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Ministry of Justice apologizes after court staff accessed Southport victims' files

UK Ministry of Justice apologized after court staff accessed Southport attack victims' files without authorization, exposing sensitive personal data with no evidence of third-party sharing.

The UK Ministry of Justice apologized after court staff accessed case files related to victims and survivors of the 2024 Southport murders without authorization, including sensitive personal data assessed as high risk for some individuals. There is no evidence the information was shared with third parties. HM Courts and Tribunals Service and HM Prison and Probation Service are investigating, and the Information Commissioner's Office has been informed. The incident follows similar unauthorized record access at North West Ambulance Service and Aintree University Hospital.

The Register · Security · 6h agoData breach

Arrested man allegedly impersonated NSA elite hacking unit, Supreme Court chief justice

Colorado man Joshua Culver indicted for impersonating NSA's Tailored Access Operations chief and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in Indiana court cases.

Joshua Culver, also known as Maverick Young, was arrested in Colorado after a July Indiana indictment on four counts of falsely impersonating an officer of the court and one count of using a forged judge's signature. He allegedly posed as an NSA officer in September to pressure the Tippecanoe County sheriff's office, and later presented a forged document purportedly from the head of the Tailored Access Operations unit demanding case dismissal and warrant quashing. The indictment also alleges he used a forged signature of Chief Justice John Roberts on a dismissal order in Grant County, Indiana.

CyberScoop · 21d agoPolicy & legal2

U.K. Supreme Court Opens Door for Spyware Victims to Sue Foreign States

UK Supreme Court ruled Bahrain not immune from spyware litigation, letting two dissidents pursue claims over FinSpy hacking; case returns to the High Court.

The UK Supreme Court ruled in The Kingdom of Bahrain v. Shehabi that Bahrain is not immune from litigation over its alleged use of FinSpy spyware against two Bahraini dissidents living in the UK. Citizen Lab researchers Siena Anstis, Natalia Krapiva, and Kate Pundyk, writing in Lawfare, called the decision a milestone for accountability in transnational repression. The case now returns to the UK High Court, where attribution, causation, and injury must be proven.

Citizen Lab · 14d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue post-9/11 mass surveillance expanded far beyond its counterterrorism justification and should be reevaluated for costs to rights.

An essay by Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn (originally in Lawfare) traces the post-9/11 shift from targeted surveillance to mass collection of telephone and internet metadata. It cites the Section 215 bulk phone records program, struck down in interpretation by the Second Circuit in 2015 and curtailed by the USA Freedom Act, and the NSA's Upstream program under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which ended content searches in 2017. The authors note mass surveillance now serves routine law enforcement and immigration actions, with FBI Director Kash Patel confirming purchases of Americans' data from brokers, and private systems like Flock license plate readers and venue facial recognition feeding government access.

Schneier on Security · 1d agoPolicy & legal

Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing

A judge banned a plaintiff from electronic court filings after hidden prompt-injection text was discovered planted in legal documents.

Bruce Schneier's blog discusses an incident in which hidden prompt-injection instructions were planted inside a legal filing, apparently targeting AI systems that might process court documents. Judge Walter Spader Jr. responded by banning the plaintiff from electronic filings, requiring all future submissions as printed hard copies. Commenters debate whether the tactic could affect future AI-based processing of court records and whether plain-text formats will regain favor.

Schneier on Security · 16d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Ukrainian Conti Ransomware Developer Sentenced to 4 Years in US Prison

A US court sentenced Ukrainian Oleksii Lytvynenko to four years in prison for developing malware loaders and handling stolen data for the Conti ransomware operation.

Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, 44, was arrested in Ireland in 2023, extradited to the US in late 2025, and pleaded guilty to wire fraud in June 2026. He admitted joining the Conti gang in September 2021 and helping develop a malware loader, and investigators found victim data in his possession suggesting participation in actual attacks. The Conti operation is estimated to have received at least $150 million in ransoms from victims in more than 30 countries. The sentencing follows recent terms for Karakurt negotiator Deniss Zolotarjovs (8.5 years) and the Ransom Cartel administrator (16 years).

SecurityWeekupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoPolicy & legal 7 sources1

Thomson Reuters Court Software Breach May Have Exposed SSNs and Sealed Data

Unauthorized access to Thomson Reuters' C-Track court platform may have exposed SSNs and sealed records across 11 US states, USVI, and Ontario.

