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As enterprises refine their strategies for handling Non-Human Identities (NHIs), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become a powerful tool for streamlining operations and enhancing security. However, since RPA bots have varying levels of access to sensitive information, enterprises must be prepared to mitigate a variety of challenges. In large organizations, bots are starting to outnumber
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An advanced persistent threat (APT) known as WIRTE has been attributed to attacks targeting government and diplomatic entities across the Middle East with a previously undocumented malware suite dubbed AshTag since 2020. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the activity cluster under the name Ashen Lepus. Artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal platform show that the threat actor has trained its
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A high-severity unpatched security vulnerability in Gogs has come under active exploitation, with more than 700 compromised instances accessible over the internet, according to new findings from Wiz. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-8110 (CVSS score: 8.7), is a case of file overwrite in the file update API of the Go-based self-hosted Git service. A fix for the issue is said to be currently in the
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Google on Wednesday shipped security updates for its Chrome browser to address three security flaws, including one it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, rated high in severity, is being tracked under the Chromium issue tracker ID “466192044.” Unlike other disclosures, Google has opted to keep information about the CVE identifier, the affected component, and
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Huntress is warning of a new actively exploited vulnerability in Gladinet’s CentreStack and Triofox products stemming from the use of hard-coded cryptographic keys that have affected nine organizations so far. “Threat actors can potentially abuse this as a way to access the web.config file, opening the door for deserialization and remote code execution,” security researcher Bryan Masters said.
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Countries looking to join NATO are still welcome to apply, a top alliance official said Wednesday in tacit repudiation of the Trump administration’s recent declaration that the group must not be a “perpetually expanding alliance.”NATO has an open-door policy, the alliance’s parliamentary secretary general, Benedetta Berti, told reporters Wednesday at an event hosted by the Project for Media and National Security. That was reaffirmed as recently as June’s summit, but the new U.S. national security strategy calls for “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
However, Berti added, “there is no consensus for moving forward with the accession of new members,” to include Ukraine.
Berti was in Washington, D.C., this week for NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly Transatlantic Forum, where officials discussed both the new NSS and the Trump administration’s recent attempt at a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, which alliance officials roundly denounced.
“What we would underline, and I've heard this from the secretary general, is that, of course, from the NATO perspective, the job for today is for the alliance to continue to support Ukraine so it can defend itself today, to continue to work with Ukraine for the long-term transformation of its armed forces, and really to, through military support, to contribute to ensure that it can negotiate from a position of strength,” Berti said.
As for the rest of the NSS—which, among other things, warns that immigrants threaten to bring about Europe’s “civilizational erasure”—Berti said NATO is keeping its focus on its commitment to increase its defense capabilities, a demand from the Trump administration that the organization is working to meet.
“It's in line, very much in line, with what all 32 NATO allies agreed on the at the summit … and that is essentially a recognition that the post-Cold War peace dividend level of defense spending that we saw from Europe was simply not adequate to the current threat assessment that we have, including because of Russia against Ukraine, but not exclusively,” Berti said.
So NATO is not necessarily recalibrating its relationship with the U.S., she said, but focusing on how the administration’s positions in the NSS will affect NATO. From discussions at the parliamentary summit, she added, it’s clear that different member countries have different reactions to the administration’s particular interest in Europe’s cultural health.
“From our organization, we really just focus on, how do we actually forward in implementing what, to me, is really the most important question from a security perspective, and that is a more credible European core,” she said.
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React2Shell continues to witness heavy exploitation, with threat actors leveraging the maximum-severity security flaw in React Server Components (RSC) to deliver cryptocurrency miners and an array of previously undocumented malware families, according to new findings from Huntress. This includes a Linux backdoor called PeerBlight, a reverse proxy tunnel named CowTunnel, and a Go-based
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SIMI VALLEY, California—This year’s Reagan National Defense Forum had a slightly different mix: fewer uniforms, more Silicon Valley and finance types.The former likely reflected the Pentagon’s new restrictions on public engagements; the latter, a new willingness by financiers to invest in the defense industry. That trend was seemingly epitomized by JPMorgan Chase’s October announcement that it would invest up to $10 billion, as part of a much larger pledge, in “industries critical to national economic security and resiliency.”
“I'm happy this is taking place. I'm happy a lot of this venture capital money is going into things we really need, not things like social media, for example,” Dimon said on stage Saturday. “It's been obvious for a while. When Ukraine got invaded by the Russian armies four years ago, it should have shattered any illusion that people have that we're safe.”
