Trump AI order dramatically collapses after Sacks-led revolt over cyber oversight

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The Trump administration’s long-anticipated executive order on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity dramatically collapsed yesterday after an intense internal battle over how aggressively the federal government should oversee frontier AI systems.

What had been expected to be a high-profile White House signing instead became a vivid demonstration of the growing divide between national security officials increasingly alarmed by AI’s accelerating cyber capabilities and technology leaders determined to avoid even voluntary forms of federal oversight.

At the center of the fight was David Sacks, the venture capitalist and former White House AI and crypto adviser who emerged as one of the most influential voices opposing the order. Sacks reportedly worked behind the scenes alongside major technology executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, to pressure the administration to abandon the proposal, arguing that even voluntary reporting expectations could evolve into a regulatory bottleneck that would slow American AI development and undermine US competitiveness against China.

The proposed order would have established a voluntary framework encouraging companies developing advanced AI systems to notify the government before publicly releasing frontier models that could pose cybersecurity or national security risks. The administration had also explored mechanisms for closer coordination between AI developers and federal officials amid mounting concern that increasingly capable systems could dramatically accelerate offensive cyber operations, infrastructure attacks, and other malicious activity.

The effort reflected growing unease within parts of the federal government over the rapid escalation of frontier AI capabilities. Officials involved in the discussions were increasingly concerned that advanced models are becoming more capable of assisting with vulnerability discovery, operational planning, malware development, and other sophisticated cyber tasks. Those fears have intensified as newer systems have begun outperforming earlier projections for how quickly AI cyber capabilities were expected to improve.

But opponents inside Silicon Valley viewed the proposal as the beginning of a much broader regulatory apparatus. Sacks and other critics reportedly warned that once companies accepted voluntary pre-release notifications or government evaluations, the process could quickly become an unofficial approval regime in which frontier AI systems would effectively require federal clearance before deployment.

Donald Trump ultimately pulled back from the order after voicing concerns that parts of the proposal might burden American companies at a moment when the race for AI dominance is accelerating globally. China loomed heavily over the debate, with opponents of the order arguing that regulatory friction could hand strategic advantages to Beijing while constraining US developers.

The collapse was especially striking because the order itself reportedly represented a compromise effort rather than a sweeping regulatory intervention. Rather than imposing mandatory licensing or binding restrictions, the framework was designed to create voluntary channels for communication between frontier AI companies and the federal government. Yet even that lighter-touch approach proved deeply controversial among influential technology executives and advisers skeptical of any expansion of federal involvement in AI development.

The abrupt reversal reportedly blindsided some officials who had spent weeks negotiating language acceptable to both national security agencies and industry leaders. Instead of presenting a unified policy vision, the administration exposed the increasingly fragile consensus around AI governance in the United States, where even modest oversight proposals can trigger fierce resistance from both Silicon Valley and ideological allies wary of government intervention. (Ashley Gold / Axios, Ashley Gold, Maria Curi, Sam Sabin / Axios, Sophia Cai, Cheyenne Haslett and Jacob Wendler / Politico, and Cat Zakrzewski, Ian Duncan, Ellen Nakashima, and Isaac Arnsdorf / Washington Post)

Related: New York Times, CyberScoop, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNBC, Reuters, Politico, The Information, Reuters, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, International Business Times, The Hill, Semafor, The Daily Signal, Crypto Briefing, ABA Banking Journal, CBS News, Newser, Quartz, Financial Times, Breitbart, The Economic Times, TechCrunch, South China Morning Post, MediaPost, Semafor, Wall Street Journal, NBC News,  Crypto Briefing, r/accelerate, Implicator.ai, UPI

In an effort dubbed Operation Saffron, European law enforcement agencies dismantled a VPN service long favored by cybercriminals to conceal ransomware attacks, fraud schemes, and other illicit activities.

The international operation, led by France and the Netherlands and carried out May 19-20, targeted a service known as First VPN, which had been marketed for years on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums as a secure way for criminals to evade law enforcement.

Authorities in Ukraine questioned the service’s administrator at the request of French investigators and conducted a house search as part of the coordinated operation. Law enforcement agencies also dismantled 33 servers linked to the platform.

According to a Europol statement, First VPN had appeared in “almost every major cybercrime investigation” the agency had supported in recent years.

The service allowed users to make anonymous payments and promised hidden infrastructure designed to shield criminal activity. Cybercriminals reportedly used it to conceal their identities and infrastructure while carrying out ransomware attacks, large-scale fraud, and data theft operations.

