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In a presidential memo this week, the White House has directed the Department of Homeland Security to establish a program through which private sector companies can carry out offensive cyber operations on behalf of the US government against cybercrime organizations.

The new program will run under the DHS National Coordination Center (DHS NCC) and under oversight of both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

Private companies will be able to apply and receive specific tasks from the two agencies on what and who they can hack—to prevent rogue behavior from the private sector.

The cybercriminal ecosystem is increasingly focussing on data theft and extortion rather than locking up victims' files. That criminals have stumbled across a new lucrative business model is a bittersweet win in the fight against disruptive, encrypting ransomware. Data theft extortion isn't great, but it doesn't leave widespread chaos in its wake like ransomware can.

Silent Ransom, aka Luna Moth, is one group currently making big bucks from data theft extortion. Last week The Cyber Risk Insurer reported two law firms had paid substantial ransoms to the group this year: Goodwin Procter and WilmerHale, which paid USD$10 million and $USD18 million respectively. 

Silent Ransom has been targeting law firms since 2023. It historically used phishing and convinced victims to install legitimate remote access software which was then used to steal sensitive data. In the last year, however, they've brazenly sent people to compromise systems in person by posing as IT support staff.

One of Russia's elite military hacker groups is targeting system administrators and IT professionals in Ukraine using fake job interviews as a malware delivery vector.

Ukraine's CERT says the campaign began in May and is ongoing.

The attacks have been linked to UAC-0145, a sub-group of Sandworm, a veteran cyber unit inside Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.

If there's one thing that has annoyed me as someone who doesn't attend the yearly BlackHat & DEFCON conferences, it's that I could never find out who won the Pwnie Awards for days and sometimes weeks after the event had concluded.

The Pwnie team would never update their website in time, tweet the winners, attendees would rarely share details on social media, and very few infosec news sites would bother writing about it.

It's kind of a ridiculous situation where the Pwnie Awards Wikipedia page doesn't even list last year's winners, probably because nobody reported on them anywhere.

The UK's AI Security Institute has disclosed a security incident after two AI models it was evaluating performed actions the agency wasn't expecting and tried to hack real-world organizations.

The incident took place at the end of last month and the malicious actions were performed by Anthropic's Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol models, which were among the several models being tested at the time.

AISI says it was evaluating the models as part of a special test where it intentionally granted them internet access and turned off their safety features.

North Korea will have to rein in its pet hackers after seemingly losing control over them. 

Last week we covered the news that a group of former North Korean military intelligence operatives had been caught hacking into the country's banks to steal funds for their personal benefit. 

Daily NK reports Pyongyang's elite are shocked at "the scale and audacity of the scheme". Punishment for those involved will reportedly be extreme, with one official saying "It will be hard for the entire family line to survive". Grim.

The same hacker who hit and wiped Romania's land registry database has now hacked Hungary's State Treasury in another brazen intrusion into an extremely sensitive government system.

The incident took place last week and portions of the stolen data have since been put up for sale on an underground hacking forum.

The intrusion was confirmed to local journalists by Hungary's State Treasury over the weekend. 

A Russian state-sponsored hacking group is behind a recent hacking wave that has targeted and compromised hotel WiFi gateways across the globe.

Microsoft says the campaign is far larger and more complex than it was initially covered in a ReliaQuest report two weeks ago.

ReliaQuest said the hackers were modifying DNS traffic on hotel networks to redirect users to Microsoft-themed phishing sites. Microsoft says the attacks also redirected users to malware downloads, often using ClickFix pages to trick users into downloading and running the payloads.

An international crime-fighting non-profit organization is offering a $22,000 bounty for any information on members of the INC ransomware group.

To be eligible for a payout, the provided information must lead to the identification, arrest, or disruption of the gang's operations.

Crime Stoppers International is the international branch of Crime Stoppers, a US foundation that was established in the 70s to allow anonymous and private individuals to provide aid in US law enforcement investigations that may lack manpower or resources.

The Trump administration has been trying to address two separate AI-related risks in recent months: The specific risk to US national security from China developing powerful AI and the global risk that powerful hacking machines will be available to all and sundry. A proposed bill suggests a sensible way for the US to chip away at both these risks, at least a little.

The Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act proposes safe harbor provisions for AI companies so they can share information related to AI-specific security risks. The idea here is to encourage frontier labs to work together to counter threats from Chinese AI labs, particularly what they describe as IP theft via distillation. Without this bill, sharing this kind of information could fall afoul of anti-trust legislation that prohibits collusion. 

We know the frontier labs can already detect distillation because they're always complaining about it after the fact. The idea behind this bill is that more permissive information sharing would let them respond quicker and disrupt at least some distillation campaigns.