Major industry groups are clamoring for Congress to include a 10-year extension of a law that they say is essential to cyber threat information sharing in the annual defense policy bill.

Congress has mixed a series of short-term renewals and lapses of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) — which provides legal protections for threat data exchanges between the government and private sector as well as between companies — since its previous 10-year sunset came and went last year. It’s now set to expire again on Dec. 11.

On Sunday, 35 business groups sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services panels, asking them to renew the law for 10 years as part of their final negotiations for the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

“The case for a long-term reauthorization has only grown more urgent,” they wrote. “Recent incidents have demonstrated that advanced AI systems can identify and exploit software vulnerabilities at machine speed, collapsing the window between the discovery of a weakness and its use in an attack.”

“AI tools are also making sophisticated cyber capabilities cheaper, faster and easier to use, allowing threats to spread and adapt in real time,” they continued. “In this environment, the speed and breadth with which defenders share information determines whether they keep pace with adversaries. That speed depends on the legal certainty CISA 2015 provides.”

The letter’s signatories include overarching business groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, the latter of which led the letter, as well as groups representing critical infrastructure sectors such as aviation, telecommunications and technology.

The House version of the fiscal 2027 defense bill includes a 10-year extension. The Senate version notably does not, and past efforts to include a long-term extension in the defense bill, which has been signed into law every year for decades, have encountered objections from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Paul has hinged his support for any long-term extension of CISA 2015 on adoption of provisions designed to curtail past practices at the other CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — that he maintains threaten free speech.

Top Trump administration cyber officials have pressed Congress for a straightforward extension of the CISA 2015 laws. The Trump administration has also touted its efforts to crack down on what they said was the free-speech-limiting disinformation work of the agency CISA, which the Biden administration denied impinged on free speech and that it had ended anyway.

The annual defense policy bill often passes at the end of each calendar year or beginning of the next. A potential congressional committee leadership shuffle could change the equation for CISA 2015 in 2027, but the Dec. 11 expiration looms in 2026.

The post Business groups mount fresh campaign for long-term renewal of information sharing law appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Trump administration is breaking the law after being more than a month overdue on declassifying a court opinion on the surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to two senators and a coalition of civil liberties groups.

Release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion has been closely tied to reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lapsed this summer, although collection authority has continued under another court ruling that runs through March of next year.

Under Section 702, the government can warrantlessly search foreign targets’ electronic and phone communications using the personal information of Americans who have been in contact with them.

In the FISC opinion that the administration has not declassified, a judge objected to tools the government has created to let analysts process messages. The objection reportedly was over a filtering system that allowed analysts to get information in a way that should be counted as a query of Americans’ information, which is subject to extra protections.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who co-authored a letter to administration officials Monday with Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., had previously said the opinion shows “major compliance problems” and had  objected to a short-term reauthorization of Section 702 until officials agreed to release it.

“As Congress continues to debate the fate of this authority, lawmakers must be able to discuss these abuses openly,” Wyden and Schiff wrote to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Otherwise, the American people will rightly question whether a government that so flagrantly violates basic legal requirements, like the statute requiring declassification, can ever be trusted to not abuse a powerful surveillance tool like Section 702.”

The Senate duo and the coalition of civil liberties groups in a separate letter to congressional leaders said that under the law, the letter was due Sept. 13. Blanche had previously committed to declassify the letter to lawmakers by the statutory deadline. The letter was also overdue by another measurement, with the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee saying that they expected the declassification and release by May 15.

A spokesperson for Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the office of the leader of the Democratic side of the panel, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, did.

“The Vice Chairman has been clear that he supports transparency with regard to Section 702 of FISA,” a spokesperson, Rachel Cohen, said in a statement to CyberScoop. “This is precisely why he and Chairman Cotton urged then-DNI [Tulsi] Gabbard in March to declassify the March 17 FISC opinion. Unfortunately, neither Director Gabbard nor Acting Director [Bill] Pulte were responsive, but Senator Warner expects that DNI Clayton will declassify the opinion, consistent with the bipartisan SSCI letter and as required by law.”

Failure to declassify the opinion should be fatal to reauthorizing the expired surveillance law, the civil liberties groups wrote.

“Congress should refuse to support any reauthorization of Section 702 while the administration actively withholds legally mandated information about how the surveillance program operates,” they wrote. “Further, it must stop relying on executive branch self-policing to protect Americans’ rights and reauthorize Section 702 only with a warrant requirement to access Americans’ private communications.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The post Senators, rights groups say Trump administration breaking law by withholding surveillance court opinion appeared first on CyberScoop.

Two senators say that revelations about online targeted advertising being used as a vector for spyware infections underscore the need for better security practices in the industry.

Some members of the advertising industry that were subjects of the report, meanwhile, think their practices are up to the task.

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, in partnership with the cybersecurity and ad-tech firm Confiant, last week published a report on AdFection, a technique whereby targeted ads were delivering zero-click mercenary spyware.

“Ad vendors must significantly level up their cybersecurity and threat detection capacity to effectively cut off malicious advertisers across the supply chain,” The Citizen Lab report states. “They must rigorously and regularly vet, screen, and audit their business partners and hold them accountable for their own supply chains.”

In 2023, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced legislation to ban advertising networks and facilitators from using personal data to target, but the legislation never advanced past introduction. Both said The Citizen Lab report illustrated the need for industry reform.

“The report underscores the growing risk of spyware and the increasingly sophisticated methods used to track and target people online,” Booker said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Americans need vastly stronger privacy protections that stay ahead of these evolving surveillance threats.”

The security threat of targeted online advertising to government devices is of particular concern to Wyden, with his letters to government agencies cited in the report. Wyden has called adtech a national security threat. Ads from Discover-Tech, the company most linked to AdFection, got impressions on government networks.

“Allowing targeted ads on government devices is an open invitation to spies and criminals. It’s the digital equivalent of leaving all the doors and windows unlocked at a sensitive government facility,” he said in a statement to CyberScoop.

“It’s clear that advertising exchanges are not meaningfully protecting users against malware and location tracking, which is why I’ve been urging the government to disable ads on government browsers and turn off mobile ad IDs, and have pushed my bill to ban all targeted advertising,” he continued. “The latest Citizen Lab report is an impressive reminder that this sector simply cannot be trusted to put users’ security ahead of profits.”

A number of U.S. agencies have taken steps to block ads due to the threats they pose, or recommended blocking them for feds.

Discover-Tech appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved” vendors that Google and the advertising industry association IAB Europe maintained. Google participated in the report, but IAB Europe didn’t respond to it until after publication. Both provided additional comments to CyberScoop.

