The world's most-visited deepfake website and another large competing site are stopping people in the UK from accessing them, days after the UK government announced a crackdown.

Two of the biggest deepfake pornography websites have now started blocking people trying to access them from the United Kingdom. The move comes days after the UK government announced plans for a new law that will make creating nonconsensual deepfakes a criminal offense.

Nonconsensual deepfake pornography websites and apps that “strip” clothes off of photos have been growing at an alarming rate—causing untold harm to the thousands of women they are used to target.

Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University, says the move is a “hugely significant moment” in the fight against deepfake abuse. “This ends the easy access and the normalization of deepfake sexual abuse material,” McGlynn tells WIRED.

Since deepfake technology first emerged in December 2017, it has consistently been used to create nonconsensual sexual images of women—swapping their faces into pornographic videos or allowing new “nude” images to be generated. As the technology has improved and become easier to access, hundreds of websites and apps have been created. Most recently, schoolchildren have been caught creating nudes of classmates.

The blocks on the deepfake websites in the UK were first spotted today, with two of the most prominent services displaying notices on their landing pages that they are no longer accessible to people visiting from the country. WIRED is not naming the two websites due to their enabling of abuse.

One of the websites with the restriction in place is the biggest deepfake pornography website existing today. Its homepage, when visiting from the UK, displays a message saying access is denied. “Due to laws or (upcoming) legislation in your country or state, we are unfortunately obligated to deny you access to this website,” the message says. It also shows the visitor’s IP address and country.

The other website, which also has an app, displays a similar message. “Access to the service in your country is blocked,” it says, before hinting there may be ways to get around the geographic restriction. The websites do not appear to have any restrictions in place when visiting from the United States, although may also be restricted in other countries.

It is not immediately clear why the sites have introduced the location blocks or whether they have done so in response to any legal orders or notices. Nor is it clear whether the blocks are temporary. Messages sent to the websites through email addresses and contact forms went unanswered. The creators of the websites have not posted any public messages on the websites or their social media channels about the blocks.

Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has the power to persue action against harmful websites under the UK’s controversial sweeping online safety laws that came into force last year. However, these powers are not yet fully operational, and Ofcom is still consulting on them.

It’s likely the restrictions may significantly limit the amount of people in the UK seeking out or trying to create deepfake sexual abuse content. Data from Similarweb, a digital intelligence company, shows the biggest of the two websites had 12 million global visitors last month, while the other website had 4 million visitors. In the UK, they had around 500,000 and 50,000 visitors, respectively.

This week, politicians in the UK announced plans for a law that criminalizes the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes. Under the law, which is yet to be passed, people could face an unlimited fine if they create deepfakes to “cause alarm, humiliation, or distress to the victim.” This builds on previous provisions that make it illegal for people in the UK to share sexualized deepfakes.

“While it’s unclear if these platforms have been ordered to block UK access or have done so proactively due to the recent criminalization, it shows legislation can make a meaningful difference in removing the legal ambiguity that many deepfake pornography platforms use as cover for the clear ethical harms they cause,” Henry Ajder, an AI and deepfake expert, tells WIRED. Ajder adds that search engines and hosting providers around the world should be doing more to limit the spread and creation of harmful deepfakes.

While the two websites can still be accessed in the UK using a VPN, the restrictions are a sign that constant pressure—from lawmakers, tech companies, and campaigners—can make deepfake porn harder to access and create. “Of course, people will be able to use VPN to access these websites and apps, but that introduces friction,” Durham University’s McGlynn says. “It introduces a message that there’s something wrong and harmful about this material such that you have to use a VPN to access it.”

“Hopefully,” McGlynn adds, “this can show other governments around the world that if we take steps, we could actually reduce the prevalence \[of\] and easy access to deepfake sexual abuse material.”

The Biggest Deepfake Porn Website Is Now Blocked in the UK

One juror in former US president Donald Trump’s criminal case in New York has been excused over fears she could be identified. It could get even messier.

You’ve been asked to serve on the jury in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a United States president. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is everything.

A juror in former president Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal trial in New York was excused on Thursday after voicing fears that she could be identified based on biographical details that she had given in court. The dismissal of Juror 2 highlights the potential dangers of participating in one of the most politicized trials in US history, especially in an age of social media frenzies, a highly partisan electorate, and a glut of readily available personal information online.

Unlike jurors in federal cases, whose identities can be kept completely anonymous, New York law allows—and can require—the personal information of jurors and potential jurors to be divulged in court. Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s prosecution in Manhattan, last month ordered that jurors’ names and addresses would be withheld. But he could not prevent potential jurors from providing biographical details about themselves during the jury selection process, and many did. Those details were then widely reported in the press, potentially subjecting jurors and potential jurors to harassment, intimidation, and threats—possibly by Trump himself. Merchan has since blocked reporters from publishing potential jurors’ employment details.

The doxing dangers that potential jurors face became apparent on Monday, day one of the proceedings. An update in a _Washington Post_ liveblog about Trump’s trial revealed the Manhattan neighborhood where one potential juror lived, how long he’d lived there, how many children he has, and the name of his employer. Screenshots of the liveblog update quickly circulated on social media, as people warned that the man could be doxed, or have his identity revealed publicly against his will with the intent to cause harm, based solely on that information.

“It's quite alarming how much information someone skilled in OSINT could potentially gather based on just a few publicly available details about jurors or potential jurors,” says Bob Diachenko, cyber intelligence director at data-breach research organization Security Discovery and an expert in open source intelligence research.

Armed with basic personal details about jurors and certain tools and databases, “an OSINT researcher could potentially uncover a significant amount of personal information by cross-referencing all this together,” Diachenko says. “That's why it's crucial to consider the implications of publicly revealing jurors' personal information and take steps to protect their privacy during criminal trials.”

Even without special OSINT training, it can be trivial to uncover details about a juror’s life. To test the sensitivity of the information the _Post_ published, WIRED used a common reporting tool to look up the man’s employer. From there, we were able to identify his name, home address, phone number, email address, his children’s and spouse’s identities, voter registration information, and more. The entire process took roughly two minutes. The _Post_ added a clarification to its liveblog explaining that it now excludes the man’s personal details.

The ready availability of those details illustrates the challenges in informing the public about a highly newsworthy criminal case without interfering in the justice process, says Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics and director of the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Simply because a notable figure is on trial does not mean that a juror automatically surrenders any claim to privacy,” Bartzen Culver says. “People who have been drawn into a case that is exceptionally newsworthy are not aware that a simple statement that they make about where they work might identify them and open them up to scrutiny and possibly risk.”

The dangers to jurors or potential jurors has only increased since the first day of jury selection, which remains ongoing, in part due to the challenges of prosecuting a former US president and the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 US presidential election. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, a class E felony in New York state, for payments made ahead of the 2016 presidential election related to alleged affairs with two women, adult performer Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Trump has claimed his prosecution is a “communist show trial” and a “witch hunt” and has pleaded not guilty.

On Fox News, coverage of Trump’s trial has repeatedly focused on the potential political motivations of the jurors, bolstering the former president’s claims. Trump, in turn, has repeated the claims by the conservative news network’s hosts. In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump quoted Fox News commentator Jesse Watters claiming on air that potential jurors in Trump’s trial are “undercover liberal activists lying to the judge in order to get on the Trump jury.” This, despite a gag order that forbids Trump from “making or directing others to make public statements about any prospective juror or any juror in this criminal proceeding.”

