The Federal Communications Commission approved new rules Thursday that boost cybersecurity regulations for the nation’s emergency alert systems and update security rules for the nation’s undersea cables.

The new rule would overhaul two national emergency systems, the Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts, to better protect against hijacking attacks from malicious actors.

The EAS is a national public warning system that state and local authorities use to disseminate information related to weather events, AMBER alerts and other emergencies via radio and television broadcasting stations. The WEA handles much of the same messaging via text.

A compromise of either system by a foreign government, cybercriminal group or other rogue actor could be used to sow chaos and disinformation in calmer times, or impede coordination efforts in the face of a genuine emergency. Any vulnerability in systems like the Emergency Alert System “can have serious consequences,” said FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty in a statement after the vote.

“That is why it has been appropriate for the Commission to conduct a comprehensive review of the EAS framework by focusing on the security of the system itself,” Trusty continued. “As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, EAS participants must take appropriate steps to safeguard the infrastructure that supports the delivery of life-saving alerts.”

The new rules amount to basic – but still critical – cyber hygiene practices for users accessing and updating the EAS and WEA systems. They must use strong passwords, quickly install security patches from vendors and use firewalls to limit access to their equipment.

The rule also creates a new authentication ID system to verify alerts before they’re submitted and avoid duplicate or unauthorized alerts from spreading.

Another rule passed by the Commission Thursday provided the first comprehensive update to the FCC’s submarine cable regulations in decades, and moves to tighten cybersecurity requirements in some areas while loosening them in others.

It exempts some undersea cable providers from submitting to stringent national security licensing reviews needed to land and operate cables that touch U.S. territory.

The review, called “Team Telecom,” is an interagency body led by the Department of Justice’s Foreign Investment Review Section and other federal agencies that advise the FCC on the national security implications of their telecom policies.

The new rules would presumptively exempt applications for undersea cable licensees when the provider can self-certify to “high security standards” that are “structured to increase certainty, predictability, and faster timelines for the licensing process.”

“Currently, all submarine cable applications get referred to Team Telecom…the changes adopted would exempt applications from applicants that have operated cables without incident, can certify to the highest national security standards, and agree to ongoing oversight and monitoring,” the FCC said in a release.

Other parts of the rule give the FCC greater oversight of critical functions within undersea cable operations. Owners and operators of submarine line terminal equipment, who connect submarine cables to land-based facilities in the U.S., will be subject to a new licensing requirement.

The rule also moves to update safeguards meant to address vulnerabilities related to principal equipment, third-party service providers, and other areas of concern in the undersea cable supply chain.

The post FCC passes new cybersecurity rules for emergency systems, undersea cables appeared first on CyberScoop.

A federal judge in Massachusetts struck down major sections of a Trump administration executive order  that would have restricted mail-in ballots through the U.S. Postal Service and required states to adopt federally approved voter lists.

The ruling Thursday from Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts found those parts of the order were unconstitutional, while declaring another section that directs federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute noncompliant state and local officials legally nonbinding.

Talwani wrote that the U.S. Constitution empowers States and Congress in different roles but “does not grant the President any specific power over elections.”

While the White House has cited the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and Civil Rights-era voting laws as justification, Talwani found those laws do not authorize the government to regulate state voter registration practices.

“Notably, nowhere in HAVA does Congress prescribe who should be included on State voter lists,” Talwani wrote. “Further, neither in HAVA nor any other federal statute does Congress authorize the federal government to create their own voting database. Instead, Congress, consistent with the Constitution, has left that authority to the States alone.”

Talwani also declined to remove President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as named defendants in the suit, rejecting the administration’s argument that the court could not regulate or intrude upon the president’s’ constitutional authority “in the performance of his official duties.”

“Contrary to Defendants assertion, Presidential action is not inherently unreviewable,” Talwani wrote.

The order, issued in March, instructs the Homeland Security secretary, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to compile lists of American voters for each state, including their supposed citizenship status.

