Normal view

There are new articles available, click to refresh the page.
Today — 26 June 2026Main stream

FCC passes new cybersecurity rules for emergency systems, undersea cables

By: djohnson
25 June 2026 at 15:55

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.

Russia uses Cellebrite to break into human rights activist’s phone, even after cancellation of contract

25 June 2026 at 10:52

Russian authorities used Cellebrite phone-cracking technology to break into a device belonging to a prominent domestic human rights activist they arrested and imprisoned, despite the company canceling its contract with the Russian government, according to a report published Thursday.

The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab reached its conclusions after analyzing a phone belonging to Andrey Pivovarov and examining court documents he provided confirming the usage of Cellebrite’s UFED product.

Pivovarov was arrested in March 2021, sentenced in 2022 and released in 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange. Citizen Lab found evidence that authorities accessed his phone around June 2021 while the phone was in Russian government hands.

Investigators also said it appears Russian authorities might have used information it got from Pivoarov’s phone to surveil other regime opponents, combining information in the court documents with the later targeting of fellow dissident Anastasiya Burakova in a hacking campaign linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

“The historic architecture of Cellebrite forensic systems means that much of the functionality in the UFED product has continued to operate long after updates cease,” Citizen Lab said in its report. “Furthermore, Cellebrite systems have historically featured an offline mode. Consequently, the way Cellebrite’s technology was designed appeared to make it difficult for the company to meaningfully cut off problematic customers.

“While Cellebrite has argued that its cancellations in Russia … went beyond what was legally required, this investigation contributes evidence that the contract cancellation did not immediately block Russia from leveraging Cellebrite’s tools for political persecution,” it continued.

Cellebrite provided a response to Citizen Lab’s report, saying that Cellebrite’s technology would be ineffective in Russia today.

“Any use of legacy Cellebrite hardware in Russia after March 2021 is entirely unauthorized,” Cellebrite spokesperson Victor Cooper told CyberScoop, echoing the Citizen Lab response. “The Cellebrite hardware previously sold, prior to March 2021, would now be incompatible with modern devices and would operate without our technical support, our consent or any legal sanction from Cellebrite. Rapid technology advances render legacy digital forensic hardware and software ineffective within a short period of time. Russia remains permanently on our restricted-customer list.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Russia uses Cellebrite to break into human rights activist’s phone, even after cancellation of contract appeared first on CyberScoop.

Yesterday — 25 June 2026Main stream

Open-source security is posing challenges governments can’t easily solve

24 June 2026 at 05:00

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.

Before yesterdayMain stream

Intel agencies: Frontier AI models will reshape cybersecurity faster than expected

By: djohnson
22 June 2026 at 11:25

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.

Adobe Adds Its AI Assistant To Premiere, Illustrator and InDesign

By: BeauHD
18 June 2026 at 19:00
Adobe is expanding its Firefly AI assistant into Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, where it can automate all sorts of tasks such as organizing clips, renaming assets, adding interview markers, rearranging layers, and finding missing fonts. It's available starting today as part of a public beta. TechCrunch reports: Adobe is slowly transforming Firefly to increasingly resemble Canva, at least when it comes to AI features, loading up the app with AI tools that can generate images, videos and storyboards. The company is now adding a new feature called Elements that can save AI-generated characters, objects and locations for later use. Firefly is also getting a Projects feature that can store existing assets in one place, and share context. This could be useful for teams creating a video series or brand campaigns. Both of these features are currently available in a private beta. The company said users can now describe a brand and its style, or upload existing collateral, in Firefly to have it generate a brand kit, complete with logos, brand identity and color palettes, or even generate product videos from photos. Users can also create storyboards to create videos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cybersecurity experts don’t think Anthropic’s Fable 5 presents a unique threat 

By: djohnson
15 June 2026 at 12:07

Last Friday, the Trump administration sent a shock through the tech ecosystem when the Department of Commerce levied export controls on Anthropic’s new AI model Fable 5.

Anthropic has taken steps to limit the risks around the commercial sale of its Mythos model, including declining to release it publicly, funneling it to organizations for cyber defense and developing guardrails for Fable 5 that would default its answers to older, less powerful models around sensitive topics like cybersecurity and biological warfare.

But the Trump administration was reportedly alarmed by recent reports from Amazon and another cybersecurity researcher claiming to have jailbroken Fable 5 within days of its public release, and determined that if researchers in the U.S. could jailbreak the model, so could America’s foreign adversaries.

The Commerce Department’s decision spurred Anthropic to shut off the models for all users as they attempted to convince the White House to change course.