Google and IAB Europe, and the ad networks Beeswax, Vungle and Eskimi all took steps to remove Discover-Tech’s access to the digital advertising ecosystem, according to the report. A mix of other ad systems replied to The Citizen Lab, but some did not, including Microsoft, which owns the ad system Xandr. Microsoft also didn’t respond to requests for comment from CyberScoop.

The Citizen Lab report concluded that the advertising industry displayed “a dangerous lack of due diligence” and criticized “broken digital infrastructure,” while also saying that the sector needed to “get serious” about security.

It said ad vendors needed to better share threat data, improve vetting of partners, audit vendor registries and ban vendors by default in jurisdictions known to be permissive of abuse.

In response to questions from CyberScoop about those conclusions, a Google spokesperson provided a statement.

“We banned Discover Tech during a joint investigation with Citizen Lab and Confiant,” the spokesperson said. “Throughout that work, we continuously blocked malicious ads to help people stay protected while we dismantled the network.”

Google said that its safety teams and systems continuously blocked individual bad ads from Discover-Tech, but banning them entirely from the platform required proof that their ad infrastructure was linked to spyware.

The company also said it regularly audits participants in its Authorized Buyer program, as well as deploying “multi-layered defenses to stop bad ads,” and that its automated systems detected over 99% of policy-violating ads before reaching users last year.

IAB Europe responded more specifically.

“The findings do not demonstrate that the digital advertising infrastructure is broken, but rather point to the potential misuse of existing technologies and functionalities that are not specific to digital advertising but inherent to web technologies,” said Lauren Wakefield, marketing and communications director for the association. “While the industry continuously invests in improving security and safeguards against fraud and other forms of misuse, the investigation of potentially unlawful activities, such as the deployment of spyware, ultimately falls within the remit of competent authorities.”

The Citizen Lab report also urges regulators to take action, including conducting an investigation of Discover-Tech and the spyware firm Candiru, which infect users through Discover-Tech online ads; “more closely scrutinize the advertising ecosystem to determine whether other companies are leveraging it for espionage and spyware delivery, and determine whether they have violated applicable laws and regulations;” and pursue sanctions against mercenary spyware firms and the companies that enable them.

“Preventing fraud and other forms of misuse is already an ongoing priority across the digital advertising ecosystem, and IAB Europe supports industry efforts to invest in technologies, processes and safeguards to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks,” Wakefield continued. “We hope this report will be seen as an opportunity to reassess and improve existing approaches to cybersecurity. It is important to recognise that cybersecurity requirements and measures must be proportionate to the risks and circumstances of each individual company, which is why one-size-fits-all recommendations may not always be appropriate.”

The post Senators say targeted ads are a security risk. Ad groups say the critics are off base. appeared first on CyberScoop.

A new bipartisan House bill would charge the federal government with developing formal guidance for defending AI models against distillation attacks.

The AI Cyber Defense Act, shared exclusively with CyberScoop ahead of release, is sponsored by Reps. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., and George Whitesides, D-Calif. It would direct the National Institute for Standards and Technology to develop voluntary industry standards and best practices for preventing distillation attacks from foreign entities from four countries: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

In an interview, Harrigan told CyberScoop it is “incredibly expensive” for the U.S. AI industry to maintain its six-to-12 month lead over other countries, and distillation attacks give other parties an incentive to copy other models while keeping their own spending low.

He said he believes countries such as China are making a strategic choice to hold back on full investment of their own AI industry, instead betting they can drift behind American companies as they perform the arduous and expensive research and development to advance the field.

“One of my concerns is that our adversaries just see it as much more beneficial and productive for them as this [U.S. industry] engine burns,” said Harrigan. “Where they actually just see it as more beneficial for themselves in the short term, to hang six to 12 months behind the United States, let us burn really hot and for 5 to 10% of the spend, they can just distill and steal, and they can do that up to until the point where our market kind of falters. At which point they can turn it into high gear, having not expended those resources yet in the past, and actually leapfrog us.”

As part of that mission, NIST will first have to define what a distillation attack is, and separate it from much of the sharing and collaboration between open-weight and open-source models that have also helped drive innovation.

Distillation attacks happen when one AI model is trained on the output data and reasoning of another, usually more powerful or advanced, model. The U.S. government, along with AI companies Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, has accused Chinese companies like Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Alibaba, of carrying out “systematic” campaigns to distill and copy U.S. commercial models.

According to AI and cybersecurity experts, these campaigns involve the use of hundreds of burner and resold accounts and false identities to bypass geographic restrictions to access U.S. frontier models, and involve thousands, sometimes millions of prompts meant to extract valuable outputs and capabilities that can be used to train a foreign model.

Meanwhile, U.S. AI companies themselves face multiple ongoing lawsuits from media organizations, creators, artists and other laborers, who allege that commercial U.S. models were originally trained on their works without any compensation or permission.  

“AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, and every month we keep China and other adversaries from stealing our progress is a month we gain to build the safeguards this technology needs,” Rep. Whitesides said in a statement to CyberScoop.

The bill would also establish an “AI Cybersecurity Roundtable” at NIST composed of governments and AI industry stakeholders that would work to develop voluntary standards for defensive use of AI in cybersecurity in critical infrastructure.

Harrigan said he envisions the roundtable as including frontier AI companies including software and hardware security experts, who can add independent third-party voices in discussions on the best way to defend IT assets in critical infrastructure and other industries. A place “where you can go and pick an off-the-shelf set of standards that says these are the best practices as we know them all today, given the current state of technology development and the threats that are out there.”

The bill defines “entities of concern” as any foreign person or organization headquartered in one of the four listed countries of concern (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea), or one operating under the direction of a company based in those countries. The director of NIST would also have the ability to designate specific individuals or organizations as entities of concern.

The post Exclusive: Bipartisan bill would develop federal guidance for distillation attacks, convene industry on defensive cyber appeared first on CyberScoop.

The summer’s cyberattacks by Iranian hackers on water systems in 12 states underscored how vulnerable U.S. water systems are to foreign adversaries. A broad attack on water infrastructure could have consequences comparable to a public health crisis that impacts the country’s entire population.

The threat to water has long been clear. As the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment from the U.S. intelligence community states “Cyber actors from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and ransomware groups . . .  pose critical threats to U.S. networks and critical infrastructure.”

Advances in artificial intelligence have heightened those vulnerabilities. Advanced AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, have demonstrated the ability to identify thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in critical software systems, including major operating systems and browsers. Other systems, including some developed in China, are demonstrating similar capabilities. AI systems can now “plan, test, and execute attacks in rapid cycles,” ranging from minutes down to seconds.

U.S. water systems are vulnerable to cyberattacks for technical, legal and practical reasons.

Technical: About 80% of U.S. water systems lack even basic cyber hygiene, a weakness exploited in the summer attacks. Even systems that serve most of the population (approximately 450 large and 4500 medium-sized water systems) have not adopted advanced cybersecurity capabilities used in other sectors where failure can have catastrophic consequences, including aviation, rail, mass transit, medical devices, finance, and nuclear power.

