31/03/2021: Cybersecurity & Tech News Roundup

Welcome to Wednesday’s tech news roundup – the place where we keep you up to date with the latest technology updates, cybersecurity news, and more. Here’s what’s going on in the tech world today:

Has Amazon been taking a leaf out of the fake news playbook?

Amazon has been fighting a fierce campaign against staff unionising in Alabama, but has the ecommerce giant taken things a step too far? Fake accounts claiming to be Amazon workers who have praised their working conditions and denounced unions have been popping up on Twitter recently.

The accounts were tweeting clear falsehoods such as:

“What bothers me most about unions is there’s no ability to opt out of dues,” – @AmazonFCDarla

This is incorrect – state law in Alabama prevents this from happening.

“Unions are good for some companies, but I don’t want to have to shell out hundreds a month just for lawyers!” – @Ok4At

Also incorrect, unions obviously don’t cost members hundreds per month.

While the corporation clearly has the motive for being behind this ruse, Amazon has denied all involvement and has been debunking negative claims via their official twitter account. Whether Amazon was directly involved or this was an unrelated party attempting to troll the company/unionists in Alabama is up for debate, but one thing’s for sure – this situation serves as another dent in the company’s reputation. Read more here.

A whistleblower has claimed that Ubiquiti’s data breach was much worse than the company originally stated

As the new year was being welcomed in, Ubiquiti Networks was being breached by cyber-criminals, and in early January, the organisation reported the cyber attack to customers. Their report included information on how a hacker had obtained unauthorised access to their systems via a third-party cloud provider and stolen data from a customer-facing device management service.

Recently, a whistleblower has called foul on Ubiquiti’s report, saying that the cyber-incident was massively downplayed by the company and was actually “catastrophic.” The anonymous source – who claims to have been involved in the response to Ubiquiti’s data breach – said that claims the hacker gained access to their systems via a third-party cloud provider are completely false.

The whistleblower wrote the following to regulators: “It was catastrophically worse than reported, and legal silenced and overruled efforts to decisively protect customers. The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers’ devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk.” Read more here.

Child is accidentally given access to the US nuclear agency’s Twitter account

A young child made an “oopsie” of potentially epic proportions over the weekend by posting an unintelligible tweet to a family member’s Twitter account. How bad could it be? Well the family member in question was the social media manager of the United States Strategic Command – the agency responsible for safeguarding America’s nuclear weapons.

“;l;;gmlxzssaw” said the tweet, which led social media users to worry the account had been hacked. In actual fact, the youngster had started playing with their relatives phone, which they had left momentarily unattended, while they were working from home. Thankfully, the tweet was spotted quite quickly and was deleted. Nuclear holocaust avoided. Read more here.

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