China is being roundly mocked over its decision to sanction the children of lawmakers who have spoken out over its aggression towards Taiwan and human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Five British politicians and their families were hit with Chinese sanctions last year, which bars them from visiting Hong Kong, Macau, and the mainland. Dozens of European parliament MEPs have since been added to the Chinese sanctions list, along with US senators and members of the Taiwanese legislature. The joke doing the rounds at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) summit at the senate in Washington DC last week was that…

CHINA has been accused by the United Nations of large scale imprisonment, systematic rape, enforced sterilisation, and torture against the Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities. An explosive report by Michael Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, details credible evidence that China’s government is committing serious “crimes against humanity.” Among the UN’s findings is that a “pattern of large-scale arbitrary detention” occurred in Xinjiang’s detention centres from 2017 to 2019. The 48-page report also reveals policies supporting forced labour. China slammed the report as “manufactured,” claiming it is completely illegal and invalid, insisting it serves as a political tool for…

We all knew that this sad day was inevitable but still held eternal hope that we would somehow find ourselves not having to utter those four sober and solemn words: ‘The Queen is dead.’ That day has come, and we have spoken. Her Majesty was, without a shadow of doubt, a truly exceptional woman. She was a much-loved Monarch, undeniably the world’s pre-eminent Statesperson, the standard bearer for the United Kingdom, the Head of our Armed Forces, and the indomitable and steadfast head of our Royal family. Her incredible legacy and duty to public service will live on and on;…

In mid-August, China’s angry response to US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei was to fire live missiles over Taiwan and into its territorial waters and hold military exercises closer than ever before to the island. Tension between China and Taiwan, or between China and the USA over Taiwan, is not new. The latest incident has already been dubbed ‘the fourth Taiwan Strait crisis’ after previous events in 1995-6, 1958 and 1954, but this time the Chinese intimidation occurred closer than ever before to Taiwan, with the attendant risk that a miscalculation would spark full scale conflict.…

Lord Richard Dannatt, former head of the British Army, writes exclusively for National Security News, urging King Charles III to “take on the same mantle of inscrutability” as his beloved late mother, and serve Britain and the armed forces in the 21st century. Much has already been written and said about the special relationship that members of the British Armed Forces have with their Sovereign. Until last Thursday, every recruit to the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force swore an Oath of Allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. I swore that Oath on 28th August…

by Mark Toth and Jon Sweet. In February, no one predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine would result in Moscow becoming militarily dependent on rogue states – including Iran and North Korea – operating, in effect, as ‘Arsenals of Evil.’ Not General Mark Milley, the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who testified before Congress that Kyiv “could fall within 72 hours.” Nor western think-tanks or analysts – including the Rand Corporation and Tor Bukkvoll, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, who speculated it could only be “days or weeks”…

Dennis Rice, reporting from the Senate, Washington DC. China is facing an extraordinary double whammy of sanctions over its aggression towards Taiwan and what one of the Ukraine’s most powerful politicians termed as its “hypocritical” stance over the former Russian republic. After addressing a historic meeting of representatives from pacific nations at the Senate, organised by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), Aleksandr Merezjko, Chair of the Ukraine’s influential Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke exclusively to NSN, saying he and his fellow Ukrainians felt “utterly betrayed” by their former close trading partner. Merezjko earlier told a packed press conference at the…

Her Majesty the Queen, Britain’s longest serving monarch, passed away on Thursday afternoon, aged 96, at Balmoral. Senior members of the Royal family rushed to her bedside at the Scottish estate, where she had earlier been placed “under medical supervision.” The Prince of Wales will now lead the nation in mourning, and will be known as King Charles III, and also take over as the head of state for 14 Commonwealth realms. Buckingham Palace released a statement on his behalf, which read: “The death of my beloved Mother, Her Majesty The Queen, is a moment of the greatest sadness for…

The Taliban is on the brink of securing a multi-billion-dollar deal to import oil and gas from Russia, according to Afghan officials. Bilateral trade between the two once warring nations is currently worth US$200 million annually, but this agreement would eclipse that figure many times over. Talks taking place in Moscow are said to be in the final stages and would see the murderous regime granted access to gasoline, benzene, and wheat, currently denied to it because of international trade embargoes. Russia, for its part, would have a new source of revenue for its war in Ukraine, weakening attempts by…

North Korean hackers posing as foreign students are weaponising the computer faculties of Indian universities to carry out crimes around the world, according to a shocking new study. Cyber security firm Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, identified the hackers as state-sponsored cyberterrorists who have been flooding into the Indian mainland since 2017. They arrive under the guise of being foreign students wanting to study abroad, but instead use the country’s universities to engage in ransomware and other forms of online extortion. Carrying out destructive cyber-attacks overseas in countries like India has become an integral part of North Korea’s broad national and…

Dr Cenk Tamer, a research fellow who specialises in Asia-Pacific affairs, analyses the possible outcome for global security from either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak as Britain’s new prime minister. While nowhere near the scale of “when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold,” the impact of either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak being installed as the new prime minister next week will be profound. In Liz Truss we have a politician who, by common consent, will be the most conservative prime minister in decades, stretching back to Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady herself. China may have…

TWO Russian spies have reportedly been unearthed working at the heart of Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs. The pair are both senior civil servants under the country’s current economy minister Robert Habeck, having also worked under his predecessor Peter Altmaier. They aroused suspicion by “deviating wildly from the minister’s line” when filing internal reports concerning sensitive subjects such as Nord Stream 2, a 745-mile-long natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. The US$11 billion project was mothballed shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. German chancellor Olaf Scholz suspended its certification in response…

