SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — As the 2024 Summer Olympics get under way, so does an unprecedented effort to keep the games safe.   Access all [...] More The post At Paris Olympics, Americans and Israelis Top List of Security Worries appeared first on The Cipher Brief ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — While the public focus of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington this week has been on his speech to Congress and his newly fraught relationship with many American politicians, one issue sure to come up when Netanyahu meets with President Joe Biden is Washington’s reluctance to supply Israel with certain heavy weapons.  In May the White House said it was implementing a “pause” on the shipment of 1,800 2,000-lb bombs and 1,700 500-lb bombs over concerns about Israel’s impending incursion into Rafah, in southern Gaza, and “the impa ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — On July 28, Venezuela’s authoritarian President, Nicolás Maduro, will face his most formidable electoral challenge since assuming office following the death of his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, in 2013. Polls show his primary opponent, formerly little-known diplomat Edmundo González, leading by a wide margin.  One survey from Meganalisis has González at 32.4% of the vote, compared to only 11.2% for Maduro​. Another report put González’s support at around 50%, and Maduro’s between 22% and 25%​. Either way, it’s a substantial lead that reflects widespread ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — With the 2024 U.S. election season already the most volatile in recent history, election officials across the country are scrambling to prepare for a new threat that has quickly become a top concern: a potential tidal wave of artificial intelligence–fueled lies designed to confuse and agitate angry, scared and paranoid American voters. AI has advanced rapidly in recent years, as ChatGPT and services that generate fake images, audio, and video constantly improve their capabilities. These advances have jolted the election community, which was already reeling fr ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE ANALYSIS – As the world gets back online after a global outage that impacted some 8.5 million individual devices around the world, national security and cybersecurity experts are assessing lessons learned from a still fragile global tech ecosystem and how that fragility could impact future national security. BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member. Sign Up Log In The post National Security Lessons from Crowdstrike’s Global Disaster appeared first on The Cipher Brief ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — While the world has gotten used to warnings about cyberattacks and the vulnerability of technology, Friday brought a different wake-up call – a reminder that it doesn’t take an attacker to bring about a global meltdown. A huge and widespread technology outage disrupted operations across multiple industries in several parts of the world Friday, grounding flights and impacting health care, banking, media, and government services, in what some called a “historic” breakdown, and the “largest IT outage in history.”  Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national ..read more

EXPERT Q&A — Christine “Christy” Abizaid was sworn in as director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) in June of 2021, as the threat of terrorism was already on the rise. Domestic terrorism investigations had grown by 357% over the decade prior to her swearing in as the new head of the organization tasked with collecting and sharing information on those threats with federal, state and local government partners. Just months after Abizaid was sworn in to the role, The Cipher Brief sat down with her at The Cipher Brief Threat Conference in her first public interview as director, t ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING – Whoever wins the November 5 U.S. presidential election will face an almost unprecedented set of global security challenges: Wars in Europe and the Middle East (unless they end before then); a tense relationship with China and the possibility of conflict over Taiwan, and an increasingly potent and coordinated group of adversaries – what some have called an “axis of authoritarians” – set against the U.S. and the West. Along with that, a threat of terrorism which has risen to “a whole other level,” as FBI Director Christopher Wray put it, driven largely by Israe ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — On a Russian TV program recently, Dmitry Novikov, a Russian lawmaker, said that political chaos and divisions in the U.S. were “good for us,” meaning his country and its people. “Destabilization inside an adversary is always a good thing.” That was before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Kremlin propagandists have seized on Saturday’s shooting in Pennsylvania as the latest example of political dysfunction in the U.S. – themes that Russian media influencers have hammered for years, especially since the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A ..read more

SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — Almost from the moment the shots were fired in Butler, Pennsylvania Saturday, terrorism experts and ordinary Americans shared a common fear: that extremists on the fringes of the country’s deep political and cultural divides were now only more likely to turn to violence.  “The lethality of the anti-government, anti-authority movement has really increased on both sides,” former FBI Executive Assistant Director Jill Sanborn told The Cipher Brief, “and I think that is showing in this attack.” “The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for fo ..read more