Thousands of planes and ships are facing GPS jamming and spoofing. Experts warn these attacks could potentially impact critical infrastructure, communication networks, and more.

The disruption to GPS services started getting worse on Christmas Day. Planes and ships moving around southern Sweden and Poland lost connectivity as their radio signals were interfered with. Since then, the region around the Baltic Sea—including neighboring Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—has faced persistent attacks against GPS systems.

Tens of thousands of planes flying in the region have reported problems with their navigation systems in recent months amid widespread jamming attacks, which can make GPS inoperable. As the attacks have grown, Russia has increasingly been blamed, with open source researchers tracking the source to Russian regions such as Kaliningrad. In one instance, signals were disrupted for 47 hours continuously. On Monday, marking one of the most serious incidents yet, airline Finnair canceled its flights to Tartu, Estonia, for a month, after GPS interference forced two of its planes to abort landings at the airport and turn around.

The jamming in the Baltic region, which was first spotted in early 2022, is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, there has been a rapid uptick in attacks against GPS signals and wider satellite navigation systems, known as GNSS, including those of Europe, China, and Russia. The attacks can jam signals, essentially forcing them offline, or spoof the signals, making aircraft and ships appear at false locations on maps. Beyond the Baltics, war zone areas around Ukraine and the Middle East have also seen sharp rises in GPS disruptions, including signal blocking meant to disrupt airborne attacks.

Now, governments and telecom and airline safety experts are increasingly sounding the alarm about the disruptions and the potential for major disasters. Foreign ministers in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have all blamed Russia for GPS issues in the Baltics this week and said the threat should be taken seriously.

“It cannot be ruled out that this jamming is a form of hybrid warfare with the aim of creating uncertainty and unrest,” Jimmie Adamsson, the chief of public affairs for the Swedish Navy, tells WIRED. “Of course, there are concerns, mostly for civilian shipping and aviation, that an accident will occur creating an environmental disaster. There is also a risk that ships and aircraft will stop traffic to this area and therefore global trade will be affected.”

“A growing threat situation must be expected in connection with GPS jamming,” Joe Wagner, a spokesperson from Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, tells WIRED, saying there are technical ways to reduce its impact. Officials in Finland say they have also seen an increase in airline disruptions in and around the country. And a spokesperson for the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, tells WIRED that the number of jamming and spoofing incidents have “increased significantly” over the past four years, and interfering with radio signals is prohibited under the ITU’s rules.

**On the Upswing**

Attacks against GPS, and the wider GNSS category, come in two forms. First, GPS jamming looks to overwhelm the radio signals that make up GPS and make the systems unusable. Second, spoofing attacks can replace the original signal with a new location—spoofed ships can, for example, appear on maps as if they’re at inland airports.

Both types of interference are up in frequency. The disruptions—at least at this stage—mostly impact planes flying at high altitudes and ships that can be in open water, not people’s individual phones or other systems that rely on GPS.

The Dangerous Rise of GPS Attacks

President Joe Biden has updated the directives to protect US critical infrastructure against major threats, from cyberattacks to terrorism to climate change.

The Biden administration is updating the US government’s blueprint for protecting the country’s most important infrastructure from hackers, terrorists, and natural disasters.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum overhauling a 2013 directive that lays out how agencies work together, with private companies, and with state and local governments to improve the security of hospitals, power plants, water facilities, schools, and other critical infrastructure.

Biden’s memo, which is full of updates to the Obama-era directive and new assignments for federal agencies, arrives as the US confronts an array of serious threats to the computer systems and industrial equipment undergirding daily life. In addition to foreign government hackers and cyber criminals seeking to destabilize American society by crippling vital infrastructure, extremist groups and lone actors have plotted to sabotage these systems, and climate change is fueling natural disasters that regularly overwhelm basic services.

But foreign cyber threats loom largest as a danger in the near future. “America faces an era of strategic competition, where state actors will continue to target American critical infrastructure and tolerate or enable malicious activity conducted by nonstate actors,” Caitlin Durkovich, the deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response, told reporters during a briefing on Monday.

The memorandum has three core purposes: to formalize the role of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as the lead agency tasked with protecting infrastructure from bad actors and natural hazards; to improve partnerships with the private sector through faster, more comprehensive information sharing; and to lay out the groundwork for minimum cybersecurity requirements for sectors that currently lack them.

The regulatory push represents a dramatic shift from the government’s approach to infrastructure protection a decade ago. The Biden administration, having concluded that voluntary partnerships were not sufficiently reducing risks to essential services, has applied new cyber rules to the aviation, pipeline, railroad, maritime, and medical device industries, and the Department of Health and Human Services is working on security requirements for hospitals. Now, the administration plans to use the new memo to turbocharge efforts to apply rules to other sectors.

“It is important that we work together to set baseline security standards for the lifeline sectors on which the American way of life and our democracy depends,” Durkovich says.

The document tasks the government’s “Sector Risk Management Agencies,” or SRMAs—each of which oversees and assists one or more infrastructure sectors with cyber and physical security—with determining whether existing rules adequately address their industries’ vulnerabilities and, if not, crafting new rules. The memo includes a process to help agencies if they conclude that they lack “the tools or authorities necessary to ensure effective implementation of those requirements,” a senior administration official said during Monday’s briefing, speaking anonymously pursuant to the White House’s terms.

That process is designed to support agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, which tried to issue cyber requirements for water systems in 2023 but abandoned the effort after a legal challenge from industry groups and Republican-led states.

Anticipating further industry pushback to new rules in various sectors, the White House is promising to collaborate with companies. “These requirements … need to be developed in close coordination with the owners and operators of that infrastructure to ensure they are appropriate and proportionate to the vulnerability,” the senior administration official says.

In addition to new cyber standards, the memo attempts to kickstart more harmonious and productive information-sharing relationships between government agencies and private companies. The private sector often complains that agencies either declassify information too slowly or keep it tightly restricted to only executives with security clearances. Many companies say that without timely access to the government’s detailed intelligence about hackers’ activities, it is difficult to stay ahead of those adversaries.

To address these tensions, Biden is directing US spy agencies to redouble their efforts to “collect, produce, and share intelligence” with infrastructure operators, Durkovich says.

The memo requires the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to produce a report on the state of the government’s information-sharing with the private sector. As part of that process, the senior administration official says, ODNI will work with CISA and other agencies to write procedures for better outreach to companies.

The government can look to two recent case studies for insights about the best ways to share useful information without jeopardizing the sensitive sources and methods used to gather it. As Russia began its expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the intelligence community declassified and published intelligence about the Kremlin’s plans at such a rapid tempo that it stunned many former officials. And when officials wanted to warn companies about the seriousness of China’s recent cyber intrusions into US infrastructure, they convened classified briefings that starkly laid out the potential damage Beijing could do in the event of a war.

