found that US programmer job growth has dropped roughly 50% since ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, making software engineers among the professional groups most visibly impacted by generative AI adoption.

► This is the first hard labor-market evidence that AI is directly displacing coding jobs, not just augmenting them—forcing career planning conversations across the industry.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre officially ceased recommending passwords, instead endorsing passkeys—login methods stored on users' devices that resist phishing and breaches. The shift signals mainstream readiness for password-free authentication.

► A major government security authority abandoning password guidance legitimizes the infrastructure shift tech companies need to move users toward more secure, frictionless authentication.

US and UK cybersecurity agencies warned of custom Firestarter malware that persists on Cisco Firepower and Secure Firewall devices despite security updates and patches targeting Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software.

► Malware that survives vendor patching on perimeter defenses represents a critical threat-model failure that could compromise entire enterprise networks upstream of detection systems.