The United States Defense Department has ideas about a dramatic strategy for defending Taiwan against a Chinese military offensive that would involve deploying an “unmanned hellscape" consisting of thousands of drones buzzing around the island nation. Meanwhile, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a red-team hacking competition …
Read More »When War Hit Ukraine, They Built a Map to Track Conflict
Roman Pohorilyi was 22 when he started tracking Russian troop movements near Ukraine’s border. It was the fall of 2021, and he and a childhood friend, Ruslan Mykula, had been sharing news about foreign affairs to an audience of about 200 subscribers on a Telegram channel. It was just a …
Read More »The US Government Wants You—Yes, You—to Hunt Down Generative AI Flaws
At the 2023 Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, prominent AI tech companies partnered with algorithmic integrity and transparency groups to sic thousands of attendees on generative AI platforms and find weaknesses in these critical systems. This “red-teaming” exercise, which also had support from the US government, took a step …
Read More »Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports
Thousands of people lined up outside Citi Field in Queens, New York, on Wednesday to watch the Mets face off with the Orioles. But outside the ticketing booth, a handful of protesters handed out flyers. They were there to protest a recent Major League Baseball program, one that’s increasingly common …
Read More »An AWS Configuration Issue Could Expose Thousands of Web Apps
A vulnerability related to Amazon Web Service's traffic-routing service known as Application Load Balancer could have been exploited by an attacker to bypass access controls and compromise web applications, according to new research. The flaw stems from a customer implementation issue, meaning it isn't caused by a software bug. Instead, …
Read More »The Pentagon Is Planning a Drone ‘Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan
It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell. Speaking to The Washington Post on the …
Read More »Geofence Warrants Ruled Unconstitutional—but That’s Not the End of It
The 2024 US presidential election is entering its final stretch, which means state-backed hackers are slipping out of the shadows to meddle in their own special way. That includes Iran’s APT42, a hacker group affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Google’s Threat Analysis Group says targeted nearly a …
Read More »The Slow-Burn Nightmare of the National Public Data Breach
Data breaches are a seemingly endless scourge with no simple answer, but the breach in recent months of the background-check service National Public Data illustrates just how dangerous and intractable they have become. And after four months of ambiguity, the situation is only now beginning to come into focus with …
Read More »Nearly All Google Pixel Phones Exposed by Unpatched Flaw in Hidden Android App
Google's flagship Pixel smartphone line touts security as a centerpiece feature, offering guaranteed software updates for seven years and running stock Android that's meant to be free of third-party add-ons and bloatware. On Thursday, though, researchers from the mobile device security firm iVerify are publishing findings on an Android vulnerability …
Read More »A Single Iranian Hacker Group Targeted Both Presidential Campaigns, Google Says
When Donald Trump's presidential campaign publicly stated last week that it had been successfully targeted by Iranian hackers, the news may have initially seemed like a sign that the Middle Eastern country was particularly focused on the candidate whom it perceived to take the most hawkish approach to its regime. …
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