The week started out with a bang, or several of them really. Remember Meltdown and Spectre, the vulnerabilities that affected basically every Intel processor from the last decade? There’s a related attack called ZombieLoad—yes, ZombieLoad—with similarly broad and bad impact. Serious stuff! But honestly not even the worst disclosure of the week.
That distinction probably goes to Cisco. Researchers at security firm Red Balloon found that they could hack the company’s ubiquitous enterprise router, meaning they could listen in on whatever traffic goes to and from those networks. Cisco then acknowledged that dozens of its products were susceptible to the attack, likely comprising millions of devices, and that a fix would require an on-site visit.
And that’s before you even get to the week’s big actual hack: Israeli hacking company NSO Group apparently found a way to break into phones simply by placing a phone call through WhatsApp. The recipient didn’t even have to pick up. There’s also Microsoft, which released its first Windows XP patch since the months before the WannaCry ransomware strain swept to globe—and we all know how that turned out.
I can’t stress enough that all of these things had happened by Tuesday.
Things calmed down a bit from there. The FCC rolled out a new robocall-stopping plan, which is pretty much the same as the old robocall-stopping plan. google tracks online gmail
