SECURITY

Never Tweet

So someone hacked Twitter to plug their bitcoin address. As the company picks up the pieces, the FBI is looking into the sweeping security breach. 

It’s time for our own newsletter armchair investigation. 

A lame heist

Imagine if robbers broke into the Federal Reserve, and instead of stealing money printers they made off with the gift shop cash register. That’s what Wednesday's Twitter incident felt like. 

Back of the napkin: The hacker tweeted from prominent accounts with at least 300 million followers...and netted about 13 bitcoin (about $120,000). Last night, Twitter said roughly 130 accounts were affected. 

We’re lucky it wasn’t worse. Hackers could have tanked the market (it’s happened before), tried to start a war, or siphoned DMs from prominent accounts for kompromat. For the record, the last scenario could still be possible—Twitter DMs aren’t end-to-end encrypted. 

Attack vectors

Hackathon: Let’s count the ways one could compromise a Twitter account: beating/brute-forcing bad passwords, SIM-swapping to bypass two-factor authentication, hacking the company’s internal tools, or sneaking in via someone on the inside. 

Twitter says it “detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack,” meaning an employee was flipped or tricked into providing credentials to a third party. According to Vice, the attacker had access to internal tools. 

• The incident raises questions about how lax Twitter is with “God mode” permissions (it’s not the only one).

Damage control 

During the attack, Twitter limited tweeting and other permissions for some verified accounts. I didn’t waste the opportunity to poke fun at blue checkmarks...nor did my alt. 

Outside of the twitterverse, cryptocurrency exchanges moved quickly to block the scammer’s wallet addresses. The crypto community was quick to point out the hack was a centralized point of failure, not a consequence of any flaws in the bitcoin protocol.

Big picture: It looks like the perpetrator was a scammer who wanted to score some extra digital coin. But it’s still a major security lapse for a critical communications platform—and other hackers are probably paying attention. 

AR/VR

Jio’s Next Annual General Meeting:

Fresh off raising $20 billion in a few months, Jio kept The Big Mo going Wednesday at its annual general meeting. 

The highlights:

• Google and Jio will jointly develop an Android-based OS for smartphones. 
• Jio says it’s building a homegrown 5G tech stack from scratch, which should be ready for 2021 deployment. 
• The Indian telco is developing Jio Glass, a mixed reality headset tethered to a smartphone. A Jio exec said the headset supports 25+ applications and highlighted educational use cases. 

Also developing AR/VR headset tech: Jio backers Facebook, Google, and Qualcomm and non-Jio backers Microsoft, Apple, Snap, Amazon, HTC, Samsung, and Sony. It’s a crowded market—and no word yet on a Jio Glass launch date or pricing. 

For now...

Pay more attention to the 5G and mobile moves. 

Jio says it wants to export 5G gear to other countries’ carriers. Plus, it’s expanding from its closed-source KaiOS to an Android-based OS. The telco could be laying the groundwork to 1) wean India off Chinese devices and 2) support user upgrades from limited-capability feature phones to full-fledged smartphones.

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POLICY

Shield Deactivated

The European Robetrotters giveth and they taketh away. 

On Wednesday, a European court ruled Apple does not have to pay $14.8 billion in back taxes. Ultimately, the EU couldn’t show that Apple had unfair tax dealings on the island where my last name hails from. 

That ruling was upstaged

Yesterday, the European Court of Justice struck down the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, a 2016 trade pact governing transatlantic data flows. American firms won’t be able to process Europeans’ data off the continent.

Go off: “It is clear that the U.S. will have to seriously change their surveillance laws if U.S. companies want to continue to play a role on the EU market,” said Max Schrems, the privacy activist who brought the case. 

• The U.S. points to China’s lax privacy laws when discussing Huawei and TikTok. The EU is, ironically, making a similar argument with the U.S. in mind. 
• FWIW, American lawyers argued that U.S. surveillance programs are limited and targeted.

My takeaway: Brussels doesn’t want to cede tech rulemaking to Beijing or Washington. One policy the EU and China agree on? Data localization.

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Oculus is boosting VR headset production to 2 million units this year, a 50% annual jump, Nikkei reports. Sony has also upped PlayStation production targets by 50%. 

Quote: “We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours.”—FBI Director Chris Wray, cited by Wired. 

Read: I’m a sucker for inside looks at secretive tech labs. Fast Company profiled Google’s ATAP division, which wants to weave ambient computing into clothes.

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Instagram will launch Reels, its TikTok rival, in August. Facebook shut down Lasso, its other TikTok clone, earlier this month. 
• A star is born: China’s largest chipmaker, SMIC, raised $6.62 billion in an IPO on Shanghai’s STAR market. Its share price jumped 245% on Wednesday, the first day of trading. 
• Amazon says Alexa Echo Buds could overheat and is urging users to install a software update. 
• TikTok is staffing up on K Street, the NYT reports. It’s hired 35 lobbyists so far.
• WeRide, a Chinese self-driving startup, is testing driverless vehicles on public roads, a milestone that only Waymo has hit.
• Attorney General Bill Barr said Google, Microsoft, yahoo, and Apple “have shown themselves all too willing to collaborate” with the Chinese Communist Party.

GOING PHISHING

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...I made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

1. A blogger with bylines in the Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel was a made-up character with an AI-generated profile picture. 
2. Samsung is very seriously already planning for 6G. 
3. A YouTuber built a data center powered by fruit.
4. Netflix mentioned TikTok as a new competitor in its earnings.

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For changing the face of tech: The weekly newsletter from Girls Who Code features free online and offline coding programming and stories about young women using tech to change the world. Sign up and join the 300,000-strong community.

For something unexpected: Facebook’s connectivity team created a fiber-spinning robot that moves across traditional power lines. Have to say I wasn’t expecting this one. 

For butter: Microsoft and Land O’Lakes are building an agtech platform. I know it sounds like this should be in Going Phishing, but Microsoft is heavily investing in agtech.

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Smart carts
• Analog to acquire Maxim 
• TikTok faces timeout

GOING PHISHING ANSWER

A YouTuber didn’t build a fruit-powered data center.