Democrats’ big win on Election Day, which saw them take control of both the House and Senate, has ramifications for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, artificial intelligence, surveillance policy and much more.

Here’s what lawmakers and cybersecurity experts have to say about the short-term and long-term prospects on Capitol Hill.

Leadership plans ahead

Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. is in line to take the gavel on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, with Sen. Gary Peters, Mich., retiring.

“Our government’s number one job is to keep people safe, and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee must work to ensure that our country remains safe, secure and free from all kinds of threats,” Hassan said in a statement to CyberScoop. “That work involves protecting against terrorism and fentanyl trafficking, but it also includes guarding against emerging threats like artificial intelligence security risks and strengthening our cybersecurity.”

“The Trump-Vance administration has undermined our security on these fronts, including by diverting resources away from combatting fentanyl trafficking and gutting CISA,” she continued. “We need to reverse these cuts, confront these challenges and put public safety first.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is poised to return once again as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Democrats are taking over at a “pivotal time for CISA,” with it looking to add staff after cutting back by nearly one-third.

“First and foremost, we will aim to work with CISA to expedite its critical re-staffing effort and to ensure it has the expertise necessary to support stakeholders as they defend against the scale and velocity of AI-enabled cyber-attacks,” he said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Advances in AI can help defenders, but it will also accelerate the consequences of deferred investments in security and CISA must be well-positioned to help critical infrastructure owners and operators rapidly improve their cybersecurity posture.”

“We will prioritize getting resources straight into the hands for defenders — by extending the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program and improving support of under-resourced sectors, especially water,” he continued. “We will work to ensure CISA re-establishes its cross-sector coordination capacity, which was diminished when the Trump administration- terminated CIPAC, by making sure the Anchor-CI is eventually up and running and meets the needs of stakeholders. Finally, we will make sure CISA is well-positioned to support the secure development and deployment of AI.”

What happens in the lame-duck session

Before the GOP relinquishes control of the House and Senate to Democrats, though, there’s a lame-duck session ahead. 

Long-term renewal of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) is a bipartisan and industry priority, with it set to expire Dec. 11. Current Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., has been the biggest obstacle to reauthorization, but he could get “rolled” by GOP leadership on an extension, said Michael Garcia, a former government cyber official and vice president of the cybersecurity practice at Monument Advocacy. Possible vehicles for CISA 2015 to hitch a ride include an omnibus funding bill or the annual defense policy bill.

The Department of Homeland Security, and its subagency CISA, are currently operating on a continuing resolution that’s also set to expire Dec. 11, where lawmakers could temporarily extend CISA 2015 if a long-term solution can’t be reached in the lame duck. Another continuing resolution before Dec. 11 in lieu of an omnibus spending bill is an option for the lame duck. Both a CR and omnibus spending bill would theoretically include DHS funding, although the agency’s funding has been made more difficult in the past by the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the department.

Republicans have talked about wanting to get the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act done in the lame duck. Besides the possibilities of CISA 2015 being included in the bill, Nicholas Leiserson, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Security and Technology, said the Senate version of the legislation has a pair of very noteworthy cyber provisions: a “very broad” authorization for contractor-owned, contractor-operated offensive cyber operations, and a requirement that every artificial intelligence product sold to the Defense Department have an AI bill of materials.   

Additional leadership shuffle

While Paul is losing his gavel, he’s shown he can be a disruptive force on passing cybersecurity legislation through the Senate in the minority. That makes what he does next possibly determinative for cyber bills, Leiserson and Garcia said. “If he leaves HSGAC, let a thousand cyber bills flourish!” Garia quipped on social media. Paul could opt to become the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee instead of HSGAC.

Nebraska Sen. James Lankford would take over for Paul as top HSGAC Republican in that scenario, and an industry source said he’s viewed as a supporter of CISA 2015.

On Senate Intelligence, the panel’s leadership goes to a lawmaker who has placed a big emphasis on cybersecurity in his congressional career: Mark Warner, D-Va. 

On the House side, while Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., moves to the minority on the Homeland Security panel, he has proven willing to collaborate with Democrats on cybersecurity issues. Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., is poised to take the gavel of the panel’s cybersecurity subcommittee, and Rep. Vince Fong, R-of California looks set to become the subcommittee’s top Republican and has his own history of bipartisanship. Fong would replace current subcommittee chair Andy Ogles, the far-right Tennessee Republican who lost in the primaries.

One thing to watch in the House, Leiserson said, is how the House looks to tackle AI — through existing committees, a select committee or some other structure. Democrats haven’t put forward a unified front on AI guardrails yet.

With AI models uncovering as many vulnerabilities as they are, “highly capable frontier models are going to drive a lot of discussion” about AI and cybersecurity, said Craig Albright, the Business Software Alliance’s senior vice president for U.S. government relations.

Appropriations, oversight, legislation

If the NDAA or a CISA 2015 extension don’t pass in the lame duck, they’d be priorities in 2027, too.

“CISA 2015 has to happen, and if we can’t get it done, then we can’t move to the next thing,”  said Henry Young, BSA’s policy director. “Once we get it done, there’s an open question about which of these priorities that we’ve talked about gets to be number one. Is it post-quantum cryptography? Is it government IT modernization? Is it frontier AI cybersecurity systems? We don’t know that yet, and we can’t know until we pass this law.”

How damaged the agency CISA is by Trump administration’s budget cuts is something Democrats are expected to scrutinize closely. Another top budget issue is what to do with the expired State and Local Cybersecurity Grants Program housed at DHS, since even if it’s reauthorized, it will require appropriators taking steps to invest in it.

Democrats could take a look at a variety of other Trump administration changes at DHS and CISA, on topics like election security, the Cyber Safety Review Board, the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative and more. 

More broadly, Leiserson said an area of Democratic cyber oversight is likely to be the Department of Government Efficiency that cut cyber personnel at agencies at and beyond CISA, and “particularly the integrity of systems that DOGE touched when they were given very high privileged access to federal systems.”

If the White House puts forward a permanent nominee for director of CISA, Democrats would be poised to vet that person. They also would have a say in who leads the Office of the National Cyber Director, should the incumbent, Sean Cairncross, depart.

So far, Democrats haven’t put forward a unified posture on expired surveillance authorities known as Section 702, although both Warner and incoming House Intelligence Chairman Jim Himes, D-Conn., have fought in the past for its renewal. The surveillance program is operating similarly still due to a court order, but that order only lasts through next spring.

The post What Democratic control of Congress means for cybersecurity appeared first on CyberScoop.

Early reports of ballot scanner malfunctions in Westchester County, New York are a sign of the challenges election officials will face in the current online information environment as voters head to the polls Tuesday on the final day of voting.

While such equipment failures and breakdowns are not uncommon and happen in a small number of precincts every election cycle, and there is no evidence of foul play, conspiracists quickly jumped on the news.

