Free Republic

A squad of Ukrainian “kamikaze ground robots” airdropped behind enemy lines have taken out 3,000 Russian soldiers and reclaimed 48 square miles of occupied territory in Donetsk, officials announced. The secretive mission, dubbed “Operation Vivaldi,” began in May and wrapped up last week, when the Third Army Corps of the Ukraine’s Armed Forces made details of the feat public. “An historic moment,” it boasted on Telegram Thursday. “The Third Army Corps has begun a new stage of the war with the landing of ground robots.” The operation recaptured five villages and three settlements in the contested region of Donetsk in...

Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed by a robot, The New York Times reported Saturday. Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in November 2020, and initial reports claimed he was gunned down by a remote-controlled machine gun. According to the new Times report, the gun was planted in a pickup truck by Iranian agents, and operated by a Mossad sniper working on a computer located outside Iran. The newspaper also said that the gun was a beta test of a weapon "kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute." The truck itself...

Aaron Rich, who had reportedly been blocking his family’s private investigator from looking into whether or not his brother Seth was a WikiLeaks source, works for an influential defense contractor that provides cyber security. According to a source close to the Rich family, Aaron works for Northrup Grumman, which was named as the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world in 2015. The source did not provide what his specific role is at the company. “It’s not just hacking and defending, there’s a lot more to it,” a cyber software engineer at Northrup Grumman says in a video on the company’s...

Days after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, thousands flocked to the streets of New York City to demonstrate against the president elect in a protest organized by a Kremlin-connected Facebook page called BlackMattersUS, The Hill reports. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people attended the protest organized by the Facebook page, which, according to an archived screen grab, had more than 99,000 likes.“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!” the Facebook event page reads for the protest, which was called “Trump is NOT my President. March against Trump.” “Divided is the reason we just fell,” it reads. “We must...

Content warning: This story contains references to violence, suicide, child abuse and self-harm. A suicide attempt, depression, substance abuse, insomnia, surveillance, threats. These are just some of the experiences reported by the low-paid moderators tasked with sifting through Facebook and Instagram’s most disturbing images. The tech giant Meta, which owns both platforms, has kept the whereabouts of this operation a closely guarded secret since moving it from Kenya, where the company is facing lawsuits over working conditions and human rights. For months, it has also refused to name the company that won the lucrative contract to provide the content moderators...

The UK Ministry of Defense has discovered that the Royal Navy’s new fleet of spy drones, being operated by elements of the Royal Marines since March, have been secretly transmitting information from the drone’s primary camera to China, according to an investigation from The Telegraph. Components of the camera on the K3 Scout, a 27-foot-long multirole uncrewed surface vessel (drone boat) built by Kraken Technology in the United Kingdom, were produced in and secretly transmitting data to a device in China. An investigation into the drones revealed that the cameras were transmitting “heartbeat communications” – data to confirm they were...

This whole thing with China goes well beyond trade issues. We have known (or, at least, suspected) for years that China has been making cyber-incursions into American networks and systems. Now, in an exclusive Wall Street Journal report from Cybersecurity and Intelligence reporter Dustin Volz, we learn that in December, China made a tacit admission of being behind a series of attacks on American infrastructure.Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are...

Microsoft was breached in the massive suspected Russian campaign that has hit multiple U.S. government agencies, including those responsible for maintaining America's nuclear weapons stockpile, according to people familiar with the matter. The sprawling attack, which targeted critical government infrastructure using a Trojan horse hidden in network management software from SolarWinds Corp, also compromised broad swathes of the private sector, likely including most of the Fortune 500, it emerged on Thursday. Officials say the attack went undetected for nearly nine months, allowing the hackers free range in the affected agencies and companies, and that the true scale of the stolen...

A handful of users in a private online forum gained access to Mythos on the same day that Anthropic first announced ‌a plan to ⁠release the model... The group has been using Mythos regularly since then, though not for ​cybersecurity purposes... Announced on April 7, Mythos is being deployed as part of ‌Anthropic's "Project Glasswing," a controlled ​initiative under which select organizations ​are permitted ​to use the unreleased Claude Mythos ‌Preview model for defensive ​cybersecurity. Mythos is ​a powerful AI model that has sparked concerns among regulators about its unprecedented ​ability to ‌identify digital security vulnerabilities and potential for ​misuse.

