U.S. and South Korean cyber agencies warned Monday about a ransomware-as-a-service outfit, Gunra, that reportedly recruits ethical hackers and penetration testers and benefits from North Korean government-linked hackers’ tools to target government and critical infrastructure organizations.

Gunra has gone after sectors such as academia, financial services and insurance, government services and facilities, healthcare, manufacturing and construction, media, retail, transportation and utilities. Its global scope is far-ranging, according to Monday’s alert: Africa, the Americas, the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

“Gunra is another variant in the ongoing trend of ransomware attacks causing disruption and harm to U.S. and international organizations,” said Chris Butera, acting assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which produced the advisory with the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center, FBI, National Security Agency, Secret Service and Republic of Korea’s National Police Agency.

The alert is part of the #StopRansomware series, a joint FBI-CISA project aimed at network defenders.

The FBI first took notice of Gunra in April of last year. The double-extortion group established a data leak site on Tor to list victims and publish purloined data. By January of this year, Gunra had launched a formal ransomware-as-a-service affiliate and was growing in its ambition, Monday’s alert states.

“The FBI observed the group adopting new branding aliases (notably operating under the name Golden Community) to support this expansion,” it reads. “Gunra has further commercialized its platform by actively recruiting penetration testers and ethical hackers to serve as initial access brokers, offering a share of the ransom profits in exchange for enterprise network access.”

Gunra seeks initial access with known vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices like firewalls or virtual private networks, and is based on or influenced by the Conti ransomware code leaked in 2022, according to the agencies.

Research published in July by a South Korean cybersecurity firm took note of Gunra overlap with Lazarus Group, although it doesn’t explicitly mention the latter group’s name.

“These commonalities suggest that although the state-sponsored threat group and the Gunra ransomware group appear to be separate threat actors with different ultimate objectives, they may have shared certain techniques, tools, and infrastructure or collaborated to a limited extent during the attacks,” AhnLab wrote in its report.

That kind of North Korean government-ransomware gang collaboration dates back to at least 2024. Nor is Gunra alone among ransomware-as-a-service outfits recruiting penetration testers.

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Senators from both parties Thursday probed Trump administration officials about whether federal agencies and foreign governments are coordinated enough in the battle against scammers, something witnesses told the Foreign Relations Committee they were working to remedy.

At least 13 federal agencies have authorities to counter scams, raising questions about whether someone needs to be in charge of all those efforts. And while there was some bipartisan sentiment at Thursday’s hearing that the Trump administration has taken good actions to battle scammers, both lawmakers and administration officials said that scam operations have demonstrated that cracking down on them in one place often just leads to them going elsewhere.

Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., compared the situation to an international initiative that gained prominence in the 1990s to counter drug trafficking, Joint Interagency Task Force South.

“Given that today’s scam centers are similarly transnational, combining cybercrime, human trafficking, money laundering and cryptocurrency, has the threat reached the point that we should establish a comparable multinational coordination mechanism?” he asked.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., focused on federal coordination: She paraphrased a former federal official who said, “there is nobody that is heading that effort up across agencies. We need to treat this like combat, and so we need somebody in charge.”

Shaheen, the top Democrat on the panel, is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act, which seeks to unify federal efforts on the subject.

A State Department official told Shaeen scammers were a national security priority for President Donald Trump, and that his executive order on the topic sought to tackle coordination.

“I do understand that this is a whole-of-government approach, and many agencies are focused on this,” said David Bedard, deputy assistant secretary at State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs “The Action plan that was directed by the president is currently in the interagency review process to deconflict some of the concerns that you have raised. We certainly think the task force that will be implanted through the executive order will solve the problems you might be referencing.”

There’s also an international plan under the task force, he said. Currently, the administration shares intelligence on scammers with foreign allies, and Interpol has “productive” channels to work through there and is setting up its own task force, Bedard said, but there are concerns about other countries taking similar, duplicative action.

There have been signs of progress on the international front, Bedard and another State Department witness told the panel.

Michael DeSombre, assistant secretary at the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said Trump has raised the subject with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and that China has used its influence in Asia as its own citizens have become scam victims. Still, there’s been more progress in countries where the United States has stronger relations, such as Cambodia, than in those where ties aren’t as close, like Burma and Laos.

In Cambodia, one key has been pursuing scam center bosses first and foremost, Bedard said.

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The Trump administration executive order on artificial intelligence tried to strike the balance between responsible use, security and mutual benefit, all with an eye toward not making it regulatory in nature, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said Tuesday.

“Everyone is working towards the same goal in terms of protecting the country and securing our systems, and we are trying to ensure that defenders have this technology as quickly and at scale as possible, but there are obviously specific security concerns, and industry has been very sensitive to this as well,” Cairncross said at the Black Hat 2026 conference in Las Vegas.

The security concerns about AI have moved to the forefront of discussions about the technology after OpenAI models escaped a test environment to hack the company Hugging Face last month.

“The design of this is that when there is something that happens, when there is a breach, when there is an event, that that system, that network of connections can exist, adapt to that, and seek to remedy that as quickly as possible, so that form follows function rather than turning that upside down, and as usual with the government pen just proceeding in a vacuum,” Cairncross said.

The Trump administration has drawn criticism over whether it has struck the right balance on AI rules. Trump’s AI executive order notably got pulled just before its scheduled release, with the final version signed in June missing some aspects that had drawn industry opposition.

“What needs to be built is a flexible, adaptable structure that enables information sharing between industry and government, so we can guarantee that this technology benefits everyone it’s going to benefit, but is used responsibly and securely,” Cairncross said.

He said the administration is working with industry during implementation of the executive order.

“A regulatory regime would not only strangle growth, development, and innovation, and be enormously harmful to the industry, but it would be obsolete 48 hours after it was gone through whatever process it had gone through,” Cairncross said.

Open source will play a “vital” role in the U.S. spreading its vision for AI across the globe, he said.

“We are extremely interested in looking at ways to build U.S. open source, make it competitive, make it the preferential adoption by planet Earth,” Cairncross said. “We understand and appreciate the value to the ecosystem that it has, the innovation, the startups who rely on it, the leap forward it makes possible in ways that otherwise would never happen. And so I think it’s an incredibly thriving ecosystem in AI right now, and we are looking to do what we can to grow, foster, and push that U.S. open source model.” 

Speaking at the same conference, Nick Andersen, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, seconded Cairncross’s comments about AI executive order implementation. He touted the Gold Eagle clearinghouse as one example.

“Those are fantastic opportunities we have to really provide a unifying function around the way that we’re going to do AI-enabled vulnerability reporting and disclosure at scale in a way that we haven’t had to do before with some of our legacy platforms, and just continue to expand out those opportunities,” he said. “That access — to build off the director’s point earlier — to really enable that industry collaboration, that’s so key and critical to us as we move forward.”

Matt Kapko contributed reporting to this story.

Updated 8/5/2026: to include comments from Andersen.

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The Trump administration’s haphazard and opaque interventions into artificial intelligence security matters could catapult Chinese alternatives into broader acceptance, posing new security risks altogether, a group of Democratic senators wrote to top administration officials Monday.

