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Lawmakers call on Treasury to sanction hackers-for-hire
Bipartisan US lawmakers asked Treasury to sanction three India-based hack-for-hire firms accused of long-running espionage against Americans.
Sens. Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Pat Harrigan urged Treasury to add Sunkissed Organic Farms (formerly Appin), BellTroX, and CyberRoot to the Entity List. The letter says the mercenary groups conducted targeted espionage against US citizens, businesses, and lawyers for over fifteen years, allegedly including work for Qatar's government such as targeting opponents of Qatar's World Cup bid and Kristi Rogers, wife of Senate candidate Mike Rogers. Adding the firms to the Entity List would restrict their access to American software, cybersecurity tools, and cloud infrastructure. The lawmakers also accuse the groups of lawfare campaigns to censor investigative reporting on their hacking activities.
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In most cities, nobody owns the whole network
Former Waco CIO argues cellular-connected water controllers sit outside scanned networks, and accountability plus operating-budget funding—not technology—block segmentation.
Writing as Waco, Texas's former CIO, the author describes July water-sector intrusions that CISA linked to over 100 compromised systems, typically controllers on public cellular links absent from asset lists. The FBI and EPA reported incidents at utilities in at least seven states since July 27, and a Clayton County, Georgia pump station failure triggered a boil-water advisory. He argues accountability and funding—using mechanisms like the Texas Water Development Board's new cybersecurity scoring criteria—are the binding constraints, citing Waco's 43-day segmentation of five treatment plants with operating funds.
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Week in review: Salesforce and ServiceNow portals exposed for 17 months, exploited Metabase 0-day
Weekly digest: exploited Metabase zero-day breached Framework; Salesforce/ServiceNow portals read for 17 months; Microsoft patched 400+ flaws.
Help Net Security's week in review aggregates top stories: a 'City-Forum' campaign tracked by Reco has been pulling records from Salesforce and ServiceNow portals worldwide for 17 months, and Framework suffered a breach via an exploited Metabase zero-day exposing customer contact and IP data. It also covers Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday fixing 400+ flaws including exploited zero-day CVE-2026-68820, Cisco's fix for exploited firewall DoS bug CVE-2026-20349 (added to CISA KEV), and a second N-able N-central hotfix for actively exploited CVE-2026-18577. Other items include GitHub expanding Dependabot malware alerts to eight package ecosystems and EU AI Act enforcement beginning on 2 August 2026.
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