Collaborate Disseminate
Of all nature’s miraculous gifts, few can compare to the experience of witnessing a new hacker con grow. If you’re in the Philadelphia area this weekend, you can get a …read more Continue reading JawnCon 0x1 Kicks off Friday, Tickets Almost Gone
Last month, I had the pleasure witnessing a birth. No, not of a child. What I’m talking about is something far rarer, though arguably, just as loud and danger fraught …read more Continue reading JawnCon 0x0: A Strong Start with a Bright Future
AWS today closed out its first re:Invent keynote with a focus on edge computing. The company launched two smaller appliances for its Outpost service, which originally brought AWS as a managed service and appliance right into its customers’ existing data centers in the form of a large rack. Now, the company is launching these smaller […] Continue reading AWS updates its edge computing solutions with new hardware and Local Zones
Fishtown Analytics, the Philadelphia-based company behind the dbt open-source data engineering tool, today announced that it has raised a $29.5 million Series B round led by Sequoia Captial, with participation from previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Amplify Partners. The company is building a platform that allows data analysts to more easily create and disseminate organizational […] Continue reading Fishtown Analytics raises $29.5M Series B for its data engineering platform
Amazing what online search, social media profiles, a DMV database and cameras everywhere can turn up about us. Continue reading FBI uses T-shirt, tattoo and Vimeo clips to track down alleged arsonist
It’s hard to beat the warm memories of Hasbro’s Operation, a game that boils down the fine art of surgery to removing farcically named plastic bones and organs. Just in case you can’t conjure up the memory, the game board looks just like this huge version of it, but normally …read more
Continue reading Larger-Than-Life Game of Operation is the Future of Healthcare
Comcast’s 3,500-seat stadium will give East Coast esports fans a dedicated space to cheer on their favorite teams. Continue reading Philadelphia Is Building a $50 Million Esports Stadium
At $400, the Philadelphia ransomware kit isn’t cheap – but crooks buying it will get a lot of bang for their buck, as we’ve discovered from digging in to how it works Continue reading Philadelphia RaaS: our map of how it works (and how to prevent it)
Is this defendant protected by the Fifth Amendment over revealing his password? Campaigners think he is – and predict that the case might go to the Supreme Court Continue reading ‘I forgot my password’ doesn’t impress judge in a child images case
I shared a meal not long ago with a source who works at a financial services company. The subject of ransomware came up and he told me that a server in his company had recently been infected with a particularly nasty strain that spread to several systems before the outbreak was quarantined. He said the folks in finance didn’t bat an eyelash when asked to authorize several payments of $600 to satisfy the Bitcoin ransom demanded by the intruders: After all, my source confessed, the data on one of the infected systems was worth millions — possibly tens of millions — of dollars, but for whatever reason the company didn’t have backups of it.
This anecdote has haunted me because it speaks volumes about what we can likely expect in the very near future from ransomware — malicious software that scrambles all files on an infected computer with strong encryption, and then requires payment from the victim to recover them. Continue reading Ransomware Getting More Targeted, Expensive