After months of delays, the US House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend a controversial warrantless wiretap program for two years. Known as Section 702, the program authorizes the US government to collect the communications of foreigners overseas. But this collection also includes reams of communications from US citizens, which are stored for years and can later be warrantlessly accessed by the FBI, which has heavily abused the program. An amendment that would require investigators to obtain such a warrant failed to pass. A group of US lawmakers on Sunday unveiled a proposal that they hope will become the country's first nationwide privacy law.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) both recently disclosed that they suffered corporate email breaches at the hands of Russia's "Midnight Blizzard" hackers. The group, which is tied to the Kremlin's SVR foreign intelligence, is specifically linked to SVR's APT 29 Cozy Bear, the gang that meddled in the United States 2016 presidential election, has conducted aggressive government and corporate espionage around the world for years, and was behind the infamous 2021 SolarWinds supply chain attack. While both HP and Microsoft's breaches came to light within days of each other, the situation mainly illustrates the ongoing reality of Midnight Blizzard's international espionage activities and the lengths it will go to to find weaknesses in organizations' digital defenses. "We shouldn't be surprised that Russian intelligence-backed threat actors, and SVR in particular, are targeting tech companies like Microsoft and HPE. With organizations that size, it would be a much bigger surprise to learn they weren't," says Jake Williams, a former US National Security Agency hacker and current faculty member at the Institute for Applied Network Security.