White House Proposes $500 Million Cut to CISA
President Donald Trump has proposed slashing the budget of the federal cyber defense agency by nearly $500 million as part of the administration’s forthcoming spending plan. The White House provided a series of recommendations on discretionary spending levels for fiscal year 2026 in a Friday letter sent to the Senate appropriations committee, detailing a “rigorous, line-by-line review” of the previous year’s budget which it said was found to be “laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans.” The proposal includes a $491 million cut to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – a nearly 16% reduction in funding from the previous year – which the White House said will help the agency refocus “on its core mission.”
Messaging app seen in use by Mike Waltz suspends service after hackers claim breach
TeleMessage, the app that President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, appeared to use to archive his group chats, has suspended all services after hackers claimed to have stolen files from it. A spokesperson for Smarsh, the company that owns TeleMessage, said Monday that the company “is investigating a potential security incident. Upon detection, we acted quickly to contain it and engaged an external cybersecurity firm to support our investigation.”
Myanmar militia leader sanctioned by US over cyber scam connections
The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a Myanmar militia group and its leader on Monday for their alleged participation in the booming cyber fraud industry. The designation targets the Karen National Army (KNA) and Saw Chit Thu, a longtime power broker in the Myawaddy area of Karen State along the border with Thailand. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also sanctioned his two sons, Htoo Eh Moo and Saw Chit Chit. The KNA, who until mid-2024 were known as the Karen Border Guard Force, control security in Shwe Kokko, an area home to industrial-size scamming compounds, where much of the workforce is made up of people who are lured into the industry on false premises and forced to carry out scams.
Germany Most Targeted Country in Q1 2025 DDoS Attacks
The digital world faced an unprecedented onslaught of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the first quarter of 2025, according to Cloudflare’s latest threat report. The sheer volume of these malicious attempts to disrupt online services reached a staggering 20.5 million, marking an astounding 358% increase compared to the same period last year.
Smishing on a Massive Scale: “Panda Shop” Chinese Carding Syndicate
Resecurity was the first company to identify the Smishing Triad, a group of Chinese cybercriminals targeting consumers across the globe. In August 2023, our team was able to identify their activity and locate the smishing kit they were using, successfully exploiting a vulnerability, which exposed the threat actors and their infrastructure. Since then, the group has become stealthier and upgraded its tooling, tactics, and procedures (TTPs). A group of this scale is not limited to just one threat actor; it has numerous associates with different roles, blurring its public profile. Such groups leverage a “Crime-as-a-Service” model, enabling other cybercriminals to use their smishing kit and scale their operations targeting consumers in different countries.
Texas School District Notifies Over 47,000 People of Major Data Breach
A data breach affecting Alvin Independent School District (AISD) in Texas has compromised sensitive personal information belonging to 47,606 individuals. The district confirmed the breach, which occurred in June 2024, and began notifying impacted people over the weekend. Exposed information includes names, Social Security numbers, state-issued IDs, credit and debit card details, financial account numbers, medical data and health insurance information. The incident was reported by the Texas attorney general on May 2 2025.
