Daily Intel Brief
US commandos kill 2 ISIS leaders in Syrian helicopter raid, China bans AI-generated media without watermarks, and American student reported missing in France while studying-abroad...
Counterterrorism
American forces killed two ISIS commanders in a helicopter raid in eastern Syria on Sunday, US Central Command confirmed. One of the two killed was identified only as Anas, an “ISIS Syria Province official” who helped plot and facilitate the terrorist group’s deadly attacks in…
Israeli forces have killed a 16-year-old Palestinian youth during a military raid on the city of Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank. The Palestinian health ministry identified her as Jana Majdi Zakarneh and announced her killing shortly after midnight on Monday…
Military & Defense
Ukraine has called for the west to supply Patriot missiles batteries and other modern air defence systems. The country’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, appealed to western allies amid growing concern that attacks by Russia on its electricity grid could prompt a new wave…
China's Cyberspace Administration recently issued regulations prohibiting the creation of AI-generated media without clear labels, such as watermarks—among other policies—reports The Register. The new rules come as part of China's evolving response to the generative AI trend that has swept the tech world in 2022, and they will take effect on January 10, 2023…
Cybersecurity
Enterprise security teams can add three more ransomware variants to the constantly growing list of ransomware threats for which they need to monitor. The three variants — Vohuk, ScareCrow, and AESRT — like most ransomware tools, target Windows systems and appear to be proliferating relatively rapidly on systems belonging to users in multiple countries…
Customers affected by a ransomware attack on Rackspace's Hosted Exchange Email have experienced service outages and a forced transition to Microsoft 365 — and have widely expressed outrage about an overall lack of transparency from the company about the breach…
Counterintelligence & Espionage
What happened? Your files are encrypted?”, “What is the price to repair? The price depends on how fast you can pay to us” — this is the message received from the alleged hackers, who crippled the servers of the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) in Delhi last month…
Incorporating drones into an organization’s security operations can be a huge benefit, but it’s essential to understand available technology, regulatory requirements and continued costs. With more sophisticated enemies and threat vectors in today’s security landscape comes the…
Transnational Organized Crime
An American college student has been reported missing by his family while studying abroad in France. The parents of 22-year-old Ken DeLand Jr. have set up a website in an effort to share information about their son, who they say has been missing since last month. They say they…
Residents of Soyapango, a densely populated municipality on the outskirts of San Salvador, woke up on December 3 surrounded by 10,000 police and military forces. The spectacle, staged by the Salvadoran government in an attempt to smoke out gang members in the city’s…