The week was particularly chock-full of dramatic security news. On Friday, a flawed update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform caused massive global service outages and disruptions around the world. The issue, which only impacted Windows computers, crashed PCs and servers, disrupting air travel, hospitals, banks, universities, and more.
Earlier in the week, WIRED had reported that following a massive data breach, AT&T paid $370,000 to get hackers to delete the stolen data. And, though it’s always possible that attackers saved a copy of the trove, a security researcher with knowledge of the transaction told WIRED he believes the only copy has been wiped. In a separate incident, hackers claimed last week to have stolen and leaked more than a terabyte of data comprising Disney’s complete Slack archive.
A WIRED analysis of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s Venmo account sheds some light on the Senator’s network and connections, including some of the architects of Project 2025 and enemies of Vance’s running mate, Donald Trump.
Federal prosecutors indicted a 20-year-old man on Tuesday for allegedly leading the violent and White supremacist Eastern European gang known as “Maniac Murder Cult,” or MKY. The group has been implicated in a number of assaults and attacks abroad, including at least one murder.
The US Supreme Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo to overturn what’s known as the Chevron deference will have major implications for US cybersecurity defense, because federal agencies are now limited in their ability to regulate. And US senator Mark Warner of Virginia is working to pass new limits on government wiretaps, but at least two senators are quietly trying to stop him.
And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.
Sometimes “Julia,” the shadowy, pseudonymous Russian hacker telling you her grand plans to sabotage the West, really is just Julia. Or Yuliya.
On Friday, the Treasury Department announced that it is imposing sanctions on two alleged Russian cybercriminals for their alleged involvement in the hacktivist group Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, or CARR, which rose to prominence this year due to its reckless and somewhat sloppy attacks on Western critical infrastructure, as well as its apparent ties to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. Those two sanctioned hackers are identified in Treasury’s statement for the first time as Yuliya Vladimirovna Pankratova and Denis Olegovich Degtyarenko.
In May, WIRED interviewed a CARR spokesperson who called herself Julia about the group’s attacks, which included one that caused tens of thousands of gallons of water to be spilled from a water utility in the small town of Muleshoe, Texas. That spokesperson now appears to have likely been Pankratova, who is identified by Treasury as CARR’s spokesperson, while Degtyarenko is described as its “primary hacker.”
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