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The Year 2 0 1 9
2019 Jan 16:  Epic Games, maker of hit online battle royal Fortnite, acknowledged that a flaw in the game’s log-in system could have allowed hackers to impersonate real players and purchase in-game currency using the credit cards on file; the hackers could then have siphoned off those purchases from hijacked accounts into other accounts that they controlled; the company has previously said that there are around 200 million registered users and about 80 million people play Fortnite every month.
2019 Jan 23: China blocked Microsoft's search engine Bing, the last foreign search tool left in the country; China has been shutting down all sorts of websites and apps – including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – in its on-going policy of stifling communication and dissent.
(The Google search engine left China in 2010 over censorship issues.)
2019 Jan 30: After a report by news site TechCrunch, Facebook shut down a controversial 3-year-old iOS app that collected data from people between the ages of 13 and 35 who downloaded a VPN on their phone; users were paid $20 a month in gift cards to allow Facebook 'nearly limitless access' to their devices and data, including private messages, emails, and web activity. Just hours after the report was published, Facebook said that it would discontinue the iOS app, and Apple banned the company from using a program intended for businesses that it says Facebook misused.
2019 Jan 31: Social media giant Twitter announced that they had identified and removed troll accounts from five countries trying to manipulate the 2018 U.S. midterm elections; thousands of Twitter accounts backed by foreign governments including Russia, Iran, and Venezuela were reportedly found to be copying tactics of the Internet Research Agency, a Moscow-backed group indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller; the deletions included 418 accounts from Russia, 764 troll accounts from Venezuela, and another 6,000 U.S.-based accounts spreading disinformation or inflaming political discourse. Separately, Facebook removed 783 pages, groups, and accounts that were 'engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior tied to Iran'.
2019 March 22: A memo from the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that describes the unnecessary and unlawful disclosure of private data, including banking information, of 2.3 million hurricane and wildfire disaster survivors; the data was shared with an unidentified federal contractor and places the survivors at 'increased risk of identity theft and fraud' and included 20 'unnecessary' fields such as electronic funds transfer numbers, bank transit numbers, and residential addresses. F.E.M.A. said that it has already begun filtering their data to ensure that it cannot be shared, and that there is so far no indication that any information has been compromised.
2019 May 23: Facebook announced removal of a record 3 billion fake accounts over 6-month span.
2019 July 11: Emperor Trump convened a Social Media Troll Summit at the White House; representatives of Facebook and Twitter were not invited; the stated purpose was to 'bring together digital leaders for a robust conversation on the opportunities and challenges of today's online environment'; however, the so-called industry leaders who attended included wacky conspiracy theorists, internet trolls, and far-right conservatives such as: right-wing smear-monger Ali Alexander; radio host Bill Mitchell, who promotes the extremist QAnon conspiracy theory on Twitter; a pro-Trump 'memesmith' who goes by the screen name @CarpeDonktum; and Jim Hoft, who runs the Gateway Pundit blog that often promotes hoaxes.
2019 July 29: Capital One announced that a hacker had accessed more than 100 million credit card applications & accounts; the breach was one of the largest ever for the financial services industry and also accessed 6 million accounts in Canada, 80,000 bank account numbers, 140,000 Social Security numbers, and the Social Insurance numbers of 1 million Canadians, as well as an unknown number of credit scores, limits, balances, etc. The FBI arrested a woman from the Seattle area and charged her with computer fraud and abuse in federal court; Capital One said that the hack could cost the company up to $150 million in the near term.
2019 Aug 9: Presbyterian Healthcare Services of New Mexico revealed a data breach that allowed unauthorized access to 183,000 patients & health plan members after an employee respon-ded to a 'phishing' scam email; P.H.S. believes that none of the data has been used in any way, but have already begun sending letters to customers possibly affected by the breach.
2019 Sept 4: Facebook revealed a security breach that exposed the phone numbers of over 400 million users, including celebrities; the server contained records of users from all around the world, including 133 million records on users in the US, 50 million users in Vietnam, and 18 million users in the UK.
2019 Sept 19: Online retailer CafePress [est. 1999] revealed their recent discovery that an unidentified third party had on or about February 19 obtained customer information, without authorization, that was contained in a company database; they are investigating the incident with the assistance of outside experts and are cooperating with federal law enforcement authorities; they have also taken various steps to further enhance the security of all systems and customer informa-tion, and the affected database has been moved to a different environment.