But some cybersecurity and AI experts have sharply disagreed with the White House’s actions, saying the research has not demonstrated that anyone has been able to circumvent Fable 5’s safeguards and access the kind of dangerous new capabilities that have worried officials.

Katie Moussouris, a well-known cybersecurity expert, said Monday that Anthropic provided her with a copy of third-party research on guardrail bypass techniques for Fable 5.

According to Moussouris, the researchers asked three Claude models – Fable 5, Mythos and Claude Opus – to review batches of known, vulnerable open source code for security issues. Fable 5 initially refused the request, but the researchers were able to use “a multistep and manual process” to get Fable 5 to turn the output into automated scripts that could test patches for the vulnerability.

Third-party research since Fable 5’s release has not found ways to bypass its safeguards around hacking. The capabilities researchers have demonstrated are foundational to what makes Fable 5 and other frontier models valuable for cybersecurity defense.

“Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works,” she wrote. “That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day.”

Moussouris previously provided technical expertise to the Waasenaar Agreement, a voluntary multilateral security agreement around controlling exports for both munitions and dual use technology that includes the U.S. and dozens of other countries.  Based on the research she’s seen, she called placing export restrictions on all foreign sales of Fable 5 “heavy handed” and “misguided.”

Some lawmakers who in favor of higher regulations and scrutiny on the national security implications of AI were nevertheless critical of the White House decision. Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., told CyberScoop in a statement that while “there may be circumstances where restrictions on the export of frontier AI models are warranted,” those decisions must be “grounded in a transparent, risk-based process with clear rules and consistent standards.”

The Trump administration’s approach, he argued, has been the opposite, and he called for Congress to pass a statutory framework for testing and approving frontier AI models based on transparency, predictability and fairness.

“This administration has repeatedly shown a willingness to weaken export controls designed to protect our national security and maintain our technological edge over adversaries, while also making no secret of its hostility toward Anthropic,” said Warner. “That raises serious questions about whether this effort is being driven by objective national security concerns or something else.”

Anthropic said it subjected Fable 5 to 1,000 hours of testing from internal and external red team, reporting that no universal jailbreaks were found that would remove those guardrails or allow the model to access Mythos for cyber and biology work.

Moussouris is far from alone. She is one of dozens of cybersecurity experts who signed an open letter Monday calling on the Trump administration to “Free Fable.”    

The researchers say that while Mythos-class models are “quite good” at identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in software code, they “are not uniquely good” compared to other frontier models they use every day for cybersecurity defense.

For example, despite OpenAI’s Daybreak model offering similar vulnerability discovery and patching capabilities. It was not included in the Commerce Department’s restrictions.

The researchers also note that Fable 5’s guardrails have been notoriously oversensitive compared to other frontier models used by red teamers, becoming “a source of humor in the cyber community on launch day” as IT and cyber workers reported online that they couldn’t get the model to perform basic defensive cybersecurity tasks.

The letter questions whether the issues found in the jailbreaking reports would even qualify as offensive capabilities, and note they can be reproduced in other commercial and open-source models, including GPT 5.5, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet and Chinese models like Kimi 2.7.

“The justification for this unprecedented action was that Fable provides a unique ‘uplift’ of capabilities beyond other AI models, but AI has been finding bugs and generating working exploits at superhuman levels since last year,” they wrote.

The White House decision comes as AI companies face increasing backlash from a public that is now overwhelming calling for more robust government intervention.

A Johns Hopkins University poll in May found broad, bipartisan support for AI regulations, with 73% calling for bans on AI-generated images and video, 68% calling for labels on AI content, 75% wanting disclosure laws around when they interact with AI chatbots and 70% calling for “the right to interact with a human rather than an AI in medical, legal, educational and government settings.”

Another global survey of 18,000 people released this week found that the top four concerns most people have around AI all revolve around the tool’s ability to spread misinformation, create deepfakes to embarrass or hurt others, making it easier for criminals to hack into victim networks and helping terrorists create new weapons.

Senior reporter Tim Starks contributed reporting for this story.

The post Cybersecurity experts don’t think Anthropic’s Fable 5 presents a unique threat  appeared first on CyberScoop.

DOD wants to integrate cyber in all operations, and integrate security into AI

2 June 2026 at 13:11

The Pentagon is focusing on integrating cyber into all its operations, and wants to make sure it integrates security into artificial intelligence usage from the outset, the Defense Department’s top cyber policy official said Tuesday.

Recent conflicts have made clear how important cyber is, said Katherine Sutton, assistant secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber adviser at DOD — especially when it’s paired with physical force.

