For years, Registered Agents Inc.—a secretive company whose business is setting up other businesses—has registered thousands of companies to people who appear to not exist. Multiple former employees tell WIRED that the company routinely incorporates businesses on behalf of its customers using what they claim are fake personas. An investigation …
Read More »Meta Abandons Hacking Victims, Draining Law Enforcement Resources, Officials Say
Forty-one state attorneys general penned a letter to Meta’s top attorney on Wednesday saying complaints are skyrocketing across the United States about Facebook and Instagram user accounts being stolen, and declaring “immediate action” necessary to mitigate the rolling threat. The coalition of top law enforcement officials, spearheaded by New York …
Read More »Inside the Shadowy Firm Pushing the Limits of Business Privacy
Inside a drab one-story office building in Post Falls, Idaho, a little-known American company has built the machinery that enables hundreds of thousands of businesses to operate in near-total secrecy. The company, Registered Agents Inc., is a one-stop shop for people seeking to incorporate a business in any US state, …
Read More »Hackers Behind the Change Healthcare Ransomware Attack Just Received a $22 Million Payment
The ransomware attack targeting medical firm Change Healthcare has been one of the most disruptive in years, crippling pharmacies across the US—including those in hospitals—and leading to serious snags in the delivery of prescription drugs nationwide for 10 days and counting. Now, a dispute within the criminal underground has revealed …
Read More »The Privacy Danger Lurking in Push Notifications
Just days after an international law enforcement operation disrupted LockBit, the ransomware group reemerged with a new dark-web site where it threatened to release documents stolen from Fulton County, Georgia, where Donald Trump and 18 codefendants stand accused of a conspiracy to overturn the 2024 election. But by the time …
Read More »Here Come the AI Worms
As generative AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini become more advanced, they are increasingly being put to work. Startups and tech companies are building AI agents and ecosystems on top of the systems that can complete boring chores for you: think automatically making calendar bookings and potentially buying …
Read More »The UK’s GPS Tagging of Migrants Has Been Ruled Illegal
The way the UK government has been tagging migrants with GPS trackers is illegal, the country’s privacy regulator ruled on Friday, in a rebuke to officials who have been experimenting with migrant-surveillance tech in both the UK and the US. As part of an 18-month pilot that concluded in December, …
Read More »The Mysterious Case of the Missing Trump Trial Ransomware Leak
This week, the notorious ransomware gang known as LockBit threatened a kind of disruption that would have been a first even for a criminal industry that has crippled hospitals and triggered the shutdown of a gas pipeline: leaking documents from the criminal prosecution of a former president and presidential candidate. …
Read More »Russia Attacked Ukraine's Power Grid at Least 66 Times to ‘Freeze It Into Submission’
Last week marked the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has been marked by multiple reports that Russia may have committed war crimes by indiscriminately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. During the first winter of the conflict, Russia pursued a strategy that US secretary of …
Read More »A Pornhub Chatbot Stopped Millions From Searching for Child Abuse Videos
For the past two years, millions of people searching for child abuse videos on Pornhub’s UK website have been interrupted. Each of the 4.4 million times someone has typed in words or phrases linked to abuse, a warning message has blocked the page, saying that kind of content is illegal. …
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