This Company Wants to Bring End-to-End Encrypted Messages to Bluesky’s AT Protocol

A company called Germ is aiming to bring end-to-end encrypted messages to Bluesky’s AT Protocol, a feature that the social network doesn’t currently have.  The tool’s security is yet to be independently audited, but the company says it plans to seek that out soon. Mark Xue, a former privacy engineer at Apple and CTO of…

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Women Dating Safety App ‘Tea’ Breached, Users’ IDs Posted to 4chan

Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and…

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A Startup is Selling Data Hacked from Peoples’ Computers to Debt Collectors

When your laptop is infected with infostealing malware, it’s not just hackers that might get your passwords, billing and email addresses, and a list of sites or services you’ve created accounts on, potentially including some embarrassing ones. A private intelligence company run by a young founder is now taking that hacked data from what it…

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Hackers Can Remotely Trigger the Brakes on American Trains and the Problem Has Been Ignored for Years

Many trains in the U.S. are vulnerable to a hack that can remotely lock a train’s brakes, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the researcher who discovered the vulnerability. The railroad industry has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but only recently began to fix it. Independent…

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40,000 Cameras, From Bird Feeders to Baby Monitors, Exposed to the Internet

A report from a cybersecurity company last week found that over 40,000 unsecured cameras—including CCTV and security cameras on public transportation, in hospitals, on internet-connected bird feeders and on ATMs—are exposed online worldwide.  Cybersecurity risk intelligence company BitSight was able to access and download content from thousands of internet-connected systems, including domestic and commercial webcams,…

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AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

AI bots that scrape the internet for training data are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, and are in some cases knocking their collections offline, according to a new survey published today. While the impact of AI bots on open collections has been reported anecdotally, the survey is the first attempt at…

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A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account

This article was produced with support from WIRED. A cybersecurity researcher was able to figure out the phone number linked to any Google account, information that is usually not public and is often sensitive, according to the researcher, Google, and 404 Media’s own tests. The issue has since been fixed but at the time presented a privacy…

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Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales

Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE), the iconic and long-running hacking conference, says far fewer people have bought tickets for the event this year as compared to last, with organizers believing it is due to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and more aggressive detainment of travellers into the U.S. “We are roughly 50 percent behind…

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