Plus: A porn-quitting app exposed the masturbation habits of hundreds of thousands of users, Russian hackers are trying to take over people's Signal accounts, and more. The United States and Israel's war with Iran has now been ongoing for two weeks, and the bombs continue to fall. But many of Iran's missiles are failing to hit their targets. WIRED's team in the Middle East detailed how countries in the Gulf region are intercepting these weapons . Of course, the international conflict is not just happening in the physical realm.

Pig butchering, the crypto-based scammer scourge that has pulled in an estimated 75 billion from victims globally, is spreading beyond its roots in Southeast Asia, with operations proliferating across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa. The UK's National Crime Agency disclosed new details about the identities of the Russian ransomware group known as Evil Corp--as well as the group's ties to Russian intelligence agencies and even its direct participation in espionage operations targeting NATO allies. A WIRED investigation revealed how car-mounted automatic license plate reader cameras are capturing far more than just license plates, including campaign yard signs, bumper stickers, and other politically sensitive text, all examples of how a system for tracking vehicles threatens to become a broader surveillance tool. In other news, ICE signed a 2 million contract with Paragon Solutions, a known vendor of spyware including the hacking tool Graphite. And the Pentagon is increasingly adopting handheld controllers for weapons systems in an effort provide more intuitive interfaces to soldiers who have grown up playing Xbox and PlayStation consoles.

Russian cyber-criminals have been observed on dark web forums trying to bypass OpenAI's API restrictions to gain access to the ChatGPT chatbot for nefarious purposes. Various individuals have been observed, for instance, discussing how to use stolen payment cards to pay for upgraded users on OpenAI (thus circumventing the limitations of free accounts). Others have created blog posts on how to bypass the geo controls of OpenAI, and others still have created tutorials explaining how to use semi-legal online SMS services to register to ChatGPT. "Generally, there are a lot of tutorials in Russian semi-legal online SMS services on how to use it to register to ChatGPT, and we have examples that it is already being used," wrote Check Point Research (CPR), which shared the findings with Infosecurity ahead of publication. "It is not extremely difficult to bypass OpenAI's restricting measures for specific countries to access ChatGPT," said Sergey Shykevich, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point Software Technologies.

An Associated Press investigation finds that Russian cyber spies exploiting a national vulnerability in cybersecurity are trying to break into the emails of scores of people working on military drone technology. An accused Russian hacker blamed for attacking LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring is finally facing American prosecutors after a lengthy extradition fight in the Czech Republic. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin is due to appear in U.S. federal court in California on Thursday for a detention hearing. It's unclear whether Nikulin has any connection to the Russian troll farm the Internet Research Agency, which is widely blamed by American authorities for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. But only two days after Nikulin's arrest, American officials for the first time publicly warned that the Russian government was directing efforts to influence the election by hacking and releasing private information.

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday showed no inclination toward sanctioning Russia, despite President Barack Obama's push for the country to take steps against Russia over its alleged interference in the election that saw Trump emerge victorious. "I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on," Trump told reporters at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. "We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I'm not sure we have the kind of security that we need," he added.

WASHINGTON – CIA Director John Brennan warned on Sunday that Russia has "exceptionally capable and sophisticated" computer capabilities and that the U.S. must be on guard. When asked in a television interview whether Russia is trying to manipulate the American presidential election, Brennan didn't say. But he noted that the FBI is investigating the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, and he cited Moscow's aggressive intelligence collection and its focus on high-tech snooping. "I think that we have to be very, very wary of what the Russians might be trying to do in terms of collecting information in a cyber realm, as well as what they might want to do with it," he told CBS' "Face the Nation" on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. On the terrorism threat, Brennan said the U.S. government is much better now at sharing information.