A cybercrime crew claims to have hacked Mike Lindell’s MyPillow

US The military has known this for years Enemies can use location data to track troop phones-She has also been aware of the easy solutions to this problem for a long time. The Pentagon has adopted almost none of these protections, though it acknowledged in a letter disclosed this week that America’s adversaries are already using the data to target soldiers in war. Meanwhile, law enforcement in the United States This week he warned of “anti-technology extremism.”“As backlash to AI grows across the country.

After an internet outage for approximately 90 days Calls began flowing again to Iran this week Amid internal struggles over political power and ongoing negotiations with the United States to end its war with Tehran. The researchers cautioned that it is unclear how extensive the restoration will be and whether connectivity will only return temporarily.

As cybercriminals and offensive hackers intensify their use of artificial intelligence to exploit vulnerabilities and develop hacking tools, the technology is also becoming more… Radically changing the dynamics of how security researchers search for vulnerabilities. Fraudsters use real hotel booking data and more Travel details for effective phishing campaignspotentially accessing customer data from 350 hotels and vacation rentals around the world.

And there’s more. Every week we round up security and privacy news that we haven’t covered in depth ourselves. Click on the titles to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Play, a Russian-language ransomware operation that affected more than 900 organizations Since 2022, it posted on its dark web leak site on Monday claiming to have pulled “private and personal confidential data, customer documents, budget, payroll, IDs, taxes,” and other financial records from MyPillow. The Minnesota-based home goods company is run by Mike Lindell, who is among at least 10 Republicans seeking the party’s nomination for governor of Minnesota in the August primary. Lindell is also one of the most prolific supporters of Donald Trump’s false claims of winning the 2020 election.

Play has reportedly set a deadline of Friday for MyPillow to make contact before publishing the data online. Lindell He told Straight Arrow Newsany The story of the ransomware claims broke on TuesdayThat his company was not hacked and that the allegations that it was a political hit.

“This is another successful outsourced mission as I run for governor,” Lindell said. “I guarantee it. We have never had any data breaches.”

Lindell has been on the losing end of two recent defamation rulings over his 2020 election claims: A federal jury in Colorado last year found that he defamed Eric Coomer, a former director of Dominion Voting Systems, and ordered Lindell and his media platform, FrankSpeech, to pay $2.3 million in damages; A federal judge in Minnesota ruled separately in September that Lindell defamed Smartmatic with 51 false statements about its voting machines, with damages yet to be determined at trial.

In recent years, ransomware groups have become more aggressive and ruthless in their efforts to extract money from victims. Most of these criminal hackers now focus on stealing data and extorting companies rather than using malware to lock down computer systems. But in rare cases, ransomware groups have been seen directly threatening executives, or contacting people named in the stolen data, to try to extract money. FBI He said this week One ransomware group goes even further: sending people to steal data directly from companies IRL.

Among more traditional social engineering techniques, the FBI says the Silent Ransom Group (SRG), which targets law firms, sent people into firm offices to gain direct access to computers. “By personally sending someone to the victim’s location to facilitate the break-in, SRG actors leak data to an external hard drive or USB drive that the threat actor inserts into the victim’s computer,” the FBI said in an alert. Security researchers say this tactic has never been seen before. The FBI did not provide any information about who the Russian-language ransomware group was sending to carry out its attacks, but researchers believe they may be paying freelancers who do not necessarily know who they are working for.

AI surveillance company BusPatrol, which has installed its cameras in tens of thousands of school buses in the United States, says it will now turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers that record the location of every vehicle passed by a BusPatrol school bus and make the data available to law enforcement without a warrant. The initiative will transform the familiar yellow buses into what 404 Media aptly described as “roving surveillance vehicles.” BusPatrol, and school bus monitoring technology more broadly, was originally intended to be used to issue tickets to vehicles that illegally pass parked buses — a serious safety issue for children.

University of Chicago sociology professor Rob Vargas found this month that the Chicago Police Department was four minutes faster in responding to the most urgent non-shooting-related 911 calls in the six-month period after Mayor Brandon Johnson shut down ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology in 12 neighborhoods in September 2024. By analyzing city of Chicago data as well as data obtained through public records requests, Vargas compared the time period to the previous six months that ShotSpotter was still active During it. The data could not be used to evaluate response times to calls specifically related to gunshots, but it indicated that ShotSpotter alerts may have been distracting officers with false positives and delaying them in responding to other types of important 911 calls. “ShotSpotter clearly wasted the officers’ time by sending them on wild goose chases,” Vargas told WTTW News.