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A malicious threat actor has exploited a misconfigured instance of Open WebUI, a widely-used self-hosted AI interface with over 95,000 stars on GitHub, designed to enhance large language models (LLMs). This incident underscores the growing risks associ…
Threat actors have increasingly turned their attention to exploiting misconfigurations in DevOps-managed web servers to deploy malicious payloads. Recent investigations into web server vulnerabilities reveal a sophisticated pattern of attacks targeting…
A recent wave of malicious NPM packages has emerged as a significant threat to cryptocurrency users, specifically targeting Ethereum wallet holders. Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a sophisticated campaign where attackers leverage the widely-u…
Smuggled Ukrainian drones struck dozens of bombers at airfields across Russia over the weekend. “The spectacular operation, known as Spiderweb, was prepared in secret over 18 months. Ukraine’s agents moved short-range drones and explosives inside Russia before they were launched remotely for a coordinated strike on Sunday that was intended to strike at Moscow’s air superiority,” reported The Guardian, whose “Operation Spiderweb: a visual guide to Ukraine’s destruction of Russian aircraft” offers video, maps, photos, and diagrams.
The operation’s 117 drones hit more than one-third of “the strategic cruise missile carriers stationed at airbases,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told press. Read more, here.
Capital Alpha’s Byron Callan: “The creativity of the Ukrainian strike should get countries thinking much harder about sheltering combat aircraft and defense against short-range UAS – that will cost money. It’s not a good idea to park aircraft out in the open where they can be easily destroyed. We don’t know how this could shape thinking about 1) investment in air defense; 2) investment in strategic bombers, tankers, and other special mission aircraft; and 3) construction to harden bases.”
Also: two Russian railroad bridges collapsed over the weekend. It was not immediately clear whether these were among the dozens of incidents of sabotage since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but Russian officials said they are treating them as “acts of terrorism.” (Moscow Times)
All that was prelude to the resumption of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine today in Istanbul. Just over an hour’s worth of talks produced an agreement to “swap all severely wounded and ill prisoners of war and to exchange the bodies of thousands of fallen soldiers,” ABC News reported, citing Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who added that the sides also discussed a possible meeting between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Recap, per ABC: “Ukraine is calling for a full 30-day ceasefire during which time peace negotiations can take place. Russia has refused the request, with Putin and his top officials retaining maximalist war goals dating back to the opening days of the Russian invasion”—e.g., demands that Ukraine disarm, cede four of its regions plus Crimea to Russia, and promise to never join NATO. Read on, here.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Bradley Peniston wth Jennifer Hlad. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1941: USS Long Island (CVE-1) was commissioned, the first of 120-plus escort carriers the United States built for World War II.
The Trump White House released some more details about its 2026 budget proposal in a 1,224-page document on Friday afternoon. The doc includes “only a basic outline for $893 billion in military spending,” and no details on “total troop numbers or specifics on weapons purchases,” Air & Space Forces Magazine wrote.
The Department of the Air Force would get $260.8 billion for the Air Force and Space Force. That’s up $3.7 billion, or 1.4 percent—which is “roughly half the rate of inflation for 2024, which was 2.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” wrote A&SFM’s Rachel Cohen.
What’s next? “The Republican-led tax-and-spending package, dubbed ‘the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ that has passed the House and is awaiting Senate action would add at least $23.5 billion for Air Force and Space Force programs starting in 2025.”
“The increasingly fragmented budget process in Washington makes it difficult to compare funding across fiscal years,” Cohen adds. Read that, here.
Additional reading:
The plan describes what Britain will do as it ups defense spending to 2.5% of GDP, including “create a British Army which is 10 times more lethal” by combining capabilities with air defence, long-range weapons and other technologies. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday. The Evening Standard has key points, here.
Army scrambles to improve drone training. As drones move toward the center of modern combat, U.S. Army units are racing to invent ways to give soldiers the training they need. That includes exploring virtual and small-scale, home-station training environments to get more practice in between larger training exercises, leaders told reporters Friday after Exercise Arcane Thunder in Europe.
“I mean, the Army’s spent 250 years perfecting places where we can shoot tanks and shoot helicopters and rifles and all those things,” said Maj. Gen. John Rafferty, who commands the 56th Artillery Command in Wiesbaden, Germany. “And so we have to really work hard to find the places where we can train, to bring all these multi-domain capabilities together.” Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more, here.
