Ilya Angelov was a member of the cybercrime group tracked as TA-551, Shathak, Gold Cabin, Monster Libra, and ATK236. The post Russian Cybercriminal Gets 2-Year Prison Sentence in US appeared first on SecurityWeek.
PwC finds AI is amplifying speed and scale of attacks, as identity theft evolves into a cybercriminal supply chain. The post AI Speeds Attacks, But Identity Remains Cybersecurity’s Weakest Link appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Apple released security fixes for older devices as well, in iOS 18.7.7, iPadOS 18.7.7, macOS Sequoia 15.7.5, and macOS Sonoma 14.8.5. The post iOS, macOS 26.4 Roll Out With Fresh Security Patches appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702: Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell: There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information. Over the decades, we have learned to take Wyden’s warnings seriously.
A man has pleaded guilty to defrauding online music streaming platforms out of more than US $8 million, after creating hundreds of thousands of songs with AI, and then using bots to play them billions of times. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics. In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations. Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an AI Interviewer walks them through the subject, answering their questions, interrogating their experience, even challenging their thinking. Voters get immediate feedback on how their individual point of view matches—or doesn’t—a party’s platform, and they can see whether and how the party adopts their feedback. This isn’t like an opinion poll that politicians use for calculating short-term electoral tactics. It’s a deliberative reasoning process that scales, engaging voters in defining policy and helping candidates to listen deeply to their constituents. This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election. It’s how Team Mirai, which translates to ‘The Future Party,’ does politics. Its founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56 candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement. Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national legislature—the Diet—and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing politics a reality. In this recent House of Representatives election, Team Mirai shot up to win nearly four million votes. In the lower chamber’s proportional representation system, that was good enough for eleven total seats—the party’s first ever representation in the Japanese House—and nearly three times what it achieved in last year’s Upper Chamber election. Anno’s party stood for election without aligning itself on the traditional axes of left and right. Instead, Team Mirai, heavily associated with young, urban voters, sought to unite across the ideological spectrum by taking a radical position on a different axis: the status quo and the future. Anno told us that Team Mirai believes it can triple its representation in the Diet after the next elections in each chamber, an ostentatious goal that seems achievable given their rapid rise over the past year. In the American context, the idea of a small party unifying voters across left and right sounds like a pipe dream. But there is evidence it worked in Japan. Team Mirai won an impressive 11% of proportional representation votes from unaffiliated voters, nearly twice the share of the larger electorate. The centerpiece of the party’s policy platform is not about the traditional hot button issues, it’s about democracy itself, and how it can be enhanced by embracing a futuristic vision of digital democracy. Anno told us how his party arrived at its manifesto for this month’s elections, and why it looked different from other parties’ in important ways. Team Mirai collected more than 38,000 online questions and more than 6,000 discrete policy suggestions from voters using its AI Policy app, which is advertised as a ‘manifesto that speaks for itself.’ After factoring in all this feedback, Team Mirai maintained a contrarian position on the biggest issue of the election: the sales tax and affordability. Rather than running on a reduction of the national sales tax like the major parties, Team Mirai reviewed dozens of suggestions from the public and ultimately proposed to keep that tax level while providing support to families through a child tax credit and lowering the required contribution for social insurance. Anno described this as another future-facing strategy: less price relief in the short term, but sustained funding for essential programs. Anno has always intended to build a different kind of party. After receiving roughly $1 million in public funding apportioned to Team Mirai based on its single seat in the Upper Chamber last year, Anno began hiring engineers to enhance his software tools for digital democracy. Anno described Team Mirai to us as a ‘utility party;’ basic infrastructure for Japanese democracy that serves the broader polity rather than one faction. Their Gikai (‘assembly’) app illustrates the point. It provides a portal for constituents to research bills, using AI to generate summaries, to describe their impacts, to surfacing media reporting on the issue, and to answer users’ questions. Like all their software, it’s open source and free for anyone, in any party, to use. After last week’s victory, Team Mirai now has about $5 million in public funding and ambitions to grow the influence of their digital democracy platform. Anno told us Team Mirai has secured an agreement with the LDP, Japan’s dominant ruling party, to begin using Team Mirai’s Gikai and corruption-fighting Mirumae financial transparency tool. AI is the issue driving the most societal and economic change we will encounter in our lifetime, yet US political parties are largely silent. But AI and Big Tech companies and their owners are ramping up their political spending to influence the parties. To the extent that AI has shown up in our politics, it seems to be limited to the question of where to site the next generation of data centers and how to channel populist backlash to big tech. Those are causes worthy of political organizing, but very few US politicians are leveraging the technology for public listening or other pro-democratic purposes. With the midterms still nine months away and with innovators like Team Mirai making products in the open for anyone to use, there is still plenty of time for an American politician to demonstrate what a new politics could look like. This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.
It’s an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released: Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat, as Gaasedelen couldn’t ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so had to develop new hardware introspection tools. Eventually, the Bliss exploit was formulated, where two precise voltage glitches were made to land in succession. One skipped the loop where the ARM Cortex memory protection was setup. Then the Memcpy operation was targeted during the header read, allowing him to jump to the attacker-controlled data. As a hardware attack against the boot ROM in silicon, Gaasedelen says the attack in unpatchable. Thus it is a complete compromise of the console allowing for loading unsigned code at every level, including the Hypervisor and OS. Moreover, Bliss allows access to the security processor so games, firmware, and so on can be decrypted.