The five senators said that the administration’s handling has alternated between too passive, such as when OpenAI models escaped testing in the Hugging Face hack last month, and overstepping, such as when the Commerce Department suspended access for any foreign national to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in June.

“The Administration’s ad hoc and unpredictable approach undermines U.S. competitiveness, heightening market incentives to adopt open weight models from vendors based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” wrote Sens. Kristen Gillibrand of New York, Adam Schiff of California, Mark Warner of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Kelly of Arizona.

In the Hugging Face hack, the senators wrote that “the Federal Government cannot be passive as these capabilities emerge.”

In the case of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 suspensions, the senators said that the administration “utilized an infrequently used authority to direct Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals (including foreign national employees inside the United States) citing an undisclosed national security concern later described as a narrow jailbreak finding.”

Because Anthropic couldn’t immediately assess users’ nationality, the firm had to disable both models for everyone. The administration and Anthropic negotiated for 18 days behind closed doors before reaching an agreement, the lawmakers complained.

“While the Administration may have been responding to real security concerns to protect the United States, even justifiable interventions can create broader harm if the standards and decision-making processes are opaque, ad hoc, or unpredictable,” they said in their letter to leaders in the White House, Office of the National Cyber Director and departments of State, Treasury and Commerce. “Moreover, when the Executive Branch exercises authority delegated from Congress, such as in the conduct of export control administration, it is essential that it keep Congress fully apprised of its actions and procedures.”

During the time Anthropic was under export controls, the stock price of “an entity-listed Chinese lab” nearly doubled, the senators said. And while Hugging Face was breached, the company “had to” rely on a Chinese open-weight model due to guardrails on U.S. frontier models.

“If American models are perceived as subject to sudden access disruptions based on a black-box U.S. Government process, or as unreliable because U.S. AI labs are overcorrecting in the face of this black-box process, companies and governments in the United States and abroad may hedge by adopting Chinese or other foreign models instead,” the senators contended. “That outcome would undermine U.S. technological leadership while increasing exposure to systems that may carry risks of PRC or otherwise directed censorship, espionage, IP theft, and other supply chain security risks.”

Their letter asked for answers to questions about the standards the administration uses to determine the national security risks a frontier model presents, what legal authorities it will use to invoke restrictions, which agencies are responsible for which decisions and more.

None of the offices or departments the letter was addressed to immediately responded to a request for comment.

The letter follows inquiries at the state level, where 15 attorneys general asked OpenAI for more information regarding the security incident at Hugging Face.

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With identity protection services for millions of victims of the 2015 Office of Personnel Management breach set to expire, a group of lawmakers is making a push to extend them forever.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., introduced legislation to give lifetime identity protection coverage to around 4.2 million federal employees exposed in the historic breach by alleged Chinese hackers, which affected 22.1 million people. Warner said “the threat remains,” necessitating lifetime coverage.

That coverage is due to end at the end of September, as set by a 10-year authorization from Congress. That prompted the pair of lawmakers to introduce Reducing the Effects of the Cyberattack on OPM Victims Enduring Response and Protecting Identifiable Information Act, or  RECOVER PII Act.

“The data stolen included workers’ most sensitive and personal information – from Social Security numbers to security clearance records – and once that information is in the hands of a bad actor, you don’t get it back,” Warner said in a news release Monday. “We have a responsibility to stand by the federal workers who were put at risk through no fault of their own. This legislation will ensure those affected continue to receive the identity protection they need, while helping better safeguard personal information from future exploitation.”

But the bill could have an uphill climb, given the makeup of Congress and stance of the Trump administration.

The Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate are Tim Kaine of Virginia, with Angela Alsobrooks of Chris Van Hollen, both of Maryland. The Democratic House cosponsors are Reps. Don Beyer and James Walkinshaw of Virginia, with Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

Warner and Norton listed no co-sponsors from the GOP, which controls both chambers of Congress and the White House.  And OPM has declared the program too expensive based on the cost relative to the number of claims.

Similar legislation to extend the coverage, including from Norton, has fallen short in recent years.

“Lifetime identity protection is the only solution that will give the workers whose data was compromised the peace of mind they deserve,” Norton said Monday. “Because there is no limit on how long personal information can be exploited, Congress must protect these federal employees and contractors in perpetuity.”

Some watchdog scrutiny of the OPM program has been critical, and while consumer advocates say identity theft protections are helpful, they nonetheless say they aren’t adequate.

The Warner-Norton legislation also would offer reimbursements to federal employees and contractors for privacy services.

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President Donald Trump blamed Minnesota Friday for the cyberattacks its water systems have suffered in recent days, saying the state was “behind it.”

Trump said the state being “incompetent” was the issue, but it wasn’t clear whom he thought actually conducted cyberattacks that U.S. investigators have attributed to Iran — if, perhaps, somehow Minnesota incompetently cyberattacked itself. The White House referred a request for clarification back to Trump’s remarks.

“I think that Minnesota is behind it,” Trump told reporters Friday. “Because they’re grossly incompetent. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack. I think Minnesota ought to get its act together.”

The White House also didn’t clarify whom the president believed was behind similar attacks in other states, when asked for comment. Trump has repeatedly used federal power aggressively in Minnesota, a state led by Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who was on the ticket that ran against him in 2024 as the vice presidential nominee. Trump also has downplayed Iranian attacks amid the war he launched against the nation with Israel in February.

A number of cyber experts quickly pushed back on Trump’s comments after he made them.

“Victim blaming in cyber is so 2000 and late,” cybersecurity pioneer Chris Wysopal, Veracode co-founder and chief security evangelist, said on the Bluesky social media platform. Said Jake Williams, a member of the IANS faculty: “His own intelligence services are attributing this to Iran.”

Andy Jabbour — founder and CEO of Gate 15, a cybersecurity firm which provides support to the water sector — told CyberScoop that, “speaking candidly, I’m not even sure what he was actually saying or suggesting Minnesota’s government did or didn’t do.”

“Attribution is tricky business,” he continued, referencing recent alerts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and others. “But logically, given an ongoing war with Iran, recent statements made by Iran-aligned threat groups, with assessments that the recent activity is aligned with recent CISA warnings, given yesterday’s statements from CISA and the FBI, random unsubstantiated allegations aimed at political opponents seem reckless and are a disservice to the American people.”

Walz struck back at Trump in a Facebook post, noting steps from his Department of Government Efficiency to slash federal funding. CISA has shrunken considerably under Trump, and his administration has pushed states to defend against cyberattacks that feds once countered.

“Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too,” Walz said. “This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran.”

“DOGE took an axe to CISA and left the U.S. exposed to cyber attacks,” he continued. “Thankfully, our experts in Minnesota were able to identify the vulnerability quickly and work with local communities to stop it.”

A spokesperson for Minnesota IT Services, a state agency that has been responding to the water cyberattacks, declined to address Trump’s remarks.

“We remain focused on supporting affected communities, securing critical infrastructure and coordinating with local partners and federal officials as the investigation continues,” the spokesperson, Emily Zimmer, told CyberScoop. “We will not comment on political statements or speculate about attribution.”

