An Alleged Russian Spy Was Busted Trying to Intern at The Hague

Dutch intelligence agency AVID claimed this week that “Viktor Muller Ferreira” is just a cover story and false identity for Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, an alleged Russian intelligence officer belonging to the GRU military unit. AVID said it caught Cherkasov applying to be an intern at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, which is investigating potential war crimes in Russia’s wars against Ukraine and Georgia.

As well as stopping Cherkasov from obtaining the position at the ICC and sending him back to Brazil, the Dutch intelligence agency also published his long and detailed cover story. The four-page story, often known as a covert intelligence officer’s “legend,” details the background of the “Ferreira” identity. “The threat posed by this intelligence officer is deemed potentially very high,” AVID said in a statement.

Since outing “Ferreira,” more clues about his undercover life have emerged. Social media profiles belonging to “Ferreira” have been discovered by the investigative unit Bellingcat, as well as a blog and online CV. He also studied at Trinity College Dublin and Johns Hopkins University. Eugene Finkel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins, who says he taught “Ferreira,” tweeted: “I wrote him a letter. A strong one, in fact. Yes, me. I wrote a reference letter for a GRU officer. I will never get over this fact. I hate everything about GRU, him, this story. I am so glad he was exposed.”

For years it’s been impossible to move backups of WhatsApp chats between Android and iOS, and vice versa. In August last year, WhatsApp announced it was starting to roll out the ability for people to move their data between iPhones and Android devices. Now, this week, the Meta-owned company says backups will work in the other direction too—from Android to iOS.

Processors from Intel and AMD are vulnerable to a new side-channel attack called Hertzbleed. The attack could allow the theft of cryptographic keys and data, as reported by BleepingComputer and DarkReading. Hertzbleed works by exploiting a common power-saving feature in chips—called dynamic frequency scaling (DVFS)—that could allow an attacker to steal data. Frequency changes…