Europol said investigators gained access to the service and obtained its user database, allowing authorities to identify VPN connections allegedly used by cybercriminals to conceal their activities. (Daryna Antoniuk / The Record)

Related: Europol, Bleeping Computer, TechCrunch, Computer Weekly, Security Affairs, Bitdefender, SC Media, The Cyber Express, Help Net Security, TechRadar, Infosecurity Magazine, Tech Times, Cyber Insider, Tom's Hardware

Edmonton police in Canada say they partnered up with “ethical hackers” to prevent more than $42 million in losses to scammers.

The Edmonton Police Service says the partnership with the so-called “scam baiters” began last July. The hackers intercepted victim information during in-progress scams and shared it with the police.

EPS and partners in the US – the United States Secret Service and the Collin County, Texas Sheriff’s Office – worked together to identify victims, contact them, and disrupt fund transfers by asking banks to freeze accounts before money was withdrawn.

“Contacting victims was often difficult because the information received was fragmented and incomplete,” said EPS Cst. Brian Mason. “Once contacted, convincing them they are being scammed wasn’t always easy and often involved the support of local police agencies and sometimes family members.”

In some cases, police say the scammers watched and listened as victims spoke to police, and “actively worked to convince them the police were the actual scammers.”

In total, Edmonton police say more than 50 law enforcement agencies – in Canada, the US, and the UK – were contacted. Police claim they were able to stop 300 people from losing money.

The largest single loss was $4 million from a victim in the US, police say. (Edmonton City News)

Related: Edmonton Police, City News, Edmonton Journal, CTV News, Global News

Canadian authorities arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man, Jacob Butler, a.k.a. “Dort,” on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months.

KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS, doxing, and swatting campaigns against this author and a security researcher. He now faces criminal hacking charges in both Canada and the United States.

A criminal complaint unsealed today in an Alaska district court charges Butler with operating the Kimwolf DDoS botnet. A statement from the Department of Justice says the complaint against Butler was unsealed following the defendant’s arrest in Canada by the Ontario Provincial Police pursuant to a US extradition warrant. Butler is currently in Canadian custody, awaiting an initial court hearing scheduled for early next week.

The government said Kimwolf targeted infected devices that were traditionally “firewalled” from the rest of the internet, such as digital photo frames and web cameras. The infected systems were then rented to other cybercriminals or forced to participate in record-smashing DDoS attacks, as well as assaults that affected Internet address ranges for the Department of Defense.

Consequently, the DoD’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the case, with assistance from the FBI field office in Anchorage. (Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security)

Related: Justice Department, Toronto Sun, Help Net Security, CyberScoop, Bleeping Computer, CBC, Ottawa Citizen

Hundreds of accounts on Bluesky were hijacked and used to post fake Kremlin-originated news articles, according to the company and researchers at Clemson University working with a collective of internet monitors who track Russian influence operations and call themselves the dTeam.

The compromised Bluesky accounts included those of people who are influential in their fields, though perhaps not famous. They were journalists and professors, a pollster in Texas, an anime artist and a filmmaker in Hollywood, whose account posted a video doctored by artificial intelligence to impersonate a Canadian police official criticizing France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.

The campaign, which the researchers at Clemson linked to the Social Design Agency, a company in Moscow, shows how Russia continues to seek new ways to erode public support for Ukraine, which Russian forces invaded in 2022.

Russian propaganda on Bluesky first became notable during Germany’s elections last year, when the Kremlin sought to bolster Germany’s far right, led by the Alternative for Germany party, known as AfD.

Joseph Bodnar, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international organization that has also tracked Russian disinformation, said the hijacking of individual accounts on Bluesky had “a level of sophistication beyond what we usually see.” (Steven Lee Myers / New York Times)

Related: Clemson Media Forensics Hub, The Independent, NDTV

Google has accidentally leaked details about an unfixed issue in Chromium that keeps JavaScript running in the background even when the browser is closed, allowing remote code execution on the device.

The flaw was reported by security researcher Lyra Rebane and acknowledged as valid in December 2022, as per the thread on Chromium Issue Tracker.

An attacker could exploit the problem to create a malicious webpage with a Service Worker, such as a download task, that never terminates. Rebane says that this could allow an attacker to execute JavaScript code on the visitors' devices.

