Cyber rights org retools for the days of AI and unrestrained government interview The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Tuesday appointed Nicole Ozer to succeed Cindy Cohn as the cyber rights group's executive director when Cohn departs this summer.…
Crims 'creating a snowball effect' across open source projects RSAC 2026 Thousands of organizations' cloud environments have been infected with secret-stealing malware as a result of the Trivy supply-chain attack last week, and now the crims that compromised the open source scanners are working with notorious extortion crews like Lapsus$.…
Python interface for LLMs infected with malware via polluted CI/CD pipeline Two versions of LiteLLM, an open source interface for accessing multiple large language models, have been removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) following a supply chain attack that injected them with malicious credential-stealing code.…
Nearly 300 employees caught up in intrusion at benefits provider Navia Almost 300 HackerOne employees are caught up in a data breach, with the bug bounty biz slamming a third-party benefits provider for a weeks-long delay in notification.…
Unfortunately, there aren't many options unless you're Starlink Citing national security fears, America is effectively banning any new consumer-grade network routers made abroad.…
Aleksei Volkov sentenced after enabling attacks that cost victims millions A Russian national who sold the keys to corporate networks faces nearly seven years in a US prison after prosecutors tied his handiwork to a string of ransomware attacks costing victims millions of dollars.…
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 freakin' worked' says Rob Joyce - and shows how relentless AI agents can find holes humans miss RSAC 2026 The now-infamous Anthropic report about Chinese cyberspies abusing Claude AI to automate cyberattacks was a Rorschach test for the infosec community, according to former NSA cyber boss Rob Joyce.…
Here's where you ought to spend your security billable hours budget this year Strengthen your MFA policies, double-down on anti-phishing training, and for Jobs' sake, patch all your vulns right away. The past year of intelligence collected by Cisco's Talos threat hunters suggests that attackers are moving faster to exploit vulns, and fooling more staff than ever into giving up their credentials. …
Claims it can analyze millions of daily events with 98 percent accuracy RSAC 2026 Google's Gemini AI agents are crawling the dark web, sifting through upward of 10 million posts a day to find a handful of threats relevant to a particular organization.…
Voice phishing is second most common initial access method across all IR probes, and top in cloud break-ins RSAC 2026 Voice phishing surged last year to become the second most common method used by cybercriminals to gain initial access to their victims' IT estate – and the No. 1 tactic used when breaking into cloud environments.…
Press release 26/07
Trio-Tech International initially said hack wasn't 'material,' but then stolen data was published Trio-Tech International initially shrugged off a ransomware attack at a Singapore subsidiary as immaterial, only to reverse course days later after discovering stolen data had been disclosed.…
Infosec pros descend on San Francisco kettle When El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons joins infosec industry colleagues in San Francisco for RSAC 2026 this week, she's expecting agentic AI to be on everyone's lips - at least those who aren't busy gossiping about the lack of presence from any representatives of the US federal government.…
The era of reliability begins... right after this out-of-band patch Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to resolve bugs introduced by a Windows patch just days after promising improved reliability.…
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.
Ukraine's battlefield lessons show quantity and affordability now trump exquisite hardware NATO is unprepared to deal with attacks by cheap, mass-produced drones and urgently needs layered, affordable air defense systems to counter the threat, taking a cue from the experience gained by Ukrainian forces over the past four years.…
PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more! Infosec In Brief Russian intelligence-affiliated parties are posing as customer support services on commercial messaging applications such as Signal to compromise accounts and conduct phishing attacks, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned last Friday.…
Rust security maintainers contend Nadim Kobeissi's vulnerability claims are too much Updated Since February, cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi has been trying to get code fixes applied to Rust cryptography libraries to address what he says are critical bugs. For his efforts, he's been dismissed, ignored, and banned from Rust security channels.…