Pulse of Truth

Andrew Osborn / Reuters: Since Russia ratcheted up control over the internet this year, some Russians are turning to solutions like using multiple phones and VPNs to evade restrictions  —  In a quiet cafe popular for its free Wi-Fi and good coffee, a Russian interior designer logs onto a virtual private network …

In the spring of 1381 the English crown levied a poll tax on everyone aged fifteen and over. To verify age the collectors were said to need to inspect bodies directly. The story goes, perhaps exaggerated, perhaps a metaphor to expose state-sanctioned rape, that there would be official measuring of pubic hair, meaning the cost … Continue reading This Day in 1381: Biometric Age Verification Leads to Beheadings →

Hidden inside a building in Alabama, the FBI has created its own small town as a dedicated cyber training ground for simulating cyberattacks.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created a new paradigm for identifying online phishing campaigns. Their new system, PhishLumos, is triggered when links show signs of concealing information and looks for clues in the "infrastructure" of the website to uncover the whole campaign of which the site is only a tiny part. Real-world testing showed detection that was eight days faster than an expert's, with 190,000 URLs detected over six months.

A former  IT employee at an Iowa school district was sentenced to 21 months in prison after conducting a prolonged cyberattack against the former employer that disrupted classroom operations, deleted accounts, and caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages. [...]

An AI-powered dystopian future seems increasingly inevitable to many these days, but for some, it’s already here.

Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal: Luta Security CEO says US government restrictions on Mythos follow a jailbreak report by Amazon researchers and calls the restrictions a “complete overreaction”  —  The Trump administration is banning foreign governments, companies and individuals from using Anthropic's …

The Trump administration is making another move into venture-style investing, taking equity stakes in nine quantum computing companies. IBM, the largest recipient of the investment, thinks that quantum systems could eventually solve problems involving drug discovery, financial markets, cybersecurity, logistics, and climate science that remain beyond the reach of classical computers. But while companies such as IBM and IonQ claim major breakthroughs are near, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano questions the government’s role in choosing specific corporate winners and warns that commercial adoption may still take years to realize. (Source: Bloomberg)

Chinese hackers took control of a target organization's authentication stack and maintained persistence for 10 years, with full visibility into the administrative activity. [...]

Attackers took over more than 400 packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) this week and rewrote their build scripts to install a credential stealer on any machine that built them.

The malware is a Rust binary built to harvest developer secrets. When it lands with root, it can also load an eBPF rootkit to hide itself. The AUR is Arch Linux's community package collection, and it is separate

Jessica Loudis / Bloomberg: A review of The Yahoo Boys, a deeply reported book on four online scammers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring how and why they scam and the local impact of the trade  —  Nigeria's “Yahoo Boys” have industrialized romance scamming, reflecting and distorting modern hustle culture in the face of collapsing economic prospects.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets US intelligence agencies collect communications from foreigners abroad without a warrant, and routinely sweeps in Americans’ emails, messages, and calls in the process. The authority for this program is set to expire Friday, June 12th, 2026, at midnight. As we wrote earlier this week, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road for months now—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus on a longer reauthorization could be reached.  EFF has said for decades, every time this program is up for renewal: Section 702 should require a warrant before the Federal Bureau of Investigation can look at digital communications collected from Americans. If not, we should let the whole thing expire. And this time, it has, at least for a little while.  Ironically, we have Bill Pulte to thank for this (probably temporary) reprieve. Earlier this month, Trump on Tuesday named Pulte – currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – to replace current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation last month. As has been widely reported, Pulte lacks any intelligence, military, or congressional experience. Senate Democrats responded by refusing to move forward with their version of a bill to reauthorize Section 702. Similarly, the House refused to approve even a short-term renewal[...]

We can no longer ignore the growing threat of fully autonomous weapons. The world must either act to ban them or accept that they are the future of war

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Ananya Palyekar / Reuters: Anthropic says it believes the US government's export control order for Mythos 5 and Fable 5 is a “misunderstanding” and that it is working to restore access  —  Anthropic said on Friday it has been ordered by the U.S. government to suspend access for all foreign nationals …

The company said on Friday night that the federal government had ordered limits on its Mythos and Fable 5 A.I. systems, citing national security concerns.

Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, exposed some of the license plate cops were looking for and the reason for doing so.

Maine has taken its public data breach reporting portal offline after fraudulent breach disclosures were published on the state's website, prompting a review of procedures to prevent abuse in the future. [...]

Failure raises questions about how Verizon prepares refurbished phones for new users.

This week in cybersecurity from the editors at Cybercrime Magazine Sausalito, Calif. – Jun. 12, 2026 – Watch the YouTube Short During World War II, some of America’s most powerful weapons weren’t bombs or guns. They were women sitting in secret rooms breaking enemy codes, The post Code Girls: The Secret Heroes Of World War II appeared first on Cybercrime Magazine.

Michael Peel / Financial Times: After years of false dawns, Big Tech, startups, and governments are betting on commercially useful quantum computers by 2030, as skeptics worry about hype  —  Companies are betting on big implications for pharmaceuticals, financial services and crypto.  But sceptics worry about hype.

A Ukrainian national extradited from Ireland to the United States last year has pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges tied to the Conti ransomware operation. [...]

The French government revealed that a recent breach of its Tchap encrypted messaging platform affects the accounts of over 73,000 employees in the French public sector. [...]

Kyushu Electric Power Co., Inc. has disclosed a physical security incident that affects private data of more than 10 million customers. [...]

Extortion-only attacks are increasing as data theft drives most ransomware claims, with many organizations unable to stop stolen data from being exposed