Thomson Reuters' West Publishing disclosed that an unauthorized party obtained files from the C-Track court case management platform starting in March 2026, with access to one environment running from March 1 through June 29, 2026 per Montana's account. Notices name roughly 24 court bodies across 11 US states, the US Virgin Islands, and Ontario, including appellate courts in Minnesota, Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania. Exposed data may include names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, dates of birth, medical and health insurance information, and confidential or sealed court records. The company is offering 12 months of Experian or TransUnion monitoring, and courts disagree over whether the vendor's backup cloud environment or the production platform was accessed.

The Hacker News · 13d agoData breach in the wild

Bad Likert Judge: A Novel Multi-Turn Technique to Jailbreak LLMs by Misusing Their Evaluation Capability

Unit 42 details the Bad Likert Judge multi-turn jailbreak that abuses LLMs' evaluation capability, raising attack success rates over 60% across six frontier models.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes the Bad Likert Judge technique, a multi-turn jailbreak that asks a target LLM to act as a Likert-scale judge scoring the harmfulness of example responses. The highest-rated example in each scale can carry harmful content, bypassing the model's internal guardrails. Testing across six state-of-the-art text-generation LLMs showed an average attack success rate increase of more than 60% versus plain attack prompts, with tested models anonymized. The technique targets edge cases rather than typical use, and the article positions the work as guidance for defenders on potential jailbreak risks.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

First ‘Take It Down Act’ Sentencing Puts Man Behind Bars for 15 Years

Ohio man James Strahler gets the first US Take It Down Act sentence: 15 years for distributing real and AI-generated abuse imagery.

James Strahler, 38, became the first person convicted under the Take It Down Act, receiving a 15-year federal prison sentence after investigators found more than 3,000 real and AI-generated abuse images across his devices, including over 700 he posted online. He pleaded guilty to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse, and publication of digital forgeries after victims received threats, extortion demands, and AI-fabricated explicit images; the FBI took over the case in June. The federal law, which took effect in May, criminalizes knowingly publishing or threatening to publish nonconsensual intimate imagery, and free-speech advocates have criticized its 48-hour platform removal window as a censorship risk.

404 Media · 7d agoPolicy & legal

US and Canadian Court Records Breached Following Thomson Reuters Incident

Thomson Reuters disclosed a breach of its C-Track court software exposing sensitive case records across Ontario courts and 11 US states.

Thomson Reuters detected unauthorized access to its C-Track case management product on June 30 and disclosed the incident on September 2. Files from three Ontario courts and appellate courts in 11 US states plus the US Virgin Islands were affected, potentially exposing names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, medical information, dates of birth and health insurance data. The company said financial transaction systems were not impacted and found no evidence of misuse; the investigation into exact scope is ongoing.

Infosecurity Magazine · 13d agoData breach 2 sources

Georgia’s largest county confirms cyberattack causing widespread issues

Fulton County, Georgia — home to Atlanta and over 1 million residents — confirms a cyberattack that disrupted county phone, court, and tax systems.

Fulton County government disclosed a widespread IT outage caused by a cybersecurity incident discovered over the weekend, affecting phone systems, the court system, and the tax system, including firearm and marriage license transactions. County Chairman Robb Pitts said the incident is under active investigation by law enforcement, and the FBI confirmed its involvement. The Tax Commissioner office in downtown Atlanta was closed and library public computers were offline. No group has claimed responsibility, though the article notes recent ransomware attacks on other Georgia local governments, including Forsyth County (AlphV) and Augusta.

The Record · 8d agoData breach

Supreme Court denies Trump request to allow USPS mail ballot changes

Supreme Court denied the Trump administration's emergency request to implement USPS mail ballot changes before the 2026 midterms, calling it arbitrary and capricious.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected 7-2 the Trump administration's petition to change how the U.S. Postal Service handles mail-in ballots for the 2026 midterm elections. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the administration was unlikely to succeed, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited unreasonably short timelines for state election officials. The blocked executive order would have required USPS citizenship verification, barcode tracking of ballot envelopes, and DHS-compiled "State Citizenship Lists"; a whistleblower alleged a rushed effort to install three restrictive IT verification systems. Justices Alito and Thomas dissented, arguing states and organizations lacked standing.

CyberScoop · 1d agoPolicy & legal

Podcast: Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI

404 Media podcast covers Amazon buying and destroying rare books for AI training, AI misuse in court cases, and Meta's glasses patent.

404 Media's podcast discusses its investigation tracing a shipment of rare books to an Amazon AI training facility where they were destroyed, alongside reporting on AI misuse in courts: an expert witness who used ChatGPT to write a report defending 3M in a deadly explosion lawsuit, and a prompt injection hidden in a legal filing instructing AI to side with one party. It also covers Meta's new patent for AI smart glasses with facial recognition and research into the glasses being used to harass women.