“We have a lot of instructive emerging practices and lessons learned from what has happened in the first three years of this administration,” says the senior official.

In addition to the report on information sharing, the memo also gives ODNI 180 days to produce a formal intelligence assessment on threats to America’s infrastructure, and the senior official says the government “will work to share that” with companies to the extent possible.

Beyond its major substantive changes, the new memo significantly boosts the stature of CISA, which did not exist when the previous plan was written. The memo codifies CISA’s twin roles as a government-wide coordinator for infrastructure security work and as the designated SRMA for eight of the 16 sectors.

CISA has pursued its role as the lead infrastructure protection agency in multiple ways, its director, Jen Easterly, told reporters during Monday’s briefing.

First, CISA reestablished a council of senior officials that makes major decisions about how agencies coordinate to address risks. Second, Easterly says, CISA has provided agencies with “guidance and templates” to help produce risk assessments and risk management plans for each of their sectors. Third, CISA is finalizing a list of “systemically important entities” whose operations power daily life in fundamental ways.

The government will work with the companies on the important-entities list—there are fewer than 500 of them—“to ensure they have the resources necessary to manage risk,” a second senior administration official told reporters on Monday. Those companies will also be priorities for regulation.

While it updates key parts of the government’s defensive playbook, the memo does not change the basic structure underpinning this work: the 16 sectors—each containing a collection of related industries—that together comprise the nation’s critical infrastructure. A CISA report published in late 2021 recommended that the administration consider adding new sectors for the space and bioeconomy industries, but officials decided not to do so.

“Because space is really a part of so many different sectors, it did not, at this time, make sense to break space out as a separate sector,” the second senior official says. (CISA is, however, focused on space cybersecurity.) Government leaders similarly decided that bioeconomy risks were not unique enough to merit a new sector. But both industries could receive their own sectors in the future “if there are significant changes” to the risks they face, says the second official.

In light of how quickly those risks and other conditions could change, the memo directs DHS to submit a “national risk management plan” to the White House every two years summarizing what the government is doing to prevent harm.

Biden administration officials see the new document as more than just an updated strategy. To them, it is a watershed moment in how the government organizes itself to protect Americans from poisoned water, widespread blackouts, and other infrastructure disasters.

The new memo, Durkovich says, “prepares us for the next decade—what the president calls the decisive decade—and what lies out on the horizon.”

The White House Has a New Master Plan to Stop Worst-Case Scenarios

Plus: Google holds off on killing cookies, Samourai Wallet founders get arrested, and GM stops driver surveillance program.

Controversial gunshot-detection company ShotSpotter has deployed more than 25,000 microphones across 170 cities worldwide. This week, WIRED and _South Side Weekly_ revealed the company may continue to provide gunshot data to police in cities even after contracts have ended. Internal emails seen by the publications suggest ShotSpotter sensors may have stayed online despite law enforcement deals having expired, raising questions about what will happen to 2,500 microphones in Chicago when its contract runs out at the end of the year.

Elsewhere, Change Healthcare finally admitted to paying a ransom to the AlphV hackers, also known as BlackCat, that extorted the medical company. Weeks ago, WIRED revealed the attackers were paid $22 million, one of the largest ransomware payments ever. However, in a statement this week the company admitted for the first time that it paid the ransom as part of its effort “to do all it could to protect patient data from disclosure.” Some of that data still found its way onto the dark web.

In another successful grift, researchers have found animators in North Korea creating artwork for major Hollywood studios. A misconfigured North Korea cloud server, discovered at the end of last year, contained thousands of animation files, notes, and working documents for productions of shows that stream on Amazon Prime Video and Max. The companies likely didn’t know workers from the Hermit Kingdom were creating the artwork, but it’s another example of how North Korea is using skilled workers to circumvent sanctions and make the regime money.

Meanwhile, Cisco revealed this week that some of its devices, called Adaptive Security Appliances, have been targeted by state-sponsored hackers who exploited two zero-day vulnerabilities in the systems. The attack, dubbed ArcaneDoor, is believed to have had an espionage focus and sources suspect China’s state-backed hackers may be the culprits.

The November presidential elections may still be months away, but the next US president will have increased surveillance capabilities. This week Joe Biden signed a controversial bill extending and enhancing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA allows spy agencies to collect Americans’ calls, emails, and more when pursuing foreign intelligence. Critics say the changes are “a gift to any president who may wish to spy on political enemies.”

That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

**School Principal Framed Using AI Voice Deepfake**

In January, an Instagram account in Baltimore, Maryland, posted an alleged audio recording of local school principal Eric Eiswert making racist and antisemitic comments. Baltimore County Public Schools quickly opened an investigation into the incident. However, this week, a former athletic director at Pikesville High School was arrested after police said he used artificial intelligence software to create the fake audio clip of Eiswert. The audio included comments about “ungrateful Black kids” and disparaging remarks about the Jewish community.

Dazhon Darien, the former staff member, was arrested after being stopped in possession of a gun at an airport when officials saw there was an outstanding arrest warrant, the _Baltimore Banner_ reported. The media organization reports that Darien was charged with disrupting school activities and stalking. The fake clip was allegedly made in retaliation for the principal investigating Darien over irregular payments to his roommate.

Police reports, the _Banner_ says, indicate that the audio clip had a “profound” impact on the school principal. “It not only led to Eiswert’s temporary removal from the school but also triggered a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and numerous calls to the school,” police reports said.

Voice-cloning technology, which can fall under the broader banner of deepfake technology, has rapidly improved within the last year. Cloning tools can recreate someone’s voice to a relatively realistic level using just a few seconds of real audio. The systems have increasingly been used to impersonate politicians and scam people over the phone.

**General Motors Stops Driving Surveillance, Following Privacy Complaints**

Your car knows a lot about you—from where and how you drive, to your weight and how you sit. This week, following a series of revelations from _New York Times_ reporter Kashmir Hill, General Motors announced it will end its “Smart Driver” program and unenroll all customers. Until the reports from the _Times_, GM was sharing data with data brokers LexisNexis and Verisk, which shared it with insurers and led to high payments for some people. The OnStar Smart Driver program had been designed to promote safer driving, GM said. However, many people were not aware they had been enrolled in the system. Ten lawsuits have been filed so far about the Smart Driver program and how it shared data.

**Google Delays Killing Cookies—Again**

In January 2020, Google said it would remove third-party cookies from Chrome within two years—following Safari, Brave, Firefox, and other browsers in eradicating the tracking technology. It’s now April 2024 and the company has delayed the change for a third time, saying it’ll happen in 2025. Google’s proposed cookie replacement has faced scrutiny from competition and privacy regulators in the UK, with critics saying cookies are just being replaced by another form of tracking and suggesting the changes could further benefit Google’s ad business.

**Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested Over $2 Billion Unlawful Transactions**

Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, the founders of crypto-mixing service Samourai Wallet, were charged by US prosecutors this week for running an unlicensed money transfer business and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The company processed $2 billion in “unlawful transactions” and “facilitated more than $100 million in money laundering,” according to Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and other investigators. The charges can carry a maximum of 20 years each. The move comes as US prosecutors try to clampdown on crypto mixing services that may be used to hide funds or allow illicit behavior. Mixers Bitcoin Fog, Helix, and Tornado Cash have all faced action in recent years.

**Chinese Keyboard Vulnerabilities Could Reveal Typing**

New research from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab this week revealed vulnerabilities in eight Chinese keyboard apps that, if exploited, could allow everything typed to be intercepted. Up to a billion people may be impacted, the researchers say. They tested apps from major technology companies and phone makers, including Baidu, Honor, Huawei, Samsung and Tencent. “Most of the vulnerable apps can be exploited by an entirely passive network eavesdropper,” they researchers write, adding that most of the impacted companies fixed the vulnerabilities when they were reported.

School Employee Allegedly Framed a Principal With Racist Deepfake Rant

A ban on weapons of mass destruction in orbit has stood since 1967. Russia apparently has other ideas.

Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution Wednesday that would have reaffirmed a nearly 50-year-old ban on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit, two months after reports Russia has plans to do just that.

Russia's vote against the resolution was no surprise. As one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, Russia has veto power over any resolution that comes before the body. China abstained from the vote, and 13 other members of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution.

If it passed, the resolution would have affirmed a binding obligation in Article IV of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says nations are "not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction."

**Going Nuclear**

Russia is one of 115 parties to the Outer Space Treaty. The Security Council vote Wednesday follows reports in February that Russia is developing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.

"The United States assesses that Russia is developing a new satellite carrying a nuclear device," said Jake Sullivan, President Biden's national security advisor. "We have heard President Putin say publicly that Russia has no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space. If that were the case, Russia would not have vetoed this resolution."

The United States and Japan proposed the joint resolution, which also called on nations not to develop nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction designed to be placed into orbit around the Earth. In a statement, US and Japanese diplomats highlighted the danger of a nuclear detonation in space. Such an event would have "grave implications for sustainable development, and other aspects of international peace and security," US officials said in a press release.

With its abstention from the vote, "China has shown that it would rather defend Russia as its junior partner, than safeguard the global nonproliferation regime," said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN.

US government officials have not offered details about the exact nature of the anti-satellite weapon they say Russia is developing. A nuclear explosion in orbit would destroy numerous satellites—from many countries—and endanger astronauts. Space debris created from a nuclear detonation could clutter orbital traffic lanes needed for future spacecraft.

The Soviet Union launched more than 30 military satellites powered by nuclear reactors. Russia's military space program languished in the first couple of decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, and US intelligence officials say it still lags behind the capabilities possessed by the US Space Force and the Chinese military.

Russia's military funding has largely gone toward the war in Ukraine for the last two years, but Putin and other top Russian officials have raised threats of nuclear force and attacks on space assets against adversaries. Russia's military launched a cyberattack against a commercial satellite communications network when it invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Russia has long had an appetite for anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. The Soviet Union experimented with "co-orbital" ASATs in the 1960s and 1970s. When deployed, these co-orbital ASATs would have attacked enemy satellites by approaching them and detonating explosives or using a grappling arm to move the target out of orbit.

In 1987, the Soviet Union launched an experimental weapons platform into orbit to test laser technologies that could be used against enemy satellites. Russia shot down one of its own satellites in 2021 in a widely condemned "direct ascent" ASAT test. This Russian direct ascent ASAT test followed demonstrations of similar capability by China, the United States, and India. Russia's military has also demonstrated satellites over the last decade that could grapple onto an adversary's spacecraft in orbit, or fire a projectile to take out an enemy satellite.

These ASAT capabilities could destroy or disable one enemy satellite at a time. The US Space Force is getting around this threat by launching large constellations of small satellites to augment the military's much larger legacy communications, surveillance, and missile warning spacecraft. A nuclear ASAT weapon could threaten an entire constellation or render some of space inaccessible due to space debris.

Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, called this week's UN resolution "an unscrupulous play of the United States" and a "cynical forgery and deception." Russia and China proposed an amendment to the resolution that would have banned all weapons in space. This amendment got the support of about half of the Security Council but did not pass.

Outside the 15-member Security Council, the original resolution proposed by the United States and Japan won the support of more than 60 nations as co-sponsors.

"Regrettably, one permanent member decided to silence the critical message we wanted to send to the present and future people of the world: Outer space must remain a domain of peace, free of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons," said Kazuyuki Yamazaki, Japan's ambassador to the UN.

_This story originally appeared on_ _Ars Technica._

Russia Vetoed a UN Resolution to Ban Space Nukes

Sources suspect China is behind the targeted exploitation of two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco’s security appliances.

Network security appliances like firewalls are meant to keep hackers out. Instead, digital intruders are increasingly targeting them as the weak link that lets them pillage the very systems those devices are meant to protect. In the case of one hacking campaign over recent months, Cisco is now revealing that its firewalls served as beachheads for sophisticated hackers penetrating multiple government networks around the world.

On Wednesday, Cisco warned that its so-called Adaptive Security Appliances—devices that integrate a firewall and VPN with other security features—had been targeted by state-sponsored spies who exploited two zero-day vulnerabilities in the networking giant's gear to compromise government targets globally in a hacking campaign it's calling ArcaneDoor.

The hackers behind the intrusions, which Cisco's security division Talos is calling UAT4356 and which Microsoft researchers who contributed to the investigation have named STORM-1849, couldn't be clearly tied to any previous intrusion incidents the companies had tracked. Based on the group's espionage focus and sophistication, however, Cisco says the hacking appeared to be state-sponsored.

“This actor utilized bespoke tooling that demonstrated a clear focus on espionage and an in-depth knowledge of the devices that they targeted, hallmarks of a sophisticated state-sponsored actor,” a blog post from Cisco's Talos researchers reads.

Cisco declined to say which country it believed to be responsible for the intrusions, but sources familiar with the investigation tell WIRED the campaign appears to be aligned with China's state interests.

Cisco says the hacking campaign began as early as November 2023, with the majority of intrusions taking place between December and early January of this year, when it learned of the first victim. “The investigation that followed identified additional victims, all of which involved government networks globally,” the company's report reads.

