An AI image creator startup left its database unsecured, exposing more than a million images and videos its users had created—the “overwhelming majority” of which depicted nudes and even nude images of children. A US inspector general report released its official determination that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put military personnel at risk through his negligence in the SignalGate scandal, but recommended only a compliance review and consideration of new regulations. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince told WIRED onstage at our Big Interview event in San Francisco this week that his company has blocked more than 400 billion AI bot requests for its customers since July 1.

A new New York law will require retailers to disclose if personal data collected about you results in algorithmic changes to their prices. And we profiled a new cellular carrier aiming to offer the closest thing possible to truly anonymous phone service—and its founder, Nicholas Merrill, who famously spent a decade-plus in court fighting an FBI surveillance order targeted at one of the customers of his internet service provider.

Putting a camera-enabled digital device in your toilet that uploads an analysis of your actual bodily waste to a corporation represents such a laughably bad idea that, 11 years ago, it was the subject of a parody infomercial. In 2025, it’s an actual product—and one whose privacy problems, despite the marketing copy of the company behind it, have turned out to be exactly as bad as any normal human might have imagined.

Security researcher Simon Fondrie-Teitler this week published a blog post revealing that the Dekota, a camera-packing smart device sold by Kohler, does not in fact use “end-to-end encryption” as it claimed. That term typically means that data is encrypted so that only user devices on either “end” of a conversation can decrypt the information therein, not the server that sits in between them and hosts that encrypted communication. But Fondrie-Teitler found that the Dekota only encrypts its data from the device to the server. In other words, according to the company’s definition of end-to-end encryption, one end is essentially—forgive us—your rear end, and the other is Kohler’s backend, where the images of its output are “decrypted and processed to provide our service,” as the company wrote in a statement to Fondrie-Teitler.

In response to his post pointing out that this is generally not what end-to-end encryption means, Kohler has removed all instances of that term from its descriptions of the Dekota.

The cyberespionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon represents one of the biggest counterintelligence debacles in modern US history. State-sponsored Chinese hackers infiltrated virtually every US telecom and gained access to the real-time calls and texts of Americans—including then presidential and vice-presidential candidates Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. But according to the Financial Times, the US government has declined to impose sanctions on China in response to that hacking spree amid the White House’s effort to reach a trade deal with China’s government. That decision has led to criticism that the administration is backing off key national security initiatives in an effort to accommodate Trump’s economic goals. But it’s worth noting that imposing sanctions in response to espionage has always been a controversial move, given that the United States no doubt carries out plenty of espionage-oriented hacking of its own across the world.

As 2025 draws to a close, the nation’s leading cyberdefense agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), still has no director. And the nominee to fill that position, once considered a shoo-in, now faces congressional hurdles that may have permanently tanked his chances to run the agency. Sean Plankey’s name was excluded from a Senate vote Thursday on a panel of appointments, suggesting his nomination may be “over,” according to CyberScoop. Plankey’s nomination had faced various opposition from senators on both sides of the aisle with a broad mix of demands: Florida’s Republican senator Rick Scott had placed a hold on his nomination due to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) terminating a Coast Guard contract with a company in his state, while North Carolina’s GOP senators opposed any new DHS nominees until disaster relief funding was allocated to their state. Democratic senator Ron Wyden, meanwhile, has demanded CISA publish a long-awaited report on telecom security prior to his appointment, which still has yet to be released.

The Chinese hacking campaign centered around the malware known as “Brickstorm” first came to light in September, when Google warned that the stealthy spy tool has been infecting dozens of victim organizations since 2022. Now CISA, the National Security Agency, and the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity jointly added to Google’s warnings this week in an advisory about how to spot the malware. They also cautioned that the hackers behind it appear to be positioned not only for espionage targeting US infrastructure but also potentially disruptive cyberattacks, too. Most disturbing, perhaps, is a particular data point from Google, measuring the average time until the Brickstorm breaches have been discovered in a victim’s network: 393 days.

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Leah Feiger: So it’s a really good question actually, and it’s one that I’ve thought about for quite some time. I think if it’s not annoying, I want to read this quote from Scott Kupor, the director of OPM and the former managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to be clear, just to remind everyone where people are coming from in this current administration. He posted this on X late last month, and this was part of Reuter’s reporting. So he posts, “The truth is, DOGE may not have centralized leadership under USDS anymore, but the principles of DOGE remain alive and well, deregulation, eliminating fraud, waste and abuse, reshaping the federal workforce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Which is the exact same, the thing that they’ve been saying this entire time, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, right? It’s like, oh no, no, well, DOGE doesn’t exactly exist anymore. There’s no Elon Musk character leading it, which Elon Musk himself said on the podcast with Joe Rogan last month as well. He’s like, “Yeah, once I left, they weren’t able to pick on anyone, but don’t worry, DOGE is still there.” So it feels wild to watch people fall for this and go like, “DOGE is gone now.” And I’m like, they’re literally telling us that it’s not.

Zoë Schiffer: I think one thing that does feel honestly true is that it is harder and harder to differentiate where DOGE stops and the Trump administration begins because they have infiltrated so many different parts of government and the DOGE ethos, what you’re talking about, deregulation, cost cuttings, zero-based budgeting, those have really become kind of table stakes for the admin, right?

Leah Feiger: I think that’s such a good point. And honestly, by the end of Elon Musk’s reign, something that kept coming up wasn’t necessarily that the Trump administration didn’t agree with DOGE’s ethos at all. It was that they didn’t really agree with how Musk was going about it. They didn’t like that he was stepping on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and having fights outside of the Oval Office. That was bad optics and that also wasn’t helping the Trump administration even look like they were on top of it.