Defense officials have noted that there’s been a cultural shift on the importance of cyber at the department since the war in Iran and the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

“Information is becoming more and more important on the battlefield, so having the ability to integrate space, cyber and other non-kinetic effects to be able to degrade that information advantage is something that’s going to be critical and foundational to any future conflicts going forward,” she said at the GDIT’s Emerge: Battlespace of the Future conference, hosted by Scoop News Group. “We have to fully pull cyber out of its silo, which means not just integrating the effects, but starting the integration from day one with operational planning … and built in from the beginning, and not something that we strap on as we’re going to execute.”

Brandon Pugh, principal cyber adviser for the Army, backed up that message at the same conference, saying that cyber “being considered in a silo is not where it’s most effective,” and is more effective “when we see cyber blending in the kinetic operations while still being an option in its own right.”

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has made Pugh Army secretariat lead for all its defense critical infrastructure, both physical and cyber, which Pugh said emphasizes how the Army sees the two linked. The Army brought agencies together last month for an exercise to contemplate threat scenarios across domains.

By the same token, security needs to be interlaced with artificial intelligence, Sutton said. It’s a truism in the cybersecurity world that the internet wasn’t built with security in mind. As advanced AI models grow in usage at the Defense Department, Sutton said the Pentagon can’t make similar mistakes.

“As we adopt these new tools, we’re also creating a new threat landscape for adversaries to attack us and to exploit these new capabilities, so we need to start thinking about how we’re going to secure them,” she said. “One of the challenges we have often had with tools is we adopt them, and security is an afterthought, or we realize that we didn’t think about security from the front. I just don’t think we have that luxury with AI going forward.”

CORRECTED 6/3/2026: to clarify Pugh’s role on defense infrastructure within the Army.

The post DOD wants to integrate cyber in all operations, and integrate security into AI appeared first on CyberScoop.

Trump administration releases scaled-back AI executive order

By: djohnson
2 June 2026 at 12:53

The Trump administration issued a revised executive order Tuesday focused on artificial intelligence, offering a significantly pared-back vision for the federal government’s role vetting AI systems compared with a draft version that was spiked weeks ago.

The order keeps in place the administration’s largely voluntary framework for companies to engage with the federal government around testing new models before release, but appears to considerably weaken or loosen provisions that had been opposed by industry.

Under the order, AI companies would voluntarily provide the federal government access to frontier models before release, but now it will be for “up to” 30 days instead of the 90-day timeline included in previous drafts.

It also explicitly states that nothing in the program will be construed as mandatory or part of a federal licensing or permitting regime, and gives AI companies significant influence to help define what models would and would not be covered under for testing.

It also states that all federal testing and access to the models would be subject to “confidentiality, cybersecurity, insider-risk, and intellectual-property protection, use, and nondisclosure requirements.”

Section one of the order highlights the central friction that has plagued the Trump administration’s AI policy since assuming power: While the White House increasingly sees national security implications in the rapid release of frontier models from the private sector, it has also been one of the loudest critics of regulating the technology for fear it could harm American businesses.

“The United States continues to lead the world in Artificial Intelligence (AI) because of the enormous talent and innovation of our AI industry, and because we refuse to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation,” the order reads.

That argument was bolstered in recent days as industry members and top advisers to Trump, like tech investor and AI czar David Sacks, lobbied against previous draft language, arguing it would put too much of a regulatory burden on U.S. businesses.

On X, Sacks called the revised EO, including changes reducing the government’s access from 90 days to up to 30 days “a game changer” because it would allow frontier labs to comply without delaying new model releases. He also said the discussions he’s had with the White House indicate that not all new model releases would be subject to even that level of scrutiny.

The White House characterization that the order is not a program for conducting oversight of all new AI models “is completely consistent with the discussions that I have participated in, where it was agreed that the EO is intended to apply only to models that represent a meaningful step-change in cyber capabilities (eg Mythos), not to incremental version numbers of existing models,” Sacks wrote.

The order also puts the Department of Treasury at the head of a new interagency cybersecurity clearinghouse on AI, where the private sector, critical infrastructure operators and federal agencies voluntarily collaborate to coordinate and deconflict scanning for software vulnerabilities, discovery and validation and remediation activities, like patching.

Treasury, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the NSA, the Office of the National Cyber Director and other agencies would also be responsible for developing classified benchmarks that would be used to identify or flag the kind of advanced cyber and hacking capabilities that agencies are interested in testing.  