In those intrusions, the hackers exploited two newly discovered vulnerabilities in Cisco's ASA products. One, which it's calling Line Dancer, let the hackers run their own malicious code in the memory of the network appliances, allowing them to issue commands to the devices, including the ability to spy on network traffic and steal data. A second vulnerability, which Cisco is calling Line Runner, would allow the hackers' malware to maintain its access to the target devices even when they were rebooted or updated. It's not yet clear if the vulnerabilities served as the initial access points to the victim networks, or how the hackers might have otherwise gained access before exploiting the Cisco appliances.

Cisco has released software updates to patch both vulnerabilities, and advises that customers implement them immediately, along with other recommendations for detecting whether they've been targeted. Despite the hackers' Line Runner persistence mechanism, a separate advisory from the UK's National Cybersecurity Center notes that physically unplugging an ASA device does disrupt the hackers' access. “A hard reboot by pulling the power plug from the Cisco ASA has been confirmed to prevent Line Runner from re-installing itself,” the advisory reads.

The ArcaneDoor hacking campaign represents just the latest series of intrusions to target network perimeter applications sometimes referred to as “edge” devices like email servers, firewalls, and VPNs—often devices intended to provide security—whose vulnerabilities allowed hackers to obtain a staging point inside a victim's network. Cisco's Talos researchers warn of that broader trend in their report, referring to highly sensitive networks that they've seen targeted via edge devices in recent years. “Gaining a foothold on these devices allows an actor to directly pivot into an organization, reroute or modify traffic and monitor network communications,” they write. “In the past two years, we have seen a dramatic and sustained increase in the targeting of these devices in areas such as telecommunications providers and energy sector organizations—critical infrastructure entities that are likely strategic targets of interest for many foreign governments.”

State-sponsored hackers' shift to compromising edge devices has become prevalent enough over the past year that Google-owned security firm Mandiant also highlighted it in its annual M-Trends report earlier this week, based on the company's threat intelligence and incident response findings. The report points to widely exploited vulnerabilities in network edge devices sold by Barracuda and Ivanti and notes that hackers—and specifically espionage-focused Chinese groups—are building custom malware for edge devices, in part because many networks have little or no way to monitor for compromise of the devices. Detecting the ArcaneDoor hackers' access to Cisco ASA appliances, in particular, is “incredibly difficult,” according to the advisory from the UK's NCSC.

Mandiant notes that it has observed Russian state-sponsored hackers targeting edge devices too: It's observed the unit of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, known as Sandworm, repeatedly hack edge devices used by Ukrainian organizations to gain and maintain access to those victim networks, often for data-destroying cyberattacks. In some cases, the lack of visibility and monitoring in those edge devices has meant that Sandworm was able to wipe a victim network while holding on to its control of an edge device—then hit the same network again.

“They’re systemically targeting security appliances that sit on the edge for access to the rest of the network,” says John Hultquist, Mandiant's head of threat intelligence. “This is no longer an emerging trend. It's established."

Hultquist notes, however, that China is unmatched in its discovery and use of network appliance zero days, like the ones it has used to run rampant through Cisco firewalls over the past several months. He expects more to come, as China's cyberspies continue to turn devices meant to protect target networks against their owners. “It's unlikely these zero days are being produced haphazardly. We suspect a well-resourced, coordinated effort is underway to find and exploit these vulnerabilities,” Hultquist says. “Unfortunately, we'll almost certainly see several more zero-days in security appliances this year.”

'ArcaneDoor' Cyberspies Hacked Cisco Firewalls to Access Government Networks

Internal emails suggest that the company continued to provide gunshot data to police in cities where its contracts had been canceled.

When Mayor Brandon Johnson announced in February that Chicago would stop using the gunshot-detection system known as ShotSpotter by year’s end, local activists were elated.

Ever since 2021, when the police fatally shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo while responding to a ShotSpotter alert, the Stop ShotSpotter Campaign has been pressuring the city to ditch the technology. Johnson’s decision not to renew the Windy City’s contract with ShotSpotter was seen as the culmination of the campaign’s efforts.

But ending the contract may not be enough to remove the company’s more than 2,500 sensors from neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides, where they’re disproportionately located. Internal emails reviewed by _South Side Weekly_ and WIRED suggest that ShotSpotter keeps its sensors online and, in some instances, provides gunshot-detection alerts to police departments in cities where its contracts have expired or been canceled. The emails raise new questions about whether the more than 2,500 sensors in Chicago will be turned off and removed, regardless of Johnson’s decision.

“We continue to focus on serving the City of Chicago with our critical gunshot detection technology service during our contractual term,” a ShotSpotter spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Nothing has changed regarding our singular purpose to close the public safety gap by enabling law enforcement agencies globally to more efficiently and effectively respond to incidents of criminal gunfire … where gunshot wound victims’ lives are in the balance.”

An organizer who’s been active in the push to cancel ShotSpotter’s contract in Chicago wasn’t surprised that the company has continued to work with police behind the scenes in cities where contracts have ended.

“I think it’s exactly what cops and corporations do,” says Nathan Palmer, an organizer with the Stop ShotSpotter Campaign and Black Youth Project 100. “Especially when we’re thinking about Chicago, it would benefit ShotSpotter to keep the mics up and working so that they can also throw lobbying money at whoever’s gonna oppose Mayor Brandon Johnson in the next election.”

ShotSpotter, which rebranded as SoundThinking in 2023, has a customer base of roughly 170 cities, according to its most recent filing with the US Securities and Exchanges Commission. Chicago is not the first to deem the ShotSpotter technology not worth the cost. (By the time the city’s contract extension ends in November, ShotSpotter will have cost Chicago more than $57 million since then-mayor Rahm Emanuel inked a comprehensive deal with the company in 2018.)

San Antonio, San Diego, and Dayton, Ohio, have all joined a growing list of cities that have publicly cut ties with ShotSpotter. Confidential company emails reviewed by the _Weekly_ and WIRED, however, indicate that the company never completely pulled its technology out of some cities.

An October 2023 email sent to John Fountain, a director of field and network operations at SoundThinking who left the company in December, described how the company continued to secretly offer its help to police in cities where contracts had lapsed. The email, which addressed a shortage of sensors in a city with an active contract, apparently referred to Clark Dunson, SoundThinking’s director of systems engineering.

“I would like to imagine we can pull some \[sensors\] from an old coverage area … Maybe San Diego and Indianapolis,” wrote the sender, whose name was redacted. “Last time we looked to remove sensors from an old coverage area I know Clark flipped out since we still work with police using those sensors (which I did not know).”