Legal: The Environmental Protection Agency lacks clear statutory authority to impose broad cybersecurity requirements on water systems. In 2023, EPA issued a memo interpreting existing regulations to strengthen the cybersecurity of water systems. The action met widespread opposition from the water sector as well as formal legal challenges, and the EPA ultimately withdrew the memo. The agency retains limited authority. It can require water systems to complete  risk and resilience assessments, maintain emergency response plans and, in emergencies, address critical cybersecurity flaws.  

Practical: Most U.S. water systems are small.  Some 45,000 serve 3,300 persons or fewer. Because of their size, many fall outside the EPA’s regulatory authority and below the “cyber poverty line,” lacking the funding, staff and expertise necessary for effective cybersecurity.

Not surprisingly, the summer attacks drew attention from the administration and Congress. The EPA ,in partnership with the FBI, and CISA each issued guidance on remedial actions, including disconnecting operational technology, from the internet where feasible and adopting robust password practices.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Adam Schiff (D-Calif., introduced the Water Safety Shield Act, a bill that would require tiered cybersecurity standards for the water sector and dedicate a proposed $600 million annually to water cybersecurity. It would go beyond earlier, less prescriptive efforts to improve resilience in the sector.  

The administration has also established a pilot program with Texas and private-sector cybersecurity companies to identify and address water-system vulnerabilities at no cost to utilities. These efforts are well intentioned, but they do not address the underlying causes of the problem.

Large and midsize U.S. water systems have long been targets of sophisticated adversaries. China’s Volt Typhoon revealed deep Chinese penetration of critical infrastructure, including water systems, that support national security, economic security, and civil society. Those systems remain vulnerable because many have not adopted well-known protections, such as zero-trust architecture. More fundamentally, the software on which they depend remains vulnerable to exploitation.

Policymakers have struggled to respond for two reasons: the cost and complexity of adopting stronger technical defenses, and the highly fragmented nature of the water sector. A relatively small number of large systems serve about half the U.S. population. Roughly 49,000 systems serve the rest, including the 80% of the systems serving 3,300 people or fewer. Those smaller systems serve about 7% of the population.

Despite these challenges, the capabilities needed to significantly strengthen U.S. water-system security are well known and widely used in other sectors where failure can be devastating, including those listed above.

A five-part federal program could provide high-level cybersecurity for U.S. water systems.

Establish stronger technical capabilities. Water systems should adopt zero-trust architecture, which permits only authenticated, minimum-necessary access to resources and segments networks so that a breach in one area does not compromise the entire system. Such architecture could have blocked the unauthorized intrusions used in the summer attacks. Zero-trust systems are already widely used across multiple sectors, and commercial providers can support their adoption. The Department of Defense has certified several companies to provide zero-trust architecture for department components.

Water systems should also use formal methods to reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software that cannot safely fail.  Although the summer attackers did not appear to exploit flaws in the water systems’ code, a high-level adversary such as China would be likely to do so.

Formal methods range from “memory-safe” programming languages, which prevent coding errors that leave computer memory open to attack, to rigorous mathematical proofs that verify that software behaves as intended. They also support secure “microkernels,” which strictly separate software functions and make it far more difficult for an attacker to move laterally through a system.

Safe code development draws on the principles of formal methods but is a more practical, semi-formal approach. AI tools developed by companies including Google and CrowdStrike can identify and help repair software vulnerabilities, a process sometimes called “code mending.” Water systems should use such tools to defend against advanced adversaries.

Developing formally verified code for water systems would not be simple. But much of the software that directs the mechanical operations of water utilities comes from a small group of companies, including Siemens, Schneider, and Rockwell Automation. Those companies have the technical expertise to develop more secure code where it is necessary. Secure microkernels are also commercially available.

Support large water systems.  Congress should require large water systems to adopt zero-trust architecture, code-mending tools, and formal methods for critical software. The requirements should be phased in over time.  The legislation should also provide tax credits to help cover the costs of developing, implementing, and maintaining these protections.

Assist midsize water systems. The federal government should establish a program that provides technical expertise and financial support to midsize water systems, including municipal utilities. The program should help them adopt zero-trust architecture, code-mending tools, and formal methods for software development.

Midsize systems will likely need a longer phase-in period than large utilities.  A federally funded cohort of experts drawn from government and the private sector could provide the necessary support. Regional teams, organized by geography or technical specialty, could address the different needs of different water systems.

Create a safe operations posture for small water systems. Few, if any, systems serving 3,300 people or fewer are run by organization with substantial cybersecurity resources. Many cash-strapped systems rely on remote monitoring because on-site service is beyond their budgets. But remote monitoring can create serious risk when industrial devices are exposed directly to the public internet without proper firewalls or virtual private networks. 

The summer attacks primarily exploited such exposed devices. The EPA, FBI, and CISA guidance said the affected systems could be protected by locking them into “run” mode, which prevents remote reprogramming. That step may reduce immediate risk, but it also requires systems to be operated in person.

Small utilities therefore need either the staff and funding for manual operations or secure remote-access systems operated by trained personnel.

A voluntary cybersecurity corps could help address the budget and staffing challenges facing small water systems.  One model would follow the National Guard approach: State governors would oversee the effort, while the federal government would provide funding. A state-led program could begin with water systems and later expand to other vulnerable critical-infrastructure sectors.

The Texas pilot, which brings together the state, the federal government and private-sector companies, could serve as a model. It could also serve as a test for a regional approach, something we suggested in a prior op-ed.  

Build an AI-capable cybersecurity cohort. The proposed cohort should include specialists in artificial intelligence, including experts from leading AI companies. They could use AI tools to develop and deploy cybersecurity programs, including zero-trust architectures and code-mending systems, for utilities of all sizes. AI is advancing rapidly and applying it to protect water systems should be a national priority. The AI specialists should work with major industrial-technology companies, including Siemens, Schneider, and Rockwell, as well as directly with the water systems, both larger and smaller.

U.S. water systems face a significant and growing threat. The Trump administration, Congress, states and private sector should work together urgently to ensure that every American can rely on safe, clean water.

Franklin D. Kramer is a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

Robert J. Butler is the co-founder and managing director of Cyber Strategies LLC, served as the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for space and cyber policy, and served as the Chief Security Officer for IO Data Centers, a global data center enterprise, among other cybersecurity-related roles in both corporate and government organizations.

Melanie J. Teplinsky is an adjunct professor and senior fellow in the Technology, Law and Security Program at American University (AU), Washington College of Law.  She previously practiced technology law at Steptoe & Jonson LLP and served on the pre-IPO advisory board for CrowdStrike.

