The Feds were given approval by the courts to carry out the deletions, which occurred without first warning the servers' owners, following the discovery and exploitation of critical vulnerabilities in the enterprise software.

“Although many infected system owners successfully removed the web shells from thousands of computers, others appeared unable to do so, and hundreds of such web shells persisted unmitigated,” the Justice Department noted in an announcement. “Today’s operation removed one early hacking group’s remaining web shells, which could have been used to maintain and escalate persistent, unauthorized access to US networks.”

Cable company WideOpenWest (which markets itself as WOW!) yesterday told customers that it is imposing a data cap and explained the change with a pizza analogy that would seem more appropriate for a kindergarten classroom than for an email informing Internet users of new, artificial limits on their data usage.

The good is that it has backups of some systems impacted by last week’s fire that destroyed one of its four data centres in the French city of Strasbourg.

The bad news is that it doesn’t have backups of some systems impacted by last week’s fire that, is yet to determine if it has viable backups for plenty of services and can’t be sure that it has backups for some services it has classified as “recoverable”.

The ransomware—known as Black Kingdom, DEMON, and DemonWare—is demanding $10,000 for the recovery of encrypted data, security researchers said. The malware is getting installed on Exchange servers that were previously infected by attackers exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Microsoft email program. Attacks started while the vulnerability was still a zero-day. Even after Microsoft issued an emergency patch, as many as 100,000 servers that didn’t install it in time were infected.

The most well-known and popular blogging platform, WordPress, is considering dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 as the browser's usage dips below 1%.

In August 2020, Microsoft announced that they would no longer support Internet Explorer on the Microsoft Teams web app, and Microsoft 365 would no longer support it starting on August 17th, 2021.

The Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities that allow hackers to take over Microsoft Exchange servers are under attack by no fewer than 10 advanced hacking groups, six of which began exploiting them before Microsoft released a patch, researchers reported Wednesday. That raises a vexing question: how did so many separate threat actors have working exploits before the security flaws became publicly known?

Researchers say that as many as 100,000 mail servers around the world have been compromised, with those for the European Banking Authority and Norwegian Parliament being disclosed in the past few days.

FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers.

Your FLoC ID will be like a succinct summary of your recent activity on the Web.

We emphatically reject the future of FLoC. That is not the world we want, nor the one users deserve. Google needs to learn the correct lessons from the era of third-party tracking and design its browser to work for users, not for advertisers.

Peter Sunde is one of the original Pirate Bay founders, but in recent years he's mostly known for his role in various Internet-related startups. This includes domain registrar Sarek, for which Sunde tried to get ICANN accreditation. However, this request was denied, apparently due to Sunde's 'uncomfortable' background.

Over the phone, ICANN explained that the matter was discussed internally. This unnamed group of people concluded that the organization is ‘not comfortable’ doing business with him.

Privacy researchers recently found that the presence of CNAME trackers has increased 21 per cent over the past 22 months and that CNAME trackers show up on almost 10 per cent of the top 10,000 websites. Worse still, 95 per cent of websites that fiddle with their domain records in this manner leak cookies, which sometimes contain sensitive information.

The Facebook-owned platform previously said it had been the victim of "misinformation" around the change.

"In its efforts to clarify that [it] isn't doing anything wrong, Whatsapp has in fact inadvertently highlighted that it was already harvesting huge amounts of data for Facebook," said Ray Walsh, a digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy.