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A recently disclosed high-severity security flaw in Apache ActiveMQ Classic has come under active exploitation in the wild, per the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). To that end, the agency has added the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-34197 (CVSS score: 8.8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian
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NASHVILLE—A group of soldiers from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard is teaming up with the Army Research Laboratory to develop a prototype enemy drone recovery system that won the innovation award at the Army’s first Best Drone Warfighter competition in February.
The idea came together over a “couple beverages” after Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Reed and his 28th Infantry Division Innovation Team got the invitation to enter the competition late last year, he told an audience Thursday at the Army Aviation Warfighter Summit.
“So we wanted to come up with something that wasn't just the run-of-the-mill, Army-type system, something that industry would be excited about and potentially be able to take and make it scale from there,” he said.
They came up with Project RED—Recovery Exploitation Drone—an unmanned system that uses AI to find downed enemy drones, and an attached robot arm to pick up those drones and fly them back to the unit to download their data.
“We're currently working with Army Research Laboratory at this time to kind of refine our product, create more autonomy, more stability in the flight controls,” Reed said. It’s part of a one-year research-and-development agreement with ARL.
Other units are already starting to work on their pitches for next year, Reed said as part of a panel discussing lessons learned from the first Best Drone Warfighter competition.
He suggested creating sub-categories for the “best innovation” award with different budget thresholds, to give units of varying size and resources more room to develop their ideas.
He was joined by Sgt. Javon Purchner and Staff Sgt. Angel Caliz, who won the best drone operator and best team portions of the competition.
Purchner, a fire support specialist, brought several years as a first-person view drone hobbyist to the competition, he said. He suggested units give soldiers more designated time to train on drones.
“At installations, have actual courses for soldiers that want to compete,” he said. “They can have time to actually go out and practice their flying skills and have that time set aside for them, because flying FPV drones isn't just as easy as picking up the controller and flying. It's something that takes a lot of time and practice to become proficient at.”
Purchner’s leaders were so impressed with his skills that they plucked him from his unit in 1st Cavalry Division to serve at III Corps headquarters and develop a training center with multiple levels of courses to train new drone pilots at Fort Hood, Texas.
Caliz said he’d been practicing the hunter-killer drone mission with his fellow 2nd Cavalry Regiment soldiers, giving him an edge.
He suggested that next year’s competition include electronic warfare interference to make the scenario more realistic. He also had some suggestions for industry to make the drone mission more viable.
One would be some sort of transport system for drones, he said, because when you’re a team carrying five to 10 of them, they no longer just fit in a backpack. Another idea was a new kind of ground control station.
“I'd like to see more mobility. Something smaller, more compact,” he said. “Something that doesn’t tie you down to a certain case or certain bag, something that’s not too many wires.”
Assuming the second annual Best Drone Warfighter competition becomes a reality, leadership would like to expand the challenges with a nighttime portion, said Col. James Brant, the lessons learned and training manager for the Army Aviation Center of Excellence.
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Space-based interceptors may be too costly even for the massively budgeted Golden Dome missile defense system, the program’s leader said Wednesday.
Acknowledging what many analysts have said ever since President Trump ordered up orbiting interceptors in one of the first executive orders of his second term, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein told the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee on Wednesday that building and deploying satellites armed to down enemy missiles early in flight may never be affordable.
“What we do not know today is ‘can I do it at scale and can I do it affordably?’ That’s going to be the huge challenge for boost-phase intercept,” he said. “I will tell you because we are so focused on affordability. If we cannot do it affordabl[ly] we will not go into production.”
Trump’s 2025 executive order that established the missile defense system explicitly calls for the “development and deployment” of boost-phase space interceptors, even though defense budget analysts and physicists have continuously pointed out that the technology would be too expensive and even ineffective for the project’s desired cost and ambitions. The recently increased $185 billion price tag for Golden Dome would be supported by $17.5 billion in the Defense Department’s 2027 budget request. Most of that is coming from reconciliation spending, a special budget process that requires a simple majority to pass mandatory legislation.
Even though reconciliation isn’t a guarantee for future years, defense spending analysis shows that Golden Dome funds will likely be included in the baseline budget for several years.
Baseline Golden Dome spending is estimated to be $14.7 billion in 2028 and rise to $16 billion by 2031, according to data from the American Enterprise Institute’s budget data navigator. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at AEI, said that’s a big deal and shows there’s support for the project outside of abnormal spending bills.
“They actually roll it into the base budget in future years; they don’t stay dependent on reconciliation,” Harrison said. “That’s been one of the big lingering questions.”
Trump said last year that the system would intercept “very close to 100 percent” of a wide-range of missile threats, although his most recent defense budget request acknowledged that “the goal is to not create a 'perfect' defense.”
During Wednesday’s hearing, Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., said Trump “probably thinks himself a greater theorist of strategic deterrence than everyone else” and that a limited missile defense system would be more feasible.
“It is clear to me now that the reality does not match what President Trump has promised to the American people, an impenetrable shield, as he says, against all threats,” Moulton said. “Experts from both sides of the aisle have admitted this both from a technical and fiscal perspective.”
Guetlein told Congress that the boost-phase interceptors aren’t the only missile-defense solution for the project. In November, the Space Force put out a notice for prototype ideas for a “kinetic midcourse interceptor,” technology that would destroy a missile mid-flight with a direct collision.
“So, if boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it because we have other options to get after it,” Guetlein said.
