The Department of Justice unveiled charges against 300 defendants, alleging they misled patients into paying for, and sometimes receiving, medical care they did not need in a 14.6 billion healthcare fraud scheme. The Department of Justice's unveiling this week of sweeping charges against more than 300 defendants who allegedly defrauded Medicare and other taxpayer-funded programs came as part of the department's annual "takedown" event. The healthcare fraud takedowns have been a practice at the DOJ for more than a decade, but officials touted this one as the largest on record. It stood out not only for its size but also because it focused on transnational criminals and broached artificial intelligence. "This takedown represents the largest healthcare fraud takedown in American history," DOJ Criminal Division head Matthew Galeotti said.

A United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement database WIRED obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the agency has been leaning on a certain type of administrative subpoena to collect data from elementary schools, abortion clinics, and other vulnerable populations. And new details about a recent supply chain attack against the VoIP software 3CX indicate that attackers--likely hackers working for the North Korean government--were targeting cryptocurrency companies in the broad assault. We also looked at this week's move by Italy's data regulator, Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, to temporarily stop OpenAI from incorporating Italians' personal information into training data. In response, the company has currently stopped people in Italy from accessing its generative AI platform, ChatGPT. Meanwhile, we explored the dangerous missing security defense in the US agriculture sector and the nation's food supply chain, and we went deep on the saga of a small US gadget blog that found troubling flaws in foreign security cameras and took on the Chinese surveillance industry to get them fixed. In virtual private network news, the open source VPN Amnezia has been allowing users in Russia to stay one step ahead of the Kremlin's inveterate censorship and digital control.

At first blush, the idea of scanning images synced up to iCloud for child sexual abuse materials against the hash list of known CSAM images seems like a good idea. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse myself, I want tech companies to takes some initiative to deal with this issue. They also want to scan images on kids' phones using AI to see if kids are getting into any trouble with sending or receiving sexual material. Again, that sounds like a good thing. But, as the EFF points out, this all requires a backdoor, and backdoors, once created, almost never remain used for just one purpose.

The era of disinformation driven by artificial intelligence is here. For years, pundits have warned that the dawn of smarter software in the form of artificial intelligence would make it easier. Propaganda campaigns driven entirely by robotic trolls are still a long ways off but researchers at the disinformation-tracking firm found that a far-right media group used AI-generated profile pictures to build up a network of fake Facebook users and pages found in one of the largest troll takedowns in Facebook history. On Friday, Facebook pulled down a network of 700 pages with 55 million followers run by The Beauty of Life, a media outlet linked to the Epoch Media Group. Researchers at the disinformation-tracking groups Graphika and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found that "dozens" of the fake accounts found in the network taken down by Facebook had avatars that had been generated by AI software as part of a campaign Graphika dubbed Operation Fake Face Swarm.

Once upon a time, media content had a price. To consume it, you had to pay for it. Years passed, and with advances in technology along came digital piracy. The problem grew significantly with Internet making its way into everyone's home and then expanded exponentially when the same technology was made accessible from everyone's hands. Some media domains, such as live sports, only later began being exploited by modern day pirates.