How the Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency

The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your knowledge or consent. It’s both redundant and inconsistent. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of fragmented digital profiles that often contain contradictory or logically impossible information. Each serves its own purpose, yet there is no central override and control to serve you—as the identity owner…

July 24, 2025
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Google Sues the Badbox Botnet Operators

It will be interesting to watch what will come of this private lawsuit:

Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software.

These devices lack Google’s security protections, and the perpetrators pre-installed the Badbox 2.0 malware on them, to create a backdoor and abuse them for large-scale fraud and other illicit schemes.

This reminds me of Meta’s lawauit against Pegasus over its hack-for-hire software (which I wrote about …

July 23, 2025
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Editor’s Note:

The Defense Daily website will be down temporarily mid-day EST on July 23 to enable a significant upgrade. These improvements are targeted on improving the reader experience, better packaging of […]

July 23, 2025
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“Encryption Backdoors and the Fourth Amendment”

Law journal article that looks at the Dual_EC_PRNG backdoor from a US constitutional perspective:

Abstract: The National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of three theories removed the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that this be reasonable. The first is that a challenge to the encryption backdoor might fail for want of a search or seizure. The Article rejects this both because the Amendment reaches some vulnerabilities apart from the searches and seizures they enable and because the creation of this vulnerability was itself a search or seizure. The second is that the role of the technology companies might have brought this backdoor within the private-search doctrine. The Article criticizes the doctrine­ particularly its origins in Burdeau v. McDowell­and argues that if it ever should apply, it should not here. The last is that the customers might have waived their Fourth Amendment rights under the third-party doctrine. The Article rejects this both because the customers were not on notice of the backdoor and because historical understandings of the Amendment would not have tolerated it. The Article concludes that none of these theories removed the Amendment’s reasonableness requirement…

July 22, 2025
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U.S. CISA urges to immediately patch Microsoft SharePoint flaw adding it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Microsoft SharePoint flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added Microsoft SharePoint flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 (“ToolShell”) (CVSS score of 9.8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. This week, Microsoft released emergency SharePoint updates for two zero-day flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 and CVE-2025-53771, […]

July 21, 2025
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Another Supply Chain Vulnerability

ProPublica is reporting:

Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems—with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel—leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage…

July 21, 2025
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Singapore warns China-linked group UNC3886 targets its critical infrastructure

Singapore says China-linked group UNC3886 targeted its critical infrastructure by hacking routers and security devices. Singapore accused China-linked APT group UNC3886 of targeting its critical infrastructure. UNC3886 is a sophisticated China-linked cyber espionage group that targets network devices and virtualization technologies using zero-day exploits. Its primary focus is on defense, technology, and telecommunications sectors in […]

July 20, 2025
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