Author: TechBrunch

Google has confirmed that some customers' information has been stolen in recent database violations. In a blog post late Tuesday, Google's Threat Intelligence Group said one of the Salesforce database systems used to store small business contact information and related notes was violated by a hacking group known as Shiny Hunters, officially designated as UNC6040. “The data obtained by threat actors was limited to basic, largely public business information, such as business name and contact details,” the company said. Google did not disclose the number of affected customers, and company spokespersons did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It…

Sales Automation Startup Clay raised a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation in the round led by Capitalg, confirming TechCrunch's report in June. Funding followed the $1.25 billion Series B round six months ago, followed by a $1.5 billion sequoia-led tender offer several months ago, allowing most employees to sell a portion of their shares. The latest deal brings Clay's total funds to $204 million. Existing investors Meritech Capital, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup and Boldstart also participated in Series C, with new supporters Sapphire Ventures taking part in the round. The 8-year-old startup uses AI-powered…

WhatsApp is introducing new features to help people find fraud on messaging services, the company announced Tuesday. The company also said it has deleted more than 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts linked to crime fraud centres targeting people around the world. The new feature is designed to help detect fraud in both groups and individual chats on meta-owned platforms. For group chat, WhatsApp is launching a safety overview feature that appears when people who are not in their contact list are added to a new group that is not recognised. The safety overview includes important information about the group and tips…

Cybercriminal has deceived Cisco representatives to grant access to steal Cisco users' identity, the company said Tuesday. Cisco said it found the violation on July 24th and condemned the incident involving voice phishing or “Vishing” calls. Hackers accessed and exported “subset of basic profile information” from a database of third-party cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems, according to the company's disclosure. Cisco said the stolen data includes the customer's “name, organization name, address, Cisco assigned user ID, email address, phone number and account-related metadata,” including the account creation date. The networking tech giant has not specified the number of Cisco.com…

Finding the fit in the product market is not a milestone. It's a messy, make-up or break journey. And the founder who has been experiencing a disturbed and fire in 2025 at TechCrunch, and two investors who helped the startup hit the speed of escape, break down how to do it right. On the builder stage, Rajat Bhageria (founder and CEO, Chefrobotics), Ann Bordetsky (partner, NEA), and Murali Joshi (partner, ICONIQ) join forces to unlock the most important and elusive stages of the startup lifecycle. They dive into smart testing strategies, real-time iterations, and how to listen to users without…

TechCrunch will advance the startup world in 2025 and break the 20-year mark. And you only have two days left to join the movement and save up to $675 on your ticket. From October 27th to 29th, Moscone West will be home to more than 10,000 motors and manufacturers in the world of technology. Join San Francisco and celebrate 20 years of startup breakthroughs, VC connectivity and industry shift ideas. The deadline for locking your savings is 11:59pm on August 6th. Don't wait – sign up now to save a lot. Why confuse 2025? Confusion is more than a tech…

Spotify is expanding access to audiobooks to more US subscribers. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of its $11.99 per month audiobook + plan on the market. This allows family or duoplan subscribers or their household members to add 15 hours of audiobook listening in addition to the master plan. Spotify launched an audiobook service in the US in 2022, but duo and family planning household members have long been ruled out. The offering will make audiobooks available to household members for the first time in the US market. Through Spotify Premium, subscribers already have access to 15 hours…

Enterprise security company Sonic Wall is urging customers to disable the core functionality of their latest lineup of firewall devices after security researchers reported an increase in ransomware incidents targeting Sonic Wall customers. In a statement this week, Sonic Wall said there was a “significant increase” of security incidents targeting Generation 7 firewalls where customers have VPN enabled. The company said it will “proactively investigate these cases to determine whether they are related to previously disclosed vulnerabilities, or whether new vulnerabilities could be held liable.” The company's alert says security researchers have identified hackers targeting SonicWall devices and gained initial…

Google's AI-powered bug hunter just reported the first batch of security vulnerabilities. Heather Adkins, Google's vice president of security, announced Monday that LLM-based vulnerability researcher Big Sleep has discovered and reported 20 flaws in a variety of popular open source software. Adkins said Big Sleep, developed by the company's AI division Deepmind and the elite team of Hackers Project Zero, reported the first vulnerability in open source software, primarily audio and video libraries FFMPEG and image editing suite image mogik. Given that the vulnerability has not been fixed yet, Google doesn't want to provide details yet, so there are no…

According to the Internet Infrastructure Provider CloudFlare, AI startups' stumps are raw scraping content from websites that explicitly indicate they don't want to be scraped away. On Monday, CloudFlare published a survey that found that AI startups ignored blocks and observing their raw or scraping activities. The Network Infrastructure giant has accused them of obscuring their identity when trying to scrape web pages “to avoid website preferences,” CloudFlare researchers wrote. AI products like Prplexity offer rely on gobbling large amounts of data from the Internet, and AI startups have repeatedly scraped text, images and videos from the Internet without permission…