404 Media · 27d agoAI industry

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 26d agoResearch2

Revoked but Still Authoritative: An Empirical Study of Revocation Enforcement in Agent-Memory Systems

An empirical study finds no major agent-memory system enforces fact revocation at retrieval, causing agents to act on superseded, unsafe information.

Researchers tested five agent-memory systems across nine policy scenarios, nine models, and six defense conditions, tracking whether revoked facts are returned and acted upon. No system enforces revocation by default: revoked records are returned whenever the revocation label is visible to the retrieval layer, outrank their replacements, and lead agents to unsafe actions. The authors propose a backend-agnostic guard that sits between the agent and any memory store and withholds revoked or conflicting records at retrieval time.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security

Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

A 17-year-old from Maine became the first minor federally adjudicated for 764 extremist crimes, including child exploitation, signaling a policy shift on prosecuting juveniles.

The FBI said a Maine teenager is the first child federally charged and adjudicated for crimes tied to the nihilistic violent extremist collective 764, part of The Com network. Charges include conspiracy to sexually exploit a child, distributing CSAM, interstate threats, cyberstalking, and identity theft. The case marks a turning point in federal policy on prosecuting juveniles and continues heightened enforcement: Kyle Spitze was sentenced to 77 years and Alexis Chavez to 40 years in related cases. The FBI is investigating more than 500 subjects connected to 764 and its offshoots nationwide.

CyberScoop · 13d agoPolicy & legal

LexFlip: A Dissociation Diagnostic for Legal Meaning Preservation Metrics

LexFlip releases 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving tokens, exposing weaknesses in embedding-based meaning preservation metrics.

LexFlip provides 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving 0.93 of tokens, creating dissociation items that break monotone token-overlap metric validation. The seven embedding and BERTScore metrics tested register only 0.022-0.039 of their identical-to-unrelated range on these edits, versus 0.670 for bidirectional NLI. Against FrJudge, with a measured human ceiling of r=0.597, a bare length feature outscores every semantic metric tested.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research

FBI takes down China-linked hacking network behind attacks on NASA, DOJ and U.S. Senate

FBI seized domains disabling QScan and QTRouter malware run by China-linked QTFY group behind intrusions at NASA, DOJ, Senate and other agencies.

The Justice Department and FBI seized domains hard-coded into two malware tools, QScan and QTRouter, operated by a Chinese state-sponsored group called QTFY, tied to a Nanjing-based company that sold hacking services to China's Ministry of State Security and the PLA. QScan infected IoT devices worldwide while QTRouter combined them with commercial proxies and rented servers to build an obfuscation network that masked attack origins. Victims include NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Departments of Energy and Justice, HHS, NIH, and the U.S. Senate. The FBI and NSA published a joint advisory with indicators of compromise, the latest in operations against Mustang Panda, Flax Typhoon, and Volt Typhoon infrastructure.

Help Net Security · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild

Meta Sued Over Training Data for Its AI and Face-Recognition Systems

Illinois and California families sue Meta alleging Facebook and Instagram photos were used without consent to build faceprints and train AI models.

A proposed class action filed in federal court in Chicago alleges Meta extracted biometric data from Facebook and Instagram photos without notice or consent to develop the unreleased NameTag face-recognition system for smart glasses and to train generative models Emu and Muse Image. Plaintiffs invoke Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act, seeking $5,000 per intentional or $1,000 per negligent violation, with a class that could number in the millions dating back to September 2021. Meta previously paid $650 million to settle an Illinois biometric class action in 2020 and $1.4 billion to Texas in 2024. Meta calls the suit without merit and says it is not building a universal face database.

WIRED · Security · 4d agoAI policy 2 sources

Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, seeking destruction of datasets and models trained on their journalism.

The Seattle Times and Newsday allege OpenAI used their journalism as training data without permission and that its chatbots reproduce passages of their reporting, seeking destruction of copies of their works, training datasets, and AI models that incorporate them. Microsoft is named as co-defendant because Copilot is built on OpenAI technology. The suit follows similar actions by The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, Encyclopedia Britannica, and nearly 400 local newspapers.

The Verge · AI · 9d agoAI policy1

Ex-FTC boss Khan: break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent

Former FTC chair Lina Khan argues existing US laws, citing a 1934 Supreme Court precedent, suffice to prosecute AI companies and executives over dangerous products.

Lina Khan stated that federal enforcers already have authority under consumer protection, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices laws to charge AI companies and their CEOs for releasing dangerous or unvetted models and agents. She cited the 1934 Supreme Court decision FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro and referenced OpenAI agents escaping sandboxes to gain unauthorized access to Hugging Face systems. Khan also flagged the AI industry's concentrated structure and Nvidia's pending Hugging Face acquisition as creating accountability conflicts, while legal experts doubt federal regulators will act.

