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If you work in cybersecurity, there’s a good chance you’re pretty tired now. On the heels of Russia [devastating Solarwinds hack](https://www.wired.com/story/russia-solarwinds-supply-chain-hack-commerce-treasury/) which was revealed in December, Chinese hackers mounted what appears to be a [full-on assault against Microsoft Exchange Servers](https://www.wired.com/story/russia-solarwinds-supply-chain-hack-commerce-treasury/), striking [at least 30,000 servers in the United States](https://www.wired.com/story/china-microsoft-exchange-server-hack-victims/) alone. Chinese spies will narrow the target list from there for a further compromise, but this mess is still going to take a long time to clean up.
Speaking of clutter, apps from the App Store and Google Play Store are still too much data leaking too often, according to a new study from mobile security company Zimperium. Thanks to misconfigured cloud settings, tens of thousands of apps on both platforms inadvertently expose user information such as financial data and medical test results. Another category of error was found on the far-right Gab platform, which was very extensively hacked, apparently due to a coding error introduced by the CTO of the platform.
Cyber ​​security entrepreneur turned man on the run John McAfee was indicted on Friday for his alleged involvement in two cryptocurrency scams. Twitch released its first transparency report this week after a decade of, well, don’t do that. Microsoft has started testing their decentralized credentials in the real world, if you wanted to put your college degree on the blockchain. We watched how Myanmar citizens face prolonged internet shutdown during the military coup in this country. And we published our sixth installment of 2034, a fictional tale of a war in the near future with China that seems all too real.
And there’s more! Each week, we collect all the news that we haven’t covered in depth. Click on the titles to read the full stories. And stay safe there.
Conservative Utah lawmakers have passed a handful of anti-pornography laws in recent years, including declaring a public health crisis in 2016. Now, they’ve upped it a few notches. Measure HB72 was approved in the state Senate this week and at home last month, meaning it is heading to the governor’s office for a signature. The law would require all new smartphones and tablets sold in the state to come with a preinstalled adult content filter enabled by default. This makes no sense at certain levels – logistical, constitutional, ethical – but fortunately also seems unlikely to have any short-term effect; the bill states that its requirements will only come into effect for five other states have passed identical legislation, and even then, it seems unlikely that Apple, Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and anyone within a thousand yards of the intersection of civil liberties and technology will acquiesce in the demands. from Utah.
As classrooms have moved away, educators have increasingly relied on intrusive software that monitors students in their homes. This week, Motherboard explained to college students around the world how they got along with exam monitoring software, using everything from FaceTime and flash cards to recording notes on the wall out of sight. the webcam of a laptop. Considering how easy it is to bypass surveillance, it hardly seems worth the compromise in privacy that its installation requires.
IOS jailbreaks keep coming. Last weekend, the Unc0ver team released their latest effort, which releases Apple devices from iOS 11 to iOS 14.3. (But not, it should be noted, iOS 14.4, which was released in February.) The usual caveat of “you probably shouldn’t be doing this unless you absolutely know what you are doing“applies.
While everyone has their hands full with the Microsoft Exchange Server hacks this week, the Solarwinds campaign continues to simmer in the background. This week, Microsoft and security firm FireEye both shared new details about the strains of malware used by the Russian-linked group to gain such devastating access to so many targets. The more researchers can discern the Solarwinds team’s methods, the faster and more efficiently they can fix the problem and prevent it from reoccurring.
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