This week, the The Justice Department charged a 22-year-old with tampering with the water facility where he worked. It reminds us that while the power grid is getting most of the attention, it is not the only piece of critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to potentially devastating attacks.
We also looked at YouTube’s ongoing issues with moderating child-centric content; a WIRED survey found dozens of scary thumbnails on videos before Minecraft and child-centered pursuits that were at the top or near the top of the platform’s “Topic” pages. It’s not as dire as the so-called Elsagate controversy a few years ago, in which the YouTube Kids app was inundated with grotesque videos featuring popular kids’ characters performing unspeakable acts. But it still goes to show that YouTube still has a lot of moderation work to do.
Tired of receiving junk files from strangers, whether that’s via AirDrop or whatever Android calls its version these days? You can make them stop! And probably. Just follow our guide to toggling on and off the various settings needed to shut down the transfer.
And there is more! Every week we collect all the news that WIRED has not covered in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
An organization known as “Chicken Drumstick” reportedly raised $ 76 million in revenue for its video game cheating service before police broke up this week. The group had been charged $ 10 a month for cheats for games such as Overwatch and Call of Duty MobileIn addition to seizing $ 46 million in assets – including a large number of luxury cars – police say they destroyed 17 cheats and arrested 10 people at the takedown. Chinese tech titan Tencent, who has an interest in several major gaming companies, worked with authorities on the operation.
A whistleblower tells independent security journalist Brian Krebs that a recent breach of network equipment company Ubiquiti was much worse than initially reported. The source said hackers have “obtained full read / write access to Ubiquiti databases at Amazon Web Services,” as well as root administrator access to Ubiquiti’s AWS accounts. Those are actually the keys to the kingdom. Ubiquiti said in response that it has no indication that user data has been accessed or stolen, although Krebs’s source says the company does not keep any logs that would give them that information in the first place. Either way, it’s a mess!
In January, Google reported that hackers from the Lazarus Group in North Korea had spent a significant amount of energy trying to mislead security researchers, and that they had even achieved some success. This week, the search giant’s Threat Analysis Group followed up and said the North Korean campaign was moving forward quickly, this time armed with a fake website and fake social media profiles. In an inspired piece of trolling, one of the Twitter dolls was named Sebastian Lazarescue.
It’s safe to say that many, many people today are experiencing pandemic burnout. But look at the men and women of the American Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. After well-respected leader Chris Krebs was fired by presidential tweet last fall, CISA has had to grapple with the fallout from SolarWinds and Hafnium, one of the largest hacking campaigns to hit the US in recent memory. Politico reports that the agency’s 2,000 workers have been stretched dangerously thin – leaving the country ill-prepared for the next attack.
Last weekend, the U.S. Strategic Command – they are the ones overseeing the nuclear weapons – tweeted a small series of gibberish, which made some understandably ask if they had been hacked. The good news is they weren’t. The less good news is that instead, the child of the person logged into the account had a moment behind the keyboard. Just the right mix of cute and alarming!
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