1. The Wall Street Journal:
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is tightening his grip on the Communist Party with relentless purges and new strictures on discipline, as Beijing gears up for a key personnel shuffle next year that seems set to extend his rule.
Xi’s crackdown on corruption and disloyalty has pruned the party elite so much that the governing Central Committee was reduced this week to its lowest attendance at a policy-setting meeting since the Mao Zedong era.
About a quarter of the 376 officials that were on the Central Committee when its current term started four years ago didn’t attend the elite body’s four-day plenum in Beijing that ended Thursday. Many of the absentees have been felled in Xi’s campaign to cleanse the party.
Those who did show up approved a strategic plan for perpetuating Xi’s efforts to impose “full and rigorous party self-governance,” as Beijing describes its high-pressure enforcement of disciplinary rules and demands for absolute commitment to Xi. (Source: wsj.com)
2. Binance has suspended all deposits and withdrawals after the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange fell victim to an industry-record heist. The exchange put the “estimated total impact” of the hack at about $6.3 billion, adding that it had frozen some $3 billion of affected assets. An “initial investigation” suggested hackers had been able to compromise an engineer’s laptop and withdraw funds from the platform, Binance said, adding that it was working with law enforcement. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs linked the hack with a North Korean unit known as TraderTraitor, saying that the sums involved would make it “the largest crypto theft on record”. (Source: ft.com)
3. Earlier this year, sources tell WIRED, a contractor caused a security incident at the Department of Defense by connecting a secure centralized system used by multiple agencies to their personal account for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. It appears that the agent used by the contractor, who is employed by global consulting firm Accenture, then sent information about the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high-risk third-party website. The centralized system contains controlled unclassified information (CUI), which is considered sensitive and not to be released to the public without review. CUI can include information about critical infrastructure, nuclear submarine propulsion, and vulnerabilities to chemical and biological terrorism. Additionally, security experts say, access to the system could allow for the exploitation of even more sensitive ones. (Source: wired.com)