Broader media coverage of the Trump trial jurors appears to often be the work of political reporters who are unfamiliar with the journalism ethics specific to covering a criminal trial, says UW-Madison’s Bartzen Culver. “It's like when political reporters covered Covid and science journalists lost their minds.” She adds that it’s important for any journalist covering a criminal case—Trump’s or otherwise—to “consider our role within the justice system.”

“Unethical behavior by journalists can delay trials. It can result in overturned convictions and the people having to go back and do a retrial,” Bartzen Culver says. “That all works against our system of justice.”

The New York case is one of four ongoing criminal proceedings against Trump. In Georgia, where he faces multiple felony charges for alleged attempts to interfere with the state’s electoral process in 2020, Trump supporters leaked the addresses of members of the grand jury, after their names were listed in the 98-page indictment against the former president, as required by state law. Georgia’s Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said last August that it was investigating threats against the jury members. The incident highlights the persistent dangers people can face from Trump’s supporters, both in the near term and for the rest of their lives, if they’re viewed as having acted against him.

The leaks were discovered by Advance Democracy Inc. (ADI), a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and investigations organization founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former investigator for the FBI and the US Senate Intelligence Committee. So far, Jones tells WIRED, ADI has not uncovered attempts to dox jurors in Trump’s New York trial. But it’s still early days.

“We have not yet found identifying information on the extremist forums we monitor,” Jones says. “Having said that, I share your concern that it is only a matter of time before this happens.”

The Trump Jury Has a Doxing Problem

Watch how smooth-talking scammers known as “Yahoo Boys” use widely available face-swapping tech to carry out elaborate romance scams.

The compliments start flowing as soon as she answers the video call. “Wow, you so pretty, honey,” says the man on the other side of the screen. His video feed shows he’s white, with short hair, likely a few years younger than her, and is sitting in front of his camera wearing a plaid shirt.

“You’re looking different with that beard and stuff gone,” the woman says in an American accent as the conversation gets going. The man doesn’t miss a beat. “I told you I was going to shave my beard so I will look good.”

Except, he isn’t who he claims to be. His videofeed is a lie. And—beard or not—the face the woman can see over the video call is not his: It’s a deepfake.

In reality, the man is a scammer using face-swapping technology to totally change his appearance in real time. In a video of the call—filmed by the scammer’s accomplice likely thousands of miles away from the woman—his real face can be seen on this laptop alongside the fake persona as he speaks to his victim.

This self-shot video is one of scores posted online by scammers known as Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of con artists, often based in Nigeria. The video reveals how they are using deepfakes and face-swapping to ensnare victims in romance scams, building trust with victims using fake identities, before tricking them into parting with thousands of dollars. More than $650 million was lost to romance fraud last year, the FBI says.

A Yahoo Boy scammer uses multiple phones and face-swapping software against a victim. It’s one of two techniques the group uses for real-time calls.

The Yahoo Boys have been experimenting with deepfake video clips for around two years and shifted to more real-time deepfake video calls over the last year, says David Maimon, a professor at Georgia State University and the head of fraud insights at identity verification firm SentiLink. Maimon has monitored the Yahoo Boys on Telegram for more than four years and shared dozens of videos with WIRED revealing how the scammers are using deepfakes.

A WIRED review of the videos and three associated Yahoo Boy Telegram channels shows how the con artists’ techniques have evolved as deepfake applications and artificial intelligence have improved. It is one of the first times the specific tactics and outlandish techniques of scammers using deepfake video calls has been documented in this detail.

The videos show Yahoo Boys using the technology on setups involving both laptops and phones. In multiple videos, the scammers often brazenly show their own faces, as well as those of the victims they are scamming. “I don't think they're doing this because they’re stupid,” Maimon says. “I think that they simply don’t care, and they’re not afraid of the repercussions.”

The Yahoo Boys are experienced scammers—and they openly brag about it. Photos and videos of their conning and recruitment can be found all across social media, from Facebook to TikTok. However, the cybercriminals, who have links back to Nigerian prince email scams, are arguably their most open on Telegram.

In groups containing thousands of members, Yahoo Boys organize and advertise their individual skills for a smorgasbord of scams. They’re skilled social manipulators, who can have long-lasting impacts on their victims. Business email compromise, crypto scams, and impersonation scams are all touted in hundreds of posts per day. Members claim to be selling photo and video editing skills and entire albums of explicit photographs that can be used to build a convincing persona. Fake IDs and legitimate-looking social media profiles are for sale. Scam “scripts” are free to download.

“The Yahoo Boys have elements of organized crime and disorganized crime,” says Paul Raffile, an intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, who has investigated Yahoo Boys sextorting teenagers and driving them towards suicide. “They don't have a leader, they don’t have a governance structure.” Rather, Raffile says, they organize in clusters and share advice and tips online. Telegram did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about Yahoo Boys’ channels, but the three channels no longer appear to be accessible.

The digital con artists started using deepfakes as part of their romance scams around May 2022, says Maimon. “What folks were doing was just posting videos of themselves, changing their appearance, and then sending them to the victim—trying to lure them to talk to them,” he says. Since then, they’ve moved on.

To create their videos, the Yahoo Boys are using a handful of different software and apps. WIRED is not naming the specific software, to limit people’s ability to copy the attacks. However, the tools they are using are often advertised for entertainment purposes, such as allowing people to swap their faces with celebrities or influencers.

The Yahoo Boys’ live deepfake calls run in two different ways. In the first, shown above, the scammers use a setup of two phones and a face-swapping app. The scammer holds the phone they are calling their victim with—they’re mostly seen using Zoom, Maimon says, but it can work on any platform—and uses its rear camera to record the screen of a second phone. This second phone has its camera pointing at the scammer’s face and is running a face-swapping app. They often place the two phones on stands to ensure they don’t move and use ring lights to improve conditions for a real-time face-swap, the videos show.

The second common tactic—shown below—uses a laptop instead of a phone. (WIRED has blurred real faces in both videos.) Here, the scammer uses a webcam to capture their face and software running on the laptop changes their appearance. Videos of the setup show scammers are able to see their own face alongside the altered deepfake, with just the manipulated image being displayed over the live video call.

Maimon says he and his teams have tracked down some of the victims, both in deepfake videos and photo albums being sold by Yahoo Boys, and have tried to contact them. WIRED was not able to determine the real identities of victims or scammers, and it is not clear how many times deepfakes have been used. Still, the videos appearing to feature victims reveal how the scammers build rapport with their targets.

Videos show scammers telling people they “love” them and frequently complimenting their appearance. In one video, a scammer says they want to travel to Canada to meet their target, and when they do, they will pay them “instantly,” suggesting the target has sent them money that the scammer has falsely promised to pay back. Other videos contain deeply personal information, showing the levels of trust that scammers can create with the people they target. “Some victims, they talk about their eating disorders, they talk about their depression,” Maimon says.

The videos are likely only a snapshot of the Yahoo Boys’ romance-scamming activity, and many of the videos they self-publish are partly intended to show off their capabilities to allow others to “buy” the approach. Raffile says that, as he investigated the groups for sextortion, he noticed most face-swapping was being used for romance scams. However, there were also instances where Yahoo Boys claimed to use deepfake “nude” generators on photographs.

The scammers can run face-swapping software on laptops. It mimics their facial expressions and mouth movements.

