It’s the Friday after Labor Day. If you’re still whirling from the holiday weekend, short week at work and start of the NFL season, you may have missed some big-time tech news. But it’s okay – we have you covered. Here are the most trendy-worthy stories that our B2B PR teams have been monitoring.
Jack gets hacked
Last Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked and started posting some pretty awful things. This week, the social media giant announced that it was temporarily turning off a feature that allows users to send tweets via text message.
Ransomware reaches new heights with municipalities
Local governments have been targeted with a ton of ransomware lately, and cybercriminals are now asking for an astonishing amount of money. On Wednesday, the mayor of New Bedford, Massachusetts announced that the town refused to pay a $5.3 million ransom demand. This Dark Reading article explains how municipalities and other organizations may be hitting their limit in terms of how much they’re able to pay out.
NSA’s director of cybersecurity details top threats
Anne Neuberger, the head of the NSA’s new Cybersecurity Directorate, spoke this week about the top cyber threats facing the United States, detailed in this piece on CSO Online. The Directorate was created to bring the NSA’s foreign intelligence and cybersecurity operations together in order to “eradicate cyber actors from national security systems and critical infrastructure.” Neuberger believes that ransomware needs to be a major focus (no surprise, considering the story in New Bedford detailed above), and also called out nation-states like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
AI deepfakes are now being used to scam companies
This one is pretty wild. Apparently, someone was able to use AI deepfake software to mimic the voice of a CEO in the UK and instructed an employee to wire him over $200,000. The software was able to imitate the voice, tonality, punctuation and accent.
A whole lot of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts have been found online
TechCrunch has reported that an exposed server contained more than 419 million records, including 133 million records in the U.S. These records contained the user’s Facebook ID and phone number.
And in non-security news this week:
Stripe launches Stripe Capital
Some big news in the world of fintech – Stripe officially unveiled a new service for advancing cash to customers, getting repaid out of future sales coming through its platform. TechCrunch explains here how the company is looking to diversify into other financial services.
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