"It's realistic to get tens of thousands of pageviews for creating a 'botnet', and people won't be aware that JavaScript can be remotely executed on their device," Rebane says in the original bug report.

Potential exploitation scenarios include using compromised browsers to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, proxying malicious traffic, and arbitrarily redirecting traffic to target sites.

“Back in 2022, I found a bug that would let me, with no user interaction, turn any Chromium-based browser into a permanent JS botnet member,” the researcher said in a post yesterday.

After noticing that the exploit still worked, the researcher realized that Google had likely published the details by mistake.

To make matters worse, the download pop-up that appeared when triggering the exploit previously no longer comes up in the latest Edge, making the exploit even stealthier.

“OH NO I JUST REALIZED THIS IS NOT ACTUALLY PROPERLY FIXED AND STILL WORKS,” posted Rebane on Mastodon.

Rebane said that Google’s exposure would make exploitation “pretty easy,” however, scaling it into a large botnet is more complicated.

She also clarified that the bug does not bypass browser security boundaries and doesn’t give attackers access to the victim’s emails, files, or the host OS. (Bill Toulas / Bleeping Computer)

Related: Ars Technica, Chromium, Cyber Security News, Tempo

Securing some of the open-source technology that serves as the backbone for all modern digital infrastructure is going to require some “hard decisions” amid a wave of malware attacks, Nick Andersen, acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said.

CISA has been working with industry and others “to modify our approach to vulnerability management, modify our approach to coordinated vulnerability disclosure, modify our approach to remediation, with the explicit understanding that we’re just not going to be able to keep up using traditional mechanisms,” Andersen said while speaking at the National Cyber Innovation Forum in Washington, DC. (Tim Starks / CyberSecoop)

Related: Federal News Network

Researchers at ESET report that the China-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) group Webworm has expanded its victim list beyond Asia, shifting focus to European governmental organizations as it evolves its tactics.

ESET found Webworm targeting government organizations in Belgium, Italy, Poland, Serbia, and Spain. The group is known for its cyber espionage campaigns.

Speaking during ESET World in Berlin on 19 May, Robert Lipovsky, principal threat researcher at ESET, said that there was not necessarily a correlation among the victim organizations and the operation seemed to be “semi-opportunistic”.

Alongside the European ventures, Webworm made a foray into South Africa, compromising a local university.

While the exact entry point for Webworm campaigns is not 100% clear, Lipovsky noted that in the case of the Serbian victim organization, a vulnerability in the now-discontinued SquirrelMail webmail service was identified as a likely way for the attacker to gain initial access. (Beth Maundrill / Infosecurity Magazine)

Related: We Live Security, Help Net Security, Dark Reading

Cisco has released security updates to address a maximum-severity Secure Workload vulnerability that allows attackers to gain site admin privileges.

Formerly known as Cisco Tetration, Cisco Secure Workload helps admins reduce their network's attack surface through zero-trust microsegmentation and stop lateral movement to keep business applications safe.

Tracked as CVE-2026-20223, the security flaw was found in Secure Workload's internal REST APIs, and it enables unauthenticated attackers to access resources with the privileges of the site admin role.

"This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation and authentication when accessing REST API endpoints. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability if they are able to send a crafted API request to an affected endpoint," Cisco explained.

"A successful exploit could allow the attacker to read sensitive information and make configuration changes across tenant boundaries with the privileges of the Site Admin user." (Sergiu Gatlan / Bleeping Computer)

Related: Cisco, CSO Online, Security Affairs, The Cyber Express, Heise Online, Flying Penguin, The Cyber Express

According to researchers at Lumen's Black Lotus Labs and PwC Threat Intelligence, a Chinese cyber-espionage campaign has been targeting telecommunications providers with newly discovered Linux and Windows malware dubbed Showboat and JFMBackdoor, respectively.

The operation has been active since at least mid-2022 and targeted organizations across the Asia Pacific and parts of the Middle East. It was attributed to the Calypso threat group, also tracked as Red Lamassu.

The Linux implant Calypso uses in these attacks, dubbed Showboat/kworker, is a modular post-exploitation framework built for long-term persistence after initial compromise. The initial infection vector is unknown.

According to a report today from Black Lotus Labs, once Showboat is deployed on a target system, it starts collecting information about the host and sends it to a command-and-control (C2) server. The malware can also upload or download files, hide its own process, and establish persistence via a new service.