“Somehow, we missed a lot” of vulnerabilities, from the Pentagon’s dependence on foreign supplies of crucial materials to America’s broader reliance on imported pharmaceuticals, he said.
JPMorgan’s investment is meant to galvanize others’, and ultimately boost and reshore small and medium suppliers for major primes, like RTX, whose CEO, Chris Calio, shared the stage with Dimon. Such investments might finance “vendor supply chains that someone like Chris might have, where if he wants to double, triple production of his missiles, he's got to get some of them to double triple their production. They may not have the money, or they may need a little bit of advice or help, or build a new plant.”
Dimon said the money might also boost research, help tackle complicated problems like shipbuilding, and even affect policy.
“What can we do to [be] faster, better, quicker? As you all know, you've heard it many times: There's not that much time, and so, we better get our act together,” he said.
Welcome
You’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and rooftop recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!
AI for shipyards. The Navy wants its shipbuilders to use AI to improve production, so it’s spending $448 million to link their data to a new tool—Palantir’s ShipOS—to simplify scheduling, increase capacity, and reduce costs, Navy Secretary John Phelan announced Tuesday in Washington, D.C.
The move is part of Phelan’s promise to cut costs and put more hulls in the water faster using emerging technologies.
This “isn't a concept, it's not a pilot program. It's not a study. It's real. This is funded. This is happening,” Phelan said during the service’s first industry day for its new Rapid Capabilities Office. “Every shipbuilder who partners with us will have AI-powered tools that optimize their work in real time. Every supplier in the network will be connected through intelligent logistics. Every program manager will have unprecedented visibility into schedule, cost and risk. We're not just building ships faster. We're rebuilding American maritime industrial capacity for the AI age.”
What’s interesting about this deal is that the onus is on Palantir to prove its usefulness to suppliers once the tech is implemented. Oh, and part of that $448 million is being funded by budget reconciliation.
The goal is to “automate manual processes” such as paper drawings, and have a handful of public and private shipyards and 100 suppliers “delivering sooner and not being delayed in getting their items to the shipyards,” Jason Potter, the Navy’s current acquisitions head told a select group of reporters. “That's what success looks like.”
During pilot deployments, a Navy press release said, General Dynamics Electric Boat did 160 manual hours’ worth of submarine schedule planning in less than 10 minutes, while Portsmouth Naval Shipyard “cut material review times from weeks to under one hour.”
New frigate. Just days earlier, Phelan had announced plans to design and build a new frigate just days after canceling the Constellation-class program. The “big, beautiful ship,” as he called it, will be an American design and part of the White House’s proposed “Golden Fleet.” But it won’t displace other shipbuilding efforts.
The service is also retooling the Landing Ship Medium, Phelan announced over the weekend. The “14-knot, lightly armed, and unprotected” LSM, which had drawn criticism from former Marine Corps commandants, had seen an earlier acquisition effort aborted.
ICYMI
The Pentagon wants AI everywhere too. The Defense Department rolled out AI tools Tuesday—Google Gemini for Government.
Golden Dome gets a $151 billion contract vehicle. The Pentagon picked 1,000 companies to vie for pieces of the White House’s domestic missile defense system via SHIELD, perhaps the department’s biggest-ever contract vehicle.
“I don't know if it's the largest ever, but it's certainly near the top in terms of overall contract ceiling,” Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense One’s Thomas Novelly. “The number of awards suggests that they're just trying to get nearly everyone on contract so they have easy options to award actual funding later on.”
New CCA, who dis? Defense One got a sneak peak of Northrop Grumman’s Project Talon—an autonomous aircraft borne out of the defense company’s original, losing bid for the Air Force program. The sleek multi-mission roboplane, which was unveiled under soft lighting at the company’s facilities in Mojave, California, will use the Prism autonomy package that also flies Northrop’s optionally manned Beacon aircraft.
A little more: Northrop Grumman said it increased the range of its Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar. The company wouldn’t give numbers, but said software upgrades boosted “high-fidelity surveillance,” such as threat detection, tracking, and targeting.
Keyword: collaboration. The Pentagon has called on defense companies to come up with new tech the military can use before it asks for it in a program of record. To address that, two segments of General Dynamics are trying something different: creating spaces, including a new lab, where companies can work shoulder-to-shoulder with competitors. Get the story here.
