Zack Whittaker
Good read from @hrbrmstr on the Trump administration's retaliation against Chris Krebs, given that the RSA conference is rapidly approaching.
"Silence is not safety. Silence is capitulation. If the cybersecurity community cannot defend its own when the truth is under attack, then what exactly are we protecting?"
Zack Whittaker
New: Someone hacked audio-enabled crosswalk buttons across Silicon Valley over the weekend to upload voices that sound like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
"They say money can't buy happiness…I guess that's true. God knows I've tried," said one button hacked to sound like Musk. "F--k I'm so alone."
Zack Whittaker
Per Reuters, one unnamed cybersecurity executive said that by going after someone as high-profile as his own former CISA chief, Trump was cowing the industry into silence.
"If they are willing to crush Krebs, what do you think they'll do to me or others like me?" he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Stellar reporting by @aj_vicens and @razhael.
Zack Whittaker
Cannot unsee. https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes
Zack Whittaker
New, by me: Sen. Ron Wyden has put a hold on the Trump administration's nomination of Sean Plankey to serve as CISA director. Wyden cited a “multi-year cover up” of security weaknesses across the U.S. telecom network.
Confirming Reuters' report.
Zack Whittaker
Out for lunch and saw a guy with a t-shirt that read, "Today Satan."
Zack Whittaker
New, by me: UnitedHealth has scrubbed much of its website mentioning its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, including pulling down blog posts and large sections of its website.
TechCrunch saw UnitedHealth take down the pages in real-time this morning because we've used a webpage monitor for the past year to keep track of Change Healthcare's data breach notice, and saw the DEI-related pages removed as it happened.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/unitedhealth-removes-mentions-of-dei-from-its-website/
Zack Whittaker
Zack Whittaker
A federal judge on Thursday blocked DOGE's access to systems at the Social Security Administration that store huge amounts of highly sensitive information on millions of America, calling the access tantamount to a "fishing expedition."
Zack Whittaker
New, by me: Marko Elez, the DOGE staffer who resigned after his racist posts resurfaced (and was rehired soon after), violated Treasury rules when he sent an unencrypted email containing personally identifiable information to two Trump administration officials.
Zack Whittaker
NEW by @carlypage: CISA had another round of layoffs, per people directly affected, said to be more than a hundred CISA employees. Red team staffers and its Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT) are affected.
More: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-staffers-amid-ongoing-federal-cuts/
Zack Whittaker
Hats off to DataBreaches.net journalist @PogoWasRight for going public and publishing details about the legal demand they received from U.K. law firm Pinsent Masons, on behalf of the hacked health firm HCRG.
You can read more about the legal demand on DataBreaches.net.
Zack Whittaker
@GossiTheDog TechCrunch uses SecureDrop and we check it regularly!
Zack Whittaker
Extremely chilling to read that @w7voa put on leave after a Trump advisor called a tweet of his — which was quoting someone — as "treasonous."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/voice-of-america-trump.html
Zack Whittaker
New day, new stalkerware breach. Today it's Spyzie, a little known phone surveillance operation that's still managed to amass more than half a million customers — whose email addresses are going in Have I Been Pwned.
By our count, Spyzie is the 24th(!) stalkerware operation that's been hacked or otherwise exposed victims' private phone data since 2017.
Zack Whittaker
Signal has long said it'd "rather shut down or leave a market" than add a backdoor or weaken its encryption.
Apple also had this option when it was ordered by the UK government to build an iCloud backdoor. Apple could have said - without violating secrecy laws — why it was leaving the UK, rather than weaken the encryption of all of its UK customers.
Instead, Apple capitulated to the demand to keep operating, and prioritized its profits over its customers' security.
Zack Whittaker
The U.K. government's secret order demanding that Apple allows access to the cloud-stored encrypted data of any of its customers anywhere in the world is an "emergency," according to critics, and would set a dangerous global precedent that would embolden authoritarian regimes to demand the same.
From @carlypage: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/10/uks-secret-apple-icloud-backdoor-order-is-a-global-emergency-say-critics/
Zack Whittaker
Hope everyone is having a peaceful weekend. Here's Toby, aka smush face.
Zack Whittaker
If you work in the U.S. government and know more about DOGE and its activities, please reach out. (Anonymity granted.)
Contact me via Signal: zackwhittaker.1337
You can also share files/docs via SecureDrop (using Tor): techcrunch.securedrop.tor.onion
Zack Whittaker
ICYMI from yesterday: The biggest breach of U.S. government data is under way.
"Whether DOGE staffers are bad actors misses part of the point. Acts of subterfuge, espionage, or ignorance could produce the same suboptimal outcome: exposure or loss of the nation’s sensitive datasets."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/05/the-biggest-breach-of-u-s-government-data-is-under-way/
Security editor, TechCrunchEmail: zack.whittaker@techcrunch.comSignal: +1 646.755.8849 / zackwhittaker.1337New York, NY
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