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…