Barclays' latest Regional Investment Map shows that UK businesses attracted £14.4 billion in equity investment in H1 2026, up 26 percent from H2 2025. Northern Ireland investment rose 63.4 percent to £72.2 million, led by a £53.5 million round for Cloudsmith. Cloudsmith's raise was one of the standout deals driving Northern Ireland's growth.
Dozens of cryptographically verified open source packages from Microsoft were compromised late last week to add advanced credential-stealing code that was triggered when developers opened them in AI coding agents.
Microsoft has cut off access to dozens of its open source projects hosted on GitHub as it investigates how hackers apparently breached the projects and injected password-stealing malware into the code. According to security firm Cloudsmith and community-driven malware analysis site OpenSourceMalware, which were some of the first to flag the hack, the malware allowed the hackers to steal the users’ passwords and other sensitive credentials when they opened the compromised tools in their AI coding apps.