On my radar
- Army taps C3.AI for brigade command and control to improve logistics and supply distribution.
- More maritime drones. Venture-backed Vatn Systems secured $60 million in a series A funding round for its underwater autonomous vessel.
- Workforce + implementing acquisition reform. The latest version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act removes a House-passed provision that would have protected collective bargaining rights for the Defense Department’s civilian workers.
- White House-directed workforce cuts have hit DOD across organizations, but especially with respect to contracting officers. That could affect the Pentagon’s move to systemically change how it buys weapons and other technology as part of broad acquisition reform—and how contracts are executed amid top-down directive to move fast. For example, the U.S. The Space Force is already feeling the impact of those cuts to contracting workers.
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New research has uncovered exploitation primitives in the .NET Framework that could be leveraged against enterprise-grade applications to achieve remote code execution. WatchTowr Labs, which has codenamed the “invalid cast vulnerability” SOAPwn, said the issue impacts Barracuda Service Center RMM, Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM), and Umbraco 8. But the number of affected vendors is likely to be
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Nearly half of Americans (48%) oppose U.S. military attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats, and that includes almost a fifth (19%) of Republicans, according to a new survey conducted in early December and published Wednesday by Reuters/Ipsos.Just 34% support the attacks, while another 18% said they were unsure. “There have been at least 22 strikes that have killed 87 people since September 2,” Reuters reminds readers. The U.S. has killed those aboard the boats without due process and in a manner that critics have argued may violate the laws of war.
- Also in that survey: 64% said they don’t support Trump’s recent pardon of convicted cocaine trafficker former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, whom Trump last week ordered to be released amid a 45-year prison sentence in the U.S. Read more, here.
New: Two U.S. Navy F/A-18s were tracked flying over the Gulf of Venezuela on Tuesday, according to open-source monitor Flightradar24, which noted afterward the fighter jets were the most tracked flights on the live radar website.
When asked about the jets, a U.S. official told Defense One’s Thomas Novelly Tuesday evening that the Defense Department “conducts routine, lawful operations in international airspace, including over the Gulf of Venezuela,” adding: “We will continue to fly safely, professionally, and in accordance with international law to protect the homeland, monitor illicit activity, and support stability across the Americas.”
Their flight path marks the latest escalation of U.S. military force near Venezuela, which has included repeated military strikes on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean Sea in addition to regional B-1 and B-52 bomber flights amid the largest U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis.
Could the U.S. really invade right now? The force “lacks support or logistics for Venezuela ground invasion,” which “leaves airstrikes as Trump’s most feasible and immediate option—despite his warnings of stronger action,” Politico reported Tuesday after a podcast interview with the president.
Expert input: “The United States does not have the ground forces needed for an invasion,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and co-author of a recent CSIS analysis. “The Venezuelan ground forces number some 90,000 including the army, marines and National Guard. The United States has only 2,200 Marines [nearby], and there’s no movement to reinforce them.” Read on, here.
During classified briefings about the Pentagon’s boat strikes Tuesday on Capitol Hill, “We got some clarity on the chain of command and who made decisions at what point, but on the legality of it we didn’t get a lot of clarity,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said afterward, according to the New York Times. Smith also said it was “pretty clear” that the second strike on Sept. 2 to kill two survivors was the commander at the time “Admiral [Frank] Bradley’s call, based on the rules of engagement given to him by Hegseth.”
Developing: Smith’s counterpart on the Armed Services Committee said he plans to quash a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 2 strikes, Politico reported Tuesday. “It’s done,” said HASC Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., to reporters. “I’ve got all the answers I needed,” he said. Meantime, “It’s still an open question whether the video will be made public, as some lawmakers have urged,” Politico’s Connor O'Brien reports.
Hegseth told lawmakers Tuesday he wants more time to weigh the merits of releasing the footage publicly, the New York Times reported. Lawmakers could still “hear from the commander who ordered the strike and see the unedited video of the incident in the coming days,” according to Politico.
A new window into the boat-strikes: In September and October, the Pentagon’s lawyers raced “to ensure survivors did not end up in the U.S. judicial system, where court cases could force the administration to show evidence justifying President Trump’s military campaign in the region,” the New York Times reported Tuesday (gift link).
