New York City Lawmakers Push to ‘Ban the Scan’ at MSG

At a press conference outside Madison Square Garden, politicians, musicians, and privacy advocates argued for tighter restrictions on how public venues deploy biometric surveillance...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for the Colossal Squid

Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what's going on down there. Lots of...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking, signing books, and participating in panel discussions at LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA. My full schedule is here. I'm speaking online via Zoom at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at...

Apple now uses iPhone alerts for targets of mercenary spyware

Apple has expanded its threat-notification system for targets of mercenary spyware. Apple now shows a warning directly on an iPhone’s Lock Screen and in Settings when it believes the device owner has been targeted by mercenary spyware. The new on-device alert is meant to make a high-risk warning...

WhatsApp is testing a new warning for scam messages

Meta announced it’s rolling out a new feature for WhatsApp users in the fight against scammers. Scam Alert is an optional beta feature that uses an on-device machine-learning model to flag likely scam messages from people who are not in a user’s contacts. The Scam Alert feature arrives as scammer...

The OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2026: From Model Risks to Agentic Security

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Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

It can be daunting to determine who's responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who's harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of...

If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. OpenAI, and then Anthropic, were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development--specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious,...

APT group HoneyMyte upgrades CoolClient: the backdoor gets a kernel-level Windows rootkit

Introduction CoolClient is a backdoor family attributed to the HoneyMyte APT group also known as Mustang Panda that has been used in their cyber-espionage campaigns targeting organizations across Asia and Russia. It supports such capabilities as keylogging, clipboard theft, credential harvesting,...

Curiouser and Curiouser

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. " Experiment is the mother of knowledge." ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time " Don't slide down the rabbit hole. The way down is a breeze, but climbing back's a battle." ― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter Hacker Summer Camp...

Why API Discovery Is Critical for Modern AppSec Programs

Hidden API Estate And AI-speed Recon Are Reshaping Modern Application Risk Key Takeaways Unknown APIs create unattributed exposure , and such exposure rarely gets tested. Attackers build their own inventory through live reconnaissance; they do not wait for your spreadsheet. API discovery must pul...

Keep Your Tech FLAME Alive: Trailblazer Suzanne Wheeler

In this Akamai FLAME Trailblazer blog post, Suzanne Wheeler describes her journey into cybersecurity and gives advice to women who are finding their own path...

New Android malware lets criminals use your bank card in real time

Researchers at Group-IB have discovered a new NFC relay malware family, purpose-built to capture live card data via NFC and forward it in real time to attackers. They dubbed it "WindRelay." NFC Near Field Communication is wireless technology that allows devices such as smartphones, payment cards,...

Separating AI’s Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inTech Policy Press. AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam...

Dissecting the JWR phishing framework

Cisco Talos recently identified an undocumented phishing framework, internally branded "JWR" by its developer, built to convincingly impersonate checkout and login pages across major payment and shopping platforms. The client engine of the JWR phishing framework is a real-time, operator-driven...

Parents take on Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap in 3,000 youth safety lawsuits

A group of big tech firms is fighting to stop roughly 3,000 youth safety lawsuits from moving forward, and they just lost a critical procedural battle in court. The lawsuits, brought by attorneys general and families, allege that Meta, Google, ByteDance's TikTok, and Snap knew their products were...

CBP Workers Allegedly Used Government Databases to Spy on Exes, Crushes, and Colleagues

Records obtained by WIRED detail hundreds of allegations of Customs and Border Protection workers misusing internal tools to look up romantic interests and track colleagues’ cell phones...

Imperva API Security Token & Authentication Risk Report: Nearly 40% of APIs Face Multiple Authentication Risks

Every year, the security industry publishes benchmark reports built more or less the same way: pick a handful of common vulnerabilities, measure how often they show up, publish the percentages, and move on. We just finished our second year running one of those reports — and the most important thi...

Armored Likho expands its cyber-espionage toolkit

In May 2026, we discovered a new cyber-espionage campaign by the Armored Likho group, also known as Eagle Werewolf, that targets private individuals and organizations across various industries in Russia, including major corporations, the public sector, IT, and education. The attackers used a fake...

Qualys Introduces Real-Time Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for Faster Risk Detection and Remediation

Key Takeaways Cloud environments change continuously, while security still relies on periodic scans, leaving gaps where risks go undetected. That gap becomes exposure. Qualys Real-Time CSPM monitors cloud changes as they happen, while still supporting periodic scans for environments that require...