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Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a […]
New mobile apps from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek have remained among the top three “free” downloads for Apple and Google devices since their debut on Jan. 25, 2025. But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption keys, and sending unencrypted user and device data to […]
Today’s guest post is from Lauren Algee, a Senior Digital Collections Specialist & By the People community manager at the Library of Congress. On February 14, the Library of Congress transcription program By the People will celebrate the legacy of Frederick Douglass with a virtual transcribe-a-thon of rare books and manuscripts related to African American history. […]
I’ve been poking at VOSviewer while helping a student figure out whether it’ll be helpful for a bibliographic analysis project, and I was stymied by running out of memory when attempting to work with a large dataset. The manual (PDF) unhelpfully addresses this issue with a whole section: But there is no VOSviewer.jar file to […]
The FBI joined authorities across Europe last week in seizing domain names for Cracked and Nulled, English-language cybercrime forums with millions of users that trafficked in stolen data, hacking tools and malware. An investigation into the history of these communities shows their apparent co-founders quite openly operate an Internet service provider and a pair of […]
The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized dozens of servers and domains for a hugely popular spam and malware dissemination service operating out of Pakistan. The proprietors of the service, who use the collective nickname “The Manipulaters,” have been the subject of three stories published here since 2015. The FBI said the […]
Image: Shutterstock, ArtHead. In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such outfit — a sprawling network tied to Chinese organized crime gangs and […]
Image: Shutterstock. Greg Meland. President Trump last week issued a flurry of executive orders that upended a number of government initiatives focused on improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture. The president fired all advisors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board, called for the creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, and voided a […]
The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent […]
The following is a guest post by 2025 Innovator in Residence Vivian Li, an illustrator, comics artist and web developer from Macomb, Illinois who currently lives in Seattle. As someone who has lived in both rural Illinois and bustling Seattle, I was shocked that I could find really cool items about both locations on the […]
Residents across the United States are being inundated with text messages purporting to come from toll road operators like E-ZPass, warning that recipients face fines if a delinquent toll fee remains unpaid. Researchers say the surge in SMS spam coincides with new features added to a popular commercial phishing kit sold in China that makes […]
Microsoft today unleashed updates to plug a whopping 161 security vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, including three “zero-day” weaknesses that are already under active attack. Redmond’s inaugural Patch Tuesday of 2025 bundles more fixes than the company has shipped in one go since 2017. Rapid7‘s Adam Barnett says January marks the fourth consecutive month […]
Another incredible year made possible by volunteers Happy New Year to all our Signal blog readers and to all our By the People crowdsourced transcription program volunteers! Every year, the By the People team publishes a “happy birthday to us” blog post right here on the Signal (you can check out previous years’ editions here […]
Besieged by scammers seeking to phish user accounts over the telephone, Apple and Google frequently caution that they will never reach out unbidden to users this way. However, new details about the internal operations of a prolific voice phishing gang show the group routinely abuses legitimate services at Apple and Google to force a variety […]
I recently saw a link to a post on LinkedIn, in which the author argues that we shouldn’t be citing chatbots, but should instead be disclosing their use. He argues that, “The proper thing to do when using a chatbot is to disclose it, for transparency, rather than cite it for attributing credit or signalling […]
Happy 2025 to all of our Signal subscribers! In this special edition of “What’s New Online at the Library of Congress,” we’re looking back on some of our new digital collections releases in 2024. Do you have a favorite digital collection or item at the Library? Leave us a comment below and stay tuned for […]
This guest post was authored by Abbie Grotke, Head of the Web Archiving Section. As described in our prior blog post, we have been in the process of modernizing and making improvements to the Library of Congress Web Archives to improve functionality for users. While this work has taken us a bit longer than anticipated, we are pleased to announce the […]
Today’s blog post is an interview with Genevieve Havemeyer-King of the Digital Services Directorate here at the Library of Congress. You can read other interviews with digital collections staff here. Carlyn: Hi Gen, could you tell us a bit about what you do in the Digital Services Directorate? How would you explain your job to […]
Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South […]
Image: Shutterstock, Dreamansions. KrebsOnSecurity.com turns 15 years old today! Maybe it’s indelicate to celebrate the birthday of a cybercrime blog that mostly publishes bad news, but happily many of 2024’s most engrossing security stories were about bad things happening to bad guys. It’s also an occasion to note that despite my publishing fewer stories than […]
