This week was filled with wide-scale calamity. Hundreds of millions of PCs have components whose firmware is vulnerable to hacking—which is to say, pretty much all of them. It's a problem that's been known about for years, but doesn't seem to get any better.
Likewise, Bluetooth implementation mistakes in seven SoC—system on chips—have exposed at least 480 internet of things devices to a range of attacks. IoT manufacturers will often outsource components, so a mistake in one SoC can impact a wide range of connected doodads. The most troubling part, though, is that medical devices like pacemakers and blood glucose monitors are among the affected tech.
YouTube Gaming, meanwhile, wants to take Twitch's crown as the king of videogame streaming. But its most-viewed channels are almost all scams and cheats, a moderation challenge that it'll have to take more seriously if it wants the legitimacy it's spending big money to attain. In another corner of Alphabet's world, hundreds of Chrome extensions were caught siphoning data from people who installed them, part of a sprawling adware scheme.
WIRED reported exclusively this week that US officials have pinned a wave of cyberattacks against the country of Georgia on Russia's notorious Sandworm hackers. The hack itself was brazen—defacing 15,000 websites and disrupting two TV networks—but the attribution serves mostly as a warning to Russia that it shouldn't attempt the same sort of malarky stateside.
With the firing of director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire this week, Donald Tru ..
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