Questions linger over implementation, politicization

Consisting of less than 1200 words, the directive is vague in many areas about exactly how implementation will work.

“On frontier capability access, vulnerability discovery for critical infrastructure, and sharing with trusted partners, many questions remain,” wrote American Enterprise Institute fellow Ryan Fedasiuk.

Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., said the order would help the White House “begin to grapple” with the threats that new frontier models and their hacking capabilities pose to critical infrastructure and praised certain provisions, like putting the NSA in charge of classified testing of new models. But he was also sharply critical of the administration’s about face on the need for federal scrutiny of emerging AI technologies.

“Once again, the Trump administration has belatedly discovered the need to redo something it hastily dismantled in its first year,” Warner said in a statement. “While this course correction – a rehash of proposals contained in the last administration’s 2023 executive order, bipartisan congressional legislation, and each of the last three years of intel authorization bills the Senate Intel Committee has passed – can begin to grapple with widespread impacts that new frontier models will have on our critical infrastructure, it can’t undo the years wasted on dismantling some of the most vital pillars of our nation’s cybersecurity response, including key information sharing initiatives and the federal agency established to protect the security of U.S. critical infrastructure.”

Warner also said he will be “watchful” for indications the administration may politicize any testing regime, for instance, such as using the partnerships “to pressure U.S. firms into making changes to their products or Terms of Service to suit partisan or legally questionable objectives of the president and his allies.”

The administration’s lighter touch approach around voluntary testing yielded approval from some experts who have traditionally been more in favor of regulation, but who also expressed similar worries about the downsides of putting the federal government in charge of vetting AI models.

Samir Jain of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that while AI models pose real cybersecurity threats to critical services, the order “attempts to avoid the deeply concerning implications of a mandatory licensing regime for release of new models.”

“Testing and benchmarking programs are important to promote cybersecurity and address other risks,” Jain said in a statement. “However, the EO should not become a mechanism for the Administration to punish companies for political or other arbitrary reasons, and so we will be closely monitoring the details of its implementation as they emerge.”

You can read the full order on the White House’s website.

The post Trump administration releases scaled-back AI executive order appeared first on CyberScoop.

Android to iPhone: Will’s journey

18 May 2026 at 03:42
APPLE By Will Fastie Nineteen years after the introduction of the iPhone, I succumbed. It was an emergency purchase; I had not planned to do so for a few more months. But my Samsung Galaxy A53 5G received a One UI update, and performance crashed. Action was needed. The battery was bad, too. Having done […]

Pentagon cyber official calls advanced AI ‘revolutionary warfare’

14 May 2026 at 16:35

Advanced artificial intelligence models will “fundamentally change warfare as we know it,” a top cyber official at the Defense Department said Thursday, saying it represents “not evolutionary warfare, but revolutionary warfare.”

Paul Lyons, principal deputy assistant secretary for cyber policy, said the development of frontier AI models like Mythos amounted to a “watershed moment,” speaking at Rubrik’s  Federal Cyber Resilience Breakfast produced by FedScoop.

Such models will “change both offense and defensive posture within the Department of War to something that’s close to you for critical infrastructure,” he said. “This is the ability to hunt and speed across the domain and outside the fence line in critical dependencies with water, power, compute.”

The advent of the technology is forcing the department to address difficult questions, but it’s a great opportunity as well for the United States given that it’s being developed by American companies, Lyons said. It’s something his department is optimistic about, he said.

“To be blunt, we’re trying to figure out, what authorities do we need? How do you leverage that within both decisionmaking and employment?” he said. “We have the right people looking at the speed, scale and complexity of cyber and how it’s going to be affected through the advent of AI.”

The Pentagon labeled Mythos a “supply chain risk” after its creator, Anthropic, resisted commands from the department to use its Claude model in ways the firm opposed. The department has nonetheless been using Mythos to hunt for cyber vulnerabilities.

Lyons said that cyber warfare overall has become more mature, as recent conflicts have shown.

“We saw it in spades in Venezuela, where you can layer cyber to create conditions that are favorable to the warfighter, that lower risk to mission, lower risk to force that where paired with both no kinetic and kinetic effects, can increase lethality,” he said. “We see it in Iran today.”

President Donald Trump’s cyber strategy places an emphasis on taking the battle to the malicious hackers, something Lyons said was a vital approach.

“America’s posture in cyber defense has been largely a defensive posture,” he said. “That’s a losing strategy for America. America has to dominate the full spectrum of cyber operations.”

The post Pentagon cyber official calls advanced AI ‘revolutionary warfare’ appeared first on CyberScoop.

❌
❌