See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 19–23.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Oct. 19–23.
The post This Week in Tech: AI Agents Clock In as Apple Buyers Wait and IT Scrambles appeared first on TechRepublic.
Australia is preparing legal action against Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Google over alleged breaches of its under-16 social media ban. Here's what could happen next.
The post Australia Prepares to Sue Meta, TikTok Over Under-16 Social Media Ban appeared first on TechRepublic.
Australia is preparing legal action against Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Google over alleged breaches of its under-16 social media ban. Here's what could happen next.
The post Australia Prepares to Sue Meta, TikTok Over Under-16 Social Media Ban appeared first on TechRepublic.
The DHS said agencies should remove DeepSeek products as well as third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek from their IT systems.
The post China Defends DeepSeek After US Ban of Its AI From Government Systems appeared first on SecurityWeek.
TP-Link yesterday announced plans to assemble Wi-Fi routers in the US, as the company attempts to get the Trump administration's approval to sell its newest routers to American consumers.
The timing is uncertain, as TP-Link's press release said it expects US-based assembly to begin "as early as" 2027. TP-Link's application to sell new routers in the US could be rejected by the Trump administration or remain pending long enough to push the US-based assembly to 2028.
"Pending US regulatory approval, TP-Link expects domestic assembly of its groundbreaking Wi-Fi 8 home networking product line to begin as early as next year," the company said. TP-Link said it signed a Letter of Intent with US company Keytronic, which agreed "to become a primary domestic manufacturing partner for TP-Link, supporting assembly of the company’s advanced networking portfolio in Corinth, Mississippi."
© TP-Link
Just finished the Insane difficulty Eloquia machine on Hack The Box which one of the more layered and creative Windows boxes I’ve done in a while.
The path starts with a custom Django publishing platform that integrates with a Qoogle OAuth service. After registering and creating articles, you discover that the application trusts certain meta-refresh tags and can be leveraged for redirects. Combined with OAuth authorization flows and a bit of CSRF, this opens the door to higher-privilege access inside the web application.
From the admin interface, SQL Explorer becomes available. Because the backend is SQLite, `load_extension` can be abused to load a malicious DLL. That gives the first reverse shell as the `eloquia\web` user and the user flag.
Privilege escalation requires deeper enumeration. Edge browser credentials stored for the Olivia.KAT account can be extracted and decrypted offline. WinRM then provides a stable shell as that user. From there, Seatbelt and process enumeration reveal an interesting custom service called Failure2Ban that runs with high privileges and periodically restarts. By racing a binary overwrite of `Failure2Ban.exe` with a reverse shell, you land as `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM` and grab the root flag.
What made this machine feel genuinely Insane was the number of different skill sets required: web application logic, OAuth/CSRF, SQLite extension loading, Windows credential dumping, service abuse under AppLocker and PowerShell restrictions, and careful timing for the final binary overwrite.
Great learning experience overall.
#HackTheBox #CTF #PenetrationTesting #WindowsPrivilegeEscalation #RedTeam #InfoSec #Eloquia #InsaneBox …
Learn MoreHack The Box: Eloquia Machine Walkthrough – Insane Difficulty
The post Hack The Box: Eloquia Machine Walkthrough – Insane Difficulty appeared first on Threatninja.net.
Some Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses were recording people’s conversations without the wearer knowing. The recordings occurred without users saying the prompt phrase (“Hey, Meta”), in a bug that Meta says has been fixed.
This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened to them across three Meta Ray-Bans and that they had the “Respond without Hey Meta” setting turned off. The person said the Meta AI app “saves audio recordings and text transcripts of these conversations in my conversation history.”
“I believe this deserves a serious technical investigation. Customers should not have to wonder whether their private conversations are being captured when they have not intentionally activated their glasses’ AI assistant,” the Reddit user said.
© Meta
China’s cryptocurrency crackdown has not eliminated crypto activity. Instead, new data shows that a growing share of the country’s crypto economy is moving through peer-to-peer transactions and self-custodied stablecoin wallets, creating a market that is increasingly difficult to track through traditional exchange data.
According to Chainalysis, China’s crypto economy was worth at least $176 billion during the 2026 study period, despite the country’s longstanding restrictions on cryptocurrency services. The actual figure could be higher because China’s regulatory environment makes domestic crypto flows difficult to measure.
The most striking development is the rapid expansion of P2P stablecoin activity. The number of unique wallets sending P2P stablecoin transactions from China increased 43-fold between the first quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2026.
That figure needs some context. The 43× increase refers to the number of participating wallets, not a 43× increase in transaction volume. It nevertheless points to a substantial expansion in the number of users engaging in stablecoin transactions outside traditional centralized exchanges.
China’s crypto market looks different from many other major markets. With centralized crypto services heavily restricted, users have increasingly relied on self-custody and direct transactions between individuals.