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Cybersecurity researchers have warned of an active malicious campaign that’s targeting the workforce in the Czech Republic with a previously undocumented botnet dubbed PowMix since at least December 2025. “PowMix employs randomized command-and-control (C2) beaconing intervals, rather than persistent connection to the C2 server, to evade the network signature detections,” Cisco Talos
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week instructed department leaders to terminate most of the department’s collective-bargaining agreements, more than a year after President Trump signed an executive order banning federal employee unions from many agencies on national-security grounds.
In an April 9 memo obtained by Government Executive, Hegseth gave his deputies 24 hours to take action to cancel most union contracts.
“I hereby direct the termination of all collective bargaining agreements to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation of Executive Order 14251, ‘Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,’ within 24 hours of the date of this memorandum, except as applied to the population covered by the [April 2025] secretary of defense certification . . . and the local employing offices of any agency police officers, security guards or firefighters, pursuant to EO 14251,” the secretary wrote last week. “This action is required to align agency operations with national security requirements as outlined in EO 14251.”
A year ago, Hegseth exempted bargaining units of Federal Wage System workers at four installations: the Letterkenny Munition Center in Pennsylvania, the Air Force Test Center in California, the Air Force Sustainment Center in Oklahoma, and the Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Florida.
Spared from the new memo are the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association, which last fall secured preliminary injunctions blocking implementation of the executive order. The order cites a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act as authority to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective-bargaining rights on national-security grounds,.
Not so for AFGE, the nation’s largest federal-employee union. In a statement Wednesday, National President Everett Kelley decried Hegseth’s decision as “cowardly.”
“For 50 years, these employees have exercised their union rights; under several administrations, during a global pandemic and throughout peacetime and wartime, including our most recent conflict with Iran,” he said. “To rip up the union contracts of civilian employees after touting a successful ceasefire in the Middle East is not only a slap in the face to the employees who supported those efforts, but again proves that this action has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with silencing workers’ voices.”
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OpenAI unveils GPT-5.4-Cyber, a cybersecurity-focused model built to help defenders analyze malware and fix software bugs. The company is also expanding its Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program to thousands of verified experts.
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Since the United States began to blockade Iran’s ports on Tuesday, 13 ships have heeded warnings from U.S. warships to turn back, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday.
The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is leading the blockade, Gen. Dan Caine said at a Pentagon press briefing with sailors prepared to board any commercial vessels that attempt to cross the blockade line.
In addition to ships, there is a “massive, massive force of fighters, intelligence aircraft, helicopters, and other embarked forces, to include aerial refueling tankers that are up overhead this blockade area,” Caine said, indicating a chart of U.S. presence in the region.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, joined the briefing to talk about two recent trips to the Middle East, where he said he “had the privilege of personally recognizing more than 100 servicemen and women for their extraordinary valor, their courage and their initiative under fire.”
Cooper also said he met with teams who had recovered downed Iranian one-way attack drones and rebuilt them.
“We brought them back to America, took the guts out, put a ‘made in America’ stamp on them, and fired them right back to Iran,” he said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed Iran’s government directly in his remarks, asserting that Tehran can attempt to “dig out” of its destroyed military and defense industrial base facilities, “but you can’t reconstitute.”
Hegseth also challenged Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, saying they “don’t have a real navy or real domain awareness,” though Iran’s mines have effectively kept the waterway closed.
Hegseth then turned his ire upon the press.
“I just can't help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage you cannot resist peddling, despite the historic and important success of this effort and the success of our troops,” he said. “Sometimes it's hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on. It's incredibly unpatriotic.”
He compared coverage of the Iran war to that of the Afghanistan withdrawal, accusing the media of bending “over backwards to explain away” the chaos of the American airlift out of Kabul’s airport as Taliban forces took over the country.
In reality, news organizations at the time asked the Pentagon in its daily briefings how and why the withdrawal effort had been left to the last minute and allowed to get so out of control. Pentagon officials deferred questions about planning and decision-making to the State Department.
Hegseth then turned his attention to recruiting efforts by the Air Force and Space Force, which announced Tuesday they had met their fiscal year 2026 goals five months ahead of deadline.
“Where are the reports on that? Where's the coverage of the new spirit in the country? The new spirit in the ranks, the surge of Americans wanting to join the greatest military in the world,” he said. “Nothing from the fake news.”
In fact, ABC News reported on the story on Wednesday, becoming the latest of several news organizations to do so.
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You know that feeling when you open your feed on a Thursday morning and it’s just… a lot? Yeah. This week delivered. We’ve got hackers getting creative in ways that are almost impressive if you ignore the whole “crime” part, ancient vulnerabilities somehow still ruining people’s days, and enough supply chain drama to fill a season of television nobody asked for. Not all bad though. Some
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A surge of targeted cyberattacks was detected against local governments and municipal healthcare institutions particularly clinical and ambulance hospitals. The campaign has been attributed to threat cluster UAC-0247, known for advanced data theft, persistence, and lateral movement methods. The attack chain begins with well-crafted phishing emails that appear to discuss humanitarian aid proposals. These emails typically […]
The post UAC-0247 Hits Hospitals, Governments With Browser and WhatsApp Data Theft appeared first on GBHackers Security | #1 Globally Trusted Cyber Security News Platform.
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In 2024, compromised service accounts and forgotten API keys were behind 68% of cloud breaches. Not phishing. Not weak passwords. Unmanaged non-human identities that nobody was watching. For every employee in your org, there are 40 to 50 automated credentials: service accounts, API tokens, AI agent connections, andOAuth grants. When projects end or employees leave, most
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