As the standoff between the United States government and Minnesota continues this week over immigration enforcement operations that have essentially occupied the Twin Cities and other parts of the state, a federal judge delayed a decision this week and ordered a new briefing on whether the Department of Homeland Security is using armed raids to pressure Minnesota into abandoning its sanctuary policies for immigrants.
Meanwhile, minutes after a federal immigration officer shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last Saturday, Trump administration officials and right-wing influencers had already mounted a smear campaign, calling Pretti a “terrorist” and a “lunatic.”
As part of its surveillance dragnet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been using an AI-powered Palantir system since last spring to summarize tips sent to its tip line, according to a newly released Homeland Security document. DHS immigration agents have also been using the now notorious face recognition app Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of countless people in the US—including many citizens. And a new ICE filing provides insights on how commercial tools, including for ad tech and big data analysis, are increasingly being considered by the government for law enforcement and surveillance. And an active military officer broke down federal immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis and around the US for WIRED, concluding that ICE is masquerading as a military force, but actually uses immature tactics that would get real soldiers killed.
WIRED published extensive inside details this week of the inner workings of a scam compound in the Golden Triangle region of Laos after a human trafficking victim calling himself Red Bull communicated with a WIRED reporter for months and leaked a massive trove of internal documents from the compound where he was being held. Crucially, WIRED also chronicled his own experiences as a forced laborer in the compound and his attempts to escape.
Deepfake “nudify” technology and tools that produce sexual deepfakes are getting increasingly sophisticated, capable, and easy to access, posing more and more risk for millions of people who are abused with the technology. Plus, research this week found that an AI stuffed animal toy from Bondu had its web console almost entirely unprotected, exposing 50,000 logs of chats with kids to anyone with a Gmail account.
And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Epstein Had a “Personal Hacker,” Informant Claims
According to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday, an informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker.” The document, first reported by TechCrunch, was released as part of a large trove of material the DOJ is legally required to release related to the investigation into the late sex offender. The document does not provide an identity for the alleged hacker, but it includes some details: They were allegedly born in Italy in the southern region of Calabria, and their hacking focused on discovering vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. The informant told the FBI that the hacker “was very good at finding vulnerabilities.”
The hacker allegedly developed offensive hacking tools including exploits for unknown and/or unpatched vulnerabilities and allegedly sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the UK, and the US. The informant even reported to the FBI that the hacker sold an exploit to Hezbollah and received “a trunk of cash” in payment. It is unclear whether the informant’s account is accurate or whether the FBI verified the report.
Viral AI Agent OpenClaw Makes Security Experts Sweat
The viral AI assistant OpenClaw—which was previously called Clawdbot and then, briefly, Moltbot—has taken Silicon Valley by storm this week. Technologists are letting the assistant control their digital lives: connecting it to online accounts and letting it complete tasks for them. The assistant, as WIRED reported, runs on a personal computer, connects to other AI models, and can be given permission to access your Gmail, Amazon, and scores of other accounts. “I could basically automate anything. It was magical,” one entrepreneur told WIRED.
They haven’t been the only ones intrigued by the capable AI assistant. OpenClaw’s creators say more than 2 million people have visited the project over the last week. However, its agentic abilities come with potential security and privacy trade-offs—starting with the need to provide access to online accounts—that likely make it impractical for many people to operate securely. As OpenClaw has grown in popularity, security researchers have identified “hundreds” of instances where users have exposed their systems to the web, the Register reported. Several included no authentication and exposed full access to the users’ system.
While the misconfigurations leading to those exposures have now reportedly been fixed, various other security concerns exist and demonstrate how increasingly autonomous AI systems can become a security nightmare. To complete tasks for you, these types of agents often require access to online accounts, data, and your login credentials. That could involve breaking down traditional security measures. “They need to read your files, access your credentials, execute commands, and interact with external services,” security researcher Jamieson O’Reilly told the Register. “The value proposition requires punching holes through every boundary we spent decades building.”
China Executes 11 Scam Compound Bosses
Scam compounds across Southeast Asia, including in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, have stolen billions from people around the world. They operate using a forced-labor workforce with fraud profits often going back to Chinese organized crime groups. This week, Chinese authorities said they executed 11 members of the Ming crime family who were previously found guilty of running scam compounds in Myanmar and had been sentenced for a range of crimes including fraud and homicide. Another 20 members of the Ming family were handed jail sentences in September last year, the BBC reported. In the eight years between 2015 and 2023, the family reportedly made $1.4 billion from its illegal scam and gambling operations. Five members of another Chinese mafia group, the Bai family, have also been sentenced to death over their role in running scamming operations.
Federal Contractor’s Son Accused of Stealing $40 Million in Seized Crypto
Cryptocurrency offers many ways for young people to disappoint their parents. But one crypto crime story that emerged this week likely led to a particularly awkward father-son talk. When a young hacker online began flaunting $23 million in crypto holdings, independent crypto investigator ZachXBT traced the funds to a collection of $90 million in thefts from the US government and other victims in 2024 and 2025. According to ZachXBT, $40 million of those crypto holdings were taken from wallets storing funds seized by the government, and held by a contractor called CMDSS that acts as a custodian of seized crypto on behalf of the US Marshals Service. ZachXBT alleges, based on his crypto tracing investigation, that the culprit behind the theft was none other than John Daghita, the son of CMDSS’s president Dean Daghita. Just how the younger Daghita would have exploited his father’s access to the funds to steal them remains unclear, but Coindesk reports that the US Marshal’s Service is now investigating ZachXBT’s claims.
Poland Attributes Cyberattack on Its Grid to Russia’s Berserk Bear Group
Five years ago, WIRED described a group of Russian hackers known as Dragonfly or Berserk Bear with an analogy to “Chekhov’s gun,” the metaphorical rifle hanging over the fireplace in act one that has to go off sometime before the play is over. The Russian hacker group had repeatedly gained access to power grids and other critical infrastructure systems around the world—including in the US—but never actually pulled the trigger to cause a blackout. More than half a decade later, Chekhov’s gun may have finally gone off.
The Polish government this week released a technical report about a series of cyberattacks targeting its energy systems, including one combined heat and power plant and multiple solar and wind farms. The attackers used “wiper” malware designed to delete data on the target networks and also attempted to reach into industrial control systems to disrupt the facilities’ operations, though their attacks didn’t actually cause any power outages. Despite the cybersecurity firms ESET and Dragos blaming Russia’s Sandworm hacker group—the usual suspect—for these attacks, the Polish government instead pinned the attacks on Berserk Bear, which is believed to work on behalf of Russia’s FSB domestic intelligence and security agency. If that attribution is correct, it may signal a new era where the restraint of FSB’s grid hackers has come to an end.
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