The Internet has turned the idea of Florida Man into a joke. This week, we finally know why it’s a thing. It’s the unofficial start of the weekend and I’m glad to be back on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, Tesla’s BTC buy pushes it higher, a Florida water treatment facility gives hackers the red carpet treatment, and ten million Android users get infected. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
TESLA BUYS A BUNCH OF BITCOIN, TREES GROAN
Yesterday, Tesla bought $1.5 billion, with a ‘B’, BitCoin sending the price of the cryptocurrency to a high of $48,000 before coming back down. Investors were bullish on the news thinking that BitCoin will become a part of Tesla’s long term assets. Thing is though, the crypto purchase was counter intuitive. The energy computers are consuming to mine BitCoin is more than the country of Argentina.
FLORIDA WATER SYSTEM COMPUTERS WEREN’T HACKED, THEY WERE UNSECURED
Hacking is both art and science. Hacking usually requires one to know something about the system to be hacked, and a lot about human nature. Recently, hackers were said to have penetrated the computer systems in the Oldsmar, Florida water treatment plants. The intruders had raised the amount of lye by 100 times the normal levels. Well, the hackers didn’t break security or encryption, they connected to the computers via TeamViewer, a commonly used remote control software. The IT department didn’t bother to change the default passwords used to connect to TeamViewer. Moral: always change your password, enable security when it’s there. This isn’t the first high profile intrusion into a public service utility because systems weren’t secured, a water treatment facility in Illinois also left their systems unguarded. All that lye may explain…Florida Man.
ANDROID BARCODE SCANNER INFECTS 10 MILLION USERS
If you’re an Android user and have an app called Barcode Scanner, remove it now. The dangerously titled, Barcode Scanner app, was really a piece of malware that infected over 10 million Android users. Malwarebytes researcher, Nathan Collier, discovered that a software update for the app in December installed new code that caused popup ads to be bombarded on the user’s screen. Essentially, the app was installed without malware and was approved by Google Play. A later update caused the app to turn users’ phones into an annoying ad delivery service. Remove the app now if you have it.
