DHS Secretary Noem: CISA must return to ‘core mission’ | Google says Gemini AI coming soon to iPhone | DeepSeek quietly updates open-source AI model
Who is H. Fong, the man behind the Trumpet of Patriots texts?
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In an appearance at the 2025 RSAC Conference, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem outlined how the Trump administration is pushing CISA to a “back-to-basics” approach aimed at hardening defenses against adversaries who have demonstrated capabilities to infiltrate critical systems. Cyberscoop
During the search monopoly trial on Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai suggested that the company plans to roll out its Gemini integration by the end of this year. The Verge
The Chinese start-up DeepSeek has silently released the Prover-V2 model a day after Alibaba released Qwen3, and ahead of an anticipated release of DeepSeek-R2. South China Morning Post
Australia
Who is H Fong, the man authorising the flurry of annoying Trumpet of Patriots text messages?
The Guardian
Ariel Bogle
Australians have been infuriated this election cycle, yet again, by a deluge of unsolicited text messages from a political party associated with Clive Palmer. “You don’t need to be welcomed to your own country, 3% home loans Vote 1 Trumpet of Patriots,” some of the texts read. The messages have been authorised by a “H Fong” for Trumpet of Patriots – Palmer’s latest venture – but who is the man behind the texts?
‘Two years is too short’: Scientists call out switch to shorter grants
InnovationAus
Trish Everingham
Australian scientists have balked at a proposal for the federal government to fund high risk research over just two years, warning administration will eat into the short timespan and hold back early career researchers. The short sharp research grants could come from a new ‘Initiate’ scheme that has been proposed in a review of the National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP). The review has called for an increased risk appetite in funding decisions as part of radical change to the NCGP, including funding more individuals and smaller teams with the short grants.
Cybercriminals have stolen almost 100 staff logins at the Big Four banks, experts say
ABC News
Ange Lavoipierre
Cybercriminals have stolen almost 100 staff logins from workers at Australia's biggest banks, putting those businesses at higher risk of mass data theft and ransomware attacks, according to cyber security researchers. The most serious risks arise from the fact that attackers could ultimately use those leaked logins to gain access to the banks' corporate networks, they warned.
China
Chinese AI stocks advance after Xi Jinping’s incubator visit
Bloomberg
Shares of Chinese smart-device manufacturers rose after president Xi Jinping visited an artificial-intelligence innovation center in Shanghai. YingTong Telecommunication, which makes wireless acoustic parts and bluetooth headphones used in AI glasses, jumped by the 10% limit in Shenzhen. Minami Acoustics and Shenzhen Rapoo Technology which manufacture consumer electronics parts, each gained more than 6%.
How China is building an army of hackers
Bloomberg
China and the US actively engage in cyber espionage for strategic advantage. Leaked files now suggest how rapidly Beijing is catching up in preparation for any future conflict.
USA
DHS Secretary Noem: CISA needs to get back to ‘core mission’
CyberScoop
Greg Otto
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem outlined her plans Tuesday to refocus the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on protecting critical infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated threats — particularly from China — while distancing the agency from what she characterized as mission drift under previous leadership. Speaking at the 2025 RSAC Conference, Noem provided the most detailed vision yet of how the current administration is pushing CISA to a “back-to-basics” approach aimed at hardening defenses against adversaries who have demonstrated capabilities to infiltrate critical systems.
Congressional officials wonder how CISA can carry out core mission in face of workforce cuts
CyberScoop
Greg Otto
In her appearance at the RSAC 2025 Conference, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spoke about getting CISA back to its “core mission” of protecting federal networks and critical infrastructure from cybersecurity threats. Other cyber policy experts wonder how that is going to unfold with such concentration on cutting CISA’s workforce.
White House calls Amazon ‘hostile’ for reportedly planning to list tariff costs
The Guardian
Blake Montgomery and Callum Jones
The White House accused Amazon of committing a “hostile and political act” after a report said the e-commerce company was planning to inform customers how much Donald Trump’s tariffs would cost them as they shopped. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was responding to a report in Punchbowl News, which reported that Amazon would begin displaying on its site how much the tariffs had increased the prices of individual products, breaking out the figure from the total listed price.
Cyber experts, Democrats urge Trump administration not to break up cyber coordination in State reorg
CyberScoop
Cyber experts are urging Congress to ensure that a planned reorganization of the State Department continues to integrate cyber diplomacy at the highest levels of decision-making, while providing the resources, staffing and structure necessary to project American digital security policy abroad with both allies and adversaries. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s reorganization plan would split up the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, with its economic team and portfolio reporting to the undersecretary of economic growth, energy and environment, while its cybersecurity mission and personnel would go to a newly created Bureau of Emerging Threats and report to the undersecretary for arms control and international security.