The population needs better conservation. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.
Pedestrians crossing a street in Denver, Colorado, got rather more than they bargained for last weekend, when the audio signals at two crosswalks began broadcasting a political message alongside their usual walking instructions. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI. It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail.
A ransomware gang that claims to be a group of "investigative journalists"? Meet LeakNet - the group using fake CAPTCHA pages to trick employees into hacking themselves. Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.
Someone tries to remote control his own DJI Romo vacuum, and ends up controlling 7,000 of them from all around the world. The IoT is horribly insecure, but we already knew that.
The European Union – the media freedom hub marsrgi Thu, 03/19/2026 - 08:58 Opening: 16 April 2026 Closing: 28 May 2026 The overall goal of this preparatory action is to continue the activities of the ongoing Free Media Hub EAST project, i.e. to sustain and improve existing financial and other kinds of support to exiled independent media from Russia, Belarus, as well as media from Ukraine that has relocated in the EU, and to foster the coordination and consolidation of a pan-European platform or network of media hubs to promote the preservation of a pluralistic media environment. GettyImages © Mihajlo Maricic Main link https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportuni… Related topics Media and democracy Media freedom and pluralism International relations Funding for Digital Actions to Support Ukraine Democracy in the digital age {"service":"share","version":"2.0","color":true,"networks":["x","facebook","linkedin","email","more"]}
In episode 459 of Smashing Security, we dive into a chillingly clever account takeover attempt targeting WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg - involving MFA fatigue, real Apple alerts, a convincing support call, and a phishing page that oh-so-nearly worked. If a famous techie could have this happen to you, can you be sure you're immune? Plus: would you donate your lifetime medical history to science if you were promised anonymity? We unpack serious concerns around UK Biobank, where “de-identified” data may not be as anonymous as you think — and how surprisingly little information it takes to reveal everything. And! Human-powered “AI”, and a punishment worse than prison: eight hours on the RSA expo floor... All this, and much more, in episode 459 of the "Smashing Security" podcast with cybersecurity veteran Graham Cluley, and special guest Paul Ducklin.
Surprising no one, Meta’s new AI glasses are a privacy disaster. I’m not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby.
CEF-Digital Info Session: 2026 Calls Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/18/2026 - 10:35 26 March 2026 Online Learn more about the calls "Equipment for smart European cable systems" (CEF-DIG-2026-SMART-CABLES) and "Backbone connectivity for Digital Global Gateways" (CEF-DIG-2026-GATEWAYS). GettyImages © Dragon Claws Main link https://hadea.ec.europa.eu/events/cef-digital-info-session-2026-calls-2026-03-2… Related topics Connecting Europe Facility Funding for Digital Related content Press release 17 March 2026 Commission makes available €200 million for submarine cable and digital infrastructure projects The European Commission has opened two new Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) calls worth €200 million for projects in high-capacity networks, including submarine cables. {"service":"share","version":"2.0","color":true,"networks":["x","facebook","linkedin","email","more"]}
An expensive mistake: Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea’s National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet. The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at 124 high-value tax evaders that resulted in confiscating digital assets worth 8.1 billion won (currently approximately $5.6 million). When announcing the success of the operation, the agency released photos of a Ledger device, a popular hardware wallet for crypto storage and management. However, the images also showed a handwritten note of the wallet recovery phrase, which serves as the master key that allows restoring the assets to another device. The authorities failed to redact that info, allowing anyone to transfer into their account the assets in the cold wallet. Reportedly, shortly after the press release was published, 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG) tokens, worth approximately $4.8 million at the time, were transferred out of the confiscated wallet to a new address.
Equipment for smart European cable systems - Works Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/17/2026 - 08:45 Opening: 17 March 2026 Closing: 30 June 2026 This call supports the upgrade of existing submarine telecommunications/digital infrastructures to “smart capabilities” enabling applications that monitor them as well as other surrounding critical infrastructures (e.g. power cables, pipelines, etc.) and/or their vicinity. Main link https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportuni… Related topics Digital connectivity Connecting Europe Facility Funding for Digital {"service":"share","version":"2.0","color":true,"networks":["x","facebook","linkedin","email","more"]}
Backbone connectivity for Digital Global Gateways - Studies Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/17/2026 - 08:19 Opening: 17 March 2026 Closing: 30 June 2026 This call for proposals will fund studies related to the deployment/significant upgrade of backbone networks that address risks, vulnerabilities and dependencies in the EU backbone infrastructure. GettyImages © Dragon Claws Main link https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportuni… Related topics Digital connectivity Connecting Europe Facility Funding for Digital {"service":"share","version":"2.0","color":true,"networks":["x","facebook","linkedin","email","more"]}
Drivers in the Russian city of Perm have been enjoying an unexpected bonus this week: free parking. Not because the city council suddenly decided to embrace generosity - but rather because hackers succeeded in knocking the city's payment system offline. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.