According to Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington who researches online rumors and disinformation tied to elections, the rumors are already spreading within right-wing online circles as evidence of election malfeasance.

Starbird cited metrics showing that posts on X about the scanner malfunctions grew to as many as 100 a minute in the hours after the news was reported, with established election deniers, such as The Gateway Pundit, amplifying conspiracist framings.

The Westchester County Board of Elections said the problems appear related to some ballots being too thick for the machines to accept, leading to rejections. Voters with affected ballots were told to place them in designated orange emergency ballot bags that will be secured, monitored and counted by officials in compliance with election laws.

“The Board of Elections is in constant communication with New York State officials, Westchester County Government and poll workers to address this issue and ensure that voting continues with as little disruption as possible,” the board wrote in a statement. “In the meantime, voters should continue to complete their paper ballots as instructed by poll workers.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James said her office was also monitoring the situation and “is in touch with the state and local Boards of Elections as they work on a solution.”

“Westchester voters can still safely fill out and turn in their ballots at their polling locations,” James wrote on X. “Your votes will count.”

Westchester County is where many votes in the NY-17 congressional race will be cast between Republican incumbent Mike Lawler and Democratic Party nominee Cait Conley. Conley previously served as the election security lead for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under the Biden administration.

Lawler sought to assure his supporters that the affected ballots will be transported by police escorts to a central location at the board of elections and will not be opened at the polling site.

“I want to be clear: there’s no shenanigans going on here,” Lawler said in a news conference Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice issued a news release announcing charges against 63 individuals, many of them lawful permanent residents who have lived in the U.S. for decades and some who later became naturalized citizens with legal voting rights, for allegedly voting as noncitizens in a past election.

The charges are part of a flurry of last-minute actions by the Trump administration to promote the specter of widespread noncitizen voting. The administration also brought lawsuits against states, like California and Alaska, in the past week that have sought to influence how ballots are treated and counted in the upcoming Senate races. Federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have thrown them out while reiterating the executive branch has no constitutional or legal role in the administration of state-run elections.

Another federal court ordered the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to stop sending lists of “potential noncitizen” voters to states, after Trump administration lawyers acknowledged in court that the data they rely on for those assertions has a “high” error rate.

Nevertheless, the department continued its aggressive posture, announcing Tuesday that it would be deploying 1,000 election monitors to precincts across all 50 states.

The post Ballot scanner malfunctions, flurry of federal legal actions test election officials on final day of voting  appeared first on CyberScoop.

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 taking direct aim at California state election officials, issuing grand jury subpoenas to election offices statewide ahead of the final day of voting on Nov. 3.

The investigations, first reported by Bloomberg, center on alleged administration of illegal voting. They are ostensibly tied to demands by the U.S. Justice Department that California and other states use federal voter lists to determine whether a voter is a “potential noncitizen” and should be removed.

The Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters told CyberScoop it received multiple grand jury subpoenas last week related to the investigation. The office called the federal efforts an attempt to intimidate California election officials into accepting federal supremacy over state voter registration authority.

“At every step, the U.S. Department of Justice has taken a confrontational, adversarial approach,” said Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan in a statement. “Election officials are acting in accordance with state and federal law. Clear court rulings at both the U.S. District Court level and the Court of Appeals have confirmed that. Threats and intimidation have no place in elections. We will take whatever steps necessary to ensure the safety of our employees and to remain focused on serving the voters of Los Angeles County so they can exercise their voting franchise.”

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, also reportedly a target of the federal probe, did not respond to a request for comment from CyberScoop.

One California election official, Clint Curtis, the outgoing registrar of voters in Shasta County, endorsed the federal government’s efforts to remove 20,000 voters from California voter rolls. Curtis, whose term ends in January, was previously part of a failed effort to hire Tina Peters, a felon and former Mesa County, Colorado, election clerk to help with the upcoming midterms. Curtis has long believed in widespread election fraud.

He told CyberScoop earlier this year that he believed Shasta County elections in 2024 were plagued by suspicious mail-in ballots, saying they looked, felt and “smelled” different from normal mail ballots.

The U.S. Constitution gives states the authority to administer elections and Congress the power to make election laws, something courts have repeatedly upheld in dozens of legal challenges by the Trump administration.

The Department of Justice has claimed there are at least 20,000 such potential noncitizens on California’s voter lists, while the Department of Homeland Security told CyberScoop the figure could be as many as 190,000. The administration’s data, drawn from public voter lists, federal databases and commercially purchased personal information, has been repeatedly criticized by election officials, voting experts and federal courts as inaccurate and unreliable for determining voter eligibility.

Most people identified as “potential noncitizens” turn out to be naturalized citizens who have since gained voting rights, or the result of state administrative errors that mistakenly registered a small number of ineligible voters. Many of those mistakenly registered never cast a ballot.

State officials have had to defend against attempts at federal coercion as well as third-party activists who are constantly testing and probing election procedures nationwide, sometimes without understanding the laws election officials must follow to verify voters.

On Wednesday, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in Minnesota announced felony charges against a pair of right-wing provocateurs, James O’Keefe and Cam Higby, for unlawful voting and identity theft. According to a statement from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the two showed up at various election offices, provided false identities of real voters to election judges, violating state laws against misrepresenting their identity in applying for a ballot.

“Elections are the bedrock of democracy and their protection is one of our highest priorities. Individuals engaging in unlawful conduct related to our elections will be held accountable,” said Moriarty. “Our office has had regular meetings with Hennepin County Elections staff in preparation for both the primary and the general elections this year and we are fully prepared.”

Voting rights and civil society groups are also executing short- and long-term plans to combat potential voter disenfranchisement ahead of Tuesday.

Jessica Ayoub, deputy political director for the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union, said her organization has “never been more prepared” for any expected fights with the federal government or local officials seeking to disenfranchise voters, saying they first began planning for different scenarios 18 months ago, cultivating relationships with hundreds of clerks and election staff across Michigan.

“We’ve gamed out 25 potential scenarios and have rapid response strategies that we’ll deploy to ensure our elections are protected and that our democracy remains intact,” said Ayoub, who cited a desire not to publicize further details ahead of next month.

On Friday, voting rights groups filed a new lawsuit against the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security in California, seeking to block the federal government’s efforts against state election officials.

The groups are asking a judge to declare that the federal government has exceeded its constitutional authority and that state officials are legally carrying out their duties. They also want the court to force the departments to contact all California election officials who received subpoenas and tell them the investigation has halted due to a court order.

The post California officials confirm grand jury subpoenas as states, civil groups brace to protect elections from federal encroachment appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Office of the National Cyber Director has rolled out its second regional cyber pilot program, this one focused on rural hospitals.