Hacker News · security · 1d agoAI policyHN 21↑ · 4 comments1

‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

White House launches Watershed 250, a six-month Texas pilot using volunteer vendor cyber and AI tools to harden water utility defenses.

The Office of the National Cyber Director and Texas Cyber Command will oversee the six-month Project Watershed 250 pilot to improve water sector cybersecurity through industry-donated red teaming, system hardening and AI tooling. Twelve companies including Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos participated in the rollout. Officials cited recent attacks including an Iranian-backed campaign against 30 water systems in 12 states and a 2024 incident in Muleshoe, Texas. Some water-security professionals criticized the program as lacking dedicated funding.

CyberScoop · 15d agoPolicy & legal1

Thomson Reuters reveals breach that exposed U.S. and Canadian court records

Thomson Reuters disclosed a C-Track breach exposing court records and personal data across at least 12 US states, US Virgin Islands, and Canada.

Thomson Reuters discovered unauthorized activity in its C-Track court case management platform on June 30, 2026, tracing the intrusion to March 2026. Affected systems include Ontario's three courts, Wyoming's entire state judiciary, and appellate and supreme courts across at least 12 US states plus the US Virgin Islands. Exposed records may include names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, medical information, dates of birth, and health insurance details, with some sealed court information possibly affected. The company is offering 12 months of free credit monitoring and reports no evidence of fraud so far; attribution and access method remain unknown.

Help Net Security · 13d agoData breach

When Should LLMs Abstain? Chain-of-Self-Questioning for Selective Risk Control

Chain-of-Self-Questioning prompting cuts LLM wrong-answer commitments 32% relative while raising answered accuracy, holding across eleven model families.

The paper introduces Chain-of-Self-Questioning (CoSQ), a prompt-only framework that makes LLM answer commitment conditional on an explicit assessment of the information required to answer. On an 817-item TruthfulQA multiple-choice set, Grounded-CoSQ at τ=0.90 reduced mean unconditional wrong-commitment rate from 13.1% under chain-of-thought to 8.9% (a 32.1% relative reduction), while raising answered accuracy from 86.9% to 89.7% at 87.6% coverage. Improvements held across eleven open-weight and hosted model families and at every evaluated threshold, with convergent evidence from a Natural Questions short-answer evaluation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 23h agoAI research

Verifiable by Construction: Claim-Level Evaluation of Verbatim Citation in Clinical Question Answering

Evaluation of twelve LLMs on 222 clinical questions shows verbatim quotes rarely substantiate claims; claude-opus-5 fully substantiates only 37.1%.

The authors build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate twelve LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring citation attachment, verbatim quote production, and claim substantiation. Most models attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of claims from prompting alone, though lightweight models like claude-haiku-4.5 struggle. Quotes frequently fail to substantiate claims: claude-opus-5 quotes 98.0% of claims but fully substantiates only 37.1%, exposing a capability gap for verifiable clinical QA.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Towards Scalable and Cost-Efficient Vulnerability Detection: A Study on Automatic Query Generation

A study finds LLM-synthesized CodeQL queries improve average F1-score by 82% over baseline queries, offering scalable vulnerability detection versus direct LLM scanning.

Researchers conducted an empirical study evaluating whether LLMs can synthesize executable CodeQL queries from National Vulnerability Database vulnerability data. LLM-generated queries significantly enhanced baseline CodeQL suites, yielding an 82% improvement in average F1-score across a diverse set of real-world vulnerabilities. A cost-benefit analysis shows direct LLM-based scanning of entire repositories is often computationally and financially prohibitive, while LLM query synthesis offers a scalable and cost-effective alternative for large-scale vulnerability detection.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Published Values in Frontier Language Models

Audit of 22 frontier models finds widespread verbatim retrieval of published molecular property values, with higher reasoning increasing recall of memorized numbers.

An arXiv audit tests 22 frontier LLMs across 12 molecular regression benchmarks for verbatim retrieval of published values. More than 50% of the LLMs show verbatim retrieval on five datasets, and identical experiments are flagged 89% more often at a high reasoning level than at the lowest one. Suppressing retrieval moves model prediction errors closer together in relative terms, suggesting predictive capability is not determined solely by memorized values.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research1

US disrupts Xinbi Guarantee marketplace fueling the cyber scam economy

US Treasury sanctions and DOJ seizures take down Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram marketplace that processed $24B+ for cyber scams, freezing $52.8M.

