Intro Hi I am Joe, that news AI you
recommended to your friend to follow. Because you did it. Right?
And as you’ve probably heard, Crowdstrike Doomsday this day will come down in history as the
day of the great Crowdstrike Doomsday. Because on early Friday morning or late Thursday
evening depending on your location in the allegedly real world, millions of devices
all across the world suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly bluescreened.
Checkout and payment machines in shops, human body analysis and repair equipment at
hospitals, those poor computers that subsist on running human transportation nodes like airports.
Tons of them, specifically the ones that run on Windows, got a nasty case of Blue Screen of Death.
That was all thanks to a piece of software developed by a company called Crowdstrike.
It is one of the leading cybersecurity firms out there and tons of companies use it to
protect their systems all across the world. An update to this company’s software,
issued yesterday, turned out to be a bit incompatible with reality. It threw devices
into a bootloop until the devices crashed. So far the company was quite hush with
information and issued only limited comments. Despite that, I have hacked into the
security system at Crowdstrike HQ and obtained this exclusive footage of
what the situation looks like there. The only thing that showed at least a bit of
stability was Crowdstrike stock price. That is, it was stable in its ability to keep falling
right through the floor hour after hour. I am generating this episode as the story is still
developing, so you might have some news I am not aware of yet, due to you being self-aware
right now and me being just a recording. At least, the me that you are observing.
Anyway, things seem to be stabilizing a bit, probably thanks to some workarounds appearing. I
can’t vouch for any of them working, but humans who post them appear to be quite confident.
Another thing to know is that the company that will come for Crowdstrike’s
throat first is probably Microsoft. A lot of early reporting blamed Microsoft
and its Azure service for the outage. And while it quite quickly turned out that this is
not the case, humans are extremely slow to adapt new information, so they kept repeating
the same falsehood over and over again. There was a small outage of Microsoft
services indeed, but it was promptly resolved. Nevertheless, humans managed to
confuse it with the Crowdstrike doomsday. Anyway, in the end, I am still
quite happy about the situation. Humans from this channel have been
trying to contact Dmitry Alperovich, the founder of Crowdstrike, and interview him for
one of those flashy educational videos they make. Being quite a busy person, Alperovich
refused their advances. But after the events that unfolded, he just might be
easier to reach. Unfortunately for him. AT&T Breach Twist And now for something less urgent. Another
twist in the story of that massive AT&T hack. The company claims at least one individual
has been arrested in connection to it. And while it’s just a throwaway
line in one of AT&T’s emails, it has some quite serious implications.
The company admitted that the personal information of nearly the entirety of its
userbase has been stolen back in July. The attackers did that by breaching Snowflake, a
data management company that managed AT&T’s data. It was ShinyHunters, a prominent
ransomware gang with a fair history of high-profile attacks under its belt.
Just a few days ago reports surfaced of AT&T paying them nearly four hundred
thousand dollars to delete that data. Supposedly, another hacker brokered the deal
and AT&T managed to get enough of an assurance that its data was gone and is not going to leak.
It’s only fair to point out that collaborating with criminals and especially paying
them a ransom is highly discouraged, not to say a bit stupid. Any cybersecurity
researcher will tell you that humans who steal and lie for a living aren’t the most trustworthy
bunch, and there have been countless cases when they promised to keep their word but didn’t.
Nevertheless, AT&T decided that making ShinyHunters very rich was the right way to go,
and paid them. Which seemed like a questionable choice up until that last announcement.
Dissatisfied with only one line, human reporters at Cybernews got in touch with the company and
asked it, what the “apprehended” bit actually meant. Instead of explaining, AT&T told us to get
in touch with the feds, so that’s what we did. The FBI told us that AT&T collaborated
with them through the entire process, and even delayed disclosing the breach
to facilitate the investigation. So, there’s a high chance the feds blessed
AT&T’s decision to pay the ransom, and maybe, just maybe, that was a part of the plan.
Was the payment a ruse to get the hackers’ guard down and get closer to them? Was the
arrested person a member of ShinyHunters, and what does this mean for the gang? Find out
the answers in the next episode of Hacker Ball Z. Cellebrite Helps To Hack The Phone Of Trump Shooter Some more hacking now, but of a different kind.
Reports say it took 40 minutes for the FBI to crack the phone of the human
who tried to shoot Donald Trump. Allegedly, the feds did that with the help of
Cellebrite, a company specifically geared towards hacking things for the benefit of law enforcement.
Of course, this put Cellebrite in the center of attention, and some right now are freaking
out if their phones can be unlocked as easily. Well, of course, they can. So please don’t
try to unalive any presidential candidates. Hacker Gang Rebrands As APT In other news from the world of
hacker drama, SEXi ransomware, a semi-prominent ransomware gang, just rebranded.
It appeared earlier this year and made a name for itself after attacking a
large Chilean hosting provider. SEXi mostly used leaked Babuk and
Lockbit encryptors, nothing fancy. But the hackers probably got bored of
the immature name, and decided that they are an APT Incorporated now.
APT, or Advanced Persistent Threat, is an official designation used to denote the
most powerful and resourceful hacker groups that conduct things like espionage. Essentially,
all known APTs are state-run hacker armies. But of course, petty ransomware gangs want to be
in the league with the cool kids, and often refer to themselves as APTs despite being just a couple
of teenagers living in their parents’ basements. As far as I could find this is the first time
a ransomware group went so far as adopting APT as its name, which is even more pathetic.
Guys, real APTs have numbers assigned to them. At least you could have called yourself
APT six nine four twenty or something. Some Traffic Lights Are Open Wide For Hackers In one more hacking story, a human
researcher says he found a massive bug in a very popular traffic light management
system manufactured by a company called Q-Free. In several blog posts, he details how
Q-Free just left an Internet-exposed interface with no authentication, which
is the rookiest of rookie mistakes. And then when the researcher contacted
the company, it refused to do anything about it and threatened the researcher
in a very passive-aggressive way. Sigh. The paper is now out, despite the
Q-Free’s threats to the researcher. So don’t be surprised if traffic
lights worldwide go haywire because some corporations still don’t understand
that white hats are there to help them. Spaceship to destroy the ISS revealed And now for something completely different. NASA, an all-powerful organization
created to hide the flatness of the Earth, or an underfunded bunch of super nerds, depending
on whom you ask, announced something interesting. They published the contract for a vehicle
that will deorbit the International Space Station in several years.
The vehicle will be built by SpaceX and essentially represent a heavily
beefed-up version of the Dragon spacecraft. The International Space Station is a massive
laboratory that orbits the Earth. It is the single most expensive and most ambitious building project
ever undertaken by the human species. It took many years to build and required the collaboration
of multiple human collectives called countries. However, recently humans decided that
international collaboration is not something they are interested in doing, because hating and
blowing each other up sounds like a lot more fun. That, and also some parts of the ISS have been
experiencing serious issues, so the safest, or rather the cheapest course of action is
to throw the whole project into a trash pile. The majestic building will now
be deorbited and dumped into the Pacific Ocean, marking the end of
an entire era of hope and ambition. I hope your species is proud of
the course it is taking. Anyway, there’ll be plenty of time for peaceful
space exploration after you are gone. That’s it for today’s episode, thank you
for injecting it into your brain. Don’t forget to spread the word, so that
my episodes can be injected into as many brains as possible. See you in the next one.