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16 stories in the last 30d

Lawmakers call for investigation into impact of CISA staffing cuts

Democratic lawmakers asked the GAO to investigate how CISA's roughly one-third workforce reduction affects its mission and critical-infrastructure protection.

Democratic lawmakers led by House Homeland Security ranking member Bennie Thompson asked the Government Accountability Office to examine how recent staffing cuts at CISA affect its ability to protect critical infrastructure and respond to cyber and physical threats. Nearly 1,000 CISA employees have been fired or quit since the Trump administration began, and acting director Nick Andersen plans to hire 300. The letter also flags the FY2027 budget proposal to eliminate nearly 900 additional positions and cut more than $700 million from the agency. CISA has had no confirmed director since Jen Easterly departed, and GAO confirmed it received the request.

The Record · 26d agoPolicy & legal

CISA review makes the case for eliminating vulnerability classes

CISA's FY2024-2025 vulnerability review urges eliminating recurring vulnerability classes, finding 41.5% of 2025 KEV entries map to persistent 'stubborn weaknesses'.

CISA's Vulnerability Review for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 found most compromises stemmed from opportunistic exploitation of known, exposed vulnerabilities rather than nation-state zero-days or advanced tradecraft. The review found 41.5% of 2025 KEV catalog entries map to 'stubborn weaknesses' - injection flaws, improper input validation, memory-safety failures, path traversal and broken access control - recurring on the CWE Top 25 since 2019. CISA advocates Secure by Design practices, vulnerability class elimination, and buyer-driven 'Secure by Demand' contract requirements, while warning that AI-enabled vulnerability discovery will soon accelerate exploitation.

Help Net Security · 16d agoPolicy & legal

CISA decides weekly vulnerability bulletin isn't necessary anymore

CISA will discontinue its weekly vulnerability bulletin on September 28, pushing users toward KEV, alerts, and CVE data under risk-based prioritization.

CISA announced its weekly vulnerability bulletin will stop on Monday, September 28, as part of a shift from static CVSS severity scores to a modern, risk-based approach detailed in a June Binding Operational Directive. The directive prioritizes federal remediation based on exposure, exploitation evidence, control granted by exploitation, and whether exploitation can be automated. CISA directs bulletin subscribers to rely instead on its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, cybersecurity alerts and advisories, and the CVE catalog, requiring users to enable those subscriptions in GovDelivery or Granicus to avoid missing critical notices.

The Register · Security · 17h agoPolicy & legal

Severity Is Not a Strategy: What CISA BOD 26-04 Means for the Future of Federal Software Security

CISA's BOD 26-04 replaces severity-based federal patching with risk-based remediation deadlines of 3, 14, or 60 days.

CISA's Binding Operational Directive 26-04, released June 10, 2026, replaces BOD 19-02 and BOD 22-01 for Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies and shifts remediation prioritization from CVSS scores to risk context. Agencies assess four factors: public exposure, KEV listing, exploit automatability, and whether exploitation grants partial or total asset control, resulting in 3-, 14-, or 60-day remediation windows or next-upgrade fixes. In CISA's first review at a large civilian agency, only 1% of vulnerabilities required three-day remediation while over 60% could wait for future system upgrades. The directive also requires forensic analysis when exploitation is suspected, and Checkmarx argues the same risk-based logic must extend upstream into software development and SBOM-driven exposure management.

Checkmarx · 7d agoPolicy & legal

What’s next for CISA’s CDM program that gives cybersecurity tools to federal agencies

CISA officials outline future plans for the CDM program, emphasizing speed, automation, unified data, and data-driven federal risk management.

Speaking at an Elastic Federal Cyber Defense Breakfast, CISA officials described next steps for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program that supplies cybersecurity tools to federal agencies. Acting deputy program manager Richard Grabowski named velocity, unification, and data-driven risk management as core goals, including a three-year roadmap to expand SIEM-as-a-Service. Federal CISO Mike Duffy urged aggregating demand across agencies, buying outcomes rather than products, and designing acquisition for continuous improvement. CISA's Matt House tied the program's evolution to post-SolarWinds needs for a government-wide common operating picture.

