Security News
Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman accused of leaking dozens of classified Pentagon documents, is expected to plead guilty in a US court on Monday. A US Air Force report made public in December concluded Teixeira was the only airman behind the leak, though determined that his chain of command bears some responsibility for letting the classified data dump happen on its watch.
Last night's launch of six Pentagon missile-detection satellites was well timed as fears mount that Russia is considering putting nuclear weapons into space. The US Department of Defense confirmed its payload included two satellites for the Missile Defense Agency's Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, and the final four Tranche 0 satellites for the Space Development Agency's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture communications constellation.
Highly realistic AI-generated images depicting an explosion near the Pentagon that went viral on Twitter caused the stock market to dip briefly earlier today. Tweets of this image supposedly depicting an explosion near the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, were amplified by many verified Twitter accounts, including Russian state media and a verified account impersonating the Bloomberg news agency.
The FBI has detained a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman suspected of leaking a trove of classified Pentagon documents on Discord. He also controlled a private Discord server, and allegedly posted photographs of the classified Pentagon documents to impress the private group's 25 members, which included netizens in Europe, Asia, and South America.
According to bug bounty platform HackerOne and the DoD, the Hack US initiative received 648 submissions from 267 security researchers who uncovered 349 security holes. The Pentagon didn't say how many bug hunters received rewards, or how much they each earned.
The US Department of Defense has created a broad but short bug bounty program for vulnerabilities in public-facing systems and applications. The Hack US program kicked off on Independence Day and is scheduled to run though July 11, with reward totals reflected by the severity of the flaws.
A report commissioned by the Pentagon concluded that the blockchain is not decentralized, is vulnerable to attacks and is running outdated software. The report, "Are Blockchains Decentralized, Unintended Centralities in Distributed Ledgers", uncovered that a subset of participants can "Exert excessive and centralized control over the entire blockchain system."
The Pentagon said Tuesday it is canceling a cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion and will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon. "With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD's capability gaps," the Pentagon said in a statement.
The Pentagon is reconsidering how to make a massive shift to cloud computing, officials said Monday, suggesting it could scrap the so-called JEDI contract potentially worth $10 billion that was awarded to Microsoft Corp. but is mired in legal challenges. "So for all of those reasons, moving to a cloud architecture is going to be vital to how we innovate in this department and we're going to have to assess where we are with regard to the ongoing litigation around JEDI and determine what the best path forward is for the department," Hicks said April 30.
A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world's computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense. It's also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.