This week, the The Justice Department charged a 22-year-old man with charges of handling the water facility where he worked. It’s a total reminder that while the power grid receives most of the attention, it’s not the only critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to potentially devastating attacks.
We also took a look at YouTube’s ongoing issues with child-centered content moderation; a WIRED investigation found dozens of creepy thumbnails in videos for Minecraft and child-centered activities that were at or near the top of the platform’s “Topic” pages. It’s not as dire a situation as the so-called Elsagate controversy of a few years ago, in which the YouTube Kids app was flooded with grotesque videos featuring popular children’s characters doing indescribable acts. But it still shows that YouTube has a lot of moderation work ahead of it.
Tired of receiving unwanted files from strangers, either through AirDrop or any other way that Android is currently calling your version? You can stop them! And you probably should. Just follow our guide to check and uncheck the settings needed to stop over-sharing.
And there is more! Every week we gather all the news that WIRED did not cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full news. And stay safe.
An organization known as the “Chicken Drumstick” reportedly entered $ 76 million in revenue from the subscription video game cheating service before law enforcement broke them this week. The group had been charged $ 10 a month for cheating on games like Overwatch i Call of Duty Mobile. In addition to confiscating $ 46 million in assets – which included a few luxury cars – police say it destroyed 17 traps and arrested 10 people in the retreat. Chinese technician Tencent, who is involved in several major gaming companies, collaborated with authorities in the operation.
One complainant tells independent security journalist Brian Krebs that a recent breach by network equipment company Ubiquiti was much worse than initially reported. The source said the hackers “gained full read / write access to Ubiquiti’s databases on Amazon Web Services,” as well as root administrator access to Ubiquiti’s AWS accounts. These are basically the keys to the kingdom. Ubiquiti has said in response that it has no indication that users ’data can be accessed or stolen, although the Krebs source says the company does not keep records that provide them with this information. Anyway, it’s a mess!
In January, Google reported that hackers from the North Korea Lazarus Group had spent a considerable amount of energy trying to trick security investigators and had even had some success in doing so. This week, the search giant’s threat analysis group tracked down and said the North Korean campaign was continuing at a good pace, this time armed with a fake website and fake social media profiles. In an inspired troll, one of the Twitter puppets was named Sebastian Lazarescue.
It is safe to say that many, many people are feeling pandemic exhaustion these days. But keep in mind the men and women of the U.S. Security and Cybersecurity Agency. After its respected leader, Chris Krebs, was fired in a presidential tweet last fall, CISA has had to contend with the aftermath of SolarWinds and Hafnium, one of the largest piracy campaigns affecting the United States in history. recently. Politico reports that the agency’s 2,000 workers are lying dangerously stretched, which could leave the country ill-prepared to deal with the next attack.
Last weekend, the U.S. Strategic Command – which oversees nuclear weapons – tweeted about a small string of nonsense, prompting some to question whether they had been hacked. The good news is that no, they weren’t. The bad news is that instead, the son of the one who logged in to the account had a moment on the keyboard. The right combination of adorable and alarming.
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