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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department’s civil rights branch is losing nearly half its staff in the Trump administration’s layoffs, effectively gutting an office that already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the nation.Among a total of more than 1,300 layoffs announced Tuesday were roughly 240 in the department’s Office for Civil Rights, according to a list obtained and verified by The Associated Press. Seven of the civil rights agency’s 12 regional offices were entirely laid off, including busy hubs in New York, Chicago and Dallas. Despite assurances that the department’s work will continue…

Steel and aluminum are ubiquitous in Americans’ lives. A stainless steel refrigerator holds aluminum soda cans. A stainless steel drum tumbles inside an aluminum washing machine. They’re the metals used in cars and airplanes, phones and frying pans, skyscrapers and zippers.That’s why President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports — which went into effect Wednesday — could have widespread impact on manufacturers and consumers.Here are some of the industries and products that rely on aluminum and steel: ConstructionThe construction industry uses about one-third of all U.S. steel shipments, more than any other industry, according to the…

Strong and smart security operations teams are at the heart of any cybersecurity strategy, and today a startup that builds tooling to help keep them on their toes is announcing some funding on the back of a lot of growth. Pentera — which has built a system that launches simulations of network attacks to stress test software and human response — is announcing $60 million in funding, a Series D that values the Boston-based, Tel Aviv-founded startup at over $1 billion.  The funding will be used for M&A and to continue developing product, CEO Amitai Ratzon said in an interview.…

Elliot Wolf, the executive producer and son of “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, is entering a new venture aimed at engaging true crime fans.  He, along with co-founders Andrew Adashek (CEO) and Noah Rosenberg (CTO), are developing Wolf Games, a new startup that leverages AI to generate daily murder mystery games. The company also announced on Wednesday its $4 million seed funding round. Wolf Games’ flagship title is called Public Eye and capitalizes on the growing interest among true crime enthusiasts who often love to play detective.  Public Eye is set in a dystopian future where crime rates have…

ICS/OT security firm Dragos on Wednesday published a case study describing an intrusion attributed to the notorious Chinese threat actor Volt Typhoon into the US electric grid. The target was Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments (LELWD), a small public power utility in Massachusetts that serves Littleton and Boxborough. The utility had been in the process of implementing Dragos operational technology (OT) security solutions when the intrusion was detected, which led to an expedited deployment. The case study published by Dragos focuses on the benefits of its solutions, including how they can be used to detect such intrusions and protect…

Fortinet on Tuesday informed customers about more than a dozen vulnerabilities found and patched in its products.  The company has published 17 new advisories describing 18 vulnerabilities affecting FortiOS, FortiProxy, FortiPAM, FortiSRA, FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer-BigData, FortiSandbox, FortiNDR, FortiWeb, FortiSIEM and FortiADC. High-severity vulnerabilities include CVE-2023-48790, an XSS flaw in FortiNDR that can be exploited by unauthenticated hackers for arbitrary code or command execution.  In FortiOS, FortiProxy, FortiPAM, FortiSRA and FortiWeb, the company patched CVE-2024-45325, which allows a privileged attacker to execute code or commands via specially crafted requests. Technical information describing this flaw appears to be publicly available.  Another high-severity…

The Trump administration has cut millions of dollars in federal funding from two cybersecurity initiatives, including one dedicated to helping state and local election officials. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, has ended about $10 million in annual funding to the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, a CISA spokesperson said in an email Monday. It’s the latest move by Trump administration officials to rein in the federal government’s role in election security, which has prompted concerns about an erosion of guardrails to prevent foreign meddling in U.S. elections. CISA announced a few weeks ago that it…

Meta is facing an AI copyright lawsuit in France that’s been brought by authors and publishers who are accusing it of economic “parasitism,” Reuters reports. The French litigation was filed in a Paris court this week by the National Publishing Union (SNE), the National Union of Authors and Composers (SNAC), and the Society of People of Letters (SGDL), which are accusing Meta of unlawfully training its AI models on their protected content. The case is thought to be the first such action against an AI giant in the country. Meta is facing similar litigation in the U.S. in relation to…

A Windows zero-day vulnerability addressed by Microsoft with its March 2025 Patch Tuesday updates has been exploited in the wild since March 2023, ESET says. The issue, tracked as CVE-2025-24983 (CVSS score of 7.0), is described as a use-after-free bug in the Win32 kernel subsystem that could allow attackers to elevate privileges to System. “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to win a race condition. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges,” Microsoft notes on its advisory. On Tuesday, the tech giant rolled out patches for CVE-2025-24983 and five other security defects marked as…

The contentious arrest of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, who played a key role in organising the pro-Palestine protests at the Ivy League campus last year, has sparked outrage and raised concerns about free speech protections in the United States. Khalil, a 29-year-old Palestinian student, was arrested from his university residence in New York’s upper Manhattan over the weekend by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who said they would revoke his permanent residency – popularly known as a green card – at the behest of the Department of State. Though no federal charges have been pressed against Khalil. “This…