Author: TechBrunch

A New York Times investigation finds that dozens of potential pedophiles frequent the child influencer industry, posing as photographers and social media experts to approach children. did. One such man, Michael Allen Walker, reportedly promised mothers that under his tutelage, their daughters would gain more followers on Instagram. He runs his business from state prison and is serving a 20-year sentence for child sexual exploitation. Walker also bragged on Telegram, where these men communicated, that he had seen sexual photos of child influencers, according to the report. According to the investigation, the men walked a fine line to gain the…

For the past few years, TechCrunch has looked back at some of the worst, badly handled data breaches and security incidents in the hope — maybe! — other corporate giants would take heed and avoid making some of the same calamities of yesteryear. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, here we are again this year listing much of the same bad behavior from an entirely new class of companies — plus, some bonus (dis)honorable mentions from the year that you might’ve missed. 23andMe blamed users for its massive data breach Last year, genetic testing giant 23andMe lost the genetic and ancestry data…

Lumen, one of at least nine U.S. carriers reportedly compromised by the Salt Typhoon hackers, said the Chinese hacker group is no longer present on its network. Lumen spokesperson Mark Molzen told TechCrunch that an independent forensic analysis confirmed that the company removed Chinese attackers from its network, adding that during the Salt Typhoon breach, “customer data was accessed. There is no evidence that it was,” he added. Lumen's confirmation comes after US telecom giants AT&T and Verizon confirmed to TechCrunch that they also secured their networks following the breach. T-Mobile, another Salt Typhoon target, said last month that it…

French food delivery startup Epicerie closed for business on Tuesday after the latest holiday hustle for clients and local food businesses that used the platform during its nine-year run in exchange for a 25% commission. stop. In a message announcing the decision to customers earlier this month, Epicerie's team said it was “a result of the economic and financial challenges we have faced for several months and, despite our best efforts, This is a result that we were unable to overcome.” ” Epicerie, which focuses on high-end groceries and local delivery, has suffered as inflation has caused customers to rethink…

As regular readers of TechCrunch know, 2024, like the years before it, was filled with data breaches, ransomware attacks, and massive hacks that exploited the most trivial of software vulnerabilities. Even the most well-resourced organizations have been unable to keep hackers from infiltrating their systems over the past 12 months. AT&T experienced its second major breach this year, this time affecting “nearly all of its customers.” Ticketmaster allegedly had 560 million records stolen in a hack by cloud storage giant Snowflake. Additionally, health insurance giant Change Healthcare was hit with a ransomware attack that accessed sensitive medical information on at…

India has lifted restrictions on WhatsApp's payment services, a major win for Meta by users in its biggest market as the social media giant looks to compete with stalwart fintech rivals. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the payments agency that oversees the popular instant payments rail called UPI, announced on Tuesday that WhatsApp can now roll out WhatsApp Pay to all users in the market. WhatsApp has over 500 million users in India. This decision removes the previous 100 million user cap on WhatsApp Pay. The move signals a shift in regulators' cautious approach to WhatsApp's payments ambitions. NPCI,…

Asset management firm Fidelity last month cut the estimated value of its stake in business messaging platform Gupushyap by a further 7.7%, reducing the value of its holding in the SaaS startup by more than 65% in total since its investment in mid-2021. One of the funds managed by the U.S. asset management company valued its holdings in Gapshap at $5.62 million at the end of November, down from $6.09 million in October, according to monthly disclosures. Fidelity originally invested $16.2 million from Gupshap's Blue Chip Growth Fund in mid-2021 in a funding round that valued the San Francisco-based startup…

TikTok's parent company ByteDance has big plans to buy Nvidia chips in 2025, despite US restrictions. ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on the chip in 2025, The Information reported, citing internal sources. If ByteDance does this, it will become one of the world's largest owners of NVIDIA chips, despite US efforts to restrict Chinese companies from purchasing such US-made AI chips. In 2022, the United States announced export restrictions on certain types of AI chips to countries including China, where ByteDance is headquartered. These restrictions have since been tightened many times. According to a report in The Information, ByteDance…

The U.S. Treasury Department told lawmakers in a letter Monday that it suffered a cyberattack in early December that it blamed on hackers from the Chinese government. In a letter shared with senior members of the U.S. House of Representatives and seen by TechCrunch, the Treasury Department said the hackers gained remote access to certain workstations of Treasury Department employees and accessed unclassified documents, calling it a “critical It is called a “cybersecurity incident.” The Treasury Department reported on December 8 from BeyondTrust, a company that provides identity access and remote support technology to large organizations and government agencies, that…

While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as budgets remained constrained and AI tech often remained in the “experimental” category. Will that all start to change in 2025? Depends on who you ask. TechCrunch talked to 20 venture capitalists who back startups looking to sell to enterprises about their predictions for 2025. They…