Researchers at PwC Threat Intelligence analyzed Red Lamassu's infection chain on Windows and noted that it starts with the execution of a batch script that drops payloads to stage a DLL-sideloading procedure (fltMC.exe + FLTLIB.dll). Ultimately, the final payload called JMFBackdoor is loaded.

Lumen concludes that the tooling is likely shared across multiple China-aligned threat groups, each targeting different regions and using the same malware ecosystem. (Bill Toulas / Bleeping Computer)

Related: Lumen, PwC, SC Media, Dark Reading

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the creation of a nomination form, which they said enables “researchers, vendors, and industry partners” to report bugs that need to be added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

“Every day, CISA collaborates with security researchers and industry partners that identify and report exploited vulnerabilities. This new reporting capability enhances CISA’s ability to identify, validate, and quickly share critical threat information,” said Chris Butera, CISA’s Acting Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity.

“Early detection and coordinated vulnerability disclosure are among the most powerful tools we have to reduce risk at scale. CISA strongly encourages researchers and organizations to share vulnerability threats and help us secure the systems Americans rely on every day.”

Experts can now submit vulnerabilities through a nomination form or by email and have to provide information about the bug as well as evidence of its exploitation.

The catalog, known colloquially as the KEV, is meant to provide cybersecurity defenders within the federal government with an authoritative list of software and hardware vulnerabilities that need to be patched within a certain time frame — typically three weeks.

It has allowed defenders to focus on remediating vulnerabilities that hackers and nation-state actors are actively exploiting. (Jonathan Greig / The Record)

Related: CISA, CISA KEV Nomination Form, Help Net Security

State cybersecurity officials urged the federal government to roll back cuts to cybersecurity programs, arguing that deteriorating federal support weakens defenses just as artificial intelligence and nation-state belligerence are introducing significant new threats.

Technology and cyber officials from New York, Florida, and Tennessee told a House Homeland Security Committee hearing that states must now defend against advanced threats as federal backing diminishes.

The witnesses cited the pending expiration of the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, the significant budget and workforce cuts to federal agencies, and new limits on the information-sharing platforms that state governments rely on to track threats.

Witnesses repeatedly pointed to the shrinking of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as a serious problem, noting that the agency has lost roughly a third of its workforce and budget because of recent federal spending shifts. The cuts have also hit information-sharing and analysis centers dedicated to state security and election integrity.

State officials urged lawmakers to press forward on renewing the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, a $1 billion federal initiative established in 2021 that expires this year. (James Rundle / Wall Street Journal)

Related: StateScoop, BankInfoSecurity, GovTech, The Register

Malaysia will introduce new measures from June 1 ​to protect children and reduce their exposure to ‌harmful content on online platforms, its communications regulator said.

The new rules will require online service providers to ​include safeguards that limit account registration and ​ownership by users under the age of ⁠16, as well as implement stronger content governance ​on their platforms, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission ​said. (Danial Azhar / Reuters)

Related: The Star, The Edge Malaysia, The New Straits Times, Free Malaysia Today, Scoop, The Vibes, Business Today Malaysia

Best Thing of the Day: If You're Not Going to Have Federal AI Safety Rules, Let the States Do Their Thing

New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores and state Sen. Andrew Gounardes are re-demanding that House Democrats representing their state reject an early-stage bipartisan push to override state AI safety rules with a federal standard.

Bonus Best Thing of the Day: As a Reminder, CISA Is Woefully Underfunded

Reps. Don Bacon (R-NE) and James Walkinshaw (D-VA) agreed that CISA’s current workforce, funding, and resource structure are a continued concern, especially in the wake of the use of artificial intelligence to discover previously unknown zero-day attacks.

Worst Thing of the Day: When the FBI Director Can't Even Stop His Website From Infecting Visitors With Malware

An apparel site from FBI director Kash Patel, BasedApparel.com, has been spotted trying to trick macOS users into installing malware by hosting a “ClickFix”-style attack that tries to dupe unsuspecting users into running a malicious command on their Mac computers. 

Bonus Worst Thing of the Day: Russia Finding New and Clever Ways to Spy, Coerce, Repress, and Infect People With Malware

A new state-controlled Russian app, MAX, part of the Kremlin’s broader effort to replace foreign digital platforms with a centralized domestic ecosystem for communications, public services, and everyday online activity, could function as a mechanism enabling surveillance, coercion, and transnational repression, without relying on traditional digitally infectious mechanisms, like malware.

Closing Thought