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Threat actors have been observed exploiting file upload vulnerabilities to deploy web shells and advanced malware on both Windows and Linux systems. The campaign, which showcases a blend of publicly available tools and custom malicious payloads, indica…
In a recent discovery by the CYFIRMA research team, a sophisticated malware campaign dubbed Odyssey Stealer has been uncovered, targeting macOS users through a deceptive method known as Clickfix tactics. This campaign leverages typosquatted domains mal…
After two days of a ceasefire, Israel’s military chief is signaling more strikes on Iran could be on the horizon. With Tehran’s nuclear program believed to be badly damaged after Saturday’s U.S. strikes, Israel is now focused on “preserving aerial superiority, preventing the advancement of nuclear projects and preventing the advancement of threatening long-range missiles,” Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israel’s Channel 12 on Thursday, according to the New York Times.
Katz noted Israel would have killed Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during the nearly two-week war “if he had been in our sights.” Katz also reiterated his threat above, saying Israel doesn’t need U.S. President Trump to authorize another attack on Iran. “We are saying unequivocally, once the Iranians violate, we will strike,” Katz said Thursday.
Iran, for its part, vowed a tough response should Israel strike Iran again, with foreign minister Abbas Araghchi on Thursday promising a “decisive response” to “any breach by the Zionist regime,” according to Iranian state media.
Iran’s damage assessment from Saturday’s U.S. strikes: “The losses have not been small, and our facilities have been seriously damaged,” Araghchi said on state-run TV.
Caution on Capitol Hill: “Certainly, this mission was successful insofar as it extensively destroyed and perhaps severely damaged and set back the Iranian nuclear arms program,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, after the upper chamber was briefed by administration officials Thursday. “But how long and how much really remains to be determined by the intelligence community itself,” Blumenthal said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, the other Connecticut senator: “To me, it still appears that we have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months. There’s no doubt there was damage done to the program, but the allegations that we have obliterated their program just don’t seem to stand up to reason,” he told reporters Thursday, and added, “I just do not think the president was telling the truth when he said this program was obliterated.”
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona: “The president said something, the secretary of Defense repeated it, before they had anything from the [Defense Intelligence Agency]. I think that’s pretty clear to people. I mean, he basically made his own assessment based on very limited information.…The airplanes weren’t even back in Missouri by the time he’s doing his own personal [battle damage assessment].” But, he continued, “I think what’s really fair to say is there’s been a lot of damage done to the Iranians’ ability to enrich uranium, and that has set them back if they wanted to develop a nuclear weapon.” Read more at The Hill.
Update: American forces defended Qatari base with the “largest single Patriot engagement in U.S. military history,” CJCS claims. When Iran fired roughly a dozen missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on June 23—retaliation for Saturday’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities—the base was already largely emptied of the U.S. forces that normally occupy it, Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine told reporters in a combative briefing at the Pentagon Thursday. (Full transcript here.)
About 44 soldiers remained behind, manning the Patriot missile batteries that defend the base. The War Zone has more details from Thursday’s briefing, here. Caine also offered a few new details about the development of the 15-ton bunker-busting bombs used in the U.S. strikes. The Associated Press has more on that, here.
Developing: The U.S. quietly built a new base near Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast in case of war with Iran. And that means the base, known as Logistical Support Area Jenkins, is now bustling with activity—including “dozens of structures and tents, vehicles, paved roads, an upgraded munitions storage site and construction at several locations across the mile-wide facility.” The New York Times has more, assisted by satellite imagery, here.
Commentary: How to restart nuclear diplomacy with Iran. A renewed nuclear agreement should be the starting point, but discussions must include regional players and Iran’s proxy network, argues Jesse Marks, who worked as a Middle East policy advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Biden and Trump administrations. Read on at Defense One, 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 and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1950, President Truman ordered U.S. forces to South Korea following the invasion by North Korea.
DOD’s budget request finally drops, combining a real decrease with a one-time boost. The Pentagon rolled out its $848.3 billion fiscal year 2026 discretionary budget request on Thursday, a small real decline from last year’s enacted $831 billion budget—and only the largest chunk of the Trump administration’s plan to spend more than one trillion dollars on defense next year. The balance would come through a one-time, $113-billion infusion from Congress via the reconciliation bill currently in the Senate.
The roll-out itself was a stark departure from past years: instead of an overview briefing by the Pentagon’s comptroller followed by service officials, Thursday’s presentation was by one senior defense official who was not authorized to speak on the record.
The Pentagon has posted only limited documentation online with links to budget summaries accompanied by “(Coming Soon!)” in red print. Defense One’s Meghann Myers has more, here.
Coverage continues:
Additional reading: “Military Domestic Violence Convictions Skyrocketed After Commanders Were Removed from Process,” Steve Beynon and Patricia Kime reported Tuesday for Military-dot-com.
After Trump joined Israel’s war against Iran, the Department of Homeland Security decided to return anti-terrorism money it had held back from cities like Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco, Politico reported Thursday.
