WIRED broke the news on Wednesday that SoundThinking, the company behind the gunshot detection system ShotSpotter, is acquiring some assets – including patents, customers and employees – from the company Geolitica, which developed the infamous predictive policing software PredPol. WIRED also exclusively reported this week that the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the potentially biased use of ShotSpotter in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
As the federal government inches closer to a possible shutdown, we take a look at the sprawling conservative media apparatus and the large group of right-wing hardliners in Congress who are using their influence to block a compromise in the House of Representatives.
Satellite images from Yale University’s Conflict Observatory provide harrowing insights and important information about the devastation wrought by Sudan’s civil war in the city of Khartoum. Meanwhile, researchers at cybersecurity firm eQualitie have developed a technique to hide digital content in satellite television signals – a method that could bypass censorship and internet shutdowns around the world. And the productivity data that companies are increasingly collecting about their employees using monitoring software could be analyzed in other ways to train AI models and ultimately automate entire jobs.
Plus there’s more. Every week we round up the security and privacy news that we haven’t covered in detail ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories and stay safe out there.
A China-linked hacking group called BlackTech is compromising routers in the United States and Japan, secretly modifying their firmware and moving around corporate networks, a warning from cybersecurity officials said this week. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the NSA, the FBI, and Japan’s National Police Agency and Cybersecurity Office issued a joint warning saying the BlackTech group had “involved itself in the router “Firmware hidden”.
The officials said they observed the China-linked actors using their access to the routers to get from “global subsidiaries” into the networks of corporate headquarters in the U.S. and Japan. BlackTech, which has been active since about 2010, targeted several types of routers, the officials said, but emphasized that it compromised Cisco routers using a custom-made backdoor. “TTPs against routers allow actors to hide configuration changes, hide commands, and disable logging while BlackTech actors perform operations,” the alert says.
Microsoft and U.S. government officials said in July that Chinese government hackers had penetrated the cloud-based Outlook email systems of about 25 organizations, including the U.S. State Department and Commerce Department. On Wednesday, an anonymous aide to Senator Eric Schmitt told Portal that the State Department incident had exposed 60,000 emails from 10 accounts. Nine of the accounts were used by State Department employees focused on East Asia and the Pacific, while one focused on Europe. The congressional staffer learned the information in a State Department IT briefing for lawmakers and shared the details with Portal via email.
The zero-day market, where new vulnerabilities and the code needed to exploit them are exchanged for cash, is big business. And it may become more and more lucrative. Russian zero-day seller Operation Zero announced this week that it would increase part of its payments from $200,000 to $20 million. “As always, the end user is a non-NATO country,” the group said, noting that these included Russian private and government organizations.
Unlike bug bounties, in which security researchers find bugs in companies’ code and then disclose them to companies to fix in exchange for payments, the zero-day market encourages trading in bugs that can potentially be exploited by buyers. “Full-chain mobile phone exploits are currently the most expensive products and are primarily used by government actors,” Sergey Zelenyuk, CEO of Operation Zero, told TechCrunch. “When an actor needs a product, they are sometimes willing to pay as much as possible to own it before it gets into the hands of other parties.”
The European Union’s proposed law to combat child sexual abuse content – by scanning people’s messages and potentially compromising encryption – is one of the continent’s most controversial laws in the last decade. This week, a series of revelations from a group of reporters showed that the law’s main architect was under intense pressure in the lead-up to the proposed law and that police wanted access to the news data. First, an investigation revealed the close links between European Union Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson and child protection groups. A second report shows that European police agency Europol pushed for access to data collected under the proposed law. In response to the investigation, the European Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs has written to Johansson and asked questions about the relationship.