Artificial intelligence will supercharge scams. While deepfake videos have been around for more than half a decade—mostly used for nonconsensual pornography—they’re often glitchy and easy to spot. Lips don’t sync up as people talk, and errors are relatively trivial to detect. However, the technology is quickly improving and becoming easier for anyone to use.

Some of the Yahoo Boy videos are unbelievable, obvious fakes, while others appear plausible. When they’re viewed live, on a mobile phone, with unstable connections, any obvious flaws may be masked—especially if a scammer has spent months social-engineering their victim.

Rachel Tobac, the cofounder and CEO of SocialProof security, who along with company CTO Evan Tobac reviewed a selection of Yahoo Boy videos for WIRED, says she has generally seen some face swapping being used in romance scams over the past 12 months. “They were not super convincing last year, when I checked them out. This year, a lot has changed,” Rachel Tobac says. “Especially the ones where they’re able to change the pitch of their voice and the look of their face—sometimes changing skin tone, hair, eye color, everything’s matched. It’s pretty wild.”

The Yahoo Boys appear to often use existing personas and faces built into the apps. The scammers largely talk using their own voices, although in a couple of videos this may have also been altered. In many of the videos seen by WIRED, the onscreen characters can turn their heads but not move their entire bodies. Their lips and facial expressions move with those made by the face of the scammer. The capabilities of these tools will only improve over time.

Andrew Newell, the chief scientific officer at identity verification company iProov, says he has seen a “massive change” in the number of face-swapping systems being used in the last year, tracking more than 100 different tools. Only a fraction of these tools allow for real-time face-swapping, he says. “We have seen quite big advances in terms of how good these live tools are.”

While the Yahoo Boys may not develop their own software or be technically sophisticated, Maimon says, they are versatile. They’ll run multiple scams at once, speak with dozens of victims at a time, and different individuals will have the skills needed to complete an entire scam. “There's a constant evolution,” Maimon says.

Ronnie Tokazowski, the chief fraud fighter at Intelligence for Good, which works with cybercrime victims, says because the Yahoo Boys have used deepfakes for romance scams, they’ll pivot to using the technology for their other scams. “This is kind of an early warning where it's like: ‘OK, they’re really good at doing these things. Now, what’s the next thing they're going to do?’”

The Real-Time Deepfake Romance Scams Have Arrived

One of Silicon Valley’s most influential lobbying arms joins privacy reformers in a fight against the Biden administration–backed expansion of a major US surveillance program.

A trade organization representing some of the world’s largest information technology companies—Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft among them—say its members are voicing strong opposition to ongoing efforts by the Biden administration to dramatically expand a key US government surveillance authority.

The US Senate is poised to vote Thursday on legislation that would extend a global wiretap program authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Passed by the House of Representatives last week, a provision contained in the bill—known as the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA)—threatens to significantly expand the scope of the spy program, helping the government to compel the assistance of whole new categories of businesses.

Legal experts argue the provision could enable the government to conscript virtually anyone with access to facilities or equipment housing communications data, forcing “delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utilities providers,” among others, to assist US spies in acquiring access to Americans’ emails, phone calls, and text messages—so long as one side of the communication is foreign.

A global tech trade association, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), is now urging Congress not to pass RISAA without removing a key provision “dramatically expanding the scope of entities and individuals covered” by the program, known as Section 702. Changes to the 702 program included in the House bill, ITI says, would only serve to send customers in the US and abroad fleeing to foreign competitors, convincing many that technology in the US is far too exposed to government surveillance.

The group’s membership includes several major equipment manufacturers, such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Broadcom, as well as large cloud storage providers like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce. “ITI’s position is that the provision should be removed,” the group’s communications director, Janae Washington, tells WIRED. “Our positions are based on member consensus.”

The individual ITI member companies WIRED contacted for their comment on the legislation did not immediately respond or declined to comment.

The provision under fire stems from a ruling handed down by the US government’s secret surveillance court—the FISA court—that oversees the 702 program. The program is designed to target the communications of foreigners, including calls and emails to and from US citizens. To this aim, the federal statute specifies that the government may compel the assistance of businesses that fall into the category of what it calls “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs.

Companies like Google and AT&T have typically fallen into this category as direct providers of the services being wiretapped; however, the US government has also moved in recent years to interpret the term more broadly as part of an effort to expand the roster of entities whose assistance it’s allowed to compel.

The FISA court, in a decision backed by its own review body, pushed back against the expanded definition, telling the government that what constitutes an ECSP remains “open to reconsideration by the branches of government whose competence and constitutional authority extend to statutory revision.”

More concisely: The court reminded the government that only Congress has the power to rewrite the law.

The US Intelligence Community (IC) thus began a campaign to ensure that this year’s legislation reauthorizing the 702 program redefines “ECSP” to address what it calls a “collection gap resulting from recent court opinions.”

Internal emails obtained by WIRED show that members of the House Intelligence Committee served as intermediaries for the IC in its campaign to convince Congress to support the provision. An email circulated to House members in February by Michael Calcagni, the intel committee’s deputy staff director, for instance, informed lawmakers that the “collection gap” was both “serious and dangerous” and that “contrary to unsubstantiated assertions, it would not authorize or enable the Government to conduct surveillance of any American who connects to public WiFi at a Starbucks or McDonalds.”

One of the nation’s leading FISA experts, Marc Zwillinger, a private attorney who has twice appeared before the FISA Court of Review, began raising the alarm in December over the provision, pointing to text that would allow the government to compel the assistance of “any service provider” with access to “equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store” communications, so long as one of the recipients is a foreigner reasonably believed to be overseas.

While rejecting Zwillinger’s analysis publicly, House intel members nevertheless attempted to quietly “narrow” the provision to clamp down on any criticism, excluding a handful of business types such as senior centers, hotels, and coffee shops. In a follow-up last week, Zwillinger and other attorneys who’ve made rare appearances before the FISA court characterized the intel committee’s improvements as “marginal,” saying the need for the exclusions only served to demonstrate the government is overreaching.

The provision, Zwillinger says, continues to ensnare owners and operators of facilities housing equipment used to store and carry data, “such as data centers and buildings owned by commercial landlords, who merely have access to communications equipment in their physical space.” The text could be interpreted to extend to “delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utility providers.” And while the new provision excludes businesses like coffee shops, those businesses typically rely on cloud computer services whose equipment remains subject to the 702 program’s expanded scope.

“Although the effects of this provision may be unintentional, its impacts would be very real,” ITI’s senior vice president of policy, John Miller, says. “The language in the provision vastly expands the US government’s warrantless surveillance capabilities, damaging the competitiveness of US technology companies large and small, and arguably imperiling the continued global free flow of data between the US and its allies.”

Should it become apparent to the world that America’s top IT companies—data centers, cloud providers, and security services alike—have been turned into a watering hole for the US Intelligence Community, many customers will “likely look to foreign competitors,” Miller says, companies whose technologies are viewed as less exposed to clandestine government requests.

“There is no greater responsibility of the US government than to provide for the security of the country,” he says, adding it was incumbent upon to craft legislation to address national security concerns “in a focused way.”

_Updated 4/17/2024, 6:30 pm ET: Added additional details clarifying ITI's position on RISAA._

Big Tech Says Spy Bill Turns Its Workers Into Informants

Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, a group with ties to the Kremlin’s Sandworm unit, is crossing lines even that notorious cyberwarfare unit wouldn’t dare to.