2019 Oct 1: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the Federal Communication Commission's repeal of so-called net neutrality rules that have prohibited broadband internet providers from charging more for faster service; the mixed ruling also said that the F.C.C. had gone too far in barring state and local governments from imposing their own rules.
2019 Oct 16: Law enforcement authorities arrested 338 people in 12 countries in connection with a South Korea-based 'dark web' child pornography site; seized website Welcome to Video allegedly sold access to 250,000 videos of child sexual abuse, taking payment in bitcoin. Officials also rescued at least 23 underage victims in the U.S., Britain, and Spain who had been raped by site users.
2019 Dec: Wawa [est. 1964], the East Coast chain of convenience stores & gas stations, was hit with a massive data breach, potentially affecting more than 850 locations.
2019 Dec 13: New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell signed a declaration of emergency order after phishing attempts and suspicious activity were detected on the city's network; the city's information technology depart-ment then began to power down servers and city computers as a precaution; ransomware was detected, but no ransom was demanded in the cyberattack, and officials believe that no employee or city information was com-promised during the phishing attempts.
2019 December: Telephone service provider CenturyLink revealed a recent 'data security incident', insisting that 'no sensitive information was involved'.
The Year 2 0 2 0
2020 July 21: Twitter cracked down on accounts that spread the QAnon right-wing conspiracy cult theories, and has removed more than 7,000 of them over the last few weeks after the accounts engaged in targeted harassment; the company will stop recommending accounts & content related to QAnon and will keep QAnon information from appearing in trending topics or search results; it is also taking steps to keep QAnon followers from coordinating harassment campaigns against other people. Twitter said that these actions will affect roughly 150,000 accounts.
2020 late July: Microsoft has reportedly been working to buy TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, for some time; Bloomberg reported that Emperor Trump's threat to ban the app in USA is likely a 'negotiation tactic' to pressure ByteDance into selling off the app to a U.S. company.
2020 July 31: Authorities arrested a Tampa, Florida teen in connection with this month's massive Twitter hack; 17-year-old Graham Clark was charged with 30 felony charges, including one count of organized fraud and 17 counts of communications fraud, 'for being the mastermind behind' the July 15 event; he took over high-profile accounts like former President Barack Obama's to promote a Bitcoin scam. Clark allegedly gained access to Twitter's internal controls 'through compromising a Twitter employee' and then received more than $100,000 in Bitcoin.
2020 Aug 20: Another terrible blow to small websites: The Internet Movie Database dropped support of all us.IMDb.com addresses - without warning or notice, of course -
so that going there displays a security violation page and then IMDb Help - which is no help. For my dozen websites and 1,800+ pages, there were 653 pages that needed fixing, with from just one link to dozens of broken links on each.
2020 Oct 7: Yelp has begun placing an alert notice on businesses 'accused of racist behavior' (this project will take some time to check all the million or so restaurants on their website).
2020 Monday Oct 12: Microsoft, Inc. said that they seized control of computers that were installing malicious software on local government networks, threatening to disrupt the November elections by interfering with voter registration records or the reporting of election results; Microsoft invoked copyright law to persuade a federal judge in Virginia to issue a court order allowing the seizure of the computers because they were infected with Trickbot, a common piece of malware that uses Microsoft code. Microsoft said that the action will prevent Trickbot from infecting more computers or activating already-installed ransomware.
2020 mid-October: The Verizon cellphone network is promoting its new 5G technology, saying that the coverage nationwide now reaches 200+ million people in 1,800+ cities {population, not customers}, with the unprecedented performance of 5G Ultra Wideband, the fastest 5G in the world, being added in more and more major cities – 60+ by the end of the year; so Verizon released a new hour-long video about developing future uses of the 5G technology:
watch full 10/2020 docufilm "Speed of Thought" [55:10] online at Verizon
2020 Nov 11: Because of the pending election runoffs and recounts, Facebook and Google announced that they will keep their political ad bans in place for several more weeks.
2020 Dec 9: YouTube has decided to remove new videos falsely claiming that widespread fraud changed the outcome of the election.
