Today ICE is allowed to resume using Medicaid data in deportation cases. The transfer of Medicaid data to ICE was unprecedented and put on hold. It's now back. We've uploaded the data sharing agreement here: www.404media.co/here-is-the-...

First blog of the year is five general tips for learning about #OTCybersecurity as a student tisiphone.net/2026/01/04/my-t...

three bylines, six months late, almost zero new information we hadn't reported months ago. lowercased our name and mentioned deep in the story. no link to us. said they couldnt find the govt privacy document (we did). good job wall street journal

Many are just waking up to the Grok-nonconsensual images story as these pictures began flooding X over the holidays, but here’s our piece from Jan 2 featuring a victim, Julie Yukari, who was brave enough to speak on the record and on camera: www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

NEW: A hacktivist dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers wiped three white supremacist websites on stage at the end of a talk at a hacker conference. The hacker also published users’ data on the website okstupid.lol. The three sites are still down, a week after the live hack.

Listening this morning: Save the Country, by The Fifth Dimension.

New year, new this.weekinsecurity.com newsletter, with all the cyber news you need to know. Includes: MongoBleed under global exploitation; Condé Nast data breach; Kimwolf's growing botnet; U.S. lifts sanctions on spyware executives, EU hackers call for digital independence from U.S. tech, and more.

News: Gang of Eight in Congress were only notified about Trump's Venezuela operation after it began, source familiar tells me. That means the heads of the Intelligence Committees in Senate and House were *not* consulted. Just crazy.

This is definitely not a SCIF and, among many other things, this alone is a major national security breach. Random third rate intelligence agencies would have known about this attack before Congressional leaders did.

While the Senate is asking Trump why they started a war to kidnap a foreign leader perhaps they might also ask why Trump freed a former foreign leader convicted of the same kind of crimes.

This is utterly insane shit, not normal. Most of the U.S. hasn't even fucking woken up yet.

'“On a daily basis I’m worrying that federal cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection may be backsliding,”' - @malwarejake.bsky.social tells @lhn.bsky.social in @wired.com. Me too, brother. Me too. www.wired.com/story/expire... @gate15.bsky.social @fergdawg.bsky.social #cybersecurity

Are you a security researcher or journalist? We want to hear from you! Please take this survey! DataBreaches.net and myself (at this.weekinsecurity.com) are running this survey to better understand the state of legal demands and criminal threats experienced in cybersecurity. Please share!

I'll be back on January 3, 2026 with the newest edition of this.weekinsecurity.com, your guide to the week in cyber, featuring all the news you might've missed, good news in the happy corner, and a reader-submitted cyber-cat. No email open/link tracking! Sign up/RSS today.

NEW: Apple, Google, and WhatsApp now regularly notify their users if they suspect they have been targeted or hacked with government spyware, such as that made by NSO Group or Paragon. We spoke to experts and wrote a guide on what to do, and where to go, if you receive one of those notifications.

“You are not entitled to a response from us, or anyone, ever,” is what a US Education Department spokesperson wrote to one of our reporters, @megomatz.bsky.social, after she repeatedly tried to get comment from the department and its officials. My column on the condemnation of good journalism.

Tech companies are increasingly warning their customers that they have been targeted by governments with advanced government spyware, such as NSO's Pegasus or Paragon's Graphite. What happens after receiving a threat notification?

Hello cyber friends! There's no this.weekinsecurity.com newsletter today (I'm off for the holidays). But if you're a fan of my weekly dispatch (and now blog!), please consider a paying subscription starting at $10/month for exclusive articles, analysis & more. Here's what I've written about so far:

NEW: Meet the folks at AccessNow's Digital Security Helpline, who have been investigating government spyware for more than a decade, helping journalists and dissidents all over the world. I spoke to Hassen Selmi, who heads the incident response team, to learn how his team fights spyware abuses.

Techdirt Doesn’t Annoy You Into Paying, And That’s Worth Paying For We're a few weeks into our end of year crowdfunding campaign—donate $100 or more (check out that $230 option!) and we'll send you our first commemorative challenge coin celebrating 30 years of Section 230. I've already laid out…

New, by @lorenzofb.bsky.social and me: We just published TechCrunch's annual jealousy list of cybersecurity stories that we *didn’t* publish but wish we had. This is the very best cybersecuirty reporting from our friends at competing publications. techcrunch.com/2025/12/26/t...

Very excited for this.

“It’s [Citizen Lab] one of the few institutions that investigate cyberthreats exclusively in the public interest, and in doing so, it has exposed some of the most egregious digital abuses of the past two decades.”

