For years, Registered Agents Inc. – a secretive company involved in setting up other companies – thousands of companies registered to people who don’t seem to exist. Multiple former employees tell WIRED that the company routinely creates companies on behalf of its clients, claiming they are fake personas. An investigation found that the incorporation papers for thousands of companies that listed these allegedly fake personas had links to registered agents.
Attorneys general from across the U.S. sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company take “immediate action” amid a record-breaking spike in complaints about hacked Facebook and Instagram accounts. Figures from the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who spearheaded the effort, show her office received more than 780 complaints in 2023 — ten times as many as in 2019. Many complaints cited in the letter , saying Meta did nothing to help. they restore their stolen accounts. “We decline to operate as customer service representatives of your company,” officials wrote in the letter. “A good investment in response and mitigation is mandatory.”
Meanwhile, Meta suffered a major outage this week, causing most platforms to go offline. When it came back, users were often forced to log back into their accounts. However, last year the company changed the way two-factor authentication works for Facebook and Instagram. Now all the devices you’ve used frequently with Meta services over the years will be trusted by default. This move has made experts uneasy; this means your devices may no longer require a two-factor authentication code to log in. We’ve updated our guide on how to disable this setting.
A ransomware attack targeting medical company Change Healthcare has caused chaos at pharmacies across the US, delaying the delivery of prescription drugs across the country. Last week, a Bitcoin address linked to AlphV, the group behind the attack, received $22 million worth of cryptocurrency – indicating that Change Healthcare likely paid the ransom. A company spokesperson declined to answer whether it was behind the payment.
And there is more. Every week we highlight the news that we have not discussed in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
In January, Microsoft revealed that a notorious group of Russian state-sponsored hackers known as Nobelium infiltrated the email accounts of the company’s senior leadership team. Today the company announced that the attack is ongoing. In a blog postthe company explains that in recent weeks it has seen evidence that hackers are using information from its email systems to gain access to source code and other “internal systems.”
It’s unclear exactly which internal systems were accessed by Nobelium, which Microsoft calls Midnight Blizzard, but the company says it’s not over yet. The blog post states that the hackers are now using “different types of secrets” to further penetrate their systems. “Some of these secrets were shared via email between customers and Microsoft, and now that we have discovered them in our exfiltrated email, we have contacted these customers to help them take mitigation measures.”
Nobelium is responsible for the SolarWinds attack, a sophisticated supply chain attack in 2020 that affected thousands of organizations that downloaded a compromised software update and led to the compromise of approximately 100 organizations, including major US government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security , Defense, Justice and Finance.