Good morning. U.S. financial regulators have fined Canaccord Genuity $80 million, reports Risk Journal's Max Fillion, with authorities saying the broker-dealer’s lackluster compliance program allowed fraudulent microcap trades and other suspicious transactions to pass through the company.

• The details: Canaccord on Friday entered parallel settlements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and Wall Street’s self-regulator, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The company agreed to pay $20 million each in the Finra and SEC settlements, with the remaining $40 million allocated to the FinCEN resolution. FinCEN suspended $5 million from the penalty pending a compliance review.
   
• What the firm did: Canaccord, a subsidiary of Canadian-based financial services firm Canaccord Genuity Group, acted as a market maker for microcap companies and executed trades for institutional customers, and repeatedly failed to review and report suspicious trading activity, FinCEN said in its settlement order.
   
• Canaccord's reaction: The company exited its market-making business and significantly reduced the size of its trade execution business, FinCEN said. In a statement, Canaccord executive Michael Auerbach said the company’s board believes the regulatory matters are resolved and the underlying conduct is in the past. The company has taken several steps to strengthen its compliance program in the last three years, including replacing its compliance department leadership, Auerbach added.

Cyber teams brace for new era of AI-powered threats.

Rising geopolitical tensions and the rapid spread of artificial intelligence will require cybersecurity teams to ratchet up defenses for a new era of increasingly sophisticated attacks, Adobe’s top security chief said at the Dow Jones Risk Journal Summit.

With the conflict in the Middle East triggering a surge of cyberattacks against global targets, companies in all industries need to fortify AI deployments across their business systems, while safeguarding against hackers and other cyber adversaries armed with AI capabilities, said Aanchal Gupta, the enterprise software company’s chief security officer.

“For moments like these, you prepare well in advance,” she said.

• Companies should think about data and cybersecurity laws worldwide as competitive advantages rather than just compliance risks, experts from Gibson Dunn and Citi told Risk Journal’s James Rundle.
   
• The former acting commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said that 2026 will be the year that big banks start to fully embrace cryptocurrency.
   

To take a free peek at all of our Risk Journal Summit coverage, including links to talks by Oxford Analytica's Nick Redmond and Dragonfly's Barbara Kelemen, click here. 

White House publishes long-awaited cybersecurity strategy.

The Trump administration published its new cyber strategy Friday, framing digital security in the context of broader geopolitical issues and promising to incentivize the private sector to identify and disrupt cyber adversaries.

Change in approach. Compared with the Biden administration’s 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy, which ran more than 35 pages and detailed dozens of policy initiatives, the new document is far shorter at five pages and sets out broad principles for future policy decisions and priorities. Here is what to know.

This law enforcer is rewriting the playbook for policing companies in Trump 2.0.

Andrew Ferguson has found the formula for antitrust enforcement in the MAGA era: Mix a series of mainstream cases against big business with warning shots at liberal interests and critics of President Trump’s agenda.

In his first year as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Ferguson has steered it closer than ever to the rhythms of the White House, referring to his agency regularly as the “Trump-Vance FTC.” He has leaned in to novel fraud and antitrust theories to pursue right-wing targets like diversity, equity and inclusion programs, transgender healthcare, and media censorship and bias. The president is taking notice.

• Mastercard, BlackRock and Philip Morris International used carbon credits from a remote project in the Brazilian Amazon to offset greenhouse-gas emissions generated by the companies or their clients. The only hitch: The project had been suspended pending an investigation into its validity.
   
• The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday moved to dismiss a civil fraud lawsuit it had filed against crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who became a major investor in President Trump’s crypto projects as he pursued leniency from U.S. law enforcers.
   
• BP has called on shareholders to vote against a resolution that would require it to publish more detailed disclosures on how it takes investment decisions.
   
• Hungarian authorities detained seven employees of Ukraine’s second-largest bank and confiscated more than $80 million in cash and gold they were transporting in two armored trucks from Austria to Ukraine through Hungary, escalating a worsening feud between the two neighbors over oil deliveries.
   
• In a move aimed at easing the flow of Russian oil amid the Gulf energy crisis, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a general license allowing transactions with the German branch of Russia’s Rosneft oil company, Risk Journal reports.
   
• A federal judge has given the Trump administration more time to start refunding the approximately $166 billion it collected from tariffs the Supreme Court recently invalidated.

Iran selects Khamenei’s son as new supreme leader.

Iran has picked Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the country’s new supreme leader, Iranian state media said, echoing the kind of hereditary rule the Islamic Republic once replaced. The 56-year-old cleric is a divisive pick. The younger Khamenei represents continuity from his father and is considered a hardliner, close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the intelligence apparatus.

The choice of a new Iranian leader comes as the price of crude oil surged above $100 a barrel this weekend amid the second week of U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran. West Texas Intermediate oil, the U.S. standard, rose nearly 20% on Sunday evening to $109 a barrel. Gasoline prices were also surging with the rise in the price of oil.

• The Long-Feared Persian Gulf Oil Squeeze Is Upon Us
• The Trillions of Dollars of U.S. Investment at Stake in the Gulf
• Trump Is Rewriting the Iran Endgame in Real Time
• De Facto Wartime Leader Steers Iran’s Defiant Response to U.S.
• How AI Is Turbocharging the War in Iran
• Americans Stranded in the Middle East Say U.S. Left Them to Fend for Themselves

• U.S. military assets, including Patriot missile batteries, are being diverted from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, straining China readiness.
   
• President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that Cuba may be next in line for a U.S. intervention after the war with Iran concludes.
   
• Global food prices broke a five-month downward trend as rising wheat, vegetable oil and meat levels outweighed declines in cheese and sugar prices, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said.
   
• U.S. investigators believe hackers affiliated with the Chinese government are responsible for a cyber intrusion on an internal Federal Bureau of Investigation computer network that holds information related to some domestic surveillance orders, according to people familiar with the matter.
   
• President Trump is sending a blunt message to Latin America: If you’re with us in fighting drug cartels, you need to use your military. And the U.S. stands ready to help.
   
• Europe is gaining an upper hand with the U.S. on trade and defense.

Anthropic’s AI hacked the Firefox browser. It found a lot of bugs..

It took Anthropic’s most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess. The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox’s developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call?

“What else do you have? Send us more,” said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox’s parent organization. Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said.

• President Trump signed an executive order Friday directing diplomatic, law enforcement and national security agencies to dismantle cybercriminal outfits.

• There's been a surge in natural gas prices after the largest LNG export facility on earth was shut down by an attack from Iran. But Americans aren’t likely to feel much pain from higher power bills as they did four years ago when energy markets were shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, analysts say.
   
• Kalshi is pushing to expand its prediction markets business beyond the sports bets that have powered its growth by attracting more women users.
   
• MacKenzie Scott has given away over $26 billion since 2019, including $7.17 billion in a roughly one-year period ended in December 2025. The gifts routinely shock recipients. There is no formal application process, and no public list of employees or advisers to which to lob an appeal.
   
• The home of a famous 1773 tea party is revolting again, this time over coffee, and in particular Dunkin’ Donuts.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Send tips to our reporters Max Fillion at max.fillion@dowjones.com, Mengqi Sun at mengqi.sun@wsj.com and Richard Vanderford at richard.vanderford@wsj.com.

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