A spokesperson for SoundThinking declined to answer detailed questions about what services the company has provided to police departments after contracts are up and instead emailed a statement. “SoundThinking believes this confidential information was illegally disclosed by ex-employees and is currently pursuing civil and criminal remedies against the private parties responsible,” the statement read. “Due to this ongoing litigation, we cannot comment specifically on the leaked materials; however, we will continue to object to the use of our stolen data and reinforce the safety and privacy risks of disclosing individual sensor locations.”

ShotSpotter is suing two former employees who the company alleges posted confidential company information on Twitter after one was fired in November.

In February, WIRED reported ShotSpotter sensor locations based on leaked company data showing more than 25,000 microphones arrayed across the globe. Those maps revealed active sensors remained in both San Diego and Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police recently told the _Indianapolis Star_ that it does not have a contract with the company after piloting technology from three different gunshot-detection companies in 2022.

“The evaluation of whether or not gunshot detection technology system is right for Indianapolis is still ongoing,” a police spokesperson told the _Star_. The statement added that the department believed it was ShotSpotter’s responsibility to remove its sensors.

ShotSpotter doesn’t sell its sensors to cities. Instead, the company uses a software-as-service model, billing cities for the software and applications that allow police to access ShotSpotter alerts. When a contract expires, the company apparently doesn’t always retrieve its sensors.

An email from Fountain dated from December 2022 estimated that there were a “few hundred sensors still installed” in San Diego and that they are “active even if the market isn’t.”

Fountain again noted that removing any sensors from San Diego would require Clark Dunson’s approval. “Clark is really pushy and he likes to tinker around with those coverage area\[s\] but I imagine we can pull a few here and there,” he wrote.

In August 2023, Dunson sent an internal email that said ShotSpotter had been providing “test alerts” to police in San Diego and San Antonio. “As a last resort we can pull sensors away from San Diego or San Antonio if needed but Lee \[Lim, a SoundThinking tech-support engineer\] has been working with the PD in those areas giving test alerts and tracking down detections for them.”

The San Diego Police Department denied that sensors in that city are active or collecting any data. SDPD also claimed to have never asked the company for help with gunshot detections in any incidents involving homicides or shootings.

“At this time, there is no contract and there is no plan to move forward with the company,” a spokesperson for the department wrote in an email. San Diego and ShotSpotter entered into an agreement that allows the company to leave its sensors on city property. “However, as of September 2021, the equipment is deactivated, cannot collect any data, and is inoperable.”

But emails the _Weekly_ and WIRED obtained via a California Public Records Act request show that ShotSpotter stayed in touch with SDPD for more than 15 months after the city’s contract expired in September 2021. In those emails, ShotSpotter support staff routinely address SDPD as a “ShotSpotter Customer.”

These weren’t just mass marketing emails that all customers past and present are frequently subjected to. The emails we obtained show that in October 2021, after the contract had lapsed, ShotSpotter also provided an SDPD officer with an “investigative lead summary” about a shooting in San Diego, including the precise location and the number of rounds detected, upon SDPD’s request.

ShotSpotter also sent SDPD emails updating the department about routine scheduled maintenance in October 2022 and how the company planned to address the “extremely high volume of fireworks activities” around New Year’s Day in 2023.

“Despite our efforts, we may occasionally miss a gunshot in error,” wrote Dinh Nguyen, a technical support engineer at ShotSpotter, in a December 2022 email to SDPD. “You may also experience some delays in the publication of incidents.”

ShotSpotter is not on a list of surveillance technologies the SDPD is required to frequently publish as a part of a sweeping surveillance ordinance passed by the San Diego City Council in August 2022 and amended in January of this year.

A San Diego councilmember whose district includes several of the neighborhoods where ShotSpotter sensors were installed in 2016 said that their “office is aware of the ShotSpotter situation” via a spokesperson. In July 2021, the then-District Four councilmember requested the city remove sensors from his district, which helped scuttle the contract renewal.

“A request to remove such \[sensors\] has been forwarded to the San Diego Police Department and the mayor’s office,” a spokesperson for current District Four councilmember Henry L. Foster III (who was sworn in in April) wrote in an email to the _Weekly_ and WIRED. “Devices that have not been approved in accordance with the Surveillance Ordinance should not be installed and or operational by the City of San Diego or third party.”

San Diego mayor Todd Gloria’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2021, San Diego’s city council pulled a scheduled vote on a four-year extension to ShotSpotter from its agenda, effectively sunsetting the city’s agreement with the company. Although Gloria’s office said in statements at the time that it would bring the extension back up in the city council, there is no indication that it did.

Based on a map of the secret locations of every ShotSpotter sensor in the country published by WIRED, there are still about 30 active sensors in San Diego, most of which are clustered near UC San Diego’s La Jolla campus and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

When asked to comment on whether SDPD receives and responds to ShotSpotter alerts from these active sensors, a spokesperson for the department directed questions to the UCSD police. UCSD did not respond to requests for comment.

The _Weekly_ and WIRED requested emails sent between San Antonio Police Department and ShotSpotter dated after the city’s contract with ShotSpotter expired in the fall of 2017. In March, the SAPD filed an appeal with the Texas attorney general, seeking to have the responsive records withheld under a laundry list of exemptions provided for by the state’s public records act. The police provided sealed records to the Texas AG to review. The AG is expected to decide whether to release the records by May.

SAPD said that after the contract lapsed, the department never asked ShotSpotter for assistance, and no arrests were made based on detections provided by the company.

Records produced in response to a separate public records request show that ShotSpotter sent four-term San Antonio mayor Ron Nirenbergt at least two marketing emails months after the city council voted not to include ShotSpotter in its budget for the upcoming fiscal year. The company does not appear to have communicated with his office after November 2018, however. Nirenberg’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

“To me it sounds like, on their part, another strategic business decision, and that’s what they’re doing in every city,” says Palmer, the Stop ShotSpotter organizer. “It sounds like a business decision, because they don’t actually care about public safety.”

_This story was copublished in collaboration between_ Southside Weekly _and_ WIRED.

ShotSpotter Keeps Listening for Gunfire After Contracts Expire

The company belatedly conceded both that it had paid the cybercriminals extorting it and that patient data nonetheless ended up on the dark web.

More than two months after the start of a ransomware debacle whose impact ranks among the worst in the history of cybersecurity, the medical firm Change Healthcare finally confirmed what cybercriminals, security researchers, and Bitcoin's blockchain had already made all too clear: that it did indeed pay a ransom to the hackers who targeted the company in February. And yet, it still faces the risk of losing vast amounts of customers' sensitive medical data.

