Government

March 14, 2025

A group of bipartisan U.S. lawmakers are urging the head of the U.K.’s surveillance court to hold an open hearing into Apple’s anticipated challenge of an alleged secret U.K. government legal demand. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, along with four other federal lawmakers, said in a letter this week to the president of the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers ...

March 10, 2025

Last year, Kaspersky researchers published an article about SideWinder, a highly prolific APT group whose primary targets have been military and government entities in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, and Nepal. In the article, they described activities that had mostly happened in the first half of the year. The researchers tried to draw attention to the group, ...

March 6, 2025

The change was spotted by security expert Alec Muffett, who wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is no longer recommending that high-risk individuals use encryption to protect their sensitive information. The NCSC in October published a document titled “Cybersecurity tips for barristers, solicitors & legal professionals,” that ...

March 5, 2025

Apple is challenging a U.K. Government data access order in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the Financial Times reports. The order targeted iCloud backups that are protected by end-to-end encryption. Aple responded by announcing it would end U.K. users’ access to the strongly encrypted version of the iCloud storage feature. The challenge via the IPT was ...

March 1, 2025

British nationals have been told that they could be banned or deported from the US as the free speech row rages on across the transatlantic. US Congressman and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, handed a letter to Keir Starmer slamming the state of UK “censorship”. He added that his committee had subpoenaed American ...

February 25, 2025

A pro-Russian hacker group, Noname057(16), staged for the ninth consecutive morning on Tuesday a new wave of cyberattacks against Italian websites, specifically targeting local administrations. The provinces of Trapani, Ragusa, Caltanissetta, Enna, the municipality of Catania and the Puglia region were among those affected by the attacks. The Agency for National Cybersecurity is providing help to ...

February 21, 2025

Angry Likho (referred to as Sticky Werewolf by some vendors) is an APT group we’ve been monitoring since 2023. It bears a strong resemblance to Awaken Likho, which we’ve analyzed before, so we classified it within the Likho malicious activity cluster. However, Angry Likho’s attacks tend to be targeted, with a more compact infrastructure, a limited ...

February 21, 2025

Apple is scrapping its most advanced security encryption feature for cloud data in Britain, the company said on Friday, an unprecedented response to government demands for access to user data. The change affects a feature called Advanced Data Protection (ADP), which extends end-to-end encryption across a wide range of cloud data. Apple said it is no ...

February 18, 2025

A 39-year-old man has been jailed for sending malicious communications to a government minister, the mayor of London and a senior Met Police officer. Jack Bennett, of Newlands Park, Seaton, Devon, pleaded guilty to four counts of sending malicious emails; one to Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, one to Metropolitan police officer Matt Twist, and two counts ...

February 18, 2025

A judge in Argentina was selected Monday to investigate allegations of fraud against President Javier Milei for his brief promotion of a cryptocurrency whose value collapsed within hours of its launch last week. Milei distanced himself from the scandal and said he acted in good faith. Milei and his office denied involvement with creators of the ...

February 16, 2025

If you’ve ever dared to read the comments on a social media post, you might start to wonder if civilized discourse is just a myth. Aggressive threats, lies, and harassment have unfortunately become the norm online, where anonymity has emboldened some users to push the limits of civility. In the United States, most of what ...

February 14, 2025

The Trump administration on Friday moved to fire more than 400 employees at the Department of Homeland Security, the latest effort in a government-wide campaign to dramatically reduce the federal workforce. Officials at DHS said they had fired hundreds of employees across several of its agencies after supervisors identified “non-mission critical personnel in probationary status” within ...

February 13, 2025

Security researchers say the Chinese government-linked hacking group, Salt Typhoon, is continuing to compromise telecommunications providers, despite the recent sanctions imposed by the U.S. government on the group. In a report shared with TechCrunch, threat intelligence firm Recorded Future said it had observed Salt Typhoon — which the company tracks as “RedMike” — breaching five telecommunications ...

February 12, 2025

Italy denied on Wednesday that Israeli spyware maker Paragon had cut ties with Rome following allegations that the Italian government had illegally used its technology to hack the phones of critics instead of criminals. “Paragon has never suspended the service and has not terminated its contract,” the cabinet undersecretary for intelligence matters, Alfredo Mantovano, told reporters. ...

February 12, 2025

Microsoft is publishing for the first time their research into a subgroup within the Russian state actor Seashell Blizzard and its multiyear initial access operation, tracked by Microsoft Threat Intelligence as the “BadPilot campaign”. This subgroup has conducted globally diverse compromises of Internet-facing infrastructure to enable Seashell Blizzard to persist on high-value targets and support tailored ...

February 10, 2025

Scammers target Italian tycoons using defense minister’s AI-generated voice on OpenAI Voice Engine Scammers used AI-generated voice of Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto in an atempts to steal millions of dollars from Italian business tycoons, according to reports. Crosetto said last Thursday on X that someone was using his name and his artificially generated voice to ...

February 7, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he was revoking former President Joe Biden’s security clearances and stopping his daily intelligence briefings as there was no need for his predecessor to receive classified information. In a post on Truth Social, Trump referenced a report by Special Counsel Robert Hur that described Biden last year as a ...

February 7, 2025

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post. The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not ...

February 4, 2025

Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions confirmed to TechCrunch that it sells its products to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries. Paragon’s executive chairman John Fleming said in a statement to TechCrunch on Tuesday that “Paragon licenses its technology to a select group of global democracies — principally, the United States and its allies.” Fleming ...

February 3, 2025

FunkSec is a relatively new but highly active ransomware group that, as of this writing, has targeted several dozen victims across industries like government, banking, communications, and education. In a recent blog post, the group announced a partnership with another ransomware outfit, FSociety, aiming to carry out attacks more efficiently. This week, SonicWall Capture Labs research ...