Other cyber professionals declined to comment directly on Trump’s remarks, but offered thoughts on who was behind the attacks and their motives.

Bryson Bort, CEO and founder of Scythe said the evidence supports the attribution with Iran, and that it looks like hackers there found something they could exploit on the internet and seized the chance.

“This was a target of opportunity,” said Bort, co-founder of the ICS Village, a non-profit advancing awareness of industrial control system security; such systems are common in the water sector. “It wasn’t that Minnesota did something as a state to raise Iran’s ire.”

Cynthia Kaiser, a former top FBI cyber official, said that when the bureau conducts attributions, it looks at technical indicators but also who has the capability, who has conducted similar attacks in the past and what the purpose of the attacks is.

“Iran ticks all these kinds of things,” Kaiser, now senior vice president at cybersecurity firm Halcyon, told CyberScoop. “My view is, if it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck, I strongly suspect it’s a duck. I’d be shocked if we found out it wasn’t Iran.”

Just last week, CISA updated an advisory about how Iranian hackers were targeting programmable logic controllers in the water sector and other sectors, a warning that the water industry’s information sharing and analysis center said it believed.

“WaterISAC is confident in our government partners’ assessment that the confirmed activity is aligned with the joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) AA26-097A ‘Iranian-Affiliated Cyber Actors Exploit Programmable Logic Controllers Across U.S. Critical Infrastructure’ published and recently updated by CISA,” Tom Dobbins, executive director, WaterISAC, told CyberScoop. “We have evidence of earlier attacks from Iran even before this current conflict. Cyber attacks are the most viable way that Iran can directly attack our homeland, and it is logical that they would do so, especially given the challenges of absolute attribution.”

The water sector is often viewed as one of the most vulnerable critical infrastructure sectors, and Dobbins called on Congress to provide funding to provide funding for the ISAC.

Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., also took issue with Trump’s comments.

“The President provided an unserious response that is beneath the dignity of the office he holds. Iran’s purported cyberattack on Minnesota’s water infrastructure must be taken as a serious threat to our national security.  Smith said in a statement, adding that she’s been in touch with CISA and the FBI and was grateful to Minnesota’s IT experts. “The entire situation serves as a stark reminder of the danger this war puts us in the longer it drags on.”

Fellow Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar had earlier been in touch with Sean Cairncross, the national cyber director and a Minnesota native, about the incident.

Trump has previously displayed a laissez-faire view toward other cyberattacks on the United States, such as when he’s been asked about Chinese and Russian cyberattacks and Trump shrugs them off as something America does, too.

He also has cast doubt before on his government officials’ assessments of who’s responsible for cyberattacks on the United States, such as when he asserted China rather than Russia was behind the landmark SolarWinds breach.

Updated 8/3/2026: with comments from Minnesota’s senators.

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a guidebook for federal agencies Thursday to aid them on managing security risks with open-source software, touching on topics like patching and open-source AI models.

An executive order President Joe Biden signed and that President Donald Trump amended ordered CISA and other agencies to issue open-source security recommendations to federal agencies. But the guidance is also timely, given a recent slew of attacks on open-source software (OSS).

“As part of our statutory mission, CISA remains laser-focused on enhancing the nation’s cybersecurity by collaborating with government, industry and the open-source community to understand and securely use OSS,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity. “CISA encourages federal civilian agencies to review this guide and implement the principles and practices to improve risk management, better execute their mission, and better serve the public.” 

The document, “Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices,” touts the advantages of open-source software — which anyone can use, modify and share — as offering benefits in efficiency, cost, security transparency and more, but notes that it also has unique tradeoffs.

“All software carries risk, and OSS is no more or less risky than other software. The key distinction is that, with OSS, agencies can directly assess code quality and security, rather than relying solely on vendor assurances,” the guidance reads. “OSS is increasingly intertwined with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Agencies that adapt to OSS’s unique characteristics will position themselves to meet future challenges and leverage new innovations.”

The guidance says that agencies need to take steps to evaluate the trustworthiness of an OSS project before approving an OSS component for use, and track OSS in their asset management repositories. It details how agencies should deal with patching, including when there’s a new OSS vulnerability that doesn’t have one. It offers advice on how agencies might contribute to OSS projects, produce them and secure rights for government reuse of code when contracting for custom software development. And it explains how it should approach open-weight AI models.

“Agencies should approach ‘open source’ AI systems differently from other OSS because open source licenses for AI software do not require the level of transparency needed to evaluate the trustworthiness of the software,” the guidance states.

Æva Black, an open-source security expert and former OSS lead at CISA, said she applauded her former agency for the guidance, telling CyberScoop that it “demonstrates a grounded understanding of the global, diverse, and participatory nature of open source software development, and provides essential guidance for federal agencies to safely use open soure during a crucial moment.” 

She singled out its recommendations on the risks of deploying unverifiable open-weight AI models on sensitive networks.

“Due to recent advances in AI, particularly in large language models capable of finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, vulnerability management is facing a global crisis,” she said. “Many proprietary software vendors are using this as an opportunity to spread ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ about open source in order to capture public attention, and, I presume, public money — but when used responsibly and maintained collaboratively, I believe open source software is, and will remain, the safest and most cost-effective means for building large scale public infrastructure.” 

CISA has produced a bevy of security guidance and updated advisory materials this week: on the creation of software bills of materials written in conjunction with other agencies and allied governments that won praise from experts; on the isolation of vital operational technology during a crisis, also written with other agencies and allied governments; and the release of updated secure cloud configuration baselines for Google Workspace.

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One of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in the quantum race will be the supply chain, given how diffuse it is, a top White House official said Wednesday.

“Supply chain is one of the biggest challenges in my mind, and really, the challenge with the quantum supply chain is that quantum is not defined by a single hardware platform,” said Brad Blakestad, director of the National Quantum Coordination Office within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“If you look at the quantum computing technologies, the quantum sensing technologies, the networking — those are all different,” he said in a webinar hosted by Inside Cybersecurity and USTelecom. “And even within computing, there’s seven different modalities that use completely different components. So we have this not just one monolithic supply chain, but just a bunch of different supply chains that are kind of intertwined in various ways.”

Blakestad made his remarks a little more than a month after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on quantum computing. He referenced proposed ways to address the supply chain challenge in one of the orders.

“The other major issue or challenge that we face right now is that we’re on the cusp of quantum exploding from a commercialization perspective, but we’re not quite there yet,” he said. “So there’s not the funding, the revenue coming from large-scale quantum companies at this point to really make the supply chain as robust as you would want. So thinking about it from the government perspective, it’s just [that] there are too many places that I would want to bolster and not enough funding to do it.”

Blakestad touted steps to help that along such as the government buying widgets from a company that makes them to certain specifications, or prize challenges.

The quantum supply chain isn’t just diffuse in the United States, an International Institute for Strategic Studies policy paper noted Wednesday. It’s “inherently international: no single country dominates the supply chain, whether specialised materials, cryogenic equipment, hardware, software, fabrication or algorithms,” the authors, Dongyoun Cho and Maria Shagina, wrote.