In a statement sent to WIRED and other news outlets on Monday evening, Change Healthcare wrote that it paid a ransom to a cybercriminal group extorting the company, a hacker gang known as AlphV or BlackCat. “A ransom was paid as part of the company’s commitment to do all it could to protect patient data from disclosure,” the statement reads. The company's belated admission of that payment accompanied a new post on its website where it warns that the hackers may have stolen health-related data that would “cover a substantial proportion of people in America.”

Cybersecurity and cryptocurrency researchers told WIRED last month that Change Healthcare appeared to have paid that ransom on March 1, pointing to a transaction of 350 bitcoins or roughly $22 million sent into a crypto wallet associated with the AlphV hackers. That transaction was first highlighted in a message on a Russian cybercriminal forum known as RAMP, where one of AlphV's allegedly jilted partners complained that they hadn't received their cut of Change Healthcare's payment. However, for weeks following that transaction, which was publicly visible on Bitcoin's blockchain and which both security firm Recorded Future and blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs told WIRED had been received by AlphV, Change Healthcare repeatedly declined to confirm that it had paid the ransom.

Change Healthcare's confirmation of that extortion payment puts new weight behind the cybersecurity industry's fears that the attack—and the profit AlphV extracted from it—will lead ransomware gangs to further target health care companies. “It 100 percent encourages other actors to target health care organizations,” Jon DiMaggio, a researcher with cybersecurity firm Analyst1 who focuses on ransomware, told WIRED at the time the transaction was first spotted in March. “And it’s one of the industries we _don’t_ want ransomware actors to target—especially when it affects hospitals.”

Compounding the situation, a conflict between hackers in the ransomware ecosystem has led to a _second_ ransomware group claiming to possess Change Healthcare's stolen data and threatening to sell it to the highest bidder on the dark web. Earlier this month that second group, known as RansomHub, sent WIRED alleged samples of the stolen data that appeared to come from Change Healthcare's network, including patient records and a contract with another health care company.

As of Monday, strangely, the listing for that data on RansomHub's dark-web site had been taken down. Change Healthcare's post to its website, however, warns that 22 screenshots of its data had been posted to the dark web by an unnamed hacker group, and that they included “protected health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information (PII),” though it said it hadn't seen any sign that medical records like doctor's charts or full medical histories for any patients were among the stolen data.

For Change Healthcare and the beleaguered medical practices, hospitals, and patients that depend on it, the confirmation of its extortion payment to the hackers adds a bitter coda to an already dystopian story. AlphV's digital paralysis of Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, snarled the insurance approval of prescriptions and medical procedures for hundreds of medical practices and hospitals across the country, making it by some measures the most widespread medical ransomware disruption ever. A survey of American Medical Association members conducted between March 26 and April 3 found that four out of five clinicians had lost revenue as a result of the crisis. Many said they were using their own personal finances to cover a practice’s expenses. Change Healthcare, meanwhile, says it has lost $872 million to the incident and projects that number to rise well over a billion in the longer term.

Change Healthcare's confirmation of its ransom payment now appears to show that much of that catastrophic fallout for the US health care system unfolded _after_ it had already paid the hackers an exorbitant sum—a payment in exchange for a decryption key for the systems the hackers had encrypted and a promise not to leak the company's stolen data. As is often the case in ransomware attacks, AlphV's disruption of its systems appears to have been so widespread that Change Healthcare's recovery process has extended long after it obtained the decryption key designed to unlock its systems.

As ransomware payments go, $22 million wouldn't be the most that a victim has forked over. But it's close, says Brett Callow, a ransomware-focused security researcher who spoke to WIRED about the suspected payment in March. Only a few rare payments, such as the $40 million paid to hackers by CNA Financial in 2021, top that number. “It’s not without precedent, but it’s certainly very unusual,” Callow said of the $22 million figure.

That $22 million injection of funds into the ransomware ecosystem further fuels a vicious cycle that has reached epidemic proportions. Cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis found that in 2023, ransomware victims paid the hackers targeting them fully $1.1 billion, a new record. Change Healthcare's payment may represent only a small drop in that bucket, but it both rewards AlphV for its highly damaging attacks and may suggest to other ransomware groups that health care companies are particularly profitable targets, given those companies are especially sensitive to both the high cost of those cyberattacks financially and the risks they pose to patients' health.

Compounding Change Healthcare's mess is an apparent double-cross within the ransomware underground: AlphV, by all appearances, faked its own law enforcement takedown after receiving Change Healthcare's payment in an attempt to avoid sharing it with its so-called affiliates, the hackers who partner with the group to penetrate victims on its behalf. The second ransomware group threatening Change Healthcare, RansomHub, now claims to WIRED that they obtained the stolen data from those affiliates, who still want to be paid for their work.

That has created a situation where Change Healthcare's payment provides little assurance that its compromised data won't still be exploited by disgruntled hackers. “These affiliates work for multiple groups. They’re concerned with getting paid themselves, and there’s no trust among thieves,” Analyst1's DiMaggio told WIRED in March. “If someone screws someone else, you don’t know what they’re going to do with the data.”

All of that means Change Healthcare still has little assurance that it has avoided an even worse scenario than it has yet faced: paying what may be one of the biggest ransoms in history and still seeing its data spilled onto the dark web. “If it gets leaked after they paid $22 million, it’s pretty much like setting that money on fire,” DiMaggio warned in March. “They’d have burned that money for nothing.”

Change Healthcare Finally Admits It Paid Ransomware Hackers—and Still Faces a Patient Data Leak

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden signed legislation not only reauthorizing a major FISA spy program but expanding it in ways that could have major implications for privacy rights in the US.

The ability of the United States to intercept and store Americans’ text messages, calls, and emails in pursuit of foreign intelligence was not only extended but enhanced over the weekend in ways likely to remain enigmatic to the public for years to come.

On Saturday, US president Joe Biden signed a controversial bill extending the life of a warrantless US surveillance program for two years, bringing an end to a months-long fight in Congress over an authority that US intelligence agencies acknowledge has been widely abused in the past.

At the urging of the agencies and with the help of powerful bipartisan allies on Capitol Hill, the program has also been extended to cover a wide range of new businesses, including US data centers, according to recent analysis by legal experts and civil liberties organizations that were vocally opposed to its passage.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), among other agencies, to eavesdrop on calls, texts, and emails traveling through US networks, so long as one side of the communication is foreign.

Americans caught up in the program face diminished privacy rights.

While the government requires a foreign target to commence a wiretap, Americans are often party to those intercepted conversations. And although US attorney general Merrick Garland insisted in a statement on Saturday that the updates to the 702 program “ensure the protection of Americans' privacy and civil liberties,” and that the government never intentionally targets Americans, the government nevertheless reserves the right to store their communications and access them later without probable cause.