Russia's military intelligence unit known as Sandworm has, for the past decade, served as the Kremlin’s most aggressive cyberattack force, triggering blackouts in Ukraine and releasing self-spreading, destructive code in incidents that remain some of the most disruptive hacking events in history. In recent months, however, one group of hackers linked to Sandworm has attempted a kind of digital mayhem that, in some respects, goes beyond even its predecessor: They've claimed responsibility for directly targeting the digital systems of a hydroelectric dam in France and water utilities in the United States and Poland, flipping switches and changing software settings in an apparent effort to sabotage those countries’ critical infrastructure.

Since the beginning of this year, a hacktivist group known as the Cyber Army of Russia, or sometimes Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, has taken credit on at least three occasions for hacking operations that targeted US and European water and hydroelectric utilities. In each case, the hackers have posted videos to the social media platform Telegram that show screen recordings of their chaotic manipulation of so-called human-machine interfaces, software that controls physical equipment inside those target networks. The apparent victims of that hacking include multiple US water utilities in Texas, one Polish wastewater treatment plant, and a French hydroelectric plant—though it’s not clear exactly how much disruption or damage the hackers may have managed against any of those facilities.

A new report published today by cybersecurity firm Mandiant draws a link between that hacker group and Sandworm, which has been identified for years as Unit 74455 of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. Mandiant found evidence that Sandworm helped create Cyber Army of Russia Reborn and tracked multiple instances when data stolen from networks that Sandworm had attacked was later leaked by the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn group. Mandiant couldn't determine, however, whether Cyber Army of Russia Reborn is merely one of the many cover personas that Sandworm has adopted to disguise its activities over the last decade or instead a distinct group that Sandworm helped to create and collaborated with but which is now operating independently.

Either way, Cyber Army of Russia Reborn’s hacking has now, in some respects, become even more brazen than Sandworm itself, says John Hultquist, who leads Mandiant’s threat-intelligence efforts and has tracked Sandworm’s hackers for nearly a decade. He points out that Sandworm has never directly targeted a US network with a disruptive cyberattack—only planted malware on US networks in preparation for one or, in the case of its 2017 NotPetya ransomware attack, infected US victims indirectly with self-spreading code. Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, by contrast, hasn’t hesitated to cross that line.

“Even though this group is operating under this persona that’s tied to Sandworm, they do seem more reckless than any Russian operator we’ve ever seen targeting the United States,” Hultquist says. “They’re actively manipulating operational technology systems in a way that’s highly aggressive, probably disruptive, and dangerous.”

**An Overflowed Tank and a French Rooster**

Mandiant didn't have access to the targeted water utility and hydroelectric plant networks, so wasn't able to determine how Cyber Army of Russian Reborn got access to those networks. One of the group’s videos posted in mid-January, however, shows what appears to be a screen recording that captures the hackers’ manipulation of software interfaces for the control systems of water utilities in the Texas towns of Abernathy and Muleshoe. “We are starting our next raid across the USA,” reads a message introducing the video on Telegram. “In this video there are a couple of critical infrastructure objects, namely water supply systems😋”

A screen recording shows Cyber Army of Russian Reborn clicking buttons on the interface of a water utility in Texas.

Cyber Army of Russia Reborn via Telegram

The video then shows the hackers frenetically clicking around the target interface, changing values and settings for both utilities’ control systems. Though it’s not clear what effects that manipulation may have had, the Texas newspaper _The Plainview Herald_ reported in early February that local officials had acknowledged the cyberattacks and confirmed some level of disruption. The city manager for Muleshoe, Ramon Sanchez, reportedly said in a public meeting that the attack on the town’s utility had resulted in one water tank overflowing. Officials for the nearby towns of Abernathy and Hale Center—a target not mentioned in the hackers’ video—also said they’d been hit. All three towns’ utilities, as well as another, in Lockney, reportedly disabled their software to prevent its exploitation, but officials said that service to the water utilities’ customers was never interrupted. (WIRED reached out to officials from Muleshoe and Abernathy but didn't immediately hear back.)

Another screen recording shows Cyber Army of Russian Reborn tampering with the control systems of a Polish wastewater treatment plant, seemingly changing settings at radom.

Cyber Army of Russia Reborn via Telegram

Another video the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn hackers posted in January shows what appears to be a screen recording of a similar attempted sabotage of a wastewater utility in Wydminy, a village in Poland, a country whose government has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine in the midst of Russia’s invasion. “Hi everybody, today we will play with the Polish wastewater treatment plants. Enjoy watching!” says an automated Russian voice at the beginning of the video. The video then shows the hackers flipping switches and changing values in the software, set to a Super Mario Bros. soundtrack.

A third screen recording shows Cyber Army of Russia Reborn's access to a French water utility.

Cyber Army of Russia Reborn via Telegram

In a third video, published in March, the hackers similarly record themselves tampering with the control system for what they describe as the Courlon Sur Yonne hydroelectric dam in France. That video was posted just after French president Emmanuel Macron had made public statements suggesting he would send French military personnel to Ukraine to aid in its war against Russia. The video starts by showing Macron in the form of a rooster holding a French flag. “We recently heard a French rooster crowing,” the video says. “Today we’ll take a look at the Courlon dam and have a little fun. Enjoy watching, friends. Glory to Russia!”

In their Telegram post, the hackers claim to have lowered the French dam’s water level and stopped the flow of electricity it produced, though WIRED couldn’t confirm those claims. Neither the Wydminy facility nor the owner of the Courlon dam, Energies France, responded to WIRED’s request for comment.

In the videos, the hackers do display some knowledge of how a water utility works, as well as some ignorance and random switch-flipping, says Gus Serino, the founder of cybersecurity firm I&C Secure and a former staffer at a water utility and at the infrastructure cybersecurity firm Dragos. Serino notes that the hackers did, for instance, change the “stop level” for water tanks in the Texas utilities, which could have triggered the overflow that officials mentioned. But he notes that they also made other seemingly arbitrary changes, particularly for the Wydminy wastewater plant, that would have had no effect.

Hackers Linked to Russia’s Military Claim Credit for Sabotaging US Water Utilities

A cybercriminal gang called RansomHub claims to be selling highly sensitive patient information stolen from Change Healthcare following a ransomware attack by another group in February.

Change Healthcare is facing a new cybersecurity nightmare after a ransomware group began selling what it claims is Americans’ sensitive medical and financial records stolen from the health care giant.

“For most US individuals out there doubting us, we probably have your personal data,” the RansomHub gang said in an announcement seen by WIRED.

The stolen data allegedly includes medical and dental records, payment claims, insurance details, and personal information like Social Security numbers and email addresses, according to screenshots. RansomHub claimed it had health care data on active-duty US military personnel.

The sprawling theft and sale of sensitive health care data represents a dramatic new form of fallout from the February cyberattack on Change Healthcare that crippled the company’s claims-payment operations and sent the US health care system into crisis as hospitals struggled to stay open without regular funding.

Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, previously acknowledged that a ransomware gang known as BlackCat or AlphV breached its systems, and told WIRED last week that it is investigating RansomHub’s claims about possessing the company’s stolen data. Change Healthcare did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the group’s alleged sale of its data.

The wide variety of patient data that RansomHub claims to be selling is a testament to Change Healthcare’s role as a critical intermediary between insurers and health care providers, facilitating payments between both parties and collecting reams of sensitive information about patients and their medical procedures in the process.

