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8 hours agoAI capabilities are needed to counter drone threats, senator says
The U.S. must adopt new AI capabilities to counter the growing threat of unmanned drones used by foreign adversaries.
The outage left millions of Starlink customers in the dark back in August of 2025, dealing a blow to the company's image as an always-on satellite internet provider.
Much like the war in Ukraine, future battlefields could be drowning in electronic interference, so the US Army stress-tested new command-and-control tech against that threat. The need to maintain connections between command and deployed weapons and crews, or reestablish those links when they're lost, is shaping how soldiers train on the service's Next Generation Command and Control, a new software-driven system that's being developed for the Army.
Step one, effective immediately, is to make roughly 400 carefully picked patents available online for a free two-year trial period. Specifically, any company that wants to try out one of the 400 technologies in its own research, development, and products can get what's called a Commercial Evaluation License (CEL) without the usual fee. Those 400 technologies- everything from a Navy-developed drone tracking system to novel Army mortar fuses - were chosen out of the thousands of possibilities by Michael's staff.
I've always had what I would consider a hacker mindset, a curiosity to take things apart, understand them, and use that knowledge to solve problems. That mindset took me on a circuitous route into the cybersecurity industry; after being kicked out of high school for hacking computer systems, I worked a range of jobs, managing office supply companies by day and cracking Wi-Fi networks by night until I started a Digital Forensics degree which led me to the world of security research.
In a notice sent to customers on Monday and seen by The Register, the EV charging outfit said that it detected "unusual activity" on its AWS cloud platform on March 7 and quickly discovered that attackers had launched a ransomware attack against parts of its infrastructure. According to the message, some databases were both encrypted and copied during the intrusion, meaning that the crooks likely walked off with user information before the company pulled the plug.
Entering the cyber world is stepping into a warzone. Cyber is considered a war zone, and what happens there is described as cyberwar. But it's not that simple. War is conducted by nations (political), not undertaken by criminals (financial). Both are increasing in this war zone we call cyber, but the political threat is growing fast. Cyberwar is a complex subject, and a formal definition is difficult.
The findings are based on several years of deploying OMICRON's intrusion detection system (IDS) StationGuard in protection, automation, and control (PAC) systems. The technology, which monitors network traffic passively, has provided deep visibility into real-world OT environments. The results underscore the growing attack surface in energy systems and the challenges operators face in securing aging infrastructure and complex network architectures.
If platforms and solutions are not developed and put in place, according to "Quantum Threat: The Trillion-Dollar Security Race is On," there will be no protection against the breaking of public-key encryption in use today. This is ominously referred to as "Q-day." Q-day is coming. The report maintains quantum computers will be able to "perform certain calculations, particularly those required to break today's complex encryption standards, at speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than any supercomputer imaginable."
In its yearly cybersecurity report, Dragos said state-sponsored crews haven't let up on their attempts to compromise America's critical infrastructure, with three new OT-focused threat groups joining the fray. This brings the total number worldwide to 26, and of these, 11 were active in 2025. Additionally, an existing group that Dragos tracks as Voltzite and is "highly correlated" with Volt Typhoon, according to Dragos CEO Robert M. Lee, kept up its intrusion activities last year.
The report catalogues a relentless barrage of cyber operations, most by state-sponsored groups, against EU and US industrial supply chains. It suggests the range of targets for these hackers has grown to encompass the broader industrial base of the US and Europe from German aerospace firms to UK carmakers. State-linked hackers have long targeted the global defence industry, but Luke McNamara, an analyst for Google's threat intelligence group, said they had seen more personalised and direct to individual targeting of employees.