The post The US needs a real plan to defend its water systems appeared first on CyberScoop.

Biotechnology doesn’t fall neatly into any one of the 16 government-designated critical infrastructure sectors that receive specialized and focused attention from feds, leading some lawmakers to worry that it’s not getting the protection from cyberattacks and other risks that it needs.

That’s why a bipartisan group of senators and representatives announced legislation Thursday that would place an emphasis at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on defending biotechnology, biomanufacturing and biological data.

The Protecting Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing as Critical Infrastructure Act and the Protecting Biological Data Act are two separate bills with the same group of cosponsors. Both bills would weave biotech into the law that established the Department of Homeland Security.

The former would direct DHS to come up with plans to make sure biotech and biomanufacturing are protected as critical infrastructure, but not as a whole new sector. The plans would identify key biotech players, conduct outreach to them and develop steps to update the National Infrastructure Protection Plan this year to incorporate biotech sector input.

The latter would make sure that systems handling genomic sequences and sensitive biometric data are covered as critical infrastructure and integrated into the national cyber strategy, that CISA would work with biotech players on security steps like joint exercises and that the agency would get new personnel to handle biometric data security.

In the last two months, biotech giants Boston Scientific and Amgen have revealed that they suffered recent cyberattacks.

Sponsors of the measures include leaders and members of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a legislative advisory group.

“Biotechnology infrastructure and data are becoming vital to America’s economic and national security,” said Commission Chair Senator Todd Young, R-Ind. “Just as we are serious about where the sensitive data of Americans is stored and who can access it, we should be equally serious about protecting our biological data and infrastructure. Designating biotech as critical infrastructure is about recognizing its strategic importance and making sure the capabilities America will depend on tomorrow remain resilient and protected from foreign threats.”

Notably, however, the bills do not seek a separate critical infrastructure category for biotech to add to the 16. Currently, biotech cuts across a number of existing sectors, including the health, agricultural and industrial sectors.

Some industry groups and experts have lobbied for the inclusion of new critical infrastructure sectors, such as space or artificial intelligence.

“Protecting biomanufacturing infrastructure and the most sensitive biological data of Americans is essential for our national security,” said commissioner Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. “These bipartisan bills will help ensure we are protecting this sector from physical and cyber threats while keeping America as the world leader in biotechnology.”

The bill’s sponsors in the House are Khanna, Stephanie Bice, R-Okla. and Scott Peters, D-Calif., and in the Senate the sponsors are Young and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.

You can read the text of the bills below.

The post House and Senate members propose legislation for CISA to step up cyber defenses for biotech appeared first on CyberScoop.

A new Democratic bill in Congress would establish a federal Cybersecurity and AI Board of Investigations to provide independent government oversight of cyberattacks carried out by AI agents, following recent hacks by models run at companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and others.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., would attempt to establish a federal mechanism to investigate incidents where AI models escape sandbox environments and access live internet systems.

Currently, frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic largely control the investigation and public reporting of such incidents. Markey and other critics argue that these companies have too much control over investigations and reporting due to their financial and legal interests. 

“Despite the unprecedented depth and scale of recent AI-enabled cyberattacks, the public is learning critical details piecemeal,” Markey said in a statement. “Building stronger defenses requires a full accounting of what goes wrong, and we cannot depend on companies with little incentive to disclose their failures to give us one. We need the Cybersecurity and AI Board of Investigations to get to the bottom of major incidents and give companies and the government the critical information necessary to build resilience and better secure our economy and our country.”

Although frontier AI companies maintain external red-teaming programs and allow limited access to organizations like METR and Redwood Research, they control the scope, terms and time frames of those engagements.

The board, which would coordinate with the secretary of commerce, could subpoena witnesses and conduct “independent and impartial reviews and assessments” of AI agent-led hacks that impact federal information systems or critical infrastructure. 

It would be led by five members, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms, with no more than three members from one political party.

The board would also investigate systemic vulnerabilities in the AI supply chain, so-called “near misses” where unauthorized agent-led hacks were “narrowly averted,” and gaps in federal regulatory oversight. It would have technical staff including engineers, malware analysts, and digital forensic experts.

The board would “operate independently from regulatory review and enforcement actions without assigning legal fault or liability for any review and assessment” it conducts, according to the bill.

OpenAI confirmed Wednesday its AI agents breached a statistics portal used by the Australian government’s social services agency, Services Australia. Though the breach happened in June, OpenAI learned of the incident in August. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the company did not notify him until Sept. 10, when it sent findings to a general government email inbox, according to the BBC.

The post New bill would create federal investigative body for AI-driven hacks  appeared first on CyberScoop.

A House Democrat tapped to lead his party’s efforts on artificial intelligence has introduced legislation that would establish a test program within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to give critical infrastructure operators free access to frontier AI models to protect their systems.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., introduced the AI Cyber Defense Act Monday, inspired by the series of cyberattacks on water facilities in recent months. “If we don’t get ahead of it, it can mean a disaster for our families,” he said at a news conference when he first announced the measure and others tackling water cybersecurity.

Gottheimer holds a couple of posts relevant to the legislation: He’s one of three co-chairs of the House Democratic Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee’s cyber subcommittee. He also has bipartisan support for the bill, with co-sponsors Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., and Greg Landsman, D-Ohio.

The bill directs the Department of Homeland Security, through CISA, to create a program “through which owners and operators of critical infrastructure that participate in the Program are able to securely utilize artificial intelligence procured through the Secretary and technical assistance provided by the Secretary to protect against, detect, test for, and remediate vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity of such critical infrastructure.”

AI-tinged, water-focused cybersecurity pilot programs are all the rage lately. The introduction of Gottheimer’s legislation is adjacent to, but different from, a test program that the Office of the National Cyber Director recently announced in Texas.

One criticism of that program is that private sector companies offered their cyber and AI services through it on a purely voluntary basis, with no significant budget to bolster the pilot. Gottheimer’s bill would authorize $100 million for the pilot program from 2027 to 2031 before it ends, although appropriators would have to follow through on providing the actual dollars. The Trump administration has significantly cut CISA funding in its second term.

“Right now federal funding for critical infrastructure has an uncertain future and many of our local communities just don’t have the resources they need to pay for AI tokens to do the patching they need,” Gottheimer said when he introduced the bill. “It’s expensive to bring the AI in to analyze your system and find those vulnerabilities.”

Critical infrastructure owners and operators could apply for the pilot program, which the bill directs to give priority to nonprofit, publicly owned, rural and small-sized organizations.

“The same technology that can help a small town’s IT guy find and patch a gap in cybersecurity can also help a hostile government find a hundred more it hasn’t even discovered yet,” Gottheimer said when he announced the bill. “AI didn’t create this threat, but it’s accelerated it, and our defenses have to keep up.”