INDOPACOM brings AI to wargaming exercise. “The Pentagon has long sought to realize the potential of artificial intelligence to help commanders; now U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is about to use AI-powered decision aids in a signature tabletop exercise, D1’s Lauren C. Williams reports. That exercise begins today.
“INDOPACOM will put its work on the Thunderforge project to use during the second half of its annual Pacific Sentry exercise, in which headquarters staff and command components square off against a simulated enemy, the command’s director of requirements and resources said Thursday.” Read on, here.
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Cybersecurity researchers have identified a sophisticated malware campaign utilizing deceptive CAPTCHA interfaces to distribute EddieStealer, a Rust-based information stealing malware that targets sensitive user data across multiple platforms. The atta…
Advanced threat actors have developed sophisticated stealth syscall execution techniques that successfully bypass modern security infrastructure, including Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), Sysmon monitoring, and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) sy…
The nonprofit research organization MITRE has unveiled a comprehensive roadmap designed to guide organizations through the critical transition from current cryptographic standards to quantum-resistant algorithms. This strategic framework addresses the …
The Cofense Phishing Defense Center has uncovered a highly strategic phishing campaign that leverages Google Apps Script a legitimate development platform within Google’s ecosystem to host deceptive phishing pages. This attack, masquerading as an invoi…
After Trump pulled aid to allied countries, AFRICOM asks for help deterring terrorism. U.S. Africa Command, which does everything from helping the Somalian military target strikes on al-Shabaab to sending Army civil affairs soldiers to build schools in Cameroon, is working out what their new role on the continent will look like as the U.S. halts aid that was meant to stabilize those countries and make it easier for them to defend themselves, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday.
“Some things that we used to do, we may not do anymore,” AFRICOM commander Marine Gen. Michael Langley, speaking from the 2025 African Chiefs of Defense Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, told reporters Thursday. “So we’re asking you to step up and burden-share with us.”
Langley called the African Sahel region “the epicenter of terrorism on the globe.” The region includes Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. “It is the flash point of prolonged conflict and growing instability,” he said.
And around the Horn of Africa, which is the stomping ground for al-Shabaab terrorists around Mogadishu, “They’re making assumptions that there’s going to be gaps in aid in certain regions across Somalia, and there’s shadow governments,” Langley said. “They’re trying to exploit that scene.”
In the meantime, China can and has stepped in to provide aid to Africa and otherwise fill gaps left by the U.S., though their influence model depends more on lending to African governments, Myers writes. Read the rest, here.
The Air Force Reserve is on track to lose nearly half of its fighter jets by the end of the decade, a course its top general warns could sideline the force in conflicts and deepen the military’s pilot crisis, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported Thursday.
Background: The Air Force is retiring those and other aircraft to free up money for newer technology and modernization, but active-duty forces are prioritized over the part-time Reserve and National Guard components. And unlike the Guard, the Reserve lacks gubernatorial advocacy, making it more vulnerable.
Involved: The F-16 aggressor squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, is to shut down this year. The F-16 unit at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Florida, and the A-10 units at Davis-Monthan, Whiteman, and Moody Air Force Base are slated to close in the following years, Lt. Gen. John Healy, chief of the Air Force Reserve, said during an interview at the Pentagon.
Also notable: Over the past two years, 200 pilots left active duty without moving to the Reserve because of a lack of modern aircraft, the general recently told Congress. As of now, only one Reserve fighter squadron is set to receive new aircraft: the 301st Fighter Wing in Fort Worth, Texas. That unit received its first four F-35s in November, and is slated to have all 26 jets by 2027. Continue reading, here.
The Army is set to meet its recruiting goal early and could go beyond it this year thanks in part to 14,000 who signed up last year, Military-dot-com reported Thursday.
Topline read: “As of Monday, the Army had brought in 59,875 new active-duty enlisted soldiers with a total goal of 61,000 for fiscal 2025, which ends Sept. 30,” reporter Steve Beynon writes. The 2024 batch had “delayed shipping to basic training due to school obligations or training capacity issues,” he explained.
