This week's news roundup covers a major hack of the US Treasury Department, the sale of gun silencers disguised as fuel filters on social media, and a critical flaw in an Amber Alert notification system.
It may be a new year, but the hacks, scams, and dangerous people lurking online haven’t gone anywhere. Just a day before the ball dropped, the United States Treasury Department said it had been hacked. Officials believe the attackers are an as-yet-unidentified Advanced Persistent Threat group linked to China’s government that exploited flaws in remote tech support software made by BeyondTrust to carry out what the Treasury Department described as a “major” breach.
The company told the Treasury on December 8 that the attackers stole an authentication key, which ultimately allowed them to access department computers. While the Treasury says the attackers were only able to steal “certain unclassified documents,” new details have already begun to emerge, which we’ll get into more below. Before the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last month, gun silencers were mostly a thing you encountered in Hollywood films—or in Facebook and Instagram ads, if you looked closely. WIRED found that someone has run thousands of ads for “fuel filters” that are, in fact, meant to be used as gun silencers, which are heavily regulated by US law. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has since removed many of the ads, but new ones keep popping up. So if you see one, keep scrolling—owning an unregistered silencer could result in felony charges. When an Amber Alert push notification pops up on your phone, getting all the information you need to help find an abducted child can literally be a matter of life and death. That’s a lesson the California Highway Patrol learned this week when it sent out an Amber Alert that linked to a post on X, which people couldn’t access unless they were signed in. While CHP says it has linked to posts on the social network since 2018 without any issues until this week, a spokesperson tells WIRED they’re “looking into it” no
CYBERSECURITY HACKING GUN SAFETY SOCIAL MEDIA AMBER ALERT
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