A group of human rights lawyers and investigators has asked the Hague to pursue the first-ever “cyber war crimes” accusations. The group is seeking the International Criminal Court to file charges against Sandworm, a dangerous and destructive Russian hacking outfit managed by Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU. Meanwhile, activists are attempting to prevent Russia from broadcasting state-run propaganda via satellites controlled by the French business Eutelsat.
Researchers discovered this week that thousands of major websites retain data that users enter into forms before clicking the Submit button—even if the user quits the page without submitting anything. Google published a study on an in-depth security research it did with chipmaker AMD to identify and correct weaknesses in specialised security processors used in Google Cloud infrastructure. In addition, the company introduced a plethora of privacy and security improvements for its new Android 13 mobile operating system, as well as a vision for making them easier to comprehend and use.
The European Union is exploring child protection laws that would require private talks to be scanned, potentially compromising end-to-end encryption on a vast scale. Furthermore, defenders from the cybersecurity nonprofit BIO-ISAC are racing to secure the bioeconomy from digital dangers, announcing this week a collaboration with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab that will assist fund pay-what-you-can incident response services.
But hold on, there’s more. Every week, we compile the news that we did not break or cover in full. To read the entire stories, click on the headlines. And remember to stay safe out there.
The NSA promises that it did not backdoor new encryption.
The United States is nearing completion of the development of a new generation of high-security encryption standards that will be robust in today’s technological environment and resistant to circumvention in the age of quantum computing. While the National Security Agency helped develop the new standards, the agency claims it has no specific ways of compromising the safeguards. “There are no backdoors,” said Rob Joyce, the NSA’s director of cybersecurity, to Bloomberg this week. The NSA has previously been involved in backdoor encryption techniques, including a case in the early 2010s in which the US revoked an NSA-developed algorithm as a federal standard due to backdoor concerns.