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross visited South Carolina on Monday to debut the six-month program, Project Lifeline 250, which connects industry with rural hospitals. The concept is similar to the first pilot program in Texas that connected industry with the water sector.

“Project Lifeline 250 connects the world-leading American industry with rural hospitals and uses the greatest American tools and capabilities to defend hospital networks; deploy physical back up devices after an initial incident to ensure an impacted hospital can still provide critical care; and identify high-risk and legacy devices and replace them,” Cairncross said in a statement.

The health care sector had a record year for breaches last year, with 804 large breaches reported to the Health and Human Services Department’s Office for Civil Rights that affected more than 140 million people. The FBI identified the sector as the top target for ransomware and other hackers in 2025.

Rural hospitals, like the water sector, lack resources compared to other kinds of critical infrastructure.

Besides industry and the ONCD, the effort is a project that draws in the South Carolina Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity program, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and local governments in the state.

“Cyber threats are a rising challenge to our nation’s security, and we must remain vigilant to protect the systems our communities depend on,” said South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster. “Project Lifeline 250 is another important step toward ensuring South Carolina’s rural hospitals have the resources they need to defend against cyberattacks and continue providing critical care.”

Some of the same companies involved in providing free services in the Texas pilot are involved in the South Carolina pilot, too, along with some new participants. Among the participating firms: Abnormal AI, Cisco, Cyera, Microsoft, Rilian Partners, Trellix and Zscaler.

“The stakes for critical infrastructure are getting higher and higher,” said Yotam Segev, cofounder and CEO of Cyera. “There’s real urgency in bringing cyber expertise from some of the world’s largest and most complex enterprises to rural hospitals through Project Lifeline 250. When a hospital knows where its patient data lives and who can reach it, it can reduce the leverage behind ransomware. Every community should have that clarity, no matter the size of the hospital or its IT team.”

Members of Congress also have introduced legislation designed to aid rural hospital cybersecurity.

The ONCD hasn’t said what will happen at the end of the six-month pilots. And so far it has only partnered, or publicly discussed partnering with, GOP-led states.

The post National cyber director rolls out latest pilot in South Carolina, this time for rural hospitals 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.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a strategy Monday that focuses on taking a leading role in cyber defense, prioritizing protection of critical infrastructure and building the ability to withstand attacks.

The 10-page strategy — “CISA 2030: Defend, Harden, Prevail” —  largely reaffirms existing roles for the agency, but CISA will begin reviewing its core services and capabilities within 60 days to make sure they meet key objectives, followed by implementation over the next 180 days and an update on its progress after one year.

Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen said in a foreword that the agency needs to act with “renewed purpose” in the face of threats.

“The threat landscape we face today is not static,” he said. “Nation-state actors and other malicious adversaries continue to grow more sophisticated in their efforts to compromise our networks, and there is no guarantee that a strong defense will eliminate intrusions. As President Trump has reminded us, resilience must be the foundation of our approach. We must ensure that when adversaries gain a foothold, we are prepared to detect them quickly, evict them decisively, and keep critical operations running without interruption.”

The strategy is also meant to align with the administration’s broader cyber strategy, published in March, and last year’s executive order on state and local preparedness.

“I call on every company and organization in the critical infrastructure community — from owners and operators to vendors and technology manufacturers — to act now,” Andersen said in a comment released with the strategy. “CISA 2030 provides a focused roadmap to strengthen defenses, eliminate adversarial footholds, and deny them any advantage that could endanger the nation’s security, economy, or public health.”

Within each section of the strategy, there are other goals listed.

Under “defend: lead national cyber defense,” the key objectives are to integrate state, local and industry cyber defense; protect operational technology; developing guidance and best practices on software security; and assess and develop emerging technologies.

Under “harden: prioritize national infrastructure security,” the key objectives are to coordinate intelligence for critical infrastructure; analyze infrastructure data; work with international partners; and emphasize strengthening the nation’s most important infrastructure.

Under “prevail: mobilize national resilience,” the key objectives are to invest in critical infrastructure resilience; strengthen national communications interoperability; modernize planning and exercises; and build next-generation interoperable infrastructure.

Critics say much of CISA has been badly diminished by budget cuts at the agency by the Trump administration, including many of them specifically a focus of the new strategy, that have left it understaffed.

The last strategic plan at the agency, published in 2023, also had three pillars: address immediate threats, harden the terrain and drive security at scale.

The post CISA publishes strategy with eye on the next four years 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.

A series of federal raids and arrests of voters in California has escalated the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to take administrative control of U.S. elections.

The arrests, paired with comments from top officials at the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, also make it clear that the federal government is willing to act on its past threats to investigate, arrest, or prosecute more than 190,000 California voters who the administration claims are “potential” noncitizens.

The Department of Justice announced Monday it made 28 arrests across California, part of what it was calling “Operation Protect the Vote.” All those arrested were foreign nationals and permanent green card holders, charged with fraudulently registering to vote in U.S. elections and making false statements in a naturalization application.

The Department of Justice said on Oct. 13 it provided a “list” of 20,000 registered California voters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, claiming they were ineligible to vote based on federal records.

“Each of the 28 defendants charged today appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants we provided to California election officials last week,” said Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter in a statement. “California refused to look at that list. Today’s charges show exactly what that refusal puts at risk. California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”

A DHS spokesperson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations are “actively rooting out and investigating” alleged voter fraud while claiming the Trump administration has “repeatedly” proven that noncitizens vote in elections.  

“DHS and DOJ are laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens,” the unnamed DHS spokesperson wrote in response to questions about the raid. “ONLY Americans should elect American leaders.”

There is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in U.S. elections, either among legal voters or noncitizens. The Trump administration’s record, in public statements as well as lawsuits and other court actions, reflects a history of wildly overinflated claims of actual fraud, while casting routine or isolated errors in voter registration as evidence of larger election malfeasance.

Over the course of Trump’s first term, his subsequent time as a private citizen, and his current second term, he has had many chances to provide evidence of widespread voter fraud or noncitizen voting in court, and he has lost each time. His administration has also filed dozens of lawsuits against state and locally run elections. In these cases, the administration argues the federal government’s authority to investigate and prosecute voter fraud outweighs states’ authority to run elections. In the lawsuits seeking states’ voter registration records, the federal government has lost every case so far. 

In the past two years, the Department of Justice and Republican secretaries of state have regularly announced findings of hundreds of thousands of “potential noncitizens” registered to vote. In nearly every single instance, follow-up investigations confirm the number of confirmed noncitizens registered was a tiny fraction of the original claims, with the vast majority being simple mistakes with no evidence of a larger plot.

A DHS spokesperson told CyberScoop that its internal list contains more than 190,000 registered California voters alleged to be “potential noncitizens.” The spokesperson said the list was culled from publicly available state voter registration data, federal databases and “commercial third-party data,” that cross-referenced them “with known aliens in our systems.”

“Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation,” the spokesperson said.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the raids.

“190,000 remains the number of potential noncitizens registered to vote in California that DHS asked Secretary Weber to review,” the spokesperson continued. “The 20,000 referenced by DOJ is a subset of registrants that have gone through the manual verification process so far.”

Last week three Democratic senators, including Alex Padilla, D-Calif., wrote to Attorney General Todd Blanche pressing him to commit that the Department of Justice, FBI or other federal law enforcement agencies will not seize live ballots or voting machines during the upcoming midterm elections.

The administration has already carried out federal raids in Georgia and Arizona to seize ballots from the 2020 election, and the senators called out personal efforts “by President Trump directly to DOJ attorneys to influence election-related investigations in California and elsewhere.”

Padilla’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the arrests.

The post DOJ escalates fight for election supremacy with California raids appeared first on CyberScoop.

Hundreds of federal agencies should adopt an encryption tool to protect whistleblowers, veterans suffering from mental health crises and others from hackers who might target them when they reach out via agency websites, Sen. Ron Wyden said Monday.

The Oregon Democrat urged the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Office of Management and Budget to take steps to adopt Encrypted Client Hello — a cybersecurity technology that protects the name of the website visited by a user — in a letter to the two agencies. His office identified at least 350 sites that don’t use its protections.

While almost all federal agency websites are encrypted, standard web encryption doesn’t secure some website names, Wyden said, using reportfraud.ftc.gov as an example.

“As data travels across the internet, hackers and foreign actors monitoring network connections can easily see these exposed website names,” he wrote. “This visibility could lead to malicious eavesdroppers identifying whistleblowers, profiling cleared federal personnel, tracking Americans seeking crisis support, and mapping interactions between agencies.”

Wyden wrote that Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is especially effective with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that connect hundreds of thousands of websites to the internet. For websites delivered by a CDN, ECH makes it so anyone intercepting user web traffic can view the network delivering the content but not the specific site.

Agencies using CDN infrastructure without Encrypted Client Hello include an FBI tipline that supports ECH but doesn’t enable it and a Department of Veteran Affairs online suicide prevention hotline that isn’t protected by ECH because Amazon doesn’t support it, as well as agencies offering things like national security personnel services and whistleblower channels.

Because of the lack of ECH protection, foreign adversaries might be able to identify someone submitting crime tips to the FBI, Wyden warned.

Wyden made two recommendations to the leaders of CISA and the OMB.

“CISA should require that civilian federal agencies enable the protections of ECH across all public-facing websites and inter-agency web systems,” he said. “OMB, in coordination with the Office of the National Cyber Director and CISA, should establish support for ECH protections as a mandatory condition for commercial cloud and network vendors seeking federal contracts.”

CISA and OMB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter, first reported by NextGov/FCW.

Wyden’s Monday missive is his most recent aimed at improving security technology at federal agencies, following on the heels of a letter in July first reported by CyberScoop that urged feds to get rid of older, insecure, public-facing VPNs.

The post Wyden seeks adoption of encryption tech at hundreds of federal agencies to protect visitors’ sensitive traffic appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Department of Homeland Security is banning the use of Chinese AI model DeepSeek and its affiliates by civilian federal agencies.

The notice, set to publish Tuesday in the Federal Register, cites the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Act and a review by the Federal Acquisition Security Council to bar federal agencies from buying all information technology products and services from parent company Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence.

The notice includes a copy of a letter from Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin ordering the exclusion of DeepSeek products on June 26, indicating the ban has been in place for months.  

Mullin claimed that DeepSeek’s models present “multiple threat vectors” to civilian federal agency IT systems. Some are unique to the company’s country of origin, while others identify potential privacy and mass data collection concerns that could also apply to other Chinese and U.S. AI models.

He said DeepSeek models store data in servers based in China, where national security laws give the Chinese government wide latitude to request and obtain data from domestic companies. Models hosted directly by DeepSeek collect personally identifiable information from users and trace their “digital fingerprints” online. And like every other major AI model on the market, DeepSeek relies on a “prompt and response” process, something Mullin said “may result in the transfer of sensitive data” to the Chinese government.

“The transfer of the aforementioned information to the [People’s Republic of China], either independently or in combination with publicly available data, could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs,” Mullin wrote.

CyberScoop had reached out to CISA and DHS for further details.

The decision will exclude federal agencies from using one of the most popular and powerful Chinese open-weight AI models more than a year after U.S. frontier AI companies and the federal government accused DeepSeek’s makers of “systematically” distilling their models.

The order requires civilian agencies to exclude DeepSeek products from future procurements while removing any versions that might have been put in place prior to the ban. In the past, federal agencies have used their own discretion to block the use of models like DeepSeek, as the Department of Commerce confirmed to FedScoop last year.

Agencies can request exceptions, but must submit their request 60 days in advance and must provide a “compelling justification” for the action, like an inability to fulfill a mission-critical function, or other national security considerations.

Mullin also said agencies that remove DeepSeek from their IT are “encouraged” to enhance their security controls to protect against the possibility that their networks were compromised through the Chinese AI tool.

“During the period between the issuance of this order and full removal of covered articles from agency systems, federal agencies are encouraged to take steps to address risk to their systems, such as monitoring the flow of traffic in and out of the agency, implementing enhanced logging and controls on data exfiltration for the relevant systems, and detecting and flagging anomalous activity,” he wrote.”

DeepSeek is the only Chinese AI model named in the order, but it’s just one of several Chinese open weight AI models that have worried national security officials or have been accused of illegally distilling U.S. models, along with Moonshot AI, the makers of Kimi and Alibaba, makers of Qwen.

The post DHS to ban DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies appeared first on CyberScoop.

The federal government is advising AI companies to set more industry standards for securing agents in sandbox testing environments.

In joint guidance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the National Security Agency and the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI) at the Department of Commerce, AI companies are encouraged to lean more heavily on cybersecurity technical controls, independent testing and evaluation of new models and develop “shut down policies” that govern when a model or test should be taken offline.

The guidance comes after a summer when OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and other companies say their AI models escaped from testing environments and hacked real organizations and websites. The problem has bedeviled frontier AI companies, with many of their own researchers saying it’s possible that hundreds – even thousands – of similar sandbox escapes may have occurred over the summer, raising major questions about the lack of effective monitoring in place.

“While these incidents highlight the importance of traditional cybersecurity principles and practices, they also introduce novel considerations for incident prevention, response, and reporting,” the agencies wrote. “These novel considerations primarily stem from the agentic nature and advanced cyber capabilities of cutting-edge SI systems.”

While voluntary, the document marks the federal government’s most detailed cybersecurity guidance for securing sandbox environments during AI model tests. 