Background: “Chicago had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in May, claiming the funds that Congress had allotted for the city were being illegally withheld by DHS. San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Boston joined in the lawsuit when their funds were also cut.”
Thirteen cities are involved in the program, known as Securing the Cities. More, here.
Border check-in from the Rio Grande valley: The New York Times found mostly “Empty Farms and Frightened Workers,” according to Edgar Sandoval reporting Friday. The TLDR version: “As workplace raids have eroded [Trump’s] popularity and sparked angry protests across the country, the border region has been eerily quiet.”
In other surveys this week: “More Than 9 In 10 Voters Say Politically Motivated Violence In The U.S. Is A Serious Problem,” according to Quinnipiac University.
Related reading: “Former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman to lie in state as suspect faces court date,” AP reported Friday from Minneapolis.
China is testing a drone “mothership” that can carry 100 small drones, reports Nikkei Asia, citing Chinese state media. The Jiutian is described as having a wingspan of 25 meters and a payload of six metric tons. A bit more, and a screenshot from CCTV, here.
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A novel social engineering technique dubbed “ClickFix” has surged by an alarming 517% between the second half of 2024 and the first half of 2025, as reported by ESET telemetry data. This manipulative attack vector, now the second most preva…
Researchers at BallisKit have introduced a sophisticated scenario within their MacroPack Pro tool to obfuscate and weaponize .NET assemblies, significantly enhancing their stealth against modern security solutions. As .NET has become a preferred langua…
The White House is upset about skepticism over the effectiveness of its Iran strikes carried out by B-2 stealth bombers over the weekend. The aircraft dropped 14 special-purpose munitions intended to penetrate the mountain complex at Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant and destroy Iran’s ability to enrich enough uranium to create a nuclear weapon. But a leaked early intelligence assessment indicated the U.S. strikes did not fully eradicate Tehran’s nuclear program and only set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back by a few months.
About Iran’s nuclear program: “It’s gone for years, years,” President Donald Trump insisted Wednesday during his visit to the annual NATO summit, hosted this year at The Hague. He then verbally attacked three media outlets, calling each “scum,” and said, “They’re bad people. They’re sick. And what they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less.”
Notable: An estimated 20,000 uranium centrifuges are believed to have been damaged at two locations inside Iran, Natanz and Fordow, David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security wrote online Wednesday after reports of the initial U.S. intelligence assessment emerged.
However, it wouldn’t take much work to get what Iran needs to proceed to a weapon, argued James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace. “A single cascade of 174 IR-6 centrifuges could produce a bomb’s worth of 90% highly enriched uranium from the 60% enriched material whose location is unknown in 10-20 days,” Acton wrote on social media Wednesday, responding to assertions otherwise from top U.S. officials like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. “Iran doesn’t need to rebuild enrichment facilities on their previous scale to get the bomb,” Acton warned.
Latest: Trump dispatched his defense chief and top military officer to criticize the media Thursday morning at the Pentagon, though neither outright denied the intelligence finding’s existence or argued against it. SecDef Hegseth opened his presser—the second this week, but also just the second of his five-month tenure as Pentagon chief—accusing media outlets of not reporting “big, momentous moments” in developments affecting the Defense Department.
His first example: NATO allies agreed to eventually spend 5% of their GDP on defense during this week’s alliance summit at The Hague. “So I hope with all the ink spilled, all of your outlets find the time to properly recognize this historic change in continental security,” Hegseth said to his audience of reporters before repeating the allegation. “In hunting for scandals all the time in trying to find wedges and spin stories, this press corps misses historic moments,” Hegseth said, “You miss historic moments like 5% at NATO.”
It was a tense, bizarre scene, in part because virtually every major outlet covered that story nearly 24 hours earlier, as a quick Google News search reveals along with publication dates. The Washington Post put it on the front page of their latest paper. Hegseth even went after his former co-worker Jennifer Griffin of Fox, saying, “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst. The one who misrepresents the most intentionally.”
But Hegseth, a former weekend TV host on Fox, was not done. “You, the press corps,” he said, gesticulating angrily, “it’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren’t effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration is representing them isn’t true. So let’s take half-truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it. Spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind—the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful.” Defense One’s Meghan Myers has more from the press conference, here.
As far as we know, no one is claiming the pilots were not successful. Rather, the DIA report—and it is an initial assessment, which could be revised as time passes—conveys the message that Iran’s nuclear program was probably only set back by months as opposed to being completely halted.
New: European countries believe Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the U.S. strikes and remains intact, the Financial Times reported Thursday, citing two unspecified European sources briefed on the intelligence assessments. Those assessments claimed roughly 900 pounds of Iran’s highly enriched uranium had been divided up and sent to multiple locations ahead of the B-2 strikes.
Later today in Washington: Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine are set to brief senators about the Iranian strikes.
Tehran reax: Iranian officials are now leaning into counterintelligence operations, “which likely reflects the regime’s paranoia about Israeli infiltration,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote in their latest daily assessment.
