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Socket’s Threat Research Team has exposed a persistent campaign involving over 60 malicious RubyGems packages that masquerade as automation tools for platforms like Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, WordPress, Telegram, Kakao, and Naver. Active since…
How the Mossad secretly recruited Iranian dissidents to attack their country from within.
Some 80% of contractors are relatively small, said the NSA’s head of defense-industry security, who has helped hundreds of them spot thousands of vulnerabilities in their systems.
Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu, also known as Chukwuemeka Victor Eletuo and So Kwan Leung, was extradited from France to the United States to face charges related to sophisticated hacking, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft operations. The 39-year…
A soldier opened fire on his coworkers at Fort Stewart Army base in Georgia, injuring five before he was subdued and taken into custody, Army officials said in a press conference Wednesday afternoon. Two of the wounded remain hospitalized Thursday morning, while three others were released Wednesday, CNN reports.
Latest: The Army awarded the Meritorious Service Medal to six soldiers who intervened in a brief presentation livestreamed Thursday morning at Fort Stewart.
The alleged shooter was a 28-year-old supply sergeant with no prior deployments who used his personal handgun for the violence, Brig. Gen. John Lubas told reporters. He had purchased the 9mm Glock in Florida less than three months ago, the same month he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. The incident Wednesday lasted about 30 minutes, and triggered a lockdown across the base. Investigators are still digging into a possible motive.
Related reading: “Base shooting raises questions about military gun policies,” AP reported separately Wednesday.
Welcome to this Thursday 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 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, enabling the Johnson administration to begin heavy bombing in Vietnam. President Johnson had declared in public that North Vietnamese forces attacked a U.S. destroyer, while privately admitting, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
Commentary: How many nuclear weapons will Beijing build? No one knows, but we can game out some logical endgames, writes Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “Since 2020, China is believed to have tripled its nuclear arsenal to 600 warheads—enough to begin to shift the strategic balance, if still well short of the thousands held by the United States and Russia.”
Will Xi Jinping stop short of 1,000? Seek parity with the 1,550 deployed warheads of the U.S. and Russia? Go beyond? Stokes looks at the likelihoods for Defense One, here.
Spain rejects F-35, will choose between Eurofighter or FCAS. The downselect is a consequence of Spain’s decision to spend some of the funds earmarked for new fighter jets on more immediate needs, in a bid to raise defense expenditures to 2 percent of GDP, a spokesman for the Spanish defense ministry said on Wednesday. The country will buy either the European-made Eurofighter and the tri-national Future Combat Air System. Reuters has a bit more, here.
That makes Spain the latest nation to drop or go wobbly on the F-35 since Trump took office. As New York magazine put it a few months ago: “On March 13, Portugal’s defense minister said that the country would cancel plans to buy the plane. Then Canada’s prime minister said it would reconsider its purchase. Germany, too, is said to be wavering in its commitment to the jet” (though the latter has more recently been thinking about buying more).
What’s going on? Even before Trump returned to office, he and political backer Elon Musk had loudly criticized the F-35, but the real turn came after the second-time president began issuing “threats to forsake or even annex NATO allies,” as Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported back in March.
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Trump’s military will spend $10 million to resurrect a monument to Civil War-era treason at Arlington National Cemetery. The memorial was removed at the recommendation of Congress, and putting it back will take about two years, AP reported Wednesday. “It features a classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, representing the American South, alongside sanitized depictions of slavery.”
SecDef Pete Hegseth: The monument “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it,” the defense secretary wrote on social media Tuesday.
Earlier: Hegseth ordered the military to erase memorials of American servicemembers throughout history as one of his first acts, moving swiftly on the Trump administration’s rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Confederate monument being restored at Arlington was erected in 1914 during a busy decade of such construction and a year before the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the 1915 racist epic, “The Birth of a Nation” by D.W. Griffith—the first film to be screened at the White House. But it’s not the only such monument being restored in the Capitol region more than 100 years later. “The National Park Service is planning to restore and reinstall a statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and Freemason leader, that was toppled during Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020,” NPR reported Tuesday.