And a March report from the Center for a New American Security identified strengthening the quantum supply chain as pivotal to the United States seizing the benefits of the technology, citing gaps in the U.S. supply chain and reliance on foreign suppliers such as China and Russia. 

Supply chain wasn’t the only obstacle Blakestad mentioned as looming large.

“The encryption challenge is a real challenge, and we want to make sure that we are aware of when quantum computers will ultimately get to a scale that they start having these sorts of implications and move as quickly as we can,” he said. “So, just by owning the technologies, by owning the workforce, by making the United States the place that people want to come to be on the cutting edge of this technology, I think that kind of addresses both of those issues, and that’s what makes it so critical.”

Another difficulty is measuring progress, Blakestad said: “It’s also very, very hard to benchmark, and to know that you’re actually doing what you’re supposed to, what you are intending to do.”

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Sen. Ron Wyden implored a trio of federal leaders Monday to lead a comprehensive campaign to purge older, insecure virtual private networks that are directly accessible via the public internet from federal agencies.

“For too long, federal agencies and government contractors have suffered devastating cyberattacks due to their reliance on legacy, insecure, internet-facing VPN servers to grant employees remote access,” Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in his missive to top officials at the Office of Management and Budget, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Institute of Standards and Technology. They should coordinate “require the adoption of modern, secure remote-access technology across the federal government,” he said.

Such VPNs serve as a digital “front door” accessible via the public internet that allows mobile devices and remote employees to log in, Wyden said in a letter first reported by CyberScoop.

Wyden referenced several attacks that have affected federal agencies, including the ArcaneDoor attacks on Cisco firewalls, the FortiBleed credential exposures across Fortinet gateways and vulnerabilities that hackers exploited across Ivanti and Check Point VPN appliances.

“Modern remote-access solutions eliminate this vulnerability entirely. Instead of leaving an open door accessible from the public internet, modern solutions provide remote access without broadcasting their presence,” he said. “This effectively makes these servers invisible, ensuring that hackers cannot attack an entry point they cannot see.”

Agencies should move away from what a Congressional Research Service report to Wyden called a “castle-and-moat” approach of assuming anyone inside the network is authorized to access an organization’s resources that VPNs rely upon by extending virtual bridges to a more remote workforce, he said. They should instead focus on zero-trust architecture that uses a never-trust, always-verify approach, he said.

Furthermore, CISA, the OMB and NIST need to fundamentally change how the federal government approaches agency vulnerabilities, Wyden wrote. 

“The federal government has become trapped in an endless game of ‘whack-a-mole’ in responding to widespread compromises of legacy remote access technologies,” he said. “To keep federal networks online, CISA has been forced to repeatedly issue extraordinary Emergency Directives and hyper-accelerated patch mandates. These reactive emergency mandates are unsustainable for federal cybersecurity teams, and fail to address the fundamental issue that these flaws are inherent in the use of legacy remote-access appliances.”

CISA needs to issue a binding operational directive that gives agencies two years to fully expunge legacy, public-facing remote access systems, he said. NIST needs to issue implementation standards for transitioning to zero-trust architectures.

OMB needs to issue a memo directing agencies to prioritize zero-trust architecture spending. And OMB needs to team with CISA and the Defense Department to update procurement rules to block agencies and defense contractors from buying network edge, VPN or other remote access solutions unless a vendor supplies an attestation that it complies with NIST zero-trust standards, Wyden wrote.

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Industry groups who spoke at town halls hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency about a pending cyber incident notification regulation had a few consistent messages:

We want this to apply to fewer of us. We don’t want to report to you on as many incidents. We want to give you less information when we do. 

CISA last week published transcripts from the town halls, where the agency sought feedback on the delayed rule for the 2022 Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act — perhaps the most significant cyber legislation Congress has ever passed. That law required critical infrastructure owners to report major cyberattacks to the federal government within 72 hours, and ransomware payments within 24 hours.

The law was designed to let the feds share information about significant incidents more widely to prepare other would-be victims. CISA published a proposed rule on the law in 2024 to define terms like “covered cyber incident” and more, and industry groups have persistently registered their objections since then.

CISA missed the October 2025 deadline for finalizing the rule, then missed a May reset target date, and now the administration says the rule will be completed in September.

Some industry sources told CyberScoop they consider that unlikely. Most also haven’t received any indications from CISA about how much of the town hall feedback it intends to embrace, they said.

Companies, incidents, information 

Those town hall comments over the course of four June dates were often very direct.

“The rule includes too many companies,” said Grant MacIntyre, director of regulatory affairs and senior attorney at the Auto Care Association. CISA estimated that more than 300,000 entities will be subject to its requirements.

Some industries advocated for their removal entirely, such as two different groups representing elements of the insurance sector. Some sought to reduce the number affected within their sector, such as the Nuclear Energy Institute wanting the list cut down to those already subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission cybersecurity reporting requirements.

While CISA wrote the regulation with the intention to avoid overburdening small businesses, some feared it wouldn’t work that way in practice.

“The current approach where an entity qualifies either by size or by sector effectively negates the intended limitation on small businesses,” said Douglas Leigh, vice president of legislative affairs for the Alliance for Chemical Distribution. “In chemical distribution, even small entities could be swept in under multiple cyber categories.”

Where the rule specifies what kind of data organizations should report in a major incident, CISA should “seek to collect the least amount of information possible in the easiest to report fashion to facilitate information accuracy and reporting speed,” said Samantha Burch, vice president of technology public policy at government affairs at AHIP, a health insurance industry trade association.

Many, for instance, argued the report should not include information on the affected entities’ security measures.

Others worried about what kind of incidents would trigger reporting requirements.

“My big concern is that you’re going to be asking us to report incidents on every time some foreign entity tickles our firewall, whether they do anything or not, if they just do a ping or a search,” said Tim Pospisil, chief security officer for Nebraska Public Power District. “And that could be extremely burdensome.”

Industry Expectations

One industry representative told CyberScoop that CISA’s willingness to hold town halls, combined with the Trump administration strategy emphasizing “common sense regulation,” was a good sign about where the rule might be heading.

‘They are not picking up on the Biden administration’s approach and tweaking it. They’re thinking, ‘What are the specific pieces of information we need during a cyber incident to help critical infrastructure companies respond?’” said Henry Young, senior director of policy for the Business Software Alliance. “In general, industry is optimistic that what we’ll end up with are a few of the most important pieces of information, so that in the emergency, companies can act quickly and actually respond to an incident rather than completing lots of paperwork.”

But multiple industry sources said they haven’t gotten many indications about CISA’s intentions. Nor are they optimistic CISA can meet the September target date in the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.

“It could slip,” one said. “But I think they’re going to try.”

That industry source said they’d like to see a proposal from CISA before it cements anything forever.

Another industry source said it’s hard to trust the September date given past CISA delays, some of which aren’t CISA’s fault, such as dealing with multiple government shutdowns. Some of the delays trace to the Trump administration, given the massive cuts to CISA’s personnel.

Congress is also getting impatient.