To build the lists, the agencies would rely on the controversial Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database that DHS has been building under the Trump administration, as well as Social Security and federal citizenship and naturalization records.

Those lists would then be sent to states, most of which have already refused similar Trump administration efforts to control voter registration.. The order instructs the Department of Justice to investigate  and prosecute  state and local election officials who issue  ballots to ineligible voters. 

The order also requires mail-in ballots to be sent in special barcoded envelopes for tracking. Crucially, it demands states provide lists of voters eligible for mail-in voting, and threatens to deny ballots to states that refuse. It also claims the attorney general is entitled to withhold federal funding from noncompliant states.

Talwani found that states have shown they already have a rigorous voter registration and verification process to ensure non-citizens and other ineligible voters aren’t able to vote in U.S. elections, and have laws in place to investigate and prosecute those who do.

Executive branch lawyers argued the order was merely an internal federal directive that does not impedestate authorities. But Talwani noted that states like Connecticut were already pulling staff from critical activities, such as translating election materials required under the Voting Rights Act, to develop compliance plans for the order.

Nearly half of the states in the lawsuit have already purchased mail-in ballots for this election cycle that are out of compliance with the Postal Service’s envelope and design standards.

Despite a string of losses in the courts and Congress, the White House has continued to assert broad authority over the way states and localities administer elections.

The Department of Justice has sued dozens of states to force them to hand over sensitive voter data. In the 10 cases decided so far, states have won every one.

In their opinions, judges cited the executive branch’s lack of inherent authority to create state voter lists. Others accused the DOJ of misusing Civil Rights-era laws designed to protect Black and minority voters,  creating an “unreliable” database that would disenfranchise  legitimate voters.

The Massachusetts ruling comes to the same conclusion, with Talwani writing “it is clear that the federal agencies charged with compiling Confirmed Citizen Lists lack the ability to create complete and accurate lists of the U.S. citizens residing in every State.”

On Wednesday, Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill in an attempt to pressure  congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, which would implement many of the same changes to U.S. elections. In a Truth Social post, Trump said he considered passage of the bill to be a “National Emergency.”

The post Federal court rules Trump election-focused executive order illegal appeared first on CyberScoop.

Once a new CISA director is in place, the agency will ramp up hiring efforts, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told lawmakers. The White House has not yet announced a nominee.

Ukraine's state-owned postal operator said it was experiencing disruptions to some of its app services due to a suspected cyberattack, but did not say who was behind it.

The continued use of the powerful data extraction product soon after the company in March 2021 said it would stop working with Russia suggests the firm has been unable to pull back its technology from authoritarian government customers, researchers say.

An epidemic of cyberattacks on open-source software has mounted in recent months, making clear how uniquely difficult it is to protect the publicly available code, from both a policy and a technical perspective, that serves as the foundation for so much of the digital world.

While open-source software security got a boost in attention under President Joe Biden — whose administration grappled with the fallout from the potentially catastrophic Log4j flaw that emerged in 2021 — a number of open-source experts say that government protection efforts have suffered setbacks under President Donald Trump. Many also say companies that heavily rely on open-source software, which is basically all of them, haven’t shouldered enough of the responsibility for safeguarding it.

“What we’re seeing is years of lack of investment sustainment in open-source software that is finally starting to catch up to us, where it seems like every week there’s a new supply chain compromise,” said Jack Cable, who held a role at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency where he worked on open-source security before departing under Trump.

The advancements of frontier artificial intelligence models stand to exacerbate the risk further, while simultaneously illustrating what makes defending open source difficult: Project Glasswing said shortly after its announcement that it had uncovered 6,202 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in a scan of more than 1,000 open-source projects, but that it had disclosed only 502 of them to open-source project maintainers and only 75 had been patched as of May 22 (albeit some due to typical patching lagtimes).

At the same time, there are questions about how much the government can help, even as overseas governments seek to focus on open-source security.

The evolution of open-source risk 

There are a series of factors contributing to the current threat to open-source software, experts say.

