A federal judge has issued a second injunction preventing the United States Postal Service from carrying out President Donald Trump’s executive order focused on mail-in voting.

Judge Indira Talwani had previously ruled that the White House order, which would have essentially placed the federal government in charge of deciding which voters in each state would receive mail-in ballots, was unconstitutional.

The order was part of an ongoing lawsuit between the federal government and 23 states over the order’s legality. The Trump administration has formally petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case and reverse the decision.

In a new ruling issued Tuesday, Talwani’s said the court “finds it prudent to review the EO now, where less than 90 days pend before the midterms and the millions of citizens who rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November.”

“As to those elections occurring before or on November 3, 2026, the court preserves the current electoral status quo, grants the Plaintiffs’ Renewed Motion…enjoins the USPS’s implementation of Section 3 of the EO,” Talwani wrote.

The opinion concluded that the states “are likely to succeed on the merits” in claiming that Section 3 of the executive order violates constitutional separation of powers, and noted that the federal government’s “sole attempts to grapple with the actual merits of Plaintiff Organizations’ constitutional challenge are their briefly presented unitary executive arguments.”

But Talwani wrote that whether the president has ultimate authority over USPS actions is irrelevant if it results in a “facially unconstitutional” act.

“Instead, the court need only determine whether the EO is facially unconstitutional based on the substance of the text’s directives,” the opinion said. “The court has already answered and will again resolve the question clearly and affirmatively. The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections.”

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The National Institute for Standards and Technology is looking for input on how to overhaul its vulnerability reporting process to better meet the challenges of an “evolving cybersecurity landscape increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and machine-consumable security data.”

In a request for information set to publish Wednesday in the Federal Register, NIST said its National Vulnerability Database, one of the primary ways the federal government coordinates with security researchers to identify and fix software vulnerabilities, must be updated for the AI age.

NIST is concerned that as large language models become more capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at scale, the NVD’s process must be updated.

“The inadequacies of traditional vulnerability management approaches, which center on periodic scanning, static prioritization, and manual remediation, are increasingly apparent,” the RFI states.

NIST believes AI hacking tools are contributing to recent trends in vulnerability reporting. The NVD has seen increased volume and complexity of disclosed vulnerabilities, inconsistent data quality, increased reliance on automation and machine-readable security data, and “demand for near real-time vulnerability enrichment” from defenders facing faster threats.But NIST believes these challenges also present an “opportunity to transform the vulnerability management ecosystem” through proactive reforms and NVD innovation.

That’s where the public comes in. NIST is posing a series of questions that must be answered before a larger strategy can be developed. Many of their questions focus on better integrating automation – AI or otherwise – into the process.

The agency asked for insight on how defenders could better leverage automation in the vulnerability reporting process; which capabilities, products and processes would help more quickly disseminate information to stakeholders, how to build transparency and auditability into AI-driven decisionmaking, and what role AI should play in automated vulnerability remediation.

“NIST intends to support a future-ready vulnerability management ecosystem that is continuous, contextual, and automated, while enabling cybersecurity practices to respond appropriately to real-world threats and business priorities,” the RFI states.

The NIST effort to revamp its vulnerability database comes a month after the Trump administration rolled out a new federal clearinghouse, overseen by the Department of Treasury, for sharing AI threat information between government and the private sector called “Gold Eagle.”

It’s not clear how Treasury’s process will interact with NIST’s database. The White House also partnered with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute to create the Vulnerability Information and Coordination Environment, (VINCE) which will collect and distribute reports on AI-discovered vulnerabilities.

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Kerianne Tobitsch, who most recently served as a senior lawyer at the Homeland Security Department, is the NSA's new general counsel, sources told Recorded Future News.

Municipalities in California, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Texas are all recovering from disruptive cyberattacks that have affected government operations.

Proponents of the Kids Online Safety Act are cheering recent progress but acknowledge a long road ahead for legislation that, despite mounting political pressure, may be difficult to pass this session.

The Water Watch Center launched at DEF CON aims to help under-resourced utilities protect their systems against hackers.

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The Federal Trade Commission wants to start regulating ideological bias in AI systems and assert federal control over state laws. They’re getting an earful from opponents on all sides of the political spectrum.

