Top stories.
- US disrupts Chinese hacking campaign that breached NASA, the DOJ, the DOE, the Senate, and others.
- Meta settles children's safety lawsuits for $16.68 billion.
- Business news: AI security firm Alice raises $140 million.
US disrupts Chinese hacking campaign that breached NASA, the DOJ, the DOE, the Senate, and others.
The US Justice Department and FBI this morning announced the seizure of domains used by a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor that hacked NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Senate. The threat actor, tracked as "QTFY," is a contractor that used two hacking platforms called "QScan" and "QTRouter" to target its victims. The Justice Department seized command-and-control domains that were hardcoded into these tools, cutting them off from infected devices.
The Justice Department stated, "QScan scans and automatically infects thousands of [IoT] devices worldwide, which are then added to the QTRouter network of QTFY-controlled devices. QTRouter consists of these compromised IoT devices, as well as commercial proxy service devices and leased virtual private servers. QTRouter then serves as an 'obfuscation network' – meaning it allows QTFY and other malicious cyber actors to conceal the PRC-origin of their computer intrusion activities because the malicious communications appear to originate from computers (such as those compromised by QScan) that are outside of the PRC and may even be local to the targeted networks."
Meta settles children's safety lawsuits for $16.68 billion.
Meta has agreed to pay $16.68 billion to settle claims brought by 29 US states alleging that the company intentionally designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive for children, misled consumers about safety, and improperly collected the data of users under thirteen years old, Reuters reports. The agreement also ends a Federal trial that began in California last week, which was seeking $200 billion in damages from the company.
Meta did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement, but agreed to make substantial changes to its platforms to better protect children. These include the imposition of daily and nighttime usage limits and the enhancement of measures to prevent children from seeing age-restricted content.
Business news: AI security firm Alice raises $140 million.
Israeli AI safety and security company Alice (formerly known as "ActiveFence") has raised $140 million in funding led by Apax Digital, with participation from Samsung, SentinelOne, Maj Invest, MoreTech, and Phoenix Insurance, alongside existing investors Resolute Ventures, Grove Ventures, CRV, Highland Europe, Vintage Investments, Norwest Venture Partners, NFX, and Claltech. The company says it "will use the funding to further advance its AI platform, deepening the technology that tests, defends, and monitors AI models across their lifecycle; expand the team behind Rabbit Hole so the dataset keeps pace with attacks that evolve daily; and scale its go-to-market organization serving foundation model labs and enterprises building with AI."
Read more in the Business Briefing at 4pm ET.