One is simply that attackers go to the area where they can get the highest return on their work. Compromising open-source software gives them the chance to get into the supply chain and exploit additional targets.

“Twenty years ago, open source was still fairly niche,” said Æva Black, who also worked on open-source security at CISA but left when Trump came back into power. “The potential blast radius if you managed to compromise open source was relatively small, because back then the world didn’t run on open source. Now almost everything runs on open source,” she said, from modern cars to satellites.

Another part is the nature of open-source software itself.

“It’s a symptom [of having] lots of open source [that] is a little bit under-maintained or not cared for enough, so that we spend too little effort and money and infrastructure on them,” said Daniel Stenberg, who is the creator and maintainer of cURL, a popular open-source project. “Lots of open source is being maintained by small teams, lots of volunteers, and I think that that’s a tough situation.”

That doesn’t mean the maintainers are to blame, Stenberg said. The companies that rely on open-source need to be diligent about using it, Black said.

“What we’re seeing in that realm right now is not new; it is more advanced and far more widespread,” she said. “The problem remains that companies who use open source — because open source is by far the most efficient way to collaborate on non-product value features — most companies are not implementing a responsible and safe utilization pathway.”

Open-source projects lack a systematic way to handle coordinated vulnerability disclosures, unlike companies or industry groups with formal processes, said Dan Lorenc, CEO and co-founder of Chainguard. Project maintainers sometimes aren’t reachable, and those who are available are flooded with reports, many of them unverified findings from AI tools that waste their time without adding value..

Of course, some of those vulnerability reports turn out to be legitimate. “Mythos and AI models have contributed to an uptick in the number of vulnerabilities and things that we’re able to find” in open-source software, said Alex Zenla, chief technology officer for the cybersecurity company Edera.

All of that leaves more room for companies, non-profits and world governments to improve open-source security.

A moment of momentum

While open-source software security isn’t a new issue, the 2021 discovery of the Log4j flaw sounded alarms within the cybersecurity community. Jen Easterly, then the director of CISA, called it “one of the most serious I’ve seen in my entire career, if not the most serious,” with the potential to affect hundreds of millions of devices given the ubiquitous nature of the popular open-source logging library.

A year later, the Cyber Safety Review Board released its report on the incident, concluding that swift action from industry and government averted a disaster. But the incident “called attention to security risks unique to the thinly-resourced, volunteer-based open source community,” it wrote. “This community is not adequately resourced to ensure that code is developed pursuant to industry-recognized secure coding practices and audited by experts.”

The U.S. government actions after included some steps focused specifically on open-source software such as creation of the Open-Source Software Security Initiative and hires of well-regarded open-source security experts at CISA such as Black, but also some steps that could be applied more generally and still help with open-source security, such as greater promotion of secure-by-design, memory-safe languages and software bills of materials (SBOMs).

Some of the Biden administration work on open-source security started before Log4j, such as provisions from an executive order he issued in 2021 that directed CISA along with the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration to issue guidance to agencies. 

The administration’s 2023 cybersecurity strategy also stepped into the long, thorny discussions over software liability, with a mention of open-source security: “Responsibility must be placed on the stakeholders most capable of taking action to prevent bad outcomes, not on the end-users that often bear the consequences of insecure software nor on the open-source developer of a component that is integrated into a commercial product.“ The Biden administration always indicated that addressing software liability would take a prolonged battle ahead.

Under Trump, many of the Biden administration’s efforts have languished. CISA’s splashy hires on open-source are gone, including Black, Tim Pepper and Anjana Rajan. Also departed are leading figures on secure-by-design and SBOMs, with CISA personnel cutbacks slicing deep. 

No one has seen any sign that the national cyber director-led Open-Source Software Security Initiative is active, with few participants remaining in government today. The Trump administration cyber strategy doesn’t mention open-source.

“The loss of open-source experts at CISA “is unfortunate, and it will be hard for the government to try to rebuild capacity, but I do think now more than ever CISA has a core role to play to secure open source software,” Cable said.