In a proposed policy statement released last month, the FTC said it was considering treating ideological bias in AI systems as an “unfair and deceptive practice” under Section 5 of the FTC Act.

The commission argued that consumers have an expectation that AI systems will provide them with information free from bias or ideological manipulation. Defining such bias as an unfair or deceptive practice would potentially allow the commission to regulate training or inputs that power AI algorithms. How precisely the FTC would determine when ideological bias exists in these systems is not fully explained in the document. 

Additionally, the statement suggests that the FTC believes this regulatory authority supersedes state AI laws. It specifically mentions the Colorado AI Act, which calls for models to be subject to risk assessments, transparency disclosures and “bias audits” before release. State lawmakers are now seeking to delay or eliminate the audits before the law takes effect in 2027.

CyberScoop reviewed dozens of public comments criticizing the FTC’s proposal. Even ideological allies raised two main concerns: first, that the proposal distracts from real questions about the federal government’s role in regulating AI deception; and second, that it opens a Pandora’s Box by enabling political censorship of AI model outputs.

Leah Siskind, a former White House digital official and deputy director of the AI Corps at the Department of Homeland Security, told CyberScoop that AI companies face legitimate questions about their obligations to consumers, particularly whether they must ensure their models provide accurate information and protect against deliberate manipulation. 

Siskind’s past research has focused on how authoritarian propaganda tends to be overrepresented in answers provided by large language models, in part due to governments’ intentional efforts to poison data ingested by AI systems.

“There is a really interesting debate here about bias and about accuracy in models and whether that’s deceptive or not… about how we counter disinformation that has been absorbed and is now being reflected by LLMs…but this is not addressing that at all,” said Siskind, now a senior AI fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Instead, Siskind said the FTC statement appears primarily concerned about a power struggle with states over AI regulation and “petty squabbles about which AI model is more woke than the other.” She’s skeptical that the policy statement’s cited legal authorities are on sound footing.

“The way I see it is that the FTC’s role is to police consumer protection violations, not regulating AI systems, and it seems like they’re trying to solve a lack of congressional AI regulation by stretching section 5 [of the FTC Act] well beyond its traditional role,” she said.

Additionally, the policy statement’s language and sourcing suggests that the FTC is concerned with certain kinds of ideological bias more than others.

Anthropic, which has clashed with the Trump administration over AI guardrails and military applications of their technology, shows up more than half a dozen times in footnotes, many which are framed as examples of ideological bias the FTC is seeking to stamp out.

By contrast, the statement ignores a direct example of an American AI company owner influencing their model’s ideology: Elon Musk and his xAI-owned Grok model. Musk has publicly admitted, often on his own website, to intervening when Grok’s responses upset him. These interventions have shaped Grok’s outputs on specific topics, including South African race relations and the term “MechaHitler,” where the model now reflects Musk’s personal views.

But neither Musk and xAI are mentioned in the document, while Grok appears in a footnote which cites an advertisement for Grok as “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing.”

Criticism across the spectrum

The FTC received more than 300 comments on its proposal from trade associations, think tanks, individual experts and members of Congress. Most criticized it as ill-defined and vulnerable to politically-motivated censorship, while some supported stronger rules against bias in AI systems. 

The International Center for Law and Economics noted the statement “offers little practical guidance about how the Commission will apply its deception authority to AI” and also does little to address hard questions, like where AI providers may be exercising their own First Amendment-protected activities.

The statement’s “focus on ‘ideologically motivated distortions’ suggests that the Commission’s concerns extend beyond factual misrepresentations in marketing to speech that may receive the highest degree of First Amendment protection,” the ICLE wrote.

The America First Legal Foundation, a conservative non-profit founded by top White House adviser Stephen Miller, pressed the FTC to adopt the policy “in full,” claiming that frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic “have been programmed to prioritize ideologically liberal and progressive values as though they are objective, neutral positions rooted in truth.”

The group also argues that regulating these models’ ideological output falls under the FTC’s legal authority, because a “reasonable consumer” would expect that a model advertised for its usefulness and reliability would not prioritize liberal, ideological views.

“A reasonable consumer, based on AI companies’ advertising choices, would not expect that an AI system will adopt overwhelmingly liberal positions, thereby skewing results, or adopt a moral framework that would prefer to annihilate the earth rather than utter a slur,” wrote Emily Percival, senior counsel for America First Legal.

