NEW: Russian state media says police have arrested an unnamed person that's alleged to be the creator and founder of cybercrime forum LeakBase.

Europol, which shut down LeakBase earlier this month, said it did not cooperate with Russia on this arrest.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/25/russia-arrests-alleged-owner-of-cybercrime-forum-leakbase-report-says/

Here's a tip for you privacy minded folks in the US.
When you login to Social Security https://www.ssa.gov (and probably other US government websites) they now make you use either login.gov or id.me, both of which try to get you to upload pictures of your drivers license/passport and take a selfie or do a video call.
If you don't want to do that, select the login.gov choice and then select in-person verification. You fill out some identify information online and then it generates a barcode that you take to a post office with your drivers license. At the post office the clerk scanned the barcode I was provided and scanned the barcode on the back of my license. That was it. No photos of my IDs or selfies to upload.
About an hour later I got an email from login.gov that I was verified and all set. The least bad of the options.

#privacy #ssa #infosec

OpenAI just shut down its Sora video generator. It seems we're witnessing the beginning of the end of the GenAI bubble.

Hyperscalers like OpenAI never had realistic business models, but the Iran war and soaring energy costs have made these models even less viable.

If OpenAI is forced to evaluate the profitability of its services, it will likely keep military and B2B services, as well as cheaper, less computationally demanding text generators.

OpenAI has an added problem: compared to Anthropic's Claude, ChatGPT is now like Altavista's search engine compared to Google's in 1998. This realization is slowly seeping into the mainstream.

Due to its investments in data centers and contracts with computer hardware manufacturers, OpenAI has single-handedly drained the personal computer market of GPUs, SSDs, RAM, and hard drives. Exploding prices mean that local AI systems (local LLMs and image generators) are no longer viable alternatives for most people. This creates a bottleneck for AI image generation, from Sora to other AI image generator services.

The end of Sora could mean that OpenAI is in trouble and that the long-predicted AI industry crash similar to the 2000 dot-com crash is near.

#OpenAI #AI #sora #aibubble

Most of us have probably read that one reason not to pay threat actors is that they cannot be trusted to keep their word to delete data they have exfiltrated. But how often does that actually occur?

I have sent inquiries to a number of incident response/negotiation firms and the DOJ. If I did not send one to your firm and your firm handles a lot of negotiations and payments, please accept my apologies for not having contacted you, and answer the following question (either publicly or via a private message to me):

In what percentage of cases where payment was made to delete data, did threat actors break their word and not delete it?

Please feel free to share this post with others here and elsewhere to boost my chances of getting additional responses/estimates. Thank you all.

#incidentresponse #ransom #extortion #ransomware #databreach

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116258677474446258

elon musk, he promised Mars,
but then washed out the very stars
with no stars in the sky to see,
who would care, who would believe?
who would dream of Mars,
beneath a sky without stars?