Tag Archives: Policy

Iran-linked hackers disrupt operations at US critical infrastructure sites

Hackers working on behalf of the Iranian government are disrupting operations at multiple US critical infrastructure sites, likely in response to the country’s ongoing war with the US, a half-dozen government agencies are warning. In an advisory published Tuesday, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy,… Read More »

Thousands of consumer routers hacked by Russia’s military

The Russian military is once again hacking home and small office routers in widespread operations that send unwitting users to sites that harvest passwords and credential tokens for use in espionage campaigns, researchers said Tuesday. An estimated 18,000 to 40,000 consumer routers, mostly those made by MikroTik and TP-Link, located in 120 countries, were wrangled… Read More »

Trump gets data center companies to pledge to pay for power generation

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that a large collection of tech companies had signed on to what it’s calling the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. By agreeing, the initial signatories—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI—are saying they will pay for the new generation and transmission capacities needed for any additional data centers they build.… Read More »

County pays $600,000 to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security

Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation. The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based… Read More »

Millions of people imperiled through sign-in links sent by SMS

“We argue that these attacks are straightforward to test, verify, and execute at scale,” the researchers, from the universities of New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, and the firm Circle, wrote. “The threat model can be realized using consumer-grade hardware and only basic to intermediate Web security knowledge.” SMS messages are sent unencrypted. In past years, researchers… Read More »

Hegseth wants to integrate Musk’s Grok AI into military networks this month

On Monday, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he plans to integrate Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks later this month. During remarks at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas reported by The Guardian, Hegseth said the integration would place “the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department.”… Read More »

The nation’s strictest privacy law just took effect, to data brokers’ chagrin

Californians are getting a new, supercharged way to stop data brokers from hoarding and selling their personal information, as a recently enacted law that’s among the strictest in the nation took effect at the beginning of the year. According to the California Privacy Protection Agency, more than 500 companies actively scour all sorts of sources… Read More »

Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size

Cloudflare’s proxy service has limits to prevent excessive memory consumption, with the bot management system having “a limit on the number of machine learning features that can be used at runtime.” This limit is 200, well above the actual number of features used. “When the bad file with more than 200 features was propagated to… Read More »

Feds seize $15 billion from alleged forced labor scam built on “human suffering”

Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims. Such “pig butchering” scams have operated for years. They typically work when members of the operation initiate conversations… Read More »