The Pentagon is informing more than 2 million current and former military members that their personnel records storing sensitive personal information were stolen over a monthslong compromise of one of its networks. The breach is the second one in recent months to expose sensitive government information.

The records, according to one notification letter posted to Reddit, included Social Security numbers, names, addresses, sex, race, and occupational specialty. This last category could be particularly valuable to foreign adversaries because it could help their intelligence agencies in identifying high-value military personnel. Starting last October, hackers gained access to a system operated by the Defense Manpower Data Center, which collates Department of Defense personnel records. The Pentagon says that the breach compromised the records of 2.8 million living individuals.

A potential boon

The incident is the second time a major network breach in recent months has exposed sensitive US government personnel records that criminal groups or foreign adversaries could use. Last month, the ransomware group ShinyHunters claimed it hacked into FBI systems and stole records of thousands of the agency’s current or former employees. Reuters reported the job titles in the records included ones related to investigating China or Russia.

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For a few years now, the PS5 hacking community has been chipping away at various exploits that let users fully jailbreak their locked-down console. For the most part, though, those exploits have only worked with years-old versions of the PS5's frequently updated firmware, making them less than useful for many everyday users.

That changed Tuesday with the release of the new Relapse exploit, which works with any PS5 up to firmware version 13.6 (released in July). That means jailbreaking is now possible on any PS5 that was last updated before the mid-September release of firmware version 14.00.00.

The so-called Relapse exploit makes use of a long-known WebKit vulnerability in the PS5's hard-to-access web browser, escalating from there to gain write access to the PS5 kernel and install an ELF loader to streamline the running of arbitrary code. The new method is also a lot more efficient than previous PS5 jailbreak exploits, which could hang the system for 50 minutes per attempt.

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