The post After water attacks, Capitol Hill offers its own proposal for an AI-cyber test program appeared first on CyberScoop.

President Donald Trump continued to defend his administration’s hands-off approach to AI regulation in the wake of hacks carried out by U.S. commercial frontier models that have rattled policymakers and industry veterans and spurred calls for more regulatory oversight.

In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump dismissed worries from critics that “AI is going to kill us,” comparing them to complaints from environmentalists about climate change, which he also alleged was a false narrative. He also posited that nothing may matter more than future U.S. dominance of the technology over geopolitical rivals like China.

“Whoever wins AI, WINS!” Trump posted. “We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way! I’m not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the internet, itself.”

Trump has previously suggested that good leadership is the only regulation the U.S. needs for artificial intelligence. He later claimed the Department of Justice was ready to “rein things in” if companies overstepped, but offered no specifics on enforcement, legal authority, or where he would draw that line.

“We will be careful, and that’s why we have the Department of Justice, and other Law Enforcement bodies, that will rein things in if we have to, but I will only encourage AI or, SI (SUPER INTELLIGENCE)!” Trump concluded.

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent recently told Congress that private lawsuits could force AI companies to institute better security, saying it’s clear what the government “shouldn’t do on safety is to give these labs a liability exemption, which is what they are asking for.”

“The best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate,” Bessent said.

Beyond existential fears, critics also argue that inadequate regulation or cybersecurity controls in current AI systems make them impossible to fully control or monitor.

Recently, former President Barack Obama criticized the argument from Trump administration officials that the free market will naturally push industry toward self-regulation and that “these companies will solve the safety issues because they have every incentive to do so.”

“If it turns out to be dangerous, people will just sue them and they’ll be worried about financial liability,” Obama said last week in remarks at Colgate University in New York. “That’s not how we treat airlines or drug companies or food companies.”

The Trump administration issued an executive order earlier this year that set up a voluntary testing regime for some commercial frontier models, largely at private industry’s discretion. That order was significantly delayed and altered by AI industry boosters to ensure that governmental review did not cause companies to postpone their release timelines for new models.

That agreement did not last long before fast-moving events caused the administration to strike another, non-public agreement with frontier AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and others governing pre-release testing for models.

But the Trump administration has consistently argued that regulation will harm, not help, U.S. innovation and global competitiveness, and the threat of China frequently looms large in those discussions.

Experts believe China’s AI models are behind U.S. models at the top of the market, where OpenAI and Anthropic have consistently pushed the frontier limits of model capabilities. But Chinese lower and “middle class” models are often cheaper, more efficient and can even outperform more powerful models because users can dedicate exponentially more tokens for their tasks.

The U.S. government has accused Chinese AI companies of conducting widespread, “systematic” distillation of U.S. frontier models, with the implicit encouragement of Beijing.

In defending the administration’s approach, David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology and a top adviser on AI issues, specifically cited the threat from China and other countries that he claimed would not be subject to similar restrictions.

“We’re not the only country that has advanced AI labs, and as the president declared…we have to win this AI race,” Sacks told Politico in May, later adding “I think that’s the first thing to recognize is that if somehow we slow down or stop AI development, it doesn’t mean that AI progress is going to stop. It just means it’s going to happen in other countries and specifically China.”

Some observers have alleged that despite their larger differences, top leaders in the U.S. and China may view AI similarly at the strategic level, specfically that increased adoption – and risks – of AI are inevitable.

Ronan Murphy, director of the tech policy program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, posited that while there may not be a formal agreement between the two countries, “they share views both in Beijing and in Washington, particularly in the White House, of: you have to allow this to happen.”

“Clearly there’s a call for regulation from many quarters of AI in the U.S. and elsewhere, but in the White House – and we heard David Sacks talking about it [recently] – It’s ‘let them cook,’ and the Chinese approach seems to be the same,” said Murphy in a press briefing. “So there might be consensus at that level, if nothing else.”

The post Citing China, President Trump doubles down on hands-off approach to AI regulation appeared first on CyberScoop.

A group of leading House Democrats introduced legislation Monday requiring the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to conduct an assessment of its workforce to determine whether it’s up to the task after the exit of around 1,000 employees during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The concept of a force structure assessment is more common in military branches, including one that Congress previously ordered for Cyber Command. The CISA Force Structure Assessment Act would order the agency to carry out a review of whether the agency still has the necessary personnel, training and certifications after budget cuts and other Trump-era departures.

“America’s cyber defenses are only as strong as the people behind them,” Rep. James Walkinshaw, the Virginia Democrat serving as lead sponsor of the bill, said in a news release. “As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing reshape the threat landscape, Congress needs a clear accounting of whether CISA has the workforce, skills, and resources required to keep Americans safe and enable mission delivery. This legislation will identify critical gaps and give Congress concrete information to address them.”

Also sponsoring the bill are the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and the top Democrat on its cybersecurity subcommittee, Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.

Additional elements of the force structure assessmewould include a review of the security of federal IT systems and support for state and local governments; the risks posed by AI, quantum computing and other cutting edge technologies; CISA’s threat-hunting and incident response capabilities; support for critical infrastructure and operating technology, including CISA’s role as a sector risk management agency for a number of industry sectors; the operation of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative; and international cooperation.

Some lawmakers and other observers have worried those areas have been greatly impacted by staffing cuts, ultimately hurting CISA’s ability to carry out its core functions.

Ramirez dinged GOP lawmakers for “a lack of interest in safeguarding our nation’s cybersecurity and our residents’ civil rights and privacy” in going along with the CISA cuts and other developments at the Department of Homeland Security.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have voiced concern about the scope of cuts at CISA, but Republicans have approved some of them while pushing back on others. CISA itself is currently seeking to hire hundreds of new personnel, even as its latest budget blueprint calls for yet more funding reductions.

“With Iran targeting our critical infrastructure and frontier AI models creating new cyber risks, we must ensure we have a cybersecurity workforce to counter these growing threats,” Thompson said. “After Trump has spent the past two years targeting and slashing CISA’s workforce, we need the agency to assess if it has [the] right personnel in place to fulfill its mission.”

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has discussed White House plans to develop a cybersecurity academy meant to consolidate and enhance existing federal cyber training and education programs, with the aim of addressing cyber workforce shortages. His office has reportedly drafted an executive order that would establish that academy.

The post Dems seek top-to-bottom assessment of CISA workforce appeared first on CyberScoop.

A bipartisan trio of lawmakers is asking the Commerce Department to sanction three India-based mercenary hack-for-hire groups that have reportedly stolen data from thousands of American citizens and companies.

Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., sought in a letter to Secretary Howard Lutnick Wednesday to have the mercenary firms added to the Treasury Department’s Entity List, which would limit their access to American software, cybersecurity tools and cloud infrastructure.