Now officials are talking about how to absorb the excess. “With the Army expected to hit its target in the next week or two, the Pentagon is weighing whether to invoke a little-used and relatively obscure authority that allows the defense secretary to increase a service’s end strength by up to 3% without congressional action,” Beynon reports. “The other option, a 4% increase, would require approval from Capitol Hill.” Continue reading, here.
Commentary: “The U.S. Army is too light to win,” Dr. Richard D. Hooker, Jr. is a Senior Fellow with The Atlantic Council and a Senior Associate with the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, writes for Defense One.
His advice: Re-equip light brigades with protected, wheeled transport mounting heavy weapons; restore their antiarmor companies; increase the density of Javelin anti-tank and Stinger air defense systems across light formations; replace towed light artillery with wheeled, 155mm systems like the French Caesar or German RCH-155; reverse the deactivation of divisional air cavalry squadrons; and arm divisional UH-60 assault helos with the Hellfire antitank missile system. Read the rest, here.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2024, Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to be found guilty in a criminal case when he was convicted of falsifying business records to hide payments made to a pornographic film actress to buy her silence ahead of the 2016 election.
Update: Sub-maker General Dynamics’ Electric Boat agreed to a 30% wage increase following talks this week with the United Auto Workers, Reuters reported Wednesday. “The ratification comes over a month after members authorized a strike, demanding cost-of-living adjustments to keep up with inflation,” the wire service writes.
IVAS, resurrected? Palmer Luckey of defense contractor Anduril is working with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg again, this time on a contract to build new headsets for the U.S. Army, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
TLDR: “Meta and Anduril have jointly bid on an Army contract for VR hardware devices, worth up to about $100 million,” the Journal’s Heather Somerville writes. “The contract is intended to vet headset prototypes that are part of a larger $22 billion Army wearables project, of which Anduril became the lead vendor in February after Microsoft failed to deliver a functional VR headset.
And if the Army doesn’t want it? “Anduril said the collaboration on the headsets…is going forward irrespective of winning the Army contract. Anduril is betting other parts of the military will also be buyers,” the Journal reports.
ICYMI: “Anduril is among the leading candidates to help build Trump’s Golden Dome, an elaborate and expansive plan to protect America from high-tech missiles.” More, here.
In development: Northrop Grumman just put $50 million into a space startup to boost the development of a new rocket, Reuters reported Thursday. The Texas-based startup is called Firefly Aerospace, and Grumman’s “Eclipse” rocket is scheduled to launch off the coast of Virginia sometime in early 2026.
Notable: “Firefly gained prominence in the space race after becoming the second private firm to score a moon landing in a successful first attempt with its uncrewed Blue Ghost spacecraft earlier this year.” More, here.
Chart crazy: “America Let Its Military-Industrial Might Wither. China’s Is Booming,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (gift link) in an explainer featuring two dozen different charts.
See also:
The State Department is moving forward with a plan to eliminate or consolidate more than 300 of its offices and bureaus, including various national security offices, as well as units that cover Asia and the Middle East, Eric Katz and David Dimolfetta reported Thursday for Government Executive.
The plans could lead to a reduction of more than 3,400 employees and 45% of its structural entities, according to documents provided to lawmakers and employees on Thursday.
Why it matters: The plans presented Thursday offer more detail than those first laid out by State Secretary Marco Rubio in April, though the number of employee reductions was first reported by GovExec earlier this month. For details on which divisions will see reductions, go here.
Coming soon: Federal job applicants will soon be quizzed on their favorite Trump administration policy as part of the hiring process, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s new “merit hiring plan,” Erich Wagner of GovExec reported Thursday.
Background: The plan is a hodgepodge of bipartisan reforms developed under both Trump and former President Biden to accelerate and improve the hiring process, alongside plans to eradicate longstanding efforts to make the federal workforce more reflective of the American populace.
OPM said it will expand its recruiting efforts particularly at religious colleges and universities, homeschooling and other faith-based groups, an apparently conservative spin on the Biden administration’s efforts to step up recruitment at historically black colleges and universities.
The questionnaire also queries job applicants on their patriotism, “commitment to the Constitution” and the country’s “founding principles.” Said one federal human resources official: “Everything in it will make it more difficult to hire, not less. How the f— do you define if someone is patriotic?” More, here.
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Security officials and extremism researchers say federal coordination for preventing terrorism and targeted violence has evaporated.