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Popular password manager plugins for web browsers have been found susceptible to clickjacking security vulnerabilities that could be exploited to steal account credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and credit card details under certain conditions. The technique has been dubbed Document Object Model (DOM)-based extension clickjacking by independent security researcher Marek Tóth,
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The Trump administration asked a federal appeals court on Tuesday to toss rulings that found its mass firings of recently hired and promoted federal employees unlawful, arguing that the judicial orders are hurting its management of the civil service.
The Supreme Court in April already overturned a California district judge’s injunction that prevented the firings of employees in their probationary periods, but that order has not yet been formally revoked. After the high court’s ruling, the district judge ordered federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense and Energy, to send letters to dismissed workers attesting that they were let go as part of an effort to shrink government and not because of their individual performances. Much of the argument at an appeals court on Tuesday focused on that second order.
While agencies cited "performance" in the termination letters that they sent to probationary employees in February, they generally did not conduct individual assessments of the workers before firing them; instead, they followed guidance from the Office of Personnel Management to dismiss recently hired staff. Due to the initial injunctions, most of those probationers have since been hired back. Most of them remain on the job, though agencies such as the departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development have re-fired their “trial period” staff.
Attorneys for the Trump administration on Tuesday argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that the district judge’s orders must be formally dismissed. While the letters stating the firings were not for performance were delivered months ago, the attorneys said, the injunction is still having an impact.
“The government continues to be bound to those letters that it was required to send out to those employees,” a Justice Department lawyer said. “And so the government is not able to, for example, send a subsequent letter saying we disagree with that letter, we never wished to send it.”
The district court’s injunction, the attorney added, is precluding agencies from potentially sending follow-up letters "clarifying the reasons for termination.”
Danielle Leonard, an attorney for the plaintiffs on the case, made up of federal employee unions and advocacy groups, argued the appeals court should dismiss the government’s appeal as moot rather than formally rescind the injunctions. The Supreme Court has already stayed the ban on firings and the letters stating the terminations were not for cause cannot be unsent, Leonard said.
The argument before the appeals court took place as the Internal Revenue Service’s inspector general issued a new report that found 99.5% of the 7,300 probationary employees the agency fired had either received at least “fully successful” performance reviews or had not been rated at all. More than half of the workers had not been given a performance review and of those who had, just 43 received a “below fully successful” rating.
IRS still suggested in the termination letters that the employees were fired for performance.
The district judge that had found the firings to be unlawful said OPM had illegally directed agencies to terminate the staff, rather than the agencies making their own decisions. The impacted employees were “terminated through a lie,” the judge said, and the justifications they were initially provided were “a total sham.”
The Supreme Court, however, found that the Trump administration was likely to win its case on the merits and struck down the injunction. It did not suggest federal court was an inappropriate venue for the case, though the administration again made that argument on Tuesday. The plaintiffs should instead take their case to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the Justice official said.
A majority of the panel that heard the case, made up of Judge Morgan Christen, a President Obama appointee, and Judges Lawrence Vandyke and Daniel Bress, both President Trump appointees, appeared to favor the administration’s argument that the unions should take their case elsewhere.
Vandyke and Bress both suggested employees should challenge their employing agency rather than OPM, with the former judge likening the situation to an Instagram influencer calling for a federal employee be fired, the agency firing the employee and the individual suing the influencer instead of the agency. The administration’s attorneys noted probationary employees are severely restricted in their appeal rights, but the case was brought by unions and advocacy groups and not any individual workers.
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Do you know how many AI agents are running inside your business right now? If the answer is “not sure,” you’re not alone—and that’s exactly the concern. Across industries, AI agents are being set up every day. Sometimes by IT, but often by business units moving fast to get results. That means agents are running quietly in the background—without proper IDs, without owners, and without logs of
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A Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group known as Static Tundra has been observed actively exploiting a seven-year-old security flaw in Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE software as a means to establish persistent access to target networks. Cisco Talos, which disclosed details of the activity, said the attacks single out organizations in telecommunications, higher education and manufacturing
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Update: More than 2,000 National Guard troops have been assigned to the nation’s capital as part of President Trump’s “crime emergency” announced in an executive order nine days ago. But the troops aren’t in high-crime regions; rather, they’re sticking to tourist areas such as the National Mall and Union Station, the New York Times reported Tuesday.Rewind: Trump says crime is “out of control” in Washington despite Justice Department data showing violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low.
