Daily Intel Brief
Greece slams Turkey for 'repeated threats of war', Belgium is found to be a hub for Vietnamese human trafficking, and a suicide bomber attacked an Indonesian police station...
Counterterrorism
A suspected suicide bomber who was also armed with a knife has detonated a device shortly after entering a police station in West Java, killing one police officer and wounding several, Indonesian authorities have said. The attack took place at about 8:20am local…
Government forces and allied militias in Somalia have recaptured a strategic town that the al-Shabab armed group had controlled for six years. Pro-government forces entered the town of Adan Yabal in Hirshabelle, about 220km (140 miles) northeast of the capital Mogadishu…
Military & Defense
A mysterious aircraft has appeared near a massive hangar at the North Korea Air Force Base. New satellite imagery shows an unmanned aerial vehicle at the Panghyon Air Force Base in Kusong, Pyongan-bukto, North Korea. Aviation experts have identified aircraft as a…
Greece’s foreign ministry has slammed what it called Turkish threats of war, after the Turkish foreign minister threatened to “take action” against Greece in the wake of a military exercise in the Aegean Sea. In a statement issued Wednesday, the foreign ministry said that Turkey’s…
Cybersecurity
Hackers allegedly connected to the Iranian government have been accused of targeting diamond companies in South Africa, Israel and Hong Kong with a wiper malware built to destroy data. Researchers from ESET attributed the wiper tool – named Fantasy – to the…
The New Zealand government this week confirmed being impacted by a ransomware attack on managed service provider (MSP) Mercury IT, which has disrupted businesses and public authorities in the country. A small business with only 25 employees, Mercury IT provides…
Counterintelligence & Espionage
A human rights group in Spain says Chinese authorities have set up more than 100 police stations overseas to monitor, harass and in some cases force its nationals abroad, especially dissidents, to return home. A report on CNN, however, says that China insists the facilities…
Several members of a Bangladesh anti-crime unit accused of human rights abuses travelled to the United Kingdom in 2022 to receive security training, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit) reports. Members of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a law enforcement unit dubbed…
Transnational Organized Crime
Human smuggling and trafficking of Vietnamese people to Europe has increased over the last decade, with smugglers increasingly active in Belgium, a report by the Belgium Federal Migration Centre Myria published Wednesday found. From May 2018 to May 2020…
The Russian paramilitary group Wagner supplies international markets with diamonds sourced from the Central African Republic’s conflict areas, said a new report by the French initiative All Eyes on Wagner in collaboration with Dossier Center, a Kremlin-focused…