In today’s cybersecurity news…
Law enforcement cracks down on illegal streamers
Bulgaria, in coordination with Europol and private security vendors, led a seven-month effort dubbed Operation KRATOS 2 to disrupt illegal streaming services that distribute copyrighted sports, TV, and movie content. This led to the takedown of 27,000 URLs and over 4,300 domains, and the identification of 86 suspects, with 59 cases sent to authorities for prosecution. Europol stated that investigators targeted a broader criminal network that supports these services and warned that users of illegal streaming platforms face significantly increased cybersecurity risks.
The European Commission releases digital sovereignty plan
This plan looks to boost Europe’s existing tech sector to eventually challenge U.S. rivals and reduce dependency. The plan includes the EU’s Cloud and AI Development Act, which empowers the Commission to review vendors from countries outside the bloc to determine if they are trustworthy enough to serve the public sector. The plan will also direct more public money toward tech products that contribute to Europe’s economy, reduce administrative overhead for opening new data centers, and require member countries to create national strategies to boost adoption of new tech. A European Commission study found that member countries spent €264 billion annually on tech from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
(Politico)
The startup costs for US cyber force
According to a new report from the Commission on U.S. Cyber Force Generation as part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the cost of starting up a US Cyberforce is estimated to be around $11 billion. The report estimates that starting up the force would take 12 to 18 months and require at least 5,000 National Guard members and up to 6,000 civilian staff. The Government Accountability Office reported last year that roughly 61,000 people are currently involved in cyberspace operations across the Department of Defense, and the Trump administration’s 2027 budget allocates $ 7.7 billion for cyberspace operations within the Pentagon.
Microsoft BUILD featured quantum and AI updates
Microsoft announced a new quantum computing chip called Majorana 2 at its BUILD conference. This chip uses lead-based materials for superconducting wires rather than aluminum, and claims to offer a 1,000-fold increase in certain performance metrics, compared to Majorana 1. Notably, Microsoft now estimates that production-capable quantum computers will be available sometime in 2029.
Microsoft also announced the Adaptive Spec Driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing, or ASSERT framework. This open-source framework is designed to make evaluating AI behavior easier, letting researchers use plain-language descriptions of expected behavior and policy, which are then turned into structured sets of behaviors, problem scenarios, and test cases, and then run against AI systems that produces a final score.
And finally, Microsoft also released the Agent Control Specification (ACS), which lets developers define policies for agents to follow in a single file. The idea is to create a common governance layer for agents, where admins can state what they can and cannot do, as well as when to bring a human into the loop.
(TechCrunch [1], [2], Reuters)
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Trump signs EO on AI model reviews
The order directs federal agencies to create a process in which makers of frontier AI models could grant the government early access to models for evaluation, 30 days prior to releasing them to other trusted partners. To be clear, the order does not require AI companies to submit their models for evaluation. It merely establishes a process and an invitation for them to participate. The order also includes other cybersecurity provisions, such as requiring agencies to harden national security systems using defensive AI-enabled tools within 30 days and establishing an “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse” within the Treasury Department to enhance coordination of vulnerability scanning, validation, and patching.
HTTP/2 Bomb shows the wild world of AI vulnerability scanning
Security researchers at Calif discovered a denial-of-service technique dubbed “HTTP/2 Bomb” using OpenAI’s Codex. This attack impacts over 880,000 sites that use HTTP/2 and exploits a chain of three old 2016 vulnerabilities to launch compression-layer attacks and amplify rates. Unlike other classic “bomb” attacks, this attack floods a server with near-empty headers, exhausting the machine’s memory due to the per-entry bookkeeping it allocates. NGINX, Apache HTTPD, Microsoft IIS, Envoy, and Cloudflare Pingora are vulnerable to this attack, although at the time of this recording, NGINX, and Apache rolled out patches.
OAuth tokens vulnerable on GitHub Dev
Security researcher Ammar Askar released details on a vulnerability that allows threat actors to install malicious VS Code Extensions that can steal GitHub OAuth tokens when using the GitHub.dev web-based source code editor. This is possible because the web editor does not scope tokens to a particular repository you’re interacting with. Threat actors can exploit a message-passing mechanism between VS Code windows and webviews using malicious JavaScript to extract the OAuth token. Microsoft was notified of the vulnerability on June 2nd, an hour before Askar released a proof of concept. He cited previous bad experiences with the Microsoft Security Response Center for the comically short notice.
Acer working to patch critical router bugs
In a security advisory released over the weekend, Acer detailed two security flaws impacting its Wave 7 mesh routers. One is a broken access-control vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely access plaintext credentials in log archives. The other vulnerability stems from hard-coded cryptographic keys, which can allow an attacker without admin credentials to gain a persistent backdoor into the router and decrypt, modify, and re-encrypt system backups. Acer expects to release patches for both issues in its next firmware update, expected by the end of June 2026.