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ICE wants young Americans to “Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!” The Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement formally opened up its ranks to 18-year-olds this week, removing its 21-year age limit in an effort to boost Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda and hire 10,000 more staff members.
On the other end of the spectrum, the agency had previously limited potential recruits to as old as 37 or 40, “depending on what position they are applying for,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this week, “We no longer have a cap on how old you can be” to join ICE.
Fine print: Recruits still “have to go through medical and drug screening and complete a physical fitness test,” AP adds.
By the way: DHS officials have twice seemingly appropriated Nazi propaganda posters to boost ICE recruiting in the past month. Army veteran Brandon Friedman shared the posters—and their apparent Nazi-era precedents—on social media Wednesday, here.
On Wednesday, ICE announced a no-bid contract for iris-scanning and facial recognition services that agents can use on their cell phones. The manufacturer—Massachusettes-based Bi2 Technologies—promises positive identification “in seconds from virtually anywhere” using “the nation’s only secure, encrypted, real-time national criminal justice data sharing network.”
“The user can stand or sit as far as 10 to 15 [inches] away from the unit, and even wear glasses or contact lenses without compromising system accuracy,” Bi2 says on its website.
According to the notice, “The [U.S.] Government conducted extensive market research and determined that Bi2 is the only company that can provide the required services.” (Hat tip to Sean Morrow of the nonprofit newsroom More Perfect Union.)
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Anatomy of a redaction: The Trump administration recently released a thinly-redacted, classified report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. In doing so, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard “with the blessing of President Donald Trump, overrode arguments from the CIA and other intelligence agencies that more of the document should remain classified to obscure U.S. spy agencies’ sources and methods,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday (gift link).
The gist: “The document that Gabbard ordered released on July 23 is a 46-page report stemming from a review begun in 2017 by majority Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. It takes issue with U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding earlier that year that Russian President Vladimir Putin developed a preference for Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton and aspired to help him win the election,” veteran intelligence reporter Warren Strobel reports for the Post. However, “Multiple independent reviews, including an exhaustive bipartisan probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee, have found that Putin intervened in part to help Trump,” he adds.
While Gabbard claims the report shows “proof of a deep state conspiracy. The documents themselves tell a much duller story,” Georgetown University researcher Renee DiResta explains, writing Wednesday for Lawfare. One notable consideration: Gabbard is “confusing (or conflating) hacking voting machines with the other forms of interference, such as propaganda and the hack-and-leak efforts, that the later ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment] focused on.”
ICYMI: “Public record contradicts US spy chief’s Russia-gate ‘conspiracy’ accusations,” is how Defense One’s Patrick Tucker put it after Gabbard’s initial release.
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A sophisticated network of hackers with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) unleashed a barrage of cyber-operations designed to disrupt adversaries, steal sensitive data, and propagate ideological narratives. SecurityScorecard…
Threat actors have been deploying a novel antivirus (AV) killer since at least October 2024, leveraging the legitimate ThrottleStop.sys driver to execute Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) tactics. This malware, detected by Kaspersky as Win64.Kil…
SentinelLABS has exposed a sophisticated series of cryptocurrency scams where threat actors distribute malicious smart contracts masquerading as automated trading bots, resulting in the drainage of user wallets exceeding $900,000 USD. These scams lever…
Tomorrow’s counter-drone systems will need to fire without human approval, Pentagon’s joint missile defense commander says. “The ability to accurately discriminate the threat, positively ID the threat, and then have the system auto-select the right interceptor or non-kinetic capability to defeat the threat is where we would definitely like to go,” Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, the head of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense, said Tuesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “We will push the boundaries on that, because we have to.”
Drone swarms are getting too large and too smart to be stopped by systems that rely on human command-and-control, Gainey said, noting Russia’s use of autonomous drones to target civilians. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports from Huntsville, Alabama.
Related: the Army wants AI tools to help keep track of increasingly congested skies. The service recently posted a request for information about ways to ease “the cognitive burden faced by commanders in managing complex airspace operations and maintaining situational awareness in a rapidly evolving battlefield environment.” The Army is looking for near-term “fight tonight” gear, and longer-term ideas to integrate AI and ML into next-generation command-and-control systems, reports Nick Wakeman of Washington Technology, here.