Among the sample records that RansomHub posted are a list of open claims handled by the company’s EquiClaim subsidiary that includes patient and provider names; a hospital record for a 74-year-old woman in Tampa, Florida; and part of a database record related to US military service members’ health care.

RansomHub said it would allow individual insurance companies that worked with Change Healthcare and had their data compromised to pay ransoms to prevent the sale of their records. It specified that it was selling data belonging to MetLife, CVS Caremark, Davis Vision, Health Net, and Teachers Health Trust.

Change Healthcare’s “processing of sensitive data for all of these companies is just something unbelievable,” RansomHub said in its announcement.

Most firms whose data RansomHub claims to possess did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.

Mike DeAngelis, the executive director of corporate communications for CVS Health says the company is “aware of unsubstantiated claims from threat actors that confidential data, including personal information of patients and members belonging to multiple organizations, was accessed as part of Change Healthcare’s cyber security incident.”

“We are closely monitoring Change Healthcare’s response to this issue and will provide updates with more information as appropriate,” DeAngelis adds, noting that Change Healthcare has not yet confirmed that patient data “was impacted by this incident.”

Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the security firm Emsisoft who closely tracks ransomware gangs, says the new sale of stolen data was probably “less about actually selling the data” and more about putting Change Healthcare—and the partner companies whose records it failed to protect—“under additional pressure to pay.”

Change Healthcare appears to have paid a $22 million ransom to AlphV to stop it from leaking terabytes of stolen data.

Two months into the crisis spawned by the ransomware attack, Change Healthcare has faced mounting losses. The company recently reported spending $872 million responding to the incident as of March 31.

At the same time, Change is under increasing pressure from lawmakers and regulators to explain its cybersecurity lapse and the steps it’s taking to prevent another hack.

A subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the health sector’s cyber posture on Tuesday, with key lawmakers saying they were disappointed that UnitedHealth Group declined to make an executive available to testify. And the Department of Health and Human Services is investigating whether Change Healthcare’s failure to prevent hackers from accessing and stealing its data violated federal data-security rules.

_Updated 4/16/2024, 5:38 pm ET: Added additional details about the firms whose data RansomHub claims to possess._

Change Healthcare’s New Ransomware Nightmare Goes From Bad to Worse

A controversial bill reauthorizing the Section 702 spy program may force whole new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the US government’s behalf, including on fellow Americans.

The United States Senate is poised to vote on legislation this week that, for the next two years at least, could dramatically expand the number of businesses that the US government can force to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.

Some of the nation’s top legal experts on a controversial US spy program argue that the legislation, known as the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), would enhance the US government’s spy powers, forcing a variety of new businesses to secretly eavesdrop on Americans’ overseas calls, texts, and email messages.

Those experts include a handful of attorneys who’ve had the rare opportunity to appear before the US government’s secret surveillance court.

The Section 702 program, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was established more than a decade ago to legalize the government’s practice of forcing major telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on overseas calls in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

On the one hand, the government claims that the program is designed to exclusively target foreign citizens who are physically located abroad; on the other, the government has fiercely defended its ability to access wiretaps of Americans' emails and phone conversations, often years after the fact and in cases unrelated to the reasons the wiretaps were ordered in the first place.

The 702 program works by compelling the cooperation of US businesses defined by the government as “electronic communications service providers”—traditionally phone and email providers such as AT&T and Google. Members of the House Intelligence Committee, whose leaders today largely serve as lobbyists for the US intelligence community in Congress, have been working to expand the definition of that term, enabling the government to force new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the government’s behalf.

Marc Zwillinger, a private attorney who has twice appeared before the FISA Court of Review, wrote last week that the RISAA legislation expands the definition of “electronic communications service provider” (ECSR) to include data centers and commercial landlords—businesses, he says, that “merely have access to communications equipment in their physical space.” According to Zwillinger, RISAA may also ensnare anyone “with access to such facilities and equipment, including delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utilities providers.”

Zwillinger had earlier criticized the ECSR language this year, leading House lawmakers to amend the text to explicitly exclude certain types of businesses, including hotels.

Zwillinger noted in response that the need for those exclusions is proof enough that the text is overly broad; an exception that merely serves to prove that the rule exists: “The breadth of the new definition is obvious from the fact that the drafters felt compelled to exclude such ordinary places such as senior centers, hotels, and coffee shops,” he wrote. “But for these specific exceptions, the scope of the new definition would cover them—and scores of businesses that did not receive a specific exemption remain within its purview.”

This analysis quickly flooded inboxes on Capitol Hill last week, with some Hill staffers and privacy experts quietly dubbing the ECSR language the “Stasi amendment,” a reference to the East German secret police force notorious for infiltrating industry and forcing German citizens to spy on one another.

Digital rights groups have pointed to Zwillinger’s assessment while lobbying US senators this week to vote against the RISAA. “While the Department of Justice wants us to believe that this is simply about addressing data centers, that is no justification for exposing cleaning crews, security guards, and untold scores of other Americans to secret Section 702 directives,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at Demand Progress, which has taken to calling the ECSR text the “Make Everyone A Spy provision.”

In an interview with _The New York Times_ on Tuesday, Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, decried comparisons between the ECSR text and the East German secret police, saying critics of the provision were “massively exaggerating” the 702 program's domestic reach.

The Senate is expected to vote on RISAA on Wednesday, though a few procedural hurdles remain. A two-thirds majority vote will be needed to get the bill to the floor, and another two-thirds majority is required to prevent privacy defenders from filibustering the bill. Once those hurdles are cleared, however, a simple majority is needed to send the FISA reauthorization bill to the White House.

There is almost zero chance of US president Joe Biden rejecting the bill. The administration has spent months sending top lieutenants to the Hill to champion its cause. Biden’s support for the 702 program stands in stark contrast to the views of his campaign rival, former president Donald Trump, who last week commanded his supporters in Congress to “KILL FISA.”

Ron Wyden, the senior US senator from Oregon, argues that RISAA represents “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” A leading privacy hawk in Congress, Wyden joined the Senate Intelligence Committee just prior to the 9/11 attacks and has served for more than two decades.

The US House of Representatives passed RISAA last week in a 273–147 vote. An amendment aimed at requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain search warrants before accessing wiretaps on US citizens was rejected after a vote on the amendment ended in a tie.

Members of the House Intelligence Community allied with the Biden White House and its spy agencies to defeat the amendment in what multiple House sources referred to as a “campaign of fear.” An hour before the vote on Friday, Himes openly threatened US lawmakers supporting the warrant requirement, claiming that if it passed, he’d ensure those lawmakers face the brunt of the blame in the wake of any future terrorist attacks.

“If we turn off the ability of the government to query US person data, the consequences will be known soon,” Himes said. “And we will audit why what happened happened. And accountability will be visited.”

For years, the US government has claimed that it would be impossible to estimate the number of Americans who are being eavesdropped on under Section 702. While statistics on the program are difficult to come by, it is known to have captured hundreds of millions of individual calls, texts, and emails while in the process of targeting only a few million individuals. (The FBI claims that, following a series of recent internal reforms, the 702 program now targets fewer than 300,000 individuals per year.)

While Section 702 is hailed as a powerful tool against terrorism, cybercrime, and drug trafficking, US spy agencies are likewise authorized to target foreigners on the basis that they’re believed to receive or possess “foreign intelligence information,” an ambiguous term legal experts argue could extend to a virtually unlimited number of activities with any number of tenuous ties to “foreign affairs.”

