Category: Tech

About 100,000 industrial control systems (ICS) were found on the public web, exposed to attackers probing them for vulnerabilities and at risk of unauthorized access. Among them are power grids, traffic light systems, security and water systems. Exposed ICSs include units (sensors, actuators, switches, building management systems, and automatic tank gauges) for critical infrastructure systems. Cybersecurity company BitSight alerted of the…

I know many of you have heard this before, but Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” concept is such a useful framework to think about things: first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. As I’ve highlighted,…

This month, the Philippines celebrates its creative industries by dedicating a special month to their work. On top of that, the Government presented a long-awaited ‘gift’. The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) announced that local site-blocking plans are about to come to fruition. IPOPHL Director General Rowel Barba signed a memorandum that will go into effect in late…

Following the creation of its Hadopi anti-piracy agency over 13 years ago, France monitored and stored data on millions of users suspected of infringing copyrights. The majority were BitTorrent users and the plan was to use evidence of their piracy activities as a basis for escalating actions including warnings, fines, and ultimately, internet disconnections. Operating the program for a decade…

Unintended Consequences We’ve spilled a great deal of ink discussing the GDPR and its failures and unintended consequences. The European data privacy law that was ostensibly built to protect the data of private citizens, but which was also expected to result in heavy fines for primarily American internet companies, has mostly failed to do either. While the larger American internet…

Chinese hackers reportedly stole tens of thousands of emails from U.S. State Department accounts after breaching Microsoft’s cloud-based Exchange email platform in May. During a recent Senate staff briefing, U.S. State Department officials disclosed that the attackers stole at least 60,000 emails from Outlook accounts belonging to State Department officials stationed in East Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, as Reuters first…

Air Canada, the flag carrier and the largest airline of Canada, disclosed a cyber security incident this week in which hackers “briefly” obtained limited access to its internal systems. According to the airline, the incident resulted in the theft of a limited amount of personal information of some of its employees and “certain records.” Customer data was not affected. Hackers “briefly”…

The hacker behind the recent attack on Airbus has warned that he will sell US and European military intelligence on the dark web. Known by the moniker “USDoD,” the hacker said he recently managed to enter the company’s website by exploiting employee access from Turkish Airlines. He also immediately posted the stolen data on a hacker forum. In a lengthy…

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has introduced new recommendations to streamline the reporting of cyber incidents across the Department of Defense and 32 other federal agencies. The guide is expected to further protect the country’s vital infrastructure, reduce the burden on cybersecurity partners, and decrease the downtime of associated operations in each sector covered. The recommendations will also…

Credit reporting firm TransUnion has denied claims of a security breach after a threat actor known as USDoD leaked data allegedly stolen from the company’s network. The Chicago-based company’s over 10,000 employees provide their services to millions of consumers and more than 65,000 businesses from 30 countries. “Immediately upon discovering these assertions, we partnered with outside cybersecurity and forensic experts…

The Microsoft AI research division accidentally leaked dozens of terabytes of sensitive data starting in July 2020 while contributing open-source AI learning models to a public GitHub repository. Almost three years later, this was discovered by cloud security firm Wiz whose security researchers found that a Microsoft employee inadvertently shared the URL for a misconfigured Azure Blob storage bucket containing the…

NASA is offering to join forces with the Pentagon on UFO research to move away “from sensationalism to science,” NASA’s chief administrator told reporters this week. The space agency released a report Thursday recommending that its scientists work with the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which spearheads the U.S. government’s investigations of UFOs. That coordination could allow better research and…

  The University of Sydney (USYD) announced that a breach at a third-party service provider exposed personal information of recently applied and enrolled international applicants. The public university started operations in 1850 and has nearly 70,000 students and about 8,500 academic and administrative personnel. It is considered one of Australia’s most important educational institutes. In the data breach announcement, the…

  Last July, we noted how media reform activists had petitioned the FCC to revoke Fox News’ local broadcast license in Philadelphia. More specifically, the group argued that Fox News’ rampant election fraud propaganda technically violated the “character clause” embedded in the Communications Act the FCC is supposed to use to determine whether an organization should hold a broadcast license. To be…

The two founders behind Tornado Cash, a Russian cryptocurrency mixing service, have been charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, according to a statement on Wednesday. Roman Storm and Roman Semenov were officially charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions violations and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business,…