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US government rescinds West Point role for former cyber director
In this Quick Take, Ian Bremmer reacts to the US government's decision to rescind former CISA Director Jen Easterly’s appointment to West Point, raising serious concerns about the state of American democracy and national values.
Ian argues that the United States is falling short of the ideals it claims to uphold. “I believe that it is still patriotic to criticize your country when it makes a mistake,” he says. “What we now see are increasingly values that the US has said historically that it stands for not living up to that.”
Ian also points to the role of far-right political activist Laura Loomer in influencing the decision, calling it a troubling sign of democratic backsliding. “Those cadets will no longer have that opportunity,” he states, “because it has been taken away by someone who has no idea what Jen stands for.”
Members of the Bangladesh Army and the fire service start rescue operations after a Bangladesh Air Force F7 aircraft crashed into a building of Milestone College in Dhaka's Uttara around 1:30 pm on July 21, 2025 in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Hard Numbers: Bangladesh military jet crashes into school, Argentina’s economy contracts again, Texas Republicans get to gerrymandering, & More
31: A Bangladesh Air Force plane crashed onto a school campus in the country’s capital Dhaka on Monday, following a reported mechanical failure, killing at least 31 people. Most of the victims were children. The plane was a Chinese-made fighter jet called the F-7 BGI that aimed to replicate the design of the Russian MiG.
100: Around 100 mostly US and European organizations were compromised in a far-reaching cyber attack campaign targeting Microsoft SharePoint servers over the past few days, including federal and state agencies, universities, and energy companies. While the attacker has yet to be identified, Google has said Chinese-backed hackers were behind at least one of the attacks.
-0.1: Argentina’s economy contracted 0.1% in May, marking the third time this year that it has shrunk. Falling wages and rising unemployment depressed demand, leading to the drop. Although President Javier Milei has won plaudits for bringing down inflation with his “chainsaw” approach to spending, the sputtering economy could hurt him ahead of midterm legislative elections in October.
38: Texas Republicans are moving forward with a plan to redraw the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts in a bid to win more US House seats. This kind of gerrymandering is usually done only in the wake of the decennial Census. The move, pushed by president Trump, comes with both legal and political risks, which may explain why Texas Gov. Greg Abbot (R) was initially reluctant to greenlight the plan.
30%: Nigeria’s GDP in 2024 jumped by 30% after Africa’s most populous nation recalibrated its statistical models Previous GDP calculations omitted the country's digital services industry, pension funds, and the informal labour market, which employs most citizens.
1: School’s out for summer, and the US House is following suit tomorrow night, after Speaker Mike Johnson announced he will shut down the lower chamber one day early. The reason: he didn’t want to put up a vote on whether to release all the files related to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s case.
Is the Europe-US rift leaving us all vulnerable?
As the tense and politically charged 2025 Munich Security Conference draws to a close, GZERO’s Global Stage series presents a conversation about strained relationships between the US and Europe, Ukraine's path ahead, and rising threats in cyberspace.
This provocative panel discussion was moderated by David Sanger, a White House and National Security Correspondent for The New York Times. It features GZERO and Eurasia Group Founder and President Ian Bremmer, Microsoft’s Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, and former US Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger.
The group gathered atop the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, home to the Munich Security Conference for six decades, at a critical time for Europe and the world. Following a stunning and controversial speech from US Vice President J.D. Vance and concern about the next steps on the road to a potential ceasefire in Ukraine, our Global Stage program broke down key takeaways from the 61st MSC. It illuminated the threat landscape online as cyber-attacks escalate globally.
This livestream discussion is part of the Global Stage series at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft.
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A man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration of a hacker.
Hard Numbers: Hacks galore, Hollywood dreams, US on top, Pokémon Go scan the world
3 million: Evidently, there’s hot demand for AI-related scripts in Hollywood. A thriller about artificial intelligence from a relatively unknown screenwriter named Natan Dotan just sold for $1.25 million, a number that will rise to $3 million if it’s turned into a film. Despite Hollywood’s perennial discomfort with AI infiltrating the film industry, maybe all of the hubbub has got them thinking that audiences will turn out for a good old-fashioned AI thriller.
36: Stanford researchers analyzed the AI capabilities of 36 countries and determined that the US significantly leads in most of the 42 areas studied — including research, private investment, and notable machine learning models. China, which leads in patents and journal citations, came in second, followed by the UK, India, and the UAE.
10 million: Niantic, the developer of the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, announced that it’s building an AI model to make a 3D world map using location data submitted by the game’s users. The company said it already has 10 million scanned locations.AI-generated cyber threats have C-suite leaders on edge.
