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As the Biden administration comes to an end, the White House released a Thursday’s 40-page executive order aims to strengthen cybersecurity protections and putting safeguards on the US government’s use of AI. WIRED also spoke with the outgoing US ambassador to cyberspace and digital media, Nathaniel Fick, about the urgency to keep the Trump administration from beefing with Russia and China at the international competition for control technology. Outputs FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel details WIRED threats facing US telecoms, at least nine of which were recently breached by Salt Typhoon hackers in China. Meanwhile, US officials are still scrambling to crack down on the spying campaign and other breaches, with new revelations this week that the AT&T breach was revealed last summer. intercepted the FBI’s phone calls and records that could reveal unknown information.
Huione Guarantee, the largest online marketplace that analysts say provides the most support for online scammers, is expanding its offerings to include messaging app, stablecoin, and crypto exchange and has contributed $24 billion in sales.according to a new study. New results show that GitHub’s efforts to combat the use of deepfake software are on the wane. And WIRED went deep down the murky world of travel forecasting and the companies and governments that are releasing the data of those moving around the world to AI tools meant to identify potential “threats.”
But wait, there’s more! Every week, we create security and privacy stories that we haven’t covered in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read all the stories. And be safe out there.
Chinese spies, US spies, everyone is a spy. Mutual espionage is a world game that is played in almost every country in the world. So when the US government singled out one hacker for espionage, naming him and punishing him, he must have been spying so aggressively – or rightfully so – that he angered the most powerful people.
The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday indicted Yin Kecheng, a 39-year-old Chinese man accused of hacking nine U.S. companies involved with the Chinese hacking group known as Salt Typhoon, as well as other recent violations. at the US Treasury. In its statement on the news, the Treasury said that Yin is part of China’s Ministry of Defense and has been a “computer gamer” for more than a decade. It also imposed sanctions on Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology, a company the Treasury says is also linked to Salt Storm.
The Salt Typhoon breach of US telecommunications gave the Chinese access to real-time records and phone calls of Americans, and was allegedly used to spy on President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, among other purposes. FBI Director Christopher Wray has to be invited telecom breaks down “China’s most important cyberespionage campaign in history.”
As the Treasury resumes spying operations in China, it is still working to determine the extent of infiltration by some of the same hackers that took place within its networks. An internal Treasury report obtained by Bloomberg found that hackers accessed about 400 of the agency’s PCs and stole more than 3,000 files in the latest breach. The espionage intrusion appears to have been carried out after sanctions and law enforcement information, the report found, as well as other intelligence tools. Despite this high level of access, the intruders did not gain access to Treasury emails or other parts of the network, the report said, nor did they leave behind any malware that would suggest a long-term access effort.
The Department of Justice revealed this week that the FBI conducted an operation to remove the PlugX malware from 4,200 computers around the world. The malware, which is often delivered to computers via infected USB drives, has been around for at least a decade and is sometimes used by Chinese government-backed terrorist groups to target Chinese dissidents. In July last year, the cybersecurity firm Sekoia and the French police seized the command and control server behind the malware. This week, the FBI received a court order that allowed the agency to issue an order to self-destruct the software on infected machines.
Following the news earlier this week of a cyberattack in December that breached the US education technology platform PowerSchool, school districts targeted by TechCrunch told TechCrunch on Thursday that hackers had accessed “all” of student and teacher data in their accounts. PowerSchool is used by more than 60 million K-12 students in the US. Hackers obtained the information by stealing login credentials that gave them access to the company’s customer service website. The attack has not been publicly linked to a specific culprit. PowerSchool has yet to say how many schools are affected or if all of its customers are affected.