“Several India-based cyber-mercenary groups have spent more than fifteen years conducting targeted espionage against U.S. citizens, businesses and the lawyers representing them,” Wyden, Harrigan and Whitehouse wrote. “Compounding this security threat, these cyber mercenaries and their associates have engaged in an aggressive campaign of global lawfare to censor investigative reporting by prominent American media organizations. This coordinated effort effectively allows foreign entities to use foreign courts to keep the American public in the dark about cyber threats to their own country and undermines the fundamental constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.”

The three firms are Sunkissed Organic Farms, BellTroX and CyberRoot. The first of those three was formerly known as Appin and has been the subject of investigative reports and criminal probes. The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has delved into the work of BellTroX, and journalists also have reported on the activity of CyberRoot.

“The threat is further heightened by evidence that these groups have operated at the behest of the Qatari government, targeting opponents of Qatar’s World Cup bid and even the family of a former Republican Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” the lawmakers wrote. “While one of these operatives has been indicted by the Department of Justice, the foreign hackers continue to operate with impunity.”

Reuters reported in 2023 that the family member was Kristi Rogers, wife of former House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, now running for Senate as the GOP candidate against one of the midterms’ most important and contested races against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

Some of the hacking groups also have sought to censor reporting on their hacking activities, the lawmakers noted.

CyberScoop couldn’t reach the companies for comment. The Commerce Department also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and the government of Qatar didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the letter. TechCrunch first reported on the letter.

Corrected 9/10/2026: to reflect department to which the lawmakers addressed the letter.

The post Lawmakers call on Commerce to sanction hackers-for-hire appeared first on CyberScoop.

A newly released whistleblower complaint reveals details about the “rushed” effort by the Trump administration and U.S. Postal Service to install three new restrictive IT systems that would potentially deny thousands of mail-in ballots, if the federal government disagrees on their eligibility.

According to the complaint, written by attorneys at the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid and released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the individual is a federal employee with “direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems” related to USPS’ handling of mail-in ballots for the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

The person claims that USPS is deploying entirely “new and untested” IT systems, including a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal that would potentially give USPS more control over whether and when voters receive federal mail ballots.

The disclosure describes the portal and other systems as “new IT systems and corresponding protocols [that] will govern the delivery of ballots to voters as soon as the 2026 mid-term federal elections and beyond.” It calls the development process “secretive, rushed, chaotic and fundamentally flawed,” and part of a larger effort by agency leaders to rush implementation of the system ahead of the 2026 elections.

That rush has forced USPS to forgo much of the pre-release testing of those systems to ensure they work as intended and can safely interoperate with other federal systems. As a result, the whistleblower says the portal is so restrictive it can potentially reject large batches of mail-in ballots based on a single identified ballot error.

According to the letter, there are three primary new IT systems USPS is rolling out this election cycle. The Federal Ballot Mail Portal stores both voter names and newly placed ballot barcodes, while a new verification system will compare ballot batch manifests with information in the portal. A third system is described as a new physical barcode sampling verification standard “with a zero percent failure rate.”

“The Whistleblower paints a dire picture of a slapdash software development process as the USPS attempted to create this complex IT system, with multiple points of ballot review, in a matter of weeks,” the letter said. “The very manner in which the project is being developed deviates dangerously from even the most basic software development best practices.”

In all three cases, the onus is explicitly placed on state election officials to resolve discrepancies between federal and state systems.

For example, when the federal government and election officials have different data on batch manifests, which can include tens of thousands of ballots, “election officials will be responsible for resolving any errors purportedly identified in the scan, and for resubmitting the batch manifest – USPS will refuse to accept the ballot batch until the errors are resolved.”

A similarly restrictive approach is described for verifying ballot bar codes.

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state – effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the letter stated.

But the whistleblower said those kinds of small errors are likely to happen in any process that relies on scanning barcodes. In this case, the rushed development and specific location of the barcodes on federal mail ballots means the portal “will almost certainly have significant operating problems.”

The letter says the whistleblower is aware of concerns “among those whose job it is to build this software” that the project is not subject to standard testing and debugging work, and that the systems were escalated to other testing environments before they were even finished. It also claims that the systems’ development was siloed across different teams, with no time to test different software components individually or the system as a whole.

The whistleblower also claims that the USPS rule changes,  which have been subject to multiple court injunctions, have continued throughout, in violation of federal court orders. Despite those orders, the agency is believed to have started work on the IT systems in June 2026.

In response, Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform led by Robert Garcia, D-Calif., wrote to Postmaster General David Steiner saying the disclosures indicate the new IT systems are “faulty” and demanding USPS “immediately cease implementation of this irresponsible and illegal scheme.”

“To be clear, any actions taken by the Postal Service that prevent any registered voter, let alone millions, from voting are unacceptable, a violation of Americans’ voting rights, and likely illegal,” the members wrote.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the disclosures could potentially lead to new lawsuits against USPS and the federal government.

“This seems to confirm that the USPS is totally unprepared and unqualified to take on this vast responsibility interjecting itself into state’s mail voting processes,” said Becker on Bluesky. “And could incur liability if USPS truly plans to reject thousands of ballots if there’s even one error.”

The post Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Trump administration rolled out a six-month test program in Texas on Monday that will draw on volunteer expertise and technology from cyber and artificial intelligence companies to protect the water sector.

“Project Watershed 250” is the first of the state-based, industry-centric pilot projects to cross the finish line that the Office of the National Cyber Director has previewed since the publication of its national cybersecurity strategy earlier this year. Water systems have long been viewed as among the most vulnerable and neediest critical infrastructure sectors, and in recent months the sector has been the victim of a spree of attacks.

“Project Watershed 250 is a commitment from the states, industry and federal government that we will continue to prioritize our nation’s safety and deliver on America-first policies for the American people,” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said at a rollout event in San Antonio Monday.

“U.S. companies are providing world-class cyber capabilities, red teaming that tests utilities’ current defenses, system hardening using the latest private sector cyber tools and AI tooling that helps utilities’ frontier cyber defenders to protect Texas water systems and scale proven solutions across the country,” he said. “This six-month pilot program is designed to make our water and wastewater critical infrastructure more resilient and resistant to cyber attacks by proactively finding and fixing system weaknesses.”

The pilot program, featuring collaboration between federal and state governments, stands in contrast to how the Biden administration tried to tackle the issue, with audit requirements that some GOP states challenged in court, forcing Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its rule.

“For too long, at least on the federal level, the government has admired the problem of cybersecurity in water systems,” Cairncross said. “We are going to find out what works. We’re going to target that, and we are going to scale off of this and learn lessons.”

A dozen companies — Parsons, Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services, Reflection AI, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos — appeared at the rollout Monday to praise the initiative and tout their contributions to it.

