Infosec in brief On August 29, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency fired its CISO, CIO, and 22 other staff for incompetence but insisted it wasn't in response to an online attack. New material suggests FEMA's claim may be false. According to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, an audit found serious security problems at FEMA and revealed that "entrenched bureaucrats" had lied about the agency's security preparedness. "These deep-state individuals were more interested in covering up their failures than in protecting the Homeland and American citizens' personal data, so I terminated them immediately," she said. Crucially, Noem said no data had been lost but it appears that's not the case. According to a presentation passed to Nextgov, attackers broke into FEMA in June using stolen credentials to access a Citrix system. The attackers then uploaded data from FEMA's Region 6 servers, covering Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. According to the documents, FEMA didn't discover the attack until July. By July, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was telling agencies to patch against so-called CitrixBleed 2 attacks that exploited a CVSS 9.3 bug in Netscaler's ADC and Gateway platforms that would allow miscreants to steal sensitive data such as session tokens and bypass multi-factor authentication. There were warnings that the bug was being exploited back in June, but it seems they weren't heeded. Now, it appears, FEMA's IT department is getting a compl...
Nvidia warns its GPUs – even Blackwells – need protection against Rowhammer attacks
The Register
·Iain Thomson
·Published Jul 13, 2025
·Updated
Affected Software
1 affected component
Citrix Citrix system
Frequently Asked Questions
1
What does Nvidia warn about regarding its GPUs?
Nvidia warns that its GPUs, including the Blackwell architecture, require protection against Rowhammer attacks.
2
What incident occurred with FEMA's staff recently?
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency terminated its CISO, CIO, and 22 other employees for incompetence.
3
Was FEMA's staff termination related to an online attack?
FEMA insists that the staff terminations were not a response to any online attack.
4
What is a Rowhammer attack?
A Rowhammer attack is a type of security exploit that manipulates memory access patterns to induce bit flips in adjacent memory rows.
5
Which affected product is mentioned in the article?
The article mentions the Citrix system as an affected product related to security concerns.