Faith-Based Daily Awareness Post 19 February 2026

These updates are shared to help raise the situational awareness of Faith-Based organizations to best defend against and mitigate the impacts from all-hazards threats including physical security, cybersecurity, and natural disasters.

US Church faces these areas of critical concern on religious liberty, says bishops’ report

A new report from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops identifies several “critical concern” areas affecting religious liberty in the United States, including rising political and anti-religious violence, conditions placed on federal grants to faith organizations, and tensions between immigration enforcement and access to worship. The bishops point to vandalism and attacks on churches, broader increases in antisemitic incidents, and highly polarized political violence as indicators of growing hostility toward religious expression. The report also highlights fears among immigrants attending services after policy changes expanded enforcement houses of worship, in some cases prompting bishops to excuse attendance obligations. Additional concerns include school choice debates, participation of religious groups in government programs, and ongoing disputes over gender-identity policies. Despite these worries, the bishops noted some positive developments, such as government initiatives they believe strengthen religious freedom protections and certain regulatory changes tied to court rulings.

Analyst Comments: The report illustrates how religious liberty discussions are increasingly overlapping with broader social stability and security dynamics rather than remaining purely legal or constitutional debates. From a risk perspective, the combination of political polarization, targeted violence, and immigration-related fear environments can materially affect attendance patterns, community cohesion, and information-sharing trust within faith communities. Security planners should interpret this less as a single-issue policy debate and more as an indicator of elevated tension across multiple vectors: ideological violence, perception-driven deterrence from gathering, and reputational disputes tied to government relationships. As a result, faith-based organizations may face both physical-security pressures and community-confidence challenges simultaneously, requiring coordinated messaging, protective measures, and engagement strategies rather than purely legal advocacy.

A Vast Trove of Exposed Social Security Numbers May Put Millions at Risk of Identity Theft

A February 2026 WIRED report describes researchers discovering a massive publicly accessible database containing billions of records, including roughly 2.7 billion entries with Social Security numbers and about 3 billion email-password combinations. The dataset appears to be an aggregation of older breaches potentially including information from past incidents like the 2024 National Public Data breach and was hosted online without clear ownership before being taken down after notification. Researchers found that even older data remains dangerous because people reuse credentials and Social Security numbers rarely change, making them especially valuable for identity theft. In a sample reviewed, about one in four SSNs appeared valid, meaning hundreds of millions of real identities could be exposed, and many affected individuals have not yet experienced fraud, highlighting the possibility of long-term exploitation years after the original compromise.

Analyst Comments: The incident reinforces a growing shift in cyber risk: exposure now often precedes exploitation by years, turning breaches into persistent latent threats rather than immediate events. Organizations should assume personal data compromise is cumulative across multiple historical incidents, meaning victim awareness and monitoring not just breach response are essential. For security and resilience planning, this supports a “breach permanence” model: identity data cannot realistically be rotated, so defensive measures must emphasize layered verification, fraud detection, and behavioral monitoring instead of credential resets alone. In other words, the operational risk is less about one database leak and more about the expanding identity-theft ecosystem built from aggregated legacy breaches.

FB-ISAO Newsletter V8 Issue 2

The February 2026 FB-ISAO Newsletter (Vol. 8, Issue 2) announces the latest monthly update from the Faith-Based Information Sharing and Analysis Organization, distributed to member institutions and marked TLP: CLEAR for broad sharing. The newsletter emphasizes the organization’s ongoing focus areas—cybersecurity, physical security, preparedness, resilience, and the evolving threat landscape affecting houses of worship, faith-based schools, charities, and affiliated organizations. It also encourages organizations to join the FB-ISAO community to receive regular intelligence, resources, and awareness information directly each month, reinforcing the group’s mission of collective security through information sharing and collaboration across faith-based communities. 

AI Threat Landscape: Fact vs. Fiction As We Start 2026

The Gate 15 article “AI Threat Landscape: Fact vs. Fiction As We Start 2026” explains that the most important AI risks facing organizations are not science-fiction scenarios about autonomous machines, but practical security problems already occurring in real environments. The post divides the landscape into three main areas: criminal use of AI, state-sponsored influence operations, and risks organizations create by deploying AI internally. Cybercriminals are using generative AI to scale phishing, improve social engineering, clone voices, automate malware development, and conduct deepfake fraud demonstrating that AI accelerates existing attacks rather than replacing them. Meanwhile, state actors are leveraging synthetic media and automated content generation to produce convincing propaganda, fabricate statements, and rapidly adapt misinformation campaigns to manipulate public trust. Internally, organizations introduce new vulnerabilities when employees input sensitive data into AI tools, rely too heavily on automated outputs, or integrate models without proper governance leading to risks like data leakage, prompt injection, insider amplification, and expanded attack surfaces, including vendor supply-chain exposure. The article concludes that leaders should prioritize defending against these current operational threats through governance and resilience, instead of focusing on hypothetical future AI catastrophes.