Mark Forman, former OMB administrator for e-government and IT, explains why it’s time to kick-start the “collect once, use many” approach to data governance.

© Amelia Brust/Federal News Network

New executive order calls for end-to-end visibility into defense supply chains, including software dependencies, foreign ownership and cyber-related supplier risks.

The post Trump Orders Defense Contractors to Map Software, Suppliers Across Critical Supply Chains appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The new U.K. government scrapped a digital ID program that millions of British people opposed, in place of a tax cut to tackle the cost of living.

"The defense funding picture and policy picture has been pretty complicated," said Loren Duggan.

© AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

Crypto's only bailout ran through an FDIC override aimed at banks. How the systemic risk exception worked in 2023 and why it may not repeat.

In this episode of the podcast, host Paul Roberts interviews Nishawn Smagh of the firm GreyNoise Intelligence about the findings of their State of the Edge report, an analysis of GreyNoise data on risks stemming from compromised edge devices such as broadband routers, VPN gateways, smart home devices and more. Shawn and Paul talk about how attackers are turning edge devices into their favorite entry point, and strategies for organizations to counter the growing risk of compromised edge devices.

The post Edge Devices Are Your Cyber Underbelly. Here’s Why. appeared first on The Security Ledger with Paul F. Roberts.

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Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump agree on almost nothing. But they do agree that the public should own a piece of the AI industry.

The Vermont senator and the president disagree on both the structure and stake of public ownership, but the idea is being discussed at the highest levels of government. Even OpenAI and Anthropic back versions of the idea, though Anthropic’s is a tax rather than a stake. Let’s tune in.

The table below summarizes preliminary proposals and shows how far apart they stand, from a voluntary sliver to an outright seizure. After taking a stake in Intel, the president said he wanted “many more cases like it.” Treasury paid $8.9 billion for 9.9% of Intel in August 2025; by the following spring the stake was worth roughly $36 billion, increasing the appetite for such deals. The Pentagon has already taken 15% of a rare-earth miner. This is a pattern, not a one-off.

The argument for these proposals is a public-finance argument, and a strong one. The science under AI grew out of decades of federally funded research. The training data came from the writing, code, and art of millions of people who were never asked and never paid.

Sanders puts the principle plainly: “When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth.”

The cleanest versions cost the taxpayer nothing up front, because the equity is contributed rather than bought. That is not the Intel model, which Washington bought for cash; it is the AI version now on the table, where the shares would be donated. If the bubble bursts, the public is out nothing. If it holds, the public owns a slice. A bet with no ante is a rare thing in public finance.

Source	Stake	Structure
Bernie Sanders	Roughly 50% government position (reported figures vary)	Federal sovereign wealth fund; government holds voting shares; ~$1,000-per-person dividend
Trump administration	Case-by-case equity stakes; 9.9% of Intel (now ~$36B)	Direct federal ownership; framed as a taxpayer “windfall”
OpenAI	~5% of equity (~$42.6B) contributed voluntarily	“Public Wealth Fund” modeled on Alaska’s; returns distributed to citizens
Anthropic	No equity	Taxes on AI firms to fund worker support, possibly UBI

Proposals as of July 2026; talks remain preliminary and any federal version would require an act of Congress.

There’s a real danger, though, in what the government becomes when it owns a piece of the industry it is supposed to regulate. A public stake in AI can be a dividend or a trap, and the whole difference lives in the fine print.

Three things separate the dividend from the trap. The first is the size of the stake. The second is a wall between the government as owner and the government as referee, so the hand that banks the dividend never writes the safety rules. The third is a fence around the money: proceeds earmarked for the workers the technology displaces, not swept into the general fund. None of the three enforces itself.

Here’s a loose historical precedent. In 1998, 46 states settled with the tobacco industry for about $206 billion, paid out over 25 years. The states came to lean on the yearly checks, which quietly made them partners in the survival of the product they were supposed to fight. And the money drifted: today states spend only about three cents of every tobacco dollar on the anti-smoking programs the settlement was meant to fund.

A stake with no end date makes the government a permanent co-owner of the industry it regulates, and permanence is one thing that turned a tobacco settlement into a tobacco dependency. The answer is a fixed end date. The same law that creates the stake should set the year it must end. This is known as a sunset clause.

If Uncle Sam owns a stake, he should collect the dividend through the buildout years, then sell it down on a fixed, published schedule until the position is gone. Ten or 15 years. Economists can pick the number. The deadline should be set in law from the start, so a future Congress cannot quietly extend it.

Temporary co-ownership lets the public bank the upside of the boom without leaving the referee holding shares in the game for good. Sanders and Trump, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, have seized on a real grievance and reached for the permanent version of the remedy, which is the version most likely to curdle. Of course, sunset clauses are not etched in stone either.

Another challenge is that the moment Washington owns pieces of its AI champions, other capitals follow — Beijing, Brussels, the Gulf — each taking a stake in its own, and the claim that American platforms answer to no government gets harder to make. A vendor with the state on its cap table is not a neutral one. No wall and no expiration date solves this problem.

A stake also puts the government in the business of picking winners. Own a piece of OpenAI or Anthropic and Washington acquires a financial interest in their business, and a reason to favor them when it writes the next rule or signs the next contract. The startup is forced to compete against incumbents favored by the feds. And in the fast-moving AI field, the players change rapidly.

AI’s economic challenges are real and the grievance underneath these proposals is legitimate, but government ownership is the wrong remedy. The conflict of interest is real, the precedents are bad, and it’s hard to imagine that a referee with money on the game will be neutral.

