Students returning to school coincided with claims by a self-proclaimed leader of a violent online group called Purgatory that the group carried out a rash of swattings at US universities. The group asserts ties to the loose cybercriminal network The Com and claims responsibility for hoax active-shooter alerts. Multiple researchers warned that cybercriminals increasingly use generative AI tools to enable ransomware attacks, including cases where nontechnical actors deploy AI to develop malware. The shortwave station UVB-76 appears to have become a Kremlin propaganda tool. A whistleblower alleges DOGE uploaded an SSA database to an inadequately monitored cloud server, risking Social Security numbers.
As students returned to school this week, WIRED spoke to a self-proclaimed leader of a violent online group known as "Purgatory" about a rash of swattings at universities across the US in recent days. The group claims to have ties to the loose cybercriminal network known as The Com, and the alleged Purgatory leader claimed responsibility for calling in hoax active-shooter alerts.
Since it was first created, critics have warned that the young and inexperienced engineers in Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were trampling over security and privacy rules in their seemingly reckless handling of US government data. Now a whistleblower claims that DOGE staff put one massive dataset at risk of hacking or leaking: a database containing troves of personal data about US residents, including virtually every American's Social Security number.
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