Banks, airports, TV stations, health care organizations, hotels, and countless other businesses are all facing widespread IT outages, leaving flights grounded and causing widespread disruption, after Windows machines have displayed errors worldwide. In the early hours of Friday, companies in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system started reporting devices showing …
Read More »How One Bad CrowdStrike Update Crashed the World’s Computers
Only a handful of times in history has a single piece of code managed to instantly wreck computer systems worldwide. The Slammer worm of 2003. Russia’s Ukraine-targeted NotPetya cyberattack. North Korea’s self-spreading ransomware WannaCry. But the ongoing digital catastrophe that rocked the internet and IT infrastructure around the globe over …
Read More »J.D. Vance Left His Venmo Public. Here’s What It Shows
US senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican and former US president Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, has a public Venmo account that gives an unfiltered glimpse into his extensive network of connections with establishment GOP heavyweights, wealthy financiers, technology executives, the prestige press, and fellow graduates of Yale Law …
Read More »How to Shop With Virtual Credit Cards to Protect Your Privacy
In the interests of privacy and security, the less information you give out about yourself, the better. You can hide your email addresses, you can hide your cell number, and as we’ll show you in this guide, you can hide your credit and debit card information too. The idea is …
Read More »Alleged ‘Maniac Murder Cult’ Leader Indicted Over Plot to Kill Jews
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Tuesday unsealed a sweeping felony indictment against the 20-year-old they say is the head of a violent Eastern European skinhead gang implicated in a number of assaults and attacks abroad, some of them fatal. The gang, known asManiac Murder Cult or MKY, is connected to …
Read More »The US Supreme Court Kneecapped US Cyber Strategy
To protect America’s vital infrastructure from hackers without relying on a moribund Congress, the Biden administration bet big on creative uses of existing laws. But the Supreme Court probably blew up that approach. President Joe Biden’s strategy relied on agencies interpreting the laws that give them regulatory powers to include …
Read More »Hackers Claim to Have Leaked 1.1 TB of Disney Slack Messages
A group calling itself “NullBulge” published a 1.1-TB trove of data late last week that it claims is a dump of Disney's internal Slack archive. The data allegedly includes every message and file from nearly 10,000 channels, including unreleased projects, code, images, login credentials, and links to internal websites and …
Read More »US Senators Secretly Work to Block Safeguards Against Surveillance Abuse
Members of the United States Senate have been working for more than a month to shore up safeguards against further misuse of the US government’s most consequential surveillance program. Those efforts have hit a snag, however, with at least two Republican senators now privately objecting to the changes—provisions that seek …
Read More »AT&T Paid a Hacker $370,000 to Delete Stolen Phone Records
US telecom giant AT&T, which disclosed Friday that hackers had stolen the call records for tens of millions of its customers, paid a member of the hacking team more than $300,000 to delete the data and provide a video demonstrating proof of deletion. The hacker, who is part of the …
Read More »Spyware Users Exposed in Major Data Breach
In one of the largest-ever breaches of a US telecom giant, AT&T revealed this week that “nearly all” its customer phone and text records were stolen after hackers accessed its account on a third-party cloud service. That cloud service, Snowflake, has been linked to several recent breaches, including those of …
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