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A recent deep dive into the American adtech surveillance system, Webloc, highlights the national security and privacy risks of pervasive and easily obtainable geolocation data. It brings home, once again, that the US needs to clamp down on the collection and sale of geolocation data.

The report, from Citizen Lab, documents what Webloc says it can do, who uses the product and its relationship with other commercial intelligence products. 

Webloc was developed by Cobweb Technologies, but is now sold by the US firm Penlink after the two companies merged in 2023. A leaked technical proposal document, obtained by Citizen Lab, says that Webloc provides access to records from "up to 500 million mobile devices across the globe". These records contain device identifiers, location coordinates and profile data from mobile apps and digital advertising.

A recently published academic paper has studied the emerging ecosystem of LLM routers, a type of proxy that sits between AI agents and the AI provider to help with load-balancing and cost tracking and limiting.

The research team tested 28 paid routers available on marketplaces like Taobao, Xianyu, and on Shopify-hosted storefronts, as well as 400 free routers available on GitHub and other places.

The study searched for multiple suspicious behaviors, such as modifying the response to inject commands, using a delay/trigger mechanism to hide future bad commands behind a history of clean operations, accessing credentials that pass through them, and using evasion techniques to thwart analysts.

The French government is taking its first major steps to ditch Windows for Linux and reduce its dependency on US tech for local European alternatives.

The first department to bite the bullet will be the French Inter-Ministerial Directorate of Digital Affairs (DINUM). The agency is the unofficial IT department for the French government, and this is very likely a test of how a migration could happen at a larger scale.

The decision was announced last week at a seminar between several French government ministries, which also pledged to prepare plans for their own migrations and the alternatives they might need.

The main Risky Business podcast is now on YouTube with video versions of our recent episodes. Below is our latest weekly show with Pat, Adam, and James at the helm!

LA CAO hack: The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has been hacked and sensitive data has been published online. Stolen data included sensitive case details and the personal information of LA police officers. Witness names, medical records, and internal affairs investigation are also part of a trove of 7.7TB published online this week. [KTLA]

Ransomware hits key Dutch hospital provider: A ransomware attack has hit a major software provider for the Dutch healthcare sector. The incident impacted ChipSoft, the maker of an electronic patient record management platform named HiX. According to reports, the platform is used by roughly 70% of all Dutch hospitals but it's unclear if it was affected. The incident didn't impact the platform's availability. [NLTimes]

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for the State Department to push back against foreign state-backed propaganda and disinformation. Unfortunately for Rubio, he also dismantled the State Department's counter-propaganda office last year. It won't be recreated easily.

When it shut down its counter-propaganda office, the US government essentially left the detection of coordinated disinformation campaigns to private companies, at least some of which either don't care or are actively taking extreme positions: X is now a cesspool of disinformation. 

Last week, though, Rubio sent a memo to global US diplomatic posts directing them to launch their own campaigns combatting foreign propaganda. Per The Guardian:

Americans have lost almost $21 billion to cybercrime last year, more than any other since the FBI began tracking cybercrime data 25 years ago, the FBI said in its yearly Internet Crime Report [PDF].

Investment scams were again the top category in terms of losses, with $8.6 billion reported stolen, and almost $6.2 billion of that sum being stolen as cryptocurrency.

Cyber-enabled fraud accounted for 85% of last year's losses, almost $17.7 billion.

The Cambodian government passed a new law last week that introduces big fines and heavy prison sentences for the operators and workers of cyber scam compounds.

The new bill passed unanimously in the National Assembly and Senate and was sent to the country's king to be signed into law. It comes after major international pressure from both China and the US for the local government to crack down on its sprawling cyber scam ecosystem.

The law introduces tiered penalties depending on a suspect's roles in the scam operation, such as if they acted alone or part of a larger cybercrime syndicate.

The Russian government will tighten operating requirements for internet service providers in an effort to kill small neighborhood providers.

The new requirements will include higher license fees, larger minimum operational capital, and mandatory deployment of the FSB's SORM traffic interception equipment.

According to reports from Izvestia and RBC, the new proposed rules would give the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media the power to revoke licenses without a court order for those who fail to comply.

Computers are now incredibly good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. While we expect this will cause cyber chaos in industry, from a US government perspective, cyber organisations like NSA and Cyber Command need access to models from all domestic AI companies. Anthropic may be the 0day maestro this week, but there are no guarantees which firm will be crowned the champion of cutting edge when the dust settles. 

In the last week or so we've seen a stream of reports demonstrating a sudden step-change in the cyber capabilities of Anthropic's models. 

In early February Anthropic announced that it had used its latest model, Opus 4.6, to find and validate more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities in open source software. These vulnerabilities were in well-tested code and some had been present for decades. The company said Opus 4.6 reasons about code the way a human researcher would. It looks at past bug fixes to find similar issues that weren't addressed, spots risky patterns and understands logic to determine what inputs would break software. Opus 4.6 was "notably better" at finding these vulnerabilities than previous models, even "without task-specific tooling, custom scaffolding, or specialized prompting". 

A suspected Iranian APT group has conducted a wide-ranging password spray attack against the Microsoft 365 accounts of governments and private sector organizations across the Middle East.

While password spraying campaigns are a dime a dozen, this one stood out to Check Point researchers because it targeted Israeli and UAE municipalities that were hit by Iranian drone and missile strikes.

The campaign started in early March, just as Iran began mustering its comeback after initial US and Israeli strikes that killed Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and tens of high-ranking government, military,  and intelligence officials in late February.