WIRED
Believe it or not, GameStop stock wasn’t the world’s only story this week. The last few days have been tumultuous for cybersecurity as well, especially after revelations that North Korean hackers targeted security pros with a campaign of convincing DMs. Lots of folks shared screenshots of how they dodged the bullet, but it’s still unclear how many more fell for the ruse.
Speaking of falling, an international team-up of law enforcement agencies took down the notorious Emotet botnet this week, arresting two alleged members of the gang behind it and seizing servers in the process. Ransomware operators and other bad actors who used Emotet to spread their wares will likely move on to other means of distribution, but at least the “most dangerous malware in the world,” as Europol called it, has been extinguished for now.
These things do have a tendency to persist, after all. Take Flash, the software that launched a thousand vulnerabilities. While Adobe killed it dead-dead last week (for real this time) it will continue to persist and cause problems on some systems for years to come. Another potential problem-causer: Telegram, the messaging app that has exploded in popularity as users have fled WhatsApp over privacy concerns and Parler over its current state of nonexistence. While Telegram does offer end-to-end encryption, it’s not on by default and not available at all for group chats, which may lead some users to expose themselves more than they might assume.