Domestic P2P activity accounted for 59.1% of China’s overall crypto economy during the study period, a roughly 3.5-fold increase in its share compared with the previous period.
Stablecoins appear to be at the center of this shift.
A significant change in domestic stablecoin P2P activity emerged around March 2025. Monthly activity began accelerating after relatively weak January and February figures and continued increasing for 13 consecutive complete month-over-month periods.
The growth was visible across several transaction sizes. Transfers below $100 increased by roughly 996%, while transactions between $100 and $1,000 rose about 1,057%. Transfers between $1,000 and $10,000 increased approximately 1,321%.
The pattern suggests that stablecoins are being used for more than large-scale investment transactions. Smaller transfers point toward potential payments, business transactions and transfers between individuals.
The timing has also raised questions about China’s expanding social credit infrastructure.
In March 2025, Chinese authorities released new guidelines aimed at improving and expanding the country’s social credit system. The system has increasingly intersected with financial and regulatory infrastructure, raising the possibility that greater monitoring of economic activity could influence how some individuals conduct transactions.
One possible explanation is that people facing restrictions or greater scrutiny in traditional financial channels could turn to alternative payment mechanisms. Stablecoins, particularly when held in self-custody, can provide a way to transfer value without relying directly on conventional banking or centralized crypto platforms.
However, the connection remains unproven.
The timing of the two developments is notable, but there is no evidence establishing that the expansion of the social credit system directly caused the surge in P2P stablecoin activity. Other factors, including the growing availability of stablecoins, demand for dollar-denominated assets and the need for alternative payment channels, could also be contributing to the increase.
Perhaps the clearest indication of how these assets are being used comes from their velocity.
China’s self-custodied stablecoin holdings turned over at an estimated 33.2 times per year, compared with a global average of approximately 9.3 times.
Average holdings were around $3.1 billion, while approximately $104.1 billion moved across 18.1 million transfers during the study period.
That level of turnover suggests that stablecoins may be functioning less as passive investments and more as working capital or a payment mechanism.
In other words, users appear to be moving stablecoins repeatedly rather than simply holding them for long-term appreciation.
China’s experience highlights an important consequence of cryptocurrency restrictions: banning centralized exchanges does not necessarily eliminate demand for digital assets. Instead, activity can migrate toward self-custody, P2P networks and stablecoins, where transactions are harder to measure through conventional financial data.
The bigger question is whether this represents a temporary workaround to China’s crypto restrictions or the early development of a parallel digital payment economy operating largely outside traditional financial channels.
If China Banned Crypto Then Why Is Its Stablecoin Economy Exploding was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The collapse of Afghanistan in August 2021 is still widely interpreted as a military or political failure. That interpretation is incomplete.
Afghanistan collapsed because it lost the cognitive war long before it lost territory.
Inside the system, we did not face a simple insurgency. We faced a persistent contest over how reality was defined, how legitimacy was perceived, and how decisions were made. The Taliban did not defeat the Afghan state by force alone. Regional actors did not undermine it through proxies alone. The deeper failure was this: the Afghan state never fully aligned its political identity with the way its people understood themselves.
That misalignment became a vulnerability - and in the gray zone, vulnerabilities are not observed; they are exploited.
The Cognitive Gap at the Center of the State
Every state rests on an implicit agreement between its people and its institutions: a shared understanding of identity, legitimacy, and purpose. In Afghanistan, that agreement was never fully stabilized.
The modern state carried the name “Afghanistan,” historically associated with a specific ethnopolitical identity. Yet the lived reality of the country was far more complex-linguistically, culturally, and historically. For many citizens, identity was rooted not in the modern state construct, but in a deeper civilizational memory: Khurasan.
This was not nostalgia. It was cognition.
Khurasan represented a mental map that connected Herat to Nishapur, Balkh to Bukhara, Kabul to a wider intellectual and cultural ecosystem. It was inclusive, fluid, and expansive. Afghanistan, by contrast, became a bounded political construct, defined by borders drawn through imperial competition and reinforced through centralized power struggles.
This divergence created a cognitive gap: the state operated under one identity framework, while large parts of society operated under another.
In a stable environment, such gaps can be managed. In a contested environment - especially under gray zone pressure - they become strategic liabilities.
From Identity Misalignment to Decision Failure
Cognitive gaps do not remain abstract. They translate directly into how decisions are made.
Inside government, this misalignment manifested in three critical ways.
First, trust was fragmented. Decisions that should have been based on competence and mission effectiveness were filtered through identity, faction, and perceived alignment. This weakened institutions at their core.
Second, intelligence was politicized. When leadership does not share a stable understanding of the state it governs, intelligence becomes contested terrain. Information is not only collected - it is interpreted through competing lenses of identity and interest.
