Top stories.
- The Trump administration's AI czar resigns.
- Extortion group wipes Romania's land registry database.
- FBI warns of impersonators targeting scam victims.
The Trump administration's AI czar resigns.
Chris Fall, the Trump administration's director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned after three months on the job, Axios reports. A Commerce Department spokesperson told CNBC that Dr. Arvind Raman, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), will serve as acting director of CAISI until a permanent replacement is found. No reason was given for Fall's departure, but a Commerce Department official told Axios that Fall's appointment was always meant to be temporary and that Raman has been reviewing new candidates for the past few weeks.
Extortion group wipes Romania's land registry database.
A hacker breached Romania's National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration (ANCPI) and wiped the country's entire land registry database last week after a failed extortion attempt, Risky Business reports. The agency described the attack as "the most serious technical incident in the institution's history." The incident halted all property transactions across the country, and the agency is gradually migrating its applications to the Romanian government cloud, according to the Record. Dan Cimpean, director of Romania's National Directorate for Cyber Security (DNSC), said the threat actor gained access via known software vulnerabilities and previously leaked credentials.
The financially motivated threat actor "ByteToBreach" claimed responsibility for the attack. Cimpean says investigators believe ByteToBreach is an initial access broker based in Algeria.
FBI warns of impersonators targeting scam victims.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warns that attackers are impersonating the Bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) to target victims of previous scams. The attackers use AI-generated videos of public figures, company executives, law enforcement, and other authority figures to lend legitimacy to the scams.
The FBI explains, "Complainants report [that] scammers use a variety of methods to initiate contact with victims. Some individuals received an email or a phone call, while others were approached, or observed an advertisement via social media or forums. Almost all complainants indicated the scammers claimed to have recovered the victim's lost funds or offered to assist in recovering funds. However, the claim is a ruse to revictimize those who have already lost money to scams."
