55
60
60
55
55
30
30
55
30
55
30
60
House passes bill to equip local law enforcement with scam-fighting tools
The U.S. House passed the GUARD Act, letting local law enforcement use federal grants to investigate financial scams and trace stolen cryptocurrency.
The bipartisan GUARD Act (Reps. Zachary Nunn, Scott Fitzgerald, Josh Gottheimer) passed the House, allowing existing DOJ grant funds to be used for fraud analysts, victim-support training, blockchain tracing software, and financial-information sharing with law enforcement. It addresses scams like pig butchering, often run by transnational criminal groups overseas; Americans lost a record $11.4 billion to crypto-related fraud in 2025, including $8.6 billion in investment fraud. Senators Katie Britt and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a Senate companion in July 2025, and the House also passed a bill retroactively eliminating the 'scam tax' on stolen funds for 2021-2025 victims.
38
60
42
30
42
60
30
30
60
30
60
Germany moves to give spy agencies hacking and sabotage powers
Germany's cabinet approved a 732-page bill granting BND and BfV intelligence agencies new hacking, sabotage, and disinformation powers pending parliamentary approval.
Germany's cabinet approved draft legislation that would give the foreign intelligence service BND and domestic agency BfV active operational powers, including hacking foreign systems, sabotaging supply chains with faulty components, disabling servers of hostile state-sponsored hackers, and feeding false information to extremists inside Germany. The 732-page bill, the largest overhaul of postwar German spy laws, requires telecom carriers and digital providers to assist the agencies, bars measures endangering life, and imposes new statutory controls on how agencies use AI analysis, including judge-supervised spot checks of machine-generated outputs. The reforms stem from a Federal Constitutional Court ruling on surveillance proportionality and are expected to pass parliament, with the government aiming for the law to take effect next year; civil liberties groups plan to challenge it.
65
30
60
30
60
30
60
60
55
30
55
60
30
30
30
60
Risky Bulletin: Dutch intel services to get extensive new powers
Netherlands proposed a bill granting AIVD and MIVD expanded warrantless tapping, faster hacking powers, and forced data disclosure, citing Russia, China, and Iran threats.
The Dutch government introduced a bill greatly expanding surveillance powers of intelligence agencies AIVD and MIVD, allowing up to one year of tapping without pre-approval and simplified hacking operations against 'foreign adversaries'. Agencies could compel Dutch companies or citizens to provide data under threat of charges, share data with the private sector, and oversight bodies would merge into a new CTT board. The bill follows similar overhauls in Ireland, Germany, and France after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The newsletter also reports Moonwell hacked for $8.7M, a Cosmos EVM bug exploited for ~$3M, ShinyHunters listing McKesson with claimed hundreds of millions of records, and a pro-Kremlin DDoS claim against Norway's government network.
42