Kim Zetter

The real cyberwar is being waged in my inbox via pitches about the cyberwar

CIA working to arm Kurdish forces to spark uprising in Iran, sources say | CNN Politics The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran and the Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish lea...

NEW: The CIA has been working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran, multiple people familiar with the plan told CNN.
www.cnn.com/2026/03/03/p...

Important point

My initial reaction to Iran's response was surprise at how weak it seemed. Until the UAE released data on missiles-UAVs launched vs missiles-UAVs intercepted. In cyber, offense generally wins. In kinetics, at least in this one case, defense won.

"In the end, the talks between Anthropic and the Department of Defense were undone by weeks of building frustration between men who had differing philosophies about A.I. and who did not like one another."

Canceled contracts, a failed polygraph and personal disputes: Inside the turbulent tenure of Noem’s former cyber czar A dozen current and former officials said that former acting CISA director Madhu Gottumukkala's leadership was troublesome for the agency long before his reassignment late Thursday.

“I don’t think people realized how ill-served we, the American public, were by having someone that was this unserious, just asleep at the wheel in an agency leadership position like this,” said one of the four officials. www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Hegseth: "Israel has clear missions as well for which we are grateful. Capable partners are good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force ... no stupid rules of engagement."

Across party lines and industry, the verdict is the same: CISA is in trouble One year into the second Trump administration, CISA faces a 33% loss in personnel and shuttered divisions. Experts warn of "decimated" capabilities and a leadership vacuum as the agency struggles to m...

Seeing the lengthy list of changes/cutbacks to CISA catalogued in this one piece makes it clear there is little left of it. The agency is less than a decade old and struggled for years to find its footing before it started to make progress. But all advances it made have been gutted in last 12 months

ICE won’t be at polling places for midterms, Trump appointee tells state election officials | CNN Politics A Donald Trump appointee at the Department of Homeland Security told state election officials from around the country Wednesday that federal immigration agents won’t be deployed to polling places duri...

ICE won’t be at polling places for midterms, Trump appointee tells state election officials www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/p...

They've teased this for weeks as Pitt staff have placed bets about why another hospital in same city was having to send their patients to the Pitt. They finally revealed last wk it was due to ransomware - the reveal came just as the Pitt's own computers went down. Tonight's ep should be interesting

4Chan knew about Jeffrey Epstein's death 38 minutes before the rest of the world. The FBI tried to figure out how. The Epstein files address a long-running side plot of Jeffrey Epstein's 2019 death while in jail on sex-trafficking charges.

Great pull from the Epstein files. FBI tried to figure out who on 4chan had scooped all news outlets on Epstein's death, but the trail went cold when they couldn't find who had that IP address.

"It’s unclear how [Bucher] landed a gig doing publicity for...Jeffrey Epstein...but in 2017, when she still had her original last name, Drokova, she asked Epstein to connect her with 'adequate Russian oligarchs'" per the recently released Epstein files.

The Trump administration’s favorite nuclear startup has ties to Russia and Epstein Also, Christian nationalism.

Trump admin's favorite nuclear startup -- Valar Atomics, a California firm that aims to make small-scale nuclear reactors -- has ties to Russia and to Epstein through Masha Bucher, a "one-time pro-Putin Russian political activist-turned Jeffery Epstein publicist-turned Silicon Valley kingmaker"

Exclusive | Spy Agency Blocks Congress From Seeing Gabbard Whistleblower Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office rejected Democratic efforts to see all the underlying material about a foreign conversation that discussed Jared Kushner.

News: The Trump administration told Congress it won’t share the classified underlying intelligence—a conversation two foreigners had about Jared Kushner—that led to a whistleblower complaint against U.S. spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, citing claims of executive privilege. www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

These dogs are having the time of their lives following this week's historic blizzard in the Northeast. Please enjoy. 14/10 for all

Trenchant Exec Who Sold His Employer's Zero-Day Exploits to Russian Buyer Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison A former Trenchant executive who pleaded guilty last year to selling his company's software hacking tools to a zero-day broker in Russia was sentenced today to seven years and three months in federal ...

Peter Williams, former Trenchant exec who stole zero-day exploits from his employer and sold them to a Russian exploit buyer between 2022-2025, was sentenced today to 7 years and 3 months in prison in a hearing that was partially closed to the public due to sensitive nature of tools he stole.

Anthropic accuses Chinese labs of trying to illicitly take Claude’s capabilities Anthropic claims Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax used "industrial-scale" distillation to siphon Claude’s AI capabilities for offensive cyber ops.

Anthropic on Monday accused three Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories of stealthily trying to siphon Claude’s capabilities for their own models, potentially in a way that could fuel offensive cyber operations via @timstarks.bsky.social cyberscoop.com/anthropic-ac...

Fascinating and frightening social experiment and story

For those who don't understand the "banality of evil" reference, it's from Hannah Arendt's book about Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel. She used it to describe how ordinary Germans/Poles/Ukrainians became accomplices to the Nazis by mindlessly buying into the demonization of their Jewish neighbors

Thanks, Lily!

Prince Andrew's Arrest Across the pond in Britain, justice and accountability is a serious matter

Never in a million years did I ever fathom when I resurrected the Epstein story in 2018 that it would lead to first arrest of a British Royal in four centuries. Not since King Charles I was arrested in 1647.
open.substack.com/pub/jkbjourn...

The WSJ reports that the Trump administration has massed "significant" air power in striking distance of Iran, but hasn't yet decided what the purpose of an attack would be.

www.wsj.com/world/middle...

The Caracas operation suggests cyber was part of the plan – just not the whole operation Was the Caracas power outage a "precision cyberattack" or something more physical? Experts weigh in on the visible kinetic damage to Vene.zuelan substations during Operation Absolute Resolve.

Good piece from @metacurity.com about whether cyber played significant role in power outage during Caracas raid. "How the outage is framed matters because...if the episode is widely presented as a 'cyber-only' success...it may encourage outsized conclusions about what cyber tools can accomplish"

The Price of Admission to Epstein’s World: Silence

“Any time there is sufficient ambiguity in the behavior of a person, we are motivated to see it in a way that benefits us." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/w...

Everyone in San Francisco staring wide-eyed right now at a receipt showing they paid $5-per-gallon for gasoline (though it is ironic that in DC, where the cost of living rivals San Francisco, it cost me just $2.70/per gallon when I filled my tank last week)

Password managers' promise that they can't see your vaults isn't always true Contrary to what password managers say, a server compromise can mean game over.

The makers of password managers like Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane and LastPass promise they can't see your password vault. But that's not always true. A server compromise can mean game over for you, say researchers who examined some of the top password managers on the market

archive.is/202602161310...

Here's a free link to the story: archive.is/202602161310...

Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. Big mistake. Allison Nixon had helped arrest dozens of members of The Com — a loose affiliation of online groups responsible for violence and hacking campaigns. Then she became a target.

When a hacker named "Waifu" and "Judische" began posting death threats against security researcher Allison Nixon, she had no idea why he targeted her. So she set out to unmask him. The quest led her to Connor Moucka, a 25-yr-old Canadian who was ringleader of infamous Snowflake/AT&T hacks. My story:

You don't like the sound of whining in your earbuds?