Warning systems for floods, hurricanes, and famine are suffering from Donald Trump’s data purge
The Verge
Justine Calma
Within weeks of President Trump stepping into office, key health and environmental resources that doctors and farmers rely on started disappearing from federal websites. Trump was also quick to dismantle the US Agency for International Development, cutting off funding — as well as the flow of data that people around the world use to prevent famine and issue warnings ahead of natural disasters.
Donald Trump might actually believe these Calibri labels are real MS-13 tattoos
The Verge
Adi Robertson
For several weeks, President Donald Trump and his administration have been grasping for evidence that a man his administration deported and imprisoned in error is a dangerous gang member, and the effort has now reached what may be an untoppable peak: the President repeatedly insisting in an in-person interview that an obvious text label that says MS13 in the Calibri typeface is an actual tattoo.
North Asia
North Korean operatives have infiltrated hundreds of Fortune 500 companies
CyberScoop
Matt Kapko
North Korean nationals have infiltrated the employee ranks at top global companies more so than previously thought, maintaining a pervasive and potentially widening threat against IT infrastructure and sensitive data. “There are hundreds of Fortune 500 organizations that have hired these North Korean IT workers,” Mandiant Consulting CTO Charles Carmakal said Tuesday during a media briefing at the RSAC 2025 Conference.
Ukraine - Russia
DarkWatchman cybercrime malware returns on Russian networks
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
A financially motivated hacker group has targeted Russian companies across several industries in a new phishing campaign using a modified version of the DarkWatchman malware, researchers have found. The group, known as Hive0117, has attacked firms in sectors including media, tourism, biotechnology, finance, energy and telecommunications, according to Russian cybersecurity firm F6.
Europe
France accuses Russia of a decade’s worth of high-profile cyberattacks
The Verge
Tina Nguyen
In an unprecedented display of diplomatic aggression, French authorities publicly accused Russia of sponsoring several high-profile cyber attacks on French entities for over a decade to gather intelligence and destabilize the country. The incidents include everything from a faked Islamic State takeover of a French television broadcast signal in 2015 to the leak of President Emmanuel Macron’s emails in 2017.
Cyberattacks: France officially attributes hacking to Russia for the first time
Le Monde
Philippe Ricard and Martin Untersinger
On Tuesday, April 29, for the first time ever, French authorities condemned the Russian military intelligence service, implicating it in a series of incidents over recent years: hacking Emmanuel Macron's 2017 presidential election campaign, a 2015 cyberattack on the television channel TV5 Monde and intrusion attempts against sporting bodies linked to the organization of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Polish police dismantle cybercrime gang accused of impersonation scams, arrest nine suspects
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
Polish police dismantled an international cybercrime group accused of defrauding dozens of victims out of nearly $665,000, authorities said Tuesday. Nine people were detained in connection with the case. Investigators said the suspects, who ranged in age from 19 to 51 years old, posed as bank employees and law enforcement officers to trick victims into transferring funds to fraudulent accounts. In total, at least 55 people were targeted.
Big Tech
Google confirms it’s close to getting Gemini support on iPhones
The Verge
Emma Roth and David Pierce
Google is close to striking a deal with Apple to integrate Gemini into the iPhone. During the search monopoly trial on Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the company expects to strike a Gemini deal with Apple by the middle of this year and suggested it would roll out by the end of 2025. The integration would presumably allow Siri to call on Gemini to answer more complex questions, similar to the integration that Apple launched with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Elon Musk teases Grok 3.5 hours after Alibaba’s Qwen3 generates buzz amid US-China AI race
South China Morning Post
Ben Jiang
The competition between China and the US over foundational artificial intelligence models has intensified, with Elon Musk teasing his company’s Grok 3.5 model hours after Alibaba Group Holding unveiled its new Qwen3 models to widespread interest from developers.
Samsung mulls shifting some production due to Trump tariffs
Nikkei Asia
Kim Jaewon
Samsung Electronics says it is considering relocating production of some of its TVs and home appliances to cope with President Donald Trump's tariffs, while US chip export curbs are already hurting its business in China. The South Korean tech giant on Wednesday reported a 62% quarter-on-quarter fall in operating profit at its chipmaking unit for the first three months of the year.
Amazon’s investing $4B in rural America to expand our delivery network, offer even faster delivery, and create more than 100,000 new jobs
About Amazon
Udit Madan
One of the Prime benefits that members love most is unlimited fast, free delivery. Amazon's logistics network is at the center of making this incredible convenience available to customers. This new investment will grow our rural delivery network’s footprint to over 200 delivery stations, and we estimate it will create over 100,000 new jobs and driving opportunities through a wide range of full-time, part-time and flexible positions in our buildings and on the roads.
