Last night, I gave the first interview on a new project I’m working on. It’s something that’s been brewing since last year and if you want a hint, head over to Instagram. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week was jam packed with tech news, but I could only pick three stories. REvil strikes again in largest hack-a-ransom, US states sue El Goog, and Audacity denies sending usage info to Russian firm. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
SECURITY SHOULD NOT BE OUTSOURCED AS LATEST HACK HITS THOUSANDS
As I was watching fireworks the Russian hacking group, REvil, launched an attack on remote monitoring software company, Kesaya. REvil exploited vulnerabilities in Kaseya’s systems and went on to compromise more than a thousand SMALL businesses worldwide. Small businesses. Read that. Instead of attacking large companies REvil has focused on spreading mayhem. A small COOP grocer was compromised. According to Kaseya CEO, Fred Viccolo, dental practices, architecture firms, plastic surgery centers, and libraries were amongst the organizations in the attack. Basically, companies who thought they were doing the right thing by implementing network management, but did it by outsourcing it. REvil is asking for a $70 million total ransom and analysts are reasoning that REvil themselves don’t want the spread to continue. A ransom this size and scope makes them a huge target. If the ransom is paid, REvil says they will publish a universal decryption key that can be used to restore systems. Others think this is simply a PR stunt.
OPEN SOURCE AUDIO SOFTWARE ACCUSED OF SENDING DATA TO RUSSIANS
I know a lot of composers, VO artists, and other creators who produce their own content. When news broke that the open source audio editing tool Audacity was being sold to Muse Group in April, fans of the free tool rejoiced because the company said that Audacity will be released more frequently. Instead, it’s become known that Audacity’s new terms and conditions was providing usage information to a Russian infrastructure company called WSM. Audacity had 100 million users at its height, that’s a lot of data to be feeding to the Russians. This deal was dirty from the start. Audacity’s founder, Dominic Mizzoni, had transferred the rights and trademark to Muse for a sum total of…$1.
STATES BRING LAWSUIT AGAINST EL GOOG
First Epic vs. Apple, now, 36 states and Washington, DC have filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging its abusive control over the Google Play Store. The lawsuit challenges Google on its required 30% commission payment developers must pay to Google on app purchases. And, having published apps for Google and Apple’s stores, Google doesn’t do a damn thing making that 30% commission worth it. Google is facing pressure on multiple fronts including a mounting DOJ probe about their ad search business. In response to public pressure Apple and Google have reduced their commissions to 15%. Grab the popcorn, between the FTC, DOJ, and Congress, Big Tech is going to have a doozy the rest of the year.
To close out this week’s top tech stories of the week. How about this? A leather case for your iPhone’s MagSafe charging puck. Yeah. If you’re a user of Apple products, you’re already a little ridiculous. But this thing takes the cake.