The House Appropriations Committee “is concerned about delays in publishing the final CIRCIA rule and urges CISA to finalize it promptly following stakeholder review and feedback,” the panel wrote in the committee report for its fiscal 2027 Department of Homeland Security spending bill.

It’s a much different world than when CISA began writing the rule, something the agency also has to take into account now.

“AI has fundamentally changed the playing field,” the source said. “When this was set up, we didn’t even have the first generation of ChatGPT. We’re now in a mythos class environment.” That’s changed “how quickly we can identify threats, mitigate them, the level of human intervention, potential machine engagement.”

While CISA might have good intentions, past interactions give cause for skepticism about how capable it is of working collaboratively with industry, the source said.

Another industry source said conversations with CISA suggest the agency will look to simplify the regulation to keep it smaller and narrower, then potentially build upon it later.

From CISA’s mouth

Nick Andersen, the acting director of CISA, talked about his overarching intentions with CIRCIA at the town halls.

“CISA does not view CIRCIA as simply a check-the-box compliance exercise,” Andersen said at one. “CIRCIA will enhance visibility into the cyberthreat landscape to enable a robust national early warning capability for critical infrastructure. By quickly reporting covered cyber incidents and ransom payments to CISA, we will be able to provide timely and actionable defensive and eviction measures to your network defenders.”

Asked by CyberScoop about next steps for CIRCIA, and how it might incorporate the industry feedback, a spokesperson provided a statement.

“CISA recognizes the importance of CIRCIA, however, multiple funding lapses impacted CISA’s ability to conduct rulemaking activity for CIRCIA. CISA continues to work on the final rule,” the spokesperson said, adding that 1,200 critical infrastructure stakeholders attended the town halls.  “CISA will continue to communicate updates on the CIRCIA rulemaking process and timeline through CISA.gov/CIRCIA and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.”

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The State Department will restrict visas for cybercriminals like scammers to sextortionists, and in some cases even their family members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday.

The Trump administration has sought to make a crackdown on foreign-based scams one of the signature issues of his second term. An executive order that the president signed in March indicated that visa restrictions would be on the table as one response.

“By restricting visa issuance to those who are responsible for or complicit in these criminal enterprises, we are sending a clear message: The United States will go after those who prey on our citizens,” Rubio said.

Other departments have also made efforts to reduce foreign-run scams. In June, the Department of Justice seized infrastructure used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate tied to one of the world’s most prolific criminal marketplaces used to commit cyber scams and other crimes.

Rubio authorized the visa restrictions under a 1952 law that gives the State Department the ability to deport or rule as inadmissible someone who poses “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Critics have accused the Trump administration of abusing that provision of the law for political purposes.

Rubio’s statement on the visa restrictions mentions “individuals responsible for, or complicit in, cybercrime and cyber-enabled crime, such as those involved in cyberscams, and sextortion.”  Furthermore, he said, “Immediate family members of individuals engaged in such illicit activities may also be subjected to visa restrictions.”

Betsy Cooper, Founding Director of the Aspen Policy Academy, said the visa restrictions on cybercriminals could be valuable, but offered a caveat.

“Scamming people is a growing global enterprise, and it is a laudable goal to penalize those who scam and defraud people since they so rarely suffer consequences for their actions,” she said in a statement to CyberScoop. “So long as the new visa controls are used narrowly and deployed only against verified scammers and fraudsters, this is a positive step toward combatting cyber-enabled crime.”

While some cyber experts have questioned how much visa restrictions, prosecutions and other punishments of cyber miscreants who are based overseas will affect them, others maintain that it can serve as a deterrent to those who would consider getting into the line of work but want freedom to travel the globe.

FightCyberCrime.org, a nonprofit that seeks to help cybercrime victims, applauded the restrictions on the cybercriminals.

“We welcome efforts to hold cybercriminals accountable across borders. Cryptocurrency investment scams, romance scams, and sextortion cause devastating financial and emotional harm to victims,” it said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Meaningful disruption of these transnational criminal networks is an essential part of the response.”

But there’s still a long way to go in the fight, the statement continued.

“At the same time, we must invest more in victim support, prevention, and recovery resources,” the organization said. “Accountability is critical, but ensuring victims have access to trauma-informed support and resources is equally important.”

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Seven out of 10 federal cyber regulations requiring written reports to federal agencies are duplicated elsewhere, a report from a government watchdog found in a report to Congress Wednesday.

And so far, efforts to de-conflict haven’t had much success, the report from the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At the request of two top lawmakers, the GAO examined federal cyber regulations at 37 agencies. It counted 80 out of 117 rules that “either contain the same kind of reporting requirement applicable to a sector or the same reporting requirement as at least one other regulation.”

The desire to harmonize those conflicting rules gathered steam under the Biden administration, as it undertook a more aggressive push to regulate cybersecurity than prior administrations. It has continued into the second Trump administration.

The GAO scrutinized regulations that required the private sector to report cybersecurity incidents, plans and reviews to federal agencies, as part of a study sought by House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., and the top Democrat on the Senate counterpart to Garbarino’s panel, Gary Peters, D-Mich.

In some cases, a single critical infrastructure sector could have duplication with several agencies. For example, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been working on a regulation stemming from the 2022 Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA), which would require critical infrastructure owners and operators to report when they are the victims of major attacks or make ransomware payments.

Elements of the financial services sector might fall under one of 15 preexisting cybersecurity reporting rules, depending on the agency that has oversight, but they may also be subject to the pending CIRCIA rules, GAO noted.

A 2024 national security memorandum tasked the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Department of Homeland Security to harmonize conflicting regulations, and both agencies made some progress on those goals.

But the executive branch paused some of those efforts after Trump issued an executive order in March of last year while the administration conducted a study of the 2024 memo, a study that was still underway as of last month, according to the GAO.

As such, on harmonization, “many past federal efforts have experienced delays and made limited progress,” the GAO concluded in its report Wednesday, its latest on the topic. 

Congress has also looked at ways to streamline cybersecurity regulations.

GAO’s study was focused only on federal rules. BreachRx, a cyber incident response firm, published its own report Wednesday looking at major cyber incidents and how overlapping regulatory reporting obligations came into play, folding in regulations from states and other sources.

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An annual spy policy bill would authorize a cyberthreat intelligence sharing pilot program for state and local governments, and order an outside assessment of how intelligence agencies are currently sharing that information with those jurisdictions.

The House Intelligence Committee approved fiscal 2027 intelligence authorization legislation Monday that also includes provisions on election security and that are meant to boost intelligence community (IC) usage of artificial intelligence for cyber and other purposes.

The measure’s language on state and local information sharing come amid widespread frustration with Trump administration cutbacks on such aid from the federal government, with the president taking explicit action to shift more responsibility for cyber defenses to the local level.

Under the pilot program, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) would pick one state to receive monthly briefings from the ODNI, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and others to receive monthly briefings on “timely, specific, and actionable information regarding cyber threats” in unclassified form. After a year, the ODNI would then provide a report on the viability of a wider briefing program for state and local governments.

The bill requires the ODNI to produce a strategy on information sharing with states and local areas, and would require the Government Accountability Office to conduct an assessment of the state of such sharing now, including a summary of relevant agencies’ current efforts, how the agencies deconflict those efforts and what kind of obstacles security clearances pose to improving information sharing.