Amazon to invest $4 billion to expand rural delivery network in US
Reuters
Amazon said on Wednesday it would spend more than $4 billion to expand its US rural delivery network by the end of 2026, doubling down on faster shipments to drive up demand from shoppers in small towns and the countryside. The investment will grow its rural delivery network to more than 200 delivery stations and create 100,000 jobs, the company, which is among the largest private employers in the US, said in a statement.
Microsoft vows to protect European operations from Donald Trump
Financial Times
Barbara Moens and Tim Bradshaw
Microsoft’s top legal officer said the company would take the US government to court if necessary to protect European customers’ access to its services, as it tries to reassure Europe that Donald Trump will not be able to cut off critical technology. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said European leaders were shocked when Trump temporarily suspended military and intelligence support to Ukraine.
Google: 75 zero-days seen in 2024 as nations, spyware vendors continue exploitation
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
The number of unreported bugs exploited by criminals, nation states and commercial vendors fell in 2024, but hackers are increasingly targeting vulnerabilities in security software and appliances to gain greater access to victim systems. Google’s Threat Intelligence team published its annual zero-day report on Tuesday, finding that 75 vulnerabilities were exploited in the wild in 2024, down from 98 in the prior year.
Apple reshuffles government affairs and music divisions in latest changes
Bloomberg
Mark Gurman
Apple is shuffling the management of its global affairs and music divisions in separate moves, extending a series of recent changes at the iPhone maker. The global affairs reorganization includes adjusting management of the government teams for Europe, India, China and other parts of Asia, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel moves haven’t been announced.
NSO Group damages in WhatsApp spyware case could be in the ‘tens of millions,’ experts predict
The Record by Recorded Future
Suzanne Smalley
Opening arguments in the damages trial concluding a five-year court battle between the Israeli spyware maker NSO Group and WhatsApp began Tuesday, with some experts predicting a substantial penalty that could precipitate the bankruptcy of the prominent spyware manufacturer, which was found liable for hacks of WhatsApp users in December. Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, is reportedly asking for over $440,000 in compensatory damages but fines for punitive damages could rise to tens of millions of dollars, experts told Recorded Future News.
Artificial Intelligence
DeepSeek quietly updates open-source model that handles maths proofs
South China Morning Post
Ben Jiang
Chinese start-up DeepSeek quietly open-sourced a new specialist artificial intelligence model on Wednesday, just a day after Alibaba unveiled the third generation of its Qwen family, as competition heats up in the race to advance generative AI capabilities. DeepSeek uploaded its latest open-source Prover-V2 model to Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI community, without making any announcements on its official social media channels.
Smartphone giant Xiaomi unveils AI model, joining fierce competition in China
South China Morning Post
Zhou Xin
Chinese smartphone and electric vehicle maker Xiaomi on Friday unveiled a new reasoning artificial intelligence model developed in-house, underscoring the company’s ambition to integrate its hardware products with home-grown generative AI. The open-source MiMo model has 7 billion parameters and outperformed OpenAI’s o1-mini and Alibaba Group Holding’s QwQ-32B-Preview, part of the Qwen series of models, in maths reasoning and coding, Xiaomi said in a statement.
Japan's Sakana AI sees opportunity with US uncertainty
Nikkei Asia
Ryohtaroh Satoh
America's increasingly "unpredictable" foreign policy will spur demand in Japan for domestically developed defense-related artificial intelligence applications, according to one of the country's most prominent AI startups. Sakana AI, backed by AI chip leader Nvidia, believes it is particularly well placed to meet that demand. David Ha, the company's CEO, told Nikkei Asia that its focus on defense applications is crucial, "especially as the world moves toward de-globalization and the U.S. pursues a more unpredictable foreign policy."
Research
Space Threat Assessment 2025
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Clayton Swope, Kari A. Bingen, Makena Young, and Kendra LaFave
The past year mostly witnessed a continuation of the worrisome trends discussed in prior reports, notably widespread jamming and spoofing of GPS signals in and around conflict zones, including near and in Russia and throughout the Middle East. Chinese and Russian satellites in both low Earth orbit and geostationary Earth orbit continue to display more and more advanced maneuvering capabilities, demonstrating operator proficiency and tactics, techniques, and procedures that can be used for space warfighting and alarming US and allied officials.
The Cyberspace Force: A Bellwether for Conflict
The Jamestown Foundation
John Costello
One year ago, on April 19, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army eliminated the Strategic Support Force and reconstituted its subordinate components into three distinct arms that are directly subordinate to the Central Military Commission, the highest-level body within the Chinese armed forces. These three organizations are the Cyberspace Force, the Information Support Force, and the Aerospace Force. In light of the anniversary of this restructuring, this piece sheds new light on one of these new organizations—the Cyberspace Force. The analysis is drawn from open source research of thousands of recruitment notices, public procurement documents, academic research, and news coverage.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.
For more on China's pressure campaign against Taiwan—including military threats, interference and cyberwarfare, check out ASPI’s State of the Strait Weekly Digest.
