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As Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampage through United States federal institutions, WIRED reported extensively this week on DOGE’s members, activity, and digital access to some of the US government’s most delicate and critical software systems. One DOGE technologist, 19-year-old high school graduate Edward Coristine, established at least five different companies in the past four years—including Tesla.Sexy LLC—and briefly worked at a network monitoring company that has hired convicted hackers. Experts question whether Coristine, who has gone by the name “Big Balls” online, would pass the background check typically required for access to sensitive US government systems.
Meanwhile, DOGE’s apparent dismantling of USAID coupled with the US State Department’s funding freeze have dramatically disrupted efforts to help people escape forced labor camps in Southeast Asia run by criminal scammers.
Outside of US government news, WIRED conducted an investigation into more than 300 cyberattacks in the past five years against US K–12 schools and found that victim schools sometimes withhold critical information about the scale and scope of the breaches from impacted students and parents. In slightly better news, data from the cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis shows that ransomware payments fell precipitously in the second half of 2024. Experts fear, though, that the brief reprieve could be short-lived and may not be easy for defenders to sustain.
And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that Apple has received a secret order from the UK office of the Home Secretary mandating the company to provide a way to access any user data protected by the company’s Advanced Data Protection for iCloud. The feature, which debuted at the end of 2022, is designed with end-to-end encryption so only users themselves, not Apple, have access to their data. As a result, complying with the UK demand would require Apple to break the feature by building a backdoor into it. Sources told the Post that rather than install a backdoor, Apple is likely to withdraw support for Advanced Data Protection for iCloud in the UK. “Yet that concession would not fulfill the UK demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States,” the Post noted.
The order was issued under the UK’s broad 2016 Investigatory Powers Act. UK law enforcement agencies, not to mention cops in the US and other countries, have championed encryption backdoors for years, and lawmakers have tried at various times to mandate backdoors. The Home Office told the Post in a statement, “We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.” An Apple spokesperson declined to comment to the Post.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave President Donald Trump a golden pager when the two met in Washington on Tuesday. The gift references a September attack in Lebanon against the militant group Hezbollah in which booby-trapped pagers (and walkie-talkies) detonated in coordinated explosions around the country. The operation killed at least 42 people, including some civilians, and injured at least 4,000 civilians, according to Lebanese officials. The attack has been widely attributed to Israel, but the country has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement. At the meeting Trump apparently gave Netanyahu a signed photograph of the two of them, which he signed, “To Bibi, a great leader!”
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been notifying dozens of users that their personal information was stolen during a 2023 breach. The company is attributing the attack to Russian state-backed hackers. The stolen data included Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, and credit card numbers. The incident began as a system intrusion in May 2023 into HPE’s email mailboxes and Microsoft SharePoint systems. HPE publicly disclosed the incident in January 2024.
The edtech giant PowerSchool says that at least 16,000 students in the United Kingdom had their data stolen as part of a massive December data breach that may have affected 62 million students and 9.5 million teachers, most of them in the US and Canada. Attackers used compromised credentials to infiltrate the company’s customer support portal and then access user data.
PowerSchool spokesperson Beth Keebler confirmed to TechCrunch in a statement that students at four UK schools were affected totaling “approximately 16,000 students.” It is not clear if this is the total number of UK victims. The compromised data includes students’ dates of birth, contact information, some medical data, and “other related information.”
