The U.S. Department of Defense has ideas about a dramatic strategy to defend Taiwan against a Chinese military offensive that would involve deploying an “unmanned hell” consisting of thousands of drones buzzing around the island nation. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology announced this week a red-team hacking competition with AI ethics nonprofit Humane Intelligence to find flaws and biases in generative AI systems.
WIRED took an in-depth look at the Telegram channel and website known as the Deep State, which uses public data and secret intelligence to power its live-tracking map of Ukraine’s evolving front line. Protesters flocked to New York’s Citi Field on Wednesday to raise awareness of the serious privacy risks posed by the implementation of facial recognition systems at sports venues. The technology has increasingly been deployed in stadiums and arenas across the country with little oversight. And Amazon Web Services updated its instructions for how customers should implement authentication in its Application Load Balancer, after researchers found an implementation issue that they say could expose misconfigured web applications.
But wait, there’s more! Every week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe.
U.S. Navy officials confirmed to Military.com this week that pants for the standard Navy Working Uniform (NWU) are out of stock at Navy stores and are in dangerously low supply across sea service distribution channels. Navy Exchange Service Command is “experiencing a severe shortage of NWU pants” both in stores and online, according to spokesperson Courtney Williams. Sailors have been noticing out-of-stock notifications online, indicating that the pants are “not available for purchase in any size.” Williams said current stock worldwide is at 13 percent and the top priority right now is providing pants to new recruits at Recruit Training Command in Illinois, the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Rhode Island and officer training schools.
The shortage appears to be due to issues with the Defense Logistics Agency’s pants supply chain. Military.com reports that there are signs posted in Navy Exchange stores saying the shortage is due “to issues with Defense Logistics Agency suppliers.” Williams said the command has “been in communication with DLA on a timeline for uniform production and supply chain.”
Mikia Muhammad, a spokeswoman for the Defense Logistics Agency, told Military.com that the first replenishments of pants are scheduled for October, but that these supplies will go to recruits and training programs. She said Navy corpsmen should expect “full support” starting in January.
On Monday, a joint statement from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency formally accused Iran of carrying out a hacking and information leak operation against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump himself had accused Iran on a social media site. mail On August 10, after a report On August 9, Microsoft claimed that Iranian hackers targeted US political campaigns. The Iranian government denies the accusation.
“The intelligence community is confident that the Iranians, through social engineering and other methods, have sought to access individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties,” the US agencies wrote. “Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, is intended to influence the US electoral process.”
Political reported On August 10, Iran had breached the Trump campaign and an entity calling itself “Robert” had contacted the publication offering alleged stolen documents. The same entity also contacted The New York Times and The Washington Post selling similar documents.
The popular flight tracking service FlightAware saying This week, a “configuration error” in its systems exposed personal customer data, including names, email addresses, and even some Social Security numbers. The company discovered the exposure on July 25, but said in a statement that Notice of infringement The California attorney general said the situation could date back to January 2021. The company is requiring all affected users to reset their account passwords.
The company said in its public statement that the exposed data included “user ID, password, and email address. Depending on the information you provided, the information may also have included your full name, billing address, shipping address, IP address, social media accounts, phone numbers, year of birth, the last four digits of your credit card number, information about aircraft you own, industry, title, pilot status (yes/no), and your account activity (such as flights viewed and comments posted).” It also said in its disclosure to California: “In addition, our investigation has revealed that your Social Security number may have been exposed.”
Since European law enforcement hacked end-to-end encrypted phone company Sky in 2021, the breached communications have been used as evidence in numerous EU investigations and criminal cases. But a review of court records this week by 404 Media and Court Watch showed that U.S. agencies have also leaned on the trove of roughly 500 million chat messages. U.S. law enforcement has used the data in multiple drug trafficking prosecutions, notably to pursue suspected smugglers transporting cocaine using commercial ships and speedboats.