09.26.25 Security News Bites
President Signs EO Raising Fee on H-1B Visas to $100,000
All those foreign citizens that Silicon Valley hires (thousands or more for each large company). The NEW fee to file a visa application went from $215 to $100,000. It is designed to discourage the abuse of the program and only use it for exceptionally skilled people. What will happen now – unknown, but I will make some predictions. 1. Lawsuits. That is easy to predict. 2. Hire the same people but locate them in some other country. Zero benefit to the US workforce. 3. Use the H-1B program in a limited way. 4. Maybe, hire a few more Americans. Maybe. Does this help achieve his goal? Maybe a little bit, but likely not much. Credit: NBC
Congress Does What it Does Best: Kick the Can Down the Road
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expires next April. Republicans don’t want to have to deal with it before the midterm elections as either renewing or not renewing will piss some people off. As a reminder, Section 702 allows the government to do bulk data surveillance without a warrant and if they happen to wiretap Americans without a warrant, oh, well. You can see this might upset some people. On the other hand, the feds say it helps them catch terrorists. Senator Cotton is shopping a bill that would do what Congress does best – kick the expiration down the road 18 months (till after the midterms) and form a committee. Just what we need – another committee. Credit: The Record
OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank Plan 5 AI Data Centers Worth $5 Billion
The new datacenters will be in Shackelford County, TX, Dona Ana County, NM, Lordstown, OH, Milam County, TX and another undisclosed location. Nvidia will be providing the GPUs. This is part of the president’s AI push. Where the power and water comes from to run these data centers is not clear. Credit: Cybernews
The Record Keeps Getting Broken – Not for the Better
Cloudflare says it stopped an attack going after a single IP address that threw 22 terabits of traffic at that IP. The previous record was 11.5 terabits. While the attack only lasted 40 seconds (probably a test), that certainly tested Cloudflare’s capability (which is why it was likely a test). The “load” came from more that 400,000 compromised devices attached to 14 different ISPs (technically 14 ASNs). Without Cloudflare, the target would have been toast. Credit: Security Week
Trump Derails His Own AI Plan
In July the administration released its own plan for dominating the AI marketplace. The plan had some good stuff in it like expanding domestic infrastructure and encouraging other countries to adopt our AI models. But then the president started shooting himself in important body parts. He reversed his ban on Nvidia selling hundreds of thousands of AI chips to China. He is allowing AI data centers to be built in UAE and Saudi Arabia and allowing them to export hundreds of thousands of our most powerful AI chips. The move to allow China to buy Nvidia chips really bailed them out because China’s Huawei, it is predicted will only be able to produce 200,000 of their AI chips this year. The new rule allows them to supercharge their AI efforts by combining Nvidia chips with Huawei chips. It seems like the strategy is not much of a strategy. Credit: MSN
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