Trump’s pick to serve as DNI, Jay Clayton, emphasized his desire to focus on cyber threat information sharing as part of his Senate vetting last week, but some in the GOP are also pushing to significantly reduce the size of his office.

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has also talked about creating pilot programs for cyber threat information sharing with state and local governments, but there’s been little movement on that initiative.

During committee deliberation, panel Democrats won adoption of a trio of election security amendments.

An amendment from the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, would require the intelligence community to publish an unclassified assessment of foreign intelligence threats to the 2026 midterms. Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado’s amendment would partially withhold funding for the ODNI until Congress gets overdue reports it had required on the 2024 and 2026 elections. And  Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania’s amendment would “protect analysts from retribution by IC leadership for working on intelligence products related to foreign influence in US elections,” according to a news release.

The Democrats’ push arrives shortly after President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address seeking to bolster his long-debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

According to a Republican summary of the bill, it includes provisions for “significantly increasing funding for expanded access and use of frontier AI models for intelligence and cyber missions,” to codify and expand the role of the Artificial Intelligence Security Center at the National Security Agency and strengthen information sharing on AI threats.

“This year’s [bill] balances strong transparency and accountability measures while equipping the IC with the resources needed to combat the ever-evolving threats from our adversaries around the world, with a particularly strong focus on the global AI race,” said House Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford, R-Ark.

Another assessment that the bill orders would come from the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence of the Department of Energy on foreign cyberthreats to critical energy infrastructure, including their intent and risks.

The trend in Congress is for lawmakers to incorporate the annual intelligence authorization bill, or some of its provisions, into the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which often reaches the president’s desk at the end of each calendar year.

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A total of eight cyber personnel have served in a program that began in 2022 to rotate workers between federal agencies to bolster the workforce, a watchdog report said Thursday.

Over the life of the Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce program that effectively went away last year, 13 agencies offered 106 positions and received 634 applications, according to the Government Accountability Office. Eight workers won approval to participate.

The goal of the Office of Personnel Management-led program, established by bipartisan legislation, was that “participating employees develop knowledge and skills that they can bring back to their home agencies,” as the GAO noted.

A couple major factors account for the low participation, the study found. One was the sharp decline in eligible advertised positions: 75 in 2023, 31 in 2024 and none in 2025 or 2026.

As of December of last year, OPM said it planned to advertise positions on Connect.gov, but this year OPM said it didn’t do so and wouldn’t be advertising positions due to “budgetary constraints,” according to the report.

“OPM officials stated that they do not anticipate any agencies offering positions in 2026, and that OPM does not intend to invest resources in advertising and managing the program going forward,” the report reads. “As a result, OPM officials stated that the agency does not intend to post advertised positions in 2026.”

The other major factor was that even though there were 634 applications, OPM said there were issues with many of the applicants, including that they were underqualified, didn’t obtain necessary approval in advance of applying or were contractors who weren’t eligible.

Additionally, “It was often easier for agencies to allow employees to serve cyber rotations within their own agency,” OPM reported.

OPM evaluated possible shortcomings in implementing the program in late 2024 and developed plans for improving it, but never followed up on them, the GAO said. As of next summer the program will officially end, OPM said.

The program isn’t the only one that feds have tried to implement to address the persistent gap in cybersecurity skills and experience. Nor is it the only one to fall on hard times in President Donald Trump’s second term, as the administration slashed budgets at agencies and forced out cyber personnel.

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Cyberstalkers are increasingly exploiting a feature in Google Chrome meant for mobile phone user convenience, but can give intruders broad access to a device owner’s private information, according to researchers.

Certo Software said in a blog post Tuesday that stalkers are making use of Chrome’s sync capability — meant to make it so signing into Chrome on one device makes it easier to do so on other devices, too — to spy on a phone owner’s browsing history and gain access to their stored passwords.

As an illustration, Certo used the case of a pseudonymous victim, Emma, who had searched for a family lawyer and visited a domestic violence support website while her partner was sleeping, only for him to bring up to her two days later.

“Emma had been careful to only ever use her own device, and she hadn’t noticed any new apps appear on her phone,” wrote Certo co-founder Russell Kent-Payne. “What she didn’t know was that weeks earlier, during a few unattended minutes with her phone, he had opened the Chrome app and quietly signed it into a Google account of his own. From that moment on, every site she visited was being copied straight to his account, viewable from any device, anywhere in the world.”

The surveillance is as easy as that: brief access to a phone, signing into a Google account and making sure sync is turned on for that account.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said on the Bluesky social media app that Certo’s research serves as “an important reminder that tech-enabled abuse isn’t just limited to stalkerware.”

Certo said that Google could do a couple things, such as providing a temporary notification whenever a new account is added or sync is turned on or offering a regular marker to indicate when sync is active and which account it’s syncing to, to protect users.

Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Certo’s findings.

But the uptick in usage of that stalking method could be a byproduct of security successes elsewhere in the fight against spyware, Certo said.

“Modern smartphones are harder to compromise than ever. Regular security updates, stricter app store rules, and on-device threat detection have made traditional spyware a much riskier bet for a cyberstalker than it used to be,” Kent-Payne wrote. “As a result, we’re increasingly seeing abusers turn to something far simpler: the legitimate apps already sitting on their victim’s phone. No installation, no suspicious permissions, no telltale battery drain — just a quiet misuse of a feature the victim never knew existed.”

At the same time, Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, and this isn’t the first time security concerns have popped up about its sync feature, among other worries.

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Democratic senators pressed President Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence on questions of election security and integrity Wednesday, but they didn’t leave his nomination hearing satisfied with the answers.

As is typical for Trump administration nominees, Jay Clayton wouldn’t answer definitively at his Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, saying only that he was “certified,” while maintaining that he wasn’t an “election denier.”

He said that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s responsibilities were “principally” outside the United States. But he claimed varying degrees of ignorance about his predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, being physically present at an FBI raid of a Georgia election office in January, and wouldn’t comment on its appropriateness.

Democratic senators were also frustrated while trying to pin down Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who served as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Trump’s first term, on remarks about mail-in ballots and the California primary election results last month.

Multiple senators, including Mark Warner, D-Va., Angus King, I-Maine and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., tried to get Clayton to say whether Biden won the 2020 election. The final exchange came with Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.

Clayton protested that he had already answered. “I think I’ve answered the question,” he said. “We can keep doing this.”

Ossoff didn’t agree, telling him, “Well we’re going to keep doing it because you’re not being honest or forthright with the committee.”

“Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question?” he asked. “To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question. Why can you not give it?”

Earlier Clayton had said, “I’m not an election denier,” but repeatedly wouldn’t answer “yes” or “no” on whether Biden won in 2020.

That matters because of the DNI’s role, Kelly said, and it was worrying that Clayton was seeking to avoid upsetting Trump, who has maintained despite all evidence that he lost the 2020 election.

“It’s not about softening the edges when the truth is unpleasant,” Kelly said. “It’s about delivering information.”

