NEW: A U.S. government report says a Mexican drug cartel hacker spied on an FBI official to identify, track, and kill informants. The hacker also hacked into Mexico City's camera network to follow the FBI official as they met with “people of interest” for the cartel, according to the report.
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Mexican drug cartel hacker spied on FBI official's phone to track and kill informants, report says | TechCrunch
The watchdog revealed the 2018 incident as part of an audit of the FBI's counter-surveillance efforts.
NEW: The internet has collapsed in Iran on Wednesday, with one web monitoring firm saying the country is “now in the midst of a near-total national internet blackout.” “We can only see that the traffic dropped — the data doesn’t tell us why it dropped,” said David Belson, the head of data insight at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
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Internet collapses across Iran, say web-monitoring firms | TechCrunch
It’s unclear what is causing a “near-total” internet blackout in Iran.
NEW: Four months after releasing iOS 18.3.1, Apple has published details about a zero-day that it fixed at the time, but did not publicize. This is the iPhone zero-day used against the two European journalists targeted with Paragon spyware, according to Citizen Lab. It's unclear why Apple did not publish information about this zero-day until today.
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Apple fixes new iPhone zero-day bug used in Paragon spyware hacks | TechCrunch
The iPhone maker quietly updated a February security advisory to publicize a flaw that was used to hack at least two journalists in Europe.
NEW: Researchers found forensic evidence of Paragon's spyware on the iPhones of two journalists. One is Ciro Pellegrino, who works for Fanpage. The other is an unnamed prominent European journalist. They are the first confirmed cases of infection with Paragon's spyware "Graphite." This revelation show that the spyware scandal that, for now, seemed mostly focused on Italy may expand further in Europe.
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Researchers confirm two journalists were hacked with Paragon spyware | TechCrunch
The confirmation of two hacked victims further deepens an ongoing spyware scandal that, for now, appears largely focused on the Italian government.
NEW: An Italian parliament inquiry concluded that the Italian government used Paragon's spyware to hack activists working to rescue immigrants. The committee, however, said it did not find any evidence that Italy's intelligence agencies (nor anyone else) spied on journalist Francesco Cancellato. The peport leaves a this, and other, key questions unanswered.
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Italian lawmakers say Italy used spyware to target phones of immigration activists, but not against journalist | TechCrunch
A parliamentary investigation answered some — but not all — the questions related to a spyware scandal involving the use of the Israeli company...
We have finished going through the court docs and hearing transcripts from the WhatsApp v. NSO lawsuit. Here's everything we learned, from how NSO's customers use Pegasus, to the spyware's cost.
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Eight things we learned from WhatsApp vs. NSO Group spyware lawsuit | TechCrunch
The landmark trial between WhatsApp and NSO Group unearthed several new revelations.
NEW: Last week, WhatsApp won a huge court battle against spyware maker NSO, which now has to pay $167,000,000 in damages to the tech giant. As part of the lawsuit and trial, a lot of details have come out about NSO and the cyberattack underpinning the lawsuit. We are reading the hundreds of pages of court docs and hearing transcripts to recap the biggest revelations. Here they are:
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Eight things we learned from WhatsApp vs. NSO Group spyware lawsuit | TechCrunch
The landmark trial between WhatsApp and NSO Group unearthed several new revelations.
NEW: CrowdStrike announced that it will lay off around 500 workers as part of "a strategic plan" to "to evolve its operations to yield greater efficiencies." The cuts represent 5% of its global workforce.
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CrowdStrike says it will lay off 500 workers | TechCrunch
The cybersecurity company said it will lay off 5% of its global workforce.
Skype is getting shut down today. It was certainly one of the most revolutionaries chat apps in history. Skype was the first major chat app to implement end-to-end encryption, prompting authorities all over the world to freak out about it, and look at spyware as a solution. “Skype calls have excellent sound quality and are highly secure with end-to-end encryption,” Skype’s homepage read in 2004. 
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As Skype shuts down, its legacy is end-to-end encryption for the masses | TechCrunch
iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp have made E2EE the default for messaging, but Skype paved the way decades ago.
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