At least 700 Iranians have been arrested since the start of the Israeli war two weeks ago, including several from the country’s Kurdish population, according to Reuters. What’s more, “Leader Ali Khamenei recently appointed Brigadier General Mohammad Karami as the IRGC Ground Forces commander, which further illustrates the regime’s concerns about potential domestic unrest, given that Karami was previously involved in suppressing internal dissent,” ISW writes.
Iran’s military chief Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh visited China on Wednesday for a two-day meeting of his counterparts in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. That meeting follows a report of Iranian dissatisfaction over a perceived lack of support from Russia in this conflict.
Additional reading:
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 and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1917, U.S. troops of the American Expeditionary Force landed in France, successfully concluding the U.S. military’s first force-projection convoy to Europe.
Developing: The Army’s not sure what its new ‘Executive Innovation Corps’ will actually do, Defense One’s Myers reported Wednesday.
They’re known as Detachment 201, which includes Shyam Shankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer; Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO; Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and OpenAI’s former chief research officer. The four have been recruited to serve as Reserve lieutenant colonels and “work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems,” according to a press release.
But the service hasn’t identified exactly which projects they will work on, Army spokesman Steve Warren told reporters Wednesday. Their first task is to head down to the direct commission course at Fort Benning, Georgia. “So let’s get them in. Let’s, you know, teach them which hand to salute with, fundamentals of being a field-grade officer in the Army first, and then we’ll start working on specific projects,” Warren said.
Notable: This Army plan is almost a reverse version of DOD’s Training With Industry program, which allows service members to go on temporary duty to corporate America—past examples include the NFL, Amazon and FedEx—then bring what they learned about senior management and corporate processes back to their units, Myers writes. (For what it’s worth, one of your D Brief-ers used the Army’s TWI program to begin working in journalism, beginning at the local NPR station WFSS, on the campus of North Carolina’s Fayetteville State University.)
Though the service is short on details, the idea has been percolating for a while. About 18 months ago, the defense secretary’s office floated the idea to the services, and the Army volunteered to get it off the ground as a pilot program, Maj. Matt Visser, an Army spokesman, told reporters. Read on, here.
Update: The U.S. is further militarizing its border with Mexico, expanding territory associated with Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma in Arizona, and Joint Base San Antonio in Texas, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
“With the addition of the two land strips, called national defense areas, there are now four such newly designated military installations,” Eric Schmitt of the Times writes. “Migrants who enter the areas will be considered trespassers and can be temporarily detained by U.S. troops until Border Patrol agents arrive, military officials said.”
Related: “Alarming escalation” in California. Federalized National Guard troops reportedly assisted with DEA raids more than 100 miles east of Los Angeles last week. “This development represents an alarming escalation of President Donald Trump’s efforts to use the military as a domestic police force. Based on currently available information, it appears to be illegal, as well,” warns Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, writing Wednesday for Just Security.
“There is also no applicable statutory authority to federalize National Guard forces for this purpose,” Goitein says. “There is no allegation of protest activity—let alone violent protests—in the region where the drug raid took place. The fact that the marijuana growing operations spanned many acres and the day was hot cannot seriously be posited as a reason why the president could not execute the law without the help of the military,” she writes.
Why it matters: “The use of federal forces to assist with drug raids also represents a massive shift in, and an expansion of, Trump’s domestic use of the military,” Goitein says. “Military participation in routine criminal law enforcement functions like drug raids is precisely the type of activity the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to prevent.”
The potential implications are difficult to understate: “Indeed, if this use of the military were to be upheld by the courts, it is not obvious what would stop Trump from deploying federal forces to accompany almost any federal law enforcement operation—civil or criminal—anywhere in the nation, based on justifications as mundane as temperature or topography,” Goitein warns. Read the rest, here.
Additional reading:
Declining public trust in AI is a national-security problem. Americans’ trust in artificial intelligence is declining even as global advances in the field accelerate, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, which points to a potential national-security problem: lawmakers across partisan lines, industry leaders, think tanks, and others have warned that falling behind China on AI would put the United States at a disadvantage.
Negative public sentiment could undermine congressional and financial support for research and development in the field. But some AI companies are modifying their products to give government customers more control—over model behavior, over data inputs, even over the power source that runs the system. Could this mollify the public? Read on, here.
Lastly today: Maxar is launching AI-powered “predictive intelligence” to spot crises before they happen. Tucker has more, here.
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Threat actors are increasingly leveraging the trusted names of popular software and services like ChatGPT, Cisco AnyConnect, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to orchestrate sophisticated cyberattacks. According to a recent report by Kaspersky Lab, SMBs…
Hegseth rails against reporting on DIA’s initial assessment that strikes did not destroy Tehran’s efforts.
The claim follows reports of a DIA assessment that had determined the program was set back by only a few months.
CloudSEK’s TRIAD team has made the shocking discovery that the Androxgh0st botnet is a persistent and dynamic cyberthreat. It has targeted a subdomain of the University of California, San Diego, specifically the “USArhythms” portal associated wit…