Being seen: “The National Guard presence, with desert sand-colored vehicles parked near the capital’s most visited tourist spots, is now showing up regularly on social media feeds in posts by visitors to Washington,” the Times reports.
A U.S. military Humvee crashed into a car in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington early Wednesday, according to a video posted to Reddit. “Luckily [the] driver appeared conscious but firefighters brought out jaws of life to open [the car] door,” the Reddit poster said.
Notable: “The National Guard has also started sending military lawyers to work on incoming misdemeanor cases stemming from the deployment of forces, to help relieve the burden on the often understaffed U.S. attorney’s office in Washington,” Helene Cooper of the Times writes.
Expert reax: “This military occupation of the district is unprecedented and unjustified. If it’s allowed to stand, this country will be well on its way to becoming a police state,” said former Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Goitein, now with the Brennan Center for Justice. “There is a centuries-old principle against using the military for domestic law enforcement,” she added, referencing the Posse Comitatus Act. “The reason is obvious: if the president can turn the military against the people, he can suppress dissent, quash individual liberties, and undermine democracy.”
“To be clear, no court has endorsed this legal fiction, nor has Congress weighed in on the matter,” Goitein explained in a social media thread Monday. She goes on to unpack three legal loopholes in the Posse Comitatus Act that Trump is exploiting with the Guard assignment in Washington.
“Through his manufactured emergency, President Trump is engaging in dangerous political theater to expand his power and sow fear in our communities,” said Hina Shamsi, director of ACLU’s National Security Project.
“No matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution, including our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, due process, and safeguards against unlawful searches and seizures,” Shamsi said in a statement.
How long can Trump’s DC occupation continue? “It's not clear what could bring this to an end, other than intervention by the courts, by Congress or overwhelming public disapproval,” Goitein told NPR. “This administration is not immune to public pressure,” she noted in the social media thread.
Coverage continues below…
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 with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1998, the U.S. used cruise missiles to attack alleged al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in Sudan as a response to U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania two weeks prior.
Developing: The U.S. Navy sent three warships close to Venezuela ostensibly to fight drug trafficking, Reuters reported Monday, noting the ships were expected to arrive on either Tuesday or Wednesday.
Involved: Three U.S. Aegis guided-missile destroyers—USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham and the USS Sampson. Around 4,000 troops as well as “several P-8 spy planes, and at least one attack submarine” have also been tasked to assist.
Background: The White House has labeled eight drug cartels “foreign terrorist organizations,” and has reportedly ordered the U.S. military to attack the cartels, according to New York Times reporting on August 8. Two of those cartels are allegedly based in Venezeula—and the White House says one is under the command of the country’s leader Nicholas Maduro. (We discussed these developments in a recent podcast you can find, here.)
Expert reax: “It’s not legal to sink a boat in [international] waters, killing those aboard, on suspicion that it is carrying drugs for an organized crime group declared ‘terrorist.’ Congress has approved no Authorization for Use of Military Force for that,” said Adam Isaacson from the Washington Office on Latin America.
Caracas reax: “In response to the increased U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, President Maduro announced a plan to mobilise 4.5 million militia members across the country,” according to LatinAmerica Reports, writing Tuesday. “No empire will come to touch the sacred soil of Venezuela, nor should it touch the sacred soil of South America, no empire in the world,” Maduro said in public remarks Monday evening. More, here.
Additional reading:
- “After chase, US Navy, Coast Guard intercept 1,296 pounds of cocaine” in the eastern Pacific, Military Times reported Tuesday; find the Navy release on this development, here;
- “Fire breaks out on US Navy amphib New Orleans, operating near Japan,” Breaking Defense reported Wednesday;
- “Marines investigating social media post that appears to mock potential recruit,” Task & Purpose reported Monday;
- And “Trump ally Erik Prince plans to keep personnel in Haiti for 10 years to fight gangs and collect taxes,” Reuters reported Thursday.
The Army has been tasked with protecting the ex-wives of Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth as part of a “sprawling, multimillion-dollar initiative” that spans family residences in Minnesota, Tennessee and D.C., the Washington Post reported Wednesday. However, the “unusually large personal security requirements are straining the Army agency,” which is the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or CID.
