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“Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) This is the story of the mastermind behind one of the largest "fake news" operations in the US. For two years, he ran websites and Facebook…

Passengers couldn’t fly after NHS vaccine passport went offline

Enlarge (credit: VOO QQQ) England's COVID Pass system went offline for hours on Wednesday, causing British travelers to remain stranded at airports. Some passengers couldn't board their flights, while others suffered delays as…

US gov’t will slap contractors with civil lawsuits for hiding breaches

In a groundbreaking initiative announced by the Department of Justice this week, federal contractors will be sued if they fail to report a cyber attack or data breaches. The newly introduced "Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative"…

Twitch source code, creator earnings exposed in 125GB leak

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images) Live video broadcasting service Twitch has been hit by a massive hack that exposed 125GB of the company's data. In a 4chan thread posted (and removed)…

Facebook’s outage likely cost the company over $60 million

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) In a major outage yesterday, Facebook, along with its sibling sites, WhatsApp and Instagram, became unreachable for hours. Real-time website status tracker DownDetector received over 14 million reports from users…

Company that routes SMS for all major US carriers was hacked for five years

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | d3sign) Syniverse, a company that routes hundreds of billions of text messages every year for hundreds of carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, revealed to government regulators that…

Windows 11: The Ars Technica review

(credit: Microsoft) Microsoft wanted everyone to use Windows 10. Faced with slow adoption of Windows 8 and the stubborn popularity of Windows 7, Microsoft made Windows 10 a free upgrade for anyone using…

Researcher refuses Telegram’s bounty award, discloses auto-delete bug

Enlarge (credit: Joshua Sortino) Telegram patched another image self-destruction bug in its app earlier this year. This flaw was a different issue from the one reported in 2019. But the researcher who reported…

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are down. Here’s what we know [Updated]

Enlarge / Today's global Facebook and Facebook-owned-services outage appears to be the result of a flubbed BGP configuration change pushed by a Facebook engineer this morning. (credit: Sean Gladwell via Getty Images /…

Hundreds of scam apps hit over 10 million Android devices

Enlarge / Never put a GriftHorse on your phone. (credit: John Lamparsky | Getty Images) Google has taken increasingly sophisticated steps to keep malicious apps out of Google Play. But a new round…