While attempting to paint the program as merely a threat to Americans who communicate with Hamas, ISIS, or other designated terrorist groups, House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner did little to reject claims last week that the 702 program can also be aimed at foreign dignitaries and politicians of allied European nations. Notably, the US does not recognize any foreign citizen abroad as having privacy rights, and US spy agencies may freely target them without congressional approval. The 702 program exists because the government relies on US businesses to implement its wiretaps and ensnares Americans’ communications in the process.

Much of the criticism aimed at the 702 program stems from revelations in a declassified court filing last year that describes rampant abuse by agents of the FBI, which is known to have scoured the wiretap database for information on tens of thousands of American protesters, journalists, political donors, and at least one sitting member of Congress.

The FBI has implemented a number of internal policies in recent years designed to limit lower-ranking FBI employees from unilaterally authorizing searches that target Americans—reforms that Turner and other spy agency surrogates claim are sufficient to stave off future abuse.

The program’s critics, meanwhile, say relying on the FBI to internally police itself is a mistake, pointing to decades of surveillance abuses and political intelligence gathering carried out in clear violation of US law.

US Senate to Vote on a Wiretap Bill That Critics Call ‘Stasi-Like’

Microsoft has stumbled through a series of major cybersecurity failures over the past few years. Experts say the US government’s reliance on its systems means the company continues to get a free pass.

When Microsoft revealed in January that foreign government hackers had once again breached its systems, the news prompted another round of recriminations about the security posture of the world’s largest tech company.

Despite the angst among policymakers, security experts, and competitors, Microsoft faced no consequences for its latest embarrassing failure. The United States government kept buying and using Microsoft products, and senior officials refused to publicly rebuke the tech giant. It was another reminder of how insulated Microsoft has become from virtually any government accountability, even as the Biden administration vows to make powerful tech firms take more responsibility for America’s cyberdefense.

That state of affairs is unlikely to change even in the wake of a new report by the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a group of government and industry experts, which lambasts Microsoft for failing to prevent one of the worst hacking incidents in the company’s recent history. The report says Microsoft’s “security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul.”

Microsoft’s almost untouchable position is the result of several intermingling factors. It is by far the US government’s most important technology supplier, powering computers, document drafting, and email conversations everywhere from the Pentagon to the State Department to the FBI. It is a critical partner in the government’s cyberdefense initiatives, with almost unparalleled insights about hackers’ activities and sweeping capabilities to disrupt their operations. And its executives and lobbyists have relentlessly marketed the company as a leading force for a digitally safer world.

These enviable advantages help explain why senior government officials have refused to criticize Microsoft even as Russian and Chinese government-linked hackers have repeatedly breached the company’s computer systems, according to cybersecurity experts, lawmakers, former government officials, and employees of Microsoft’s competitors.

These people—some of whom requested anonymity to candidly discuss the US government and their industry’s undisputed behemoth—argue that the government’s relationship with Microsoft is crippling Washington’s ability to fend off major cyberattacks that jeopardize sensitive data and threaten vital services. To hear them tell it, Microsoft is overdue for oversight.

**A History of Breaches and Controversy**

Microsoft has a long track record of security breaches, but the past few years have been particularly bad for the company.

In 2021, Chinese government hackers discovered and used flaws in Microsoft’s email servers to hack the company’s customers, later releasing the flaws publicly to spark a feeding frenzy of attacks. In 2023, China broke into the email accounts of 22 federal agencies, spying on senior State Department officials and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo ahead of multiple US delegation trips to Beijing. Three months ago, Microsoft revealed that Russian government hackers had used a simple trick to access the emails of some Microsoft senior executives, cyber experts, and lawyers. Last month, the company said that attack also compromised some of its source code and “secrets” shared between employees and customers. On Thursday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed that those customers included federal agencies, and issued an emergency directive warning agencies whose emails were exposed to look for signs that the Russian hackers were attempting to use login credentials contained in those emails.

These incidents occurred as security experts were increasingly criticizing Microsoft for failing to promptly and adequately fix flaws in its products. As by far the biggest technology provider for the US government, Microsoft vulnerabilities account for the lion’s share of both newly discovered and most widely used software flaws. Many experts say Microsoft is refusing to make the necessary cybersecurity improvements to keep up with evolving challenges.

Microsoft hasn’t “adapted their level of security investment and their mindset to fit the threat,” says one prominent cyber policy expert. “It’s a huge fuckup by somebody that has the resources and the internal engineering capacity that Microsoft does.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s CSRB endorsed this view in its new report on the 2023 Chinese intrusion, saying Microsoft exhibited “a corporate culture that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.” The report also criticized Microsoft for publishing inaccurate information about the possible causes of the latest Chinese intrusion.

The recent breaches reveal Microsoft’s failure to implement basic security defenses, according to multiple experts.

Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the security firm CrowdStrike, points to the Russians’ ability to jump from a testing environment to a production environment. “That should never happen,” he says. Another cyber expert who works at a Microsoft competitor highlighted China’s ability to snoop on multiple agencies’ communications through one intrusion, echoing the CSRB report, which criticized Microsoft’s authentication system for allowing broad access with a single sign-in key.

“You don't hear about these types of breaches coming out of other cloud service providers,” Meyers says.

According to the CSRB report, Microsoft has “not sufficiently prioritized rearchitecting its legacy infrastructure to address the current threat landscape.”

In response to written questions, Microsoft tells WIRED that it’s aggressively improving its security to address recent incidents.

“We are committed to adapting to the evolving threat landscape and partnering across industry and government to defend against these growing and sophisticated global threats,” says Steve Faehl, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s federal security business.

As part of its Secure Future Initiative launched in November, Faehl says, Microsoft has improved its ability to automatically detect and block abuses of employee accounts, begun scanning for more types of sensitive information in network traffic, reduced the access granted by individual authentication keys, and created new authorization requirements for employees seeking to create company accounts.

Microsoft has also redeployed “thousands of engineers” to improve its products and has begun convening senior executives for status updates at least twice weekly, Faehl says.

The new initiative represents Microsoft’s “roadmap and commitments to answer much of what the CSRB report called out as priorities,” Faehl says. Still, Microsoft does not accept that its security culture is broken, as the CSRB report argues. “We very much disagree with this characterization,” Faehl says, “though we do agree that we haven’t been perfect and have work to do.”

**A Security Revenue ‘Addiction’**

Microsoft has earned special enmity from the cybersecurity community for charging its customers extra for better security protections like threat monitoring, antivirus, and user access management. In January 2023, the company touted that its security division had passed $20 billion in annual revenue.

“Microsoft has shifted to looking at cybersecurity as something that's meant to generate revenue for them,” says Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, associate vice president of research at security firm SentinelOne. His colleague Alex Stamos recently wrote that Microsoft’s “addiction” to this revenue “has seriously warped their product design decisions.”

These tensions exploded into the open in early 2021, as Congress and the new Biden administration scrambled to understand Russia’s far-reaching SolarWinds hacking campaign.

After breaching government networks through SolarWinds software, Moscow’s operatives fooled Microsoft’s cloud platform into granting them expansive access. Because most agencies weren’t paying for Microsoft’s premium service tier, they didn’t have the network activity logs necessary to detect these intrusions. Lawmakers were outraged that Microsoft was charging the government extra for such a basic feature, and Biden administration officials spent the next two and a half years privately urging Microsoft to make log data free for all customers. Microsoft finally agreed to do so last July—eight days after announcing yet another major hack, this one discovered by an agency paying for log data.