Biden will support a UN cybercrime treaty
The Biden administration is planning to support a controversial United Nations treaty on cybercrime, which will be the first legally binding agreement on cybersecurity.
The treaty would be an international agreement to crack down on child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, and so-called revenge porn. It would also increase information-sharing between parties of the treaty, increasing the flow of evidence the United States, for one, has on cross-border cybercrime. This will also make it easier to extradite criminals.
But the treaty has faced severe pushback from advocacy groups and even Democratic lawmakers. On Oct. 29, six Democratic US senators, including Tim Kaine and Ed Markey, wrote a letter to the Biden administration saying they fear the treaty, called the UN Convention Against Cybercrime, could “legitimize efforts by authoritarian countries like Russia and China to censor and surveil internet users, furthering repression and human rights abuses around the world.” They said the treaty is a threat to “privacy, security, freedom of expression, and artificial intelligence safety.”
The senators wrote that the Convention doesn’t include a needed “good-faith exception for security research” or a “requirement for malicious or fraudulent intent for unauthorized access crimes.” This runs afoul of the Biden administration’s executive order on AI, which requires “red-teaming” efforts that could involve hacking or simulating attacks to troubleshoot problems with AI systems. The UN will vote on the Convention later this week, but even if the United States supports it, it would need a two-thirds majority in the US Senate — a difficult mark to achieve — to ratify it.People are passing by an AT&T Inc store in Manhattan, New York City in the US with the company's logo and inscription visible. AT&T Inc. the American Telephone and Telegraph Company is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, USA. As of March 2024 there was a data breach with leaks of personal data of 73 million customers in the dark web according to the media. NYC, United States of America on May 2023
Chinese telecom hack sparks national security fears
A group of hackers with backing from the Chinese government broke past the security of multiple US telecom firms, including AT&T and Verizon, and potentially accessed data used by law enforcement officials. Specifically, the hackers appear to have targeted information about court-authorized wiretaps, which could be related to multiple ongoing cases in the US concerning Chinese government agents intimidating and harassing people in the US.
The hack was carried out by a group known as Salt Typhoon, one of many such units used by the Chinese government to infiltrate overseas networks. Investigators from Microsoft and a Google subsidiary have been helping investigate the breach alongside the FBI, whose cybersecurity agents are reportedly outnumbered by their Chinese opponents 50:1.
Will the hack undermine US-China relations? Both sides have been trying to keep tensions under control — largely successfully — all year, but this incident may be too awkward to smooth over. China’s Embassy in Washington, DC, denied the hack and accused the US of “politicizing cybersecurity issues to smear China,” and the FBI and DOJ have not commented. We’re watching how the fallout might affect a notional Biden-Xi phone call the White House has reportedly been attempting to arrange.
Are US elections Safe? Chris Krebs is optimistic
The debate around the US banning TikTok is a proxy for a larger question: How safe are democracies from high-tech threats, especially from places like China and Russia?
There are genuine concerns about the integrity of elections. What are the threats out there and what can be done about it? No one understands this issue better than Chris Krebs. Krebs is best known as the former director of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
In a high-profile showdown, Donald Trump fired Krebs in November 2020, after CISA publicly affirmed that the election was among the “most secure in history” and that the allegations of election corruption were flat-out wrong. Since then, Krebs has become the chief public policy officer at SentinelOne and cochairs the Aspen Institute’s U.S. Cybersecurity Working Group, and he remains at the forefront of the cyber threat world.
GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon spoke to him this week about what we should expect in this volatile election year.
Solomon: How would you compare the cyber threat landscape now to the election four years ago? Have the rapid advances in AI made a material difference?
Chris Krebs: The general threat environment related to elections tracks against the broader cyber threat environment. The difference here is that beyond just pure technical attacks on election systems, election infrastructure, and on campaigns themselves, we have a parallel threat of information operations, and influence operations —what we more broadly call disinformation.
This has picked up almost exponentially since 2016, when the Russians, as detailed in the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017, showed that you can get into the middle of domestic elections and pour kerosene on that conversation. That means it jumps into the real world, potentially even culminating in political violence like we saw on Jan. 6.
We saw the Iranians follow the lead in 2020. The intelligence community released another report in December that talked about how the Chinese attempted to influence the 2022 elections. We've seen the Russians are active too through a group we track called Doppelganger, specifically targeting the debate around the border and immigration in the US.
Solomon: When you say Doppelganger is “active,” what exactly does that mean in real terms?
Krebs: They use synthetic personas or take over existing personas that have some element of credibility and jump into the online discourse. They also use Pink Slime websites, which is basically fake media, and then get picked up through social media and move over to traditional media. They are taking existing divides and amplifying the discontent.
Solomon: Does it have a material impact on, say, election results?
