A joint US-Bulgarian operation has taken down dark web sites used by the Netwalker ransomware-as-a-service operation. BleepingComputer reports that it's not yet clear whether the FBI or the Bulgarian National Investigation Service recovered decryption keys in the course of their operation. Netwalker's choice of targets was opportunistically reprehensible, even by criminal standards: it hit a lot of healthcare facilities.
US Cyber Command strongly recommends that organizations patch the Baron Samedit bug in Sudo, disclosed this week by Qualys researchers.
Individual retail investors loosely organized around Reddit chat in WallStreetBets, drove shares of brick-and-mortar retailer GameStop very high, CNBC reports, forcing short-sellers to cover their bets at a very dear price. GameStop shares traded at $42.59 last Friday (and that already represented a considerable gain); they'd reached $469.42 by 10:00 this morning (and have since fallen off, a bit). Some of the coverage manages to make the Wall Street hedge funds caught in the short squeeze sound almost like the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in Bedford Falls. It's an interesting and unprecedented case in which a large swarm of individual investors, mobilized by influencers and motivated at least as much by lulz and resentment as by the usual fear and greed, show themselves able to move markets. (Largely unprecedented. We've recently seen one case in which a similar name drove an unrelated stock's share price up: an Elon Musk "buy Signal" tweet, meaning the messaging app, caused the stock of a very surprised Signal Advance to pop into triple-unicorn territory.)