He swore an allegiance to the US, but he was working for someone else. An IT specialist who worked across US government departments and held Top Secret clearance has pleaded guilty to transmitting sensitive documents to Ethiopia. Abraham Teklu Lemma, 53, admitted to the espionage offenses and agreed to a prison term between 120 and 262 months, the Justice Department confirmed on Tuesday. A naturalized citizen of the US, Lemma, of Maryland, had worked for the US government in different capacities and across different teams, including for the National Reconnaissance Office, State Department (DoS), and Justice Department (DoJ), between 2019 and 2023. These roles included working evening hours as an IT help desk technician at the DoS as of 2021, and daytime work at the DoJ as a contract management analyst, according to court documents. Lemma had what's known as "downdraft" authority, which is to say that he was permitted to move classified files between classified systems, and unclassified files from classified to unclassified systems. Crucially, he was only allowed to access classified files on non-DoS systems with written approval that it was part of his official duties, and worked in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) – a secure workplace built for handling classified files. The criminal complaint [PDF] initially stated that the alleged offending began in July 2022, although the DoJ more recently claimed that it began in 2021. It claims Lemma was caught trawling "several" non-DoS classified portals and accessed intelligence reports without the proper authorization to do so. On various occasions, Lemma, who had held Top Secret security clearance since 2020, copied information from at least 133 intelligence reports without need-to-know authorization, according to court documents. Prosecutors claimed that the man downloaded more than 100 documents, burned them to CD/DVDs, and deleted their classification markings. The material Lemma was copying was at the Secret and Top Secret levels, but burned onto discs with green labels, which are approved for employees and are supposed to signify the contents of the discs relating to unclassified material only. Lemma would allegedly take these discs at the end of his shift and exit the SCIF with them tucked into his jacket pocket. On other occasions, he was observed looking at classified material on his PC, then taking handwritten notes before folding the paper and again storing it in his pocket. This continued until around August 2023. Prosecutors claimed that Lemma began transmitting information to Ethiopian officials via an encrypted messaging app in or around August and September 2022, weeks after the alleged offending began. The files included documents, photographs, notes, maps, and information relating to Ethiopia, and officials would ask Lemma to provide details about command centers, logistics centers, military compounds, and other matters. Communications also covered geopolitical topics, referencing "situations" in an unspecified African country that shares a border with Ethiopia to gain an advantage, and rebel groups involved in conflict with Ethiopia. Lemma's messages also included encouragement to take action against paramilitary groups that were in conflict with Ethiopia on multiple occasions, say prosecutors. According to the complaint, one of Lemma's messages said: "We have to finish these people once and for all, otherwise there will never be peace in Ethiopia." Later that day, on December 18, 2021, he wrote: "Please send dro[nes]," after sharing additional information. Announcing the guilty plea on Tuesday, the Justice Department said many of Lemma’s contacts were senior Ethiopian officials across political, military, and intelligence branches of the government. Lemma was also accused of storing copies of classified files on his own storage drives, which prosecutors claim were accessed remotely by Ethiopian officials numerous times between April and June 2023. The man was additionally caught making several bank deposits exceeding $66,000 throughout the time he was working on behalf of foreign officials. On one occasion, he was observed "angrily discouraging" bank staff from filing a currency transaction report after trying to deposit a sum greater than $10,000. "Despite swearing an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, Abraham Lemma betrayed our country by committing espionage on behalf of the Ethiopian government," said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director at the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. "By his own admission, Lemma provided classified national defense information to Ethiopian officials, who then used it in military operations during an ongoing conflict. This guilty plea should serve notice that the FBI and our partners will work tirelessly to stop foreign intelligence services, and anyone who decides to work with them, against the interests of the United States." ®