However, comments from other conservative groups questioned that rationale. The R Street Foundation’s Spence Purnell and Adam Thierer wrote that “the consumer expectations rationale is typically used in cases where there is an omission of information that should have existed.”

“Given that most LLMs already have disclosure statements [for their outputs], it seems unlikely that the FTC could explicitly prove that consumers were deceived about a product,” Purnell and Thierer wrote.

Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Michael Lawler, R-N.Y., urged the FTC to carve out civil rights-related work from their scrutiny, such as preventing models from discriminating against users based on race, religion, gender, age and other federally protected characteristics.

“AI companies must not falsify facts in the name of fairness, but they also must prevent discrimination, stereotypes, and unequal treatment,” Gottheimer and Lawler wrote. “We would appreciate understanding how the FTC intends to ensure that these efforts remain permissible under the final policy framework.”

But the most common concern shared across the political spectrum was that the FTC could establish a precedent allowing the Trump White House and future administrations to reshape AI systems to reflect their political views.

David Inserra, Jennifer Huddleston and Juan Londoño of the Cato Institute point out that the FTC statement is conflating two different issues: ideological bias in AI systems and factual deception in marketing. 

“In other words, the FTC is trying to judge AI models’ accuracy and performance—two largely subjective variables—in the same way it evaluates dietary supplements’ medical-benefit claims or users being charged fees without proper notice or consent,” they write. “This is an absurd comparison.”

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NATO’s cyber defense arm and a startup that uses artificial intelligence to find software flaws can now issue the ID numbers the industry uses to track those flaws, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity announced last week. 

The NATO Cyber Security Centre, part of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, and AISLE, a cybersecurity company with offices in San Francisco and Prague, joined as CVE numbering authorities under the ENISA Root. The CVE program assigns a unique record to each publicly disclosed security flaw so that governments, vendors and researchers have a common marker when referring to particular vulnerabilities. 

Twenty numbering authorities now sit under the ENISA Root, with 12 brought in by ENISA itself and eight moving over from the MITRE Root, run by the U.S. nonprofit that has handled the program’s daily work for more than 20 years.

Hans de Vries, ENISA’s chief cybersecurity and operations officer, linked the growth to changes in how people find flaws. 

“Recent developments in the global cybersecurity landscape, coupled with the emergence of Frontier AI models and their impact on vulnerability discovery and exploitation, have underscored the need to build strong vulnerability management infrastructure and capabilities,” he said in a statement. He said ENISA’s role helps build a “more globally representative, resilient, and scalable vulnerability identification ecosystem.”

The two new members show how bespoke each member is within its authority. The NATO Cyber Security Centre can now assign CVE IDs to eligible flaws across the NATO enterprise. The agency said that will make tracking more consistent and let the alliance share information with trusted partners sooner. The center guards NATO’s networks, watches for threats and coordinates the response when incidents hit.

Meanwhile, AISLE’s authorization is narrower. The company said in a July press release that the designation covers vulnerabilities discovered in its own products, allowing it to publish identifiers without waiting for a third-party authority to process a request. 

Jaya Baloo, the company’s co-founder, described the step as “foundational” and said coordinated disclosure “starts with holding your own products to the same standard you expect of everyone else.” Separately from the designation, the company said its researchers have disclosed hundreds of vulnerabilities in widely used open-source software, including OpenSSL, Linux, Apache and OpenEMR, each coordinated through the relevant authority for that project.

The changes come as the CVE process continues to involve amid program upheaval and the torrent of vulnerabilities discovered by AI systems. 

The CVE program, run by CISA, narrowly escaped a sudden demise when a last-minute, 11-month contract extension averted a shutdown in April 2025. Since then, several competing databases from European nonprofits and other private entities have been stood up in order to better coordinate how vulnerabilities are tracked, disclosed, and ultimately patched.

Earlier this year, The Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg (CIRCL) launched the Global CVE Allocation System, or GCVE, as an alternative to the CVE program.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Gunra ransomware gang is breaching critical infrastructure organizations through vulnerabilities in popular brands of firewalls, the FBI and South Korea’s government warned.

