The Government Needs to Act Fast to Protect the Election | Special Ops Veterans Warn Against Impending Attacks | True-Crime Fans Are Banding Together Online to Try to Solve Cases, and more

With Murthy now dismissed and limited time before November 5, the federal government can and should immediately resume its regular briefings with social-media companies about foreign interference in our elections. Although there are encouraging signs that the federal government is slowly resuming these efforts, they appear limited compared with what was done in prior elections. The government should also, as it has in the past, help connect state and local election officials with appropriate contacts at social-media companies. That way local officials and social-media companies can keep each other apprised of any changes in disinformation they are seeing regarding how, when, and where to vote. And the federal government should drastically increase efforts to inform the American public about foreign adversaries’ operations intended to decrease confidence in elections. The government must also make clear that threatening election officials—and their families and children—will not be tolerated.

Inside a Violent Gang’s Ruthless Crypto-Stealing Home Invasion Spree  (Andy Greenberg, Wired)
Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft—and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it’s perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even kidnappings. But rarely do those thieves leave a trail of violence in their wake as disturbing as that of one recent, ruthless, and particularly prolific gang of crypto extortionists.
The United States Justice Department earlier this week announced the conviction of Remy Ra St. Felix, a 24-year-old Florida man who led a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—both in their seventies—and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in Bitcoin and Ether to the thieves’ crypto wallets.
In fact, that six-figure sum appears to have been the gang’s only confirmed haul from its physical crypto thefts—although the burglars and their associates made millions in total, mostly through more traditional crypto hacking as well as stealing other assets. A deeper look into court documents from the St. Felix case, however, reveals that the relatively small profit St. Felix’s gang made from its burglaries doesn’t capture the full scope of the harm they inflicted: In total, those court filings and DOJ officials describe how more than a dozen convicted and alleged members of the crypto-focused gang broke into the homes of 11 victims, carrying out a brutal spree of armed robberies, death threats, beatings, torture sessions, and even one kidnapping in a campaign that spanned four US states.

The US Wants to Integrate the Commercial Space Industry With Its Military to Prevent Cyber Attacks  (Sharon Lemac-Vincere, Wired)
The US military recently launched a groundbreaking initiative to strengthen ties with the commercial space industry. The aim is to integrate commercial equipment into military space operations, including satellites and other hardware. This would enhance cybersecurity for military satellites.
As space becomes more important to the world’s critical infrastructure, the risk increases that hostile nation-states will deploy cyberattacks on important satellites and other space infrastructure. Targets would include not just spy satellites or military communications satellites, but commercial spacecraft too.

Special Ops Veterans Warn Against Impending Attacks  (Rob Phillimore, HSToday)
The Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) has penned an open letter to policymakers to highlight concerns about the “heightened risk of terrorist attacks against targets inside the United States and both U.S. and allied interests abroad.”
The letter, signed by multiple members of the SOAA Board, states that the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan has created a void in which anti-American terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, are once again thriving. 
In an article titled “A Call for Vigilance: Rising Terror Threats and Global Instability Post-Afghanistan Withdrawal,” the SOAA shares some stark facts and figures about the state of affairs since the U.S. withdrew from the region in July 2021.