“Section 702 is supposed to be used only for spying on foreigners abroad,” says Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Instead, sadly, it has enabled warrantless access to vast databases of Americans’ private phone calls, text messages, and emails.”

Under the law, the government can retain communications captured by the 702 program for half a decade or more—indefinitely, so long as the government makes no effort to decrypt them.

A trade organization representing some of the world’s largest tech companies came out against plans to expand Section 702 in the final hours of the debate, claiming that a new provision authored by House Intelligence Committee members would damage the competitiveness of US technologies, “arguably imperiling the continued global free flow of data between the US and its allies.”

US intelligence obtains its vast surveillance power through yearly certifications doled out by a secret court. The certifications permit the NSA in particular to force businesses in the US—categorized as “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs—to cooperate with the program, collecting data and installing wiretaps on the agency’s behalf.

Years ago, the government sought to unilaterally expand the definition of ECSP under the law, seeking to compel the cooperation of whole new categories of businesses. That effort was beaten back by the FISA court in 2022, in a ruling that stated only Congress has the “competence and constitutional authority” to rewrite the law.

On the spy community’s behalf, the House Intelligence Committee introduced an amendment last year to codify the sought-after expansion of the 702 program, broadening the definition of what it means to be an ECSP.

With the backing of party leaders, the House and Senate intel committees maintained an outsize influence over the bill’s trajectory through Congress, lobbying lawmakers hand-in-hand with the intelligence community to defeat a slate of popular reforms, including a House amendment that would have required the FBI to obtain search warrants before accessing the communications of Americans collected under Section 702.

The House and Senate judiciary committees, which oversee the work of the US Justice Department, have traditionally held jurisdiction over FISA. However, much of their authority was sapped after the House speaker, Mike Johnson, adopted the pro-surveillance views of the intel committee members, which align with those of the White House.

Legal experts—including a rare few attorneys who’ve argued cases before the FISA court in the past—say the new ECSP text ensnares owners of facilities housing equipment used to store and carry data, as well as commercial landlords and virtually anyone with access to communications equipment in those spaces. The text, they argue, may be interpreted by the government as granting it authority to compel the assistance of “delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utility providers,” among others.

Criticism of the 702 program largely stems from revelations of abuse in a declassified court filing from 2022, which describes rampant misuse of the 702 database by the FBI. Investigators at the bureau have been caught unlawfully scouring 702 data for information on American protesters, journalists, and political donors. On at least one occasion, an FBI analyst worked to access the communications of a sitting member of Congress.

The FBI instituted scores of new procedures in an attempt to clamp down on the abuse internally, practices that are now codified under the law. House and Senate intelligence members say codifying the policies will serve as a sufficient bulwark against further abuse. Civil libertarians who have pursued new warrant requirements under FISA—an amendment that was dropped after a tie vote in the House of Representatives last week—argue, conversely, that the FBI should not be trusted to oversee itself in the wake of recent scandal.

Liza Goitein, a FISA expert and senior director at the Brennan Center of Justice at New York University School of Law, says the bill signed by Biden on Saturday represents “a gift to any president who may wish to spy on political enemies.”

“Although some senators fought valiantly to protect Americans’ civil liberties, they could not overcome the barrage of false and misleading statements from the administration and surveillance hawks on the congressional intelligence committees,” says Goitein. “This is a truly shameful episode in the history of the US Congress, and sooner or later, the American people will pay the price.”

The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers

Thousands of exposed files on a misconfigured North Korean server hint at one way the reclusive country may evade international sanctions.

For almost a decade, Nick Roy has been scanning North Korea’s tiny internet presence, spotting new websites coming online and providing a glimpse of the Hermit Kingdoms’ digital life. However, at the end of last year, the cybersecurity researcher and DPRK blogger stumbled across something new: signs North Koreans are working on major international TV shows.

In December, Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address containing thousands of animation files. Included in the cache were animation cells, videos, and notes discussing the work, plus changes that needed to be made to ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from an Amazon Prime Video superhero show and an upcoming Max (aka HBO Max) children’s anime.

The findings and security lapse—detailed in a report by the Stimson Center think tank's North Korea–focused 38 North Project, which helped analyze the findings along with Google-owned security firm Mandiant—provide a glimpse at how North Korea can use skilled IT and tech workers to raise funds for its heavily sanctioned regime. It also comes as US officials increasingly warn about North Korean IT workers infiltrating companies and their outsourcing.

North Korea’s internet is a small—and fragile—space. The repressive nation only has 1,024 IP addresses and around 30 websites that connect to the global internet. While there is a limited internal intranet, only a few thousand of the country’s 26 million people can get on the internet. When they do, it’s highly controlled: These select few North Koreans can use the internet for an hour at a time and have a person sitting next to them approving their use every five minutes.

When Roy discovered the exposed cloud server, it was being updated on a daily basis. Martyn Williams, a senior fellow on the 38 North Project who helped analyze the contents of the server, says the server likely allowed work to be sent to and from North Korean animators. The server itself is still live, but it mysteriously stopped being used at the end of February. While there is a login page, its contents can be accessed without a username and password. “I found the login page after I found all the exposed files,” Roy says.

Inside, the files contained editing comments and instructions in Chinese which were translated to Korean, the researchers write in their report. “For a lot of the animation files, we would find things like spreadsheets with details of the workflow,” Williams says. A sample of the files shared with WIRED show detailed anime images and video clips, with notes for the authors and date stamps on various files. In one instance, the report says, an animator was “asked to improve the shape of the character’s head.”

Based on the documents and drawings, the researchers were able to identify some of the shows and projects the North Koreans were working on. Some of the projects included work from season 3 of the Amazon show _Invincible_, which is produced by California-based Skybound Entertainment. There were also documents linked to Max and Cartoon Network show _Iyanu: Child of Wonder_, produced by YouNeek Studios, as well as files from a Japanese anime series and an animation studio in Japan.

Some file names gave away clues about the series and episode numbers. There were also files and projects the researchers could not identify—including a “bunch of files” with videos of horses and a Russian book on horses, Williams says.

Sanctions placed upon the North Korean regime, for its ongoing human rights abuses and nuclear warfare programs, prohibit US companies from working with DPRK companies or individuals. However, the researchers say it is highly unlikely that any companies involved would have a clue about North Korean animators working on the shows, and there is nothing suggesting the companies violated any sanctions or other laws. “It is likely that the contracting arrangement was several steps downstream from the major producers,” the report says.

Spokespeople for Amazon and Max spokesperson declined to comment for this story. YouNeek Studios did not respond to a request for comment.

“We do not work with North Korean companies, or Chinese companies on _Invincible_, or any affiliated entities, and have no knowledge of any North Korean or Chinese companies working on _Invincible_,” a spokesperson for Skybound Entertainment says. “We take any claims very seriously and have commenced an investigation into this.” In a post on X, the company characterized the findings as “unconfirmed” and said it is working with authorities to investigate.