Third, legitimacy was shallow. Citizens interacted with the state, but many did not internalize it as fully their own. That distinction is decisive. A state that is not cognitively owned cannot be strategically defended.
These were not theoretical weaknesses. They shaped daily governance, security coordination, and strategic planning. And they created the conditions for external actors to operate with precision.
Gray Zone Exploitation: Attacking the Mind, Not the Border
Afghanistan became a textbook case of gray zone competition.
Regional actors did not need to defeat the state conventionally. They exploited its cognitive vulnerabilities.
Pakistan leveraged identity divisions through the Taliban, framing them as authentic defenders of religion and tradition. Iran used cultural and sectarian narratives to extend influence in parallel networks. Russia and China approached Afghanistan as a space of managed instability, where influence could be expanded without direct confrontation.
These were not isolated actions. They were coordinated forms of cognitive warfare - targeting how citizens perceived their state, their leadership, and their future.
As one senior U.S. official recently noted, modern adversaries are engaged in a “persistent, persuasive campaign of cognitive warfare… shaping how societies see reality, trust, and decide.”
Afghanistan was already vulnerable to such campaigns because its internal narrative was never fully consolidated.
The Taliban’s Cognitive Strategy
The Taliban’s success cannot be understood without recognizing its cognitive dimension.
They did not present themselves only as a fighting force. They presented themselves as a corrective identity, a return to authenticity, faith, and order. At the same time, they framed the Republic as externally imposed, corrupt, and disconnected from the society.
This narrative was not universally accepted. But it did not need to be. It only needed to create doubt.
Cognitive warfare is not about replacing reality. It is about degrading confidence in reality.
As trust in institutions eroded, as leadership appeared divided, and as international commitment became uncertain, the Taliban’s narrative gained relative strength. The battlefield shifted from territory to perception. By the time military collapse came, cognitive collapse had already taken place.
The Strategic Vacuum: Who Defines Khurasan?
One of the most dangerous developments today is the appropriation of the term “Khorasan” by extremist groups such as ISIS-K.
This is not accidental. It is strategic.
When legitimate actors fail to define identity, adversaries will weaponize it. ISIS-K uses “Khorasan” to project a mythical, apocalyptic narrative designed to attract recruits and legitimize violence.
This creates a second-order threat. Not only is the state weakened, but its deeper civilizational identity is being redefined by actors who reject its intellectual, cultural, and inclusive legacy.
In cognitive warfare, naming is power.
If Khurasan is defined by extremists, it becomes a tool of radicalization. If it is reclaimed as a civilizational identity rooted in knowledge, trade, and coexistence, it becomes a counterweight to both extremism and fragmentation.
The Failure of State-Building as Cognitive Strategy
The international intervention between 2001 and 2021 achieved significant tactical and developmental gains. But it failed to address the cognitive dimension of state-building.
Institutions were built. Capacity was developed. Elections were held. But the deeper question - how the state was understood and internalized by its people - was never fully resolved.
This produced a structural imbalance:
In effect, we built a state without fully securing its cognitive foundation.
Toward Cognitive Realignment
Any future strategy for Afghanistan - and the broader region - must begin with cognitive realism.
First, policymakers must recognize that identity is not symbolic. It is operational. It shapes legitimacy, decision-making, and resilience under pressure.
Second, engagement must move beyond traditional state-building toward cognitive alignment. Governance structures must reflect the diversity and lived reality of the population, not impose narrow frameworks that generate resistance.
Third, investment in cognitive infrastructure is essential. Education, narrative development, and diaspora engagement are not secondary tools, they are central to long-term stability.
Fourth, the region must be reframed. Afghanistan should not be treated solely as a battlefield or buffer. Historically, as Khurasan, it functioned as a connector of regions, ideas, and economies. That perspective remains strategically relevant.
Conclusion: Stabilizing Meaning
The lesson of Afghanistan is not that state-building is impossible. It is that state-building without cognitive alignment is unsustainable.
For two decades, we focused on stabilizing territory, institutions, and security forces. We underestimated the importance of stabilizing meaning - how people understood the state, and whether they believed in it.
In modern competition, that is where advantage is decided.
The next battlefield is not territory. It is perception. It is cognition. It is the ability to shape how societies interpret reality and make decisions.
Afghanistan did not lose only because it was attacked. It lost because it could not fully define itself in a contested cognitive environment.
Reclaiming Khurasan, therefore, is not about returning to the past. It is about restoring a coherent, inclusive framework of identity that can withstand manipulation, resist fragmentation, and support legitimate governance.
Until that alignment is achieved, any political structure - no matter how well funded or defended - will remain vulnerable.
Because in the end, states do not collapse only when they lose control of land.
They collapse when they lose control of meaning.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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