“I’ve never seen this many security teams for one guy,” one official told the Post, adding, “Nobody has.” According to precedent, “Historically about 150 of the agency’s approximately 1,500 agents serve on VIP security details.” But one person said the current estimate is about “400 and going up,” while another put it somewhere “over 500.”
Reminder: A man dressed as a police officer and assassinated a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota in mid-June. The White House did not allege “out of control” crime or send any Guard troops or additional federal agents to the lawmakers’ family homes in Minneapolis in response. But Army agents are now working long-term assignments protecting Hegseth’s second wife in Minnesota where they “sit on luggage” or “sit in the cars on the driveway,” officials told the Post.
Also worth noting: Trump removed the security detail assigned to former Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley upon taking office in January. “Administration officials said at the time that Milley’s security was taken away as a means to hold him accountable for perceived disloyalty,” the Post recalls. Read the rest, here.
See also: “How Pete Hegseth’s zeal to bring religiosity to the Pentagon is dividing the military,” via Ben Makuch of the Guardian, writing last week.
Ukraine
A U.S. firm is offering a Shahed-like drone. On Monday, Alabama-based drone manufacturer Griffon Aerospace unveiled the MQM-172 Arrowhead, which looks a lot like the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 that Russia is raining down on Ukraine by the thousands. The company’s website provides no range data, but the Arrowhead can apparently match the Shahed’s 100-pound payload. (Via Interesting Engineering.)
And ICYMI: “Late last week, Ukraine unveiled a ‘Flamingo’ cruise missile, with a claimed 3,000 km range and a warhead over 1,000 kg. The warhead is 2x that of the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile,” analyst Byron Callan noted in his post-Anchorage assessment (PDF) this week.
A new poll shows a “dramatic rise” in Republicans’ support for Ukraine, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs announced Friday.
What’s new: A 21-point swing brought the share of Republicans who support sending military and economic aid to 51 percent.
Other takeaways:
- Among all Americans surveyed, six in 10 said the United States should keep sending arms and military supplies to Kyiv (62%, up from 52% in March) and providing economic assistance to Ukraine (61%, up from 55% in March)
- Six in 10 (60%) expressed a favorable view of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; just 10 percent viewed Putin favorably.
Trump 2.0
DNI Tulsi Gabbard has revoked the security clearance of the NSA’s chief data scientist. The New York Times reports that Gabbard rebuffed a request by the acting NSA director, Lt. Gen. William J. Hartman, to show evidence that Vinh Nguyen should lose his clearance. “Ms. Gabbard, on orders from President Trump, fired the scientist, who was a leading government expert on artificial intelligence, cryptology and advanced mathematics.”
NYT: “Friends and former colleagues of Mr. Nguyen said he had been in charge of developing artificial intelligence systems to improve the gathering of foreign communications. He has also been involved in the intelligence community’s work on quantum computing, which has the potential to break current encryption systems and revolutionize espionage.” Read on, here.
Gabbard also revoked security clearances for about three dozen other people on Tuesday, including former White House officials. Announcing the move on social media, Gabbard said the people had “abused the public trust.”
She “did not offer evidence to back up the accusations,” the Associated Press reports.
Former CIA director: Gabbard’s actions are part of a campaign of retribution. “It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government,” William Burns, the former diplomat and spymaster, wrote Wednesday in The Atlantic. “It is about paralyzing public servants — making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.” Read on, here.
FBI Director Kash Patel is diverting agents from their specialties— combatting terrorism, hackers, public corruption, child sex crimes, white-collar crime and civil rights—to focus on violent crime, Ken Dilanian of MSNBC reported Tuesday. “If more agents are working on violent crime cases as their total number is being reduced, these officials say, there won’t be the manpower left to devote the same level of resources to national security and other threats. Multiple current and former FBI officials say they have already seen that happening over the past several months, as agents have been diverted to immigration enforcement and veterans with years of experience have left the bureau.” Read on, here.
Additional reading: “‘Profound harm’: Veterans blast Trump threat to mail-in ballots that could disenfranchise thousands of troops,” the UK’s Independent reported Tuesday.
