The argument in Washington over the past few months has been about whether to ban Chinese AI models or restrict them. What has been less examined is what Beijing intends to do with the open-weight – that is, publicly available and downloadable – models its labs have built. Beijing has started to answer that question, and not with one voice.

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Anthropic reveals how criminal groups are increasingly targeting AI vendors' own infrastructure, including to steal a pre-release Claude model.

The post Anthropic Says Russian Hackers Used Claude AI to Automate Malware Evasion appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Casual observers of Venezuelan politics might have assumed that the US capture and removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January would guarantee the dismantling of his authoritarian regime and a rupture with Beijing.

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First-of-its-kind research from Finland’s Aalto University’s School of Business reveals the modus operandi and operating model of the pro-Russian hacking group responsible for thousands of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against NATO and European targets.

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In a recent paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team describes an AI tool it built to develop “pre-bunking” messages, a proactive communication technique intended to prevent the spread of misinformation by warning people of false claims before they encounter them.

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For decades after the Cuban Revolution’s victory in 1959, influential anticommunist circles in the United States claimed that Cuba’s communist government sowed social division and allied with left-wing groups to help defeat Washington during the Cold War.

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On Election Day in 2024, as voters cast their ballots, Elon Musk posted a campaign music video supporting Donald Trump’s bid for president.

Set to Van Halen’s “Jump,” with a montage of 1980s cultural references and images of Trump in various strongman poses, the video includes a line about “PATRIOTS” in which the “O” turns into a “Q,” a reference to the online conspiracy theory QAnon.

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OAuth Exploitation Russian threat actors are shifting away from plain old password theft and moving toward legitimate platform features like OAuth permissions. Groups like UNC6293 and UNC7005 take their time...

The post The New Russian Playbook: Bypassing MFA Without Cracking Passwords appeared first on Cyber Defense Magazine.

Seventeen Iranian men have been charged in a cybercrime case being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

The accused are members of the Mabna Institute, an Iranian-based company known for hacking U.S. higher education institutions and private sector companies on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

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The United States has had enough in cyberspace. The White House has now created a program under which American companies can conduct offensive cyber operations against ransomware gangs and other ‘cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations.’

Australia should look closely at the experiment.

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During election seasons or major national issues, online news comment sections often become heated spaces of conflict across gender, generation, and political lines. For years, there have been persistent concerns that behind some of these conflicts may lie “foreign winds,” or interventions by foreign actors seeking to manipulate public opinion and deepen social divisions.

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Do you ever see comments on social media that seem way off topic, but still manage to wrench the discussion around to divisive political debate?

A discussion about the cost of living suddenly becomes an argument about immigration. A conversation about the war in Ukraine turns into claims about government corruption. It can feel jarring – and sometimes this is deliberate.

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The following is a speech delivered by ASPI executive director Justin Bassi at the Australian Defense Science, Technology and Research Summit, held in Adelaide from 4 to 6 August 2026.

Just over 10 years ago, I sat in the oval office with my then boss Malcolm Turnbull and President Obama listening to them debate the Thucydides Trap. This is a theory that has made Graham Allison famous but for which, in my view, there is no modern-day example – where the established power is so anxious about the rising power that it strikes at the rising power and starts a war.

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Long after COVID-19 ended, China is still trying to shape the world’s perception of the pandemic.

On August 6, FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) identified at least 50 coordinated assets across 10 platforms spreading claims that U.S. biological laboratories developed bioweapons that caused COVID-19. This network revives a longstanding Chinese effort to shift blame for the pandemic and portray Washington as a biological threat. 

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Intelligence is useful only if it tells policymakers what they need to know, not what they want to hear. That distinction—between informing power and flattering it—is the oldest problem in the craft, and the U.S. built an apparatus of analytic standards, layered review, and ombudsmen to protect it. I served as a President’s Daily Brief (PDB) briefer to the vice president, in analytic leadership at the CIA, and as a National Security Council (NSC) director in both the Biden and second Trump administrations.

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Overview of the Advisory On July 23, 2026, CISA, the NSA, the FBI, and their international partners issued a joint cybersecurity advisory alerting organizations to ongoing Russian state-sponsored activity. The...

The post New CISA/NSA Advisory Spotlights Russian Attacks on Zimbra Webmail appeared first on Cyber Defense Magazine.

Description
A source told reporter Renee Dudley something she found hard to believe: that Microsoft was running tech support for the Department of Defense through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary. The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.

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How HollowGraph Operates  On July 20, 2026, Group-IB security researchers released a study describing an implant known as HollowGraph that converts a hacked Microsoft 365 calendar into hidden communication channel....

The post Ghost in the Calendar: The Microsoft 365 Calendar Implant appeared first on Cyber Defense Magazine.