A 20-year-old man in Pennsylvania has pleaded guilty to his involvement in a “SIM swap” and cryptocurrency theft scheme. Kyell Bryan carried out the plan in 2019 with several others. After he too pleaded guilty, Jordan Milleson, a co-conspirator in the scheme, was sentenced to two years in federal prison earlier this year.

Microsoft has revealed that in August 2021, it mitigated one of the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks ever recorded. The 2.4Tbps attack targeted an Azure cloud computing service client based in Europe and surprisingly resulted in minimal downtime for users. The size of the attack is second only to a 2.54Tbps DDoS attack directed at Google in 2017, though higher than any attack ever recorded on Azure previously. 

There will be a change in the requirements for SSL certificates seeking validation using the HTTP domain control validation (DCV) method in the coming weeks. This change is in keeping with new rules set out by the CA/Browser Forum, which has determined that in some instances, HTTP validation may allow threat actors to obtain SSL certificates for domains they don’t actually own.

Many website owners with SSL certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt faced outages over the past few days. This is due to the expiration of its IdenTrust DST Root CA X3 cross-signed root certificate. Although this root certificate has been replaced by one called ISRG Root X1, many users are still encountering service issues, particularly business owners and their customers. So those worst hit include not only website owners using legacy servers and older devices, but also hosting service companies that failed to update their software, leaving their customers and users without service. 

WhatsApp has announced that it will begin offering end-to-end encryption on chats backed up to Google Drive and iCloud on Android and iOS phones. This comes after the messaging service was discovered to be testing encrypted backups in WhatsApp beta for Android in early summer. Although WhatsApp has offered end-to-end protection by default on messages since 2016 (although some might beg to differ), backed-up messages have not been encrypted. 

Using cloud-based platforms and services has become increasingly popular among businesses over the past few years, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominating the market. From website hosting and app development to storage and database management, AWS is a go-to source for those looking to dip their toe into the ever-expanding online space. 

As technology becomes more sophisticated, so too, it seems, do surveillance methods. Unfortunately, with improved surveillance methods comes increased intrusiveness. Basically, what was once the stuff of science-fiction is now a reality.