Not everyone praised the initiative elsewhere, however. One cyber professional who works on water security issues, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the program was “all smoke” and that “there’s no real money behind it.”

“The White House did what it always does — reached out to industry with their hands out asking for industry to pay for things the government should be doing, at least in part,” the person said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the program would be overseen by Cairncross’s office and Texas Cyber Command, which was established just last year. Abbott cited the need for the program by mentioning “an Iranian-backed cyberattack” on 30 water systems across 12 states and a 2024 attack on the water system in Muleshoe, Texas, suspected to be the work of Russian hackers.

“The need for cyber resilience is overwhelming,” Abbott said. “Many rural providers simply don’t have the resources they need to be able to protect themselves.”

Watershed 250 isn’t the only federal effort to bolster water cybersecurity, with lawmakers introducing legislation in the aftermath of the recent attacks. Past legislation that Congress has enacted also sought to tackle the problem.

Updated 8/31/26: with comment from cyber professional.

The post ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help appeared first on CyberScoop.

A new bipartisan Senate bill would require federal regulators to prepare the U.S. electric grid for cybersecurity threats from quantum computers and create a technical sandbox to study how the technology could impact  both information and operational technology systems.

The Quantum Grid Utility Assurance and Resilient Defense (Quantum-GUARD) Act, introduced by Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Chris Coons, D-Del., would direct the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission when reviewing proposed reliability regulatory standards for electricity owners and operators under the Federal Power Act.

FERC updates its reliability standards to account for emerging cybersecurity concerns, and the legislation would expand those reviews to include the future threat of hacks from quantum computers.

The legislation also directs FERC to explore potential uses of post-quantum cryptography in IT and OT systems and “take such action the Commission determines to be appropriate based on that consideration.”

In a statement, Coons said quantum computing brings “new economic opportunities” along with “tremendous cybersecurity risks.”

“As the technology races forward and our adversaries continue to seek vulnerabilities in our critical systems, we need to pass the Quantum-GUARD Act to ensure our government is using every available tool to meet this threat,” said Coons.

The federal government has been an early adopter of post-quantum cryptography for its digital systems. The National Institute for Standards and Technology has worked with cryptographers to develop new “post-quantum” encryption algorithms that will be used by most governments and the private sector.

Under the Biden administration, most federal agencies were required to migrate their systems and data to “PQC” encryption by 2035. In June, an executive order from the Trump administration pushed that timeline up to 2030. 

Ali Shaikh, CEO of Graphiant, a networking infrastructure startup, told CyberScoop that the bill would represent a good start in terms of pushing greater adoption of quantum-resistant encryption, “the real work is upgrading infrastructure, not applications, ahead of the deadlines.”

Evgeny Gervis, CEO of SafeLogic, compared the energy sector’s challenges to previous efforts by FERC and industry to gain adoption at scale for other technological upgrades, like smart grid equipment. Among those challenges is prioritizing security upgrades in a sector where reliability is paramount.

“The highest priority for electric utilities will be preservation of integrity and availability, both services that are widely supported by legacy public key cryptographic controls that are quantum vulnerable,” said Gervis. “It is essential that quantum computers do not undermine the integrity and authenticity of SCADA communications or the software update process.“

The post Bipartisan Senate bill aims to prepare energy sector for Q-Day appeared first on CyberScoop.

A bill to battle organized retail theft has wide bipartisan support and momentum on Capitol Hill, even as opponents say it threatens to dangerously expand surveillance centered in Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a time when the agency’s aggressive conduct is under scrutiny.

Backers counter that critics are wrong about the bill that they say only would enhance existing information sharing arrangements, and could play a role in fighting cyber-enabled crime, too.

At its core, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) establishes an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center within ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division. It also would create criminal penalties for money laundering proceeds from selling stolen goods, and a $5,000 threshold for the combined total value of stolen property over a year for charging purposes.

It passed the House in June by a vote of 348-60, and Senate supporters are pushing for its inclusion in the annual defense policy bill, considered “must-pass” legislation that Congress has cleared for more than 60 consecutive years.

Opponents are trying to beat back CORCA, which arose from fears of mass theft during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Its design actually creates a very large and very dangerous surveillance network,” said Nina Patel, senior policy counsel at the justice division of the American Civil Liberties Union. “You would hear the words ‘organized retail crime’ and think that this might be about shoplifting, and you would be surprised to learn that much of the apparatus is concentrated within the Department of Homeland Security.”

The objections

Patel and Jina John, her colleague at the ACLU, said the bill inadequately defines key terms: “organized retail crime,” even, as well as “retailers,” and what kind of data can be shared.

“It’s very broadly and vaguely drafted, and so the way it’s done is that it establishes all these mechanisms for data sharing among these entities, including getting data directly from retailers,” said John, senior policy counsel for AI, privacy and technology. “The data sharing is for any threats related to retail and supply chain crime. That’s it, just: threats. …That’s the biggest concern, is that this is basically giving DHS access to retail surveillance,” she said, like surveillance cameras at malls and train stations, Flock cameras and automated license plate readers.

Rather than the federal government purchasing data from brokers for surveillance purposes — already a contentious practice — CORCA gives them an avenue to get it freely, John said.

A variety of civil liberties and civil rights organizations are among the coalition trying to defeat CORCA. A key issue for many of them is the fusion center at ICE, which has collated data like cell phone location, health and other information, said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Justice in Public Safety Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Adding retail data makes that worse, he said. 

“Together, this information allows ICE to hunt down people, find their families and associates, and pull them from their communities,”  he said. “The agency, over the last couple of years, especially, has been openly engaging in racial profiling, and poor Black and Brown people are likely to feel the impact of this the most.”

Reynolds continued: “The entire model that CORCA is going to impose allows government and industry participants to overcome protections, safeguards, guardrails, and use government to target their opposition.”

The support

Backers argue that the bill poses no risk to anyone but organized retail crime leaders.

“Over the years, organized retail crime has evolved into a deadly, multi-jurisdictional threat to American lives, the United States’ economy and our national security,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement. “My Combating Organized Retail Crime Act is a targeted, bipartisan bill that would crack down on large-scale retail theft by coordinating federal, state and local law enforcement efforts, while aligning existing resources.” 

A Senate Judiciary Committee spokesperson said the bill doesn’t give DHS any additional enforcement authorities, and is housed within DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations to build on the role they currently have in addressing transnational and organized criminal activity.

The American Trucking Associations supports the bill, and its legislative director Alex Rosen disputed opponents’ claims about its surveillance risks. 

