Author: TechBrunch

Security researchers and Ukrainian authorities have concluded that for two days in mid-January, some Ukrainians in the city of Lviv were forced to go without central heating and suffered freezing cold due to a cyberattack on the city's energy company. On Tuesday, cybersecurity firm Dragos published a report detailing a new piece of malware called FrostyGoop that the company said is designed to target industrial control systems, in this case specifically a type of heating system controller. Dragos researchers wrote in a report that they first detected the malware in April. At the time, Dragos didn't have any details about…

Messaging app Telegram has reached 950 million active users and aims to surpass the 1 billion mark this year, the company's founder Pavel Durov said on his channel on Monday. The company plans to launch an app store and an in-app browser with support for Web3 pages later this month, Durov said last week. In March, Telegram surpassed 900 million users, and in an interview with the Financial Times at the time, Durov said the company aimed to become profitable next year. Telegram appears to be accelerating the adoption of Web3 technologies on its platform. The company has supported cryptocurrency…

India's federal government has repealed the controversial “angel tax” for all investor classes, delivering a major victory for the country's startup ecosystem, which had long lobbied against the measure. “To strengthen India's startup ecosystem, stimulate entrepreneurship and support innovation, I propose to abolish angel tax for investors across all walks of life,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her Budget speech. Introduced in 2012 as an anti-money laundering measure, the tax has long been a thorn in the side of early-stage companies and their backers. It taxes investments in startups whose valuations exceed what tax authorities consider to be fair…

Cybersecurity startup Wizz has rejected a $23 billion takeover offer from Google parent Alphabet, according to sources familiar with the talks. The offer was a significant increase over the company's previous private valuation of $12 billion. Wizz's management has chosen to remain independent, with the support of investors, the people said. Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport sent the following email to Wiz’s 1,200 employees around the world: Wizard, We know the past week has been a tense one with rumors of a potential acquisition. We are extremely grateful for the offer we received, but have chosen to continue on our path…

Late last year, autonomous electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor found itself in a rocky spot, struggling to balance growth with an uncertain funding environment. Now, with $133 million in new funding, CEO Praveen Penmetsa told TechCrunch the startup is in better shape. The $133 million Series C funding round was co-led by agrifood technology impact company Astanor and HH-CTBC Partnership LP, an affiliated fund of Foxconn. The new round values ​​the startup at more than $500 million. Monarch has previously raised $220 million. Monarch has integrated technology into its electric tractors that gives customers a variety of autonomous driving features.…

Eric Chu started building Aviat, a platform for analyzing private market data, in a pretty typical place for an entrepreneur: a high school bathroom in Carmel, Indiana. Now the 17-year-old's startup is coming out of stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding. Aviato tracks funding rounds and employee numbers, just like competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, but also tracks data points like companies' credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, where their top engineers currently work, and other metrics. If it sounds a bit like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that's intentional. Zhu said Aviato's goal is to…

Choosing from New York City's nearly 25,000 restaurants can be a daunting task, especially when you're trying to impress a first date (or investor) or entertain family visiting from out of town. This weekend, a new app was released that aims to address that exact problem. The Scene, an iOS-only “pocket concierge service,” uses machine learning to match users with places to eat and dance in New York City. Scene pulls recommendations for users based on a variety of factors, including the type of event they're planning (dinner, brunch, drinks, etc.), the type of outing (date, birthday, anniversary, other special…

On today's episode of Equity, Rebecca Beran provided an in-depth analysis of the CrowdStrike outage that affected approximately 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide and caused disruption to air travel, banks, hospitals, media, federal government agencies, and businesses of all kinds. The outage began when cloud security giant CrowdStrike sent out a flawed software update. CrowdStrike quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, but the impacts continued over the weekend and will likely continue into this week, especially in the travel industry. United, American, and Delta airlines collectively canceled or delayed thousands of flights, with the impacts likely to continue…

A global technology outage hit everything from airports to banking to healthcare last weekend, halting flights across the United States. So what actually happened? The source of all these issues appears to be well-known cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and its flagship software product, Falcon Sensor. A “fault” in an update for Falcon Sensor was apparently causing all Windows computers with the software installed to crash. Reports of the IT issues began in Australia late Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday morning, then became more widespread as people around the world started working. Most consumers don't use CrowdStrike's software,…

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco is fast approaching and we're looking for highly motivated volunteers to support our events team. For anyone dreaming of becoming a startup founder, marketer, or event coordinator, this experience will provide a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a top tech startup conference. Volunteer duties Volunteers will help with a variety of fun tasks, including: Registration check-in. Queue/traffic control. Wayfinding/customer support. Expo set-up support. General event set-up. Volunteer Benefits Free pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Complete a volunteer shift and receive a free general admission ticket, valued at up to $1,500, for three…