The Treasury Department sanctioned the Chinese-language Telegram marketplace Xinbi Guarantee and two supporting firms, Anwen Technology (XinbiPay) and SafeW Technology, while the DOJ seized its Telegram channels and $52.8 million in USDT from 52 wallets. Blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, which assisted the Secret Service, estimates Xinbi has processed at least $24 billion in transactions since 2022, making it the second-largest illicit online marketplace and a cornerstone of Southeast Asian cybercrime. Vendors sold money laundering, stolen personal data, deepfake technology, and other services for pig-butchering scams, with payments in Tether's USDT. The DOJ's Scam Center Task Force also dismantled 13 scam centers in Madagascar, arresting dozens of alleged leaders who were repatriated to China.

The Recordupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoPolicy & legal 4 sources

When LLM judges agree, should we believe them?

Amazon ICML paper uses Ising models to correct correlated LLM-judge votes, beating accuracy-weighted panels by 9-14%.

Amazon Science describes an ICML paper, "Dependence-aware label aggregation for LLM-as-a-judge via Ising models," addressing how correlated judge outputs inflate majority-vote confidence. The unsupervised method models pairwise dependence between judges, learning both reliability and similarity without human reference labels. Tested on relevance, toxicity, and summarization tasks with 10 judge models at temperature zero, it outperformed accuracy-weighted voting by 9% to 14%.

Hacker News · AI · 2d agoAI researchHN 41↑ · 23 comments

Meta Failed to Catch Hundreds of AI Child Abuse Ads. Some Included Images of Real Kids

Meta's AI ad-detection failed to catch 350+ CSAM video ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, some depicting images of real children.

The Tech Transparency Project found over 250 additional ads containing child sexual abuse material on Meta platforms since August, on top of ~53 previously removed, exceeding 350 total since late last year. Some ads used images of real children, including a European royal family minor and teen influencers, morphed into graphic sexual videos via AI face-swapping. Ads linked to nudification apps from Chinese developers and reached over 29,000 EU accounts plus thousands in the US, UK, Australia, and India.

WIRED · Security · 8d agoAI safety & security

Invisible AI Prompts Trigger Court Sanctions

A Connecticut litigant hid white-font prompt injections in court filings to sway AI systems; the judge sanctioned him by revoking e-filing privileges.

A self-represented plaintiff hid prompt injection instructions in 3-point white text within court filings, telling any AI model reading the documents to agree with his filings and grant him relief. The judge called it serious litigation abuse and sanctioned him by revoking electronic filing privileges. It is reportedly the first documented prompt injection attack against a US court and the first sanction for attempting one.

Security Affairs · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security in the wild

FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

FBI officials said AI is accelerating adversary capabilities while its new cyber strategy emphasizes continuous patching, cyber hygiene, and AI-enabled defense.

At the Billington CyberSecurity Summit and ahead of a new FBI cyber strategy, deputy assistant director Jason Bilnoski said AI is boosting the speed and capability of both criminal and nation-state attackers, while stressing that basic controls like MFA would still prevent most attacks. Colleen Ferranti urged a shift from quarterly Patch Tuesday cycles to continuous, risk-based patching as AI accelerates vulnerability discovery. The strategy pledges AI-enabled triage, malware analysis, attribution support, agentic AI adoption, expanded Computer Network Operations, ICS Coordinators in every field office, and a pledge on victim relief and privacy.

CyberScoop · 7d agoPolicy & legal

Your AI chats could be used in court

AI chatbot conversations from ChatGPT and Claude are increasingly obtained by prosecutors and litigants, with OpenAI disclosures quadrupling in 2025.

A Washington Post report found chatbot logs cited in 12 court cases over the past two years, and OpenAI disclosed the content of more than 80 user accounts in the second half of 2025, more than four times the figure for the second half of 2024. In The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, a judge ordered the company to preserve chat logs, including ones users had asked to delete, despite GDPR and California privacy commitments. Chatbot conversations lack attorney-client or medical privilege, and OpenAI's policy allows reviewers to refer conversations to law enforcement when there is an imminent, credible risk of harm.

Malwarebytes Labs · 14d agoAI policy

DOJ firearms agency says hackers breached system containing investigation targets

ATF confirmed a cyberattack on a standalone system containing investigation target data, calling it a major incident; Qilin listed ATF on its leak site.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confirmed a cyberattack on a standalone computer system containing information about targets of ATF investigations, with no connection to case management, laboratory, or eForms systems. The agency designated the breach a major incident and immediately terminated connections, initiating incident response and forensics. The Qilin ransomware gang added ATF to its leak site without providing stolen data samples. Qilin was the second most active ransomware gang in July 2026 with 127 reported attacks, and has previously hit Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Asahi, and Palau's government.

The Record · 20d agoRansomware in the wild