• How You Can Tell Propaganda from Journalism − Let’s Look at Tucker Carlson’s Visit to Russia

    In the 1930s, the New York Times’s Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty wrote glowing reports about the achievements of the Soviet state while ignoring the Stalin dictatorship’s starvation of millions of Ukrainians. These days, conservative TV personality and former Fox News star Tucker Carlson is providing Vladimir Putin and his regime propaganda services similar to those Duranty offered Stalin – except that Carlson goes farther: narrating a series of reports extolling the glories of Russian society, culture, and governance under Putin, Carlson said that these achievements “radicalized” him “against our American leaders.”

  • Cybersecurity for Satellites Is a Growing challenge, as Threats to Space-Based Infrastructure Grow

    In today’s interconnected world, space technology forms the backbone of our global communication, navigation and security systems. As our dependency on these celestial guardians escalates, so too does their allure to adversaries who may seek to compromise their functionality through cyber means.

  • The List Is Long: Russians Who Have Died After Running Afoul of the Kremlin

    The list of influential Russians who have been killed or died in murky circumstances after opposing, criticizing, or crossing Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin, or the state is long. It has just gotten longer.

  • Has Trust in the U.S. Intelligence Community Eroded?

    Has trust in intelligence predictions and national estimates been degraded over time? If so, to what degree has trust been degraded? What internal and external factors have driven perceived or real changes in the relationship between policymakers and the IC?

  • Feds Deliver Stark Warnings to State Election Officials Ahead of November

    Federal law enforcement and cybersecurity officials are warning the nation’s state election administrators that they face serious threats ahead of November’s presidential election, as AI, ransomware attacks, and malicious mail could disrupt voting.

  • Social Media Posts Have Power, and So Do You

    In a healthy democracy, having accurate information is crucial for making informed decisions about voting and civic engagement. False and misleading information can lead to knowledge that is inaccurate, incomplete, or manipulated. Such knowledge can erode trust in democratic institutions and contribute to divisions within society. Fortunately, the ability to identify and resist false and misleading information is not static, because this ability relies on skills that can be learned.

  • U.S. Disrupts Botnet China Used to Conceal Hacking of Critical Infrastructure

    In December 2023, the FBI disrupted a botnet of hundreds of U.S.-based small office/home office (SOHO) routers hijacked by People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored hackers. The Chinese government hackers used privately-owned SOHO routers infected with the “KV Botnet” malware to conceal the PRC origin of further hacking activities directed against U.S. critical infrastructure and the critical infrastructure of other foreign victims.

  • Fake Biden Robocall to New Hampshire Voters Highlights How Easy It Is to Make Deepfakes − and How Hard It Is to Defend Against AI-Generated Disinformation

    Robocalls in elections are nothing new and not illegal; many are simply efforts to get out the vote. But they have also been used in voter suppression campaigns. Compounding this problem in this case is what I believe to be the application of AI to clone Biden’s voice.

  • The Spies Should Go Back into the Cold

    Recent Russian efforts to interfere in US elections, track down and eliminate defectors and other ‘disloyal elements’, and plant disinformation using social media are nothing new. Rather, they are the continuation by modern means of an intelligence war that has been going on since 1917. Following the end of the two world wars and the Cold War, the US and the UK reduced their intelligence capacity when they should have been countercyclical, gearing up for the inevitable next intelligence challenge.

  • Fifty-Five Hours of Risk: The Dangerous Implications of Slow Attack Attribution

    Assuming that its foreign adversaries’ recent violent threats are to be taken seriously, and that the likelihood of a direct attack against the United States is, if not on the rise, at least significant enough to warrant serious attention, the United States has an urgent mandate to prepare effective cognitive defenses. Foremost among these is the ability to quickly and accurately attribute attacks to their originators, and to deliver that information to the public through a trustworthy vehicle.

  • Cyber 'Kidnapping' Scams Target Chinese Students Around the World

    A recent cyber kidnapping incident involving a Chinese exchange student in Utah appears to be part of an international pattern in which unknown perpetrators, often masquerading as Chinese police or government officials, target Chinese students around the world and extort their families for upwards of tens of thousands of dollars.

  • Congress Bans Pentagon from Using Chinese Port Logistics Platform

    The U.S. Congress has passed legislation that would ban the Pentagon from using any seaport in the world that relies on a Chinese logistics platform known as LOGINK. LOGINK, by tracking cargo and ship movements, lets Beijing monitor America’s military supply chain, which relies on commercial ports.

  • Shadow Play: A Pro-China and Anti-U.S. Influence Operation Thrives on YouTube

    Experts have recently observed a coordinated inauthentic influence campaign originating on YouTube that’s promoting pro-China and anti-US narratives in an apparent effort to shift English-speaking audiences’ views of those countries’ roles in international politics, the global economy and strategic technology competition.

  • A U.S. Ambassador Working for Cuba? Charges Against Former Diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha Spotlight Havana’s Importance in the World of Spying

    The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Dec. 4, 2023, that Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, had been arrested and faced federal charges for secretly acting for decades as an agent of the Cuban government. It remains to be seen what damage Rocha may have done while working as a Cuban spy. His tenure in the U.S. government, however, would place him right up there with the most successful, and thus damaging, spies in modern history.

  • Responding to Authoritarian Information Ops in Latin America

    The Russian government is currently financing an on-going, well-funded disinformation campaign across Latin America. The Kremlin’s campaign plans to leverage developed media contacts in several Latin American countries in order to carry out an information manipulation campaign designed to surreptitiously exploit the openness of Latin America’s media and information environment.