For DCist veterans worried about their clips, some were saved in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and I have URLs you can use to find your stuff. Please share with anyone who can use it. https://rebrand.ly/dcist-archives
Earlier: /vice-archives and /the-messenger/archives
Please make it stop.
NEW: U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group has filed an 8-K notice with the SEC following the cyberattack at one of its subsidiaries, Change Healthcare, a health tech giant with access to millions of people's data.
UHG said it identified on Wednesday "a suspected nation-state associated cyber security threat actor had gained access" to Change Healthcare's systems.
UHG said it doesn't know how long the outages will last.
New: One of the largest U.S. healthcare tech companies has confirmed a cyberattack.
Change Healthcare says it handles 15 billion healthcare transactions annually, and that 1-in-3 U.S. patient records are “touched by our clinical connectivity solutions.”
Pharmacies are reporting outages and issues with fulfilling prescriptions (such as billing through insurance).
It's Thursday, and Change Healthcare is still largely offline as it responds to an ongoing cybersecurity incident.
TechCrunch is getting inbound from affected patients, healthcare providers, and Change employees about the incident as the outage drags into its second day.
When reached by email Thursday, a company spokesperson declined to comment.
As part of Operation Cronos, law enforcement agencies have seized 34 servers, arrested two alleged LockBit actors, seized 200 cryptocurrency accounts, and released a decryption tool.
Yesterday morning, very suddenly, my beloved cat Frankie Fangs died of a stroke. He fell off his cat tower, I heard it, I picked him up, and after trying some rescue breaths and his inhaler, I had a few moments to make him feel loved. Dev and I were there while he crossed over the Rainbow Bridge.
He was the best gato and was filled with unconditional love. If the spirit moves you, please donate to your local pet shelter because animals are the best parts of our lives and deserve all the the care we can give them. Frankie is survived by his little sister Whisper, and nine and a half years of incredible, joy-filled, incredibly funny, lifelong memories.
New, by me: Notorious stalkerware operation TheTruthSpy was hacked — again.
Two hacking groups independently found a security flaw in TheTruthSpy that allows the mass access of victims’ stolen mobile device data directly from TheTruthSpy’s servers.
The hack reveals TheTruthSpy continues to spy on tens of thousands of new victims.
TechCrunch added the new data to our spyware lookup tool, which lets you check if your Android device was compromised by TheTruthSpy.
Our free spyware lookup tool contains about 400,000 unique Android device identifiers that have been compromised by TheTruthSpy stalkerware. This includes victims dating back 2016 through to December 2023, which accounts for pretty much every victim of TheTruthSpy.
i've seen literally 50x more people complaining about the toothbrush thing compared to actual blogs, which is funny to me but okay, I understand.
It's probably significant that all the places i've seen publish it are mass production reblog factories. all due respect, these are not well regarded news outlets. maybe that's not obvious to the general public or even the cyber expert public? There's a difference.
contrary to the viral outrage, this is absolutely not an example of "a dozen well-regarded news outlets" being tricked. It's still worth learning from as an example of the pitfalls of aggregation but you all could act a little less outraged, if I didn't know better I'd think this thing was just published on the front page of the washington post. everyone, drink a glass of water and get some air. This is not a big deal :)
@GossiTheDog@howelloneill right, i feel that this was largely a failure of the media outlets that chase clicks and views and the authors that are incentivized as such. but on the occasion misinfo spins like this and big outlets consider covering, if not least to "dispel rumors" or under the guise of disinfo watch, it can amplify it even more. we need better media literacy (unlikely) and many outlets to be less click-driven — even if that means publishing less (not holding my breath either).
@GossiTheDog@howelloneill for me, the issue i have with this story blowing up is that i worry it desensitizes the reader to actual harms and threats out there. sometimes saying nothing at all (by not writing about it) is the best thing (in my view/opinion). but there's no incentive for media outlets to do that.
Incredible reporting by Swiss media looking at Spyhide, a stalkerware made in Iran, which we exposed last year as a phone spyware operation snooping on tens of thousands of unknowing victims. NZZ speaks with a victim to explore the human cost of phone spyware.
Spyhide had victims all over the world, including in the United States. Tens of thousands with no knowledge their phones were spying on them.
After @maia uncovered the secretive Spyhide operation, the Iranian developers rebranded as Oospy in a last-minute attempt to save the spyware operation. The spyware makers were still using PayPal accounts to make money from paying customers. PayPal was notified, those accounts were shut down, and Oospy dropped offline — for good.
News startup The Messenger abruptly shut down yesterday, pulling the entire site's archives down with it, leaving the staff unable to save their work or clips.
Well, not quite.
Whoever pulled down The Messenger forgot about the site's RSS feeds, which live on. For now, it's possible to download the entire published archive from The Messenger by scraping the enumerable RSS feed.
cms.themessenger[.]com/feed?paged=# (# is a number)
The internet is forever, so snag yourself a copy while you can.