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Welcome to this Wednesday 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 1945, the U.S. military dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing around 70,000 people instantly.
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met with Vladimir Putin for about three hours Wednesday at the Kremlin, Putin’s state-run media TASS reports. Witkoff, a real-estate billionaire before Trump tapped him for the diplomatic post, had earlier met with Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s envoy for investment and economic cooperation, at Moscow’s Zaryadye Park, TASS reported separately.
Trump set a Friday deadline for some kind of progress in talks over the future of Putin’s Ukraine invasion, which has been ongoing for nearly three and a half years. The U.S. will consider imposing tariffs on Russia and its allies as well as so-called “secondary sanctions” on countries buying Russian exports if no progress is achieved by Friday, Trump has said. “He is exerting particular pressure on India, which along with China is a huge buyer of Russian oil,” Reuters reports, adding, “It was not clear what Russia might offer to Witkoff in order to stave off Trump’s threat.”
Neither side is saying much just yet. “On our part, in particular on the Ukrainian issue, some signals were transmitted,” a top Putin aide told TASS. “The corresponding signals were received from President Trump.” Witkoff has visited Moscow five times since Trump took office in January.
“Western analysts and Ukrainian officials say Putin is stalling for time and avoiding serious negotiations while Russian forces push to capture more Ukraine land,” CBS News reports. “A Russian offensive that started in the spring and is expected to continue through the fall is advancing faster than last year’s push but is making only slow and costly gains and has been unable to take any major cities.”
One offer allegedly under consideration: “A pause on air strikes involving drones and missiles as a deescalation gesture,” but a general ceasefire is off the table for Putin, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
Background: “Putin has repeatedly spurned US and European calls to abide by a 30-day ceasefire…In March, Ukraine and Russia said they’d observe a 30-day moratorium on strikes against energy infrastructure, following calls with Trump, though each accused the other of breaching the accord.”
One big problem: Putin still thinks he is winning his war to take control of Ukraine, three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters on Tuesday. What’s more, “The Russian sources told Reuters that Putin was sceptical that yet more U.S. sanctions would have much of an impact after successive waves of economic penalties” since the invasion began in February 2022.
Russian military leaders also think the front line in Ukraine will likely “crumble” in two to three months. However, “The Russian military has a pervasive culture of lying and submitting overly positive reports to superiors,” analysts at the Institute for the Study of War wrote Tuesday. Relatedly, “The Kremlin likely assesses that projecting confidence in Russia’s ability to militarily defeat Ukraine in Western media outlets will generate fear and distrust in Ukrainian and Western society, further degrading Ukraine’s morale to continue defending against Russian aggression.”
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Bye-bye, five-things email. Six months after adopting Elon Musk’s “five things” weekly check-in for federal employees, the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management has formally dropped the requirement, Reuters reported Tuesday. “At OPM, we believe that managers are accountable to staying informed about what their team members are working on and have many other existing tools to do so,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement.
Why it matters: “While many federal agencies had already phased out compliance with the weekly email, the move signals the Trump administration is turning the page on one of Musk’s most unpopular initiatives following a falling out between the two men in early June,” Reuters writes.
But the White House could soon resurrect a civil service exam for federal jobs, ending a 44-year hiatus after the procedure was deemed discriminatory, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
Amid its aggressive deportation surge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced cash bonuses for deporting people quickly. But “Less than four hours later, the agency abruptly canceled what was supposed to be a 30-day pilot program,” the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Expert reax: “That is so ungodly unethical,” said Scott Shuchart, a former senior homeland security official. “You can’t incentivize government agents to short circuit people’s procedural rights. Would you pay a bonus to judges for wrapping up trials faster?”
Where the surge stands now: “[T]he number of deportations by ICE reached a new high in July, averaging almost 1,300 daily removals in the two weeks ending July 26,” the Times reports. By comparison, “Removals averaged fewer than 800 per day in the last year of the Biden administration.”
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Threat actors leveraged SEO poisoning techniques to manipulate Bing search results, directing users querying for “ManageEngine OpManager” to a malicious domain, opmanager[.]pro. This site distributed a trojanized MSI installer named ManageE…