Clayton discussed the DNI’s role on election security at greater length in pre-hearing written answers.

“I understand that the DNI, as head of the Intelligence Community, has substantial statutory authority to address national intelligence threats to U.S. elections,” he said. “In particular, the Director is responsible for the integration of national intelligence, which may include foreign intelligence threats to U.S. election activity. I also understand that Intelligence Community elements are authorized to cooperate with and provide appropriate intelligence and technical support to law enforcement agencies and that as head of the Intelligence Community, the DNI has oversight of those activities.”

A CNBC interview last month inspired some of the Democrats’ questions. Clayton said in response to questions about the California primaries that “On the integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job. And the American people are right to question it.” 

He said mail-in ballots present an “opportunity for fraud,” despite studies showing exceptionally low rates of fraud using that method, and said “mail-in ballots being used by one group and not another… honestly and dishonestly” was a “question that everyone is now asking.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked him about what group Clayton was referring to.

“”I would like to see where you’re pulling those quotes from. I’ve been very careful about my remarks on this,” Clayton answered. “I’d like to see the whole passage.”

In his questionnaire, when asked if “it would be inappropriate for a DNI to comment publicly about unsubstantiated claims regarding mail-in-ballots and election fraud,” Clayton answered that “If confirmed as DNI, any representations I make to the public, including about elections, will be informed by timely, objective national intelligence.”

Ossoff also had a tense exchange with Clayton when asking him about Gabbard’s appearance at the Fulton County office raid. Gabbard has said she was there because Trump asked her to be, in what subsequently became a highly publicized appearance because of questions about what the DNI would be doing at a law enforcement raid.

“I was made aware of it by you yesterday,” Clayton said.

Ossoff responded skeptically: “The first time you learned that Director Gabbard was present at that raid was in my office yesterday?”

Said Clayton: “It was the first time that in my recollection I’ve thought about it recently.”

“What?” Ossoff replied.

Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, told Clayton “I trust you” but it “strains credulity” that he wasn’t aware of Gabbard being at the raid.

“To be clear, the ODNI’s role is principally outside of the United States,” Clayton said.

On other topics, in his opening remarks, Clayton touted his SEC work on cybersecurity. In his questionnaire he said he would work to facilitate cyberthreat information sharing from his office.

He told Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., that he would evaluate whether the DNI should devote more resources to cybersecurity with federal government cyber experts being pushed out since Trump came back to office. Many Republicans are pushing to further reduce the size of Clayton’s office, contending it has become bloated beyond Congress’ original intentions as a coordinating body.

He said he supported renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which gives the executive branch controversial spying powers that Congress recently allowed to expire.

Trump has threatened to block renewal unless lawmakers advance his priority election bill. He said he will study how to “minimize the detrimental impact to our national security caused by the lapse in 702 authorities.” Some Democrats, meanwhile, have resisted action on the law until Trump’s pick for acting DNI Bill Pulte is gone, citing his prior efforts to investigate officials as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and lack of intelligence experience.

Because the GOP controls the Senate, Clayton is likely to get confirmed as DNI as long as no Republicans emerge in opposition. Wednesday’s hearing revealed no significant Republican objections.

Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., touted Clayton’s experience prosecuting terrorism cases and more.

“Jay Clayton has worked hand in glove with our intelligence agencies and counterterrorism personnel to lock up criminals who threaten our national security,” Clayton said. “I encourage my colleagues to join me and get Mr. Clayton’s nomination over the finish line.”

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The Treasury Department is slapping sanctions on First VPN and its administrator for allegedly selling services to ransomware operators, as well as another person aiding ransomware gangs.

First VPN Services, or 1VPNS, was “deeply embedded in the cybercriminal ecosystem” and appeared in virtually every Europol investigation in recent years, the law enforcement body said after a sting targeting the service in May.

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned 1VPNS as well as its alleged administrator, Ukrainian citizen Dmytro Rashevskyi, Monday in conjunction with the United Kingdom. The outfit provided anonymity services that could be legitimate in some instances, but 1VPNS advertised itself in online cybercrime forums for more than a decade, touting its refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, the office said.

“Numerous ransomware groups have purchased infrastructure from 1VPNS, which they have leveraged in attacks on U.S. companies and institutions — including to hide the origins of their attacks, deploy malware, and manage exfiltrated data,” OFAC said. “Victims of ransomware attacks that involved the use of 1VPNS infrastructure have included U.S. businesses, financial services companies, hospitals, and municipal governments.”

Treasury also sanctioned Belarus national Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev for allegedly selling “cryptors,” tools used to disguise ransomware and other malware, to ransomware operators.

“Unlike legitimate encryption tools, which are designed to protect data and the privacy of the people that own it, cryptors are built specifically to make malware stealthier and more effective by disguising it as harmless files,” OFAC said.

Treasury’s sanctions designations dovetail with separate, unrelated cyber sanctions that European governments from Monday. The FBI has previously issued an alert about First VPN Service. 

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs said it has seen 1VPNS selling its services to ransomware operators for prices ranging from $723 for Anubis to $58 Sinobi.

“The amounts are small because infrastructure subscriptions are small,” Ari Redbord, global head of policy and government affairs for the company, wrote on LinkedIn. “A named ransomware group paying a named enabler on public chains still leaves a trail investigators can follow after the fact.”

Victims tied to First VPN Service infrastructure include U.S. municipalities, hospitals and financial services companies.

Europol said it had arrested the administrator of 1VPNS in its May sting, but did not name them. 

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a question about whether its sanctions targeted that same arrested person.

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European governments sanctioned Russian individuals and organizations Monday over what they said was a years-long campaign of cyberespionage from Turla and other Russian government-led “destructive attacks” against the bloc.

Monday’s confrontation of Moscow included action from the European Union, its individual member governments and the United Kingdom. It mostly took aim at Center 16 of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) over its control of the cyber threat group known by a list of names including Turla, Secret Blizzard and Waterbug.

“Cybercriminals, self-proclaimed hacktivists and private companies linked to Russia, including actors operating under its instructions, direction or control, have also carried out, enabled and facilitated a wide range of malicious activities,” European Union High Representative Kaja Kallas said in a statement.

The EU called out Russia for the Turla campaign that dated back to 2010 in France with targeting of the government there, and has also featured activity against Germany, Poland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Romania and Finland. It made special mention of blaming the FSB for last December’s attacks on Poland’s energy grid, which left half a million people without heat.

In all, the European Union sanctioned nine Russian individuals and four entities. While the EU didn’t name them, Kallas’s statement said it also included officers of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU).

The United Kingdom’s cyber sanctions, the first it’s done in coordination with the EU, featured a longer list of 24 individuals and entities. The U.K. named GRU senior leadership figures Vyacheslav Stafeyev, Ivan Senin and Ivan Kasyanenko for their alleged hybrid cyberattacks in conjunction with cybercriminals and recruitment of hackers across Russian universities. The U.K. also sanctioned individuals behind Lumma Stealer, the target of an international takedown last year.