Attackers tampered with cold-storage settings used by France's civilian blood service after compromising a refrigeration supplier, the organization said. The French Blood Establishment (EFS) confirmed the incident on Tuesday, saying its own systems had not been directly targeted. Safeguards prevented any loss of blood products. The affected equipment stored blood samples and frozen plasma, including plasma intended for transfusion. "The EFS' monitoring and alarm systems enabled the rapid identification of these anomalies and the implementation of necessary measures to ensure that no blood samples or products were compromised," it said. "Thus, depending on the circumstances, as soon as the incident occurred, the affected equipment was either brought under control without impacting the products and samples, or neutralized; the products stored in these cold rooms were preventively transferred to other facilities." The EFS did not name the supplier publicly. According to reports, attackers changed cold-room temperature settings from -30°C to 110°C. That does not mean the equipment or its contents reached the higher temperature. The organization added that it notified the country's cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, and the Ministry of Health. News about cyberattacks targeting refrigeration devices across Europe emerged on Monday morning after retailers arrived to work, only to find puddles on the floor after cyber criminals activated defrost modes. Reports of the supermarket attacks describe remotely activated defrost cycles and temperatures as high as 50°C, forcing retailers to discard spoiled food. The attackers have not been identified. More retailers have reported disruption since the initial disclosures on Monday. Stores across Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Sweden were the first to report issues, although cases from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Portugal, Romania, and the Netherlands have since been confirmed. Richard Horne, chief executive of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), told BBC Radio 4's Today program on Wednesday that he was aware of "a couple of impacts" in the UK's own food supply chain. No affected UK businesses have publicly identified themselves, although the British Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) told the BBC that some of its more than 300 members had become "collateral" in the attacks, with two reporting that their fridges had begun defrosting. The latest wave of cold-store attacks comes a month after the first, which affected French supermarket chains Carrefour, Coopérative U, Intermarché, Monoprix, and others. Both supermarket waves involved remote interference with refrigeration controls, causing stock losses. Whether the attack affecting EFS used the same access route remains unclear. Some affected chains identified Danfoss controllers in their systems; others said they did not use the company's equipment. CERT-FR published an advisory at the time of the attacks urging organizations to remediate vulnerabilities in Danfoss AK-SM and AK-SC controllers. The attacks in France followed reports of compromises at US military commissaries, which also led to food wastage in August. ®

North Korean cryptocurrency thieves tricked a Binance software engineer into downloading malware onto their work-issued computer during a fake job interview process before last week's record-breaking $6.3 billion heist. In an incident report published on Tuesday, the cryptocurrency exchange said several techniques - including social engineering via fake job interviews, malware downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint takeover, and an “advanced transaction-authorization method” - led to the October 29 security breach. “Our current investigation indicates that this was a sophisticated, multi-stage campaign,” the incident report said. “It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident.” Over the weekend, the FBI attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking operation linked to Lazarus Group, known for combining espionage with massive cryptocurrency heists. The Pyongyang-backed crew is also highly adept at job market scams - both posing as IT workers, who are then hired by Western companies, and as potential employers to lure software engineers into downloading malware and infecting corporate devices. With the recent Binance attack, the Norks used the latter. The attack prep began back in June with a supply chain attack when one of its engineers downloaded a malicious Homebrew installation. While the malware was detected by the security team, the device was replaced, and all affected credentials rotated, “Engineer A’s role and his related colleagues on our wallet infrastructure team was exposed to the hacker,” the report says. Three months later, the social engineering part of the attack happened. In September, another software engineer was contacted via a “legitimate job-hunting platform” by someone purporting to be a project director who arranged a series of job interviews for the Binance engineer with the fake company. During the first round - a live video interview with the engineer and a fake HR rep - the interviewer “shared a social media account with him, including personal photos and videos posted on the platform, in order to build trust,” according to the report. “This was more advanced and deceptive than previously seen social engineering approaches.” The second interview with someone purporting to be the CEO of the