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Only 23% of ransomware victims paid in Q3 2025, the lowest ever, continuing a six-year decline in payment rates, Coveware reports. Cybersecurity firm Coveware reports that only 23% of ransomware victims paid attackers in Q3 2025, the lowest rate ever recorded. The researchers note this continues a six-year decline in payment rates. After 28% of […]
This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US:
The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles and monitored political discussions online, the Trump administration has been more explicit in who it’s targeting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a new, zero-tolerance “Catch and Revoke” strategy, which uses AI to monitor the public speech of foreign nationals and revoke visas…
SpyChain shows how unverified COTS hardware in small satellites can enable persistent, multi-component supply chain attacks using NASA’s NOS3 simulator. The rise of small satellites has transformed scientific, commercial, and defense operations. Using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts makes them cheaper and faster to build but also introduces new, poorly understood security risks unique to space […]
New report: “Scam GPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud.”
This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception, and more likely to either perpetuate scams or fall victim to them.
AI-enhanced scams are not merely financial or technological crimes; they also exploit social vulnerabilities whether short-term, like travel, or structural, like precarious employment. This means they require social solutions in addition to technical ones. By examining how scammers are changing and accelerating their methods, we hope to show that defending against them will require a constellation of cultural shifts, corporate interventions, and effective legislation…
The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.”
Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items:
First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past year, when compared with the sample size of the spyware market captured in the first Mythical Beasts project. In the first edition, the United States was the second-largest investor in the spyware market, following Israel. In that edition, twelve investors were observed to be domiciled within the United States—whereas in this second edition, twenty new US-based investors were observed investing in the spyware industry in 2024. This indicates a significant increase of US-based investments in spyware in 2024, catapulting the United States to being the largest investor in this sample of the spyware market. This is significant in scale, as US-based investment from 2023 to 2024 largely outpaced that of other major investing countries observed in the first dataset, including Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom. It is also significant in the disparity it points to the visible enforcement gap between the flow of US dollars and US policy initiatives. Despite numerous US policy actions, such as the addition of spyware vendors on the …
The U.S. FBI issued a flash alert to warn of malicious activities carried out by two cybercriminal groups tracked as UNC6040 and UNC6395. The FBI issued a FLASH alert with IOCs for cybercriminal groups UNC6040 and UNC6395, which are increasingly targeting Salesforce platforms for data theft and extortion. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is […]
The NSA and GCHQ have jointly published a history of World War II SIGINT: “Secret Messengers: Disseminating SIGINT in the Second World War.” This is the story of the British SLUs (Special Liaison Units) and the American SSOs (Special Securi…
“Who’s winning on the internet, the attackers or the defenders?”
I’m asked this all the time, and I can only ever give a qualitative hand-wavy answer. But Jason Healey and Tarang Jain’s latest Lawfare piece has amassed data.
The essay provides the first framework for metrics about how we are all doing collectively—and not just how an individual network is doing. Healey wrote to me in email:
The work rests on three key insights: (1) defenders need a framework (based in threat, vulnerability, and consequence) to categorize the flood of potentially relevant security metrics; (2) trends are what matter, not specifics; and (3) to start, we should avoid getting bogged down in collecting data and just use what’s already being reported by amazing teams at Verizon, Cyentia, Mandiant, IBM, FBI, and so many others…
Digital connectivity is reshaping European manufacturing, driving both efficiency and innovation.