Category: Apple

Researchers found 30 databases housing 16 billion records onlineThe records were most likely generated by infostealersRecords come from a wide range of providers, from Apple to Google and many moreSecurity researchers have reported discovering what could be the mother of all data breaches – a set of 30 databases containing a total of 16 billion records.These records were most likely generated by various cybercriminals (and possibly white hat hackers or researchers) using different infostealing malware, a new report from Cybernews claims.The researchers note the databases differed in size – from “smaller” ones containing just millions of entries, to gigantic ones housing billions of records, with accounts from Google, Apple, to various VPN services, GitHub, Telegram, and more – and of the 30 discovered datasets, just one had been previously reported by the media, a “mysterious” database with 184 million records.

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Scratching the surface“It barely scratches the top 20 of what the team discovered,” Cybernews explained. “Most worryingly, researchers claim new massive datasets emerge every few weeks, signaling how prevalent infostealer malware truly is.”The databases were available to the wider internet only briefly, and were quickly locked down – however, it wasn’t possible to determine who the owners are.It is probable that many of the information overlaps, making it virtually impossible to determine exactly how many people were affected. It’s also important to note that some 5.5 billion people have access to the internet today, meaning that many people have multiple compromised accounts.Unprotected databases continue to be the most common cause of data leaks. For years, security researchers have been warning that many organizations do not understand the shared responsibility model of cloud services, and that they are required to safeguard and secure the data they generate.Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!On the other hand, cybercriminals are having a field day with these archives. They often contain more than enough of sensitive information to launch highly personalized, successful phishing campaigns, leading to identity theft, wire fraud, and even ransomware attacks.You might also like

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There’s a lot of talk in the startup world about how AI makes individuals so productive that it could give rise to a generation of “solo unicorns” – one-person companies worth over $1 billion.

While an actual solo unicorn remains a mythical creature, Israeli developer Maor Shlomo provided compelling evidence Wednesday that the concept might not be impossible. 

Shlomo sold his six-month-old, bootstrapped vibe-coding startup Base44 to Wix for $80 million deal, Wix announced Wednesday. And the deal was cash, Wix confirmed to TechCrunch. 

Admittedly, this wasn’t a billion dollars or close to it. And Shlomo wasn’t truly solo — he had 8 employees, Wix confirmed. They will collectively receive $25 million of the $80 million as a “retention” bonus. Wix declined to give details on that part of the deal, like how long they have to stay in their jobs to get full payouts.

Still, Base44’s rapid rise and impressive sale price has been the talk of the vibe coding community. 

In its six months as a standalone company, it reportedly grew to 250,000 users, hitting 10,000 users within its first three weeks. According to Shlomo’s posts on X and LinkedIn, the company was profitable, generating $189,000 in profit in May even after covering high LLM token costs, which he also documented publicly.

Base44 spread mostly through word of mouth as Shlomo, a 31-year-old programmer, shared his building journey on LinkedIn and Twitter. The project began as side venture, he told Israeli tech news site CTech.  

“Base44 is a moonshot experiment – helping everyone, technical or not, build software without coding at all,” he explained on LinkedIn when he launched it to the public.

It’s one of the newer crop of vibe-coding products designed for non-programmers. Users enter text prompts, and the platform builds complete applications, with database, storage, authentication, analytics, and integration. It also supports email, texting, and maps, with a roadmap for more enterprise-grade security support.

Base44 isn’t unique in this area. Other vibe coders like Adaptive Computer handle similar infrastructure work. But Base44’s fast rise was astounding all the same.

Shlomo was already known in the Israeli startup community through his previous startup, the Insight Partners-backed data analytics startup Explorium. His brother is also a co-founder of an AI security startup, Token Security, which just raised $20 million led by Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital) and a bunch of Israeli tech angels.

He quickly gained partnership agreements for Base44 with big Israeli tech companies like eToro and Similarweb.

After posting about his decision to use Anthropic’s Claude LLM through AWS instead of models by OpenAI — mostly for cost-per-performance reasons — Amazon invited Base44 to demo at a Tel Aviv AWS event last month, which Shlomo documented.

“Crazy f***ing journey so far,” Shlomo posted on LinkedIn when announcing the news of the acquisition. Despite the growth and the profits – or really because of it – he sold his still-bootstrapped company because “the scale and volume we need is not something we can organically grow into … If we were able to get so far organically, bootstrapped, I’m excited to see our new pace now that we have all the resources in place,” he wrote.

For its part, Wix picked up a proven, fast-growing, local vibe-coding platform for a relative song because of its youth. OpenAI paid $3 billion for Windsurf, which was funded in 2021. 

Wix, of course, offers no-code website building that look professionally designed. Adding a profitable LLM vibe coding product to its offerings is a logical move.

Shlomo could not be immediately reached for additional comment.

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Internet connectivity in Iran almost completely disappeared on Wednesday, according to web-monitoring firms, as war with Israel enters its sixth day.

NetBlocks, a firm that tracks internet access across the world, wrote on X that Iran is “now in the midst of a near-total national internet blackout.”

The firm’s assessment was confirmed by other internet-monitoring organizations. 

Data collected by IODA, which is a system that “monitors the Internet infrastructure connectivity in near-real time, with the goal of identifying macroscopic Internet outages,” showed on Wednesday the sudden collapse of internet connectivity in Iran.

Image Credits:IODA

David Belson, the head of data insight at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, told TechCrunch that internet traffic levels in Iran “are now ~97% below where they were at the same time a week ago,” and pointed to the company’s own data on Iran’s internet connectivity.

News of the internet blackouts come as Iran and Israel are currently engaged in a military conflict. Iran has also experienced several cyberattacks since the start of this latest conflict, including the hacks of a major Iranian bank and crypto exchange. Following the attacks, Iranian news outlet IRIB said Israel had launched a “massive cyber war” against Iran, and Iranian officials reportedly began restricting access to the country’s internet. 

It is unclear, however, what is responsible for the collapse of Iran’s internet, said Belson. 

“In similar cases of near-complete Internet outages, we often see a concurrent drop in announced IP address space, meaning that the country’s networks are no longer visible on the Internet. However, we have not seen such activity in this case,” Belson told TechCrunch. 

“We can only see that the traffic dropped — the data doesn’t tell us why it dropped,” added Belson.

Other internet-monitoring experts, such as Doug Madory, who works for Kentik, also saw the same collapse.

“Numerous Iranian service providers now offline in second national Internet blackout in as many days,” Madory wrote on X. “This outage is more severe than yesterday’s.”

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