What We Are Not Told

Hi Global Recap readers,

While writing today’s first story, I kept circling the same question:

• Is the West simply better at hiding its tracks?

• Are Western agencies less active in offensive cyber ops?

• Or do adversaries of the West avoid publicizing Western breaches for strategic or political reasons?

But as with anything involving national security, the public only ever sees the shadows and not the full picture. 👇️ 

🇨🇦🇺🇸 CANADA & U.S.
Chinese Brickstorm Malware

U.S. and Canadian cyber agencies say Chinese-linked hackers have planted a long-term backdoor dubbed "Brickstorm" inside government and tech networks, embedding themselves for disruption and sabotage down the line.

Remember the backdoor found in Chinese-made electric buses in Norway that allowed potential remote access? There's a clear pattern here.

• Operation. The advisory comes from the:

  • U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

  • National Security Agency

  • Canadian Centre for Cyber Security

• Malware. Brickstorm is a custom backdoor aimed at VMware vSphere environments that manage virtual machines inside many corporate and government data centers. Once in, it can steal credentials and eventually give attackers full control of targeted systems, not just a peek at the logs.

• Persistence. Investigators analyzed eight Brickstorm samples from different victims and found that they prefer maintaining access for well over a year in at least one network and using that time to quietly move around and deepen their foothold rather than trigger obvious alarms. In at least one case, the intruders quietly sat in a victim’s systems from April 2024 through September 3, 2025, watching and harvesting access.

🇭🇳 HONDURAS
Trump’s Election Interference?

Honduran presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla says President Trump's surprise endorsement of rival Nasry Asfura in late November has sliced into his lead in a knife-edge vote count.

• Numbers. With about 87% of ballots counted:

• Intervention Nasralla says he had been comfortably ahead until Trump publicly backed Asfura, branding Nasralla a "borderline communist," a label he rejects as a center-right candidate.

• Blackout. Around 3:00 a.m. Thursday, Nasralla's team reportedly saw the official election results website go dark, then come back with the trend reversed, which he describes as "suspicious algorithmic tinkering," even while admitting he has no hard proof.

• Ballots. Roughly 17% of ballots are flagged for "inconsistencies" and must be reviewed by Honduras's electoral authority, which is urging calm while it works through technical problems in the rapid count system and its public results portal.

• Oversight. The Organization of American States has not reported manipulation of vote tallies, and outside experts currently blame the mess up to a fragile, poorly designed electoral system rather than organized fraud.

🇮🇱 ISRAEL
Israel-Backed Militia
Boss Killed

Yasser Abu Shabab, a Bedouin clan leader who fronted an Israel-backed militia in Israeli-held parts of Rafah, was recently killed in disputed circumstances.

• Figure. Abu Shabab led a Rafah-based Bedouin militia known locally as the Popular Forces that presented itself as an anti-Hamas security body, escorting aid and policing areas under Israeli military control in the southern Gaza Strip.

  • Publicly, he and his spokesmen denied that the group was armed, directed, or funded by Israel,

  • However, Israeli and international reporting has tied the militia to Israeli support, including arms and coordination.

• Silence. As of Thursday afternoon, Israeli officials had issued no formal public statement on the circumstances of his death. The militia, however, released its own statement on social media, saying he was shot while trying to mediate a dispute involving a powerful Rafah family and denying that Hamas was responsible.

• Versions. Accounts of how he died diverge sharply:

  • Clan: Several Israeli and Western outlets, citing local and Israeli security sources, describe a violent confrontation in Rafah involving rival families and factions that escalated into gunfire.

  • Internal: Later Israeli media reports, quoting defense officials, say he was caught in an internal dispute inside his own militia, linked to anger over its cooperation with Israel.

  • Ambush: Some Palestinian resistance-aligned accounts frame the incident as a planned ambush by armed factions targeting an Israel-aligned auxiliary force, rather than a purely internal feud.

• Claims. Israeli media first claimed he was rushed to Soroka hospital in southern Israel, but the hospital denies ever seeing him, and several accounts now say he died of his wounds in Gaza.

• Backfire. Abu Shabab’s killing is not just another casualty of the Gaza–Israel war. Israeli PM Netanyahu has publicly acknowledged that Israel has "activated" and supplied weapons to select anti-Hamas clans in Gaza, including forces like Abu Shabab’s—raising questions about whether these "lightly controlled auxiliaries" are stabilizing local order or simply creating new armed feuds.

🇪🇺 EUROPE
Germany Deploys Jets

Germany has confirmed a fresh deployment of Eurofighter jets to Poland and Romania as NATO quietly thickens its eastern flank against Russia.

• Deployment. The German air force is sending five Eurofighter jets to northern Poland, close to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, with 150 personnel stationed at Malbork until March 2026 to police NATO airspace.

• Spread. Additional German jets are rotating into Romania, reinforcing the alliance’s southeastern air defenses and giving NATO faster reaction times over the Black Sea and along the Ukrainian border.

• Trigger. Berlin is responding to Russian aircraft probes in September, when Polish F-16s and Dutch F-35s, supported by Italian early warning aircraft and a NATO tanker, shot down Russian drones in allied airspace in the first use of force by NATO aircraft since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

• Escalation. Romania’s defense ministry also revealed that it scrambled two fighter jets after drones crossed its airspace last week.

• Interesting. Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had been serving a 45-year sentence for creating "a cocaine superhighway" in the U.S., just walked out of a West Virginia prison after receiving a pardon from President Trump. Naturally, Honduran officials blasted the pardon as foreign interference. Connected?