2020 Sunday Dec 13: The Trump administration confirmed that hackers conducted a cyberattack on the Treasury Department and part of the Commerce Department; the acknowledgement followed news reports of the breach. Cybersecurity firm FireEye, which disclosed last week that it had been hacked, said that the monthlong 'global campaign' was perpetrated via malware inserted in the security update of the popular SolarWinds Orion server management software. The Homeland Security Department's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a rare directive late Sunday for "all federal civilian agencies to review their networks for indicators of compromise and disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products immediately." It was not immediately clear what data may have been compromised.
The Year 2 0 2 1
2021 Mon Jan 4: The Alphabet Workers Union launched public existence in an op-ed for the The New York Times by the union's executive chair Parul Koul and vice chair Chewy Shaw, both of whom are Google software engineers; 200 workers at Google's parent company Alphabet 'organized in secret for the better part of a year and elected its leadership last month'; the union leaders said that the labor group will be open to all Alphabet employees and contractors.
2021 Jan 6:  Twitter removed three tweets from the account of President Donald Trump and suspended his account for 12 hours after he continued to push conspiracy theories about the election after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building.
2021 Jan 7: Still-President Donald Trump was indefinitely suspended from Facebook due to his actions surrounding the January 6th Capitol Riot, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg citing Trump's "use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government" and saying that "the risks of allowing the president to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great".
2021 Fri Jan 8: Google removed the Parler app from its Google Play store.
2021 late Friday Jan 8: Twitter permanently suspended President Trump's account, citing 'the risk of further incitement of violence'; Trump's account has already been wiped from the site.
2021 Sat Jan 9: Apple suspended Parler, which many conservatives have joined as an alternative to Facebook and Twitter, from the App Store indefinitely because Parler "has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of ... threats to people’s safety". Amazon Web Services announced that it would no longer provide cloud-computing services to Parler.
2021 Sun Jan 10: New Zealand's central bank said that an unidentified hacker breached one of its data systems, potentially accessing commercially and personally sensitive information; the hack has been contained, and the bank's core functions 'remain sound and operational', but 'it will take some time to understand the full implications of this breach'; the attack was significant and was likely carried out by another government.
2021 Sun Jan 10: Following Wednesday's violent siege of the Capitol, payment-processing company Stripe will no longer process payments for President Trump's campaign.
2021 Sun Jan 10: Twitter banned Otero County, New Mexico Commissioner Couy Griffin’s 'Cowboys for Fascism' page in an effort to crack down on his hateful, riot-inciting speech.
2021 Mon Jan 11: Social media platform Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon for denying web-hosting services to Parler and forcing it offline. Amazon Web Services gave Parler the boot on Sunday, after noting a sharp increase in dangerous content since last week's storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump terrorists. Parler said Amazon was trying to discourage competition among micro-blogging services to Twitter's benefit; Parler's complaint also said "AWS's decision to effectively terminate Parler's account is apparently motivated by political animus" and accused Amazon of breach of contract.
2021 Mon Jan 11: Twitter announced that it had removed more than 70,000 accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory website, citing concerns that the adherents could spread material 'with the potential to lead to offline harm'; Twitter explained in a blog post that the accounts 'were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service'.
2021 Mon Jan 11: Facebook announced that it was removing all content that references the 'stop the steal' rallying cry of President Trump's supporters who believe his unfounded claim that President-elect Joe Biden only won the presidential election thanks to voter fraud.
2021 Tue Jan 12: Alphabet-owned video streaming service YouTube announced that it had suspended President Trump's channel for violating policies against inciting violence, over his remarks encouraging supporters to 'fight' to get Congress to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's election win; YouTube said that it will prevent Trump from uploading or live-streaming videos for seven days, adding that the ban could be extended; the decision came after advertisers threatened to boycott unless YouTube removed Trump's channel.
2021 Sun Jan 17: Parler, the social media site popular with conservatives fleeing Facebook and Twitter, came back online after finding a new hosting platform. "Hello world, is this thing on?" was posted by Parler CEO John Matze.
2021 Tue Jan 19: Netflix, Inc. reported that it added more than 8.5 million subscribers to its streaming video service in the fourth quarter of 2020, bringing its total to more than 200 million subscribers for the first time; the gain exceeded the company's forecast, and brought its total subscriber gain for the year to 37 million; Netflix first surpassed 100 million paying viewers in the third quarter of 2017. Netflix shares rose by 11 percent in after-hours trading.