Still, the momentum is real, too. Sanders, Trump, and the labs are all pushing versions of the same idea, and one of them may pass. If it does, the temporary version with guardrails beats the permanent one: price it honestly, wall it off, aim the money at the damage, give it a hard end date. None of that is a reason to take the stake. It is only what keeps a bad idea from calcifying into a worse one.

Industry professionals broadly agree that the suspension pauses third-party CMMC audits but not the underlying legal obligation to protect CUI.

The post Industry Reactions to Pentagon Suspending CMMC Phase 2: Feedback Friday appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Chinese cybersecurity firms are facing action from the country’s military, but it’s not due to product or technical failures.

The post China’s Top Cybersecurity Firms Hit by Mounting Military Procurement Bans appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The new program stems from an AI-focused Executive Order signed by President Trump on June 2.

The post White House Launches AI-Driven ‘Gold Eagle’ Vulnerability Coordination Initiative appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The House voted 308-117 to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide and end the twice-yearly clock change. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, "where one G.O.P. leader said it was unclear whether it could move ahead and at least one Republican appears inclined to try to block it," reports The New York Times. Some sleep experts oppose permanent daylight saving time, arguing that year-round standard time better aligns with circadian rhythms and winter morning safety. The New York Times reports: President Trump has championed the effort to save an extra hour of daylight before nightfall and make the time zone permanent, describing the ritual of moving clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall a "ridiculous, twice yearly production." "We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day," Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post in May. "And who can be against that." A sizable bloc of Florida Republicans in Congress is leading the charge on legislation that would do just that, mandating daylight saving time nationwide for the entire year. Representative Vern Buchanan of the Tampa Bay area is backing the bill, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, another Tampa Bay-area Republican, cosponsored it. House leaders agreed to allow a vote on the measure this week as a sweetener for Ms. Luna in their efforts to persuade her to lift a legislative blockade she had maintained as she sought to force Senate action on a voting restriction bill Mr. Trump has championed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis is calling for a U.S.-led AI standards body to review frontier models for national security risks such as cybersecurity and biological threats. His proposal would create a federally overseen public-private organization, initially voluntary and eventually mandatory for U.S. deployment. CNBC reports: Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, said in an article posted on X on Tuesday that "urgent action" was needed to address risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- the point at which AI matches or surpasses human intelligence. "We've already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance," he said. [...] Hassabis said the U.S. was well positioned to lead in developing an AI framework "given its economic and technical standing." "It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organisation, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives," he added. FINRA regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets in the U.S. The proposed body would need "substantial" funding "in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing," Hassabis said. Funding would "likely" come from industry, he added. Frontier labs would initially voluntarily share models with the body for review up to 30 days before release, before becoming mandatory for deployment in the U.S. market after being shown to be "effective." "Specific agentic AI tests could look for attempts to bypass safety guardrails or signs of deception, and ensure best practices, such as digitally watermarking AI-generated images and generating human-readable output tokens to understand model reasoning," Hassabis said. Further reading: Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic Impact

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If a relatively small number of companies become the preferred recipients of government financing, they could accelerate consolidation," said Paul Murphy.

© The Associated Press

Multiple state-sponsored APTs are compromising poorly secured devices across critical infrastructure sector networks.

The post US, Allies Warn of Russian Cyberattacks Targeting Critical Infrastructure Routers appeared first on SecurityWeek.

A new CMMC review and reform task force will conduct a comprehensive review of the program.

The post Pentagon Suspends CMMC Phase 2 as It Rethinks Contractor Cybersecurity Rules appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported in May that a security researcher with cyber firm GitGuardian alerted him to reams of exposed passwords stored in a publicly accessible GitHub repository, which an employee of a CISA contractor had uploaded.

Other noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Abnormal AI sued by Anthropic, AssuranceAmerica data breach affects 7 million people, NSA brings back TAO.

The post In Other News: DHS Database Hacked, Adobe Boosts Patch Cadence, Canada Disrupts Ransomware Ops appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Two announcements on July 7, 2026, demonstrate the government’s determination to improve the level of cybersecurity within the UK.

The post UK Government Rolls Out Agentic AI Defense Plan Alongside Industry Pledge appeared first on SecurityWeek.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas "forever chemicals" in food, marking another setback for public health advocates' push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds. The agency is refusing to set limits despite a growing body of science and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding food is the biggest source of Pfas exposure. Testing has found the levels of Pfas in single servings of some contaminated foods to be equivalent to drinking many glasses of contaminated water. While regulators have focused on reining in Pfas in water, the chemicals are widely used throughout the food system, and there was hope that the agency under Robert F Kennedy Jr would take the threat more seriously. Kennedy leads the "make America healthy again" (Maha) movement, of which eliminating toxic chemicals from food is a cornerstone. [...] The November 2023 petition called on the FDA to check for up to 30 Pfas compounds in a range of produce, fish, eggs, milk and bread. The agency did not respond within the six-month timeframe required by law, but TEJTF scaled back its petition in 2025 to ask the agency to set advisory thresholds for PFOA and Pfos, two of the most common and dangerous Pfas compounds, in seafood and milk. Recent FDA testing found 70% of seafood samples contain the chemicals, while independent milk testing found it in 12% of 50 samples, including extremely high levels in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature brands. The FDA rejected the revised petition, stating it plans to take action on setting standards for Pfas, and there is "insufficient evidence to support [TEJTF's] request." The agency said it plans to set less non-binding "action levels" that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. "Tolerance levels," or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced that it helped take down NetNut, a 2 million strong malicious residential proxy network. The incident highlights the growing risks posed by residential proxy networks that quietly conscript consumer devices into services used by cybercriminals and nation-state actors alike.

The post Residential Proxy Risks: Understanding Google’s Latest Action Against 2 Million Strong NetNut appeared first on The Security Ledger with Paul F. Roberts.