Last night, after several months of relative quiet, a hacking group calling itself the Shadow Brokers posted new data purportedly stolen from the NSA. The group’s last leak in August included malware believed to be used by the NSA as recently as 2013. At the time, the Shadow Brokers claimed they would auction a second set of data including the “best files” it had stolen,… Read More
Maybe you heard your LinkedIn, Tumblr or Dropbox password was floating around there. Or maybe you read a news story about that guy who got busted for running Silk Road, that site that sold drugs and other illicit goods. Chances are, you’ve seen the words “dark web” splashed in a headline or heard them mentioned by a friend. But WTF is the dark web? How do you get there? And… Read More
Facebook rolled out a new feature today that gives users a full voter guide, from the presidential candidates to the down-ballot propositions and local politicians, in an effort to “encourage civic participation.” The feature allows users to “favorite” their chosen candidates and initiatives so they can refer to their favorites once they reach the voting booth. As… Read More
Asana co-founder and head of product Justin Rosenstein discussed the political views of his controversial investor and former board member Peter Thiel today at the Tech Inclusion conference in San Francisco. Asana isn’t the only company to face questions about its continued relationship with Thiel in light of his ongoing support of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump —… Read More
DDoS — distributed denial of service — is an unsophisticated form of attack that overwhelms sites with spam traffic so legitimate users can’t get through. DDoS is a war of economics: whoever has the most computing power, defender or attacker, usually wins. This makes DDoS a useful tool for censorship of small and mid-level publishers, but major sites usually have defenses… Read More
Another city, another Airbnb lawsuit. Airbnb sued the city of New York, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and Mayor Bill DeBlasio today over legislation that would make it illegal to advertise accommodations that can’t legally be rented out for less than 30 days. The bill was passed in June and signed into law by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo earlier today. New York housing law… Read More
Weebly, the web design platform, was hacked in February, the data breach notification site LeakedSource reports. Usernames and passwords for more than 43 million accounts were taken in the breach, although the passwords are secured with the strong hashing algorithm bcrypt. Weebly said in an email to customers that user IP addresses were also taken in the breach. “We do not believe that… Read More