The incident occurred on the same day as coordinated cyberattacks struck more than 30 other renewable energy installations and a larger heat plant, as Poland publicly disclosed in January.

Two Democratic senators introduced legislation that would allocate $300 million each year to fund cybersecurity improvements for the water and wastewater sector.

Ukraine’s computer emergency response team, CERT-UA, said Saturday that the campaign has been running since at least May and is linked to Sandworm, the notorious hacking unit associated with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

A Massachusetts newspaper reports that officials from the town of Littleton (population: 10,141) "claim that five of Littletonâ(TM)s Flock Safety cameras were switched back on by the company without informing the town..." Littleton had temporarily disabled the cameras earlier this year, according to the article, but upon discovering the cameras were still active, city officials say they directed the Town Counsel "to initiate cancellation of the contract with Flock Safety and directed the Town Administrator to coordinate the removal of the six cameras on public ways" with the Department of Public Works. Ironically, it's the same Massachusetts town that last year was breached by a Chinese-state-sponsored hacking group for over 300 days. Flock has also considered dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers' vehicles "to scan license plates those drivers travelled passed," reports 404 Media, "essentially turning Uber and Lyft drivers into roaming surveillance vehicles, according to a Flock presentation shared with 404 Media... 404 Media first revealed the intended partnership last August when multiple sources provided information on the plan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC Bay Area brings news from the small idyllic California town of Suisun City (population: 29,518). The city council "declared a state of emergency Saturday after a cyberattack that shut down computer systems including 911 public safety operations." "Malicious software infected and compromised" the East Bay community's information technology systems beginning about 5:45 a.m. Friday, the city said on social media. "The cybersecurity incident hit critical public safety operations, including 911 routing, police and fire dispatch, records and city services," the city said. "There is no imminent threat to the public," the city said. "All public safety services remain active." The city shut down its computer network "to contain the threat and preserve evidence for a federal investigation," it said... Suisun City dispatchers were taking calls for service through the Solano County dispatch center. Suisun City police officers and firefighters continued responding to calls for service, the city said, but online city services and internal operations were unavailable. On Facebook the city said it was "working alongside federal, state and regional agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and California Office of Emergency Services to maintain emergency services, investigate the incident and restore systems." But Bay Area PBS station KQED notes "They're only the latest local government in the region to be hit by a cyberattack." Earlier this year, Foster City and Pittsburg experienced other cyberattacks that impacted services in their own jurisdictions. Foster City declared a state of emergency after a March ransomware incident that shut down many services for more than a week. Pittsburg lost almost $1 million to a February phishing attack, though over half of it was recovered.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump has ordered a 15% tariff on imported products made with polysilicon, a key material for semiconductors and solar panels. The new tariff will take effect on December 4th. The Guardian reports: The executive order signed by the president on Thursday evening said: "The plan of action in this proclamation will, among other things, help ensure the commercial viability of United States production of polysilicon and its derivatives that is necessary to meet United States economic and national security requirements." Polysilicon, an ultra-pure form of silicon, is an important ingredient in making the semiconductors vital for AI processing power, datacentres and solar power generation. US solar factories have long accused Chinese rivals of dumping cheaper panels on the market, which they say have been enabled by excessive government subsidies and by moving manufacturing to other countries to dodge US tariffs. [...] The US has two main polysilicon factories, including Hemlock Semiconductor, which operates a plant in Michigan and is a joint venture between the US tech company Corning and Japan's Shin-Etsu Handotai. The Munich-based Wacker Chemie runs a factory in Tennessee. Trump said in the order that he had accepted recommendations by the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to set minimum import prices of $21 a kilogram for polysilicon, $100 a kilogram for polysilicon ingots and wafers, $0.22 a watt for solar cells, and $0.38 a watt for solar modules or panels. The order also allows the commerce department to create an incentive program for companies that invest in factories to produce polysilicon or derivative products.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NTIA official Adam Cassady becomes the second person confirmed to be the State Department's ambassador-at-large for cyber policy.

The money will be used to create a fund to mitigate social media harms, including by carving out $420 million for treatment for New Mexico youth who have been hurt on the platforms.

IEH Corporation — which produces specialized products used in military satellites, missiles and fighter jets — said it discovered a cyberattack on Tuesday and immediately tried to contain it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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