Author: TechBrunch

On Wednesday morning, thousands of cybersecurity professionals packed the halls of Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay Convention Center, home to the annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference, where dozens of companies were promoting their wares. In the front row, and at one of the biggest booths, stood CrowdStrike, a company that's become pretty well-known these days — but not for its ability to thwart malicious hackers. On July 19, CrowdStrike pushed a flawed software update that crashed at least 8.5 million computers worldwide, causing flight delays, disrupting hospital operations including some surgeries, disrupting the operations of multiple U.S. government agencies, and forcing…

Tragedy has struck another prominent Silicon Valley family: Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has died at the age of 56, according to social media posts from her husband Dennis Troper and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Susan Wojcicki. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children passed away today after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer,” Troper posted on Facebook early Friday night. “Susan was not only my best friend and life partner, she was a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear…

A purported student in Singapore has published documents revealing weak security in Mobile Guardian, a popular school mobile device management service that was targeted by a cyber attack a few weeks ago that wiped masses of student devices and caused widespread disruption. In an email to TechCrunch, the student, who declined to be named for fear of legal retaliation, said he reported the bug to the Singapore government in late May by email but was unsure whether it had been fixed. While the Singapore government told TechCrunch the bug was fixed before the Mobile Guardian cyberattack on August 4, the…

Anysphere, the two-year-old startup that built the AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, has raised more than $60 million in Series A funding, bringing its post-money valuation to $400 million, two sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, with Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison also participating. Anysphere, a16z and Collison did not respond to requests for comment. Thrive declined to comment. The company was co-founded by Michael Truell, Suare Asif, Arvid Runemark, and Aman Sanger while at MIT. Truell and Sanger later participated in Neo Scholars, a prestigious mentorship program for…

The internet is full of deepfakes, most of which are nude. According to a report by Home Security Heroes, deepfake porn makes up 98% of all deepfake videos online. Thanks to easy-to-use and freely available generative AI tools, the number of deepfakes online, many of which are non-consensual, has skyrocketed 550% from 2019 to 2023. Laws against non-consensual deepfakes have been slow to emerge, at least in the United States, but a new tool in Google Search is making it a little easier to remove them. Google recently introduced changes to search to combat deepfake pornography, including tweaks to its…

New research has found that malicious hackers could take control of Ecovacs vacuum cleaners and lawnmower robots, using the devices' cameras and microphones to spy on their owners. Security researchers Dennis Giese and Braelyn will be presenting their work on Ecovacs robots in detail at the Defcon hacking conference on Saturday. After analyzing several Ecovacs products, the researchers found several issues that could be exploited to hack the robots via Bluetooth and secretly turn on their microphones and cameras remotely. “Their security was really, really, really, really bad,” Giese told TechCrunch in an interview before the talk. The researchers said…

There's been a lot of talk on Threads about a “mass exodus” from X. Anecdotally, at least, new users and other online friends are flocking from Elon Musk's X to Meta's Threads, some deactivating their X accounts in the process. But while this chatter and various hashtag trends like “Xodus” and “TwitterExodus” have filled users' timelines, revealing a mass migration of users from X to Threads over the past week, app store and website traffic data has yet to reflect any major shifts between the two platforms. Threads, Meta's Twitter-esque, less politically charged version of the social network, has been…

Substack is opening up to more users with its recent announcement that anyone can now publish content on the platform without having to open a publication. With this change, Substack appears to be trying to attract more types of writers and content creators, not just those interested in producing regularly-distributed, long-form writing. Though Substack is primarily known as a newsletter platform, the company has recently taken big steps to make the service more like a social network with the introduction of social features like tweet-like notes and DMs, and this latest change takes that ambition even further as you no…

Earlier this year, an international coalition of law enforcement agencies took control of the dark web site of the notorious ransomware group LockBit, replacing its contents with the now-familiar message from authorities: “This site is now under law enforcement control.” The operation didn't disrupt the group's activities for long, as the group set up a new one soon after it was taken down. But then, on May 6, authorities updated LockBit's old site page, announcing that they would be revealing the identity of LockBit's administrators. A box on the site read, “Who is LockBitSupp?” and also displayed a 24-hour countdown.…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, your weekly dose of the can't miss happenings from the startup world. Want to receive it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week we cover AI founders playing musical chairs, big defense tech investments, and other issues at Techstars. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: TechCrunch Founders and senior executives from some of the hottest AI startups are flying around this week. OpenAI personnel changes: John Shulman, one of OpenAI's co-founders, left the company in May to join rival AI startup Anthropic, following former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who launched…