Daily Intel Brief
Turkish airstrikes have slowed the fight against ISIS, torture allegations against Russia mount in Kherson, top CCP security body calls for protest crackdown, and China increases space capabilities...
Counterterrorism
Turkish airstrikes and the threat of another incursion are distracting Kurdish forces from fighting ISIS, the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces said Tuesday. “Our joint work alongside international coalition forces here have been…temporarily paused against ISIS…
Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s minister of state for foreign affairs, has met Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in the capital Kabul amid tension over cross-border violence. Tuesday’s visit comes a day after Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) armed…
Military & Defense
When a dozen Russian soldiers stormed into Dmytro Bilyi's home in August, the 24-year-old police officer said they gave him a chilling choice: Hand in his pistol or his mother and brother would disappear. Bilyi turned his gun over to the soldiers, who carried machine guns and had…
China has launched its Shenzhou-15 spacecraft from the Gobi Desert, carrying astronauts to its newly-built Tiangong space station. It will be the country's first-ever crew handover in orbit. Three astronauts will live on the station for six months, before being replaced by…
Cybersecurity
Killnet and its band of hacker collaborators are claiming they were able to pull off a trio of symbolic distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at punishing some of the most critical supporters of Ukraine against the Russian invasion — Elon Musk's Starlink…
Fortinet customers that have not yet patched a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that the vendor disclosed in October in multiple versions of its FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitch Manager technologies now have an additional reason to do so quickly…
Counterintelligence & Espionage
The Communist Party’s top security body has called for a “crackdown” on “hostile forces” after China saw protests in major cities against COVID-19 lockdowns and in support of greater political freedoms. The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which…
Democracy in Hungary and Poland continues to backslide but Moldova is a “bright spot” in Europe, according to a new report published Wednesday morning. Moldova, which neighbors Ukraine, faces the prospect of a serious economic and political crisis as Russia drastically…
Transnational Organized Crime
Three stowaways have been found sitting on the rudder of a ship after it completed an 11-day voyage from Nigeria, Spanish authorities say. A photo shared by the coastguard shows the men sitting on the rudder at the oil tanker's stern, their feet less than a metre away from the…
A new report by the UN Secretary General says that may be due to a shift in tactics by criminal networks to the theft of oil, known as “bunkering”. The Gulf of Guinea lies off the West African coast from Senegal to Angola and is a major shipping route for oil and gas…