🧵on Hydra, the largest Russian dark web marketplace, recently shut down by the German government and U.S. law enforcement. Here are some things you haven't heard.

With the midterms approaching, anyone monitoring threats for candidates or elected officials will see an uptick in online chatter. There will be a lot more information to review over the next several days, which means a ton of noise to filter through, plus disinformation and bots. Given the polarized political climate with this election cycle, there is a heightened chance for disruption at polling stations, widespread protesting, and potential physical violence. Whether you work in threat monitoring for political candidates or not, if you plan to share information about the midterms over the next several days, verify it before posting on social media. Advances in AI, combined with bad actors manipulating media, have made it so much easier to manufacture convincing but completely false narratives. Expect to see more misleading content and false claims than usual. Just because something looks good, seems credible, or goes viral doesn't mean it's accurate or real.

A ‘RED RISING’ movie is in the works at Paramount • Francis Lawrence (‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’) set to direct • The story follows a young miner living on Mars who attempts to bring down the color-coded class system (Source: hollywoodreporter.com/movies…)

If you're a crypto trader that’s worried about your security, here's what you should do NOW: Stop posting photos or references to your where you live. You’re not on MTV cribs, so stop doing house tours of your own house. You don’t want to provide stalkers and thugs with the exact layout and entry points of the place you live. Stop sharing your location in real time. If you want to take sick trips, do it! Just hit post once you leave. Lock down apps that are leaking your location and other sensitive info that can be exploited. You need to take privacy settings seriously. Every app, every platform, make things as private as you can. This doesn’t mean you have to stop posting, vlogging and tweeting. It means you need to do it with privacy in mind. You’re not only putting yourself and your wealth at risk, you’re also putting the lives of your loved ones on the line. Is it worth it? Last thing (for now), your phone number and email address are like a key that can be used to connect your entire life together. Guard them closely. Not everyone needs your private personal number. Share it sparingly. You don’t need to become a hermit, you just need to manage your digital footprint well or have a team that can help you. We’re already working with your mutuals so if you need to step your game up, reach out!

Many such vulnerabilities 👇🏼

We’re not prepared for drone warfare on our shores and we need to be.

OSINT is the process of collecting publicly available information and analyzing it for key insights to support intelligence requirements. It is not about going on Telegram, finding a video, posting it on X, and then adding your commentary. That's research and editorial work, not open-source intelligence. The buzzword of OSINT makes people think it is just research, which it is not. OSINT requires more than identifying a source or uncovering a piece of information. It involves assessing credibility, verifying claims, establishing context, identifying relationships and patterns, and analyzing findings against a defined intelligence requirement. Research is an essential component of OSINT, but research alone does not make something intelligence.

STATE OF EXILE. 2027. Some secrets won’t stay buried. For James Reece, those secrets will kill… Pre-order today in hardcover, eBook, and audio. officialjackcarr.com/books/s…

Here's a link to a great cause. Gray Man fan Michelle Percopo is a nurse who is heading back to Ukraine soon with Global Care Force as a medical volunteer. The people in Ukraine need our help and the brave volunteers who risk everything to go help them need medical equipment so they can do their jobs. globalcareforce.managedmissi…

When the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, these men were spread across the world. One was on a flight from Tashkent to Heathrow. Another was in a courtroom thousands of miles from the U.S. finalizing the adoption of his son. A third was underwater off Key West as part of his Special Forces diving course. A fourth was at CIA headquarters, furious that he was evacuated. “Why are we leaving when we can stay and do something?” he asked. When he finally got home, he told his wife: “This is war.” Just over a month later, they became the CIA’s Team Alpha - the first Americans behind enemy lines after 9/11. Here they are at K2 air base in Uzbekistan on October 16, 2001, in front of one of the Black Hawks that flew them into Afghanistan that night. Back row, left to right: Alex Hernandez, Scott Spellmeyer, J. R. Seeger, Mark Rausenberger, David Tyson, Mike Spann. Front row: Andy Hartsog, Justin Sapp (Green Beret captain, attached). Stenciled on the side of the 160th SOAR helicopter was a phrase adapted from the 1987 movie The Untouchables, about Al Capone: “Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight.” Team Alpha’s writ was to extend over Samangan, Balkh, Faryab, Jowzjan, and Sar-e Pol, five of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. This was a land area of over 30,000 square miles—slightly larger than the state of South Carolina. The men of Team Alpha embodied America’s desire to strike back after 9/11. On September 20, President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress, described the United States as “a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom,” declaring: “And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment.” One of these eight never came back and is now at rest in Arlington National Cemetery. Team Alpha’s story - a tale of American heroes and how the U.S. won the Afghanistan War in a few weeks before taking 20 years to lose it - is revealed in my book “First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11.” Never forget.

It happened with commercial airliners, not guns or bombs. 2,977 lives gone, children growing up without dads and moms. A rescue dog barked next to a first responder, and he froze. Because it was from the ash that clung to his clothes. A CIA officer deployed with a small team to an inhospitable land. His name was Mike Spann, and he would become the first American killed in combat in the war in Afghanistan. An Afghan teenage boy who had been told the Americans were evil. Eventually, he would fight alongside them against the Taliban and help free his people. So many lives changed, so many left mourning, All because of what happened that September morning.

