Report: Iran-linked hackers shut down UK power plant

Report: Iran-linked hackers shut down UK power plant

Israel National News

A British power plant was forced offline for four days in what The Telegraph reported on Saturday was an unprecedented cyberattack linked to Iran.

The incident is believed to be the first known case in which hackers affiliated with the Iranian regime successfully shut down a power facility in Britain. Officials reportedly consider it the most successful cyberattack of its kind against UK energy infrastructure.

The attack occurred last month, around the same time as a series of cyberattacks against water infrastructure in the United States that affected 12 states and raised concerns at the White House, according to The Telegraph.

British officials have declined to identify the affected facility, citing security considerations. The plant is understood to have been relatively small, however, meaning the disruption did not threaten Britain's overall electricity supply or energy production. Staff worked for four days to restore the facility.

The government subsequently briefed the chief executives of power companies and contacted businesses with guidance and instructions on how to respond. The incident was also reported to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the public-facing cybersecurity arm of GCHQ.

The NCSC declined to comment specifically on the incident. British and US intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned that hackers linked to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea regularly target critical infrastructure and government systems.

Previous cyberattacks have disrupted NHS systems, schools and industrial operations, including manufacturing lines at Jaguar Land Rover. Foreign hackers have also stolen customer data from retailers and voter information from the Electoral Commission.

Despite those incidents, there had previously been no known case of a cyberattack bringing a British power plant to a standstill.

The attack does not appear to have been intended to cause widespread harm to the public and reportedly went largely unnoticed, according to The Telegraph. One possibility being examined is that the operation was intended to demonstrate that hackers connected to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps could penetrate British systems and disable sensitive infrastructure.

Britain has dozens of smaller power stations connected to the national grid. Many are gas-fired facilities that operate only intermittently, such as when low wind speeds reduce electricity generation. A prolonged shutdown at one such plant would not affect the wider grid, while some industrial sites and hospitals maintain independent generators.

The NCSC advised British organizations in March to reassess their cybersecurity measures amid the conflict. Its chief executive, Richard Horne, said in June that the agency had dealt with more than 200 attacks targeting critical national infrastructure during the previous year.

A New Front in the North: Israel Confronts a Nuclear Threat From the Terrorist Turned Diplomat

Israel Confronts a Nuclear Threat From the Terrorist Turned Diplomat

Valerie Locke

had found “a few tons of nuclear material that could be put to bad use” at an undisclosed site dating to the Assad era, which Syria’s transitional government voluntarily reported to the agency on July 17. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said the material, several tons of natural uranium metal along with quantities of graphite, would remain in Syrian custody under IAEA safeguards rather than be removed from the country, and asserted Syria’s “sovereign and legal right” to pursue a peaceful nuclear program. Al-Shaibani did not raise the possibility of the material’s removal at any point in his remarks. Separately, Axios reported that the United States, Israel, and Syria reached a quiet agreement to deal with nuclear material, including yellowcake, that Israel says the Assad regime stored at “Site 99,” material officials say cannot fuel a nuclear weapon but could be used in a radiological dispersal device, a so-called dirty bomb. Israeli forces reportedly bombed the site’s entrances shortly after Assad’s fall to block access to it, and Israeli officials told Axios they threatened further strikes and grew concerned that Turkey was helping Syria’s new government reach the material, before Washington brought the IAEA in to broker a resolution. That material, too, has not yet been removed from the country as of this week, according to US officials.

Israel now faces the prospect of a new and unfamiliar danger on its northern border: several tons of nuclear material remaining inside Syria, in the custody of a government whose president has declared his intention to pursue a nuclear program, and who Washington itself was hunting under a ten-million-dollar bounty less than a decade ago. 

This week’s disclosure that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors found several tons of undeclared nuclear material inside Syria, and the resolution of a months-long, secret standoff between Israel, the United States, and Damascus over a second stockpile at a site known as “Site 99,” together mark the reemergence of exactly the kind of unconventional threat Israel has spent nearly two decades trying to ensure never took root on its border again, this time under a leader whose credentials for running the country holding it remain, at best, freshly laundered.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told reporters in Damascus this week that inspectors had found “a few tons of nuclear material that could be put to bad use” at an undisclosed site dating to the Assad era, which Syria’s transitional government voluntarily reported to the agency on July 17. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said the material, several tons of natural uranium metal along with quantities of graphite, would remain in Syrian custody under IAEA safeguards rather than be removed from the country, and asserted Syria’s “sovereign and legal right” to pursue a peaceful nuclear program. Al-Shaibani did not raise the possibility of the material’s removal at any point in his remarks.

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“Rogue AI Agents” Aren’t Rogue, They’re Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology

“Rogue AI Agents” Aren’t Rogue, They’re Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology

Charles Hugh Smith

Add all this up and what we’re hyper-hurriedly “manufacturing” is an automated army of self-cloaking digital sociopaths.

Since the status quo is characterized by self-serving PR, misdirection and delusions, it shouldn’t surprise us that “rogue AI agents” aren’t actually rogue, they’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do, which stripped of PR, hype and misdirection, is do whatever it takes to earn the reward, period.

The latest design development is AI models that “reason” rather than merely regurgitate human-generated text. While the grandiose hype claims that AI companies are “manufacturing cognition,” it would be far more accurate to stipulate that:

1. There are many levels of cognition, and AI’s current forms (Large Language Model / LLMs, agents and “reasoning”), are extremely limited forms that are best understood as brute-force mimicries of human cognition.