2021 early Friday Jan 22:  Apple and Facebook stock prices gained 7.7 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively, this week ahead of their quarterly reports.
2021 Sat Jan 23: Kroger (based in Cincinnati, with 2,750 retail grocery stores & 2,200 pharmacies in USA) was notified by Accellion that their F.T.A. file transfer product had been hacked back in December; Kroger immediately discontinued use. Kroger believes that less than 1% of customer or personnel records were affected. Accellion said on February First that it had 'patched all known F.T.A. vulnerabilities'; other customers affected were University of Colorado, Washington State's auditor, Australia's financial regulator, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and major U.S. law firm Jones Day.
2021 Tue Jan 26: Micro-blogging platform Twitter permanently banned My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell over his tweets repeating the bogus claim that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election; Twitter said that Lindell's baseless allegations of election fraud violated the company's new civic integrity policy. Major retailers, including Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl's, have stopped carrying My Pillow products due to Lindell's ongoing insistence that the election was rigged in favor of President Biden. Lindell will also likely face a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over his claim that the company's voting machines were used to flip votes to Biden. Twitter has banned more than 70,000 accounts since September, including Trump's, for spreading misinformation.
2021 Friday March 5: Hackers have been exploiting a series of flaws in Microsoft's Exchange software to break into email accounts. More than 20,000 businesses, government offices, and schools in the United States were compromised during a recent widespread cyberattack on Microsoft's Outlook email software; the total number of customers could be much larger, perhaps reaching 250,000. The culprits behind the hack have been identified as several hacking groups with links to the Chinese government; a Chinese government spokesman said that Beijing was not behind the attack.
2021 Wednesday March 10: Activist hackers said that they breached security-camera data collected by startup Verkada, Inc. for a host of companies, including Tesla and software provider Cloudflare; the compro-mised data included live feeds from 150,000 surveillance cameras at companies, hospitals, police departments, prisons, and schools, as well as at Verkada's offices. The hackers belong to an international collective seeking to expose the pervasiveness of video surveillance, and how easy it can be for outsiders to access the images.
2021 Tuesday March 23: Canadian IoT company Sierra Wireless announced that its systems were hacked over the weekend and, as a result, the company has shut down production at its manufacturing sites. The Sierra Wireless website and other internal operations were also disrupted by the ransomware attack; the company believes that it will restart production and resume normal operations soon; in the meantime, they ask customers and partners for their patience as it seeks to remediate the situation.
2021 Wednesday April 21: Hackers have compromised dozens of U.S. government agencies, defense contractors, financial institutions, and other critical sectors, according to FireEye Security, a private cybersecurity firm working with the federal government. The investigation of the latest in a series of disturbing compromises of government agencies & private companies is in its early stages, but already has turned up evidence that the sophisticated suspect Chinese government intruders breached sensitive defense companies.
2021 May 3: German prosecutors announced that they have dismantled the child pornography platform 'Boystown' and arrested three alleged site administrators and one extremely active German user, saying that 'Boystown' had more than 400,000 registered members, and thus was "one of the world's biggest child pornography darknet platforms". Prosecutors in Frankfurt and Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office said the three German administrators were arrested in mid-April – police then shut down the platform. The unidentified alleged site administrators – aged 40, 49, 58 – helped pedophiles spread child pornography while evading law enforcement, and the site included "images of most severe sexual abuse of toddlers" among other vile pornography. The 58-year-old administrator was arrested in Paraguay; the 64-year-old super-user from Hamburg allegedly uploaded more than 3,500 posts to the site. The police action stemmed from a multinational investigation involving Europol, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, the U.S., and Canada.
2021 Wed May 5: Facebook's Oversight Board announced that it has decided to uphold the platform's suspension of former President Donald Trump. (Trump was indefinitely suspended from Facebook on January 7th due to his actions surrounding the Capitol riot.) At the same time, the board also ruled that it "was not appropriate" for Facebook to indefinitely suspend Trump because it is "not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored". The board called for Facebook to "reexamine the arbitrary penalty [that] it imposed" on Trump and to decide on an "appropriate penalty" within six months.
