A human rights group based in the United States is encouraging Afghans to delete their data to prevent the Taliban from using it against them.

The Deobandi Islamist religious-political movement and military organization seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, two decades after they were removed from power by US-led forces.

With the official American mission to evacuate US citizens and Afghan allies from Afghanistan set to end tomorrow, Human Rights First is advising Afghans who remain in the country to erase their digital footprints.

The group published a Farsi-language version of its guide on how to delete digital history – produced last year to aid activists in Hong Kong – and shared advice on how to evade biometrics.

Welton Chang, chief technology officer at Human Rights First, told Reuters that in the most “dire circumstance,” the Taliban could use Afghans’ data to target those who had worked with the previous government, its security forces, and its foreign allies.

“We understand that the Taliban is now likely to have access to various biometric databases and equipment in Afghanistan,” the group wrote on Twitter on Monday.

“This technology is likely to include access to a database with fingerprints and iris scans and include facial recognition technology.”

On August 25, civil society groups, including Access Now, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Unwanted Witness and Electronic Frontier Foundation, issued an open statement calling for “an urgent safeguard of digital identity and biometric databases created in Afghanistan by development assistance missions, foreign governments previously aiding Afghan authorities, humanitarian actors, aid agencies, and the private sector vendors whose tools have been deployed to ensure they are not misused against people.”

According to the statement there are at minimum three digital identity systems known to have been in use recently in Afghanistan, including the e-Tazkira electronic national identity card system, and an Afghanistan Automated Biometric Identification System maintained by the Afghan Ministry of the Interior with support from the US government.

The third – the US military “Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment” – were seized by the Taliban earlier this month along with the biometric data it stores.

A lending-focused decentralized finance platform has lost millions of dollars’ worth of AMP tokens and crypto-currency after falling victim to a second flash loan attack.

In a flash loan attack, a cyber-thief takes out a loan that requires no collateral – a flash loan – and uses it to manipulate and exploit the markets for financial gain. The criminal uses the capital that they’ve borrowed and pays it back in the same transaction.  

Cyber-thieves drained DeFi protocols Cream Finance and Alpha Finance of funds totaling $37.5m back in February. Now Cream Finance has lost millions of AMP tokens and more than a thousand ether worth over $25m in a similar smart-contract exploit. 

The latest flash loan attack was first reported by PeckShield on social media on Monday. Researchers at the blockchain security firm became suspicious when they came across Ethereum (ETH) records revealing that at least $6m had been drained at 5:44 UTC.

The theft was confirmed by Cream Finance on Monday via a Tweet that read: “C.R.E.A.M. v1 market on Ethereum has suffered an exploit, resulting in a loss of 418,311,571 in AMP and 1,308.09 in ETH, by way of reentrancy on the AMP token contract.”

The platform went on to say that they had “stopped the exploit by pausing supply and borrow on AMP” and that “no other markets were affected.”

According to Coinspeaker, the flash loan attack occurred in the early morning of August 30. It may have involved two cyber-thieves and a total of seventeen transactions.

In May, DeFi yield farming aggregator and optimizer for Binance Smart Chan (BSC) and ETH, Pancakebunny, lost close to $3m in a flash loan attack. 

Announcing the attack on Twitter, the company said: “Attention Bunny Fam. Our project has suffered a flash loan attack from an outside exploiter. We will be posting a postmortem, in-depth analysis, but for the time being, we would like to update the community as to how this happened.”

Around a week later, a flash loan attack on Binance Smart Chain DeFi project Bogged Finance saw $3m exploited.

New positions are being created at the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) with the intention of helping prosecutors and attorneys handle emerging national security threats.

The positions are part of a new Cyber Fellowship program, announced by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco on Friday. The fellowship program will be coordinated by the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

In May, Monaco ordered a comprehensive cyber review of the Department of Justice with the purpose of developing actionable recommendations to improve and increase the department’s efforts against digital threats.

The suggestion to create a Cyber Fellowship program is one of the actionable recommendations to have emerged so far from this ongoing 120-day review.

Monaco said attorneys and prosecutors needed to have training if they were to stand a chance against future threat actors. 

“As we have witnessed this past year, cyber threats pose a significant and increasing risk to our national security, our economic security, and our personal security,” said Monaco. 

“We need to develop the next generation of prosecutors with the training and experience necessary to combat the next generation of cyber threats. This Fellowship gives attorneys a unique opportunity to gain the well-rounded experience they need to tackle the full range of those threats.”

Applications to the three-year Cyber Fellowship will be accepted through the Justice Department’s Honors Program application portal. To be accepted into the program, applicants must be able to secure a Top Secret security clearance.

The training will take place in the Washington, DC, area, with fellows’ being given the chance to handle a broad range of cyber cases taken on by the department so they can develop a deep understanding of how the DOJ responds to both critical and emerging threats.

In a statement released Friday, the DOJ said: “Fellows can expect to investigate and prosecute state-sponsored cyber threats; transnational criminal groups; infrastructure and ransomware attacks; and the use of cryptocurrency and money laundering to finance and profit from cyber-based crimes.”

Fellows will rotate through multiple department components, including the Criminal Division, the National Security Division and the US Attorneys’ Offices, while completing their training.