Four-byline alert: 🚨 “.. A broker for Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, according to three people familiar with the matter.” www.ft.com/content/744e...

Google has finally expanded on what its new disruptive cyber unit will do - it doesn't involve hacking back, as some had wondered. It's defensive-only in nature and involves, in part, doing what Microsoft has been doing for years - using court orders to take down threat actor infrastructure.

Trump deploys ICE agents to assist TSA at US airports reut.rs/4rJ3nvf

New, by me: A cyberattack on a vehicle breathalyzer company called Intoxalock has left drivers across the United States stranded and unable to start their cars.

Criminals using #OSINT to hunt down and kill other criminals www.occrp.org/en/project/b...

🧵 by @ilangoldenberg.bsky.social:

Courts generally weigh public interest in having depositions released against the deposed's interest in not being publicly embarrassed over what they said under oath. Public interest is high in this case. Interested in hearing from legal experts what chance they think gov has in getting these sealed

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigns over Iran war. x.com/joekent16jan...

Gamblers on Polymarket threatened Israeli journalist if he didn't change a report about a missile that bypassed interceptors and struck an open area outside Jerusalem. Also, an Israeli reservist and civilian were indicted for using classified info to make bets before Israel bombed Iran last June

EXCLUSIVE: The number of searches about Americans conducted by the FBI in a controversial foreign intelligence database rose by roughly 35 percent in 2025, according to a letter by a senior agency official obtained by Recorded Future News. therecord.media/new-data-sho...

Scoop: DHS ousted multiple privacy officers at CBP after they questioned orders to purposely mislabel records about government surveillance to prevent their release under FOIA.

I asked President Trump about the FBI reportedly seizing election records in Arizona. He said they must have done that because it was a “rigged” election. I pointed out to him that his own AG said there was not measurable voter fraud to overturn that election. Then he called me a rotten reporter.

Just glanced at the clock thinking it's 1pm and the clock says 5pm. Welp. So much for my plan for the day.

Reason no. 43379966 why I’ll never install MDM on a personal device.

The hackers say they targeted Stryker in retaliation for the bombing of the all-girls school in Iran and that they have wiped more that 200,000 Stryker systems, servers, and mobile devices and stolen 50 terabytes of critical data, forcing Stryker offices in 79 countries to shut down

🚨NEW🚨 Cops used an AI-generated teenager to catch pedophiles on Kik Messenger, an app notorious as a hive of predator activity. A rare insight into how police can spin up AI teens for sting operations on social media. But where else are cops using AI personas? www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

Medical device maker Stryker reportedly hit with cyberattack from Iranian hacktivist group. So far only Irish news reporting, not here in US. "many employees have had their device data wiped and cannot access their accounts" Stryker makes surgical equipment, defibrillators, imaging equipment

Exclusive: Foreign hacker in 2023 compromised Epstein files held by FBI, source and documents show - @raphae.li www.reuters.com/world/us/for...

Last year I received about half a dozen reports each week about new vulnerabilities researchers discovered in software. Imagine how many I'm getting now from people using AI to find vulns. If I'm honest, it feels a bit like cheating to use AI and then seek credit for the work.

200 hours.

Timely profile of Markwayne Mullin from @issielapowsky.bsky.social. The piece was written (but not published) prior to Mullin being tapped yesterday to replace fired Kristi Noem as DHS secretary www.inc.com/issie-lapows...

NEW: The CIA has been working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran, multiple people familiar with the plan told CNN. www.cnn.com/2026/03/03/p...

My initial reaction to Iran's response was surprise at how weak it seemed. Until the UAE released data on missiles-UAVs launched vs missiles-UAVs intercepted. In cyber, offense generally wins. In kinetics, at least in this one case, defense won.

"In the end, the talks between Anthropic and the Department of Defense were undone by weeks of building frustration between men who had differing philosophies about A.I. and who did not like one another."

“I don’t think people realized how ill-served we, the American public, were by having someone that was this unserious, just asleep at the wheel in an agency leadership position like this,” said one of the four officials. www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Hegseth: "Israel has clear missions as well for which we are grateful. Capable partners are good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force ... no stupid rules of engagement."