Krebs: I was at an event back in 2019, and a former governor came up to me as we were talking about prepping for the 2020 election and said: “Hey, everything you just talked about sounds like opposition research, typical electioneering, and hijinks.”
And you know what? That's not totally wrong. But there is a difference.
Rather than just being normal domestic politics, now we have a foreign security service that's inserting itself in driving discourse domestically. And that's where there are tools that the intelligence services here in the US as well as our allies in the West have the ability to go in and disrupt.
They can get onto foreign networks and say, “Hey, I know that account right there. I am able to determine that the account which is pushing this narrative is controlled by the Russian security services, and we can do something with that.”
But here is the key: Once you have a social media influencer here in the US that picks up that narrative and runs with it, well, now, it's effectively fair game. It's part of the conversation, First Amendment protected.
Solomon: Let's move to the other side. What do you do about it without violating the privacy and free speech civil liberties of citizens?
Krebs: This is really the political question of the day. In fact, just last week there was a Supreme Court hearing on Murthy v. Missouri that gets to this question of government and platforms working together. (Editor’s note: The case hinges on whether the government’s efforts to combat misinformation online around elections and COVID constitute a form of censorship). Based on my read, the Supreme Court was largely being dismissive of Missouri and Louisiana's arguments in that case. But we'll see what happens.
I think the bigger issue is that there is this broader conflict, particularly with China, and it is a hot cyber war. Cyber war from their military doctrine has a technical leg and there's a psychological leg. And as we see it, there are a number of different approaches.
For example, India has outlawed and banned hundreds of Chinese origin apps, including WeChat and TikTok and a few others. The US has been much more discreet in combating Chinese technology. The recent actions by the US Congress and the House of Representatives are much more focused on getting the foreign control piece out of the conversation and requiring divestitures.
Solomon: Chris, what’s the biggest cyber threat to the elections?
Krebs: Based on my conversations with law enforcement and the national security community, the number one request that they're getting from election officials isn't on the cyber side. It isn't on the disinformation side. It's on physical threats to election workers. We're talking about doxing, we're talking about swatting, we're talking about people physically intimidating at the polls and at offices. And this is resulting in election officials resigning and quitting and not showing up.
How do we protect those real American heroes who are making sure that we get to follow through on our civic duty of voting and elections? If those election workers aren't there, it's going to be a lot harder for you and me to get out there and vote.
Solomon: What is your biggest concern about AI technology galloping ahead of regulations?
Krebs: Here in the United States, I'm not too worried about regulation getting in front of AI. When you look at the recent AI executive order out of the Biden administration, it's about transparency and even the threshold they set for compute power and operations is about four times higher than the most advanced publicly available generative AI. And even if you cross that threshold, the most you have to do is tell the government that you're building or training that model and show safety and red teaming results, which hardly seems onerous to me.
The Europeans are taking a different approach, more of a regulate first, ask questions later, which I think is going to limit some of their ability to truly be at the bleeding edge of AI.
But I'll tell you this: We are using AI and cybersecurity to a much greater effect and impact than the bad guys right now. The best they can do right now is use it for social engineering, for writing better phishing emails, for some research, and for functionality. We are not seeing credible reports of AI being used to write new innovative malware. But in the meantime, we are giving tools that are AI powered to the threat hunters that have really advanced capabilities to go find bad stuff, to improve configurations, and ultimately take the security operations piece and supercharge it.
Smartphone with a displayed Russian flag with the word "Cyberattack" and binary codes over it is placed on a computer motherboard in this illustration.
NATO’s virtual battlefield misses AI
The world’s most powerful military bloc held cyber defense exercises last week, simulating cyberattacks against power grids and critical infrastructure. NATO rightly insists these exercises are crucial because cyberattacks are standard tools of modern warfare. Russia regularly engages in such attacks, for example, to threaten Ukraine’s power supply, and the US and Israel recently issued a joint warning of Iranian-linked cyberattacks on US-based water systems.
A whopping 120 countries have been hit by cyberattacks in the past year alone — and nearly half of those involved NATO members. Looking forward, the advent of generative AI could make even the simplest cyberattacks more potent. “Cybercriminals and nation states are using AI to refine the language they use in phishing attacks or the imagery in influence operations,” says Microsoft security chief Tom Burt.
Yet, in its latest wargames, NATO's preparations for cyberattacks involving AI were nowhere to be found. The alliance says AI will be added to the training next year.
“The most acute change we will see in the cyber domain will be the use of AI both in attacking but also in defending our networks,” said David van Weel, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges. He noted that the bloc will also update its 2021 AI strategy to include generative AI next year.
We can’t help but wonder whether these changes will be too little, too late.