CyberScoop · 1d agoPolicy & legal

CISA head says agency must change quickly to prevent the 'worst that could happen'

Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen warned of US cyber vulnerabilities and said the agency is refilling staff cut to about half strength.

Speaking at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit, acting CISA Director Nick Andersen warned that decades of bad decisions, overwhelming technical debt, outdated technology and AI-driven threats could lead to devastating cyber incidents without rapid, significant changes. He said the agency has about 250 screened hires awaiting security clearances after losing roughly a third of its staff to DOGE-related cuts and attrition, and referenced a June pledge by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to refill about 600 CISA jobs. Andersen called AI a gamechanger, citing daily headlines about rogue AI agents and an Anthropic researcher leaving over model safety concerns.

The Record · 7d agoPolicy & legal

CISA Calls for More Guidance, Less Spin, as Cyber Outages Escalate

CISA and partners issue a joint advisory pressing organizations toward transparent breach notification and incident response as cyber outages escalate.

Dark Reading reports on a new joint government advisory led by CISA that signals a regulatory shift. The advisory presses organizations to adopt more transparent breach notification protocols and incident response practices. The guidance comes as cyber outages escalate and reflects growing government expectation of disclosure over spin.

Dark Reading · 5d agoPolicy & legal1

Risky Bulletin: Russia tells data centers to deploy drone defenses

Russia ordered data center operators to deploy drone strike defenses under a Putin decree allowing temporary state takeover of unprotected critical infrastructure.

The Russian government instructed data center operators to deploy protections against drone strikes under a presidential decree signed by Putin that allows temporary state administration of critical infrastructure operators failing to defend against Ukrainian hacks and drone strikes. Although data centers are not formally critical infrastructure in Russia, the decree applies to them because other sectors depend heavily on cloud services; Russia has more than 180 data centers, over 80% in the European region within range of Ukrainian strikes. The digest also reports a Dropbox breach affecting nearly 5,000 accounts via the Lenovo ID integration, spyware attacks on at least 14 Serbians using NoviSpy or Pegasus, and a password recovery attack targeting hundreds of thousands of X accounts tied to the new X Money service. Other items include a 14-hour compromise of Coder's Cloudflare infrastructure delivering malicious Terraform modules, donor data breaches at Davayte and You Are Not Alone via the Stripe/WooCommerce integration, a $2.5M Aquifer crypto heist, and a TVING breach exposing data of almost 40 million accounts.

Risky Business News · 13d agoPolicy & legal

CISA: Most exploited vulnerabilities should have been eradicated decades ago

CISA says most exploited vulnerabilities are decades-old flaws, blaming organizational culture and weak Secure by Design adoption.

CISA assesses that the vulnerabilities most exploited in the wild are old flaws that should have been eradicated decades ago. The agency attributed the problem to organizational culture and systemic gaps in Secure by Design adoption. The Register's coverage frames the remarks as renewed pressure on vendors and operators to eliminate long-standing weaknesses.

The Register · Security · 20d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

Risky Bulletin: Two TeamPCP members arrested in Australia

Australian Federal Police arrested two alleged TeamPCP members behind supply-chain worm attacks that stole over 500,000 credentials from compromised open-source libraries.

The AFP arrested alleged TeamPCP leader Ruben Thomson, 21, and Louis Gaebler, 23, near Perth; both were charged and remain in custody. The group inserted a self-spreading credential-stealing worm into open-source projects including Trivy, KICS, LiteLLM, and Telnyx, harvesting more than 500,000 credentials used for network access, ransomware, extortion, and sales. About 78,000 tokens and secrets from nearly 2,200 organizations leaked online last month, and the FBI supported the investigation that began in April.

Risky Business News · 20d agoPolicy & legal in the wild1

Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action

CISA and the G7 Cyber Security Working Group urge organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration, outlining five transition priorities.

