Tag Archives: national-security

washington’s biggest problem these days isn’t partisanship. It’s that far-right lawmakers are living in their own reality. Extremist Republicans have broken off from the rest of their party to create an alternate universe in which they’re in charge, empowered by Donald Trump’s followers. This disconnect is fueling an internal GOP …

Mandiant researchers published findings this week about a newly revealed Chinese espionage operation that used Sogu malware to spy on the African operations of both European and US organizations. The campaign is significant for the scope of its victims, but also because attackers used a classic malware distribution method: thumb …

China-linked hackers are increasingly moving beyond espionage and into the disturbing world of power grid attacks. Threat researchers at security software firm Symantec this week released new evidence that the Chinese hacking group known as APT41 infiltrated the power grid of an Asian nation. Some details of the latest intrusion …

When it comes to artificial intelligence, United States senators are looking to the titans of Silicon Valley to fix a Senate problem—a problem today’s political class perpetuates daily with their increasingly hyper-partisan ways, which generative AI now feeds off of as it helps rewrite our collective future. Today, the Senate …

The loose nexus of Chinese-origin cyberspies collectively called APT41 is known for carrying out some of the most brazen hacking schemes linked to China over the past decade. Its methods range from a spree of software supply chain attacks that planted malware in popular applications to a sideline in profit-focused …

This article was copublished with The Markup, a nonprofit, investigative newsroom that challenges technology to serve the public good. Sign up for its newsletters here. Less than 10 days after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, Axon Enterprises CEO Rick Smith announced the company had …

Senior United States intelligence officials met privately in Virginia yesterday with over a dozen civil liberties groups to field concerns about domestic surveillance operations that have drawn intense scrutiny this summer among an unlikely coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the US Congress. The closed-door session, convened at the …

The United States Department of Treasury and United Kingdom Foreign Office announced today that they have sanctioned 11 people for their alleged involvement in the Trickbot cybercriminal gang. The US Department of Justice also unsealed indictments against nine people whom it says are connected to Trickbot and its sibling organization …

For years, some cybersecurity defenders and advocates have called for a kind of Geneva Convention for cyberwar, new international laws that would create clear consequences for anyone hacking civilian critical infrastructure, like power grids, banks, and hospitals. Now the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague has …

For state-sponsored hacking operations, unpatched vulnerabilities are valuable ammunition. Intelligence agencies and militaries seize on hackable bugs when they're revealed—exploiting them to carry out their campaigns of espionage or cyberwar—or spend millions to dig up new ones or to buy them in secret from the hacker gray market. But for …