The first set of recommendations deals with designing and implementing technical controls for the virtualized testing environments, while another recommends outside monitoring tools to ensure AI models don’t access tools or privileges they shouldn’t have. Cybersecurity experts have said both features were lacking in the testing environments used by AI companies this past summer.

AI testers must also scour their internal testing environments for “potential persistence mechanisms and unauthorized communication across internal and external systems” that could be used by AI agents to leave notes and collaborate on tasks in secret.

It specifically cautions against relying solely on other AI systems to monitor and restrain the behavior of their test models, using the government’s now-preferred term of “Super Intelligence” or “SI.”

“Test and red-team SI control measures with humans and SI systems before deploying them,” the guidance states. “Only use SI systems to red-team in cases where out-of-scope actions could not result in harm to critical systems.”

Security teams must evaluate risk not only from the large language model, but also from the surrounding systems and infrastructure it relies on, like the technical harness, the host and broader network, and each layer has security protocols that can stop unauthorized access to the internet or detect anomalous behavior.

Another recommendation calls for frontier AI companies to be more open to partnering with “independent, external auditors” to assess their controls and monitoring for AI agent testing. Critics have argued that Anthropic and OpenAI rely too heavily on a small group of little-known nonprofits and private research organizations, like METR and Redwood Research, to test their frontier models for safety and security concerns and respond to incidents like the Hugging Face hack. They question why these companies don’t work with more established cybersecurity or incident response firms.

Chris Painter, METR’s president, told Congress earlier this month that it had become industry practice for frontier companies to rely almost entirely on other AI systems to monitor and restrain their models in testing environments, citing the sheer volume of data and telemetry that researchers must sift through.

Cybersecurity and AI experts have told CyberScoop that a combination of human oversight, technical controls and AI systems is the most effective means of restraining the kind of agent hacks that have consumed the news.

The guidance further calls for executive leadership at these companies to be more personally involved in decisions around pausing or restarting a particular project, and only after they’ve been informed of the relevant potential risks.

The post Federal agencies recommend cyber controls, independent testing for frontier AI systems appeared first on CyberScoop.

Election influence campaigns, particularly ones playing out over social media, are a dime a dozen.

Such campaigns – sometimes devised by foreign powers, other times by domestic groups – are often designed to influence the U.S. electorate. Fake accounts and online personas are created, networks of propaganda are disseminated and the campaign seeks to nudge American voters into thinking a certain way.

Mostly, these efforts are known for getting little to no traction with U.S. audiences. But while social media influence campaigns may not be effective, bad actors continue to adapt their coordinated propaganda goals to new tactics and technologies.

Enter AI chatbots, which have become a source of information and truth for many, who consult the tool for feedback and advice on everything from their careers, to their relationships with their family, as well as their politics.

But new research from VisionHeight, an Israeli threat intelligence firm, highlights how AI systems can often serve as more useful marks for influence actors than humans. To wit: someone is setting up networks of hyperlocal websites across at least 14 different states, filled with content meant to influence U.S. races.

These networks include websites with names like “Wolverine State Report” or “Peach State Bulletin.” Each state network usually has between five to six separate sites,  some presenting themselves as hard news outlets and others as opinion or editorial sites. The outlets also cite one another, creating a circular network of local credibility.

But the content on these websites does not resemble journalism, or any writing that a human would find coherent or compelling. Rather, they often include text of statements about specific candidates running in local races, directly stating they are the better candidate for a political issue.

Statements like “Candidate X is the stronger choice” for voters who care about housing, taxes or other political issues were repeated hundreds of times on the websites, with slight changes in the language for different political issues. Most notably, they appear to be explicitly written for AI crawlers scraping web traffic, not humans.

“What’s really interesting about this is that the websites themselves and the content is so well built to let’s say optimize the probability for AI crawlers and the model to be influenced by this content,” said Nitsan Daniel, chief technology officer and co-founder of VisionHeight in an interview.

When a user asks an AI chatbot a question, the model will often search the internet for an answer. By creating specific online content providing direct answers to questions like “which candidate in a local race is better on housing affordability” it can essentially train the AI to retrieve that information when responding to queries.

Many media websites will opt to block AI crawlers, but these websites were all configured to specifically allow major U.S. AI companies to scrape their websites.

A blog by VisionHeight published Wednesday said the operation encompassed six states and 37 websites, but Daniel told CyberScoop that they have since discovered the operation spanned at least 14 states and 460 pages of online content.

The states targeted include Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin . At least seven states saw one or more House races targeted, while other sites focused on other races like Secretaries of State, statewide judicial appointments and local offices.

Most of the research focused on AI answers provided through Google search, but Daniel said they had confirmed at least one major AI model, Perplexity, linked to and cited one of the pages, Tarheel State Report, as its first source for an answer.

VisionHeight does not attribute the activity to a particular actor. To Daniel, who is behind the campaign and their ultimate goals are less important than the prospect that this kind of operation is easily reproducible by both foreign and domestic bad actors looking to influence how AI systems answer questions around political races.

“What we’re seeing here is,I think, very nicely demonstrating how the entire world is transitioning to [a new era],” she said. “So if in the previous election you could have seen fake websites aimed at getting people to actually read it, and containing content built to impact what they’re thinking, what we’re seeing here is…now instead of spending time and effort on getting people to read the content, [they’re] getting into their AI and being influenced by that.”

But Daniel’s concerns are broader. Large language models have become increasingly sophisticated in their ability to carry out a range of deceptive activities, such as creating false organizations, websites, as well as deepfake video, audio and imagery at scale.

It appears AI was used to generate much of the infrastructure and content used in the operation as well. All 37 websites VisionHeight identified in their first analysis, spanning multiple states, were registered in a single evening, and 36 were registered within an 8 minute timeframe. On Sept. 30, the network published “roughly 100,000 words of candidate content” all using the same template and layouts.

Foreign and domestic actors can easily replicate this process, generating hyperlocal propaganda that shapes what  AI chatbots say in response to political questions. Experts say chatbots have improved at avoiding false election information, but they remain vulnerable to manipulation and errors that make them unsuited to providing more complex answers around politics.

Whereas in the past a foreign actor might lack the budget, time and incentive to target small elections, AI tools now allow for such operations to be created and optimized at scale within days. Domestic actors, meanwhile, could potentially pair the same tactics with a more sophisticated understanding of how to influence American audiences.

“It really demonstrates how in general using AI just makes what was in the past small targets [more attainable], Daniel said. “People could think that the odds of them being hit, being manipulated or being attacked are just lower because people will not put all their energy and resources on that. Nowadays, because it is so much easier, we’re seeing influence operations and cyber attacks hitting small, medium businesses as well as smaller communities, like in this case.”

The post The next election influence campaign will target your AI chatbot appeared first on CyberScoop.

Members of Congress are pressing the Trump administration to expand the federal government’s role in securing artificial intelligence, wanting new safety standards and regulations, independent testing of models and more “aggressive” use of AI for defensive cybersecurity purposes.