Microsoft won’t say if it plans to make other premium security features free for all of its customers. “We continue to raise the built-in security of our products and services to benefit customers,” Faehl says.

Asked about experts’ arguments that Microsoft’s strategy of profiting off of cybersecurity is incompatible with a security-first mindset, Faehl says, “We would disagree with that characterization.”

**A System That’s Everywhere**

Microsoft’s dominance has prompted concerns that it represents a single point of failure, concentrating America’s technology dependence in such a way that hackers could easily sabotage essential services by targeting one company’s products.

Few services better illustrate the government’s overwhelming dependence on Microsoft—and an area where some experts say a more diversified approach would be safer—than email. A former US cybersecurity official who works at one of Microsoft’s competitors predicts that an attack crippling Microsoft’s email platform would significantly reduce the government’s ability to operate.

Warnings about a Microsoft “monoculture” date back two decades, but the idea is now attracting new attention from policymakers.

“The US government’s dependence on Microsoft poses a serious threat to US national security,” says US senator Ron Wyden. “The government is effectively stuck with the company’s products, despite multiple serious breaches of US government systems by foreign hackers caused by the company’s negligence.”

Last Monday, Wyden announced draft legislation that would set a four-year deadline for the federal government to stop buying collaboration technology like Microsoft Office that critics say doesn’t integrate well with competing services.

Reducing the government’s reliance on a single vendor wouldn’t just benefit the government, experts say. It would also spread the attack risk across more companies, taking some of the pressure off of Microsoft to protect such a vast portfolio of systems. The giant target on Microsoft’s back makes it a magnet for cybercriminals and government hackers, which helps explain its outsize number of breaches.

The government’s reliance on Microsoft also entrenches a sense of familiarity with its products that cements its places in federal networks. While some agencies are exploring alternatives to Microsoft, most of them are sticking with what they know—largely because it’s easier than switching to an alternative platform, the former cyber official says.

Microsoft denies making it difficult for customers to switch to or incorporate competitors’ products. “Our competitors often stoke subjective complaints about ‘compatibility,’” Faehl says, but “we hear this more from the vendors of some third-party products” than from customers trying to use them.

Regardless, experts say, the upshot is clear: The government is dependent on Microsoft, robbing it of the leverage needed to push back on the company’s practices.

**Working the Refs**

Microsoft isn’t counting on its market dominance alone to defang government oversight. Since its antitrust battles with the government in the 1990s, the company has crafted a sophisticated public policy strategy that combines earnest calls to protect cyberspace with omnipresent participation in government initiatives.

“Microsoft is by far the slickest operation out there in tech when it comes to these issues,” says Andrew Grotto, a former senior White House cyber official who now leads Stanford University’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance and consults for some of Microsoft’s competitors. “They learned this lesson 25 years ago and have been applying it ever since.”

Microsoft’s threat intelligence team, which knows more about malicious cyber activity than virtually any other company and most governments, regularly publishes research about cyber threats and collaborates with law enforcement on operations to dismantle hackers’ infrastructure. The company also helps fund groups like the CyberPeace Institute, which advocates for a safer internet and helps defend nongovernment organizations from hackers. And it has positioned itself as a helpful partner to policymakers who want to take on cyber issues but don’t know where to start, sometimes providing lawmakers with draft legislative language.

With its market dominance and political savvy, Microsoft has ensured that officials almost never publicly criticize it, experts say.

“The government's uncomfortable saying bad things about Microsoft because they're fully committed to them,” says Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank.

The Biden administration has spoken grandly about wielding the government’s formidable contracting power to force companies to improve their security. But with Microsoft, that leverage is nonexistent, experts say. “There is no realistic chance that the government will wholesale cancel its contracts with Microsoft,” Paul Rosenzweig, a cyber consultant and former DHS policy official, says in an email.

Microsoft disputes this argument. “The idea that the government is too dependent on Microsoft is at odds with reality,” Faehl says.

The government’s lack of leverage means federal officials never use the kind of blunt language found in the CSRB report when discussing Microsoft, even when they insist on speaking to reporters anonymously. The result is a remarkable display of government deference to Microsoft.

After Chinese hackers broke into government email systems and eluded agencies not paying for Microsoft’s premium security features, a senior official at CISA acknowledged that Microsoft’s business model was “not yielding the sort of security outcomes that we seek,” but they declined to directly rebuke Microsoft, instead sticking to talking points about productive conversations with the company.

In fact, despite Microsoft’s yearslong defiance of CISA’s high-profile push for companies to be “secure by design,” CISA has steadfastly refused to criticize Microsoft’s failures. When Microsoft finally bowed to pressure and made logs free last July, CISA director Jen Easterly said she was “extremely pleased with Microsoft’s decision.”

The former cyber official finds the government’s meekness remarkable. “When their own emails are stolen, they don’t seem to push back on the vendor who is the cause of that.”

The White House’s National Security Council declined to comment for this story. In a statement, Eric Goldstein, CISA’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, says his agency “has a robust partnership with Microsoft and will continue to collaborate in many areas,” while also continuing to “impress upon all technology companies the urgency of developing products that are secure by design so that consumers can trust the safety and integrity of the technology that they use every day.”

Microsoft’s Faehl says his company is “committed to secure by design and secure by default.”

**Forcing Change**

The CSRB report on Microsoft’s cloud breach calls for dramatic changes to the company’s security culture. According to many experts, it’s time for the government to find its spine and compel those changes.

“Big, powerful companies in general don’t change their behavior unless they’re incentivized to do so,” Stanford University’s Grotto says.

The CSRB report recommends tough new requirements for cloud providers like Microsoft, including periodic security reviews after they receive federal contracts. Experts say those requirements could shift corporate incentives in favor of better security.

Microsoft seems to realize that its recent breaches have sparked a public relations crisis. “We expect and welcome fair scrutiny,” says Faehl. “As an industry leader we must be accountable for the security of our products and services.”

At the same time, he says, Microsoft “wouldn’t mind seeing some scrutiny” of its competitors who “seek to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt about our position as a way to seek advantage for their own products.”

Taking on Microsoft would also be a way for the Biden administration to live up to the principles in its National Cybersecurity Strategy, which prioritizes shifting the burden of cybersecurity onto large, well-resourced tech vendors. “They make the point … that this balance needs to shift,” Grotto says. “The question now is, ‘Okay, what does administration do with that diagnosis?’”

There are signs that the administration is heeding this advice. During a briefing with reporters on Thursday about the possibility that Russian operatives stole government secrets through their latest Microsoft hack, Goldstein said that CISA and other agencies are “are working closely with Microsoft, in alignment with the recommendations of the Cyber Safety Review Board, to drive further progress in Microsoft’s improvement plans with their broader security culture and enterprise.”

In the meantime, experts say, the status quo allows Microsoft to shirk responsibility for problems that it is uniquely capable of resolving.

“No harm comes from doing nothing, at least not to these companies,” Guerrero-Saade of SentinelOne says. “And that’s what’s going to destroy us.”

The US Government Has a Microsoft Problem

The Iron Dome, US allies, and long-range interceptor missiles all came into play.

