Musk steps to the plate with essential tech support for assets threatened by Russia after its invasion didn’t go as swiftly as originally planned.

An entirely African operating room in Liberia is the fruit of decades of a Christian surgical training program and African surgeons’ sacrifices

Thousand Barrels per Day
U.S. Net Imports from Russia of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products

TechCrunch first discovered the vulnerability as part of a wider exploration of consumer-grade spyware. The vulnerability is simple, which is what makes it so damaging, allowing near-unfettered remote access to a device’s data. But efforts to privately disclose the security flaw to prevent it from being misused by nefarious actors has been met with silence both from those behind the operation and from Codero, the web company that hosts the spyware operation’s back-end server infrastructure.

The nature of spyware means those targeted likely have no idea that their phone is compromised. With no expectation that the vulnerability will be fixed any time soon, TechCrunch is now revealing more about the spyware apps and the operation so that owners of compromised devices can uninstall the spyware themselves, if it’s safe to do so.

Given the complexities in notifying victims, CERT/CC, the vulnerability disclosure center at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, has also published a note about the spyware.

What follows are the findings of a months-long investigation into a massive stalkerware operation that is harvesting the data from some 400,000 phones around the world, with the number of victims growing daily, including in the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Jamaica, the Philippines, South Africa and Russia.

On the front line of the operation is a collection of white-label Android spyware apps that continuously collect the contents of a person’s phone, each with custom branding, and fronted by identical websites with U.S. corporate personas that offer cover by obfuscating links to its true operator. Behind the apps is a server infrastructure controlled by the operator, which is known to TechCrunch as a Vietnam-based company called 1Byte.

May our unchanging concentration on our Savior at a time that makes many anxious be a testimony pointing to his sovereign grace. //

There’s a lot of panicked chatter about World War III lately. Twitter is awash in propaganda from both sides of the Russia-Ukraine border. Instagram is flooded with pro-Ukraine posts and profiles are painted with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.

NPR wants to make sure you know, amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, how to self-care. Not to be outdone, Fox also has a primer on how to cope with the stress of news of war.

Many of those reactions aren’t bad. It’s good to celebrate stories of courage and to vocally support peace. It’s also good at times to walk away from the news cycle and be present in your own daily responsibilities.

But there is a real danger to thinking that you, as an American Christian who is not on the ground in Ukraine, can do the most good by getting sucked into the online informational meatgrinder. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with using a post or a hashtag to show support for suffering people, it would be a mistake to use such a contribution to pat ourselves on the back for “helping” — as many well-meaning Christians posted black squares on Instagram in 2020 that did little but alleviate their own sense of wanting to be able to say they did something.