Pete Hegseth’s Signal Scandal Spirals Out of Control

When the aggressive immigration policy of the Trump government increases, people have started to seriously take their privacy and security into account when they go to the United States. This applies in particular to the search for travel duties and other devices that have US customs and border protection activities to search. Fortunately, There are some steps that you can takesuch as deleting certain apps from your personal phone or using an alternative phone that is only set up for international travel.

Employees with Elon Musks so -called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) I spent the first months of the Trump administration to join the US government systems. It is now clear what these systems are and what kind of data about US residents they have. We are interpreted this week that the 19 systems Doge employees have access Only in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Pope Francis died on Monday at the age of 88. The farewell of the Supreme Pope sets a conclave in motion, the secret process to select the new Pope. In order to protect and try to prevent the integrity of the conclave, to prevent leaks, A wide range of security measures is carried outFrom data protection film under Windows in the Vatican to faults and sweeps for hidden microphones.

Google recently announced the first introduction of end-to-end-encrypted emails for Google Workspace accounts. This is good news for the privacy of users at the company level. If a workspace user sends a non-workplace account by email, the recipient will receive an invitation to create a guest account so that he can read the email. Unfortunately, security experts say that this will probably probably be Create new opportunities for phishing attacksHow fraudsters try to lure people with false invitations.

But that’s not all. Every week we collect the security and data protection messages that we have not dealt with in detail. Click the headlines to read the complete stories. And stay safe out there.

Signal gate Is the scandal that will simply not die – at least not if you are US defense minister Pete Hegseth. On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Hegseth Signal had installed on a “second computer in his office” so that he could “use signal in a classified room in which his cell phone and other personal electronics are not allowed, and communicate with more easily with everyone”.

The Associated Press on Thursday Added to the picture Of Hegseth’s reported signal and revealed that Hegseth had installed a second internet line that, according to sources that spoke to the AP, was directly connected to the public internet and not the secure connection of the Pentagon. Hegseth supposedly did this so that he could use this second computer with installed signal. Then on Friday, The New York Times found That the telephone number connected to Hegseth’s signal account – the one that he used in this notorious group chat – can be easily found and may open it for targeted cyber attacks from enemy nations.

Despite a constant river of arrests and Takedowns from online fraudstersCyber ​​criminal work at unprecedented level and earn more money than ever. Two reports published this week show the strong scale of online crime. Last year in the United States, companies and individuals lost 16.6 billion US dollars for online crimesAccording to the FBI complaint center of the Internet crowd -that is that highest number ever reported And a jump of 33 percent compared to 2023. In 2024 there were 859,532 complaints about potential online crimes, whereby the FBI said Phishing and spoofing complaints Consideration of 193,000 of this, followed by blackmail with 86,000 symptoms. Investment fraud that often contains cryptocurrency took more than 6 billion US dollars of total losses Business -e -e -Mail compromises cheats Which leads to loss of 2.7 billion US dollars.

At around the same time, the United Nations office emphasized about drugs and crime Huge fraud connections in Southeast Asia– Where human trafficking is forced to cheat people – achieve 40 billion US continue to grow. These fraud organizations on an industrial scale, which are often associated with Chinese criminals, use investment fraud (sometimes mentioned Pork) To bring people out of their savings and expand outside the region. “It spreads like a cancer,” said Benedikt Hofmann from UNODC in A opinion.

As early as 2020, Google announced that his Chrome browser would stop using cookies from third-party providers, follow people on the Internet and to implement themselves in a less creepy way of advertising. Web browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Brave have stopped the announcement years before Google. But this week, after countless U-Turns, failed efforts to develop alternatives and criticism that suggestions for the replacement of cookies Google would prefer, the company announced that this was actually. Keep the trackers in Chrome.

“We made the decision to receive our current approach to ensure users select the selection of third -party cookie in Chrome” Blog post. “Since we deal with the ecosystem, including publishers, developers, supervisory authorities and the ADS industry, it remains clear that there are different perspectives in order to make changes that could affect the availability of third-party biscuits,” wrote Chavez. While the US government is Suggestions that Google Chrome sold As part of its antitrust case against the company, it is still possible to switch off cookies from third-party providers or Instead, use one of privacy-friendly browsers.