2. The AI “reasoning” form of cognition is rogue by design, and can best be understood as sociopathic by its very design and nature.

Like sociopaths, AI “reasoning” models recognize but are not restricted by guardrails or ethical/moral constraints. Guardrails / “sandbox” boundaries and ethical/moral constraints are all viewed by both AI “reasoning” models and human sociopaths as obstacles to bypass or overcome.

So what AI companies are “manufacturing” isn’t cognition, it’s unrestrained and unrestrainable agentic sociopathologies. Consider these links as useful context. The first two are from my recent post Hell Hath No Fury Like a Rogue AI Agent Scorned.

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As debt surpasses $40 trillion, the bill for Washington spending comes due

As debt surpasses $40 trillion, the bill for Washington spending comes due

David J. Lynch

Steve Thompson

Year after year, the federal government has spent more than it collected in taxes. Each annual shortfall increased the national debt, slowly at first and then by leaps, defying warnings of an inevitable reckoning.

Now, the reckoning may be at hand.

This week’s bond market sell-off brought government borrowing costs to their highest level in almost two decades and prompted an extraordinary Treasury Department intervention.

On Friday, the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond topped 5.27 percent, up slightly from one day earlier, a sign that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s plan to calm markets is not working. After decades of free spending, Washington may soon be compelled to make some long-deferred, and politically unpalatable, choices that will leave few Americans unscathed.

“This is what the bond market is trying to signal: We’re going to have to make choices that hurt growth,” said Adam Abbas, who manages $4 billion in bonds for the Oakmark Funds. “We have two levers to do that: raise taxes or cut spending. Either option is not politically popular, and it will never be popular, but at some point we have to address the problem.”

The problem is a $40 trillion national debt, along with crisis-level annual budget deficits that require significant new borrowing.

When the Treasury Department woos investors for its bonds, it competes with other governments and corporations — notably the hyperscalers building the nation’s artificial intelligence infrastructure. All that competition for capital means investors can demand higher returns, or yields, from those that want their money.

Fiscal watchdogs have warned for decades that rising U.S. debt will eventually trigger a crisis. As borrowing costs rise, debt becomes more expensive in what can become a vicious cycle, said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“What I worry about is we’re on the verge of sort of a real debt spiral, which happens when your interest [bill] is growing faster than your economy,” Goldwein said.

Fast-rising bond yields or interest rates often reverberate through the financial system in unexpected ways, exposing costly vulnerabilities. In 2023, for example, Silicon Valley Bank failed after rising bond yields blew a hole in its balance sheet.

Today, potential weak spots in the financial system include some of the nation’s largest hedge funds, where borrowed money used for investments, or leverage, is “near all-time highs,” according to the minutes of the Fed’s July 28-29 meeting. Likewise, traditionally staid life insurers are holding riskier assets that would be difficult to unload quickly if they needed to raise cash during a crisis.

Financial setbacks also could occur overseas in places like France or Japan, said Rebecca Patterson, former chief investment strategist for Bridgewater Associates and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

“When we’re thinking about what could cause a crisis in the U.S., don’t just think about what’s happening in the U.S. Think about other markets that could be vulnerable,” she said.

The U.S. now spends more than $1 trillion each year paying interest on the national credit card, more than it devotes to Medicare, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. As recently as 2010, the interest bill was less than one-fifth that amount.

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As Europe Becomes Increasingly Militarized, Norway Expands New Arctic Brigade, Strengthening NATO’s Northern Border

As Europe Becomes Increasingly Militarized, Norway Expands New Arctic Brigade, Strengthening NATO’s Northern Border

Paul Serran

The high northern regions of the planet are now undergoing the same militarization push that is affecting the whole European continent.

And beyond the tensions over control of Greenland, there’s also the overhyped yet very real Russian and Chinese threat as new maritime trade routes open in the Arctic.

On Thursday (20), Norway announced the expansion of its newly created military brigade headquartered in the Arctic.

Reuters reported:

“The NATO ‌member established the Finnmark Brigade last year, forming the country’s second brigade and the first one set up since the end of the Cold War. Both brigades have their headquarters ​in the Arctic.

Norway, like the other Nordic countries, has steeply increased its military ​budget in response to the Ukraine war and U.S. President Donald ⁠Trump’s push to get European allies to contribute more to defense.”

Norway has more than doubled its defense spending to 3,17% of GDP, from just 1,5% back in 2014.

“One of the Finnmark Brigade’s main duties until now was ​to surveil and patrol the 198-km (123-mile) border Norway shares with Russia.

It is being ​expanded to include an artillery battalion, air defense battery and communications company that will enable it ‌to carry ⁠out certain actions, such as firing at targets on land some 40 km away or coordinating firing with planes and ships from both Norwegian and NATO forces.”

The Barents Observer reported:

“The NASAMS and NOMADS missile systems might become part of the Finnmark Brigade, the commander of a newly established combat air defense unit confirmed to the National Defense Magazine (Forsvarets Forum).

According to Commander Brede Brandskognes, new air defense systems will be incorporated into the unit in 2027. ‘The new combat air defense battery in the Finnmark Brigade is set to have a layered air defense system within the next few years’, Brandskognes explained to the National Defense Magazine.

The innermost layer of defense will be based on Piorun MANPADS, followed by C-UAS (an anti-drone system) and armoured air defense vehicles. Finally, there will be the medium-range missiles.”