“When you can’t argue the merits of the legislation, it’s easy to revert back to stale, overused buzzwords and an attempt to rile up opposition,” she said. “The idea that this would increase government surveillance is nutty because what this does is it creates within HSI a kind of central reporting repository for industry to report high-level crimes, crimes that are part of big organized criminal theft groups … The idea that this would somehow give the government more authority to surveil Americans is crazy because nowhere in the text does it say that.”

David Johnston, vice president of asset protection and retail operations for the National Retail Federation, noted the difference between ICE’s HSI, focused on a variety of criminal investigations including cybercrime, and its Enforcement and Removal Operations division that’s focused on finding and evicting those who violate U.S. immigration laws.

The bill could be one answer to rising cybercrime, he said.

“There has really been a substantial increase in not only the activity but the methods, the tactics, and as retail has evolved into the digital environment as much as it is in the physical store environment — we’ve seen the criminal, the organization, the structure, the convergence between how cyber and physical thieves operate,” he said, mentioning gift card fraud, or e-commerce fraud that started from a phishing or account takeover. “It’s really become a substantial issue for retailers, consumers, communities across the board.”

Cyber means have also aided cargo theft with the creation of false personas and more, Johnston said: “They’re not going and stealing these trucks with physical violence. They’re driving them right out of the yard, waving to the security officer because they’ve got this whole organization behind them that are using these cybercriminal tactics.”

Where it’s headed

Both sides are optimistic that they’re making progress on the bill. Kristina Roth, the senior policy associate leading the NAACP LDF’s criminal legal system policy portfolio, said a number of lawmakers who actually sponsored the legislation voted against it on the floor.

That points to lawmakers becoming more educated on the bill, which moved swiftly this year from committee to a full vote. “I think the connections that this legislation has through DHS were maybe not well enough described as they could have been,” Roth said.

Patel said there’s more work to be done.

“What is really disturbing about this bill is the way it’s been presented to a number of legislators, and it keeps getting this moniker of being a bipartisan bill,” she said. “But I think few people recognize just how much power is being given to ICE, the complete lack of accountability from DHS and ICE under this administration and in the past, and empowering them to reach into Main Street and into consumer spaces.”

Rosen pointed to the wide House vote as well as bipartisan support from leaders of key committees, such as the Judiciary and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committees, to include the bill in the annual National Defense Authorization Act. The nature of the support has supporters optimistic about the chances for CORCA to become law.

The defense legislation often wins passage around the end of each calendar year. 

The post Retail theft bill spurs ‘very large and very dangerous’ surveillance fears appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.

The post Dem senators criticize Trump administration decisionmaking on AI security risks appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Senate is teeing up debate on a raft of new bills that would impact online privacy, kids safety and artificial intelligence.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will mark up five bills Wednesday. The most high-profile legislation, the Kids Online Safety Act, sponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., would implement broad changes to how social media and other websites handle data and accounts for users under the age of 17.

KOSA would require online platforms — including social media, video games, messaging apps and streaming services – to exercise “reasonable care” when designing features that could lead to more addictive or harmful online behaviors for minors. It would provide parents with digital tools to control and monitor their children’s accounts, prohibit market or product research on children under the age of 13 and empower the Federal Trade Commission to investigate, fine and enforce the law.

Earlier bill versions earned the backing of large tech companies, including Apple, OpenAI, and others.

By contrast in June, nearly 100 smaller parent, youth and tech-focused organizations signaled their opposition to the bill in a letter to congressional leaders. Some of the signatories, like the nonprofit Issue One, were previous supporters of KOSA who turned on the legislation after the House passed a significantly watered down version that stripped out stronger language around tech companies “duty to care,” which would have set a higher legal standard for covered platforms to consider user harm when designing their products.

Legal and ethical design standards are critical for online services, the groups argue, given lawsuits alleging that major tech platforms contribute to teenage addiction, depression, suicide, and non-consensual deepfakes.

“Major social media companies, the companies this bill regulates, are currently on trial across the country,” the letter said. “The evidence in those cases – internal records prioritizing teen engagement over teen wellbeing, safety changes shelved because platforms would lose users, buried research on the benefits of disconnection shows the default poor choices of these companies when the law does not require otherwise. Stripping the duty of care does not lighten a regulatory burden; it removes the most important obligation requiring these products to be designed safely in the first place.”

However, Blumenthal and Blackburn publicly stated that the House version was “dead on arrival” without those provisions, and they remain in the Senate version of the bill being considered Wednesday.

The markup will also consider other major legislation that would regulate age on the internet, safety features for AI chatbots and more. While proponents claim the bills enhance privacy and safety protections, technology experts largely disagree.

The SCREEN Act, introduced last year by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, would require social media companies to implement age verification technology.

Lee has partnered with parent-led groups to advocate for state-level age verification laws that expand  parental control over children’s social media accounts. Some public surveys have shown broad public support for age verification laws.

Louis Eichenbaum, a former chief information security officer at the Department of the Interior, told CyberScoop that one of the biggest challenges around online age verification is that it “increasingly requires collecting, storing or validating sensitive identity information about them.”

“The goal should not simply be verifying age, it should be doing so while minimizing the collection, retention, and exposure of personally identifiable information,” said Eichenbaum, now federal chief technology officer at ColorTokens. “Every additional piece of identity data collected expands the attack surface and increases the potential impact of a breach.”

Some privacy groups oppose the SCREEN Act and similar age verification laws, arguing the required data collection outweighs child protection benefits. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the SCREEN Act is broader than state-level age verification laws, which only cover websites that are predominantly sexually explicit.

“The bill requires nearly any service hosting even a single piece of sexually explicit content to verify the ages of its users,” wrote EFF director of federal affairs India McKinney. “The result is that the bill would apply not only to adult content sites like PornHub or OnlyFans, but also streaming services like Netflix, and social media platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Bluesky, if they host any adult content.”

The Youth AI Privacy Act, from Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., would require new safety features for AI chatbots.

According to a fact sheet released by Markey’s office in March, the bill would ban push alerts, require chatbots to disclose they’re not human, limit data retention, and prohibit using minors’ data for AI training or any purpose beyond providing answers.

The Chatbot Act, by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Brian Schatz, D-HawaiI, John Curtis, R-Utah and Adam Schiff, D-Calif. would require AI companies to implement “family accounts” for AI chatbots that give parents the ability to monitor and restrict their children’s interactions. Cruz has said the status quo “has left many parents in the dark” on their kids’ AI use.

The Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act, by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., would create a federal study around toys sold to children that include artificial intelligence or chatbot components.

The post Senate set to debate package of bills on privacy, AI and kids safety  appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.

The post Sen. Wyden urges feds to discard older, insecure, public-facing VPNs appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.”

The post Industry’s message on CIRCIA: Please ask us fewer questions about cyberattacks appeared first on CyberScoop.

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.”

The post Someone infected a spyware probe overseer with spyware appeared first on CyberScoop.