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A ransomware-as-a-service variant called "Medusa" has claimed over 300 victims in "critical infrastructure sectors" (including medical), according to an joint alert from CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing Analysis Center. And that alert reminds us that Medusa is a globe-spanning operation that recruits third-party affiliates to plant ransomware and negotiate with victims, notes the Register. "Even organizations that have good ransomware recovery...

Slashdot has run nearly a dozen stories about Michael Mann, one of America's most prominent climate scientists and a co-creator of the famous "hockey stick" graph of spiking temperatures. In 2012 Mann sued two bloggers for defamation — and last year Mann finally won more than $1 million, reports the Washington Post. "A jury found that two conservative commentators had defamed him by alleging...

The IRS is pausing its technology modernization efforts to reassess its strategy in light of AI advancements. Reuters reports: The agency will review a number of technology modernization initiatives that have been taken in recent years, including a new direct free filing system for tax returns that was launched last year under the Biden administration, the official told reporters. The official said the IRS...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon's cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" enabled on their Echo. Starting on March...

In late 2023, the FBI alerted the Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments (LELWD) that it had been breached by a Chinese-state-sponsored hacking group for over 300 days. With the help of cybersecurity firm Dragos and Department of Energy-funded sensors, LELWD confirmed the intrusion, identified the hackers' movements, and ultimately restructured its network to remove them. PCMag reports: At the time, LELWD had been...

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: Meta has won an emergency ruling in the US to temporarily stop a former director of Facebook from promoting or further distributing copies of her memoir. The book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who used to be the company's global public policy director, includes a series of critical claims about what she witnessed...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the EFF: EFF is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Klein, a bona fide hero who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans. Mark didn't set out to change the world. For 22 years, he was a telecommunications technician for...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it. The data was lifted from Allstate's National General business unit, which ran a website for consumers who wanted to get a quote for a policy. That task required...

Internet shutdowns in Africa hit a record high in 2024, with 21 shutdowns across 15 countries. The previous record was 19 shutdowns in 2020 and 21. The Guardian reports: Authorities in Comoros, Guinea-Bissau and Mauritius joined repeat offenders such as Burundi, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea and Kenya. Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania were also on the list. But perpetrators also included militias and other non-state...

August, 2023: Thousands of Crypto Scammers are Enslaved by Human-Trafficking Gangsters, Says Bloomberg Reporter. ("They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia...with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling.") February, 2025: A coordinated response begins by Thai, Chinese and Myanmar authorities, which includes cutting power, internet, and fuel supplies to the scam centers. Today: The Associated Press reports that thousands...

The Washington Post reports: Meta was willing to go to extreme lengths to censor content and shut down political dissent in a failed attempt to win the approval of the Chinese Communist Party and bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China, according to a new whistleblower complaint from a former global policy director at the company. The complaint by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who...

Last week Google urged the U.S. government not to break up the company — but apparently, it didn't work. In a new filing Friday, America's Justice Department "reiterated its November proposal that Google be forced to sell its Chrome web browser," reports the Washington Post, "to address a federal judge finding the company guilty of being an illegal monopoly in August." The government also...

U.S. president Donald Trump called Daylight Saving Time "very costly to our nation" and "inconvenient" in December. Today the Washington Post remembers he'd vowed his Republican party would use their "best efforts" to eliminate it. But it's still proving to be politically difficult... Polls have shown that most Americans oppose the time shifts but disagree on what should replace them... [U.S. political leaders] also...

This week the Free Software Foundation "backed a lone developer's brave effort to overturn a pivotal court ruling that threatens to undermine the AGPLv3 — the foundation's GNU Affero General Public License, version 3," reports the Register. "At stake is the future of not just the AGPLv3, but the FSF's widely used GNU Public License it is largely based on, and the software covered...

Sam Bankman-Fried — one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party — "was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 25 years in prison and mostly went silent," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Until recently..." Now, from behind bars at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Bankman-Fried is orchestrating an extraordinary public-relations blitz that looks very much like a campaign to make the most audacious...

Equuleus42 (Slashdot reader #723) brings word that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is sharing a new tool for fighting back against cellphone surveillance by Stingray cell-site simulators. Android Authority reports: "Rayhunter" uses an open-source software package designed to look for evidence of IMSI catchers in action, running on an old Orbic Speed RC400L mobile hotspot. The great thing about that choice is that you...

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned at SXSW that agentic AI poses significant privacy and security risks, as these AI agents require extensive access to users' personal data, likely processing it unencrypted in the cloud. TechCrunch reports: "So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don't have to touch it, right?," Whittaker mused. Then she...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies' scheduled release dates. According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole "numerous 'pre-release'...

President Trump has signed an executive order to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies by using tokens already owned by the government. Reuters reports: A "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was seized as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, the White House crypto czar, billionaire David Sacks, said in a post on social...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s. If the labels' proposed second...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DuckDuckGo has big plans for embedding AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company just announced that its AI-generated answers, which appear for certain queries on its search engine, have exited beta and now source information from across the web -- not just Wikipedia. It will soon integrate web search within its AI chatbot, which...

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is proposing to expand mandatory social media screening, currently required only for new arrivals, to include all non-citizens already residing in the U.S. who apply for immigration benefits. The Register reports: Back in 2019, the Department of Homeland Security, which runs USCIS, decided anyone looking to enter the US on a work visa or similar had to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Alphabet on Thursday seeking its communications with former President Joe Biden's administration about content moderation policies. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican, also asked the YouTube parent company for similar communications with companies and groups outside government, according to a copy of the subpoena seen by Reuters. The...

1Password has introduced a 'nearby items' feature, allowing users to tag credentials with physical locations so the relevant information automatically surfaces when users are near those locations. Engadget reports: Location information can be added to any new or existing item in a 1Password vault. The app has also been updated with a map view for setting and viewing the locations of your items. In...