All posts tagged: hackers

Bitwarden Is Making It Harder for Hackers to Access Your Passwords

Bitwarden Is Making It Harder for Hackers to Access Your Passwords

Password managers are a great way to store your login details, but if a hacker gets a hand on your master password, they’ll gain access to every account you’ve stored on them. Fortunately, Bitwarden is adding a feature that will make it much harder for hackers to access your vault, even if they know your password. Bitwarden Users Will Get Two-Factor Authentication Emails by Default Bitwarden As announced on the Bitwarden website, the password manager app has a new two-factor authentication (2FA) protection layer. Bitwarden users can always add their own 2FA methods via the settings for free, but this update specifically targets people who have yet to enable 2FA: Soon, after you enter your Bitwarden account email address and master password, if the device where you’re logging in is not recognized by the Bitwarden server and you do not have two-step login enabled nor are using enterprise SSO, Bitwarden will email a verification code to the email account on file. You will need to go to your email account to access the code and …

How victims of PowerSchool’s data breach helped each other investigate ‘massive’ hack

How victims of PowerSchool’s data breach helped each other investigate ‘massive’ hack

On January 7, at 11:10 p.m. in Dubai, Romy Backus received an email from education technology giant PowerSchool notifying her that the school she works at was one of the victims of a data breach that the company discovered on December 28. PowerSchool said hackers had accessed a cloud system that housed a trove of students’ and teachers’ private information, including Social Security numbers, medical information, grades, and other personal data from schools all over the world.  Given that PowerSchool bills itself as the largest provider of cloud-based education software for K-12 schools — some 18,000 schools and more than 60 million students — in North America, the impact could be “massive,” as one tech worker at an affected school told TechCrunch. Sources at school districts impacted by the incident told TechCrunch that hackers accessed “all” their student and teacher historical data stored in their PowerSchool-provided systems.  Backus works at the American School of Dubai, where she manages the school’s PowerSchool SIS system. Schools use this system — the same system that was hacked — …

The FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel Isn’t Leaving Without a Fight

The FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel Isn’t Leaving Without a Fight

As the United States scrambles to kick China out of its communications networks, Jessica Rosenworcel, the outgoing Democratic chair of the Federal Communications Commission, says it’s vital for her Republican successor to maintain strong oversight of the telecommunications industry. The government is still reeling from the Chinese “Salt Typhoon” hacking campaign that penetrated at least nine US telecom companies and gave Beijing access to Americans’ phone calls and text messages and the wiretap systems used by law enforcement. The operation exploited US carriers’ shockingly poor cybersecurity, including an AT&T administrator account that lacked basic security protections. To prevent a repeat of the unprecedented telecom intrusion, Rosenworcel used the waning days of her FCC leadership to propose new cybersecurity requirements for telecom operators. On Thursday, the commission narrowly voted to approve her proposal. But those rules face a bleak future, with president-elect Donald Trump preparing to take office and control of the FCC transferring to commissioner Brendan Carr, a Trump ally who voted against Rosenworcel’s regulatory plan. In an interview days before Trump’s inauguration, Rosenworcel is …

Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

Digital license plates, already legal to buy in a growing number of states and to drive with nationwide, offer a few perks over their sheet metal predecessors. You can change their display on the fly to frame your plate number with novelty messages, for instance, or to flag that your car has been stolen. Now one security researcher has shown how they can also be hacked to enable a less benign feature: changing a car’s license plate number at will to avoid traffic tickets and tolls—or even pin them on someone else. Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he’s able to rewrite a Reviver plate’s firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its …

Chinese Hackers Target Trump Campaign via Verizon Breach

Chinese Hackers Target Trump Campaign via Verizon Breach

The Chinese spy operation adds to the growing sense of a melee of foreign digital interference in the election, which has already included Iranian hackers’ attempt to hack and leak emails from the Trump campaign—with limited success—and Russia-linked disinformation efforts across social media. Ahead of the full launch next week of Apple’s AI platform, Apple Intelligence, the company debuted tools this week for security researchers to evaluate its cloud infrastructure known as Private Cloud Compute. Apple has gone to great lengths to engineer a secure and private AI cloud platform, and this week’s release includes extensive detailed technical documentation of its security features as well as a research environment that is already available in the macOS Sequoia 15.1 beta release. The testing features allow researchers (or anyone) to download and evaluate the actual version of PCC software that Apple is running in the cloud at a given time. The company tells WIRED that the only modifications to the software relate to optimizing it to run in the virtual machine for the research environment. Apple also …

The Ozempic Hackers – The Atlantic

The Ozempic Hackers – The Atlantic

By the time Lisa started breaking open her Mounjaro pens with pliers, she had run out of other ideas. She was 300 pounds. She had already tried bariatric surgery. (It had limited success.) She had tried getting her insurance company to cover Mounjaro. (It stopped after a month.) She had tried a cheaper copycat version from a compounding pharmacy. (It didn’t work as well, and she worried about what she was actually getting.) “I was absolutely desperate to stay on,” she says, but she could not afford the sticker price. That’s when she learned online about a money-saving loophole: She could split a maximum-strength Mounjaro pen into the smaller doses she needed. (The single-use injection pens come in multiple concentrations that cost the same.) One pen became as many as six. A year of dose-splitting later, she has lost 75 pounds—at a fraction of the original cost. Lisa is among a small number of patients who have taken to hacking their injection pens. (I’m identifying Lisa and other patients in this story by only their …

Hackers did not project the Soviet Victory banner on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate this week

Hackers did not project the Soviet Victory banner on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate this week

CLAIM: Images show the Soviet Victory banner projected by hackers onto the east side of Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Tuesday night, prior to annual festivities celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The images were fabricated. Berlin police and the company that manages the Brandenburg Gate confirmed to The Associated Press that the Soviet Victory banner did not appear this week on the monument, one of Germany’s most significant landmarks. THE FACTS: Social media users shared photos and videos that made it appear the banner was being projected onto the Brandenburg Gate ahead of this week’s commemorative celebrations. “Last night, hackers breached the projection on the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and put the Soviet Victory Banner,” reads one X post that had received approximately 21,000 likes and more than 5,300 shares as of Friday. A TikTok video viewed more than 198,000 times was similarly captioned: “Last night, hackers hacked the projection on the Brandenburg Gate and reminded authorities of who once defeated them, German police have launched an investigation.” Other …

Christie’s Website Is Brought Down by Hackers Days Before 0 Million Auctions

Christie’s Website Is Brought Down by Hackers Days Before $840 Million Auctions

Days before Christie’s expected to sell as much as $840 million worth of art at an auction set to include paintings by Warhol and Basquiat, the auction house experienced what it described as a “technology security issue” that took its website offline. Some collectors and art advisers noticed the problem on Thursday evening. By the next morning, the website was redirecting visitors to a temporary page outside of its own web domain. “We apologize that our website is currently offline,” it said. “We are working to resolve this as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience.” Edward Lewine, a Christie’s spokesman, said that a security issue had affected some of the company’s systems, including its website. “We are taking all necessary steps to manage this matter, with the engagement of a team of additional technology experts,” he said in a statement. “We will provide further updates to our clients as appropriate.” The art world has faced an increasing number of cyberattacks in recent years. In January, a service provider that helped museums host their collections online and manage internal documents was targeted by hackers. Organizations including the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra have faced cyberattacks that hampered …