A 20-year-old Florida man at the center of a prolific cybercrime group known as “Scattered Spider” was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison today, and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims. Noah Michael Urban of Palm Coast, Fla. pleaded guilty in April 2025 to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. […]
This is a guest post written by Kailyn Slater, a 2025 Junior Fellow in the Web Archiving Section. How can the Library represent the presence of mass communications, as a broad field of theory and practice, on the web? How do we know what is worth preserving? What sources will be impactful for communications workers, […]
A 22-year-old Oregon man has been arrested on suspicion of operating “Rapper Bot,” a massive botnet used to power a service for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets — including a March 2025 DDoS that knocked Twitter/X offline. The Justice Department asserts the suspect and an unidentified co-conspirator rented out the botnet to online […]
The world we dream about I’m finding it really difficult to find the right words to say goodbye to Hadestown. This show and this cast have been the very best that live theater can be; a moment, a happening, an emergent experience that was so much more than the sum of the parts. The cast, […]
Cybercriminal groups peddling sophisticated phishing kits that convert stolen card data into mobile wallets have recently shifted their focus to targeting customers of brokerage services, new research shows. Undeterred by security controls at these trading platforms that block users from wiring funds directly out of accounts, the phishers have pivoted to using multiple compromised brokerage […]
Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. At least 13 of the bugs received Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or malcontents to gain remote access to a Windows system with little or no help from users. August’s […]
A new documentary series about cybercrime airing next month on HBO Max features interviews with Yours Truly. The four-part series follows the exploits of Julius Kivimäki, a prolific Finnish hacker recently convicted of leaking tens of thousands of patient records from an online psychotherapy practice while attempting to extort the clinic and its patients. The […]
On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculation and panic among XSS denizens about the identity of the […]
This post was written by Sahar Kazmi and edited by Jaime Mears. A longer version of this post appeared in the Library of Congress staff Gazette on July 25th, 2025. The Library of Congress has embarked on a new multiyear digital initiative, LOCal, that will help expand access to the digital collections through partnerships with […]
Recurring guest writer, Nina Grant discusses how today’s libraries are helping kids grow kinder, one story at a time. Enjoy! When some people think of libraries, they picture piles of books and maybe a grumpy librarian shushing kids for sneezing too loud. But here’s what’s actually happening: libraries across the world are turning into mini […]
Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here’s a closer look at the social engineering tactics and remarkable traits of this sprawling network of more than […]
This is a fascinating summary of a big problem with some AI-enhanced library products: The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search (Aaron Tay). The link to the ACRLog post is also worth a read: “We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question”. In a nutshell, it appears that Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI content filter, […]
Three news releases in quick succession made my antennae stand up, though they’ve actually been trickling out over the past month. In the order I saw them: Introducing Lumo, the AI where every conversation is confidential. A new privacy-focussed LLM Chatbot from Proton. I’ve only poked at it a bit, but it seems solid, aside […]
Libraries are having a Hollywood moment, as several documentarians have recently turned their lenses towards libraries, librarians, and intellectual freedom issues. Some of these films made their mark at the recent American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia, on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and even at the Oscars, where The […]
KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader whose boss’s email account got phished and was used to trick one of the company’s customers into sending a large payment to scammers. An investigation into the attacker’s infrastructure points to a long-running Nigerian cybercrime ring that is actively targeting established companies in the transportation and aviation industries. Image: […]
Today’s guest post is from Sabrina Templeton, a 2025 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Sabrina is pursuing her MS in Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to starting her degree, she worked as a software engineer and she is passionate about the intersection of library and technology spaces. As this […]
Clockwise from top left: Former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; actor George Takei Photos: EPNAC Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1722. As Philadelphia’s most famous son, Franklin—and his belief in personal expression as the cornerstone of […]
Author Alex Segura signs copies of Dick Tracy at the Hoopla booth. Rebecca Lomax/American Libraries Although libraries are currently facing a climate of political and financial upheaval, that didn’t stop information professionals from showing up in force to the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition (June 26–30). The conference brought 14,292 registrants […]
Geena Davis at the American Library Association’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia on June 30.Photo: EPNAC Hollywood has no shortage of polymaths, but Geena Davis might be in a category of her own. She has won Academy Awards for both acting and advocacy, founded the groundbreaking nonprofit Geena Davis Institute, written the memoir […]
Photos: EPNAC Attendees expressed their views on a range of topics—and each in their unique way—at the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition, held June 26–30 in Philadelphia. Clockwise from top left: Tiwanna Nevels, assistant state librarian at State Library of North Carolina in Raleigh, sits with some of her favorite challenged […]
