Category: Tech

The Toronto Public Library is experiencing ongoing technical outages due to a Black Basta ransomware attack. The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is Canada’s largest public library system, giving access to 12 million books through 100 branch libraries across the city. The library system has 1,200,000 registered members and operates on a budget that surpasses $200M. Earlier this week, TPL warned…

In a devastating cyberattack that unfolded over three days in May 2023, numerous victims fell prey to a large-scale intrusion. The attackers exploited a vulnerability in MOVEit, a managed file transfer software, sending shockwaves across various sectors. Government agencies, airlines, educational institutions, financial organizations, and healthcare providers found themselves in the crosshairs of this breach. The attackers absconded with sensitive…

The Trump era was very, very good to the country’s giant telecom monopolies. Trump officials doled out billions in tax breaks (AT&T nabbed $42 billion alone) and billions more in poorly tracked subsidies. It also approved anticompetitive mergers without even reading the details, and handed out all manner of regulator favors like the dismantling of net neutrality or the elimination…

Hackers have accessed approximately 632,000 emails from the Department of Defense and other federal agencies this year, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirmed. The report detailed a large-scale cyberattack in May 2023 in which emails from US government offices, private sectors, airlines, and academic entities were accessed by a suspected Russian group called “CL0P.” Alongside electronic personal data,…

The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper. As the article explains, one of the…

Facebook and Instagram are trying to educate users on copyright infringement by showing a ‘popup’ to those who search for potentially problematic terms such as IPTV. This is one of the many voluntary anti-piracy tools the Meta-owned social media platforms have implemented, in an effort to help combat online copyright infringement. Similar to any other online platforms that deal with…

In the summer of 2021, Insider has learned, [Peter] Thiel began providing information as a “confidential human source,” or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who specializes in investigating political corruption and foreign-influence campaigns. Charles Johnson, a longtime associate of Thiel’s and a notorious figure in the far-right movement that Thiel has subsidized for a decade, told…

Japanese electronics manufacturer Casio disclosed a data breach impacting customers from 149 countries after hackers gained to the servers of its ClassPad education platform. Casio detected the incident on Wednesday, October 11, following the failure of a ClassPad database within the company’s development environment. Evidence suggests that the attacker accessed customers’ personal information a day later, on October 12. The…

Marquis Hooper, a former U.S. Navy IT manager, has received a sentence of five years and five months in prison for illegally obtaining US citizens’ personally identifiable information (PII) and selling it on the dark web. The man was indicted with his wife, Natasha Renee Chalk, in February 2021 and pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit…

A hacker has leaked an additional 4.1 million stolen 23andMe genetic data profiles for people in Great Britain and Germany on a hacking forum. Earlier this month, a threat actor leaked the stolen data of 1 million Ashkenazi Jews who used 23andMe services to find their ancestry info and genetic predispositions. 23andMe told BleepingComputer that this data was obtained through credential stuffing…

If government regulators prevail against Google in the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century, it’s likely to unleash drastic changes that will undermine the dominance of a search engine that defines the internet for billions of people. As the 10-week trial probing Google’s business practices nears its midway point, it’s still too early to tell if U.S. District…

Genetic testing provider 23andMe faces multiple class action lawsuits in the U.S. following a large-scale data breach that is believed to have impacted millions of its customers. Late last month, a threat actor leaked 23andMe customer data in a CSV file named ‘Ashkenazi DNA Data of Celebrities.csv’ on hacker forums. The file allegedly contained the data of nearly 1 million Ashkenazi Jews…

Last Thursday, a Danish court sentenced a 24-year old programmer from Silkeborg to 60 days probation for his role in operating the torrent tracker ShareUniversity. The sentencing is the latest in Denmark following an unprecedented crackdown on local torrent trackers that has already resulted in more than a dozen prosecutions, with more yet to come. The National Unit for Special…

  Microsoft says a Chinese-backed threat group tracked as ‘Storm-0062’ (aka DarkShadow or Oro0lxy) has been exploiting a critical privilege escalation zero-day in the Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server since September 14, 2023. Atlassian had already notified customers about the active exploitation status of CVE-2023-22515 when it disclosed it on October 4, 2023. Still, the company withheld specific details on the…

  The US Army has announced the successful trial of a military version of Elon Musk’s “Starlink” communications network. Called the “Starshield,” the technology utilizes low Earth orbit satellites to create a more secure network for soldiers. It will serve as a “redundant” or backup system in case the service’s main communications system gets jammed by enemies. “We’ve done some…

Hamas’s devastating terrorist attack against Israel has unleashed the most violent and serious conflict the country has seen in half a century. Already, at least 1,000 Israelis (and 14 U.S. citizens) have been killed. It is an astronomical number for such a small country—equivalent to 30,000 Americans. About 2,900 more Israelis have been injured and an estimated 150 others, including…