Voting is open for the 2025 CyberScoop 50 awards!

Click here!

Reporter

Derek B. Johnson

CyberScoop

Derek B. Johnson is a reporter at CyberScoop, where his beat includes cybersecurity, elections and the federal government. Prior to that, he has provided award-winning coverage of cybersecurity news across the public and private sectors for various publications since 2017. Derek has a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from Hofstra University in New York and a master’s degree in public policy from George Mason University in Virginia.

Articles by Author

A worker walks inside of an uranium conversion facility in Iran on March 30, 2005. Stuxnet, a piece of malware reportedly developed by Israel and the U.S. to destroy equipment in the facilities like the one pictured, will be the subject of a forthcoming Congressional hearing. (Photo by Getty Images)

House hearing will use Stuxnet to search for novel ways to confront OT cyberthreats

Cybersecurity

WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 17: U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) walks to the Senate Chambers U.S. Capitol on June 17, 2025 in Washington, DC. Padilla has returned to the U.S. Capitol with a bigger security detail and is set to make a speech on the Senate Floor, where he will discuss his removal from a news conference being held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after trying to ask a question. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Senate Democrats seek answers on Trump overhaul of immigrant database to find noncitizen voters

Cybersecurity

WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 15: Former U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on July 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. Waltz, who was nominated by U.S. President Donald Trump to be the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, previously served as the National Security Adviser. He resigned from that position after facing scrutiny for his involvement in creating a Signal chat that mistakenly included a journalist. This chat discussed sensitive plans for a military strike on Houthi targets in Yemen. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Waltz brushes off SignalGate questions, points finger at CISA

Cybersecurity

This photograph taken on January 13, 2025 in Toulouse shows screens displaying the logo of Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, the American company specializing in artificial intelligence and it’s founder South African businessman Elon Musk. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP) (Photo by LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images)

Why skipping security prompting on Grok’s newest model is a huge mistake

AI

XBOW’s AI bug-hunter landed a big funding round while dominating HackerOne’s leaderboards. But even its founder says it hasn’t fully replaced the need for humans to be involved in the bug-hunting process. (Image source: Getty)

Is XBOW’s success the beginning of the end of human-led bug hunting? Not yet.

Cybersecurity

A registered nurse tends to a Covid-19 patient in the Intensive Care Unit at Providence St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, California on January 11, 2021. – As Covid-19 tears through southern California, small hospitals in rural towns like Apple Valley have been overwhelmed, with coronavirus patients crammed into hallways, makeshift ICU beds and even the pediatric ward. When AFP visited St Mary hospital in this desert town of 70,000 people this week, palliative care supervisor Kari McGuire said her team were seeing “astronomical numbers of patients who are dying” from the novel coronavirus. (Photo by ARIANA DREHSLER / AFP) (Photo by ARIANA DREHSLER/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump bill will have major impact on health care cybersecurity, experts warn Congress

Government

A screenshot of a video posted by a player on X showing their PC being taken over by hackers on Call of Duty: World War 2. (Image source: X.com)

Call of Duty takes PC game offline after multiple reports of RCE attacks on players

Cybercrime

Cloudflare headquarters in San Francisco. (Getty Images)

Cloudflare rolls out ‘pay-per-crawl’ feature to constrain AI’s limitless hunger for data

Technology

This photograph shows screens displaying the logo of “CrowdStrike” cybersecurity technology company in Paris on July 19, 2024, amid massive global IT outage. (Photo by Stefano RELLANDINI / AFP)

Microsoft security updates address CrowdStrike crash, kill ‘Blue Screen of Death’

Technology