It was a bad week for Twitch. Amazon's streaming service was hit hard by a hacker who stole Twitch source code and streamer payouts. This is about as extensive a data dump you'll ever see. One of the many repercussions was that Twitch streamers were forced to pay transparently, which quickly became a trend on Twitch and social media.
Twitch wasn’t the only tech giant that was unlucky this week. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and WhatsApp were all taken offline for several hours Monday. It wasn't hackers. Facebook instead accidentally withdrew the BGP route that made it difficult for other internet users to locate it. It also took Facebook's BGP route off the internet, making it impossible for the rest of the internet to find it. This meant that its engineers couldn’t remotely fix the problem. It was a real mess! Friday afternoon was a down day for the company, although not as severe.
Have you used a password manager? While we're on the subject, what about your family members? They should! We have some suggestions for you if they are having trouble convincing you.
AirTag users could be vulnerable to a simple bug. A judge ruled that Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company, is not responsible for sites that infringe copyright.
There's more! Every week, we bring you all the security news WIRED hasn't covered in depth. To read the complete stories, click on the headlines. Stay safe out there.
It's all sorted now. The Navy has its Facebook page restored. On Sunday night, however, someone managed to hack into the account of USS Kidd (a US Navy destroyer) and use that access to stream the real-time strategy video game Age of Empires. A Navy spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that someone had gained access to Task & Purpose's Facebook page. Short messages such as "hi guys", "play game", and "fffffffffffffffffffff" were included in the streams. It seems that the most likely culprit is a relative of someone with the keys to the USS Kidds account on social media.
Firefox is a great browser, but not for privacy-conscious users. The latest version of Firefox will give you "new, relevant suggestions by our trusted partners based upon what you are searching for." This is a new type of advertisement that appears in unexpected places. To turn off the feature, go to Settings, Privacy & Security, then Uncheck Contextual suggestions under Address Bar Firefox Search. You shouldn't do this, but you should be aware of where the URL prompts are coming from.
Syniverse, a company that provides telecom infrastructure services, quietly disclosed a very large hack that didn't get enough attention in an SEC filing. Motherboard reported that hackers were able to access Syniverse's systems for many years. They could have had access to any number of phone records and possibly even text messages. Although it is not clear if there has been any fallout from the long-running incident, it's still a potential treasure trove of international espionage.
Talk about international espionage! Google alerted users this week that Russia's Fancy Bear hackers had launched a sophisticated phishing campaign targeting 14,000 Gmail users. Each account that was targeted received an alert. The group may have also included security researchers and journalists, as well as people from a range of other industries. Google claimed that all attempts to hack accounts were detected by spam filters. However, the magnitude of the effort was still remarkable.
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