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In this week’s Princh Library Blog, recurring guest writer Nina Grant shares some advice on how to keep libraries clean; and the role cleanliness plays in creating a welcoming space. Enjoy! 92% of consumers consider cleanliness as the deciding factor in whether or not they become repeat customers of a business, a recent study by […]
A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty last week to leaking phone records for high-ranking U.S. government officials searched online for non-extradition countries and for an answer to the question “can hacking be treason?” prosecutors in the case said Wednesday. The government disclosed the details in a court motion to keep the defendant in custody […]
One month into his second term, President Trump’s actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling an ongoing effort by the world’s richest man to wrest control over their networks and […]
Carding — the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data — has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers. Happily, the broad deployment of more secure chip-based payment cards in the United States has weakened the carding market. But a flurry of innovation from cybercrime groups in China is breathing new […]
In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a year later, Mozilla is still promoting it […]
In this week’s Princh Library Blog post, recurring guest writer Sam L. Bowman discusses how current technologies can enhance library security, while not restricting the accessible and open nature of libraries. Enjoy! Libraries face the unique challenge of maintaining their role as open, welcoming spaces while addressing increasing security concerns. Theft, vandalism, data breaches, and […]
Microsoft today issued security updates to fix at least 56 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including two zero-day flaws that are being actively exploited. All supported Windows operating systems will receive an update this month for a buffer overflow vulnerability that carries the catchy name CVE-2025-21418. This patch should be a […]
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 […]