Operation Epic Fury marks a turning point in the art of war. The key to 20th-century battles was air power. In the past, space and cyber activities have traditionally played supporting roles as so-called force multipliers. But this is no longer the case. In this conflict they have become mainstream, carving out new fronts for the wars of the future. The use of space is no longer something that is just nice to have, because everything from comms to intel to navigation uses space and cyber assets. Along with the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages US spy satellites, the US...

https://x.com/TheDebriefing17/status/2034955849840423339 TheDebriefing17@TheDebriefing17🤔The government just raided the headquarters of a 3-million-device criminal army-for-rent, the Pentagon led because military systems were being attacked, Big Tech helped execute it, and the real payoff isn't today's shutdown it's the years of prosecution data now sitting on seized servers. @Homeranger17@FBIAnchorage·16h🚨JUST IN🚨The Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), FBI Anchorage, and international partners disrupted four of the world’s largest Internet of Things (IoT) botnets that together were responsible for millions of infected devices and hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacksMar 20, 2026

The United States is using cyber operations to pressure senior Islamic Republic officials to defect, a former top commander of US Cyber Command told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, describing an information warfare campaign aimed at accelerating regime change from within. This comes in addition to the use of cyber ops to disrupt Iran’s military capabilities. Lt. Gen. Charles L. Moore Jr. explained that the US was reaching out to senior officials within the regime, the IRGC, and the security forces to create the understanding that their lives now depend on backing the desires of the Iranian people for regime...

An analysis released by Google this month showed that the U.S. defense industrial base—a network of public and private entities used to develop or maintain military weapons systems—has sustained cyberattacks from groups and criminal organizations from China, Russia, and North Korea in recent months.The report, released on Feb. 10 by Google Threat Intelligence, found that the Chinese regime and associated groups continue “to represent by volume the most active threat to entities in the defense industrial base,” which it said can pose “significant risk to the defense and aerospace sector.”Google’s report added that it “has observed more China-nexus cyber espionage...

MIAMI (Reuters) - Guantanamo war crimes prosecutions of five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked planes attacks will be delayed by two months because of lost files caused by Pentagon computer problems, U.S. military officials said on Wednesday. A weeklong pretrial hearing had been set to begin on Monday in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and four alleged co-conspirators. The judge overseeing the case postponed the hearing until June 17 at the request of defense lawyers who said three to four weeks' worth of their confidential work files had...

Chinese government-backed hackers have reportedly stolen information from critical infrastructure and government computer systems as part of a years-long campaign that includes the well-known Salt Typhoon activity. More than 80 countries were targeted and the Chinese hackers are learnt to have "stolen information from nearly every American", officials said, according to The New York Times. .. During the sweeping yearlong attack, China-backed Salt Typhoon group infiltrated major telecommunications companies and others, and stole data could allow Chinese intelligence services to exploit global communication networks to track targets including politicians, spies and activists, investigators said in a highly unusual joint statement...

Anxious FBI chiefs are trawling through 'numerous' top-level investigations spanning 22 years for fear they were compromised by convicted bureau spook Charles McGonigal, DailyMail.com can reveal. The forensic clean-up operation ranges over the entire time the philandering former head of counterintelligence in New York worked for the agency. McGonigal, 55, has already been sentenced to four years and two months in prison for taking money and conspiring with a sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a crony of despot President Vladimir Putin. But the full possible repercussions of his treachery are outlined in a sentencing memorandum by the US government for...

A former National Intelligence Officer for Cyber under President Trump and Joe Biden has come forward with explosive allegations: the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) deliberately buried evidence of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in the 2020 presidential election—and fired him when he refused to play along. The whistleblower’s damning post came in response to General Mike Flynn’s tweet Monday questioning why foreign election interference by the CCP wasn’t exposed back in 2020: “So there was foreign interference by the CCP in the 2020 presidential election. Who was running the USIC at that time and...

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, the country’s military intelligence service. Some of the...

A major cryptocurrency exchange says it was the victim of a sophisticated hack that stole about $1.5 billion worth of digital currency, marking one of the biggest online thefts of all time. Bybit said Friday that a routine transfer of Ethereum, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, between digital wallets was “manipulated” by an attacker who transferred the crypto to an unidentified address. The company sought to reassure customers that their cryptocurrency holdings with the exchange were safe. The company added that news of the hack had led to a surge in withdrawal requests and there could be delays in...

WASHINGTON — Former chief information security officer (CISO) for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense is headed back to the Pentagon — this time as DoD’s CISO — following her previous suspension from the department for allegedly disclosing classified data.Katie Arrington served as a state lawmaker for South Carolina and had an unsuccessful bid for Congress before taking her post in 2019 as the chief information officer for A&S during President Donald Trump’s first administration. She played an active role in standing up the department’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program before she was put on administrative leave...