Month: March 2021

The White House on Sunday urged computer network operators to take further steps to gauge whether their systems were targeted amid a hack of Microsoft Corp’s Outlook email program, saying a recent software patch still left serious vulnerabilities.”This is an active threat still developing and we urge network operators to take it very seriously,” a White House official said, adding that top U.S. security officials were working to decide what next steps to take following the breach.CNN reported Sunday that the Biden administration was forming a task force to address the hack. The White House official, in a statement, said the administration was making “a whole of government response.”While Microsoft released a patch last week to shore up flaws in its email software, the remedy still leaves open a so-called back door that can allow access to compromised servers and perpetuate further attacks by others.”We can’t stress enough that patching and mitigation is not remediation if the servers have already been compromised, and it is essential that any organization with a vulnerable server take measures to determine if they were already targeted,” the White House official said.A source told Reuters that more than 20,000 U.S. organizations had been compromised by the hack, which Microsoft has blamed on China, although Beijing denies any role.The server vulnerabilities can impact credit unions, town governments and small business, and have left U.S. officials scrambling to reach victims, with the FBI on Sunday urging them to contact the law enforcement agency.Those affected appear to host Web versions of Microsoft’s email program Outlook on their own machines instead of cloud providers, possibly sparing many major companies and federal government agencies, records from the investigation suggest.A Microsoft representative on Sunday said it was working with the government and others to help guide customers, and the company urged impacted clients to apply software updates as soon as possible.Neither the company nor the White House has specified the scale of the hack. Microsoft initially said it was limited, but the White House last week expressed concern about the potential for “a large number of victims.”So far, only a small percentage of infected networks have been compromised through the back door, the source previously told Reuters, but more attacks are expected.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet at auction, with bidding Saturday reaching $2 million in a sign of the appetite for virtual objects authenticated through blockchain technology.”just setting up my twttr,” Dorsey tweeted on March 21, 2006.On Friday he posted a link to “Valuables @Cent,” an online marketplace for tweets where, the site says, investors or collectors can “buy and sell tweets autographed by their creators.”The top bid Saturday for Dorsey’s tweet — $2 million — came from Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, a platform for blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies. He also heads the BitTorrent streaming platform.”The creator of a tweet decides if they would like to mint it on the blockchain, creating a 1-of-1 autographed version,” Valuables explained.Buying ‘a digital certificate’Buying a tweet means purchasing “a digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator,” according to Valuables.In Dorsey’s case, the tweet itself remains visible to all, so long as he and Twitter leave it online.The approach is much like the online sales of dramatic digital “moments” from National Basketball Association games; the short video sequences remain visible for free on the internet but a blockchain-backed “Non-Fungible Token” (NFT) is generated to guarantee the identity, authenticity and traceability of the video, confirming its value.Thus, a 10-second clip showing a spectacular sequence by basketball superstar LeBron James fetched $208,000 on the NBA Top Shot site late last month.Top Shot has generated more than $200 million in transactions this year, according to Dapper Labs, which partnered with the NBA to create Top Shot.In 2019, Sun paid $4.6 million in a winning bid to have lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett. Sun reportedly tried but failed to convince the elderly investor of the value of bitcoins.NFTs have soared in popularity, to the point that prestigious auction house Christie’s last month sold an entirely digital artwork.  
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