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A new report has taken a look at how the relationships between Russian cyber security firms and their government have changed since the country's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

The analysis by the CNA think tank shows that when it comes to cyber security and great power competition, it pays in record-making margins for companies to choose sides.

The report thoroughly explores three Russian firms that offer different cyber security services: Kaspersky, Security Code and Positive Technologies. All three had ties to the Russian state predating the war. Unsurprisingly, these ties have strengthened. 

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology released guidance this week to help companies detect face morphing incidents.

The technique involves blending photos of two or more real people to generate a new face that can be used to bypass facial recognition scans.

The new photo can be used to trick face recognition systems into identifying the morphed, combined face as both original individuals at the same time.

A team of academics has developed a novel attack that can downgrade 5G traffic to weaker states without using a rogue base station.

The attack uses a new software toolkit named Sni5Gect to intercept, sniff, and alter 5G data packets before the 5G authentication steps.

Once a 5G connection is altered, the attacker can crash the user's equipment (phone, tablet, or other device), harvest user equipment details, and finally downgrade it to a lower-generation connection where other attacks can be carried out with a higher success rate.

A new vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol can allow threat actors to launch nearly unlimited DDoS attacks to exhaust memory and crash servers.

The new attack is named MadeYouReset, was discovered by researchers at Deepness Lab, and is a variation of a previous attack known as HTTP/2 Rapid Reset.

The Rapid Reset attack was discovered in October 2023 after it was used to launch some of the largest DDoS attacks seen that year (Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare).

One by one, US federal government agencies are learning that the sensitive but unclassified information they hold is susceptible to theft by hackers. Unfortunately, education-by-breach is very costly.

Last week, Politico reported the electronic case filing system used by the federal judiciary had been breached in a "sweeping cyber intrusion". Hackers breached the Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system that legal professionals use to upload and manage case documents. They also breached PACER, the system that gives the public limited access to some of the same data. 

The hack sounds just about as bad as can be, with officials concerned that Latin American drug cartels have obtained sensitive court data. Per Politico's follow-up reporting:

Crypto-thieves have found a new package repository to terrorize, and it's Open VSX, an independent database of Visual Studio Code extensions managed by the Eclipse Foundation.

While the VS Code editor has its official marketplace, Microsoft changed its licensing terms this year to block third-party code editors based on the original VS Code from using its marketplace to pull their extensions.

The change in policy, understandably, came after several AI-powered IDEs started cutting into VS Code's market share, all while Microsoft was paying to run and keep the VS Code marketplace online.

Google has awarded a massive $250,000 reward to a bug bounty hunter for discovering a novel sandbox escape in the company's Chrome web browser.

The bug was reported in April and patched a month later, in May, with fixes also going out to the other Chromium browsers, such as Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and others.

Tracked as CVE-2025-4609, the vulnerability resides in the ipcz library of Mojo, a Chrome component for managing how the browser's internal processes talk to each other.

CISA has released a rare emergency directive ordering federal agencies to patch a new attack vector in Microsoft Exchange email servers.

Federal agencies have four days, until August 11, to address the issue and apply mitigations shared by Microsoft on Wednesday.

The guidance addresses a vulnerability (actually more of a design flaw) in hybrid environments, where Exchange on-premise servers sync data to an Exchange Online instance.

The Russian government is planning to designate enterprise resource planning (ERP) software as "critical information infrastructure" and require all Russian businesses to migrate to a domestic solution.

The move comes after Russia updated its critical infrastructure law in April this year. The government ordered the operators of all critical infrastructure to migrate to Russian software by September this year.

The government also gave itself the power to designate new items as "critical information infrastructure." This is software large enough to cause nationwide disruptions in the case of a cyberattack, and ERP systems appear to be the first item classified in this new category.

The Chinese government accused the US last week of trying to sneak backdoors into NVIDIA chips and of using Microsoft zero-days to hack and steal its military secrets.

Both accusations came via the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country's cybersecurity agency and internet regulator.

On Thursday, the CAC summoned American chipmaker NVIDIA to provide details of an alleged backdoor mechanism that could be embedded on chips sold in China.