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During a media briefing in London this Thursday, Stella Assange said that her husband's extradition to the United States is a life-or-death situation. Her husband Julian Assange, the 52-year-old founder of Wikileaks, faces 18 charges in the U.S. for the publication of classified documents. The British government sanctioned his extradition in 2022. Assange's defense team is set to challenge the decision at the High Court.

Stella cited Julian's deteriorating health, believing that extradition could be fatal due to his mental and physical decline. Despite a 2021 ruling against extradition based on suicide risk, the decision was overturned following U.S. assurances about Assange's treatment. Stella mentioned a potential appeal to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary. Assange, who sought asylum in Ecuador's embassy for seven years, has been in a London maximum-security prison since 2019.

A data breach affecting U.S. government data has been linked to a flaw in Atlassian's Confluence collaboration tools, as reported by IT contractor CGI Federal. CGI Federal, part of CGI Inc., has been collaborating with authorities and clients since the breach was revealed in October to pinpoint and report the compromised data. The extent of the breach remains unclear, but it's known that 6,000 current and former employees of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) were affected by this security incident, which was orchestrated by an unidentified "threat actor."

The breach's impact on other government entities has not been made public. Atlassian acknowledged the vulnerability on October 4, notifying customers of the exploitation risk and offering assistance with mitigation efforts. Queries regarding the incident directed towards the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) were deferred back to CGI, indicating a coordinated response to address and remediate the fallout from the exploitation of this software vulnerability.

Data scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles is now being offered for sale on a hacker forum, with a sample of 2 million records released as evidence. The leaked data includes personal and professional information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and employment details.

The seller is demanding a four-figure sum for the entire database. It remains uncertain whether this data is current or aggregated from previous breaches, but LinkedIn claims this is not a result of a data breach. In response, Italy's privacy watchdog has launched an investigation due to the country's large number of LinkedIn users.

Interesting Read

Writing for the Journal of Cybersecurity, Harold Abelson et al. give a fantastic rundown of the risks of client-side scanning (CSS). Advocates propose CSS as a kind of middle ground, allowing on-device analysis of encrypted data without compromising encryption. 

However, this paper argues that CSS poses significant security and privacy risks, failing to effectively balance crime prevention with surveillance concerns. Can CSS be evaded, easily fail, or simply be abused? These are important questions in our ongoing cybersecurity discussion.

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Stay Safe, Stay Secure.

The CybersecurityHQ Team