Are you a security researcher or journalist? We want to hear from you — please take this survey! Dissent Doe at DataBreaches.net, and yours truly at this.weekinsecurity.com, are running this survey to explore the state of legal demands and criminal threats in cybersecurity.

I need 30 people to subscribe to @garbageday.email right now. Please. We're so freaking close to 100,000. Please 😭🙏🏻❤️ www.garbageday.email

NEW: U.S. insurance giant Aflac says its June data breach affected 22.6 million people. The hackers, the company says, stole data such as Social Security numbers, government IDs, and health information. techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/u...

Scoop: The lone employee behind CISA's Pre-Ransomware Notification Initiative resigned on Friday rather than take a forced reassignment to FEMA. CISA says PRNI will continue, but sources said David Stern's loss will be a major setback for it. My story: www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cisa-ra...

NEW, by me: Uzbekistan publicly exposed its nationwide license plate surveillance system, no password needed. The system reveals a hundred locations where banks of cameras have been placed, including cities and rural areas; and contains raw video footage of millions of vehicles and their occupants.

So I hacked my way into being Cyber Policy Initiative Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Working on rural water critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Hey, ma, look! I *finally* got into University of Chicago. :D cpi.harris.uchicago.edu/2025/12/23/h...

Cyberattack knocks France's postal service and its banking arm offline | Euronews www.euronews.com/2025/12/22/c...

aka 60.Minutes.Inside.CECOT_CAM_DDoSecrets.2025.mkv

The Associated Press has an excellent story about how FCC boss Brendan Carr bullied a Bay Area AM radio station for the crime of reporting on local ICE activity. facing existential collapse it immediately demoted journalists end replaced political coverage with safe public interest cack:

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

SCOOP: Flock left at least 60 of its AI-powered, people-tracking surveillance cameras exposed and livestreaming to the open internet. We tracked ourselves. The exposure highlights the power of these cameras and types of things they're tracking. Not just cars. www.404media.co/flock-expose...

A peaceful start to the day in my morning playlist. ♫♪ Not Yet, by Ocote Soul Sounds, feat. Chico Mann & Quantic. ♪♫

The story is insane. The acting head of cyber security, a Noem crony, repeatedly demanded to see highly classified information he didn’t need access to, and when staff set up a lie detector test as a condition to grant him access, he failed it. So DHS suspended the staffers.

I am not exaggerating when I say that every week @zackwhittaker.com highlights a story I missed. Highly recommend a signing up for his newsletter.

And here it is, the final this.weekinsecurity.com newsletter of 2025, featuring all the cyber news you need to know from this past week in cyber. Including: Ransomware gang claims NHS breach; browser extensions stealing users' AI conversations; airline API bug exposes passenger data, and more. 🐈‍⬛

Tomorrow's edition of my weekly cybersecurity newsletter this.weekinsecurity.com is a very busy, very special, awesome dispatch for the holiday season. Featuring all the cyber news you need to know but might've missed, plus a festive cyber-cat, and more. Sign up/RSS! No email open/link tracking. 🐈‍⬛

Nakatomi runs on UNIX

Are you a security researcher or journalist? We want to hear from you — please take this survey! Dissent Doe at DataBreaches.net, and yours truly at this.weekinsecurity.com, are running this survey to explore the state of legal demands and criminal threats in cybersecurity.

Absolute horror story of a long-time Apple customer who was locked out of their devices and account with no recourse after redeeming a suspected bad gift card. hey.paris/posts/appleid/ Gift card scams are on the rise & increasingly difficult to spot, and can have devastating consequences.

Here's a quilt of Volume 4 of the Epstein document dump. Gives you a 10,000 foot view of the redactions. that's 2,704 docs.

The Epstein Files, everybody!

NEW: Researchers say hundreds of Cisco customers are vulnerable to the newly revealed Chinese government-backed hacking campaign. It appears the attacks right now “are targeted,” according to Shadowserver’s chief executive Piotr Kijewski. Censys for now only sees 220 exposed systems.

TechCrunch's security desk looks back at some of the worst cybersecurity incidents of 2025, including the biggest data breaches, disruptive cyberattacks, and damaging hacks.

Online casino and betting site Stake emailed customers saying their personal data was stolen in Mixpanel's breach. Stake says usernames, email addresses, dates of birth & phone numbers were compromised. That's OpenAI, CoinTracker, CoinLedger, SwissBorg, SoundCloud, Pornhub & Stake affected so far.