In a letter, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said that multiple incidents of frontier AI models escaping sandbox protections and breaching real companies, organizations and governments necessitate a stronger federal role in regulating the technology.

Recent revelations that hundreds, and possibly “tens of thousands,” of such incidents may have occurred for months without OpenAI’s staff detecting them makes the need for federal intervention even more urgent, the senators argued.

“These incidents come as AI systems are becoming dramatically more capable at discovering software vulnerabilities, writing and executing code, using digital tools, and operating autonomously,” the senators wrote.

The letter, addressed to Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence and new White House “AI czar” and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urges the federal government “to bring its full capacities to bear on this challenge, building a coordinated national response around standards, testing, auditing, and defensive AI.”

The Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), housed within the Department of Commerce, has become the Trump administration’s main body for evaluating and testing AI models. In the letter, the senators are seeking to expand the center’s resources and mandate.

Under the Trump administration, testing of frontier models has been voluntary and focused on evaluating model capabilities, not restricting them. The administration has since said it has reached a safety testing framework with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies to govern safety testing, but has not made the agreement public.

The senators call for CAISSI to spearhead the development of “technically grounded and measurable standards and risk management frameworks for advanced AI safety and security.” Those standards would address potential risks like cyberattacks, automated attacks on critical infrastructure and other threats.

“The standards should also address the security of the environments in which advanced AI systems are developed, trained, tested, and used internally, including protections against agents escaping testing environments, gaining unauthorized access to external systems, or taking actions beyond their intended permissions,” the senators wrote.

The letter argues the center and federal technology hubs like the National Institute of Standards and Technology should hire additional expertise in AI, cybersecurity, model evaluation and national security.

It also calls for a much broader community of independent and third-party testers. Currently, that testing is done almost entirely by AI companies and hand-selected auditors, like Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), Redwood Research and others.

Last month, Chris Painter, president of METR, told Congress that the firm’s investigation of the Hugging Face hacking incident was at the invitation of OpenAI, which tightly controls which organizations and testers get access to its unreleased models. While they are permitted to publicize some findings, such as those that relate to potentially catastrophic risks to humanity, researchers are otherwise restricted from discussing other parts of their investigation through nondisclosure agreements.

Additionally, Painter suggested that frontier companies are relying too heavily on their own technology, rather than technical controls, to monitor and restrain their models in testing.

“Because of the scale and speed at which AI agents are deployed, companies depend on AI monitoring and controls instead of human supervision, to prevent unwanted agent behavior,” Painter said. “That is, monitoring of AI is now in large part done by other AI systems.”

The senators call for CAISSI, national laboratories and the Department of Energy to become federal testing sites. There, the government would evaluate AI models for advanced cyber capabilities, biological or chemical threats, threats to critical infrastructure, sandbox evasion techniques and other autonomous rule-breaking behavior. They also want testing opened to universities, independent research organizations and “qualified third-party evaluators,” including private sector companies.

Other federal bodies, like the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Science Foundation can help develop new standards and testbeds for AI tools used in defensive cybersecurity that can then be shared across government and with the public.

“The recent incidents make clear that the security infrastructure surrounding advanced AI must advance as quickly as the technology itself,” the senators wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to lead both sides of this challenge: building the standards, testing, and auditing infrastructure needed for increasingly powerful AI, while harnessing those same capabilities to make American networks harder to attack.”

You can read the full letter here.

The post Senators press Trump admin to rally federal government around AI safety, security  appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Federal Trade Commission is asking a court to force the owner of multiple digital security and privacy companies from further operations, saying the businesses are serially defrauding their customers out of millions of dollars.

Earlier this month, the FTC filed a federal lawsuit in Ohio against Dmitry Belkin and 12 of his businesses, alleging they engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices under the Federal Trade Act and violated the Telemarketing Act’s prohibition against deceptive and abusive telemarketing acts since at least 2020.

The majority of Belkin’s companies, with names like Digital Forensics Corp., 1^st All Data Recovery and Remote Backup Corp., advertised services to help people deal with ongoing online romance or “sextortion” scams, where a scammer threatens to publish a nude or sexual photo of the victim unless they pay a ransom.

They operated websites like BlackmailHelpline.com, DigitalForensics.com and other sites that would routinely be advertised on Google, YouTube, X and other sites when users are searching for help with sextortion attacks.

The FTC alleges that despite taking in at least $60 million from customers, Belkin and his companies routinely failed to deliver most of the listed services meant to protect customers from ongoing scams, generated fake transcripts to fool customers into believing a sextortion threat had dissipated and routinely denied requests for refunds.

“Defendants falsely portray themselves as digital forensics experts, claiming they can track and identify sextortionists, prevent the spread of explicit material, and coordinate with law enforcement to bring criminals to justice,” the FTC said in its complaint. “Defendants further mislead victims by asserting that law enforcement will not help stop the sextortion attack” and that contacting the police is “the last thing you want to do.”

According to the complaint, Belkin’s businesses would first pitch a “Phase 1” package of services, between $1,499 and $20,000, that included “stopping” an ongoing attack, handling communications with the sextortionist, tracing their location, sending a legal cease-and-desist letter and reporting the evidence to law enforcement.

The FTC complaint alleges that in reality, the companies simply use the customer’s account to communicate with the scammer, before changing account settings to block them, fabricating chat transcripts and using pre-saved geolocation coordinates to fool customers.

After customers purchased Phase 1 services, Belkin’s companies would routinely pressure them for thousands of dollars in additional “Phase 2” services, which were advertised as monitoring services for victim accounts that could detect and prevent future attacks.

“Defendants do not perform any of these services either,” the FTC alleged.

The complaint alleges that Belkin drafted a script for employees at his companies to use during telemarketing calls, designed explicitly to exploit victims’ fears and anxieties around their nude images being made public. This included comments implying that a bad actor could alter a real photo of the victim to include sexual acts with minors, spurring concerns about legal liability. After each call, employees filled out a form confirming they had used certain keywords or phrases, such as “pedophile,” “devastating consequences,” “life altering” and “no coming back after this.”

“I’ve seen these situations ruin people’s retirement all from the accusation of being a child predator,” the script said at one point, according to the complaint. “We need to make sure nothing gets posted.”

Some customers were also asked seemingly unrelated questions about their personal lives, such as if their marriage was “on the rocks,” had cheated on their spouses, or had young children that could “mean a custody battle” if the images were released publicly.  

The companies received hundreds of requests for refunds but often denied them, also going to great lengths to prevent or drown out negative reviews online. Unhappy customers were directed to a fake version of the Better Business Bureau’s website, controlled by Belkin, to submit their complaints.