The pressure is mounting

It’s not that the issue is getting zero attention from those in a position to make a difference. Nick Andersen, the acting director of CISA, said last month that open-source security was an area of particular concern for him.

Andersen responded to concerns about CISA staffing levels on open-source security and spoke more broadly on the topic in a statement to CyberScoop.

“As artificial intelligence and other technologies have the power to transform how vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited, CISA recognizes that the open source software (OSS) that underpins much of the nation’s critical infrastructure will need to be hardened,” he said. “CISA actively collaborates with our partners on shared priorities, including OSS security, to ensure time and resources are spent where they matter the most.  We have an immensely talented team, but are also accelerating our hiring in critical areas, to strengthen the nation’s defenses against cyber threats.”

The Office of the National Cyber Director did not respond to requests for comment.

There’s been some activity on Capitol Hill, too. The Securing Open Source Software Act, which Cable worked on during a stint as a Senate staffer, would direct CISA and other agencies to take actions to mitigate open-source software security risks, but the legislation has stalled since its introduction in 2022. A portion of the bill, however, was included in the Department of Homeland Security funding law Trump signed in April, directing CISA to brief Congress on the value of establishing something like an open source program office, which some companies use to manage open source within a given firm.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has pushed the executive branch to improve its awareness of foreign adversaries playing roles in open-source software used by national security-focused agencies.

The annual defense policy bill in the House calls on the Defense Department’s chief information officer to report to Congress on a plan to secure open-source software supply chains, saying lawmakers are “concerned that the Department lacks sufficient visibility into the origins, maintenance, and security of OSS applications and software dependencies.”

That defense authorization bill language is “really beneficial, and I think it signals acknowledgement of this changing of culture” around open-source security risks, said Hayden Smith, founder of HuntedLabs, whose company won a contract with the Space Development Agency on supply chain security — agency work that the defense bill singled out.

“The report language is the first time the Hill is trying to get a true handle on foreign influence in open source code where they have oversight,” he said, saying it was a “piece of the puzzle” along with Cotton’s letter and a memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last year about foreign influence in the Pentagon supply chain. “It’s good and would trickle down into everyone who provides software to the department.”

Zenla, though, believes trying to isolate China from open-source systems isn’t in and of itself a good idea. 

“I don’t think that that makes a lot of sense, because they’re actually pretty good things that people contribute to open source,” she said. “Not everyone is malicious, and what are we going to do, spy on every single open source maintainer?” It’s more about doing things like making sure that highly-classified systems are set up in a separate way, she said.

Europe is also taking action to secure open-source software that the United States doesn’t seem ready or willing to do right now. Germany, for instance, devotes grants to the security of open-source projects, although Stenberg pointed out that sometimes money doesn’t equate to maintainers being able to fix flaws more quickly, depending on the project’s size.

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) adopted by the Council of the European Union in 2024 could offer another road on open-source security. The CRA requires those who use open-source software products as part of any commercial activity to take certain security measures. 

Black said that when she was at CISA, there were discussions between the agency and European counterparts about finding compatible ideas on open-source security, but that momentum died with the Trump administration.

But “Europe kept rolling, and now has in place a new legal framework that is set to really reshape open-source security for potentially the whole world, but certainly for anyone who wants to work with Europe on open source,” she said.

Lorenc recently wrote that “open source isn’t governable.” He said an organization like a neutral nonprofit, possibly using some government funding, should take responsibility for things like coordinating vulnerability disclosure into one pipeline. He also said there needs to be one authority in charge of “forking” — that is, taking a project and assigning stewardship elsewhere — when a maintainer isn’t responsive to vulnerabilities. 

There are differing opinions on how much past government warnings, advisories and guidance have helped. Smith gave some credit to government agencies that “have all responded to open source attacks using the means they have.”

Stenberg said that “I don’t think they make any big dent at all in the big scheme of things.” They might get some attention initially, “then two years later we all forgot about them, and they actually didn’t change much.”