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Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new prompt injection technique called PromptFix that tricks a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) model into carrying out intended actions by embedding the malicious instruction inside a fake CAPTCHA check on a web page. Described by Guardio Labs an “AI-era take on the ClickFix scam,” the attack technique demonstrates how AI-driven browsers,
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Modern businesses face a rapidly evolving and expanding threat landscape, but what does this mean for your business? It means a growing number of risks, along with an increase in their frequency, variety, complexity, severity, and potential business impact. The real question is, “How do you tackle these rising threats?” The answer lies in having a robust BCDR strategy. However, to build a
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North Korean threat actors have been attributed to a coordinated cyber espionage campaign targeting diplomatic missions in their southern counterpart between March and July 2025. The activity manifested in the form of at least 19 spear-phishing emails that impersonated trusted diplomatic contacts with the goal of luring embassy staff and foreign ministry personnel with convincing meeting invites
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A 22-year-old man from the U.S. state of Oregon has been charged with allegedly developing and overseeing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire botnet called RapperBot. Ethan Foltz of Eugene, Oregon, has been identified as the administrator of the service, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said. The botnet has been used to carry out large-scale DDoS-for-hire attacks targeting
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The United Kingdom has dropped its push to require that tech giant Apple provide the country’s security officials with backdoor access to users’ encrypted iCloud backups, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Monday.
The Washington Post reported in January that the UK issued a secret order to Apple that directed the company to provide its law enforcement and intelligence personnel with the “blanket capability” to access customers’ encrypted files worldwide. The order would have affected Apple users across the world, including those in the U.S.
Under the UK’s 2016 Investigatory Powers Act — known colloquially as the Snooper’s Charter — Apple received the order to provide cloud data without any judicial review.
In an X post, Gabbard said that U.S. officials — including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance — have been working with their UK counterparts over the past few months “to ensure Americans' private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.”
She added that, “as a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.”
News of the UK order earlier this year received bipartisan pushback from some lawmakers and calls for the U.S. to reevaluate its cybersecurity and intelligence-sharing relationship with London.
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data — or CLOUD — Act, which was enacted in 2018, provides U.S. law enforcement officials with the ability to obtain data from American companies that is stored on their overseas servers. The law also authorized the creation of bilateral data-sharing agreements between the U.S. and allies. The access agreement between the U.S. and UK went into effect in October 2022.
In a Feb. 13 letter to Gabbard, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., asked if the Trump administration was made aware of the UK’s order and its understanding of, in part, “the bilateral CLOUD Act agreement with regard to an exception to gag orders for notice to the U.S. government.”
In a reply later that month to the lawmakers’ missive, Gabbard said she had directed her attorneys to outline the implications of the UK’s order to Apple but added that the move “would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors.”
In response to a request for comment from Nextgov/FCW, an ODNI spokesperson pointed to an X post from the agency that praised the UK’s recent decision and cited Gabbard’s response to Wyden’s and Biggs’ letter.
Biggs and Wyden — along with Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Reps. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. — also sent a letter in March to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal that called for the judicial body to “remove the cloak of secrecy related to notices given to American technology companies by the United Kingdom.”
Wyden similarly released draft legislation in February to modify the CLOUD Act’s requirements so that U.S. providers do not have to weaken their security standards to meet requests from foreign governments.
“I sounded the alarm that the UK's outrageous demands that Apple weaken encryption would put the security and privacy of all Americans at risk,” Wyden said in a statement to Nextgov/FCW. “If it's true the UK has folded, that's a win for everyone who values secure communications. However, the details of any agreement are extremely important, especially when it comes to other legal avenues the UK could use to obtain Americans' data, such as by delivering spyware or requiring US user data to be stored in the UK.”
Apple did not respond to a request for comment, although the tech giant moved earlier this year to remove its high-level Advanced Data Protection tool from the UK market. The company was also in the midst of legal action to overturn the order when the UK dropped its backdoor encryption push.
The UK Home Office told media outlets that it “does not comment on operational matters.”
Some organizations, like the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, welcomed the news but also called for further changes when it comes to data-sharing agreements.
“The Administration should be more transparent about any deal it cut with the UK, and Congress should amend the CLOUD Act to prevent other countries from issuing similar orders to U.S. service providers,” Greg Nojeim, senior counsel and director of CDT’s security and surveillance project, said in a statement.
Nextgov/FCW Cybersecurity Reporter David DiMolfetta contributed to this report.
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