Williams says it is possible that a front company in China is used to help disguise the activity and involvement of North Koreans. The researchers were able to analyze connections to the exposed server and, despite most having their location masked by a VPN, spotted access from Spain and three Chinese cities. “All three cities are known to have many North Korean–operated businesses and are main centers for North Korea’s IT workers who live overseas,” the report says.

While Williams says the researchers did not find any identifiable names of North Korean organizations buried in the files, the country has a well-established animation company called April 26 Animation Studio, which is also known as SEK Studio. Originally set up in the 1950s, the studio has worked on hundreds of international TV shows and movies.

However, in recent years, the US Treasury Department has sanctioned SEK Studios, individuals linked to it, and various “front companies” that it says are used to “work for foreign customers.” Many of these have links to China, according to the sanctions. “SEK Studio has utilized an assortment of front companies to evade sanctions targeting the government of the DPRK and to deceive international financial institutions,” a statement issued as part of the sanctions in 2021 says.

The main aim of these efforts, says Michael Barnhart, a North Korea researcher at Mandiant, is to raise money for the North Korean regime. The country’s hackers and scammers have stolen and extorted billions of dollars to help fund its military ambitions in recent years, including from huge cryptocurrency heists. In early 2022, the FBI issued a 16-page alert warning companies that remote North Korean freelance IT workers were infiltrating businesses to earn money they could funnel back home.

“The volume is much higher than we were expecting,” Barnhart says of North Korea’s IT workers. They are constantly changing their tactics to avoid being caught, he says. “We had one not too long ago, where during the interview, the person’s mouth was just off-frame. You could tell that someone in the background was speaking on their behalf.” Technically, Barnhart says, companies should verify their remote workers’ devices and make sure that there is no remote software connecting to a company laptop or network. Businesses should also put extra efforts at the hiring stage by training HR staff to detect possible IT workers.

However, he says, increasingly there is a greater crossover between North Korean IT workers and individuals who are members of known hacking groups or classified as advanced persistent threats (APTs). “The more we focus on IT workers, the more we’re starting to see APT operators and efforts blending in with those,” he says. “This might be the most quick learning-on-your-feet, nimble nation-state that I've ever seen.”

North Koreans Secretly Animated Amazon and Max Shows, Researchers Say

Plus: New York’s legislature suffers a cyberattack, police disrupt a global phishing operation, and Apple removes encrypted messaging apps in China.

Looking for love? Be careful what you wish for.

A loose-knit community of con artists known as Yahoo Boys has begun using real-time face-swap technology to woo victims with romance scams. Using a variety of tools and techniques, the scammers use AI-powered apps to make themselves look like entirely different people on video calls. Just remember: If someone you’ve never met IRL is asking you for money, just say no.

Elsewhere in the world of harmful deepfakes, two major websites used for creating fake nude images of people are now blocked in the United Kingdom. The censorship, which appears to be self-imposed, comes just days after the UK proposed legislation that would ban nonconsensual, sexualized AI-generated images.

A Russian cybercriminal gang called Cyber Army of Russia Reborn appears to have been created with the help of Sandworm, the notorious Russian military hacking unit that has carried out devastating cyberattacks against Ukraine for years. The difference? Cyber Army of Russia Reborn is even more brazen, taking credit for attacks against critical infrastructure in Europe and the United States.

Change Healthcare’s ransomware saga entered a new chapter this week. A cybercriminal group called RansomHub claims to be selling highly sensitive patient information stolen from the company. The sale follows RansomHub’s claims that it possesses terabytes of data stolen in a February attack by another ransomware gang known as AlphV or Black Cat, which received a $22 million payment in March. Change Healthcare says it has spent $872 million response to the ransomware attack as of March 31.

The biggest global surveillance program carried out by the US may be about to get bigger. A two-year renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which technically expired on Friday, will soon go up for a vote by the US Senate after passing the House last week. Included in the legislation is a provision that would greatly expand the number of businesses that could be conscripted to spy on behalf of the US government, which critics have called the “Stasi provision.” One of the largest lobbying firms for Big Tech companies has opposed the provision over fears that tech industry workers could be forced to become informants.

That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

There’s a kernel of truth in every good fiction, which is why the very real Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, is a constant go-to for shows like the _X-Files_ and games like _Metal Gear Solid_. It tends to pop up whenever a shadowy government agency is needed to reverse engineer a stolen alien artifact or construct a giant killer robot. A Darpa announcement this Thursday, however, sounds almost too much like the opening sequence of a Hideo Kojima game: With the help of the US Air Force Test Pilot School, the agency says an experimental aircraft known as the X-62 was successfully flown by artificial intelligence during a simulated dogfight against a human pilot in an F-16. “The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades,” US Air Force secretary Frank Kendall says, “but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now.”

**New York State Legislature Hit by Cyberattack**

Details are scant as to the impact, but for at least several hours this week, hackers felled computer systems supporting the work of New York’s state legislature. While an attack on something called the Legislative Bill Drafting Commission isn’t quite as jaw-dropping as one against a power plant or a naval base, the LBDC is one of a dozen required stops that legislation in New York must make en route to becoming law. Bills can’t be introduced, amended, or reviewed by committee without it, much less get a vote. Luckily, the agency reports it was able to get back on its feet within a few hours using a “backup system.” An investigation of the attack is ongoing.

**Police Disrupt Global Phishing Operation**

An armada of law enforcement agencies arrested 37 suspects around the world last weekend in an operation targeting LabHost, reportedly one of the world’s largest phishing-as-a-service platforms. The investigation was spearheaded by the London Metropolitan Police in cooperation with Europol. Investigators uncovered a whopping 40,000 phishing domains being operated by as many as 10,000 users worldwide, Europol says. LabHost charged a monthly fee of $249. That cybercriminals have discovered the psychological benefits of just-below pricing is yet another sign of the growing popularity and sophistication of these markets.

**Apple Removes Encrypted Messaging Apps in China**

Encrypted messaging apps WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram have gone the way of Winnie the Pooh. Citing “national security concerns,” China ordered Apple to delete “certain apps” from its Chinese App Store this week, the tech behemoth announced (while neglecting to specify which ones). Apple reportedly met with Chinese authorities to express concern over how banning the apps would impact its users but relented after being met with a stone wall. “We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate,” the company said, “even when we disagree.” Apple is heavily dependent on China’s workforce to manufacture its products, and sales in the region have topped $70 billion in recent years. That Apple has become beholden to the Chinese government because of this is no longer much of a secret.

Source

Wired