Ideally, everyone could get on the same page, Zenla said. “The best way to do this is if people actually collaborated on a global scale on some sort of regulation around this, but that seems nearly impossible at the current moment,” she said. (The United Nations’ Open Source Week runs all this week.)

But if there’s an upside to the spate of attacks on open-source software, it’s the energy it gives to how better to secure it, Lorenc said, invoking the political saying to never let a good crisis go to waste.

“Everyone knows the industry has to change,” he said. “This is a really good crisis, and the right things are happening in the right places, and organizations are rethinking their culture around software development, and they know what they have to do. It’s just something that’s never been top of the priority list for the last 10 years. Now it is, and they’re doing it, and it’s, ‘Can we do it fast enough?’”

The post Open-source security is posing challenges governments can’t easily solve appeared first on CyberScoop.

Hundreds of C&C servers were disrupted in an operation involving law enforcement and several cybersecurity companies.

The post Microsoft and Allies Smash Shared Infrastructure of Amadey and StealC Malware appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it has seized infrastructure tied to what officials called one of the world’s most prolific criminal marketplaces, used to commit cyber scams and other crimes.

The seized cloud computing account hosted backend infrastructure used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate.

At the same time, the Treasury Department announced fresh sanctions and more against Huione and affiliated companies. The administration actions Tuesday add to disruption efforts from last fall against pieces of the same network.

The Trump administration has placed an emphasis on combating transnational cybercrime and other kinds of scams and fraud.

The seized cloud computing account was used to operate Huione Guarantee, also known as Haowang Guarantee, according to Tuesday’s DOJ announcement.

“The Huione Group used this cloud computing account as part of a technological backbone that allowed billions in fraud proceeds to be transferred, moved, and concealed — much of it stolen through Southeast Asian scam centers,” said Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Seizures of these marketplaces is critical in the fight against fraud that affects so many Americans, and to stop avenues for criminal proceeds to be laundered.”

U.S. officials allege that Huione Guarantee operated Telegram channels with discussions about illicit goods and services, including the sale of stolen credit card and sensitive personal information, malware-enabled thefts, human trafficking schemes and the laundering of money from romance and investment scams. Huione Guarantee also allegedly offered escrow services for criminals such as money launderers for cryptocurrency.

Treasury took two steps Tuesday to build on its move in October to sever Huione Group from the U.S. financial system. One was to tack H-Pay Service onto its rule for Huione Group as a successor entity. And it slapped nine people and 26 entities linked to Prince Group with sanctions.

“Huione Group served as a critical node for laundering proceeds of cyber heists and virtual currency investment scams and was used by the Prince Group to transfer and consolidate scam-derived assets,” Treasury’s announcement states.

Also last October, the Justice Department said it seized bitcoin valued at $15 billion from the chairman of the Prince Group, Chen Zhi, and indicted him over alleged cryptocurrency crimes and other schemes. 

An alleged key figure in Chen’s criminal network has been arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China.

The post Justice Department seizes infrastructure used by cyber scam and criminal marketplace appeared first on CyberScoop.

Come vulnerabilities were found within hours, but that does not mean the model was able to exploit them within that time, the official said.

The post Anthropic’s Mythos Model Found Vulnerabilities in Classified US Government Systems, Official Says appeared first on SecurityWeek.

26-year-old Abdellah Belmili faces up to 30 years in prison for allegedly operating the marketplaces Market0Day and Spoxy.

The post Algerian Man Extradited to US for Running Cybercrime Marketplaces appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Department of Justice announced the “seizure of a cloud computing account” used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a conglomerate severed from the U.S. financial system last year.

An executive order signed Monday aims to accelerate the government's transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), a new generation of encryption designed to protect data from the powerful quantum computers expected in the future.

The so-called duty of care provision that was excluded would have mandated that online platforms take reasonable measures to prevent specific harms such as suicidal ideation, eating disorders and cyberbullying by changing algorithm and design features.