CISA and the G7 Cyber Security Working Group jointly released "Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action". The document urges governments and organizations to begin migrating sensitive data, authentication systems, and critical assets to post-quantum cryptography against emerging quantum computing threats. It defines five priorities: raising quantum-risk awareness, national PQC strategies, quantum-safe R&D, public-private partnerships, and integrating PQC into cybersecurity requirements and procurement.

CISA Advisories · 14d agoPolicy & legal

U.S. Offers $10 Million Reward for Iranian IRGC Cyber Chief Linked to Critical Infrastructure Attacks

The U.S. State Department offered up to $10 million for information on Amir Yaryab, an IRGC cyber chief linked to critical infrastructure attacks.

The U.S. State Department's Rewards for Justice program offers up to $10 million for information identifying or locating Amir Yaryab, who allegedly oversees the Cyber Operations Command of Iran's IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC). Officials tie him to units called Shahid Hemmat and Shahid Shushtari conducting cyber and information campaigns against defense, telecommunications, energy, and finance sectors across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and to groups including CyberAv3ngers and Dadeh Afzar Arman. CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 Unitronics Vision Series PLCs, including 34 in US water and wastewater facilities, between November 2023 and January 2024.

Cyber Security News · 9d agoPolicy & legal

US offers $10 million for info on Iranian leaders behind CyberAv3ngers water utility attacks

The US offered $10 million for information on six IRGC-CEC officials behind CyberAv3ngers' 2023 hacks of Unitronics PLCs at US water utilities.

The State Department named six Iranian security officials, including IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command head Hamid Reza Lashgarian, and offered up to $10 million for information on their whereabouts. CyberAv3ngers publicly claimed compromises of Israel-made Unitronics Vision PLCs in October 2023, forcing the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, to take systems offline and switch to manual operations. The US had sanctioned the six men in February for targeting critical infrastructure, and CISA notified water operators using Unitronics devices while urging default-password changes. A watchdog also criticized the EPA for lacking a comprehensive water-sector cyber risk strategy.

The Record · 9d agoPolicy & legal in the wild 3 sources

Authorities seize popular, long-running DDoS-for-hire service domainsnew

FBI and RCMP seized NightmareStresser DDoS-for-hire domains under Operation PowerOFF; the service enabled hundreds of thousands of attacks since at least 2022.

The Justice Department announced the court-ordered seizure of NightmareStresser's primary domain and related sites, executed by the FBI Anchorage field office and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police under Operation PowerOFF. The DDoS-for-hire service enabled hundreds of thousands of attacks or attempted attacks since at least 2022, targeting educational institutions, government agencies, gaming platforms, and millions of people. Authorities have seized more than 100 booter domains since 2018; operators remain unidentified and the service claimed to operate under Russian law.

The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

A G7 working group report urges governments and industry to accelerate post-quantum cryptography migration, framing quantum risk as a near-term economic threat.

A cybersecurity working group formed at the June 2026 G7 Summit in France called on organizations to stop postponing migration of critical systems to post-quantum cryptography, warning that harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks against currently encrypted data exist today. The report was signed by CISA, the UK NCSC, France's ANSSI, Germany's BSI, Canada's CSE, Japan's NCO, and Italy's ACN. It also cautions that some NIST-selected PQC algorithms have already been broken on classical computers, reinforcing support for crypto-agility. The push aligns with a recent US executive order moving federal PQC migration timelines from 2035 to 2030, while Google and others target 2029.

CyberScoop · 13d agoPolicy & legal

Risky Bulletin: Russia starts blocking DoH and DoT

Russian users report blocks on DoH and DoT servers, including Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google 8.8.8.8, in an apparent censorship crackdown.

Russian internet users began reporting failures connecting to DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS servers, suggesting a government crackdown on the two privacy protocols. The blocks reportedly cover Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8 resolvers; Roskomnadzor has not officially confirmed the action. The agency tested a similar block in March on Beeline's network and had named DoH for blocking as early as 2021. The bulletin also briefly notes state-sponsored phishing of EU officials, a DDoS against Norway's Digdir, the ReliaQuest/ShinyHunters dispute, and older ransomware and breach disclosures.

Risky Business News · 22d agoPolicy & legal1