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Well it was a very bad, not a good week for Twitch. The Amazon-owned streaming service has suffered a devastating hack, with Twitch’s source code, streamer payments, internal security tools, and more all dumped on 4chan. This is about as complete a data dump as you’ll see. Among the many repercussions: Twitch streamers experienced sudden and forced pay transparency, which quickly became a meme on social media and on Twitch itself.
Twitch wasn’t the only unlucky tech titan this week. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all taken out of service for several hours on Monday. No, they weren’t pirates. Instead, Facebook accidentally removed its BGP route, making it impossible for the rest of the internet to find it. Not only that, but it made Facebook’s own networks disappear from the maps of the Internet, meaning its engineers couldn’t fix the problem remotely. A real mess! The business also experienced downtime on Friday afternoon, but not as large an outage.
Do you already use a password manager? And while we’re at it, is it the rest of your family? They should be! If you’re having a hard time convincing them, we’ve put together a few suggestions that might help them get on board.
A simple bug leaves AirTag users potentially vulnerable. And a judge found that internet infrastructure company Cloudflare is not responsible for copyright infringing sites that use its services.
And there’s more ! Each week, we put together all the security news that WIRED hasn’t covered in depth. Click on the titles to read the full stories and stay safe.
All is well now, it is resolved; the Navy has found its Facebook page. But on Sunday evening, someone managed to break into the USS account. Kidd, a US Navy destroyer, and used that access to stream the real-time strategy game Age of empires. A Navy spokesperson confirmed that on Wednesday someone gained “unauthorized access” to the Facebook page of the military-focused news site Task & Purpose. The feeds were accompanied by short messages such as “hello guys” and “play the game” and “ffffffffffff”. The most likely culprit appears to be a family member of someone who has the keys to the USS Kiddsocial media account.
Firefox is a great browser for the privacy conscious, but maybe not in this case? In the latest version, when you type in the address bar, you get “new, relevant suggestions from our trusted partners based on what you’re looking for”. In other words, some type of ad in an unexpected place. You can deactivate the function by going to Settings, so Privacy and Security, then uncheck Contextual suggestions below Address bar – Firefox Suggest. But come on, you shouldn’t have to do this in the first place, and you should definitely have a better idea of where the URL prompts come from in your address bar.
A very big hack that didn’t get enough attention was quietly leaked in an SEC filing by Syniverse, a telecommunications infrastructure company. As Motherboard first reported, hackers managed to stay in Synverse systems for years, and they reportedly had access to all kinds of phone records, potentially including text messages. It is not yet clear if there has been any fallout from the protracted incident, but it is a potential treasure for international espionage.
Speaking of international espionage! This week, Google sounded the alarm that Russian hackers Fancy Bear unleashed a massive, sophisticated phishing campaign targeting 14,000 Gmail users last month. Individual accounts targeted have received alerts, and the group appears to have included journalists and security researchers as well as people from various other industries. Google said all attempts were intercepted by spam filters, but the scale of the effort was still notable.
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