2021 Thursday May 6: Twitter said that it had suspended an account relaying posts from former President Donald Trump's new blog, on the grounds that it violated the company's rules against sidestepping its bans. Twitter and other social media organizations blocked Trump's accounts in January over his alleged incitement of the deadly attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters. Facebook is still mulling whether to some day lift its ban, but Twitter made Trump's suspension permanent in the days after the Capitol riot. The new Trump account was {at}DJTDesk, short for his new "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump" web page & blog.
2021 Friday May 7: A ransomware cyberattack forced one of the nation’s biggest fuel pipeline operators to shut down its entire network.
Colonial Pipeline Company [est. 1962] carries almost half of the gasoline, diesel, and other fuels used on the East Coast. The attack underscores the potential vulnerability of industrial sectors to the expanding threat of ransomware strikes, and appears to have been carried out by the Eastern European-based criminal gang DarkSide; federal officials and the private security firm Mandiant are investigating the matter.
2021 Monday May 10: The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that investigators had identified a criminal gang known as DarkSide as the cause of the cyberattack that forced the shutdown of Colonial Pipeline; the hack tightened fuel supplies in some areas and intensified concerns about the vulnerability of the U.S. economy to ransomware attacks.
2021 Sunday May 16: Gasoline shortages that hit the East Coast last week eased as the Colonial Pipeline returned to normal operations after a six-day shutdown caused by what has been described as the most devastating cyberattack on record. After the shutdown of the 5,500-mile pipeline, panic buying and delivery shortages plagued the region for several days: thousands of gas stations ran out of fuel, and many still had limited supplies on Sunday. Even though the pipeline is back in operation, the supply chain is still catching up, with refiners and distributors rushing to get things back to normal before the peak demand of the summer driving season.
2021 Tuesday May 18: Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said in a report that Russian hacking group DarkSide, which was behind the cyberattack that shut down the Colonial Pipeline, collected more than $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments from 47 victims. The average payment to get DarkSide to undo the effects of its malware was about $1.9 million. The hacking operation was on track to have its most lucrative month ever when it lost access to its servers and abruptly closed.
2021 Tuesday May 18: Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that Colonial had paid hackers a $4.4 million ransom to restore its computer network so that it could resume East Coast fuel deliveries, acknowledging the payment publicly for the first time. Blount said that the company decided to pay because it didn't know how bad the breach was or how long it would take to get the pipeline back in operation on its own, and that the decision to pay the ransom was 'the right thing to do for the country'.
2021 Thursday May 13: Thousands of confidential documents from the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department were leaked onto the dark web after a ransomware cyberattack from a 'Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate'; the leak included internal disciplinary files and intelligence reports, as well as infor-mation from the F.B.I., Secret Service, and other agencies. The so-called Babuk Group coordinated the leak after the D.C. police department rejected demands for a $4 million ransom.
2021 Sat-Sun May 29-30: Hackers hit Brazilian company J.B.S. SA, the world’s largest meat processor, in another ransomware cyberattack on a crucial supply chain, hitting the meat processing industry as it continues to strain against supply chain upheavals caused by the coronavirus pandemic; the company said that it detected the intrusion on its computer networks in North America and Australia on Sunday, but that its backup servers were not affected; they quickly began working with an outside cybersecurity firm to restore its systems. Hackers believed to be from Russia forced J.B.S. to shut down its U.S. beef plants, which provide nearly a quarter of the American supply; one of Canada's biggest beef plants also shut down. Chicken plants operated by Pilgrim's Pride, a J.B.S. subsidiary, also were affected.
2021 June 2: Former President Donald Trump's weblog "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump", which he launched in May to share statements with supporters, has been permanently shut down; senior aide Jason Miller confirmed that the blog 'will not be returning'.
2021 Wed June 2: Brazilian meat producer J.B.S., SA said that most of its plants were back up and running after being shut down by a ransomware cyberattack, but that the hack continued to slow distribution, pushing up wholesale meat prices. The White House said that the cyberattack appeared to be the work of a criminal group likely based in Russia, a matter that President Biden reportedly plans to bring up during his June 16 summit meeting in Geneva with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
2021 June 3: The Justice Department is raising its focus on investigating ransomware attacks to a priority level as high as terrorism after a flurry of devastating cyberattacks, including one that shut down the Colonial Pipeline and another that forced the world's largest meat producer, Brazil's J.B.S. SA, to briefly shut down its U.S. plants. Under the new internal guidance, U.S. attorneys' offices will share information through a central task force in Washington, DC to help make connections and 'disrupt the whole chain' of cyberattacks. Ransomware attacks, in which hackers lock up computer systems – usually by encrypting data – and then demanding payment to free up the system, are a global scourge. Almost 2,400 organizations in the United States – everyone from banks and hospitals to universities and municipalities – were victimized last year alone, but the cybercriminals are increasingly targeting industrial sectors because these firms are more willing to pay up to regain control of their systems.
