Hackers hit a Windows shareware archiving tool — and other cybercrimes today

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Bad news comes in threes, and here are three from the cybersecurity realm. I’ll start off with today’s top story about hackers who exploited the WinRAR zero-day bug to target financial traders. Find out what happened. Then, customers of a certain Danish cloud host have reportedly “lost all data” following a ransomware attack. Learn more. And the FBI says North Korean hackers are preparing to cash out after high-profile crypto hacks. They got a lot of bitcoin.

Meanwhile, you were excited about it yesterday, and today we can tell you that India’s Chandrayaan-3 made a successful landing on the moon. Lots of craters up there.

Next, find out what Better.com’s CEO Vishal Garg has been up to — remember the company’s layoffs debacle? — as Better.com prepares to go public. Get the scoop.

And Solana Pay, a decentralized payment protocol by Solana Labs, has integrated its plug-in with Shopify so that millions of businesses can use Solana for payments. Learn why stablecoin was attractive.

Image Credits: wenjin chen / Getty Images

More top reads

We can keep a secret. Can you?: If you’ve been dying to have a secret conversation with your friends on Messenger, you don’t have to wait much longer. Meta plans to roll out default end-to-end encryption by the end of the year. Enter the chat.

$1 billion richer: Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund rained down $1 billion into Ambani’s Reliance Retail to value the India-based company at $100 billion. See how Reliance will grow.

For when you can’t think of anything to say: Lex raised $2.75 million for its AI writing tool that helps writers get past blocks. Now, what was I saying?

Welcome to the stage: Now that in-person events are back, baby, investors are pumping money into the industry again. The latest recipient is Dice, which got $65 million for its event discovery and ticketing platform. Read more.

Num num: MOSH, the brain health bar brand started by Maria Shriver and her son, Patrick Schwarzenegger, grabbed its first institutional funding, $3 million, to get on store shelves. Take a bite.

Baby steps: Meet Apptronik’s humanoid robot, Apollo. It’s got such a cute walk.

Pushing buttons: The iOS 17 beta teased that Apple might be giving the iPhone 15 Pro an “Action Button.” Press here.

Any way you slice it: Your résumé can always use some “zhuzhing,” and jobs platform CakeResume brought in $5 million in fresh funding to help software engineers and designers show off their work while finding a job. Piece of cake.

Like magic: A creative tool for artists, Wand.app raises $4.2 million to turn your drawings into professional-looking images. Read more.

More for your Wednesday:

The late-stage venture market is crumbling (TC+)

WhatsApp now lets users create groups without names

X changes its API to retire legacy tiers and endpoints

Third time’s the charm? Sony makes $200 PlayStation Portal in-home handheld official

Crypto lender Maple Finance raises $5M to enter Asia amid regulatory clarity

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

From today’s “pod” files

Today on Equity, Mary Ann spoke with Mercedes Bent, a partner on the early-stage team at Lightspeed Ventures and co-lead of Lightspeed’s LatAm region and angel fund. The pair chatted through Mercedes’ experience investing in Latin America, why she thinks the region is more resilient than others, and where fintech stands in the AI hype cycle.

On this week’s episode of Found, we talked with Feyi Ayodele, the co-founder and CEO of CancerIQ, a precision health company designed for physicians to help their patients with monitoring cancer risk and prevention. Ayodele talked about how she came up with the startup idea while hiking Mount Kilimanjaro with her mother. She also talked about how she approached fundraising as a former VC herself and what it was like selling CancerIQ to healthcare organizations and hospitals.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

How this VC evaluates generative AI startups

When OpenAI made its Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) commercially available in November 2022, it kicked off a land run in tech. Nine months later, every startup is looking for ways to incorporate generative AI.

“Nearly every pitch deck I’ve seen since December has had AI on the front two pages,” says Adam B. Struck, founding partner of Struck Capital. “There are a few areas that we think are especially investable and others that are more challenging for a seed-stage company to compete in.”

In this TC+ column, Struck unpacks his thesis as it relates to each layer of generative AI’s tech stack and includes his “new comprehensive deal evaluation framework specific to AI.”

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription.