Welcome back, dearest Windscriber, to Tuesday Newsday. As the most meme-focused VPN in the game, we try to keep an eye on the ol' internet trends, and the Internet Chefs cook up a feast week in, week out. They didn't hold back this week, either, providing us with a healthy dose of scrumptious morsels of news to feast our mortal eyes on.
I'm not even sure that "pwned" does it justice, honestly; Change Healthcare got frickin' REKT. We're talking full systems shut down for at least 4 days, if not more. The subsidiary of United Healthcare (the largest healthcare company in the US by market cap), has allegedly identified a "nation-state associated actor" behind the cyber attack, but that's about all we know for now.
The FTC continues its crusade against bullshitters and snake oil salesman (by this, I mean data brokers) as they set their targets on Avast, the "security research" and antivirus app firm. Despite all their fancy public rhetoric about keeping people's devices safe and privacy in check, they were actually harvesting users' browser info and selling it to over 100 companies. The FTC complaint also stated that the data was far from sufficiently anonymized, giving purchasers of the data the ability to de-anonymize the data to a significant degree of granularity.
And finally, in our headline news for this episode of Tuesday Newsday, a Florida-based (lol of course it's in Florida) journalist was charged with 14 federal crimes late last week. He stands accused of unauthorized access to Fox News materials when he leaked videos of Kanye West making antisemitic comments to multiple news outlets.
The journalist's lawyer naturally maintains his client's innocence, stating that his client was able to obtain the videos via simply knowing the correct URL to access low-definition, un-encrypted Fox News feeds. Given the average state of cyber security in most corporations, it's pretty easy to imagine a scenario where Fox News is incompetent enough to leave the broadcasts unencrypted.
TL;DR
- A major Healthcare company was breached
- The FTC is really not fucking around this year
- Florida man journalist fighting for his freedom
The standard for crazy shit that happens on the internet every day continues to be raised by the second, it seems. What was normal last year is not even close to how crazy shit can get this year at the current trajectory. Considering that a lot of your life is online these days, it's in your best interest to keep your privacy while connected.