2021 June 4: Facebook suspended former President Donald Trump for 2 years in response to the Oversight Board ruling (ending in January 2023).
2021 Monday June 7: The U.S. Justice Department announced that it had recovered about $2.3 million of the $4.4 million in bitcoin that Colonial Pipeline paid as ransom to the Russia-based hackers who forced the shut-down of the nation's largest fuel pipeline; the cryptocurrency recovery was the first accomplished by the Biden administration's ransomware task force.
2021 June 7-8: Portions of the internet were effectively shut down for several hours, with sites from Amazon to The New York Times and even the British government's web portal going offline. The massive outage was evidently due to problems at Fastly, a major content delivery network (CDN) underpinning these sites. Fastly said that it is investigating the issue.
Incident #1
June 7, 19:48 UTC We are aware of a possible issue and are working to determine the scope and impact.
June 7, 20:09 UTC Fastly is currently investigating into customer reports of intermittent domain not found errors.
June 8, 02:55 UTC This issue has been resolved for impacted customers
Incident #2
June 8, 09:58 UTC We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.
June 8, 10:44 UTC The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.
June 8, 12:41 UTC Fastly has observed recovery of all services and has resolved this incident.
2021 Wed June 9: J.B.S. SA announced that it paid $11 million in ransom to hackers late last week to ensure that none of the company's data was stolen; the decision came after consultations with the Brazilian company's tech team and outside cybersecurity experts. "It was very painful to pay the criminals, but we did the right thing for our customers," said J.B.S. USA CEO Andre Nogueira.
2021 June 24: Windows 11 was announced as the successor to Windows 10 (which was released in 2015); Windows 11 will be available on October 5th as a free upgrade to some compatible Windows 10 devices through Windows Update and will be included on new hardware shipped in early October.
2021 Aug 12:  U.S. Senator Rand Paul [GOP-KY] was suspended from YouTube after uploading truly ignorant anti-science statements.
2021 September: T-Mobile reported a massive hack into its systems that affected more than 40 million people, including both T-Mobile customers and those who don't subscribe to the company's services.
2021 October: The website of all-digital wireless carrier Visible (wholly owned by Verizon) was hacked; 'threat actors' were able to access usernames/passwords from outside sources, and then exploit that information to login to Visible accounts; the damage being done is that hackers order an iPhone costing $1,000 and have it shipped to some other address; main website is shut down while the company 'deploys tools to mitigate the issue and to enable additional controls to further protect our customers' •
news story at Light Reading tech website
The Year 2 0 2 2
2022 January: Distributor DirecTV notified propagandists One America News Network (O.A.N.N.) that DirecTV would not renew their contract when it expires in April 2022.
2022 May: Official release of the Internet Draft version of HTTP/3, the proposed successor to HTTP/2; work began in 2016 and is close to being standardized.
2022 Sat July 30: Verizon will stop carrying the One America News conservative propaganda cable network on its Fios television service, the last major carrier to remove them for promoting bogus information about the 2020 election and other lies; OAN will soon be available to only a few hundred thousand subscribers on smaller providers; OAN also sells its programming directly through its OAN Live and KlowdTV streaming platforms, but they generate far less revenue than major providers did.
The Year 2 0 2 3
2023 January: According to reports from security researchers & media outlets, usernames and email addresses belonging to more than 200 million Twitter users have been posted online by hackers; the stolen credentials were compiled from a number of earlier Twitter breaches dating back to 2021. Although the database does not include users’ passwords, it nevertheless represents a security threat to those affected. Screenshots of the stolen data show that it contains a number of text files listing email addresses and linked Twitter usernames, as well as users’ real names (if they shared them with Twitter), their follower counts, and account creation dates; the database was being sold on one hacking forum for as little as $2. All internet users are being encouraged to use unique passwords for each online service and to enable multi-factor authentication for each of their accounts where it is available.
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