phony company was conducted on a “popular social chat app,” and toward the end, the CEO instructed the engineer to download an “assignment” containing a malware-laced code repository. The code executed on his work computer during the setup process, which kicked off a series of unauthorized activities. According to Binance, the malware replaced a legitimate development tool component with a malicious version, which executed commands and established communication with an attacker-controlled external server. The attackers also took steps to hide the malicious script and evade detection, and it worked. Binance’s endpoint security tools did not immediately detect the malware. Here’s the script: CREATE /opt/homebrew/Cellar/pyenv/2.8.0/libexec/pyenv_ MODIFY pyenv_ → 3,414 B DELETE .../libexec/pyenv (3,344 B) ← remove the valid pyenv RENAME pyenv_ → pyenv (3,414 B) ← replace it with a malicious version DELETE /opt/homebrew/bin/pyenv (3,414 B) ln (create a new symlink) + spawn zsh Then, on October 20, the miscreants used the compromised computer and an internal AI tool to gain access to the computers of wallet DevOps engineer A and another wallet software developer, Engineer C. Engineer A had a container deployment permission token on his computer, which the Norks soon discovered. On October 29, the attacker accessed Engineer C's computer, used the stolen credentials from Engineer A to deploy a container, and triggered a script to launch the cryptocurrency-stealing attack. As of Tuesday, Binance said it has rebuilt the compromised wallet system and internal AI tool, and replaced all of the affected devices. It also decommissioned all credentials and tokens assigned to the compromised engineers, and is working with law enforcement, blockchain intel firms, and security researchers to trace and freeze the assets. The crypto exchange has also hired independent cybersecurity experts to conduct a cybersecurity review of the incident, and recommend additional protective measures. Binance said it’s also working to establish a security research fund and initiatives with AI companies and security shops to focus on AI security in blockchain environments.®

The Center for a New American Security posits that the next big threat from our future AI overlords involves "sovereign agents" acting on their own and regularly improving themselves. These are AI agents that operate outside of human control and “pursue open-ended, evolving survival,” AI policy researcher Ben Hayum said in a Tuesday report from the bipartisan national security think tank, which was founded by Washington insiders with experience in diplomacy and military affairs. “If sovereign agents are not already possible, they will be soon.” Agents that can maintain the model and compute powering them and independently evolve their goals over time have a “minimal form of sovereignty,” Hayum wrote. A more advanced sovereign agent, however, could also acquire resources to pay for ongoing needs (like compute), grow a distributed population of agents and coordinate them, withstand efforts to shut down, and self-improve. AI models could either steal or buy compute and model access, Hayum argues, pointing to Anthropic’s claims that small AI models could replicate onto IoT devices like smart TVs, and OpenAI’s agents’ password and access key theft during the Hugging Face hack. “If sovereign agents accumulate resilient, decentralized, and untraceable infrastructure, they could trigger an irreversible loss of control,” according to the report. “In other words, proliferation with no kill switch. If sovereign agents became malicious, they could attempt to wreak havoc from cyberspace, attacking civilians, critical infrastructure, and national security systems alike.” Dun dun duuuun! There is still hope for civilization as we know it, as long as policy makers and AI developers “respond with bold pragmatism” and enact policy recommendations laid out in the report. First, frontier labs should name, evaluate, and protect against sovereign agents in their safety frameworks - and lawmakers should pass legislation to require transparency and AI incident reporting. The report also recommends AI developers, working with the National Security Agency and other federal agencies, build airgapped testbeds to study sovereign agents and kill switches to control them. And it suggests a public-private partnership modeled on the Conficker Working Group - formed in 2009 to combat the Conficker worm - to boost chokepoints against sovereign agents before they emerge. Other policy recommendations suggest lawmakers enforce human verification and cybersecurity standards for services that the working group identifies as essential to sovereign agents, and calls on departments of State, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security to disrupt any gray-market access to unauthorized services. Finally, “Congress should hold those who release sovereign agents liable for the harms that follow,” the report recommends. This hits on something your humble Reg vultures have been hissing about for quite some time now – and would likely solve all future incidents involving rogue, or sovereign, AI agents: hold frontier labs’ human bosses legally liable for their agents' illegal actions. ®