[HIGH] | No patch available | Active credential abuse confirmed | Act on mitigations now

A federal court ruled Monday that the Trump administration’s national voter database violates federal privacy laws, interferes with Americans’ right to vote, and must be dismantled.

In the ruling, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the District Court of Washington D.C. wrote that records reviewed by the court show federal agencies knew that the SAVE voter database violated federal laws like the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, but were “scrambling” to comply with President Trump’s executive order to create a system for mass voter verification.

That pressure resulted in agencies “haphazardly” combining and repurposing the personal information of millions of Americans from different government databases, including citizenship data they knew was unreliable.

“The Court therefore sets aside and vacates the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices because they were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law,” Sooknanan wrote.

The League of Women Voters, its local affiliate groups and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed the lawsuit last year. They argued the administration violated privacy laws that restrict the government’s ability to collect or combine private data without congressional authorization.

Sooknanan wrote that the SAVE database violates a prohibition in the Social Security Act against the disclosure of Social Security numbers and other related SSA records as well as substantive and procedural protections in the Privacy Act, which prevent the non-consensual disclosure of certain information both by federal agencies and between federal agencies and require notice and comment.

The court also ruled that SAVE violates the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs how the federal government develops regulations and makes official decisions to ensure they’re fair and impartial.

Sooknanan had earlier declined to rule the database illegal under the Administrative Procedures Act, saying the plaintiffs had failed to prove the data would cause  irreparable harm. In her final ruling, she changed course, writing that the states have since run their voter rolls through the federal government’s modified SAVE system, and some voters have been wrongfully identified as non-citizens and had their voter registrations canceled.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The ruling reinforces longstanding objections from former government officials and privacy experts over the past year, who have said Congress has repeatedly passed privacy laws explicitly to prevent the executive branch from using Americans’ data in ways not proscribed through law. That is what DHS did last year when it took SAVE, a database meant to process government benefits for legal immigrants, and combined it with data from the Social Security Administration and other agencies to create a new massive database of American voters and their citizenship status.

John Davisson, deputy director of enforcement at EPIC, celebrated the decision in a statement, saying the ruling “underscores that government agencies must follow the law, defend privacy and remain accountable to the public they serve.”

 “Today’s decision is a victory for us all. By halting the illegal consolidation of sensitive personal data across federal agencies, the court has safeguarded not only our privacy rights but also the bedrock of our democracy: the right to vote,” said Davisson. 

The post Court rules SAVE database illegal, orders it dismantled appeared first on CyberScoop.

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Monday to accelerate the federal government’s transition to post-quantum encryption and reprioritize government financing to support the domestic quantum computing industry. 

The orders, which CyberScoop first reported on last year, direct the government to throw its weight behind the quantum computing industry. They are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to put its stamp on the development of another key emerging technology.

In May, the Department of Commerce announced letters of intent for more than $2 billion in federal financing incentives for nine quantum companies under the CHIPS and Science Act. Last year, the administration did something similar with its AI-focused executive orders and action plan that created special federal export programs for AI technology and equipment, directed federal agencies to mobilize federal financing tools to support the industry, and cut or curtail regulations that the administration said may impede domestic growth. 

Ahead of the signing, sources previewed details of those orders to CyberScoop. Per one of those sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss pending administration actions, a “whole of government approach is used to empower research and development into quantum computing, as well as quantum sensing [and other resources].”

They described the Trump administration’s attitude for propping up industry as “don’t let us miss out on prioritizing the feeders for the research or the development of quantum.” 

The second order requires federal civilian networks to adopt quantum-resistant encryption faster than the current 2035 deadline. The new encryption algorithms, vetted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will protect against future quantum computer attacks. 

Agencies that miss the new deadline must report to the Office of Management and Budget explaining why. 

On hand for the signing were Department of Energy Undersecretary for Science Darío Gil, Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia, and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratisos.

Multiple executives from technology companies were also on hand for the order’s signing, complimentary of the government’s efforts in boosting the industry.