“These sanctions strike at the core of the cybercriminal networks propping up the Russian state’s aggression, and the UK and EU are sending a clear message that Russia cannot hide behind its use of these proxy groups,” Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, said in a news release that mentioned “destructive attacks” by Russia. “From directing criminals to targeting businesses, and striking Poland’s energy grid in the depths of winter, the Russian state is sinking to new lows in its attempts to undermine European security.”

At least two European governments, Germany and France, said they would be summoning Russia’s ambassadors in their nations over the attacks.

Also Monday, the European Union announced sanctions against the company behind Russia’s messaging app, Max, citing its use of surveillance features to clamp down on dissent. And separately, 13 nations including the United States issued a warning on Monday about Russian government hackers targeting routers to carry out critical infrastructure attacks.

Russia routinely denies allegations of responsibility for any malicious cyber activity.

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A major credential leak spurred the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to strengthen protections for its sensitive materials, improve how researchers can report agency vulnerabilities and develop plans for similar incidents, the agency said in a forensic report released Thursday.

The blog post outlines CISA’s response to the leak that the researcher who discovered it in May called one of the worst he had ever seen, which also drew congressional scrutiny.

“Sharing experiences from incident response activities help other organizations learn from such experiences and enables them to take necessary precautions to prevent similar incidents from happening in their environments,” wrote Preston Werntz, acting chief information officer and Brad Libbey, acting chief information security officer. “For years, CISA has said this type of information exchange is critical to identifying trends and contributing to broader national awareness. Now, it is our turn.”

On May 15, after learning about a contractor’s leak of privileged Amazon AWS GovCloud Keys on a public GitHub repository, CISA said it took steps to halt further harm. That meant taking the repository and its developer environment offline, and revoking the access of the person responsible for the leak.

CISA then analyzed the repository to get a sense of the scope of the leak. It also analyzed log files to learn that none of the leaked credentials were used outside of CISA, and that no customer or mission data was exposed.

The response benefited from taking the reported incident seriously, having good logging capabilities and using zero-trust principles, the blog post states.

But it also showed some things that needed to be fixed. 

CISA resolved to use its endpoint detection and response capabilities to monitor and manage uploads to public repositories. It rotated all of its secrets after the incident, and came up with a plan to improve management of its secrets.

It determined that it would make it easy to report vulnerabilities related to CISA itself. It’s better at receiving information about vulnerabilities that are less agency-specific, given its role as a hub of communication about cyber risks for the United States and world generally, the post noted.

CISA also said it had to build a playbook for GitHub-related incidents mid-incident, and recognized the need to build playbooks for all kinds of incidents in advance.

The person who uncovered the leak, GitGuardian security researcher Guillaume Valadon, applauded CISA’s evaluation of the incident. 

“I think that it is really good. CISA managed to explain what happened, what worked well and what needs to be improved,” he told CyberScoop via email. “This last part is, to me, the first time that a national cybersecurity agency is advocating for secrets scanning, and simplifying relations with researchers.” 

That’s something Valadon and his team have talked about for a while, and he said he was “proud to read that it is recognized by CISA.”

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In 2022 and 2023, the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee investigated spyware abuses across the European Union following journalistic revelations about government deployment of NSO Group’s Pegasus technology.

Now, years later, it turns out that someone was using Pegasus spyware on one of the committee’s own. 

In a report published Friday, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab revealed that it found Pegasus on the phone of substitute PEGA Committee member Stelios Kouloglou, a Greek journalist and former member of the European Parliament. It’s the first time a member of the committee has been publicly identified as a Pegasus victim.

For Kouloglou, the Pegasus infection was surprising. For another PEGA Committee member, it was fully expected, if delayed. For Citizen Lab, it was ironic.

For all of them, it was further evidence that much more needs to be done to prevent spyware abuses — such as enacting the very recommendations of the PEGA Committee’s final report that never saw action in the European Parliament.

Kouloglou told CyberScoop that he had run security tests on his phone prior to joining the PEGA committee in 2022, so he didn’t think anyone would be bold enough to try to infect his phone once he became a member. With Greece’s use of Predator spyware under scrutiny, “it would be a big scandal” if he was hacked while on the panel, he said.

But someone — Citizen Lab’s investigation didn’t uncover whom — infected Kouloglou’s phone with Pegasus twice, once around October of 2022 and once around March of 2023, investigators concluded with “high confidence.”

During the first infection, the committee was preparing for some prominent hearings and the first draft of its report. Kouloglou was in the hospital and got a visit from another Greek journalist who had testified before the committee and had himself had his phone infected with spyware earlier. Given the ability of spyware to listen to audio through an infected phone, it’s possible the infection ran afoul of protections for health data.

During the second infection, the panel was preparing for yet more hearings and “was engaged in intense discussions related to the final drafting process,” according to Citizen Lab.

The Citizen Lab investigation of Kouloglou’s came about this May, after he said a lawyer he knew told him there was a way to send his phone’s data to the research organization, during a time when Kouloglou was doing some investigative reporting and writing a “scandal of the week” column. “I said, ‘Why not? Let’s do it,” he said.

Whoever was responsible for infecting Kouloglou’s phone did so during “crucial moments” of the committee’s work, said Hannah Neumann, a member of the PEGA Committee and European Parliament member from Germany.

“Many of us were expecting some hacks during the committee, but it’s still frustrating now to figure out that it really happened,” she told CyberScoop. “When we decided to set up the Pega Committee, we really worked hard with our internal European Parliament IT security…  so that they can provide spyware checks for the members of the Pega Committee and their staff.”

Kouloglou and Neumann could only speculate on who was responsible. But for the two of them, and Citizen Lab, the motive seems clear.

“It is ironic that a member of the committee charged with investigating Pegasus was himself targeted with Pegasus spyware,” Ron Deibert, founder and director of Citizen Lab. “Someone, somewhere likely wanted to breach parliamentary privilege and find out what was going on in that committee. This case shows how the still unregulated and highly abused mercenary spyware industry is poisonous to democratic processes.” 

Kouloglou said he plans to pursue legal action against NSO Group. Many spyware victims have had difficulty winning lawsuits against spyware makers, although not all.

Israel-based NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.

Neuman said the lessons learned as a result of Kouloglou’s phone infection include, “for members of national parliament and the European Parliament: Regularly get your devices checked. Apparently they don’t respect European democracy and parliamentarism.”

Most importantly, it’s time to enact the PEGA committee’s recommendations, she said.

“I don’t know how much more it needs for member states and the commission to wake up and actually start implementing the very good recommendations of our PEGA committee, because we all know that there is a spyware abuse,” Neuman said. “I don’t need to have another committee for that. I just need them to act.”

Kouloglou almost certainly won’t be the last member of parliament to get infected, said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab. Some had been infected prior to the work of the PEGA Committee, and some have been found to be targeted since. (The United States’ legislative body has been targeted in the past as well.)

“Providing highly secretive government agencies with surveillance tools supplied by unaccountable and often unethical mercenary firms is a recipe for the abuse of power,” he told CyberScoop. “I can tell you how the next chapter will go: more hacked Parliamentarians. In fact, I suspect there are members voting and attending high level meetings with no idea that their phone has been turned into a spy in their pocket.”

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