Seeing the lengthy list of changes/cutbacks to CISA catalogued in this one piece makes it clear there is little left of it. The agency is less than a decade old and struggled for years to find its footing before it started to make progress. But all advances it made have been gutted in last 12 months

ICE won’t be at polling places for midterms, Trump appointee tells state election officials www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/p...

They've teased this for weeks as Pitt staff have placed bets about why another hospital in same city was having to send their patients to the Pitt. They finally revealed last wk it was due to ransomware - the reveal came just as the Pitt's own computers went down. Tonight's ep should be interesting

Great pull from the Epstein files. FBI tried to figure out who on 4chan had scooped all news outlets on Epstein's death, but the trail went cold when they couldn't find who had that IP address.

Trump admin's favorite nuclear startup -- Valar Atomics, a California firm that aims to make small-scale nuclear reactors -- has ties to Russia and to Epstein through Masha Bucher, a "one-time pro-Putin Russian political activist-turned Jeffery Epstein publicist-turned Silicon Valley kingmaker"

News: The Trump administration told Congress it won’t share the classified underlying intelligence—a conversation two foreigners had about Jared Kushner—that led to a whistleblower complaint against U.S. spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, citing claims of executive privilege. www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

These dogs are having the time of their lives following this week's historic blizzard in the Northeast. Please enjoy. 14/10 for all

Peter Williams, former Trenchant exec who stole zero-day exploits from his employer and sold them to a Russian exploit buyer between 2022-2025, was sentenced today to 7 years and 3 months in prison in a hearing that was partially closed to the public due to sensitive nature of tools he stole.

Anthropic on Monday accused three Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories of stealthily trying to siphon Claude’s capabilities for their own models, potentially in a way that could fuel offensive cyber operations via @timstarks.bsky.social cyberscoop.com/anthropic-ac...

For those who don't understand the "banality of evil" reference, it's from Hannah Arendt's book about Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel. She used it to describe how ordinary Germans/Poles/Ukrainians became accomplices to the Nazis by mindlessly buying into the demonization of their Jewish neighbors

Never in a million years did I ever fathom when I resurrected the Epstein story in 2018 that it would lead to first arrest of a British Royal in four centuries. Not since King Charles I was arrested in 1647. open.substack.com/pub/jkbjourn...

The WSJ reports that the Trump administration has massed "significant" air power in striking distance of Iran, but hasn't yet decided what the purpose of an attack would be. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

Good piece from @metacurity.com about whether cyber played significant role in power outage during Caracas raid. "How the outage is framed matters because...if the episode is widely presented as a 'cyber-only' success...it may encourage outsized conclusions about what cyber tools can accomplish"

“Any time there is sufficient ambiguity in the behavior of a person, we are motivated to see it in a way that benefits us." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/w...

Everyone in San Francisco staring wide-eyed right now at a receipt showing they paid $5-per-gallon for gasoline (though it is ironic that in DC, where the cost of living rivals San Francisco, it cost me just $2.70/per gallon when I filled my tank last week)

The makers of password managers like Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane and LastPass promise they can't see your password vault. But that's not always true. A server compromise can mean game over for you, say researchers who examined some of the top password managers on the market

When a hacker named "Waifu" and "Judische" began posting death threats against security researcher Allison Nixon, she had no idea why he targeted her. So she set out to unmask him. The quest led her to Connor Moucka, a 25-yr-old Canadian who was ringleader of infamous Snowflake/AT&T hacks. My story:

I'm a new transplant to the East Coast, and I don't know if I'll ever get used to the frightening sound of a massive block of ice suddenly breaking free and sliding off the rooftop.

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot. I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

Seeing posts saying FBI could not get into WaPo reporter's phone because she had it in Lockdown Mode. This isn't true. They couldn't use forensic tool to capture full-disk image, but they could still access contents. They had to take photos of it, though, which is still a gain for privacy.

For those looking for freelance work in the wake of WaPo layoffs: I'm an editor at large overseeing Ideas & Culture at Bloomberg, including our Books coverage. Find me at [email protected]

As Bezos's Washington Post announces sweeping layoffs this morning ...