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In today’s post, Abby Shelton interviews a By the People volunteer, Justin Kern, who serves as the Division Communications Director for the American Red Cross. By the People is a crowdsourced transcription program launched in 2018 at the Library of Congress. Volunteer-created transcriptions are used to make digitized collections more accessible and discoverable on loc.gov. Abby: How did you hear about By […]
Cybercriminals are selling hundreds of thousands of credential sets stolen with the help of a cracked version of Acunetix, a powerful commercial web app vulnerability scanner, new research finds. The cracked software is being resold as a cloud-based attack tool by at least two different services, one of which KrebsOnSecurity traced to an information technology […]
Interested in learning more about what’s new in the Library of Congress’s digital collections? The Signal shares updates on new additions to our digital collections and we love showing off all the hard work of our colleagues from across the Library. Read on for a sample of what’s been added recently and some of our favorite highlights. […]
Image: Shutterstock, iHaMoo. Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately seized control over the account by convincing him to […]
Earlier this year, the Library of Congress and our web harvest vendor MirrorWeb presented research on website archivability at the 2024 Web Archiving Conference at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The presentation was part of a panel called “Can we capture this?’: Assessing Website Archivability Beyond Trial and Error,” which was moderated by Martin Klein (Pacific […]
This is an easy-to-read chapter: that reiterates many of the things we need to remember when working with and teaching about Generative AI tools. I didn’t learn anything new, per se, but liked that this is focussed specifically on our profession. What’s most useful though, IMHO, is the introduction to these 8 fleshed-out scenarios: . […]
This blog post was guest-authored by Rachel Trent, Senior Digital Collections Data Librarian. For nearly twenty-five years, the Library of Congress has been archiving campaign websites for Presidential, Congressional, and gubernatorial elections. Back in 2022, we released a dataset of index files for the United States Elections Web Archive, and we are happy to announce […]
In this week’s Princh Library Blog, recurring guest writer Nina Grant gives some advice on how you can set up a cozy library nook at your home, for reading, or streaming, or just relaxing. Enjoy! Our world seems to always be abuzz with something, and whether we like it or not, it’s moving faster than […]
A financial firm registered in Canada has emerged as the payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services aimed at Russian-speaking customers, new research finds. Meanwhile, an investigation into the Vancouver street address used by this company shows it is home to dozens of foreign currency dealers, money transfer businesses, […]
Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 70 security holes in Windows and Windows software, including one vulnerability that is already being exploited in active attacks. The zero-day seeing exploitation involves CVE-2024-49138, a security weakness in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) driver — used by applications to write transaction logs — that […]
Today’s guest post is from Kate Murray, Genevieve Havemeyer-King, Marcus Nappier, Liz Caringola and Liz Holdzkom of the Digital Collections Management & Services Division at the Library of Congress. This year we added two new staff to the Formats team, who have been assisting with format research, FDD updates, and other maintenance activities throughout the year. Welcome […]
In January 2022, KrebsOnSecurity identified a Russian man named Mikhail Matveev as “Wazawaka,” a cybercriminal who was deeply involved in the formation and operation of multiple ransomware groups. The U.S. government indicted Matveev as a top ransomware purveyor a year later, offering $10 million for information leading to his arrest. Last week, the Russian government […]
Phishing attacks increased nearly 40 percent in the year ending August 2024, with much of that growth concentrated at a small number of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — such as .shop, .top, .xyz — that attract scammers with rock-bottom prices and no meaningful registration requirements, new research finds. Meanwhile, the nonprofit entity that oversees […]
In this week’s Princh Library Blog, recurring guest writer Nina Grant brings us a collection of peculiar, if unusual, libraries. Enjoy! To quote the wisdom of Albert Einstein: “The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library”. Indeed, as libraries provide free access to history and information through books, they’re […]
Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake, but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a secret for long: […]
In 2018, the Library launched the very popular Free To Use and Reuse Sets, where staff curate thematic sets of items from our digital collections that are either in the public domain, have no known copyright restrictions or have been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. The public is not only free to […]
Over on Maps Mania, Keir posted a couple of quick maps he built leveraging Bluesky’s firehose jetstream, including US State Social, which: scans Bluesky posts for mentions of the 50 US states. When it detects a mention, it adds a marker to the map and displays the associated message in the map’s sidebar. Once the […]
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles this week unsealed criminal charges against five men alleged to be members of a hacking group responsible for dozens of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies between 2021 and 2023, including LastPass, MailChimp, Okta, T-Mobile and Twilio. A visual depiction of the attacks by the SMS phishing group known […]
Today’s blog post is an interview with Tori Culler of the Digital Services Directorate here at the Library of Congress. You can read other interviews with digital collections staff here. Carlyn: Hi Tori, could you tell us a bit about what you do in the Digital Services Directorate? How would you explain your job to […]
In this week’s Princh Library Blog post, recurring guest writer Sam L. Bowman covers how your library can improve the user experience on its webpage. From optimization basics to specific accessibility guidelines, Sam provides plenty of examples and useful tips. Enjoy! Libraries are making a comeback in the post-pandemic world. More people are using libraries […]