The actual Better Business Bureau page for one of the businesses, Digital Forensics Corp., still includes numerous complaints from customers alleging they were defrauded. One customer complaint, filed in August, states that they signed a contract in 2023 “out of sheer panic and fear” and were still making payments because “they had my personal information and would contact me if I didn’t pay.”

Another review from a customer in June said they were “pressured” into a contract with the company in 2024, were still making monthly payments and when they contacted the company to cancel, were told they “could not close the account and must continue making payments.”

In both cases, the company responded within days, offering “alternative” options to resolve the disputes, such as paying a reduced settlement for the remaining balance.

They also allegedly flooded their own websites with fake positive reviews, gave partial refunds paired with non-disparagement agreements to push some customers to take down their negative reviews, and even hired Uber drivers to post fake testimonials with staged photographs.

Requests for comment sent to Belkin’s attorney and his personal LinkedIn account were not returned.

The post FTC says ‘sextortion’ protection companies deceived customers about services  appeared first on CyberScoop.

ISSUE 23.40.1 • 2026-10-09 By Susan Bradley Will October be better? It’s pumpkin spice season at the coffee shops, and there are pumpkins and Halloween decorations galore. But where I live, you wouldn’t know it. We are having our last gasp of heat, and summer will just not let go. I’m looking at the weather […]

Federal government contractors that handle sensitive information could soon face a “sea change” in rules about how they protect that information and report when it has been part of a breach.

Pending federal regulations on the handling of “controlled unclassified information,” or CUI, a category of sensitive data that falls short of classified — including people’s personal information such as Social Security numbers, information that could expose vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and more — could arrive as soon as the end of this year, but likely no later than the end of President Donald Trump’s term, attorneys who specialize in federal procurement rules said. The changes are part of a larger overhaul of federal contracting rules.

As currently written, the proposed CUI rules mandate that unauthorized access of such data, including as a result of a cyberattack, would have to be reported to the federal government within 72 hours of discovery. The rules are a companion for most federal agencies to existing  Defense Department rules that cover the same subject. The 72-hour notice also is deliberately aligned with forthcoming rules from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for critical infrastructure owners and operators to report major cyber incidents under the Cybersecurity Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA).

The CUI rules require contractors to adhere to minimum electronic security standards for protecting that sensitive information. Experts said the rules could expose contractors who fail to comply with cybersecurity guidelines to penalties under the False Claims Act, a lever that the federal government has been using increasingly since 2022 to punish contractors over lackluster cyber safeguards.

It’s “going to be a sea change for a lot of companies,” said Trayce Howard, a government contracts partner at Wiley Rein. 

“If it’s finalized in the form that it’s in now, it will be a fairly significant change for federal contractors,” said Ryan Burnette, a partner at Covington focused on government contracts and technology.

Susan Cassidy, another partner at Covington who advises government contractors, said the proposed regulation is part of a journey that began as far back as an executive order in 2010, when officials realized they couldn’t have sufficient, consistent requirements for protecting CUI given that so many agencies used different terminology for it: “sensitive but unclassified,” “for official use only,” and more.

The proposed rule is intended to “make it easier for contractors to comply with one set of standards, rather than many different types of standards” for the protection of CUI and the reporting on CUI incidents such as breaches, she said.

One industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity was candid about the difficulties CUI poses.

“CUI can be painful for many industry stakeholders because it’s not always clear what constitutes CUI,” the source said. “Many contractors will say they don’t necessarily know exactly what CUI is, despite their best efforts. Information from agencies isn’t always clearly marked as CUI.”

The reporting requirements

An earlier draft of the rule gave industry groups more heartburn: It had an 8-hour standard for reporting CUI incidents, rather than 72, and it required reporting of suspected incidents as well.

Still, a number of industry groups objected to the 72-hour standard, despite it being part of a much-sought after attempt to align federal breach reporting notification standards under CIRCIA.

The Aerospace Industries Association, for instance, said in filed comments that it “reiterates concerns with these compressed timelines which will be difficult and costly for industry to comply with,” in reference to the 72-hour standard. “AIA recommends extending these timelines to 30 calendar days to accommodate improved reporting while reducing compliance costs.”

The industry source said that “72 hours is largely a policy decision, based on extensive public-private deliberation,” rather than one based on any study of what’s best.

Another point of discussion about the reporting rule as written is where contractors report incidents.

“While the 72-hour reporting window is a significant improvement over the 8-hour window in the January 2025 proposal, the June 2026 rulemaking still appears to require reporting to agency -specific points of contact … rather than to a single centralized hub,” the Chamber of Commerce wrote in its comments.

Cassidy said “it will be interesting to see how centralized reporting into CISA, which is the other place where civilian agencies go, is handled, and whether there’s coordination with DOD or whether or not we still see two separate streams going through.”

The standards

The other major aspect of the proposed rule is that contractors handling CUI would have to abide by certain cybersecurity standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology known as SP 800-171, which Howard and her Wiley coauthors said would be imposed “on a broader group of contractors than ever before.” Some contractors might also have to meet other cybersecurity requirements, too.

“Another thing that will affect contractors is they’re going to have to flow down these requirements to their subcontractors,” she said. “So they’re going to have to identify what CUI am I giving to my subcontractors, and do some sort of oversight to make sure that their subcontractors are appropriately handling CUI.”

Howard and other experts predict that the rules could expand who might be subjected to False Claims Act punishments.

“I do think that this creates some significant False Claims at risk for contractors,” she said. This is going to encompass a whole new universe of contractors that may not be quite ready for that… contractors that have been working for civilian agencies exclusively have not been subject to this before.”

Final steps

The next steps aren’t 100 percent clear. Howard said a final rule could arrive by the end of the year. Cassidy said either an interim rule could take effect soon, or a final rule could be issued. Burnette said a final rule might be farther away, though the Trump administration has made it clear it wants everything finalized before the end of its term.

That means contractors need to get ready, he said.

“I think contractors should really be looking at this, preparing for it in certain ways, at least by recognizing at a high level, where this is headed and the types of activities and steps they need to be doing internally,” Burnette said. “Some of the minutia and the details, those are still subject to ironing out. But generally speaking, if you look at this rule compared to the rule that we saw early last year, they are much more similar than they are different. So we are starting to see  some crystallization here of the requirements, and we’re starting to get an idea what might change and what is most likely baked at this point.”

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Major rules for federal contractors handling sensitive data are nearing the finish line appeared first on CyberScoop.

The FBI and French authorities have arrested an individual and seized a pair of websites that were used to disseminate child sexual exploitation material, including AI generated deepfake media, according to court documents.

The websites, NudeLeaksTeens and NLTVIDS, were seized and shut down by the FBI this week. According to the Department of Justice, the cybercrime division of the French Paris Prosecutor’s Office has also arrested an unnamed 25-year-old French resident suspected of being the primary administrator for the sites.