A decorated former Homeland Security agent recruited serving colleagues to access secure government databases so he could help China track down and harass US-based dissidents, according to court papers. Derrick Taylor, 60, who is now working as a private investigator, has been charged for his part in what the FBI alleged was a scheme to stalk and harass activists living abroad. Taylor obtained personally identifiable information of the dissidents, including dates of birth, passport numbers, flight records, and even photographs taken by customs when they arrived in the US, which he then passed on to his Chinese handler(s). In particular,…

THE FBI is probing startling claims that an alleged Ukrainian master con-woman posed as a member of a rich European banking dynasty to gain repeated access to the Mar-a-Lago estate of former President Donald Trump. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Organised Crime Corruption and Reporting Project (OCCRP), fake heiress ‘Anna de Rothschild’ interacted with former President Trump, Senator Lindsay Graham, and former Governor of Missouri Eric Greitens. Her real name, however, is the somewhat less glamorous Inna Yaschchynshyn, and she is the Russian-speaking daughter of a truck driver from Illinois. It is unclear when she came to the…

OLGA Kolobova will go down as a hero in her native Russia as the superspy who used the cover of a widow socialite to dupe NATO officials in Naples. Using the fictitious name Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera – Maria Adela for short – she embarked on a series of liaisons with NATO officers, all the while feeding intel back to her GRU bosses in Moscow. Last night however, attention was shifting away from her decade-long deception to whether the ruthless Russian military intelligence spying machine overseeing the op killed off her husband to help create her cover. According to the…

Stolen missile data, which purports to include blueprints of weapons used by NATO allies in the Russia-Ukraine war, is being offered for sale on Russian and English hacker forums, it has emerged. A cybercriminal group, using the pseudonym of Adrastea, is pricing the haul at 15 bitcoins (equivalent to £273,000) for 80GB of stolen intelligence and has allegedly been met by one unknown buyer so far. Adrastea claimed to have found “critical vulnerabilities in the network infrastructure” of Franco-British MBDA, the world’s second largest missile maker. The classified military documents were hacked from a compromised hard drive belonging to a…

Accessing EU correspondence, targeting US tech firms operating in the South, and infiltrating UK companies in Northern Ireland and mainland Great Britain, former military intelligence officer Philip Ingram explains why Russian spies have been in the news in Ireland, and how it has long been in the sights of Vladimir Putin and his predecessors. An anonymous security source made headlines across Ireland last month when they were quoted as saying there could be as many as 40 undercover Russian spies hiding in the general population. Not long before this revelation it was announced that four senior Russian embassy staff were…

Social media trolling, which “frequently evolve (s) into threats of death, rape, or assault”, is being deployed by China to suppress reports of atrocities against Uyghurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region, according to a newly released US Department of State report. The campaigns, which feature on and offline harassment, are designed to prevent victims from sharing their stories or frighten them into silence. There is no mercy in the sponsored attacks by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which include cyber attacks, and cyber bullying or harassment through doxing – a term coined for when an individual’s personal…

by Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth, Guest Authors General George Patton once famously stated that, “Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his military leadership, valiantly, are channeling Patton’s pugnacious esprit de corps – and, to date, Kyiv’s stirring defensive attacks on Russian forces are pushing the Kremlin militarily closer to a culminating defeat in Ukraine. Defensive attacks, however, do not win defensive wars. Not in the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939. Nor at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Not in Ukraine in 2022. Wars are only won…

Russia’s FSB is facing mounting criticism over its claim that a Ukrainian woman assassinated the daughter of a prominent Putin ally, with critics insisting it should look inside its own borders first. Speculation is now rife that the real architects of last Saturday’s car bombing are either the security services themselves – the victim, Darya Dugina, and her father Alexander had been criticising how long the war was taking in the Ukraine – or a new anti-Vladimir Putin group which has been formed in Russia called the National Republican Army (NRA). The FSB boldly announced it had solved the murder…

RANSOMWARE attacks are expanding at such an exponential rate that they will cost the global economy ten trillion dollars ($10 trillion) by 2025, according to an influential new study. The figure came from researchers at the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), which has been monitoring cyber-crime across the world since 2004. The Athens-headquartered organisation arrived at its projection after analysing 623 ransomware incidents which took place between May 2021 and June 2022. And ENISA’s “Threat landscape for Ransomware Attacks” makes chilling reading. It reveals how ransomware has now become a franchise commodity where a cyber-criminal with even basic computer…

Cyber experts fear Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin has become the victim of a carefully orchestrated smear campaign, just as she has was gaining support on her call for an EU-wide ban on visas for Russian tourists. Tell-tale signs of a potential misinformation operation were the apparent hacking of a private Instagram account linked to one of her close friends, from which two videos clips were stolen. Despite being recorded on the same night several weeks ago – the first in a private home and the second in the VIP room of a Helsinki nightclub – they were leaked separately…

Pro-Russian hackers Killnet have again reminded the world that the war with Ukraine is not just being fought on the ground. This week, Killnet blitzed a wave of public and private websites in Estonia in the biggest cyber-attack of its kind against the Baltic state since 2007. The official website of Estonian President Alar Karis was among 200 targeted by the pro-Putin cyber criminals using IP addresses which have all been traced back to Russia. But despite sending more than forty million DDoS queries to the president’s website, the hackers failed to bring it down. Among those also subjected to…

Economists are warning of a global hi-tech doomsday scenario in which Chinese moves to annex or erect a trade blockade around Taiwan spark inflation-busting price rises for mobile phones and other hi-tech “must haves.” Their concern stems from parallels between this potential conflict and the one in the Ukraine, namely the rest of the world’s over-reliance on one of countries involved for a product it badly needs. But whereas it has been Russia for gas (before the war the EU was importing 40% of all its natural gas supplies from the Soviet Union) it is Taiwan for electronic chips –…