Fraudsters use urgency as a weapon. Don't fall for the urgency trap. Verify what you're being told, especially if you're asked to urgently send money or provide access to one of your accounts.

ONE. MORE. DAY. Matthew Redd is back for his most dangerous mission yet. Two books ago, at the end of OUT FOR BLOOD, Redd told former CIA operator Aaron Decker that he "owed him one." Now, Decker cashes in that favor when a team of killers breaks into his home in the middle of the night, putting his family in danger. Aaron wipes out the team who came for him, but they're just the first wave, and if he's going to survive, he needs backup. Fast. Thankfully for him, when going to war, few men are better to have in your corner than Redd, everyone's favorite neighborhood-friendly six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-sixty-five-pound former Marine Raider. Sludgehameer (Redd) meets Scapal (Decker) in this epic team-up that'll test both men like never before. Get TARGET DOWN, available tomorrow! Amazon: amzn.to/4ygHs26 B&N: barnesandnoble.com/w/target-… Audible: audible.com/pd/Target-Down-A… BAM: booksamillion.com/p/Target-D… Baker Book House: bakerbookhouse.com/products/… Christian Book: christianbook.com/target-dow… Mardel: mardel.com/christian-booksto… Target: target.com/p/target-down-by-…

Watch the trailer for FORTITUDE, starring Nicolas Cage, Ben Kingsley, Matthew Goode, Ed Skrein, Michael Sheen, and Jordi Mollà

Almost everyone has heard of the American POWs in the Hanoi Hilton, the pilots shot down over the North. Almost no one has heard of Nick Rowe, who spent five years not in a prison but in a bamboo cage in a swamp, and got out by his own hand. His story is one of the most incredible of the entire war. Nick Rowe was a young Special Forces lieutenant, one of the early Green Berets, and he was captured way back in October 1963, before most Americans even knew there was a war. On a patrol deep in the Mekong Delta, his position was overrun and he and two other Americans were taken by the Viet Cong. They marched him into the U Minh Forest, a vast, flooded mangrove swamp, and there they kept him. Not in a building. In a cage made of saplings, roughly three feet by four feet by six feet, sitting in the muck of the jungle. He would be there, in cages like that, for more than five years, 1,903 days. To survive, Rowe played a long, desperate game of deception. He knew that if the Viet Cong ever learned he was a Green Beret trained in intelligence and unconventional warfare, they would squeeze him hard or kill him. So he made up an entire false identity. He told them he was just a drafted civilian engineer, a low level nobody who built roads and bridges and knew nothing worth asking about, and he kept that lie alive under interrogation for years, inventing endless technical nonsense to explain himself. He tried to escape three separate times over those years. Three times he was hunted down in the swamp, dragged back, and punished. Then his cover collapsed, and it came from home. Antiwar activists in the United States, trying to help, published lists of American prisoners, and Rowe's real name and real background reached his captors. The Viet Cong realized the engineer they had been holding was actually a Special Forces officer who had been lying to them for years. They sentenced him to death. On the last day of 1968, they marched Nick Rowe out into the swamp to execute him. And then, by pure chance, a flight of American helicopters came clattering over the trees on an unrelated mission. The guards scattered for cover from the aircraft. Rowe saw his one instant, clubbed down the guard nearest him, and bolted into an open clearing, waving his arms at the sky. A door gunner on one of the helicopters looked down and saw a wild figure in black pajamas and nearly opened fire, taking him for a Viet Cong. What saved Nick Rowe's life was his beard, a thick beard no Vietnamese guerrilla would have. The crew realized he was an American, dropped down, and pulled him aboard. After five years in a cage, he flew out of that swamp a free man. He was one of only a tiny handful of Americans, around 34 in the whole war, to escape enemy captivity. And he did not just go home and rest. Nick Rowe took everything he had learned in those cages and built it into a school. In 1981 he founded the Army's SERE course, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, the brutal training that teaches soldiers how to survive exactly what he had survived. To this day, American special operators learn to endure captivity from a program built by a man who lived it. The end of his story is as unlikely as the rest. In 1989, serving as a military adviser in the Philippines, Nick Rowe was assassinated in his car by a communist hit squad on a Manila street. A man who beat five years in a jungle cage, only to be killed decades later by the same ideology, half a world away. Most people have never heard his name. They should.

Breaking News: At least 8 people died in Nepal and hundreds were feared missing after floods swept down a river valley. Follow live updates. nyti.ms/3UUzlcV

'Robocop' TV Series Casts Dan Stevens in Lead Role variety.com/2026/tv/news/rob…

Can’t wait.

#Lanterns premieres this Sunday at 9pm ET on @hbomax.

A cyberattack targeting more than 30 municipal water systems across Minnesota has all the hallmarks of Iran-backed hackers, a senior law enforcement official says. nbcnews.com/tech/security/mi…

William Shatner and his daughter, Melanie Shatner Gretsch, are opening up about a terrifying journey they shared together — battling stage 4 cancer at the same time. cbsn.ws/4c7tPcJ