Also notable: U.S. “military officials referred to [the survivors] by specific terms that included ‘distressed mariners.’ That phrase is usually used in a peacetime and civilian context,” a trio of Times reporters write. Read the rest, here.
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson, Thomas Novelly and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1954, U.S. Air Force Col. John Stapp took 19 Gs as his rocket sled accelerated to 632 mph in five seconds—then 40 Gs as it slammed to a halt. The test helped prove the feasibility of rocket-powered ejection seats.
SecDef Hegseth’s AI rollout stumbles immediately out of the gate. “The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I,” SecDef Hegseth said in a video announcement Tuesday—linking to the program at GenAi.Mil.
The idea is to allow service members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed,” Hegseth said. However, “the platform can’t actually be accessed from external networks,” and so readers of Hegseth’s social media post were left with internet errors, the New Republic reports. According to Reddit users, active duty troops “received surprise invitations to use the new platform on their work computer.” But since the announcement emerged for some with little warning, at least one user said the invite looked “really suspicious.”
Related: View some of the new AI program promotional posters “plastered” throughout the Pentagon and also shared on Reddit, here.
And ICYMI: Research and engineering chief Emil Michael talked about the department’s AI efforts on Monday.
Update: Congress is committing to only a fraction of the funding given to the Navy’s F/A-XX program last year. But the latest version of the defense policy bill fully backs the development of the Air Force’s F-47 fighter, Defense One’s Tom Novelly reported Tuesday.
The numbers appear to reflect a White House and Pentagon victory over lawmakers who pushed to get the long-proposed replacement for the F/A-18 Super Hornet and F/A-18 electronic-warfare jet onto the drawing board this year. As things stand, the F/A-XX will receive less than 1 percent of the $38 billion that the NDAA would authorize to develop, buy, and upgrade military aircraft, according to the House majority’s summary of the bill.
Caveat: The 2026 appropriations bill has yet to emerge, the reconciliation bill might add funds, and the program might also, as it has in the past, receive funds through classified accounts, Novelly writes. Read more, here.
Additional reading:
- Developing: “US judge blocks Trump's National Guard deployment in Los Angeles,” Reuters reported Wednesday morning from New York;
- “South Korea’s Hanwha, US defense startup Vatn to build underwater drones,” the wire service reported Wednesday as well;
- “Australian MQ-28 CCA Downs Drone in Milestone Air-to-Air Test,” Air and Space Forces Magazine reported Tuesday;
- And Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale says he “wants to bring back public executions,” Newsweek and multiple other outlets reported this week.
Trump vs. Europe
A longer, unpublished version of the National Security Strategy proposes new vehicles for leadership on the world stage and a different way to put its thumb on the scales of Europe’s future—through its cultural values. Defense One’s Meghann Myers, who reviewed the document, reveals some takeaways, here.
Trump himself espoused his desire to reshape a “weak” Europe in a Monday interview with Politico, which wrote on Tuesday that he “denounced Europe as a ‘decaying’ group of nations led by ‘weak’ people,…belittling the traditional U.S. allies for failing to control migration and end the Russia-Ukraine war, and signaling that he would endorse European political candidates aligned with his own vision for the continent.
“The broadside attack against European political leadership represents the president’s most virulent denunciation to date of these Western democracies, threatening a decisive rupture with countries like France and Germany that already have deeply strained relations with the Trump administration.” Read on, here. The New York Times added its own coverage of the interview as well.
Meanwhile, in Europe, leaders are accelerating plans to “confront the unthinkable: a future in which America is no longer their primary security guarantor and Europe has to organize its own defense far sooner than anyone imagined.” Politico, here.
By the way: Just last year, Russia reportedly plotted to plant bombs on U.S.-bound flights, according to the Financial Times. That update extends from the previously-reported instances from July 2024 when “DHL parcels exploded in logistics centres in the UK, Poland and Germany,” FT’s Sam Jones writes.
“Security services would eventually trace the plot back to a group of Russian-directed saboteurs who had a further 6kg of explosive material in their possession. That was enough to give them the capability for what security officials told the Financial Times was the next stage of the plan: to attack flights to the US, and cause more disruption to the airline industry than any act of terror since the World Trade Center attacks.” More, here.
Additional reading:
- Ukrainian President “Zelenskyy reaffirms his refusal to cede land to Russia as he rallies European support,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday;
- And ICYMI, here’s “What the US wants from Ukraine: Leave Donbas, one way or another,” Politico reported Monday.
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