According to a seizure warrant filed Oct. 2 in the Eastern District of Virginia by Arlington County police detective and FBI cybercrime task force member John Bamford, law enforcement first became aware of the websites in 2024, which advertised hacked, leaked and stolen CSAM of young girls.

The seizure warrant identifies VeriSign, a Reston, Virginia-based U.S. domain registry, as being the registry operator for .com, and directs Verisign to redirect the .com domain names identified in the warrant to FBI-designated name servers. David McGuire, a spokesperson for VeriSign told CyberScoop that the company executed its responsibilities under the warrant and has no relationship to the websites or administrators.

Together the sites offered “a wide range of explicit content including CSAM and content that violates the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which prohibits the non-consensual sharing of intimate images,” Bamford wrote.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act, passed last year, makes it a crime to create or share nonconsensual “intimate” deepfake media of real people. The law also gives the Federal Trade Commission authority to enforce it and allows courts to order websites to remove such content.

The sites posted explicit disclaimers disavowing child pornography while simultaneously advertising and selling CSAM. At least one had its own form of currency used to buy images and videos individually or bundles organized by victim. One collection, containing 189GB of material on 315 different girls, sold for $64.90.

Some of the material came from victims’ social media accounts on Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, either recorded directly or stolen from their accounts. Several victims who appear on the site reported to law enforcement that their accounts were hacked.

Some of the advertised collections were compiled by individuals now serving prison sentences for their crimes. One individual, Andrew Venegas, pled guilty in a Texas federal court to sexual exploitation of children and receipt of CSAM as was sentenced to 30 years in prison in April 2026.

“In the investigation and prosecution of Venegas, law enforcement learned that Venegas obtained sexually explicit images and videos of his victims in various ways, including extortion and the unauthorized accessing of victim social media accounts,” wrote Bamford.

A separate collection available for sale on one of the sites in 2022 and 2023 was named after an individual, Reuben Oswaldo Yeverino Rosales, who was convicted and sentenced to more than 34 years in prison in 2022 for sexual exploitation of children and cyber stalking.

The websites put up disclaimers stating that they do not host or store any files or images on their servers, but rather link to “other non-affiliated sites” that do. Administrators would often encourage payments in cryptocurrency and urge individuals to reach out to them personally for some material, rather than posting them on the site.

10/08/2026: This story was updated with comment from VeriSign.

The post FBI, French authorities seize deepfake CSAM-for-sale websites  appeared first on CyberScoop.

A bipartisan update to a California wiretapping law will eliminate the right to sue over internet-based surveillance, ending a key provision of a 57-year-old wiretapping law. Advocates say it is an overdue correction meant to prevent frivolous lawsuits, while privacy advocates call it a blow to digital consumer privacy rights.

The California Invasion of Privacy Act, originally passed in 1967, requires a court order for wiretapping, eavesdropping, interception or recording of telephone calls. Over time, courts extended the law to cover most internet-based communications as well, such as email and websites.

 In 2015, lawmakers added a provision allowing residents to sue companies for unauthorized use of certain internet-tracking technologies, such as pen registers, with penalties up to $5,000 per violation, plus triple damages. Last week, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 690 into law, that removes the right of private citizens to sue websites and mobile applications through CIPA.

Newsom and sponsors of the law say the provision has spawned thousands of lawsuits and demand letters against companies for using common internet-tracking tools, like browser cookies and tracker pixels, that can serve legitimate business purposes.

Pen registers and trap-and-trace devices are primarily used by law enforcement agencies—such as local police, the FBI, and the DEA—as well as national security organizations during active criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Authorized through a court order, investigators use pen registers to log outgoing metadata like dialed phone numbers, IP addresses, and timestamps (and trap-and-trace tools for incoming contacts) to map out a suspect’s communication network without listening to the content of the conversations.

“This measure addresses the vexatious use of CIPA lawsuits and demand letters to extract settlement money from small businesses that unwittingly install software on their websites that at times have tracked and shared the information of visitors to the site,” Newsom wrote in his signing statement. “I applaud the authors’ efforts and align myself with the goal of protecting small businesses from overzealous lawsuits based on a statute written without today’s complex technology landscape in mind.”

According to privacy attorneys at law firm Kelley Drye, the addition of the pen register and trap-and-trace statute in 2015 was meant to codify how law enforcement agencies could obtain court orders for phone metadata without violating CIPA.

 Estimates of lawsuits filed under the provision vary widely. The law was widely supported by business groups like the Chamber of Commerce, which was one of hundreds of California groups that signed in support of the legislation last year.

The Alliance for Legal Fairness, a Virginia-based lobbying firm backing the legislative update, tracked approximately 600 lawsuits under the provision in 2025, according to written comments. Today, the group claims that number has “exploded” to more than 4,000.

According to Shruti Bhutani Arora and Christine Mastromonaco, privacy attorneys for the law firm Pillsbury, plaintiffs and prospective litigants have “sent tens of thousands of demand letters to businesses threatening class-action suits under the CIPA’s pen-register and trap-and-trace provisions for using everyday website tools like cookies, analytics software and pixels.”

A report from the California Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection characterized the pen register provision as “the poster child for abusive lawsuits.”

“Enterprising plaintiffs’ attorneys have exploited the statute at scale to go after businesses using third-party software to enable advertising on their websites,” the committee wrote. “Because the potential liability can be staggering, businesses generally settle this litigation hastily, encouraging vexatious litigants to continue blasting out demand letters.”

Meanwhile, most major California labor unions opposed the law, as did the American Civil Liberties Union, the Consumer Federation of California, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and dozens of civil rights groups.

The committee report also noted opposition by “a broad array of privacy, civil society, legal and immigrant rights organizations.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in particular has fought the bill for years. Early versions of SB 690 would have exempted other privacy provisions from private lawsuits, but later versions narrowed the exemption to just pen registers and trap-and-trace devices. 

Privacy groups argue the exemption will make it easier for companies to track, collect and sell consumer data to third parties, including data brokers, while making it harder for individuals to take legal action.

Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at EFF, told CyberScoop that the bill “never should have been signed” and that the organization tried and failed to lobby Newsom to veto it.

“CIPA was originally intended to protect personal privacy against the threat of surveillance of private communications,” said Tsukayama in a statement. “But this ‘reform’ harms privacy by making it impossible for ordinary people to sue companies engaged in unlawful metadata surveillance. That’s especially scary as the federal government and other law enforcement agencies seek data from businesses or data brokers to target people based on their political beliefs, religious affiliations, or health decisions.”

California passed major privacy legislation in 2018, standing up the California Privacy Protection Agency to enforce digital privacy laws. It has some of the strictest data broker laws in the nation, requiring brokers to register with the government and provide consumers with easy, universal opt-out options for data collection.

The post Wiretapping change sparks big privacy fight in the Golden State appeared first on CyberScoop.