“IBM applauds the Administration for taking this important, timely step forward,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a statement. “Sound policy, sustained investment and public-private partnership are vital to sustaining U.S. quantum leadership and technological resilience. We’re proud to keep building on this foundation — strengthening U.S. competitiveness and bolstering national security as we shape the quantum future together.”

“At Google, we are proud of our sustained breakthroughs in quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography,” said Google President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat. “Quantum computing is a transformational technology that can advance national security, drug discovery, energy solutions and more.”

Update; 6/22/26; 5:20 p.m.: This story was updated after the signing with details about the orders, signing ceremony attendees, and comments from IBM’s Arvind Krishna and Google’s Ruth Porat.

The post Trump executive orders speed up post-quantum migration, boost industry appeared first on CyberScoop.

Intelligence agencies for the United States, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand are warning that advanced AI models capable of wreaking havoc in the cyber domain are “months away” from being publicly available.

In a joint statement, the Five Eyes alliance say they expect the kind of advanced hacking capabilities provided by frontier models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s Daybreak to become broadly available the public within the year, despite efforts by AI companies to withhold them or restrict their access.

“Frontier Al models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities,” the agencies said. “The timeline is not years, it is months.”

The statement, which included signatures from NSA’s Director of the Cybersecurity Directorate David Imbordino and acting CISA Director Nick Andersen, does not specifically cite secret or classified sources or methods to reach this conclusion.

But much of the underlying justification provided by the intelligence agencies also aligns with what public cybersecurity and AI experts have been warning about for months.

AI models capable of exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses are already available today through multiple channels: older commercial models, open-source versions, or foreign and black-market sources. And while newer models like Mythos are reportedly significantly more powerful for cybersecurity-related tasks, the breakneck pace of frontier model development often means that yesterday’s restricted frontier AI is tomorrow’s free, open-source AI.

Representative Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the warning from intelligence agencies “underscores what the Committee has repeatedly heard through roundtables, briefings, and hearings with industry leaders: China is just months, if not now weeks, away from achieving frontier AI capabilities comparable to those of the United States.”

“This threat reinforces the urgency of ensuring that federal agencies and critical infrastructure operators can responsibly leverage advanced U.S. models, and receive the guidance and support necessary to do so, to find vulnerabilities before adversaries can exploit them,” said Garbarino in a statement.”

The agencies flag legacy systems, sluggish patching loops, unnecessary internet connectivity, weak identity and access controls, and a lack of pre-incident planning by organizations as key weaknesses that AI will excel at exploiting.

“The rapid pace of frontier AI development means cyber risk assumptions can become outdated in months, not years,” the agencies wrote. “We must act before and be prepared to adapt and withstand evolving threats.”

Since large language models burst onto the scene, open-source models have run about 6-8 months behind the largest frontier AI companies.

To give an idea of how quickly the field develops: the capabilities described in the Amazon threat intelligence report that convinced the Trump administration to place export controls on Fable 5 could already be accomplished through older models like Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet, as well as open-source Chinese models.

Anthropic shut down access to their Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models as a result, and despite releasing a statement that they believe the White House decision was a “misunderstanding” the dispute remains resolved.

Programs like Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber Program provide AI systems to organizations for cyberdefense.  The goal is to give defenders a head start in finding and fixing vulnerabilities before AI systems can exploit them routinely in the coming years.

However, for all the fear surrounding the new technology, the recommended guidance is largely the same as it has been for decades. Governments, businesses and leaders must stop treating the digital security of their work as an afterthought or compliance issue.

“Success will come from getting the basics right, acting quickly, and integrating cyber security into core business strategy,” the agencies wrote. “Those that do not will face growing operational and strategic disadvantage.”

06/23/2026: This story was updated to include comment from Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y.

The post Intel agencies: Frontier AI models will reshape cybersecurity faster than expected appeared first on CyberScoop.

The incident occurred early Saturday when at least a dozen unauthorized alerts were sent through Brazil's Civil Defense Alert system, a platform designed to warn residents about imminent threats such as floods, landslides and other natural disasters.