On Saturday, Iran launched more than 300 drones and cruise missiles at Israel, a response to a strike earlier this month against Iran's embassy in Syria. As they made their way to their target, Israel invoked a number of defense systems to impede their progress. That starts with the Iron Dome.

The Iron Dome, operational for well over a decade, comprises at least 10 missile-defense batteries strategically distributed around the country. When radar detects incoming objects, it sends that information back to a command-and-control center, which will track the threat to assess whether it’s a false alarm, and where it might hit if it’s not. The system then fires interceptor missiles at the incoming rockets that seem most likely to hit an inhabited area.

“All of that process was designed for defense against low-flying, fast-moving missiles,” says Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado. Which also makes it well prepared for an onslaught of drones. “A drone is going to be flying probably slower than these rockets,” Boyd says, “so in some ways it’s an easier threat to address.”

Things get more complicated if the drones are flying so low that the radar can’t detect them. The biggest challenge to the Iron Dome, though, is sheer quantity. Israel has hundreds of interceptor missiles at its disposal, but it’s still possible for the Iron Dome to get overwhelmed, as it did on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel with a barrage of thousands of missiles.

Israel officials say that the Iron Dome and other systems successfully defended against 99 percent of the Iranian drones and missiles, although a 10-year-old boy was reportedly injured by shrapnel from an interceptor.

While the Iron Dome is Israel’s last line of defense, it’s not the only factor that came into play. The UAVs in question are likely Iran-made Shahed-136 drones, which have played a prominent role in Russia’s war against Ukraine. These so-called suicide drones—it has a built-in warhead and is designed to crash into targets—are relatively cheap to produce, which is why Iran was able to send them in such quantity.

“At one level they’re not difficult to take down. They’re not stealthy, they don’t fly very fast, and they don’t maneuver,” says David Ochmanek, senior defense analyst at the nonprofit RAND Corporation. “In some way, they're like airborne targets.”

That slowness and fixed flight path in particular mean the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) had to travel for several hours before they reached their intended destination, leaving ample opportunities to intercept them.

“Because there’s so much indication of warning in advance of the UAS, presumably there’s going to be a lot of fixed-wing, manned aircraft that are looking at these things, tracking these things, and presumably trying to engage these things,” says Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy think tank.

Some of that work fell to the US military; CNN reports that forces in the region intercepted more than 70 drones and “at least three” ballistic missiles. The UK said it also provided backup for US planes that had been diverted from their existing missions, and that it would intercept UAVs as well.

That doesn't mean, though, that these drones should be taken lightly. “They have high-explosive warheads of several hundred pounds. If one hits a building, it'll destroy that building,” says Ochmanek. “The other thing is, they fly low. If you have a ground-based radar, they don't break the horizon until they're fairly close to the target, so the engagement time is limited.”

Israel’s further-reaching defense systems also came into play. The country’s Arrow 3 antiballistic missiles can intercept exo-atmospheric targets—that is to say, in space—while Arrow 2 systems have less range but are still considered extremely effective. Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari credited the Arrow system with taking out most of Iran’s ballistic missiles. There’s also the “David’s Sling” system, which has a much shorter range than Arrow but should prove effective against drone attacks.

Hagari also said that the country would scramble GPS signals as a further effort to disrupt the incoming UAVs.

The question now is whether the tensions will escalate from here, and how Israel’s air defense resources hold up after October 7 and months of sustained attacks on Gaza. “I think that’s probably part of the strategy on the part of Iran, is that the last six months has probably depleted the number of interceptors available to the Iron Dome systems,” says Boyd. “They saw for themselves the effectiveness of the Hamas attack. I think they’re trying to use the same approach.”

In an update Sunday morning local time, Hagari said Israel had intercepted most of the dozens of surface-to-surface missiles Iran had launched thus far, along with more than 10 cruise missiles and dozens of UAVs, all outside of Israel’s territory. Iran has indicated that the attack is over and that it considers the matter settled, but warned against retaliation from Israel.

“Should the Israeli regime commit any military aggression again, Iran's response will assuredly and decisively be stronger, and more resolute,” said Iranian ambassador Amir-Saeid Iravani in a letter to the United Nations.

“What I would be concerned about,” says Karako, “is what we haven’t yet seen.”

_Update 4/13/2024, 9:33 pm ET: Added comment from RAND Corporation's David Ochmanek._

_Update 4/14/2024, 9:00 am ET: Added latest details from the attack and a statement from Iran's UN ambassador._

How Israel Defended Against Iran's Drone and Missile Attack

Two satellites will engage in a “realistic threat response scenario” when Victus Haze gets underway.

The Victus Haze mission is more complicated than Victus Nox, involving two prime contractors, two spacecraft, and two rocket launches from different spaceports, all timed to occur with short timelines "to keep the demonstration as realistic as possible," a Space Force spokesperson told Ars.

"This demonstration will ultimately prepare the United States Space Force to provide future forces to combatant commands to conduct rapid operations in response to adversary on-orbit aggression," Space Systems Command said in a statement.

**Faith in Commercial Space**

"This is a really significant operational demonstration that is really pushing the envelope on technology and demonstrates a lot of faith in the US industrial base," Rogers said.

"Fundamentally, this is about characterizing an unknown capability for the first time in low-Earth orbit," Rogers said in an interview with Ars. "There are a whole host of challenges that come with that, consistent coverage with communications, how do you track a maneuvering object in low-Earth orbit with limited space domain awareness capabilities, what’s the right level of autonomy and human interaction?"

True Anomaly's first two Jackal satellites launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission last month, but the company announced a few weeks later that the two satellites would be unable to complete their planned rendezvous demonstration. This would have been a precursor to the type of activity True Anomaly and Rocket Lab will demonstrate on Victus Haze.

Rogers said his company is working on two more demonstration missions that will fly before Victus Haze.

The military's Defense Innovation Unit awarded $32 million to Rocket Lab for its part of the Victus Haze mission. True Anomaly's contract with SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the Space Force, is valued at $30 million. True Anomaly is contributing $30 million in private capital to help pay for the mission, bringing the total cost of Victus Haze to approximately $92 million. Space Safari, a division of Space Systems Command, oversees the entire project.

"We recognize the significant opportunity to leverage the commercial space industry’s innovations to counter China as America’s pacing threat," said Colonel Bryon McClain, Space Systems Command's program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power. "The United States has the most innovative space industry in the world. Victus Haze will demonstrate, under operationally realistic conditions, our ability to respond to irresponsible behavior on orbit."

"Once the build phase is completed the mission will enter several successive phases to include hot standby, activation, alert, and launch phases," the Space Force said. "While this is a coordinated demonstration, each vendor will be given unique launch and mission profiles."

True Anomaly's Jackal satellite, nearly as large as a refrigerator, will launch on a "rapid rideshare" mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida or Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Space Systems command said. This will most likely be a rideshare launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Launching on a rideshare flight comes with different challenges than launching on a dedicated rocket, as the Victus Nox mission did last year.

True Anomaly says it could get its satellite out of storage and integrate it with a rocket in 12 to 84 hours, depending on the flight cadence of the launch provider. After the launch of True Anomaly's Jackal, the Space Force will give Rocket Lab a 24-hour call-up to launch its satellite, similar in size to True Anomaly's spacecraft, on an Electron rocket from New Zealand or from Virginia. Rocket Lab's launch must be precisely timed to allow its satellite to rendezvous with True Anomaly's spacecraft in orbit.

Source

Wired