Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A wall of white granite towered above a small team of engineers gathered in a California quarry. The ancient, ultra-hard material before them was, to most things, completely impermeable.Then the rock-melting tunnel-boring machine (TBR) roared to life.”It’s kind of like igniting a rocket,” says Troy Helming, founder and chief executive of EarthGrid, as he describes the initially loud process of lighting up three plasma torches at the front of his company’s machine.Those torches, set within a spinning head, soon quieten down as they produce a stream of super-heated plasma reaching 27,000C – significantly hotter than the surface of the Sun.During…

By Sila Ozeren Hacioglu, Security Research Engineer at Picus Security. A prevention score tells you what a control recognizes. It doesn’t tell you what that control stops. Now in its fourth year, the Blue Report 2026 from Picus Labs measures how enterprise prevention and detection actually perform in production, across more than 338 million attack simulations run in real customer environments from January through June, 2026. The headline is a genuine recovery, with a caveat: yes, prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69%, back to its 2024 peak. But that number is a stack-wide average, and it masks a softer,…

Bitcoin wallet manufacturer BitBox has told users it was able to fix “severe vulnerabilities” with its hardware wallet’s firmware, and reassured users that no funds were taken. Yet it still urged users to upgrade carefully.  Writing in a blog post Tuesday, the Swiss company said that one of the vulnerabilities would have allowed an attacker to manipulate users into installing firmware that could lead a criminal to steal funds.  Users should update firmware through the official BitBoxApp, ideally by clicking the in-app update prompt rather than searching for it, BitBox said.  We just released the Dixence security update.During our internal…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief. The highlights this week: China’s leadership wraps up its summer retreat, U.S.-China tensions simmer ahead of September summit, and a low-budget Chinese film becomes a surprise blockbuster. CCP Leadership Goes on Summer Retreat China’s leadership appears to have wrapped up its annual two-week retreat in Beidaihe, a seaside resort town about 180 miles east of Beijing. Each year, the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gather for informal meetings to discuss policy and personnel issues behind closed doors. As far back as the Qing dynasty, leaders governed from Beidaihe in the summer for…

Bunia, Democratic Republic of the Congo – When three members of his hospital team died within days of treating the same patient, Dr Richard Lokudu suspected Ebola had been spreading before authorities detected the outbreak.The patient had arrived at Mongbwalu General Hospital in Ituri Province for surgery in early April, weeks before the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) officially declared an Ebola outbreak.“Before the outbreak was declared, we discovered at the hospital that there was a patient who had been admitted on 2 April and who was due to undergo surgery performed by our team on 7 April,” Lokudu…

Putin and Russia-friendly politicians have long sought to portray Zelenskyy’s rule as illegitimate. The Ukrainian president was elected by a landslide in 2019 but has not faced a public vote since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine more than four years ago. Although Zelenskyy has faced pressure from international leaders to hold elections — including U.S. President Donald Trump — he has steadfastly maintained that they cannot take place during wartime. In February, he offered elections in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin, however, kept the war going. The Ukrainian leader has been a figurehead for his country since the full-scale invasion,…

I’ve always thought you can tell something about a country by what it learns to walk past. And, somewhere along the way, we’ve got used to seeing people sleeping rough on our streets.We see people bedded down in doorways and sat outside stations, carrying their lives in rucksacks and with sleeping bags on their backs. And I think most people have the same reaction: this isn’t right; it shouldn’t be happening here. But we’ve lived with it for so long that something that used to shock us now feels like part of the scenery.That’s not on the public. It’s on…

Andy Burnham has urged local leaders to offer all rough sleepers in England a route off the streets by Christmas, as he pledges another £100m to end street homelessness.Arguing in the Guardian that rough sleeping has become so common it now “feels like part of the scenery”, Burnham promised he would mount a Covid-style campaign to get everyone off the streets this winter.The announcement solidifies tackling homelessness as a central policy for Burnham’s government, and gives voters a measure by which to judge his success – although without a concrete target for ministers to hit.Homelessness campaigners welcomed the move, but…

The Justice Department has launched a probe into Andreessen Horowitz regarding the firm’s partners serving on the boards of competing companies, Bloomberg reported. The nearly year-long investigation focuses specifically on the firm’s board seats at Databricks, which is valued at $190 billion, and Fivetran, which combined with dbt Labs in June. The firm’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz, serves on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado serves on the board of Fivetran. Several VCs told TechCrunch they were surprised by news of the probe. Databricks and Fivetran are competitors now, but the two companies weren’t rivals when a16z invested in…

A custom Java web shell likely linked to the Clop ransomware gang was designed specifically for PTC Windchill and FlexPLM servers, with built-in features to decrypt credentials, enumerate file repositories, and steal files. Cybersecurity company ReliaQuest analyzed the web shell after it is believed to have been deployed in recent data theft attacks exploiting CVE-2026-12569, a critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting PTC Windchill. ReliaQuest says the implant is not a generic web shell repurposed for the attacks, but was instead built with detailed knowledge of Windchill’s internal APIs, database schema, keystore, and file-vault structure. “This appears to be an…